Children of the Chronotron

When their sun began to wane, the Xlarnans at first retreated underground to hoard the heat and life-supporting energies which their nuclear generators could supply. But as their world grew colder, century after century, they devised a means of creating a substitute for the ionosphere—a protective layer of radioactive gases in the upper reaches of the sky which could warm them by means of its slow, controlled reaction, give them eternal light, and yet absorb its own harder radiations.

Thus—a planetary cell of life, isolated from the universe, independent of solar heat. And the Xlarnans at last emerged from their subterranean cities to take up life anew in a tropical Paradise that knew neither nightfall nor seasons. They missed the starlit night skies of old, the sunrises and sunsets, and most of all the stupendous celestial rainbow, the Great Ring, which some of them believed to be formed of the particles of a large satellite that had encircled their world back in the dim Beginning.

But the time arrived when they knew they were losing control of their reaction sphere in the sky. The hard radiations increased inexorably in spite of all the coolants they could generate and send aloft. They had to admit that the day would come when they would be destroyed by the very instrument that had given them an extra hundred millenniums of life.

At the end of time—the Xlarnans, pressed against a wall, the reaction sphere, from which came hard radiations, burning them. The ethnic urge to survive in the face of swiftly approaching death. Necessity mothering invention. And then—

The Chronotron……………………..