“If God wills.” Solemnly, Carlos bent his head.
“With luck enough. With Day and Kipper growing up.” Andersen grinned at him. “An exciting prospect, don’t you think?”
“Not really, sir.” Andersen looked so serious that Kip hesitated. “I—I’m sorry, sir, but I can’t help what I feel. Everything here—everything is dead. Like all our friends we left on the ship. All we’ve ever found is bones. The amphibians have been dying since the oceans froze—”
He pulled the mindstone off his scalp.
“This thing turned me into the Watcher. I was dying the way he died, there in the freezing sea a billion years ago.” He held it back toward Day. “Nothing I want to remember. I don’t want it haunting me.”
“Kip, dear!” His mother looked hurt. “Don’t say that! I think the amphibians can be revived. They’d never invented genetic engineering. With what we know and what we can learn from them, I think a new generation might be born.”
“Where? With the seas all frozen solid—”
“It can be done.” Cruzet nodded to Day, as if she had spoken. “They are pumping heat from deep in the planet. There’s a big reservoir. Frozen now, but it can be roofed and thawed. The new sea folk can grow up there.”
“We can’t give up,” his mother said. “No reason to, though we do have a long way to go. A lot to learn, but we can all learn from Me Me. She says she can wake more teachers when we’re ready. Please, Kip. Please!”
She turned to Carlos, who sat smiling at her, holding her hand.
“Forget the fantasmas,” Carlos told him. “Los santos are with us now. You’re alive. Your sister’s alive. You can help us all stay alive.”
“Kipper, just imagine!” Andersen reached to prod his ribs. “Imagine you were landing here with your Captain Cometeer. Another world to save! A great new adventure! Maybe a hard job to do. A new language to learn. A new science. A new culture. So much you never knew before. That’s the thrill of it!”
“Maybe.” Kip nodded doubtfully. “Maybe.”
He didn’t want to be a coward, but a job like that looked too big, even for the Legion of the Lost.
“A job cut out for you and Day.” Andersen was looking solemn. “We’ve been working hard, and Me Me does all she can, but I’ve begun to wonder if Tony and I aren’t too old for it.” He turned to include the others. “We humans are born programmed to absorb language and culture and general competence while we’re very young. The aptitudes fade as we get into our teens. But look at your sister.”
He nodded at Day, who was searching the big dish at the middle of the table for something she wanted.
“She became half-amphibian with no effort at all. It isn’t going to be so easy for the rest of us.” Sighing, he turned back to Rima. “Maybe not really easy for Kip. If more of us were children—”
“Don’t fret, no sweat.” Day looked up, sucking at a little globe of some golden juice. “There will be more children.”
Kip frowned at his mother and Carlos, wondering.
“Don’t forget all the kids on the ship.” Day sucked happily at the ball of juice. “Mrs. Sternberg’s kids. Chris Zane. Kelly Kovik. And remember all the other women, like Reba Washburn—”
“Crazy-Daisy!” Kip scowled at her. “You know the ship blew up. They’re dead. All dead.”
“But they aren’t.” Day drained the globe and dropped it back on the dish. She stood up, pushing the new stone higher behind her ear. “I just heard about the ship.”
“What’s that?” Cruzet whispered. “What about the ship?”
“The bomb did go off,” she said. “Captain Stecker and Mr. Kelleck had taken it to the control dome. They were about to blow up the ship unless everybody did what he said, but Mr. Sternberg and Dr. Cheng never surrendered. They sealed the safety doors and opened the escape hatch to let the air out of the dome in case Captain Stecker triggered the bomb. He set it off. It killed him and Mr. Kelleck, and wrecked the top of the ship, but the safety doors saved everybody else.”
They all slid off the T-bars, blinking at her.
“Really, Day?” her mother asked. “How do you know?”
“The new mindstone Me Me just brought down for me. It can talk to the one Dr. Cheng uncovered in the bottom of the new launch pit.”
“Seguro?” Carlos slid his arm around Rima to pull her dose, and they both stared at Day. “Seguro que sí?”
“Seguro. Dr. Cheng has the mindstone now. He’s driving the spider, coming after us across the ice.”
“What spider?” Kip demanded. “They don’t have a spider.”
“Mr. Smarty, wrong again.” Day grinned at him. “They’ve got a spider now. Mr. Sternberg found spare parts and Dr. Cheng made new parts to build another spider.”
Me Me came down again with an airskin for Day. They were all waiting by the pavement when the spider rolled out of the tunnel. The airlock opened. Jim Cheng came down the ramp, Reba Washburn behind him. Then the Sternbergs and their children.
“Hi, Mr. Kip,” Cheng greeted him. “Here’s a little gift we’ve brought for you, from halfway around the planet.”
The gift was the Game Box he had left on the ship.
“Thank you, Jim.” He hugged it to his chest. “I’ve been missing Captain Cometeer and all my friends in the Legion of the Lost. I’m happy to have them back, but I don’t need them like I did.”
He stopped to look at the Sternberg children in the airskins Cheng had made for them. A little awkward in helmets too large for them, they were laughing and hugging Day.
“I thought we were done for,” he said. “But I guess we’re all copasetic now, since you got here.”
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Also by Jack Williamson
Legion of Space Series
1. The Legion of Space (1947)
2. The Cometeers (1950)
3. One Against the Legion (1967)
4. The Queen of the Legion (1983)
Humanoids Series
1. The Humanoids (1949)
2. The Humanoid Touch (1980)
Seetee Series (as by Will Stewart)
1. Seetee Shock (1949)
2. Seetee Ship (1951)
Undersea Trilogy (with Frederik Pohl)
1. Undersea Quest (1954)
2. Undersea Fleet (1956)
3. Undersea City (1958)
Saga of Cuckoo (with Frederik Pohl)
1. Farthest Star (1975)
2. Wall Around A Star (1983)
Starchild Trilogy (with Frederik Pohl)
1. The Reefs of Space (1964)
2. Starchild (1965)
3. Rogue Star (1969)
Novels
Golden Blood (1933)
Realm of Wizardry (1940)
Darker Than You Think (1948)
Dragon’s Island (1951) (also known as The Not-Men)
Star Bridge (1955, with James E. Gunn)
The Dome Around America (1955) (also known as Gateway to Paradise)
The Trial of Terra (1962)
Bright New Universe (1967)
Trapped in Space (1968)
The Moon Children (1972)
The Power of Blackness (1975)
Brother to Demons, Brother to Gods (1979)
Manseed (1982)
Lifeburst (1984)
Firechild (1986)
Land’s End (1988, with Frederik Pohl)
Mazeway (1990)
The Singers of Time (1991, with Frederik Pohl)
Beachhead (1992)
Demon Moon (1994)
The Black Sun (1997)
The Silicon Dagger (1999)
Terraforming Earth (2001)
>
The Stonehenge Gate (2005)
Autobiography
Wonder’s Child: My Life in Science Fiction (1984, updated 2005)
Collections
The Collected Stories of Jack Williamson, Volume One: The Metal Man and
Others (1999)
The Collected Stories of Jack Williamson, Volume Two: Wolves of Darkness
(1999)
The Collected Stories of Jack Williamson, Volume Three: Wizard’s Isle (2000)
The Collected Stories of Jack Williamson, Volume Four: Spider Island (2002)
The Collected Stories of Jack Williamson, Volume Five: The Crucible of Power
(2006)
The Collected Stories of Jack Williamson, Volume Six: Gateway to Paradise
(2008)
The Collected Stories of Jack Williamson, Volume Seven: With Folded Hands …
And Searching Mind (2010)
The Collected Stories of Jack Williamson, Volume Eight: At the Human Limit
(forthcoming)
Dedication
To Patrice Caldwell
Jack Williamson (1908 – 2006)
John Stewart ‘Jack’ Williamson was born in Arizona in 1908 and raised in an isolated New Mexico farmstead. After the Second World War, he acquired degrees in English at the Eastern New Mexico University, joining the faculty there in 1960 and remaining affiliated with the school for the rest of his life. Williamson sold his first story at the age of 20 – the beginning of a long, productive and successful career, which started in the pulps, took in the Golden Age and extended right into his nineties. He was the second author, after Robert A. Heinlein, to be named a Grand Master of Science Fiction by SFWA, and by far the oldest recipient of the Hugo (2001, aged 93) and Nebula (2002, aged 94) awards. A significant voice in SF for over six decades, Jack Williamson is credited with inventing the terms ‘terraforming’ and ‘genetic engineering’. He died in 2006.
For more information see www.sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/williamson_jack
Copyright
A Gollancz eBook
Copyright © The Estate of Jack Williamson 1997
All rights reserved.
The right of Jack Williamson to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
This eBook first published in Great Britain in 2014 by
Gollancz
The Orion Publishing Group Ltd
Orion House
5 Upper Saint Martin’s Lane
London, WC2H 9EA
An Hachette UK Company
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 978 0 575 11207 0
All characters and events in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor to be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
www.orionbooks.co.uk
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