by Earl
There was a suitable pause at this point for the audience to weigh that calamitous event. People stood hushed, half in ancient sorrow.
Blake stopped, hardly daring to breathe. One clank now and he might be thrown out.
“Of course, long before the final death of the planet, the last Earthmen had left for other waiting homes. There was no swift storylike doom. No panic or hardship or loss of life. And then, perhaps inevitably but still queerly, Earth receded in all human memory and was forgotten.”
The speaker paused again. It always came on cue here, a gasp from the audience, as certainly as the “ahs” and “ohs” of a fireworks display. The bald statement always had its shock effect on any audience, and here on hallowed Earth itself.
Lem Starglitter Blake resumed his slow progress toward the rostrum, glad for the noise.
PROFESSOR McKAY braced himself, winced, and went on. Who had written the original purple prose for the lecture? Yet it could not be changed now. Not without an act of the Galactic Congress.
“Yes, Mother Earth was forgotten and abandoned as it floated frozen and lifeless about its dying primary. Forlorn, deserted. Nobody came to visit Earth any more, for any reason. Nor any of its sister planets, as they too were sheathed in ice. Earth became a ghost world.
“And as centuries marched on, with humanity busy on many thriving worlds, all records were lost as to where Earth might be. Earth fell into the category of a vague legend, known only to be a frozen globe circling a sun once typed G-O. But there were a hundred such. Which one was Earth’s sun? Nobody knew any more.” Blake stepped on somebody’s toes and was roundly cursed. But he kept on, clutching his bag. They’d be sorry. All this would change when he showed what he had.
“Imagine it, friends. By the 100th century, even the name ‘Earth’ had faded from collective memory. Most humans living and dying on the worlds of Arcturus, Vega, Pollux or any others didn’t even know that the race had come from Earth originally. They almost thought themselves native life. We no longer called ourselves Earthmen by then. That term fell into discard too. We were Starmen. And so, for an age, lonely Earth was lost in space, unsung, unknown, unhallowed.”
McKay went on by rote, thinking of dinner.
“It was not till the 130th century that the Galactic Historical Society decided to make a shrine of Mother Earth, original home of the Starmen, as turned up in a musty record. But where was Earth? Vague records helped nothing. Picture how aghast they were. Finally, they had to organize a galactic hunt for Earth that took a century.”
Lem Blake sweated as he forged on through the packed crowd. If only his bag didn’t bump against shins producing two noises, one metallic, the other human and angry. But later, when they heard, they wouldn’t mind. Blake grinned. Maybe they’d tell of it proudly.
“The ships searched everywhere for unmarked Earth, known only to be a frozen world of a dead sun. It was not even known how many planets had circled Earth’s sun. Some thought three, others nine, again thirteen. Nobody could submit proof one way or another, so it became a blind search in a cosmic haystack. A star search.
“The only real clue was that it must be in the vicinity of Sirius, since it was known that such star systems as Centauri, Barnard and Epsilon Eridani held the earliest colonies of Starmen. Earth had to be somewhere among this general group, since the Starmen expanded outward slowly, jumping from near stars to far stars.
“All frozen worlds among that narrowed-down group were visited, for any tell-tale signs as to which would be Earth itself. They often had to burn down with atomic torches through glacial ice to examine ancient ruins.”
Blake glared back at an indignant glare. He grew bolder as his goal neared. Not far now, another hundred feet.
“Ultimately, the most likely evidence pointed to one certain planet: the one we stand on today. Under the ice and hoar frost was found this ancient city whose ruins now surround you. A few scraps of chiseled wording on cornerstones matched the earliest writings of Earth we know of, at least prior to the 30th century. And so, we had found the forgotten world, Mother Earth.”
McKay remembered to make his voice ring just in time.
“The GHS then enthusiastically gave Earth its deserved and honored niche in galactic history. A dome, many times replaced and enlarged, was set up around the city ruins. Precious ruins, for they proved the only ones found on Earth. AH else had vanished to dust. Visitors were welcomed. Earth became a shrine. In-the past nine centuries, no less than twelve billions of our scattered people, from all corners of the galaxy, have made the pilgrimmage here to home Earth.”
Blake was close now, panting, not caring how he swung the bag. McKay was close now, too to the end of his lecture.
“Think once, my galactic fellowmen. This we believe was New York, main metropolis of ancient Earth. The then-existing oceans are gone, the continents utterly changed and jumbled, and the day is far longer than at that time. Everything of that long past era is obliterated in dusty time, except these few ruins.
“But this is Earth. Our home planet. Our Mother World. In reverent honor to our vanished ancestors of this alpha world, we ask that you bow your heads in silent tribute for a moment.”
BLAKE had just reached the rostrum and was yelling, “Hey, Mr. Speaker. I’m Lem Blake and I got something to show you—”
Blake froze in horror even as his weak voice rang out like a gong in the pin-drop silence that had just fallen. But what did it matter now? He leaped on the rostrum before the startled lecturer.
“Listen,” said Blake hurriedly. “Listen what I found—”
“Shut up,” hissed McKay, snapping off the sound system. “Nothing like this happened in 900 years, a lecture interrupted. You fool. Don’t ruin it all for them. See me later.”
McKay tried to shove Blake bodily off the platform. But Blake twisted free. If he did not go through with it now, guards would come and hustle him out of the dome.
“Look, here in my bag,” he begged. “An old-time relic, one I stumbled on looking for paydirt under deep ice. I knew it was a real old timer when I saw it. Maybe it’s the biggest strike I ever made.”
McKay took his hand away from Blake’s collar. “Another relic of Earth, you mean? They’re so scarce . . . let me see it. Hurry, man.”
At last Blake fumbled it out of his bag and held it up.
Two cross-pieces of rusted metal, welded at right angles to a common bar, freakishly preserved by some oily patina, and with lettering still legible in white. From under glacial ice, it must be old as old.
FIFTH AVENUE read one cross-piece, to Professor McKay’s trained eye. The other, 42nd STREET.
He stared.
Blake grinned suddenly. “And you know where I found it? Not here on Procyon V but over on Sol III. You know, about eleven light-years galactic east.”
Blake grinned more, shrewdly measuring what he saw in McKay’s face, and let go his bombshell, whose fuse had been burning uncertainly inside him all this time. “So this was the wrong Earth all the time, eh? Guess that really rocks you. It’ll rock the galaxy too. I’ll be famous—”
“Don’t be a fool,” hissed the professor, signalling guards. “You’re mistaken . . . that is—but I’ll explain later.”
As the. guards dragged Blake off, McKay said, “Take him to my office. See that he keeps his mouth shut till I get there.”
In a moment, the reconnected sound system blared out to the puzzled audience—“Please pardon the rude interruption. And in conclusion, as we stand reverently on Mother Earth—”
My gawd! Did, he think he was the first one? And did he think we’d change now after nine hundred years?
1955
MAN IN THE MOONS
Considered dispassionately, it was simply a question of ethics: yes or no; right or wrong, black or white. But to Jahn and Ellyn it could mean much more—the sudden death of all their dreams, and a slow but relentless destruction of the love that bound them together.
JAHN couldn’t block
her view anymore. Now she looked out over the endless rock bareness, relieved only by sunken craters, still more hideous.
She bit her lips.
“This is Ganymede?” she said. “Not a tree. Not a blade of grass. More barren than a desert. Even Death Valley would seem like a luxuriant oasis here, Jahn.”
Jahn Dempster snatched it up triumphantly.
“Don’t you know, Ellyn? But then, you didn’t keep up with the farm journals. They reclaimed and converted Death Valley last year, like the Sahara Desert. Death Valley is all green and growing now. Produces millions of bushels of wheat a year.”
Ellyn didn’t seem to hear her husband. She stared at the hostile terrain. It was blistering hot, but she shivered in the other cold. There was no warmth of life.
“Not one tiny flower,” she said. “Or tuft of moss. Not even a . . . weed. Oh, Jahn, it’s so ghastly horrible ugly.”
Beautiful!
Tantho sighed. So beautiful Ganymede was. Or it had been, before, circling Jupiter. Those pristine pure nights and frosty dim days. The shadow-loveliness of starshine on the crags, touching each rocky crown with a soft blaze. The sparkle of sand.
So achingly lovely, his world, when sunlight spangled from the cracked white crater bottoms in a spidery pattern. Sheer wordless beauty.
“So ugly,” Ellyn repeated from a tight throat.
Jahn put an arm around her, knowing it was about zero minus ten seconds before a cloudburst of tears.
“Green, Honey. I swear it. Ganymede will be all green and lush, in time. You’ve seen movies of Callisto, the first one they moved near Earth, nine years ago. Green. Heavenly green all over. Please, darling—”
“I’m all right, Jahn. It’s just so . . . bare. The first time you see it. The same shock as empty space the first time, a bottomless black pit. Our new home. . . on a chunk of sand and solid rock.”
“Wrong,” said Jahn happily, waiting for that.
He stooped to pick up a handful of soil. It crumbled in his hand, loamy rich and dark.
“The soil conditioner crews worked all last year on Ganymede,” he said, “getting it ready. You know that. Before, the ground was sterile sand and chipped rock. Barren of any rotting organic matter out of its lifeless, inorganic past. But now the soil is alive. Rich dirt, begging for seed.”
“Yes, I know, dear. They work a miracle.”
Jahn forged on, to keep those tears away.
“A miracle compounded of several simple processes. First, the rock grinders march, pulverizing the surface with their atomic triphammers. A fine layer a foot deep is ground up. Then, millions of tons of plant-food chemicals are dusted down from planes. Finally humus—manures, to be vulgarly precise—is stirred in, loaded with nitrogen-fixing bacteria. Presto, good topsoil all over.”
He held the living, waiting soil, almost in disbelief himself.
“Earth took ages to furnish its own soil, an eon ago. They took one year, with Ganymede.”
Jahn patted a bag they passed, in the slow, dragging line of homesteaders being checked through. “We just sow the seed now.”
He gripped the tread of a harvester. “And reap.”
They basked, now, in the shade of bags piled high.
“Oats, barley, rye, wheat,” sang Jahn the farmer. “Vegetables, flowers, grass, trees, hedges. Within a year there’ll be patches of green here and there. As more homesteaders pour in after us, the green patches spread out, and merge, and sweep over hills and hide the craters.”
He squinted at Ellyn, wasn’t sure, and went on.
“Ganymede won’t be tinted orange very long. In five years, it’ll have a distinct greenish tinge, as seen from home. Like Callisto and the others. Our new home world will sparkle like an emerald in the sun, Ellyn.”
Jahn let out his breath. The hump was passed. Tears wouldn’t sparkle in the sun.
Ellyn took heart, from the bursting confidence of her man. She put the new green vision in her mind, blotting out what her eyes saw. She would pretend it was an optical illusion, this infinitely drab waste.
“You know,” said Jahn, only half-jokingly, “I feel as if Ganymede is glad we’re here. Glad to have people and life on it. Poor old lonely world, without a creature on it for untold ages. Not a living soul.”
Shade. Where was shade? The sun burned fiercely.
But Tantho did not crawl toward the cave, where the others were. They were shielded somewhat there, from the deadly rays of a sun five times nearer than, before. Rut it was only temporary relief. The hot air still rolled in, searching them out. The weaker ones, the very old and very young, were dying fast now.
Tantho did not seek the cave. He had an idea.
It gave him desperate hope.
Jahn hopped off the jetplow as he saw Ellyn coming across the field, trailed by the dancing twins.
“We came for a lunchtime picnic with you, for a change,” smiled Ellyn, unpacking the basket.
“Earth never had anything like this,” boasted Jahn, chewing down the first of his Ganymede-grown radishes. “Taste twice as good. Grow twice as fast, too.”
The last statement, at least, was no lie. The crops thrived mightily. Intense sunlight through the thin air doubled photosynthesis.
Jahn’s face, despite his yard-wide straw hat, was mahogany. His hands, the only skin area exposed out of his chalk white coveralls, were negroid black Ellyn too was dark old ivory. The twins were pickaninnies.
“Everything’s going great,” said Jahn, as they ate in the shade of a huge rock. “Only a month and look at those green fields, Ellyn. Beginining to look like home sweet home. A mite, anyway?”
“Half a mite,” teased Ellyn.
The sprouting green surrounded their home like a vast lawn. Jahn was working in a circle, with male cunning, outward from the house, so that each day no matter which way Ellyn looked, she would see green fanning out. With the march of the green and the retreat of the drab brown, Ellyn was happier now.
But still not quite at ease.
She kept turning her eyes at times, quickly. In sudden darts and sidelong glances. As if trying to catch something . . . out of the corner of her eyes.
“Still seeing those moving rocks?” asked Jahn softly, without mockery.
Ellyn flushed guiltily.
“I know what you think, dear. Imagination. Delusions. But I tell you I do see movement at times. Just a slight movement of . . . something.”
“Of rocks?” Jahn shook his head and weaved around, eloquently. “That’s all there is here, within sight. Nothing but rock piles and fields. I ask you, can rocks move?”
“I just don’t know, Jahn,” Ellyn sighed. “I just don’t know. Why do I keep sensing subtle movement? Out of the corner of my eye? When I turn and look directly, nothing moves. Yet . . . there, Jahn!”
She jumped up, pointing.
“Among those rocks . . . movement.”
Tantho could pick up their thoughts, easily. His race had been espers from origin. Though the thoughts from them came at a rapid pace, making it hard to sort them out, he could sense the sympathy of that one mind. That one—Ellyn, in their vocal symbols—could be his friend. Listen to him.
Save them.
“Let’s settle this right now,” said Jahn, grabbing her hand and leading her to the patch of jumbled rocks. The rock grinder crews had purposely skipped around such spaced piles, leaving natural erosion breaks among the farmlands.
Jahn began poking among the rocks with his foot. “If any kind of snake or toad or something exists . . .”
“No,” said Ellyn. “It was one of the rocks that moved. Just a bit. Only a tiny bit. But it moved, Jahn. It did.”
Jahn swung around slowly, an icy chill down his spine for a moment. But not in fear of rocks that moved.
“Ellyn,” he said with what he hoped was the right mixture of gentle sternness. “Please, you mustn’t. Surely you know how mental obsessions can grow into neuroses. Or psychoses. Sorry to be so blunt, Honey. But you’re a big girl
. Mature. Face the thing and lick it. It’s the only way. You’ve got a guilt complex over nothing. Over the hag-ridden thought that this world holds life of some kind. That we’re poachers of a world. Lick it, Ellyn. You must.”
Ellyn swallowed, hung her head.
“Oh, Jahn. All this trouble I’m causing you.”
“Sure,” said Jahn. “Now I warn you, Ellyn, my patience with you will run out soon, in eighty or ninety years.”
She sobbed in his arms, grateful tears at the infinite tenderness in his banter.
Jahn kicked a round oblong rock squatting upright, leaning at a rather odd angle. “See? Nothing but rocks. Stones. Calcium and aluminum silicates. Rocks, dear. Rocks.”
Tantho did not feel the blow. Almost like a rock he was in outward form and hardness, protecting his inward organs from the original frigidity of their climate. Before, far from the remote sun, his rocky epidermis had been a warm blanket against the subzero extremes that froze all gases into icy chunks.
Yet his stony skin was little help against heat, a worse enemy to him. The heat worked inward steadily, creating havoc.
Tantho wanted to talk to the sympathetic, sensitive one. Tell her about them. Beg her to save them. But his radiations didn’t seem to get across. They were not espers, unfortunately.
How else could he attract their attention? Now was his opportunity, while they were close. He tried to move. Tried to roll over. But they were gone, before he could even begin.
“Nothing but rocks,” repeated Ellyn obediently. “I’ll lick it, Jahn dear. You’ll see. Nothing but rocks. And rocks can’t move. Rocks can’t live. Nothing but rocks, rocks, rocks.”
“Good girl,” said Jahn. “And listen, Honey. Don’t be alarmed at your mental condition. It isn’t serious. It’s probably just a reflex conditioning from Earth. On Earth, no matter where you are, there is always some movement. Wind rustling tree leaves. Birds and insects darting. Unseen small animals slithering through grass, making it quiver. Clouds drifting overhead. Out of the corner of our eye, we always saw some movement on Earth.”