The Message in the Bottle and Lost in the Cosmos

by Walker Percy

  There was only one agreement. After eighteen years of living together in a space the size of a 727 fuselage, they were all thoroughly sick of each other and wanted to go their separate ways. With two exceptions.

  THE CAPTAIN: Where do you want to go?

  TIFFANY: I’m going to the coast of Oregon, where I once spent the summer doing anthropology with an Indian tribe. They were fishermen. They lived well and simply. It should be the safest spot in the U.S. from fallout. And the first are least likely to be contaminated by radiation or ultraviolet.

  KIMBERLY: I want to go to Uxmal in the Yucatan. I have an idea about deciphering the glyphs. I lived there once in a pyramid next to a lovely deep cenote. I have a feeling that if anything has survived, it has.

  THE CAPTAIN: What about your kids?

  TIFFANY-AND-KIMBERLY: Oh, they all think they’re Jane’s anyhow.

  THE CAPTAIN: What about you, Jane? Where do you want to go?

  DR. JANE SMITH: Lost Cove, Tennessee. I was born there. It’s a tiny valley of the Cumberland plateau sealed off by a ridge. No roads, no phones, no TV. Only three farms and a cave. Good water, sweet white corn, quail, squirrel, deer, fish, wild pig. I haven’t had pork sausage, grits, and collards in twenty years. All projections of East-West fallout patterns missed it. I think I’ll take my chances.

  THE CAPTAIN: Would you take the children?

  DR. JANE SMITH: Sure. Can you fly us there?

  THE CAPTAIN: Yes, but we have to land in Utah first.

  DR. JANE SMITH: What will you do, Captain?

  THE CAPTAIN: (Why didn’t she invite me to come with her to Tennessee?) I’m going back to Long Island. I don’t care what they’ve done to it. I’m getting in my ketch and sailing to Montauk.

  DR. JANE SMITH (shyly): Wouldn’t you rather come with me to Tennessee?

  THE CAPTAIN: Yes.

  The starship made two low orbits before landing at Bonneville: the first fly-by to see the Eastern Hemisphere by night; the second, the Western. Silently, like Lucifer in starlight, leaning on his great wings, they flew low over the dark northern continents.

  London was dark. Europe was dark. Moscow was dark. China was dark. Japan was dark. San Francisco was dark. Chicago was dark. New York was dark.

  At dawn on April 12, eighteen years after launch in starship time, 457 years in earth time, the starship Copernicus 4 set down on schedule on the salt flats at Bonneville, Utah, the captain landing at 190 knots as easily as an ancient airline pilot landing a 727. One does not forget how to ride a bicycle, swim, or fly an airplane.

  After a long silence, the Captain requested an external radiation reading from Kimberly. Negative.

  There was no one and nothing to be seen except the rusty shards of old steel maintenance sheds from the twenty-first century.

  They stepped out into the sweet, heavy desert air. The problem was walking—but not for the children! Perhaps they were like the newborn of the Arctic tern who fly to the Dry Tortugas, never having been there before, yet land and know it for home.

  Despite Dr. Jane Smith’s careful program of exercise and calcium maintenance, the adults were limber-legged as sailors and blind as bats in the dazzling Utah sun.

  The children ran and fell and jumped and fell like the Beatles on a soccer field.

  They made for the nearest shade and the nearest shelter—of all things, the ruins of a rest stop on old Interstate 80 between Salt Lake City and San Francisco.

  They sat at a picnic table, the returning earthlings, speechless and bemused. The rusting hulks of ancient eighteen-wheelers, Airstreams, and twenty-first-century camper-choppers (helicopters-with-tents) littered the parking area. Close by, the broken concrete of old 1-80 was drifted by salt and sand like a Roman road in Cyrenaica. But a single aspen shaded them, its crisp new leaves shivering and glittering like new money in the rising sun. A single buzzard wheeled high in the sky. As they watched, a green lizard crawled on the table, elbows sprung, cocked an eye at them, and inflated a red bladder.

  The earth was alive.

  There were also human survivors. And an odd lot they were, the four who rescued the stranded astronauts.

  One was Aristarchus Jones, an astronomer who lived in the old SAC headquarters under a mountain at Colorado Springs.

  The other three were Benedictine monks from a nearby abbey where Jones had been living for a month.

  What was he, Jones, doing here? Why, he had come to meet them. They were expected. Or rather, Jones had years ago come into possession of some documents from the old JPL in Pasadena and had made the calculation that if Copernicus 4 had failed to colonize Barnard’s P1, it would return to earth—ETA: some time in April of this year.

  So here he was. In February he had ridden a horse out old I-80 from Denver, taking two weeks, and had been put up by the Benedictines while he searched the skies for Copernicus 4.

  The Benedictines? They were even odder. The three were all that remained, the remnant of a thriving community which at its peak, a period of religious revival after the second of the great wars of the twentieth century, had as many as three hundred men.

  Now there were three: the abbot, a dried-up old sourdough with a wisp of a beard and a nose like a buzzard’s beak, and a running sore on his forehead; and two black monks, not “black monks” as all black-robed Benedictines used to be called, but black men, Negroes in the old usage, who were monks. Four white monks had died within the decade, of assorted cancers. Black men, it seemed, had the skin melanin to withstand the noxious ultraviolet.

  The community had managed to survive, if this odd trio could be called a community, thanks to the prescience of an abbot of the twenty-first century who had foreseen WWIII of the year 2069 and had excavated a huge shelter in the sandstone under the abbey deep enough and well-stocked enough to survive the hundred-year decay time of Cesium 137.

  The eighteen astronauts, young and old—the youngest, Sarah, a babe in arms, in the arms of Dr. Jane Smith—took their ease in the monastery garden next to an undistinguished barracks-like church and cloister built of twentieth-century cinder blocks, ugly but durable. The children watched in astonishment as the monks walked in tiny procession, bearing aloft fronds of a desert plant. It was Palm Sunday.

  There were also children at the abbey, a dozen or so, mostly genetically malformed and misbegotten: retardates, dolichocephalics (“steeple-heads”) bilateral cleft palates (“wolf-snouts”), armless, legless, depigmented, multipigmented (“harlequins”)—yet a remarkably cheerful and playful lot.

  The two groups eyed each other. The first, the earthlings, looking more like visitors from space than the visitors from space: three monks in black, and Aristarchus Jones, a young blond Californian who wore a loose white garment fitted with a hood with eyeholes which protected him from the ultraviolet but made him look like a Ku Kluxer from olden time.

  Abbot Leibowitz, ex-physicist, ex-Brooklynite, looked like a shtetl shopkeeper stranded in the Sinai desert for forty years.

  The two black monks looked like Amos ‘n’ Andy, one small and sober and smart as Sidney Poitier; the other ponderous, windy, and funny.

  The Captain had some questions, while the space children, who after a week had got the hang of earth, climbed trees, pulled grass, shied rocks as if they’d been born to it. They, the space children, after their initial astonishment, got along fine with the “misbegotten,” learned baseball from them, took them aboard Copernicus 4, taught them video-computer games.

  THE CAPTAIN: What was it, an M7?

  ABBOT: The old war? An M9, I’m afraid.

  THE CAPTAIN: How many are left?

  JONES AND ABBOT (looking at each other): You mean people?

  THE CAPTAIN: Yes,

  JONES: We don’t know. Not enough.

  THE CAPTAIN: Not enough for what?

  JONES: To sustain civilization.

  THE CAPTAIN: Well, who do you know for a fact to have survived?

  JONES: A couple of thousand in California. Six in Colorado S
prings.

  THE CAPTAIN: New York?

  ABBOT: Don’t know. The last courier on his way to the West Coast said there were a hundred or so on Long Island.

  THE CAPTAIN (to Abbot): What about Asia? Europe? Don’t you have communication with other monasteries? Churches?

  ABBOT (shrugging): Don’t know about Europe. A few Catholics here and there in North America, a few churches, but no bishops.

  THE CAPTAIN: The Pope?

  ABBOT: Don’t know.

  DR. JANE SMITH: Any Methodists?

  ABBOT: Very few Methodists.

  DR. JANE SMITH (eyeing him): Jews?

  ABBOT (reviving): Yeah. A young Israeli came through here several years ago looking for his family in San Francisco. He had made a boat and sailed from Tyre, all alone. He said there were several hundred Israelis holed up in the caves of Qumran.

  THE CAPTAIN: To get away from the radiation?

  ABBOT: No, to get away from the Arabs.

  THE CAPTAIN: Are they still fighting?

  ABBOT: Yes. But radiation is no longer a danger. Cesium 137 radiation became minimal a hundred years ago.

  THE CAPTAIN: Then why hasn’t the species replenished or begun to replenish? Or has it?

  ABBOT AND JONES look at each other.

  JONES: There’s another problem.

  THE CAPTAIN: What?

  JONES: Sterility.

  THE CAPTAIN: From the Cesium? How could that be? Your parents were not sterile. The lizards and buzzards are not sterile.

  JONES: We don’t really know. Maybe a cumulative effect of Cesium in the food chain. Maybe the ultraviolet, maybe a delayed effect of the chemical warfare. Anyhow, it has been slowly progressive until now—

  THE CAPTAIN: Now what?

  ABBOT: Now we estimate an incidence of 98 percent sterility in humans. There has not been a recorded birth in Utah, Colorado, or California in more than a year.

  THE CAPTAIN (looking at Jones): And you?

  JONES: Viable sperm count: zero.

  THE CAPTAIN (looking at monks, thinks better of it, looks at Jones): You married?

  JONES (looking at Tiffany, another blond Californian): No.

  MONK AMOS (solemn and a bit platitudinous, like Amos in Amos 'n’ Andy): It’s tragic to see people want children and not be able to have them. What a joy to see these children!

  THE CAPTAIN: How about the sexual drive? Is that affected, too, in some people?

  MONK ANDY: In very few white folks and no niggers at all.

  THE CAPTAIN: Let me get this straight. What you’re saying is that you’re probably the last generation on earth.

  JONES: If not this, then the next is the last, surely.

  ABBOT (brightening): Until you came along.

  THE CAPTAIN (after a long pause): Do you have a plan?

  ABBOT AND JONES: We have two plans. Two irreconcilable plans. Each involves you. I’m afraid you’re going to have to decide.

  THE CAPTAIN: Let’s hear them.

  Dr. Aristarchus Jones’s Proposal

  Here are the facts:

  The human species is finished on earth. Due to the delayed and cumulative effect of Ce 137 radiation or the reduction of ozone in the atmosphere by nitrous oxides and the resulting ultraviolet flare, male sterility is approaching 100 percent, and female is not far behind. In a word, we are either the last generation on earth or the next to last. You, Captain, and your crew are obviously fertile, but it is problematical how long you will remain so—a year? a month? And do you imagine that when your children mature sexually, they will be fertile?

  My proposal: that we colonize Europa, one of the Galilean satellites of Jupiter. You, Captain, made a fly-by eighteen years ago and know better than I that it is probably habitable: planet-size, covered by water ice, evidence of newly emerging land—the famous greening seen nowhere else but here on earth—no vulcanism, no impact craters, what appears to be a river system and, most important of all, an atmosphere of 10 percent oxygen.

  Your starship has sufficient reactor fuel for launch and to attain sufficient ramjet speeds to activate the hydrogen scoop. Hence, a journey of weeks.

  Here in the good monks’ cellar I have found a supply of seeds, algae, plants, small mammals, and even insects. I have books, music, Shakespeare on cassettes.

  As a matter of fact, we have no choice except to stay here and die. I will go along—you will need me as a technical adviser. Moreover, Tiffany and I already have a relationship. Who knows, I may not be totally sterile—no one ever is 100 percent. After all, it only takes one spermatozoon.

  With a bit of luck, we can colonize Europa in much the same way as Europe colonized the New World, except that—and here is the exciting part!—there is no reason why we cannot develop a society such as the one my namesake lived in in ancient Ionia, a society based on reason and science, and do so without repeating the mistakes of the past, for example, the Dark Ages, two thousand years of Plato and Judaism and Christianity—a sexually free and peace-loving society where the sciences and arts can flourish freed from the superstitions and repressions of religion—no offense to the good monks, who are in fact invited to come along. I think it appropriate, with your permission, to change the name of Europa to New Ionia. At long last, we are going to put behind us forever the interminable quarrels of the people of the Book—first the Jews, then the Christians, then Islam. There will be no Middle East on Ionia, no Christian vs. Jew, no Christian vs. Moslem, Shi-ite vs. Sunnite, Moslem vs. Jew, Protestant vs. Catholic.

  There is no reason why we cannot start a new society on another planet just as we started a new society in the New World.

  In fact, we have no choice. Europa lives. This planet is dying.

  There is no time to lose. I calculate that the launch window for Europa will occur for only a few days next month.

  That is my proposal.

  ABBOT: Are the children invited?

  ARISTARCHUS: The space children are. It would make no sense to perpetuate genetic defects.

  ABBOT: I see.

  Abbot Leibowitz’s Proposal

  Here are the facts:

  The human species may or may not be finished on earth. Perhaps the incidence of sterility is lower in Seattle or New Zealand. We do not know.

  But it makes no difference. In either case, I could not go.

  Why not?

  Because I believe that God exists and that he created the Cosmos (the Big Bang, as you vulgarly call it, embarrasses you, Aristarchus, doesn’t it?), that he created man through evolution, in the latest moment of which, perhaps the last Ice Age, man became ensouled and came to himself as man, body and spirit; that God thus created man as a person who had gifts of knowledge and love but most of all of freedom, that he somehow encountered a catastrophe, God alone knows what, used his freedom badly, and chose badly—perhaps chose himSELF, the one thing he can never know of itself, rather than God—and has been in trouble ever since. That, as a consequence, God himself intervened in the history of this insignificant planet, through a covenant with an even more obscure tribe, the Jews, through his son, a Jew who actually lived as a man on this earth, him and no other, through founding a church, the Catholic Church based on a very mediocre, intemperate Catholic, Peter, also a Jew; that he, God, is somehow inextricably and permanently, even hopelessly, involved with the two, the Jews and the Catholic Church, until the end of earth time.

  In a sense, nothing has changed. Here is the Christian remnant, still hanging on, a slightly mad enclave of odd sorts, gentile-bums collected from the hedgerows and invited to the feast. And over there in Israel, we know, is still the Jewish remnant, still hanging on, long ago dispersed and now come back to the same place, proud and stiff-necked as ever, still persecuted, still fighting Assyrians. What has changed?

  I am both. I am both Jew and Catholic, whether Jew or Catholic like it or not, and generally they do not, usually have no use for each other, in fact, and even less use for me. The Jews think I have apostasized, and the Catholics th
ink I am a Jew. They don’t think of Jesus and Mary as Jewish. But me? I’m still a Jew. And they’re right. I am. Catholics are a queer lot—I’ve never really gotten used to them. I admire their, our, faith, adopted it in fact, but I wish they loved learning more, as they loved it in the High Middle Ages, loved science and art more, like our brother Aristarchus here, just as they loved them in the age of the great Giotto and Roger Bacon and the monk Copernicus and the great Galileo; like Moses Maimonides and Einstein; like the monk Gregor Mendel. We are a church of sinners, yes, but can’t sinners love science and art?

  But the two, Jew and Catholic, are inextricably attached to each other, like Siamese twins at the umbilicus, whether they like it or not, and they both detest it, until the end of earth time.

  I believe that we have the promise of God and his son that he, Jesus Christ, having come once to save us from the death of SELF in search of ITSELF without any other SELF, will also come again at the end of the world. We also have his promise that the Church will endure until the end of the world.

  Now, it is also the case that I have no reason to believe that the Holy Father or a single bishop has survived the holocaust. As Dr. Jane Smith recently told me, jokingly but more seriously than she knew, I may very well be the Pope. That is to say, as an abbot, I have the episcopal power of consecrating priests. And if there are no bishops left and no Pope left, guess who that leaves. As abbot, I am in the apostolic succession, the direct line of laying on hands which goes back to Christ himself.

  As Pope, my first act will be to revive the University of Notre Dame around a nucleus of Jewish scientists whom I shall lure from Israel. The Catholic Church is responsible for the birth of science in the West, but it got too rich, got distracted by family quarrels, and dropped the ball, which the Jews picked up.

  Are you getting the point, Captain? I may be the only man left on earth who can consecrate priests. The only candidates for the priesthood I can see, not counting my little malformed innocents, are these boys, your sons, Krishna, Vishnu, Siddhartha, Oppie, Carl Jung, Chomsky, and John. Whether or not one or another chooses to become a priest is his business and God’s business, but it is my business to be around, to stay here in case the human race survives and needs priests.