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"Into the Darkness" is an 8,000-word short story by Ross Rocklynne, about lifeforms that live in space, between the stars. Although written in 1934, it was not accepted for publication until Frederick Pohl accepted it for the June, 1940 issue of Astonishing Stories.

Spoiler Warning: Plot details and/or information about the ending follow. If you wish to enjoy the work first, stop reading here and return at another time.

Plot

A superbeing is born in space, between the stars, and is named Darkness by his mother. He learns to move among the stars and galaxies, and he meets Oldster, one of the oldest and wisest of his kind. He spends much of his first 50 million years of life playing with his friends, making planets and stars, and then destroying them. Then Darkness wakes up from a 100,000 year sleep and feels alienated from his friends; he feels that just playing with matter is a waste of time, and that as an adult now, he should no longer be concerned with childish games. He goes to Oldster, and asks him three questions: what is the purpose of life? what is the purpose of the glowing energy at his center? And what lies beyond the great darkness that surrounds their universe. Oldster does not know the meaning of life. He refuses to explain the energy at his center. And he says that a few of their kind have tried to traverse the darkness around their universe, but have never returned. Darkness decides to try anyway. He says goodbye to his mother, and heads off into the darkness.

It takes him 90 million years, but finally he reaches another galaxy. In this galaxy he meets another being like himself; this one is female, and with a green light, instead of his purple light. Together they combine their lights, to create a new life (they mate); then his companion tells Darkness that he will die soon, and Darkness realizes that this is why Oldster refused to explain the purpose of that light (Oldster was afraid that Darkness would refuse to mate). Darkness heads back into the darkness, in the direction of his old universe; he decides that the purpose of life is to make life, so he creates a planet, and seeds it with primitive life, and throws his new planet off into the direction of his home universe. Darkness then dies.

Additional Notes

This story has been reprinted in, among other places, Isaac Asimov Presents The Great SF Stories 2 (1940). In the introduction to this story in that anthology, Martin Greenberg says this "is a remarkable story, very different from the 'usual' sf of 1940—with a little polishing, it would find little difficulty fitting in to the so-called 'New Wave' of the 1960s."

The intergalactic beings in "Into the Darkness" are similar to the title character in Fred Hoyle's 1957 novel The Black Cloud. The idea of lifeforms that live in space, not bound to any planet, has also been recycled in several episodes of Star Trek.