"Yes. He thinks the city should be converted into a vast warehouse
where we could accumulate spoils from the other cities."
"That's not a bad idea," said Matt. "In a few years they won't have to
be guarded against anything except the weather. Sawyer was telling me
yesterday that he's discovered two hundred and thirty new species of
the silicon amoeba."
"They adapt fast," Isaac agreed. "We didn't get the fort sealed any too
soon. Let's take the elevator."
On the ninth, tenth, eleventh, and twelfth floors, animals were
contentedly munching in stalls or exercising on treads under sun lamps.
"I'm sorry about the dogs," said Matt. "I wish to hell we could have
saved some dogs."
"Too wild," said Isaac.
Matt cast a slow glance over the floor before closing the elevator
doors. They had trapped cows and pigs, sheep and goats, chickens,
ducks, and turkeys, but there had been room for neither horses nor dogs.
They looked in at the shops and laboratory, and the school where the
children of the Amazons were being put through their lessons. It was
dusk when they reached the park on the roof.
There were birds in the park, half a dozen species, but they had gone
to roost in the grove of trees. The grass was green again, and the
water in the pool looked like water--not liquid light. A fish jumped,
making ripples that spread out and out to the tile edge. A squirrel
frisked across the lawn.
"We've done a good job," said Isaac complacently.
Matt frowned. It was raining outside like the night they had landed.
The water streamed down the plastic dome blurring the scene beyond. But
he didn't need to see; he knew. The sere brown grass, the bare skeleton
trunks and limbs of the trees.
Food had grown so scarce that the animals were mad with hunger. It was
dangerous to venture outside. But the winter would take care of them.
In the spring the Earth would be dead.
Not dead, exactly. There would be the community here, a tiny island of
the old life. And there were the new silicon protozoa. In a million
years they should evolve thousands of complex organisms. The Earth
would be cloaked again with a weird and fantastic life.