en in science.

These colonists. Would they grow in awareness? Now they seemed only to
be a part of their environment, without curiosity, their fears of even
the day before forgotten. Wiped away, as though it had never been, was
their memory of a previous existence to this. They were wholly at one
with their environment--unaware.

Were they to begin the long road? To telescope its distance? Would they
be able to continue living without peopling the trees, the streams, the
clouds, the winds, with spirits benign and vengeful--created in their
own image? Could they continue to live alone in the universe?

Yes, that was the thing he had missed. Loneliness.

In separating himself from the animals, man had cut off his kinship with
them. And so he found companionship with the gods. And cutting himself
off from the gods ...

Loneliness.

Was man the only thing aware throughout the universe? What purpose then
his exploration of it? What might he find that he had not already found?

Already, like a minor thread almost unheard in the symphony of exploding
exploration, the questions of the artists were already finding
themselves woven into music, painting, literature.

"Are we alone? In all this glittering, sterile universe, are there none
other than we who are aware?"

The theme would expand as the purposelessness of colonizing still more
and more worlds became wider known. The minor would become major, the
recessive dominant. The endless aim of non-science to make all others
subservient had lost its purpose for those who could still think. The
dominion over things instead of people, the goal of science--was that
also to lose its purpose for those who could still think? Until man,
defeated by purposelessness, sank back in apathy, lost the very
willingness to live--and so died?

What if some other awareness did inhabit the universe, sentient--and
lonely? What if, farther along in its explorations, it was feeling that
apathy? Facing that dissolution?

When one is lonely, the sensible thing is to seek companionship! To
discover in companionship purpose not apparent to the alone--or at least
hope to discover it.

For companionship there must be communication. And yet the exasperation,
the futility of trying to communicate with a friend who always
interpreted everything one said and did as meaning something entirely
different from the intent.

Some other friend was the normal answer. But what if there were no
other? Wo