“What’s also puzzling, though, is that the An, whoever they were, didn’t have a technology that was all that much ahead of ours. From what we’ve found on the Moon, they used antimatter-powered spacecraft maybe a century or two ahead of what we’re flying today. Okay, so that meant they were several thousand years ahead of the Sumerians, but that’s not much time at all when you’re talking about periods of millions or even billions of years. The Builders were more advanced, maybe a thousand years beyond where we are now. Again, not that big a difference, when there ought to be civilizations out there millions or even billions of years old.”
“Maybe there’s some built-in self-destruct mechanism, so that no civilization lasts more than a few thousand years. Or maybe they evolve into…I don’t know. Something else. Something we can’t recognize.”
“Maybe. But think about this. It only takes one long-lived and energetic civilization to overrun the entire galaxy in a few million years. That’s part of the paradox. It only has to happen once, and we know, in fact, that it must have happened many times.
“Now, imagine an intelligence that evolves, develops civilization, starflight, and moves out into the galaxy. Imagine that it evolved with a kind of Darwinian imperative, a survival-of-the-fittest mentality that leads it to seek out other, less developed civilizations, and destroy them before they become a threat. And…remember that this only has to happen once to establish a pattern. If it happens once, if it works for them, it could happen again, and again, and again.”
“This predatory species becomes top dog in the galaxy, you’re saying. It just hangs around and stomps on the new-bies as they emerge, is that what you’re saying?”
“What I developed in my paper was the idea that the galaxy may endure cycles of civilization alternating with destruction. Hundreds, maybe thousands of civilizations emerge throughout the galaxy, all at about the same time. They develop space travel, spread out…but if even one of them out of how many hundreds or thousands is a predatory race, it’s going to have an advantage over all the others, and it will destroy them.
“But if there’s one such race, maybe there are two. Or a dozen. Or a thousand. Sooner or later, they come into conflict with one another. After a few thousand years of all-out warfare, the galaxy is empty again, except for a scattering of stone-chipping primitives on a few thousand bombed-out worlds who begin starting the whole cycle all over again.”
“‘The Hunters of the Dawn.’”
“What we’ve been able to translate of the An records and tablets suggests that they were terribly afraid of someone. They called them Ur-Bakar, the Hunters of the Dawn.”
“And these Hunters also destroyed the Builders?”
“I think it was a different group of Hunters. I think that galactic civilization was at a high point half a million years ago…then it all collapsed in a war that makes our dustup with the UN look like a shoving match with the neighbor’s kid. A predator race destroyed the Builders, bombed the structures on Mars, destroyed their colonies. Fortunately for us, they missed, or didn’t bother with, the early Homo sapiens who were living on Earth at the time. Within another few thousand years or so, the Hunters were gone as well, probably fighting among themselves, or with other predators.
“Then, a long time later, maybe ten or fifteen thousand years ago, the An develop star flight. Since we’ve identified the An in the Cave of Wonders display, we have to assume that they were around half a million years ago, were smacked down, and then rebuilt their civilization.
“They come to Earth, maybe by accident, maybe because they remembered the Builders and were looking for them. They find our ancestors in Mesopotamia, settle down, and start their own colony, using primitives for slave labor.”
“And then the Hunters of the Dawn come again.”
“Right. Probably a whole new crop that evolved along those same kill-them-before-they-kill-you lines. They destroyed the An bases on the Moon. Destroyed their colonies on Earth…and by doing so must’ve left a pretty deep impression in the surviving humans about fire raining from the skies and wars among the gods.
“And once again we were lucky. The Hunters either ignored what they considered to be savages, or they just couldn’t find and exterminate them all.” He shook his head. “I hate like the devil to sound like one of the ancient-astronut preachers, but there is evidence of a cataclysmic flood throughout the Tigris-Euphrates Valley five or six thousand years ago, and it was probably the basis for the Sumerian flood myths that eventually found their way into the Book of Genesis. My thinking now is that the Destroyers dropped a small asteroid into the Arabian Sea, and let the tidal wave wipe out the An cities.”