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GOLDEN_SPHERE

                                             July 21, 2007


                                       (Based on the "The Shadow Men",
     A. E. van Vogt,                   "Startling Stories", Jan 1950)
     "Universe Maker" (1953):

     "Beauty? Cargill remembered the glorious golden ball,
     and tensed.  At the time, it had seemed the ultimate
     life-beginning, but it wasn't.  He felt completely
     convinced of that, because beauty focused.  Beauty was
     the light that kept the moth of life fluttering
     hopefully.  It drew all attention, was the final goal
     of all endeavor.  The far gleam of the beautiful kept a
     man straining all his life; and when somehow everything
     he grasped to him did not hold the radiance he had
     seen, he grew sad and sickly; and presently one of two
     thing happened: The sadness either transformed into the
     apathy of death, or into the ecstatic apathy of another
     far-seen gleam of beauty -- life after death.

     "Beauty would be but one aspect of Prime Thought.
     Prime Thought would be but one aspect of -- what?"




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