reading mastered, and the long, sweeping vistas of the
past. Their histories. Their wars. "Why did they fight, Walden?" And
Walden's sigh. "I don't know, Eric, but they did."

So much to learn. So much to understand. Their art and music and
literature and religion. Patterns of life that ebbed and flowed and
ebbed again, but never in quite the same way. "Why did they change so
much, Walden?" And the answer, "You probably know that better than I,
Eric...."

Perhaps he did. For he went on to the books that Walden ignored.
Their mathematics, their science. The apple's fall, and the orbits
of planets. The sudden spiral of analysis, theory, technology. The
machines--steamships, airplanes, spaceships....

And the searching loneliness that carried the old race from the caves of
Earth to the stars. The searching, common to the violent man and the
quiet man, to the doer and the dreaming poet.

_Why do we hunger, who own the Moon and trample the shifting dust
of Mars?_

_Why aren't we content with the worlds we've won? Why don't we
rest, with the system ours?_

_We have cast off the planets like outgrown toys, and now we want
the stars...._

"Have you ever been to the stars, Walden?"

Walden stared at him. Then he laughed. "Of course not, Eric. Nobody goes
there now. None of our race has ever gone. Why should we?"

There was no explaining. Walden had never been lonely.

And then one day, while he was reading some fiction from the middle
period of the race, Eric found the fantasy. Speculation about the
future, about their future.... About the new race!

He read on, his heart pounding, until the same old pattern came clear.
They had foreseen conflict, struggle between old race and new, suspicion
and hatred and tragedy. The happy ending was superficial. Everyone was
motivated as they had been motivated.

He shut the book and sat there, wanting to reach back across the years
to the old race writers who had been so right and yet so terribly,
blindly wrong. The writers who had seen in the new only a continuation
of the old, of themselves, of their own fears and their own hungers.

"Why did they die, Walden?" He didn't expect an answer.

"Why does any race die, Eric?"

His own people, forever removed from him, linked to him only through the
books, the pictures, and his own backward-reaching emotions.

"Walden, hasn't there _ever_ been anyone else like me, since they died?"

Silence. The