Behind the altar, the huge and intricate mass of alien circuits glowed and clicked and pulsated ... slowly; seemingly at random, but steadily.  The brain must be self-perpetuating to have lasted this long ... feeding its energy cells from some power-source Rynason could only guess at, and repairing its time-worn linkages when necessary.  In its memory banks was stored the science of the race which had preceded even the ancient Hirlaji.  The Outsiders had sprung up when this planet was young, had fought their way to the stars and galaxies, and eventually, when aeons of time pressed down, had pulled in their outposts and fallen back to this world.  And they had died here, on this world, falling to dust which was ground under by the grey race which had followed them to dominance.  “Before time,” Horng had said; that must have meant before the Hirlaji had developed telepathy, before the period covered by the race-memory.

But the Outsiders were still here, alive in that huge alien brain ... the science, the knowledge, the strange arts of a race which had conquered the stars while men still wondered about the magic of lightning and fire.  A science was encapsuled here which could speak of war and curiosity as discontent, but could say nothing definite of contentment.  An incomplete science?  A merely alien science?  Rynason didn’t know.

And the Hirlaji....  Twenty-six of their race remained, dreaming under heavy domes through which the stars shone at night and silhouetted the worn edges of broken stone.  Twenty-six grey, hopeless beings who had not even been waiting.  And the Earthmen had come.

For a moment Rynason wondered if the Hirlaji did not perhaps carry a message for the Earthmen too:  that decadence was the price of peace, death the inevitable end of contentment.  The Hirlaji had stilled themselves, back in the grey past ... had taken their measure of quiet and contentment for thousands of years, the searching drives of their race dying within them.  And this was their end.

THERE IS NO PURPOSE.

Rynason shook himself, and felt the cold wind cut through his clothing; it reawakened him.  Stooping, he gathered up several of the disintegrators and brought them with him to the head of the massive stairs up which the attackers must come.  He crouched beside those stairs, watching for movement below.  But he couldn’t see anything.

Something about the Hirlaji still bothered him; kneeling in the gathering darkness he finally isolated it in his mind.  It was their hopelessness, the numbness that had crept over them through the centuries.  No purpose?  But they had lived in peace for thousands of years.  No, their death was not merely one of decadence ... it was suffocation.

They had not chosen peace; it had been thrust upon them.  The Hirlaji had been at the height of their power, their growth still gathering momentum ... and they had to stifle it.  The end in view didn’t really matter:  it had not been what they would have chosen.  And, having had peace forced upon them before they had been ready for it, they had been unable to enjoy it; and the stifling of scientific curiosity that had been necessary to complete the suppression of the war-instinct had left the Hirlaji with nothing.