“Only a rat,” Von der Stadt said again.
“Don't worry,” said Ciffonetto. “Even if we don't find them, nothing will be lost. They were clearly sub-human. Men once, maybe. But no more. Degenerated. There was nothing they could have taught us, anyway.”
But Von der Stadt was past listening, past hearing. He just sat against the wall, clutching his stomach and feeling the blood ooze from between his fingers, mum bling the same words over and over.
Ciffonetto turned to the wall. A few short feet to the platform, then the old, rusty escalator, and the basement ruins, and daylight. He had to hurry. Von der Stadt wouldn't last long.
He grabbed the rock, pulled himself up, hung on desperately as his other hand scrambled and found a hold. He pulled up again.
He was almost there, almost at the platform level, when his weak lunar muscles gave out on him. There was a sudden spasm, his hand slipped loose, his other hand couldn't take the weight.
He fell. On the flashlight.
The darkness was like nothing he had ever seen. Too thick, too complete. He fought to keep from screaming.
When he tried to rise again, he did scream. More than the flashlight had broken in the fall.
His scream echoed and re-echoed through the long, black tunnel he could not see. It was a long time dying. When it finally faded, he screamed again. And again.
Finally, hoarse, he stopped. “Von,” he said. “Von, can you hear me?” There was no answer. He tried again. Talk, he must talk to hold his sanity. The darkness was all around him, and he could almost hear soft movements a few feet away.
Von der Stadt giggled, sounding infinitely far away.
“It was only a rat,” he said. “Only a rat.”
Silence. Then, softly, Ciffonetto. “Yes, Von, yes.”
“It was only a rat.”
“It was only a rat.”
“It was only a rat.”
“IF I FORGET THEE,
OH EARTH …”
Arthur C. Clarke
WHEN MARVIN WAS ten years old, his father took him through the long, echoing corridors that led up through Administration and Power, until at last they came to the uppermost levels of all and were among the swiftly growing vegetation of the Farmlands. Marvin liked it here; it was fun watching the great, slender plants creeping with almost visible eagerness towards the sunlight as it filtered down through the plastic domes to meet them. The smell of life was everywhere, awakening inexpressible longings in his heart. No longer was he breathing the dry, cool air of the residential levels, purged of all smells but the faint tang of ozone. He wished he could stay here for a little while, but Father would not let him. They went onward until they had reached the entrance to the observatory, which he had never visited. But they did not stop, and Marvin knew with a sense of rising excitement that there could be only one goal left. For the first time in his life, he was going outside.
There were a dozen of the surface vehicles, with their wide balloon tires and pressurized cabins, in the great servicing chamber. His father must have been expected, for they were led at once to the little scout car waiting by the huge circular door of the airlock. Tense with expectancy, Marvin settled himself down in the cramped cabin while his father started the motor and checked the controls. The inner door of the lock slid open and then closed behind them—he heard the roar of the great air-pumps fade slowly away as the pressure dropped to zero. Then the VACUUM sign flashed on and, the outer door parted, before Marvin lay the land which that he had never yet entered.
He had seen it in photographs, of course. He had watched it imaged on television screens a hundred times. But now it was lying all around him, burning beneath the fierce sun that crawled so slowly across the jet-black sky. He stared into the west, away from the blinding splendor of the sun—and there were the stars, as he had been told but had never quite believed. He gazed at them for a long time, marveling that anything could be so bright and yet so tiny. They were intense unscintillating points, and suddenly he remembered a rhyme he had once read in one of his father's books:
Twinkle, twinkle, little star,
How I wonder what you are.
Well, he knew what the stars were. Whoever asked that question must have been very stupid. And what did they mean by “twinkle”? You could see at a glance that all the stars shone with the same steady, unwavering light. He abandoned the puzzle and turned his attention to the landscape around him.
They were racing across a level plain at almost a hundred miles an hour, the great balloon tires sending up little spurts of dust behind them. There was no sign of the Colony; in the few minutes while he had been gazing at the stars, its domes and radio towers had fallen below the horizon. Yet there were other indications of man's presence, for about a mile ahead Marvin could see the curiously shaped structures clustering around the head of a mine. Now and then a puff of vapor would emerge from a squat smoke-stack and would instantly disperse.
They were past the mine in a moment. Father was driving with a reckless and exhilarating skill as if—it was a strange thought to come into a child's mind—he were trying to escape from something. In a few minutes they had reached the edge of the plateau on which the Colony had been built. The ground fell sharply away beneath them in a dizzying slope whose lower stretches were lost in the shadow. Ahead, as far as the eye could reach, was a jumbled wasteland of craters, mountain ranges, and ravines. The crests of the mountains, catching the low sun, burned like islands of fire in a sea of darkness—and above them the stars still shone as steadfastly as ever.
There could be no way forward—yet there was. Marvin clenched his fists as the car edged over the slope and started the long descent. Then he saw the barely visible track leading down the mountainside, and relaxed a little. Other men, it seemed, had gone this way before.
Night fell with a shocking abruptness as they crossed the shadow line and the sun dropped below the crest of the plateau. The twin searchlights sprang into life, casting blue-white bands on the rocks ahead, so that there was scarcely need to check their speed. For hours they drove through valleys and past the feet of mountains whose peaks seemed to comb the stars, and sometimes they emerged for a moment into the sunlight as they climbed over higher ground.
And now on the right was a wrinkled, dusty plain, and on the left, its ramparts and terraces rising mile after mile into the sky, was a wall of mountains that marched into the distance until its peaks sank from sight below the rim of the world. There was no sign that men had ever explored this land, but once they passed the skeleton of a crashed rocket, and beside it a stone cairn surmounted by a metal cross.
It seemed to Marvin that the mountains stretched on forever, but at last, many hours later, the range ended in a towering, precipitous headland that rose steeply from a cluster of little hills. They drove down into a shallow valley that curved in a great arc toward the far side of the mountains. And as they did so, Marvin slowly realized that something very strange was happening in the land ahead.
The sun was now low behind the hills on the right: the valley before them should be in total darkness. Yet it was awash with a cold white radiance that came spilling over the crags beneath which they were driving. Then, suddenly, they were out in the open plain, and the source of the light lay before them in all its glory.
It was very quiet in the little cabin now that the motors had stopped. The only sound was the faint whisper of the oxygen feed and an occasional metallic crepitation as the outer walls of the vehicle radiated away their heat. For no warmth at all came from the great silver crescent that floated low above the far horizon and flooded all this land with pearly light. It was so brilliant that minutes passed before Marvin could accept its challenge and look steadfastly into its glare, but at last he could discern the outlines of continents, the hazy border of the atmosphere, and the white islands of cloud. And even at this distance, he could see the glitter of sunlight on the polar ice.
It was beautiful, and it called to his heart across the a
byss of space. There in that shining crescent were all the wonders that he had never known—the hues of sunset skies, the moaning of the sea on pebbled shores, the patter of falling rain, the unhurried benison of snow. These and a thousand others should have been his rightful heritage, but he knew them only from the books and ancient records, and the thought filled him with the anguish of exile.
Why could they not return? It seemed so peaceful beneath those lines of marching cloud. Then Marvin, his eyes no longer blinded by the glare, saw that the portion of the disc that should have been in darkness was gleaming faintly with an evil phosphorescence … and he remembered. He was looking upon the funeral pyre of a world—upon the radioactive aftermath of Armageddon. Across a quarter of a million miles of space, the glow of dying atoms was still visible, a perennial reminder of the ruined past. It would be centuries yet before that deadly glow died from the rocks and life could return again to fill that silent, empty world.
And now Father began to speak, telling Marvin the story that until this moment had meant no more to him than the fairy-tales he had heard in childhood. There were many things he could not understand, it was impossible for him to picture the glowing, multi-colored pattern of life on the planet he had never seen. Nor could he comprehend the forces that had destroyed it in the end, leaving the Colony, preserved by its isolation, as the sole survivor. Yet he could share the agony of those final days, when the Colony had learned at last that never again would the supply ships come flaming down through the stars with gifts from home. One by one the radio stations had ceased to call: on the shadowed globe the lights of the cities had dimmed and died, and they were alone at last, as no men had ever been alone before, carrying in their hands the future of the race.
Then had followed the years of despair, and the long-drawn battle for survival in their fierce and hostile world. That battle had been won, though barely. This little oasis of life was safe against the worst that Nature could do. But unless there was a goal, a future toward which it could work, the Colony would lose the will to live and neither machines nor skill nor science could save it then.
So, at last, Marvin understood the purpose of this pilgrimage. He would never walk beside the rivers of that lost and legendary world, or listen to the thunder raging above its softly rounded hills. Yet one day—how far ahead?—his children's children would return to claim their heritage. The winds and the rains would scour the poisons from the burning lands and carry them to the sea, and in the depths of the sea they would waste their venom until they could harm no living things. Then the great ships that were still waiting here on the silent, dusty plains could lift once more into space, along the road that led to home.
That was the dream, and one day Marvin knew, with a sudden flash of insight, he would pass it on to his own son, here at this same spot with the mountains behind him and the silver light from the sky streaming into his face.
He did not look back as they began the homeward journey. He could not bear to see the cold glory of the crescent Earth fade from the rocks around him, as he went to rejoin his people in their long exile.
AFTERWARD
John Helfers
THE BLUE, WHITE, and brown planet is quiet now.
It still continues in its orbit, whirling around the G2 star it has orbited for the past 4.6 billion years, the third of nine planets held in that massive, fiery, red-golden orb's inexorable grip. The energy thrown off by this star, that takes the form of light that is essential for all known life, still takes seven minutes to traverse the ninety-three million miles to the planet's surface, always revealing oceans and continents on one half of the world, and leaving the other half shrouded in darkness.
The third planet is still orbited by its own satellite, a round, white rock that is visible due to the star's reflected light off its desolate terrain. Its airless, cratered surface is littered with debris, including a sun-bleached piece of cloth on a stick upon which can still be seen rows of white stars against what might have once been a dark-colored field. Several vehicles also rest motionless there, and a cluster of cold, silvered domes near several holes dug into the surface give evidence that at some point some kind of creatures had walked on its surface, and perhaps delved under its crust for some long-forgotten reason.
Three-hundred eighty-four thousand kilometers away, beneath black space that has been wiped clean of all artificial satellites long ago, clouds still form in the blue planet's atmosphere, growing, swelling, scudding across the bright blue sky, sometimes releasing violent storms that rage across continents and oceans, sometimes fading back into the rain cycle without shedding a single drop of moisture, just as they have for millions of years, and will do for millions more.
Once an innumerable number of species of animals roamed over this planet, from lowly yet almost indestructible insects—cockroaches, blowflies, and their ilk—to higher forms of life, including reptiles, mammals of both the air and the land, and sea creatures tiny and large. Now all of the animal species on the entire planet number in the thousands; mostly insect life, the hardy cockroach, seasonal cicadas, and flies. There always seems to be flies. The oceans are nearly dead, containing only single-celled animal life, carrying on as it has for millennia. It is rare to see warm-blooded mammals anywhere on the northern half of the planet, anything left with fur or feathers is born, lives, and dies near the equator. Looking north, it is obvious why.
As the blue planet rotates, part of it always turning into the bright sunlight, land masses come into view, many of them unchanged for thousands of years. Except one. This irregular mass, pocketed with hundreds of inlets, bays, rivers, and lakes, with a small peninsula jutting from the southeastern corner into an ocean, and a large swath of land bulging from the northwestern corner that seems to reach out with a scattering of broken islands to almost touch the enormous continent nearby, at first seems just like the rest of the land masses around it. But closer examination reveals a different story.
What used to be a broad, high, unbroken chain of mountains that stretched from the ice caps of the frozen sea at the top of the world to the banana-shaped land mass bridging the ocean between this continent and the next one is now shattered into pieces. What had once been hundreds of lofty, snow-capped mountain peaks in the middle of this once-mighty range is now a huge crater, more than one hundred kilometers wide. The crater would be visible from this planet's moon, if there were anyone there to see it.
As the star's light shines more fully on this vast terrain, it reveals that this land is not like the others. Every one of the other continents has pockets of green, small ones, no doubt, but pockets of vegetation. This land, however, has not a speck of green to be seen. Instead, it is swathed in a thick layer of gray-brown ash stretching from the western coast to a cluster of five large, still, dead lakes that lie directly below a huge bay in the northeast quadrant of the continent. It reaches from the frozen tundra in the north to the end of that mountain chain in the south, and covers everything it touches. The huge canyon to the southwest of the mountain range. The dense, once-verdant forests that ranged the entire length of the west coast, now only dead branches caked in a thick, hardened coating of ash. The remains of a long suspension bridge, its girders and foundation now twisted and buckled by a long-ago earthquake, and turned a dull gray as well. And the buildings.
The hundreds of thousands of houses, skyscrapers, farms, churches, businesses, and every other building dotting the planet are all still and quiet. Ornate spires are choked in dark dust. Mirrored windows, those that were still intact, obscured by a coating of gritty soot, hardened by years of rainfall that had turned them into a solid coating. Nothing living moves throughout the breadth of the land.
The planet turns, as it always has, and reveals more of what has been left behind by those that once lived here. Tall clock towers are now stilled, pointed hour and minute hands stilled centuries ago. Here and there natural wildfires have destroyed what was once dozens of communities, incinerating acre after acre of cities, to
wns, and forest. Several pyramid-shaped structures near a large sea are slowly being both eroded away by the constant desert wind and buried by the ever-drifting sands. A large lump that might once have been a strange, scuplted amalgam of man and crouching animal is now little more than an eroded hill of featureless stone.
On other continents, nature is reclaiming the land that had once belonged to it long ago. Thick jungle advances over tall buildings, disintegrating roads and foundations, and slowly bringing down what was once monuments to the race that once thrived here. Rivers swollen by melting runoff from the mountains overflow their banks and flood tens of thousands of miles of landscape, altering it each time. In other areas, the desert sands inch forward, covering earth and grass and water and buildings. The unstoppable ocean occasionally builds and releases its fury on the coastlines of the world, destroying, reshaping, renewing. Seasons pass, thick, heavy snow drifting down to cover the once-magnificent cities that were the pride of the race that had built them so long ago.
Once, the race that had erected these buildings had teemed on this planet, spreading over the land and water in multitudes. Ever-curious, they traversed almost every inch of the world they had inherited, scaling the highest mountain, descending to the bottom of the ocean, and even splitting the very atoms that comprised existence itself. They conquered disease, joined the world together in technology, and almost destroyed themselves more than once. They split the sky with their vehicles, always seeking to go farther, faster, and eventually slipped the surly bonds of Earth to explore the near reaches of space. They even took enough of an interest in the galaxies beyond their own to send out a signal, hoping for a response from another life form somewhere in the universe. But, as with all cycles, their time had to come to an end eventually, leaving only the scattered monuments to their legacy behind.
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