that ran without infraction through the entire experience of man.
Therefore, he argued and agreed, must worlds and life be appanages
to all the suns as they were appanages to the particular of his own
solar system.

Even as he lay here, under the breadfruit tree, an intelligence
that stared across the starry gulfs, so must all the universe be
exposed to the ceaseless scrutiny of innumerable eyes, like his,
though grantedly different, with behind them, by the same token,
intelligences that questioned and sought the meaning and the
construction of the whole. So reasoning, he felt his soul go forth
in kinship with that august company, that multitude whose gaze was
forever upon the arras of infinity.

Who were they, what were they, those far distant and superior ones
who had bridged the sky with their gigantic, red-iridescent,
heaven-singing message? Surely, and long since, had they, too,
trod the path on which man had so recently, by the calendar of the
cosmos, set his feet. And to be able to send a message across the
pit of space, surely they had reached those heights to which man,
in tears and travail and bloody sweat, in darkness and confusion of
many counsels, was so slowly struggling. And what were they on
their heights? Had they won Brotherhood? Or had they learned that
the law of love imposed the penalty of weakness and decay? Was
strife, life? Was the rule of all the universe the pitiless rule
of natural selection? And, and most immediately and poignantly,
were their far conclusions, their long-won wisdoms, shut even then
in the huge, metallic heart of the Red One, waiting for the first
earth-man to read? Of one thing he was certain: No drop of red
dew shaken from the lion-mane of some sun in torment, was the