The night was full of unfamiliar sounds. There was wind rustling in tall trees, and the steady beat of waves on the seashore. Somewhere to the south a group of animals called to each other, their voices tantalizingly familiar, like humans sobbing and crying out in some foreign tongue. When Peron at last fell asleep, it was to unpleasant dreams. The voices called to him through the night; but now he imagined he could understand their lamenting message.
Your visit to Earth is a delusion. You are hiding from the truth, trying to put off unpleasant actions. But they cannot be put aside. You must return to S-space… and go farther yet.
The next morning they took to the air again and headed north and east into Asia. Two days’ travel convinced Peron and Elissa of two things. Apart from the general location of the land masses, Earth bore no resemblance to the fabled planet described in the old records of Pentecost and the library records on the ship. And there was no chance that they would choose to live on Earth, even if it were to be colonized again in the near future. Pentecost was more beautiful in every way.
They left the information service on all the time. It described a link between the old, fertile Earth of legend and the present wilderness.
The post-nuclear winter had been the first cause of the trouble. It was far more influential as an agent of change than the Ice Age that now held Earth in a frozen grasp. Immediately after the thermonuclear explosions, temperatures below the thick clouds of radioactive dust dropped drastically. Plants and animals that fought for survival in the sunless gloom of the surface did so in a poisoned environment that forced rapid mutation or extinction.
In the air, the birds could not find enough food over the land. A few remaining species skimmed the surface of the tropical seas, competing with sea mammals for the diminished supply of fish. Their high energy-need killed them. The last flying bird on Earth fell from the skies within two years of the thermonuclear blast that obliterated Washington. The penguins alone lived on, moving north from the Antarctic to inhabit the coastlines of South America and Africa. Small colonies of emperor penguins still clung to the shores of the Java Sea and Indonesia.
The larger surface animals — including all surviving members of homo sapiens — were early victims. Long life spans permitted the build-up of lethal doses of radiation in body tissues.
The small burrowers, driven farther underground to seek out deep-lying roots and tubers, fared much better. One circumstance had assisted their survival. The hour of Armageddon came close to the winter solstice in the northern hemisphere, at a time when many animals were fat for the winter and preparing for hibernation. They had burrowed deeper and settled in for the hibernal sleep. The ones too far north had never wakened. Others, returning to consciousness in a cold, dark spring, foraged far and wide for food. The lucky ones moved steadily south, to the zone where a pale, sickly sunlight still permitted some plant growth. Of all Earth’s land mammals, only a few small rodents — mice, hamsters, ground squirrels, and woodchucks — lived on to inherit the earth.
Their competition had been formidable. The invertebrates were fighting for their own survival. Insect life dwindled at first, then adapted, mutated, grew, and multiplied. They had always dominated the tropical regions of Earth; now the larger ants and spiders, aided by their formidable mandibles and stings, strove to become the lords of creation.
The mammals took the only paths left to them. The invertebrates were limited in maximum size because of passive breathing mechanisms and their lack of an internal skeleton; and they were cold-blooded. The rodents grew in size to improve their heat retention, developed thick coats and hairy paws, and moved away from the equator to regions where there was no insect competition. Some of them were totally vegetarian, browsing on the sparse, chlorotic plant life that still grew in the dust-filtered twilight. They developed thick layers of blubber, for food storage and insulation. The other survivors became super-efficient predators, preying on their herbivorous relatives. As the nuclear winter slowly ended the insects moved north and south again, away from the tropics. But the mutated mice and woodchucks were ready for them. They had increased in size and ferocity, to become a match for any pre-civilization wolf; and now they wore thick coats of fur and protective fat that rendered impotent the fierce mandibles and poison stings. The insects were a new convenient source of protein. The carnivores followed them back into their tropic habitats, and on to the southern regions.
The changes to animal life on Earth were easiest to see; but the changes to the vegetation were in some ways more fundamental. The grasses were gone; in their place a dwarf form of eucalyptus covered millions of square kilometers with flat, bluish-green leaves. Waving fields of corn and wheat would never be seen again on Earth. Their nourishing seeds had been replaced by the red clusters of berries that hung from every euclypt stem. After being assured that it was safe to do so, Elissa sampled a couple. They were filled with a fatty syrup, and at their center sat an oval, impenetrable seed. The seeds, berries and roots of the euclypts sustained a thriving animal community beneath the foot-high canopy of their leaves, where in the blue-green gloom devolved mice fought finger-long giant ants for the best food and living space.
As they travelled on across the face of an Earth where no vestige of human works remained, Peron became gradually more silent and withdrawn. Elissa assumed that it was a reaction to their surroundings. She was reluctant to interfere with his thoughts. But as they skirted the barren western seaboard of South America, where the continuous line of glaciers stretched down to the Pacific, Peron’s need to discuss his worries became overwhelming.
They had landed in the Andean foothills to watch sunset over the Pacific. Neither spoke as the broad face of Sol, red in the evening twilight, sank steadily past a thin line of clouds far out over the western ocean. Even after the last of the light had faded, they could turn to the east and see the sun’s rays still caught by the summits of high, snow-covered peaks.
“We can’t stay here,” Peron said at last. “Even if we liked it better here than on Pentecost, even if we thought Earth was perfect, we’d have to go back — to S-space.”
Elissa remained silent. She knew Peron. He had to be allowed the time to work his way into a subject, without pressure and with minimal coaxing. That was the way that he had first managed to speak to her of their own relationship, and the way that she had finally learned of his continued doubts over leaving his family to take part in Planetfest.
The last of the light vanished, leaving them sitting side by side on the soft earth next to the aircar. Stars were appearing, one by one, twinkling brightly in the crisp night air.
“We’ve had a great time here,” Peron went on at last, “but for the past two days I’ve had trouble getting a thought out of my head. Remember the colony of mouse-monkeys, the black ones with the fat tails?”
Elissa squeezed his hand without speaking.
“You asked me how the head of the colony could control the others so easily,” he continued. “He didn’t seem to fight them, or bully them, or try to dominate them at all. But they climbed the trees, and brought him food, and groomed him, and he didn’t even have to move to live in comfort. Well, for some reason that reminded me of something my father said to me when I was only ten years old. He asked me, who controlled Pentecost? He said that was the third most important question to answer in a society, and the most important ones were, how did they control, and why did they control? If you knew all three, masters, mechanisms, and motives, you were in a position to make changes.”