Eighth Men

The Eighth Men are a physically and mentally pedestrian human species whose engineering abilities turn Venus into a world-spanning industrial society. Their history moves from confident mastery of their planet to a crisis beyond their capacity to escape: they prepare Neptune for human life and transfer the Ninth Men there, but Neptune is uninhabitable for the Eighth Men themselves. Their attempt to preserve humanity therefore becomes a passage into a future they cannot share.

Origins and Character

After the extinction of the Flying Men, the flightless, partly avian race that remained on Venus built a society founded on industry and science. Across many generations, it produced the Eighth Men, a deliberately pedestrian species, physically and mentally suited to manipulation, calculation, and invention. Their strengths made them unusually effective engineers, but the account also characterizes them as philistine: technical and material achievement did not bring a corresponding refinement of sensibility.

Venusian Civilization

The Eighth Men made Venus an engineer’s paradise. They drew power from the planet’s central heat and sent huge electric ships through its persistent monsoons and hurricanes. Islands were connected by tunnels and long bridges, while nearly every tract of land was assigned an industrial or agricultural use. The resulting wealth was so extensive that rival races and castes could periodically destroy property and lives on a vast scale without ordinarily impoverishing the generations that followed.

These conflicts were brief interruptions in long stretches of peace, not struggles that threatened the species’ survival. The Eighth Men were so insensitive to their violence that they felt little shame about it; physical strife served them as a temporary release from complacency, almost as a religious exercise. This contrast defines their civilization: its engineering order could preserve prosperity across centuries, while its social life still depended on recurring eruptions of destructive rivalry.

The Astronomical Crisis

After a long era of peace and scientific progress, the Eighth Men detected unmistakable signs that the Sun was approaching the critical transformation known to occur in a star’s life: collapse into a dense, faintly radiating body, or White Dwarf. They estimated that the change would begin in twenty thousand years and that Venus would probably be frozen and uninhabitable within another fifty thousand. Their proposed refuge was Mercury, which was becoming less intolerably hot. To make that migration possible, they began preparing an atmosphere there and breeding a new species capable of adapting to extreme cold.

A second discovery made that plan futile. Astronomers found a volume of non-luminous gas approaching the Solar System on a course that would bring it into collision with the Sun. Their calculations predicted that the impact would make the Sun flare and expand dramatically, rendering the planets uninhabitable except perhaps Uranus and, more probably, Neptune. The outer planets offered no simple alternative: some would remain frozen, and the Eighth Men’s imperfect ether ships could not reach them; another was an essentially bare iron globe without atmosphere, water, or ordinary rock. Neptune emerged as the most promising destination, though preparing it would demand that the species devote its remaining centuries to a successor it could not itself become.

Preparing Neptune and the Eighth Men’s End

The race ultimately resolved, almost unanimously, to spend its remaining time creating a human species able to carry mentality into a new world. Ether vessels reached Neptune and initiated chemical changes to improve its atmosphere. The Eighth Men also used the rediscovered process of automatic matter annihilation to provide a steady source of heat in a region where life might survive until the Sun was renewed. Specially designed vegetation was transported there and established; animals were judged unnecessary. The Ninth Men were then conveyed to the prepared refuge.

The Eighth Men could not follow them onto Neptune. The planet’s immense gaseous envelope produced gravitational pressure greater than that at the bottom of the Venerian ocean. The giant Eighth Men could scarcely support their own weight, and the pressure made it impossible for them to leave their ether ships except briefly in steel diving suits. They returned to Venus and made the best of life there. The transfer of humanity’s most precious material relics to Neptune offered no comparable reprieve to their makers.

Neptune itself escaped a near collision with the dark intruder only narrowly. Saturn was engulfed a few years later, together with its rings and satellites; the intruder then disturbed the planetary orbits, passed Mars, struck Earth and Venus, and moved on toward the Sun. The account presents the Eighth Men’s return to Venus as a reprieve that could not last: they had prepared a future for the Ninth Men, but the planetary catastrophe overtook their own world. Their decisive historical achievement is thus also the limit of their power—engineering could extend human life beyond Venus, but not save the species that had built the route.