by Howard Fast
“Perhaps—in a manner of speaking.”
“Then thank heavens science does not depend on faith. If it did, we should all be back in the horse-and-buggy era.”
“Which might not be the worst thing in the world,” the priest speculated.
In the infinity of space, however, the laws of time and chance cease to exist, and in a million or a billion years—one being as meaningless as the other—the winds of space carried the seed toward a galaxy, a great pinwheel of countless blazing stars. At a certain point in space, the galaxy exerted its gravitational pull upon the seed, and the seed plunged through space toward the outer edge of the galaxy. Closer and closer it drove, until at last it approached one of the elongated arms of the pinwheel, and there it was trapped in the gravitational field of one of the countless stars that composed the galaxy. Blindly obedient to the laws of the universe, the seed swung in a great circle around the star, as did other bits of flotsam and jetsam that had wandered into the gravitational field of the star. Yet while they were all similarly obedient to the laws of chance, the seed was different. The seed was alive.
“No, it might not be the worst thing in the world,” the professor admitted, “but as one who has just recovered from an infection that might well have killed him had it not been for penicillin, I have a bias toward science.”
“Understandably.”
“And some mistrust of a faith that renews itself with the beauty of a sunset.” He pointed toward the wild display of color in the west.
“Nevertheless,” the priest said gently, “faith is more constant and reliable than science. You will admit that?”
“By no means.”
“Surely you must. Science is both pragmatic and empirical.”
“Naturally. We experiment, we observe, and we note the results. What else could it be if not pragmatic and empirical? The trouble with faith is that it is neither pragmatic nor empirical.”
“That’s not the trouble with faith,” said the priest. “That’s the basis of faith.”
“You’ve lost me again,” the professor said hopelessly.
“Then you get lost too easily. Let me give you an example that your scientific mind can deal with. You’ve read St. Augustine?”
“I have.”
“And if I say that the core of my faith is not very different from the core of St. Augustine’s faith, you would accept that, would you not?”
“Yes, I think so.”
“You have also read, I am sure, the Almagest of Claudius Ptolemy, which established the earth as the center of the universe.”
“Hardly science!” the professor snorted.
“Not at all, not at all. Very good science, until Copernicus overturned it and disproved it. You see, my dear friend, empirical knowledge is always certain and absolute, until some other knowledge comes along and disproves it. When man postulated, thousands of years ago, that the earth was flat, he had the evidence of his own eyes to back him up. His knowledge was certain and provable, until new knowledge came along that was equally certain and provable.”
“Surely more certain and provable. Even your fine Jesuit mind must accept that.”
“I am a Paulist, if it matters, but I accept your correction. More provable. More certain. And vastly different from the earlier theory. However, the faith of St. Augustine can still sustain me.”
The life within the seed and the structure of that life gave it a special relationship to the flood of light and energy that poured out of the star. It absorbed the radiation and turned it into food, and with food it grew. For thousands and thousands of years the seed circled the star and drank in its endless flood of radiation, and for thousands and thousands of years the seed grew. The seed became a fruit, a plant, a being, an animal, an entity, or perhaps simply a fruit—since all of these words are descriptive of things vastly different from the thing that grew out of the seed.
The professor sighed and shook his head. “If you tell me that a belief in angels has not been shattered, then you remind me of the man who grew wolfsbane to keep vampires off his place. He was eminently successful.”
“That’s hitting pretty low, for a man of science.”
“My dear fellow, you can still maintain the faith of St. Augustine because it requires neither experiment, observation, nor a catalogue of results.”
“I think it does,” the priest said, almost apologetically.
“Such experiments perhaps as walking in this lovely twilight and feeling faith renewed?”
“Perhaps. But tell me—is medicine, that is, the practice of medicine, empirical?”
“Far less so than once.”
“And a hundred years ago? Was medicine empirical then?”
“Of course, when you talk of medicine,” the professor said, “and label it empirical, the word becomes almost synonymous with quackery. Obviously because human lives are at stake.”
“Obviously. And when you fellows experiment with atomic bombs and plasma and one or two other delicacies, no human lives are at stake.”
“We are even. Touché.”
“But a hundred years ago, the physician would be just as certain of his craft and cures as the physician today. Who was that chap who removed the large intestine from half a hundred of his patients because he was convinced that it was the cause of aging?”
“Of course science progresses.”
“If you call it progress,” the priest said. “But you chaps build your castles of knowledge on very wet sand indeed. I can’t help thinking that my faith rests on a firmer foundation.”
“What foundation?”
The shape of the thing that the seed became was a sphere, an enormous sphere, twenty-five thousand miles in circumference, in human terms; but a very insignificant sphere in terms of the universe. It was the third mass of matter, counting out from the star, and in shape not unlike the others. It lived, it grew, it became conscious of itself, not quite as we know consciousness, but nevertheless conscious of itself. In the course of the aeons that it existed, tiny cultures appeared upon its skin, just as tiny organisms thrive upon the skin of man. A wispy aura of oxygen and nitrogen surrounded it and protected its skin from the pinpricks of meteors, but the thing that grew from the seed was indifferent, unaware of the cultures that appeared on and disappeared from its skin. For years eternal, it swam through space, circling the star that fed it and nourished it.
“The wisdom and the love of God,” the priest replied. That’s a pretty firm foundation. At least it is not subject to alteration every decade or so. Here you fellows were with your Newtonian physics, absolutely certain that you had solved all the secrets of the universe, and then along came Einstein and Fermi and Jeans and the others, and poof—out of the window with all your certainties.”
“Not quite with all of them.”
“What remains when light can be both a particle and a wave, when the universe can be both bounded and boundless, and when matter has its mirror image, antimatter?”
“At least we learn, we deal with realities—”
“Realities? Come now.”
“Oh, yes. The reality changes, our vision is broadened, we do push ahead.”
“In the hope that at least your vision will match my faith?” the priest asked, smiling.
The thousands of years became millions and the millions billions, and still the thing that was the seed circled the sun. But now it was ripe and bursting with its fullness. It knew that its time was coming to an end, but it did not resist or protest the eternal cycle of life. Vaguely it knew that its own beginning seed had been flung out of the ripened fruit, and it knew that what had been must occur again in the endless cycle of eternity—that its purpose was to propagate itself: to what end, it neither knew nor speculated. Full to bursting, it let be what must be.
The day was ending. The sun, low on the horizon now, had taken refuge behind a lacework of red and purple and orange clouds, and against this the golden leaves of the trees put to mock the art of the best jewelers.
A cool evening wind made a proper finish for a perfect day.
No other words. “What a perfect day,” the priest said.
“Now that’s odd.”
They had come to the edge of the campus, where the mowed, leaf-covered lawns gave way to a cornfield.
“Now that’s odd,” said the professor, pointing to the cornfield.
“What is odd?”
“That crack over there. I don’t remember seeing it yesterday.”
The priest’s eyes followed the pointing hand of the professor, and sure enough, there was a crack about a yard wide running through the cornfield.
“Quite odd,” the priest agreed.
“Evidently an earth fault. I didn’t know there were any here.”
“It’s getting wider, you know,” the priest said.
And then it got wider and wider and wider and wider.
13
The Egg
It was fortunate, as everyone acknowledged, that Souvan-167-arc II was in charge of the excavation, for even though he was an archaeologist, second rank, his hobby or side interest was the eccentricities of social thinking in the latter half of the twentieth century. He was not merely a historian, but a man whose curiosity took him down the small bypaths that history had forgotten. Otherwise the egg would not have received the treatment it did.
The dig was in the northern part of a place which in ancient time had been called Ohio, a part of a national entity then known as the United States of America. The nation was of such power that it had survived three atomic fire sweeps before its disintegration, and it was thereby richer in sealed refuges than any other part of the world. As every schoolchild knows, it is only during the past century that we have arrived at any real understanding of the ancient social mores that functioned in the last decades of the previous era. A gap of three thousand years is not easily overcome, and it is quite natural that the age of atomic warfare should defy the comprehension of normal human beings.
Souvan had spent years of research in calculating the precise place of his dig, and although he never made a public announcement of the fact, he was not interested in atomic refuges but in another, forgotten manifestation of the times. They were times of death, a quantity of death such as the world had never known before, and therefore times of great opposition to death—cures, serums, antibodies, and—what was Souvan’s particular interest—a method of freezing.
Souvan was utterly fascinated by this question of freezing. It would appear, so far as he could gather from his researches, that in the beginning of the latter half of the twentieth century, great strides had been made in the quick-freezing of human organs and even of whole animals; and the simplest of these animals had been thawed and revived. Certain doctors had conceived the notion of freezing human beings who were suffering from incurable diseases, and then maintaining them in cold stasis until such a date when a cure for the particular disease might have been discovered. Then, theoretically, they would have been revived and cured. While the method was available only to the rich, several hundred thousand people had taken advantage of it—although there was no record of anyone ever being revived and cured—and whatever centers had been built for this purpose were destroyed in the fire storms and in the centuries of barbarism and wilderness that had followed.
Souvan had, however, found a reference to one such center, built during the last decade of the atomic age, deep underground and supposedly with compressors functioning by atomic power. His years of work were now drawing toward consummation. They had sunk their shaft one hundred feet into the lava-like wasteland that lay south of the lake, and they had reached the broken ruins of what was certainly the installation they sought. They had cut into the ancient building, and now, armed with powerful beacons, laser-cutters, and plain pickaxes, Souvan and the students who had assisted him were moving through the ruin, from hall to hall, room to room.
His research and expectations had not played him false. The place was precisely what he had expected it to be, an institution for the freezing and preservation of human beings.
They entered chamber after chamber where the refrigeration caskets lay row upon row, like the Christian catacombs of a barely remembered past, but the power that drove the compressors had failed three millenniums ago and even the skeletons in the bottom of the caskets had crumbled to dust.
“So goes man’s dream of immortality,” Souvan thought to himself, wondering who these poor devils had been and what their last thoughts were as they lay down to be frozen, defying that most elusive of all things in the universe, time itself. His students were chattering with excitement, and while Souvan knew that this would be hailed as one of the most important and exciting discoveries of his time, he was nevertheless deeply disappointed. Somewhere, somehow, he had hoped to find a well-preserved body, and with the aid of their medicine, compared to which the medicine of the twentieth century was rather primitive, restore it to life and thereby gain at firsthand an account of those mysterious decades when the human race, in a worldwide fit of insanity, had turned upon itself and destroyed not only 99 percent of mankind but every form of animal and bird life that existed. Only the most fragmentary records of those forms of life had survived, and so much less of the birds than of the animals that those airy, wonderful creatures that rode the winds of heaven were much more the substance of myth than of fact.
But to find a man or a woman—one articulate being who might shed light upon the origin of the fire storms that the nations of mankind had loosed upon each other—that was Souvan’s cherished dream, now shattered. Here and there important parts of skeletons remained intact, a skull with marvelous restoration work on the teeth—Souvan was in awe of the technical proficiency of these ancient men—a femur, a foot, and in one casket, strangely enough, a mummified arm. All this was fascinating and important, but of absolutely no consequence compared to the possibilities inherent in his shattered dream.
Yet Souvan was thorough. He led his students through the ruins, and they missed nothing. Over twelve hundred caskets were examined, and all of them yielded nothing but the dust of time and death. But the very fact that this installation had been constructed so deep underground suggested that it had been built during the latter part of the atomic age. Surely the scientists of that time would have realized the vulnerability of electric power that did not have an atomic source, and unless the historians were mistaken, atomic power was already in use for the production of electricity. But what kind of atomic power? How long could it function? And where had their power plant been located? Did they use water as a cooling agent? If so, the power plant would be on the shore of the lake—a shoreline that had been turned into glass and lava. Possibly they had never discovered how to construct a self-contained atomic unit, one that might provide a flow of power for at least five thousand years. It is true that no such plant had ever been found in any of the ruins, but so much of ancient civilization had been destroyed by the fire storms that only fragments of their culture had survived.
At that moment in his musings, he was interrupted by a cry from one of the students assigned to radiation detection.
“We have radiation, sir.”
Not at all unusual in a ground-level excavation; most unusual so deep in the earth.
“What count?”
“Point 003—very low.”
“All right,” Souvan said. “Take the lead and proceed slowly.”
There was only one chamber left to examine, a laboratory of sorts. Strange how the bones perished but machinery and equipment survived! Souvan walked behind the radiation detector, the students behind them—all moving very slowly.
“It’s atomic power, sir—point 007 now—but still harmless. I think that’s the unit, there in the corner, sir.”
A very faint hum came from the corner, where a large, sealed unit was connected by cable to a box which was about a foot square. The box, constructed of stainless steel, and still gleaming here and there, emitted an almost inaudible sound.
Sou
van turned to another of his students. “Analysis of the sounds, please.”
The student opened a case he carried, set it on the floor, adjusted his dials, and read the results. “The unit’s a generator,” he said with excitement. “Atomic-powered, sealed, rather simple and primitive, but incredible. Not too much power, but the flow is steady. How long has it been since this chamber was last entered?”
“Three thousand years.”
“And the box?”
“That poses some problems,” the student said. “There appears to be a pump, a circulating system, and perhaps a compressor. The system is in motion, which would indicate refrigeration of some sort. It’s a sealed unit, sir.”
Souvan touched the box. It was cold, but no colder than other metal objects in the ruins. Well insulated, he thought, marveling again at the technical genius of these ancients. “How much of it,” he asked the student, “do you estimate is devoted to the machinery?”
Again the student worked at his dials and studied the fluttering needles of his sound detector. “It’s hard to say, sir. If you want a guess, I would say about eighty percent.”
“Then if it does contain a frozen object, it’s a very small one, isn’t it?” Souvan asked, trying to keep his voice from trembling with eagerness.
“A very small one, yes, sir.”
Two weeks later Souvan spoke to the people on television. The people were simply the people. With the end of the great atomic fire storms of three thousand years past had come the end of nations and races and tongues. The handful of people who survived gathered together and intermarried among themselves, and out of their tongues came a single language, and in time they spread over the five continents of the earth; and now there were half a billion of them. Once again there were wheatfields, forests and orchards, and fish in the sea. But no song of birds and no cry of any beast; of those, no single one had survived.
“Yet we know something of birds,” Souvan said, somewhat awed at speaking for the first time over the worldwide circuit. He had already told them of his calculations, his dig, and his find. “Not a great deal, unfortunately, for no picture or image of a bird survived the fire storms. Yet here and there we were rewarded with a book that mentioned birds, a line of verse, a reference in a novel. We know that their habitat was the air, where they soared on outstretched wings, not as our airplanes fly with the drive of their atomic jets, but as the fish swim, with ease and grace and beauty. We know that some of them were small, some quite large, and we know that their wings were covered with downy things called feathers. But what in all truth a bird or a wing or a feather was like, we do not know—except out of the imaginations of our artists who have created so many of their dreams of what birds were.