Again the Singer lifted up his bearded head and sang, “In the beginning was the song of love …” And through the trees the Madman’s strong sound voice sang back, “And here’s the new redeeming melody, the only song that can set Terra free.”

The chains unlocked themselves and fell away. The Madman left the dark and hurried into day.

Like autumn leaves triumph swirled upward into sky. The song came on forever.

And distant quasars hurrying in space marveled that the dull and joyless world had finally come of age.

Thus Terra joined the universe who knew the song so long before, when the parent stars themselves were tracked by wounded feet. And for a thousand years the music never ceased. It ricocheted through canyons and hung in promise over all of Terra’s seas.

And those who know the Ancient Star-Song watch with singing for the sign of footprints in the galaxies through which the little planet rides in routine cycles of despair. But Joy seldom sleeps for long. And someday in a lonely moment mankind will shake an unfamiliar hand and find it wounded.

THE SONG

I

In the middle of the faithless sky there hangs a small, dark world that once was green and blue.

Some say it killed itself by stabbing all its lovely lands with deep atomic wounds. Some say it took an overdose of hate.

When words are rare as gems, then sentences are mined at great expense. In such a time the tiny planet Terra swung its mindless orbits in constant hunger for a word that would not come. Silence stalked the universe and Earthmaker would not speak. There was little that his love could say to a vicious world so fond of tearing holes in his beloved.

It was agreed by common guilt that spirit had turned its back on matter. Earthmaker had set his face away from the place of execution and was staring outward toward glittering and unspoiled star-fields. For Terra was a field of tombs—a universal junkyard where his creatures quarreled for refuse and waged great wars over who should own the wreckage of their times.

Messiahs were abundant, but all of them were egotists who hawked joy-plated creeds through their fading empires.

The men of Terra made a dull discovery in the tepid days that closed upon the Singer’s disappearance: When Earthmaker will not speak to men, they have nothing of importance to say to each other.

II

There is but one good illustration of SPIRIT—WIND!

Everything else is too visible.

When Spirit comes to flesh gales rage and zephyrs scream. When he withdraws, air stagnates and insects build webs in the rotors of the silent mills.

The Madman spoke only words that would not wait—the small and mindless things it took to keep life at a distance great enough to breathe.

The thick, hot air clotted commerce and forced all men to wade its deadness. The desert leered at villagers and waited with the condors for life to change to carrion.