"Those seeds--they're common weed-grass seeds. Look at them."
Kellon looked, and now he saw that from each of the tiny seeds
projected a new-looking hairlike tendril.
"They're sprouting?" he said unbelievingly.
Haller nodded happily. "I was hoping for it. You see, it was almost
spring in the northern hemisphere, according to the records, when Sol
collapsed suddenly into a white dwarf. Within hours the temperature
plunged and the hydrosphere and atmosphere began to freeze."
"But surely that would kill all plant-life?"
"No," said Haller. "The larger plants, trees, perennial shrubs, and so
on, yes. But the seeds of the smaller annuals just froze into suspended
animation. Now the warmth that melted them is causing germination."
"Then we'll have grass--small plants?"
"Very soon, the way the warmth is increasing."
It was, indeed, getting a little warmer all the time as these first
weeks went by. The clouds lifted one day and there was brilliant, thin
white sunshine from the little diamond sun. And there came a morning
when they found the rolling landscape flushed with a pale tint of green.
Grass grew. Weeds grew, vines grew, all of them seeming to rush their
growth as though they knew that this, their last season, would not be
long. Soon the raw brown mud of the hills and valleys had been replaced
by a green carpet, and everywhere taller growths were shooting up, and
flowers beginning to appear. Hepaticas, bluebells, dandelions, violets,
bloomed once more.
Kellon took a long walk, now that he did not have to plow through mud.
The chattering people around the ship, the constant tug and pull of
clashing temperaments, the brittle, febrile voices, got him down. He
felt better to get away by himself.
The grass and the flowers had come back but otherwise this was still
an empty world. Yet there was a certain peace of mind in tramping up
and down the long green rolling slopes. The sun was bright and cheerful
now, and white clouds dotted the sky, and the warm wind whispered as he
sat upon a ridge and looked away westward where nobody was, or would
ever be again.
"Damned dull," he thought. "But at least it's better than back with the
gabblers."
He sat for a long time in the slanting sunshine, feeling his bristling
nerves relax. The grass stirred about him, rippling in long waves, and
the taller flowers nodded.
No other movement, no other life. A pity, he thought, that there were
no birds for this last spring of the old planet--not even a butterfly.
Well, it made no difference, all this wouldn't last long.
As Kellon tramped back through the deepening dusk, he suddenly became
aware of a shining bubble in the darkening sky. He stopped and stared
up at it and then remembered. Of course, it was the old planet's
moon--during the cloudy nights he had forgotten all about it. He went
on, with its vague light about him.
* * * * *
When he stepped back into the lighted main cabin of the ship, he was
abruptly jarred out of his relaxed mood. A first-class squabble was
going on, and everybody was either contributing to it or commenting
on it. Lorri Lee, looking like a pretty child complaining of a hurt,
was maintaining that she should have broadcast time next day for her
special woman's-interest feature, and somebody else disputed her claim,
and young Vallely, Darnow's assistant, looked harried and upset. Kellon
got by them without being noticed, locked the door of his cabin and
poured himself a long drink, and damned Survey all over again for this
assignment.
He took good care to get out of the ship early in the morning, before
the storm of temperament blew up again. He left Viresson in charge of
the ship, there being nothing for any of them to do now anyway, and
legged it away over the green slopes before anyone could call him back.
They had five more weeks of this, Kellon thought. Then, thank God,
Earth would be getting so near the Sun that they must take the ship
back into its proper element of space. Until that wished-for day
arrived, he would stay out of sight as much as possible.
He walked miles each day. He stayed carefully away from the east and
the ruins of old New York, where the others so often were. But he went
north and west and south, over the grassy, flowering slopes of the
empty world. At least it was peaceful, even though there was nothing at
all to see.
But after a while, Kellon found that there were things to see if you
looked for them. There was the way the sky changed, never seeming
to look the same twice. Sometimes it was deep blue and white clouds
sailed it like mighty ships. And then it would suddenly turn gray and
miserable, and rain would drizzle on him, to be ended when a lance of
sunlight shot through the clouds and slashed them to flying ribbons.
And there was a time when, upon a ridge, he watched vast thunder-heads
boil up and darken in the west and black storm marched across the land
like an army with banners of lightning and drums of thunder.
The winds and the sunshine, the sweetness of the air and the look of
the moonlight and the feel of the yielding grass under his feet, all
seemed oddly right. Kellon had walked on many worlds under the glare of
many-colored suns, and some of them he had liked much better than this
one and some of them he had not liked at all, but never had he found a
world that seemed so exactly attuned to his body as this outworn, empty
planet.
He wondered vaguely what it had been like when there were trees and
birds, and animals of many kinds, and roads and cities. He borrowed
film-books from the reference library Darnow and the others had
brought, and looked at them in his cabin of nights. He did not really
care very much but at least it kept him out of the broils and quarrels,
and it had a certain interest.
* * * * *
Thereafter in his wandering strolls, Kellon tried to see the place as
it would have been in the long ago. There would have been robins and
bluebirds, and yellow-and-black bumblebees nosing the flowers, and tall
trees with names that were equally strange to him, elms and willows and
sycamores. And small furred animals, and humming clouds of insects, and
fish and frogs in the pools and streams, a whole vast complex symphony
of life, long gone, long forgotten.
But were all the men and women and children who had lived here less
forgotten? Borrodale and the others talked much on their broadcasts
about the people of old Earth, but that was just a faceless name, a
term that meant nothing. Not one of those millions, surely, had ever
thought of himself as part of a numberless multitude. Each one had been
to himself, and to those close to him or her, an individual, unique and
never to be exactly repeated, and what did the glib talkers know of all
those individuals, what could anyone know?
Kellon found traces of them here and there, bits of flotsam that even
the crush of the ice had spared. A twisted piece of steel, a girder or
rail that someone had labored to make. A quarry with the tool-marks
still on the rocks, where surely men had once sweated in the sun. The
broken shards of concrete that stretched away in a ragged line to make
a road upon which men and women had once travelled, hurrying upon
missions of love or ambition, greed or fear.
He found more than that, a startling find that he made by purest
chance. He followed a brook that ran down a very narrow valley, and at
one point he leaped across it and as he landed he looked up and saw
that there was a house.
Kellon thought at first that it was miraculously preserved whole and
unbroken, and surely that could not be. But when he went closer he saw
that this was only illusion and that destruction had been at work upon
it too. Still, it remained, incredibly, a recognizable house.
It was a rambling stone cottage with low walls and a slate roof, set
close against the steep green wall of the valley. One gable-end was
smashed in, and part of that end wall. Studying the way it was embayed
in the wall, Kellon decided that a chance natural arch of ice must have
preserved it from the grinding pressure that had shattered almost all
other structures.
* * * * *
The windows and doors were only gaping openings. He went inside and
looked around the cold shadows of what had once been a room. There were
some wrecked pieces of rotting furniture, and dried mud banked along
one wall contained unrecognizable bits of rusted junk, but there was
not much else. It was chill and oppressive in there, and he went out
and sat on the little terrace in the sunshine.
He looked at the house. It could have been built no later than the
Twentieth Century, he thought. A good many different people must have
lived in it during the hundreds of years before the evacuation of Earth.
Kellon thought that it was strange that the airphoto surveys that
Darnow's men had made in quest of relics had not discovered the place.
But then it was not so strange, the stone walls were so grayly
inconspicuous and it was set so deeply into the sheltering bay of the
valley wall.
His eye fell on eroded lettering on the cement side of the terrace, and
he went and brushed the soil off that place. The words were time-eaten
and faint but he could read them.
"Ross and Jennie--Their House."
Kellon smiled. Well, at least he knew now who once had lived here, who
probably had built the place. He could imagine two young people happily
scratching the words in the wet cement, exuberant with achievement. And
who had Ross and Jennie been, and where were they now?
He walked around the place. To his surprise, there was a ragged
flower-garden at one side. A half-dozen kinds of brilliant little
flowers, unlike the wild ones of the slopes, grew in patchy disorder
here. Seeds of an old garden had been ready to germinate when the long
winter of Earth came down, and had slept in suspended animation until
the ice melted and the warm blooming time came at last. He did not know
what kinds of flowers these were, but there was a brave jauntiness
about them that he liked.
Starting back across the green land in the soft twilight, Kellon
thought that he should tell Darnow about the place. But if he did, the
gabbling pack in the ship would certainly stampede toward it. He could
imagine the solemn and cute and precious broadcasts that Borrodale and
the Lee woman and rest of them would stage from the old house.
"No," he thought. "The devil with them."
He didn't care anything himself about the old house, it was just that
it was a refuge of quiet he had found and he didn't want to draw to it
the noisy horde he was trying to escape.
* * * * *
Kellon was glad in the following days that he had not told. The house
gave him a place to go to, to poke around and investigate, a focus for
his interest in this waiting time. He spent hours there, and never told
anyone at all.
Haller, the biologist, lent him a book on the flowers of Earth, and he
brought it with him and used it to identify those in the ragged garden.
Verbenas, pinks, morning glories, and the bold red and yellow ones
called nasturtiums. Many of these, he read, did not do well on other
worlds and had never been successfully transplanted. If that was so,
this would be their last blooming anywhere at all.
He rooted around the interior of the house, trying to figure out how
people had lived in it. It was strange, not at all like a modern
metalloy house. Even the interior walls were thick beyond belief, and
the windows seemed small and pokey. The biggest room was obviously
where they had lived most, and its window-openings looked out on the
little garden and the green valley and brook beyond.
Kellon wondered what they had been like, the Ross and Jennie who had
once sat here together and looked out these windows. What things had
been important to them? What had hurt them, what had made them laugh?
He himself had never married, the far-ranging captains of the Survey
seldom did. But he wondered about this marriage of long ago, and what
had come of it. Had they had children, did their blood still run on the
far worlds? But even if it did, what was that now to those two of long
ago?
There had been a poem about flowers at the end of the old book on
flowers Haller had lent him, and he remembered some of it.
"_All are at one now, roses and lovers,
Not known of the winds and the fields and the sea,
Not a breath of the time that has been hovers
In the air now soft with a summer to be._"
Well, yes, Kellon thought, they were all at one now, the Rosses and
the Jennies and the things they had done and the things they had
thought, all at one now in the dust of this old planet whose fiery
final summer would be soon, very soon. Physically, everything that
had been done, everyone who had lived on Earth, was still here in its
atoms, excepting the tiny fraction of its matter that had sped to other
worlds.
He thought of the names that were so famous still through all the
galactic worlds, names of men and women and places. Shakespeare, Plato,
Beethoven, Blake, the old splendor of Babylon and the bones of Angkor
and the humble houses of his own ancestors, all here, all still here.
Kellon mentally shook himself. He didn't have enough to do, that was
his trouble, to be brooding here on such shadowy things. He had seen
all there was to this queer little old place, and there was no use in
coming back to it.
* * * * *
But he came back. It was not, he told himself, as though he had any
sentimental antiquarian interests in this old place. He had heard
enough of that kind of gush from all the glittering phonies in the
ship. He was a Survey man and all he wanted was to get back to his job,
but while he was stuck here it was better to be roaming the green land
or poking about this old relic than to have to listen to the endless
babbling and quarrelling of those others.
They were quarrelling more and more, because they were tired of it
here. It had seemed to them a fine thing to posture upon a galactic
stage by helping to cover the end of Earth, but time dragged by and
their flush of synthetic enthusiasm wore thin. They could not leave,
the expedition must broadcast the final climax of the planet's end, but
that was still weeks away. Darnow and his scholars and scientists, busy
coming and going to many old sites, could have stayed here forever but
the others were frankly bored.
But Kellon found in the old house enough interest to keep the waiting
from being too oppressive. He had read a good bit now about the way
things had been here in the old days, and he sat long hours on the
little terrace in the afternoon sunshine, trying to imagine what it had
been like when the man and woman named Ross and Jennie had lived here.
So strange, so circumscribed, that old life seemed now! Most people had
had ground-cars in those days, he had read, and had gone back and forth
in them to the cities where they worked. Did both the man and woman go,
or just the man? Did the woman stay in the house, perhaps with their
children if they had any, and in the afternoons did she do things in
the little flower-garden where a few bright, ragged survivors still
bloomed? Did they ever dream that some future day when they were long
gone, their house would lie empty and silent with no visitor except a
stranger from far-off stars? He remembered a line in one of the old
plays the Arcturus Players had read. Come like shadows, so depart.
No, Kellon thought. Ross and Jennie were shadows now but they had not
been then. To them, and to all the other people he could visualize
going and coming busily about the Earth in those days, it was he,
the future, the man yet to come, who was the shadow. Alone here,
sitting and trying to imagine the long ago, Kellon had an eery feeling
sometimes that his vivid imaginings of people and crowded cities and
movement and laughter were the reality and that he himself was only a
watching wraith.
* * * * *
Summer days came swiftly, hot and hotter. Now the white sun was larger
in the heavens and pouring down such light and heat as Earth had
not received for millennia. And all the green life across it seemed
to respond with an exultant surge of final growth, an act of joyous
affirmation that Kellon found infinitely touching. Now even the nights
were warm, and the winds blew thrilling soft, and on the distant
beaches the ocean leaped up in a laughter of spray and thunder, running
in great solar tides.
With a shock as though awakened from dreaming, Kellon suddenly realized
that only a few days were left. The spiral was closing in fast now and
very quickly the heat would mount beyond all tolerance.
He would, he told himself, be very glad to leave. There would be the
wait in space until it was all over, and then he could go back to his
own work, his own life, and stop fussing over shadows because there was
nothing else to do.
Yes. He would be glad.
Then when only a few days were left, Kellon walked out again to the old
house and was musing over it when a voice spoke behind him.
"Perfect," said Borrodale's voice. "A perfect relic."
Kellon turned, feeling somehow startled and dismayed. Borrodale's eyes
were alight with interest as he surveyed the house, and then he turned
to Kellon.
"I was walking when I saw you, Captain, and thought I'd catch up to
you. Is this where you've been going so often?"