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Title: Requiem
Author: Edmond Hamilton
Release date: November 20, 2023 [eBook #72180]
Language: English
Original publication: New York, NY: Ziff-Davis Publishing Company, 1962
Credits: Greg Weeks, Mary Meehan and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK REQUIEM ***
REQUIEM
By EDMOND HAMILTON
Illustrated by SUMMERS
_All during its lifetime Earth had been deluged ...
overwhelmed ... submerged in an endless torrent
of words. Was even its death to be stripped
of dignity by the cackling of the mass media?_
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Amazing Stories April 1962
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
Kellon thought sourly that he wasn't commanding a star-ship, he was
running a travelling circus. He had aboard telaudio men with tons of
equipment, pontifical commentators who knew the answer to anything,
beautiful females who were experts on the woman's angle, pompous
bureaucrats after publicity, and entertainment stars who had come along
for the same reason.
He had had a good ship and crew, one of the best in the Survey. _Had_
had. They weren't any more. They had been taken off their proper job of
pushing astrographical knowledge ever further into the remote regions
of the galaxy, and had been sent off with this cargo of costly people
on a totally unnecessary mission.
He said bitterly to himself, "Damn all sentimentalists."
He said aloud, "Does its position check with your calculated orbit, Mr.
Riney?"
Riney, the Second, a young and serious man who had been fussing with
instruments in the astrogation room, came out and said,
"Yes. Right on the nose. Shall we go in and land now?"
Kellon didn't answer for a moment, standing there in the front of the
bridge, a middle-aged man, stocky, square-shouldered, and with his
tanned, plain face showing none of the resentment he felt. He hated to
give the order but he had to.
"All right, take her in."
He looked gloomily through the filter-windows as they went in. In this
fringe-spiral of the galaxy, stars were relatively infrequent, and
there were only ragged drifts of them across the darkness. Full ahead
shone a small, compact sun like a diamond. It was a white dwarf and had
been so for two thousand years, giving forth so little warmth that the
planets which circled it had been frozen and ice-locked all that time.
They still were, all except the innermost world.
* * * * *
Kellon stared at that planet, a tawny blob. The ice that had sheathed
it ever since its primary collapsed into a white dwarf, had now melted.
Months before, a dark wandering body had passed very close to this
lifeless system. Its passing had perturbed the planetary orbits and the
inner planets had started to spiral slowly in toward their sun, and the
ice had begun to go.
Viresson, one of the junior officers, came into the bridge looking
harassed. He said to Kellon,
"They want to see you down below, sir. Especially Mr. Borrodale. He
says it's urgent."
Kellon thought wearily, "Well, I might as well go down and face the
pack of them. Here's where they really begin."
He nodded to Viresson, and went down below to the main cabin. The
sight of it revolted him. Instead of his own men in it, relaxing or
chinning, it held a small and noisy mob of over-dressed, overloud
men and women, all of whom seemed to be talking at once and uttering
brittle, nervous laughter.
"Captain Kellon, I want to ask you--"
"Captain, if you _please_--"
He patiently nodded and smiled and plowed through them to Borrodale. He
had been given particular instructions to cooperate with Borrodale, the
most famous telaudio commentator in the Federation.
Borrodale was a slightly plump man with a round pink face and
incongruously large and solemn black eyes. When he spoke, one
recognized at once that deep, incredibly rich and meaningful voice.
"My first broadcast is set for thirty minutes from now, Captain. I
shall want a view as we go in. If my men could take a mobile up to the
bridge--"
Kellon nodded. "Of course. Mr. Viresson is up there and will assist
them in any way."
"Thank you, Captain. Would you like to see the broadcast?"
"I would, yes, but--"
He was interrupted by Lorri Lee, whose glitteringly handsome face
and figure and sophisticated drawl made her the idol of all female
telaudio reporters.
"_My_ broadcast is to be right after landing--remember? I'd like to do
it alone, with just the emptiness of that world as background. Can you
keep the others from spoiling the effect? Please?"
"We'll do what we can," Kellon mumbled. And as the rest of the pack
converged on him he added hastily, "I'll talk to you later. Mr.
Borrodale's broadcast--"
* * * * *
He got through them, following after Borrodale toward the cabin that
had been set up as a telaudio-transmitter room. It had, Kellon thought
bitterly, once served an honest purpose, holding the racks of soil and
water and other samples from far worlds. But that had been when they
were doing an honest Survey job, not chaperoning chattering fools on
this sentimental pilgrimage.
The broadcasting set-up was beyond Kellon. He didn't want to hear
this but it was better than the mob in the main cabin. He watched as
Borrodale made a signal. The monitor-screen came alive.
It showed a dun-colored globe spinning in space, growing visibly larger
as they swept toward it. Now straggling seas were identifiable upon it.
Moments passed and Borrodale did not speak, just letting that picture
go out. Then his deep voice spoke over the picture, with dramatic
simplicity.
"You are looking at the Earth," he said.
Silence again, and the spinning brownish ball was bigger now, with
white clouds ragged upon it. And then Borrodale spoke again.
"You who watch from many worlds in the galaxy--this is the homeland of
our race. Speak its name to yourselves. The Earth."
Kellon felt a deepening distaste. This was all true, but still it was
phony. What was Earth now to him, or to Borrodale, or his billions of
listeners? But it was a story, a sentimental occasion, so they had to
pump it up into something big.
"Some thirty-five hundred years ago," Borrodale was saying, "our
ancestors lived on this world alone. That was when they first went into
space. To these other planets first--but very soon, to other stars. And
so our Federation began, our community of human civilization on many
stars and worlds."
Now, in the monitor, the view of Earth's dun globe had been replaced by
the face of Borrodale in close-up. He paused dramatically.
"Then, over two thousand years ago, it was discovered that the sun of
Earth was about to collapse into a white dwarf. So those people who
still remained on Earth left it forever and when the solar change came,
it and the other planets became mantled in eternal ice. And now, within
months, the final end of the old planet of our origin is at hand. It
is slowly spiralling toward the sun and soon it will plunge into it as
Mercury and Venus have already done. And when that occurs, the world of
man's origin will be gone forever."
Again the pause, for just the right length of time, and then Borrodale
continued in a voice expertly pitched in a lower key.
"We on this ship--we humble reporters and servants of the vast telaudio
audience on all the worlds--have come here so that in these next weeks
we can give you this last look at our ancestral world. We think--we
hope--that you'll find interest in recalling a past that is almost
legend."
And Kellon thought, "The bastard has no more interest in this old
planet than I have, but he surely is smooth."
* * * * *
As soon as the broadcast ended, Kellon found himself besieged once
more by the clamoring crowd in the main cabin. He held up his hand in
protest.
"Please, now--now we have a landing to make first. Will you come with
me, Doctor Darnow?"
Darnow was from Historical Bureau, and was the titular head of the
whole expedition, although no one paid him much attention. He was a
sparrowy, elderly man who babbled excitedly as he went with Kellon to
the bridge.
He at least, was sincere in his interest, Kellon thought. For that
matter, so were all the dozen-odd scientists who were aboard. But they
were far out-numbered by the fat cats and big brass out for publicity,
the professional enthusers and sentimentalist. A real hell of a job the
Survey had given him!
In the bridge, he glanced through the window at the dun-colored planet
and its satellite. Then he asked Darnow, "You said something about a
particular place where you wanted to land?"
The historiographer bobbed his head, and began unfolding a big,
old-fashioned chart.
"See this continent here? Along its eastern coast were a lot of the
biggest cities, like New York."
Kellon remembered that name, he'd learned it in school history, a long
time ago.
Darnow's finger stabbed the chart. "If you could land there, right on
the island--"
Kellon studied the relief features, then shook his head. "Too low.
There'll be great tides as time goes on and we can't take chances. That
higher ground back inland a bit should be all right, though."
Darnow looked disappointed. "Well, I suppose you're right."
Kellon told Riney to set up the landing-pattern. Then he asked Darnow
skeptically,
"You surely don't expect to find much in those old cities now--not
after they've had all that ice on them for two thousand years?"
"They'll be badly damaged, of course," Darnow admitted. "But there
should be a vast number of relics. I could study here for years--"
"We haven't got years, we've got only a few months before this planet
gets too close to the Sun," said Kellon. And he added mentally, "Thank
God."
* * * * *
The ship went into its landing-pattern. Atmosphere whined outside its
hull and then thick gray clouds boiled and raced around it. It went
down through the cloud layer and moved above a dull brown landscape
that had flecks of white in its deeper valleys. Far ahead there was the
glint of a gray ocean. But the ship came down toward a rolling brown
plain and settled there, and then there was the expected thunderclap of
silence that always followed the shutting off of all machinery.
Kellon looked at Riney, who turned in a moment from the test-panel
with a slight surprise on his face. "Pressure, oxygen, humidity,
everything--all optimum." And then he said, "But of course. This place
_was_ optimum."
Kellon nodded. He said, "Doctor Darnow and I will have a look out
first. Viresson, you keep our passengers in."
When he and Darnow went to the lower airlock he heard a buzzing clamor
from the main cabin and he judged that Viresson was having his hands
full. The people in there were not used to being said no to, and he
could imagine their resentment.
Cold, damp air struck a chill in Kellon when they stepped down out
of the airlock. They stood on muddy, gravelly ground that squashed
a little under their boots as they trudged away from the ship. They
stopped and looked around, shivering.
Under the low gray cloudy sky there stretched a sad, sunless brown
landscape. Nothing broke the drab color of raw soil, except the
shards of ice still lingering in low places. A heavy desultory wind
stirred the raw air, and then was still. There was not a sound except
the clinkclinking of the ship's skin cooling and contracting, behind
them. Kellon thought that no amount of sentimentality could make this
anything but a dreary world.
But Darnow's eyes were shining. "We'll have to make every minute of the
time count," he muttered. "Every minute."
Within two hours, the heavy broadcast equipment was being trundled
away from the ship on two motor-tracs that headed eastward. On one
of the tracs rode Lorri Lee, resplendent in lilac-colored costume of
synthesilk.
Kellon, worried about the possibility of quicksands, went along for
that first broadcast from the cliffs that looked down on the ruins of
New York. He wished he hadn't, when it got under way.
For Lorri Lee, her blonde head bright even in the dull light, turned
loose all her practised charming gestures for the broadcast cameras, as
she gestured with pretty excitement down toward the ruins.
"It's so _unbelievable_!" she cried to a thousand worlds. "To be here
on Earth, to see the old places again--it _does_ something to you!"
It did something to Kellon. It made him feel sick at his stomach. He
turned and went back to the ship, feeling at that moment that if Lorri
Lee went into a quicksand on the way back, it would be no great loss.
* * * * *
But that first day was only the beginning. The big ship quickly became
the center of multifarious and continuous broadcasts. It had been
especially equipped to beam strongly to the nearest station in the
Federation network, and its transmitters were seldom quiet.
Kellon found that Darnow, who was supposed to coordinate all this
programming, was completely useless. The little historian was living
in a seventh heaven on this old planet which had been uncovered to
view for the first time in millennia, and he was away most of the time
on field trips of his own. It fell to his assistant, an earnest and
worried and harassed young man, to try to reconcile the clashing claims
and demands of the highly temperamental broadcasting stars.
Kellon felt an increasing boredom at having to stand around while all
this tosh went out over the ether. These people were having a field-day
but he didn't think much of them and of their broadcasts. Roy Quayle,
the young male fashion designer, put on a semi-humorous, semi-nostalgic
display of the old Earth fashions, with the prettier girls wearing
some of the ridiculous old costumes he had had duplicated. Barden, the
famous teleplay producer, ran off ancient films of the old Earth dramas
that had everyone in stitches. Jay Maxson, a rising politician in
Federation Congress, discussed with Borrodale the governmental systems
of the old days, in a way calculated to give his own Wide-Galaxy Party
none the worst of it. The Arcturus Players, that brilliant group of
young stage-folk, did readings of old Earth dramas and poems.
It was, Kellon thought disgustedly, just playing. Grown people, famous
people, seizing the opportunity given by the accidental end of a
forgotten planet to posture in the spotlight like smart-aleck children.
There was real work to do in the galaxy, the work of the Survey, the
endless and wearying but always-fascinating job of charting the wild
systems and worlds. And instead of doing that job, he was condemned to
spend weeks and months here with these phonies.
The scientists and historians he respected. They did few broadcasts
and they did not fake their interest. It was one of them, Haller, the
biologist, who excitedly showed Kellon a handful of damp soil a week
after their arrival.
* * * * *
"Look at _that_!" he said proudly.
Kellon stared. "What?"
"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?"
Kellon, a little guiltily, evaded. "I've been here a few times."
"But why in the world didn't you _tell_ us about this?" exclaimed
Borrodale. "Why, we can do a terrific final broadcast from here. A
typical ancient home of Earth. Roy can put some of the Players in the
old costumes, and we'll show them living here the way people did--"
Unexpectedly to himself, a violent reaction came up in Kellon. He said
roughly,
"No."
Borrodale arched his eyebrows. "No? But why not?"
Why not, indeed? What difference could it possibly make to him if they
swarmed all over the old house, laughing at its ancientness and its
inadequacies, posing grinning for the cameras in front of it, prancing
about in old-fashioned costumes and making a show of it. What could
that mean to him, who cared nothing about this forgotten planet or
anything on it?
And yet something in him revolted at what they would do here, and he
said,
"We might have to take off very suddenly, now. Having you all out here
away from the ship could involve a dangerous delay."
"You said yourself we wouldn't take off for a few days yet!" exclaimed
Borrodale. And he added firmly, "I don't know why you should want to
obstruct us, Captain. But I can go over your head to higher authority."
* * * * *
He went away, and Kellon thought unhappily, He'll message back to
Survey headquarters and I'll get my ears burned off, and why the devil
did I do it anyway? I must be getting real planet-happy.
He went and sat down on the terrace, and watched until the sunset
deepened into dusk. The moon came up white and brilliant, but the air
was not quiet tonight. A hot, dry wind had begun to blow, and the stir
of the tall grass made the slopes and plains seem vaguely alive. It was
as though a queer pulse had come into the air and the ground, as the
sun called its child homeward and Earth strained to answer. The house
dreamed in the silver light, and the flowers in the garden rustled.
Borrodale came back, a dark pudgy figure in the moonlight. He said
triumphantly,
"I got through to your headquarters. They've ordered your full
cooperation. We'll want to make our first broadcast here tomorrow."
Kellon stood up. "No."
"You can't ignore an order--"
"We won't be here tomorrow," said Kellon. "It is my responsibility to
get the ship off Earth in ample time for safety. We take off in the
morning."
Borrodale was silent for a moment, and when he spoke his voice had a
puzzled quality.
"You're advancing things just to block our broadcast, of course. I just
can't understand your attitude."
Well, Kellon thought, he couldn't quite understand it himself, so how
could he explain it? He remained silent, and Borrodale looked at him
and then at the old house.
"Yet maybe I do understand," Borrodale said thoughtfully, after a
moment. "You've come here often, by yourself. A man can get too
friendly with ghosts--"
Kellon said roughly, "Don't talk nonsense. We'd better get back to the
ship, there's plenty to do before take off."
Borrodale did not speak as they went back out of the moonlit valley. He
looked back once, but Kellon did not look back.
* * * * *
They took the ship off twelve hours later, in a morning made dull and
ominous by racing clouds. Kellon felt a sharp relief when they cleared
atmosphere and were out in the depthless, starry blackness. He knew
where he was, in space. It was the place where a spaceman belonged.
He'd get a stiff reprimand for this later, but he was not sorry.
They put the ship into a calculated orbit, and waited. Days, many of
them, must pass before the end came to Earth. It seemed quite near the
white sun now, and its Moon had slid away from it on a new distorted
orbit, but even so it would be a while before they could broadcast to a
watching galaxy the end of its ancestral world.
Kellon stayed much of that time in his cabin. The gush that was going
out over the broadcasts now, as the grand finale approached, made him
sick. He wished the whole thing was over. It was, he told himself,
getting to be a bore--
An hour and twenty minutes to E-time, and he supposed he must go up
to the bridge and watch it. The mobile camera had been set up there
and Borrodale and as many others of them as could crowd in were there.
Borrodale had been given the last hour's broadcast, and it seemed that
the others resented this.
"Why must you have the whole last hour?" Lorri Lee was saying bitterly
to Borrodale. "It's not fair."
Quayle nodded angrily. "There'll be the biggest audience in history,
and we should all have a chance to speak."
Borrodale answered them, and the voices rose and bickered, and Kellon
saw the broadcast technicians looking worried. Beyond them through the
filter-window he could see the dark dot of the planet closing on the
white star. The sun called, and it seemed that with quickened eagerness
Earth moved on the last steps of its long road. And the clamoring,
bickering voices in his ears suddenly brought rage to Kellon.
"Listen," he said to the broadcast men. "Shut off all sound
transmission. You can keep the picture on, but no sound."
That shocked them all into silence. The Lee woman finally protested,
"Captain Kellon, you can't!"
"I'm in full command when in space, and I can, and do," he said.
"But the broadcast, the commentary--"
Kellon said wearily, "Oh, for Christ's sake all of you shut up, and let
the planet die in peace."
* * * * *
He turned his back on them. He did not hear their resentful voices,
did not even hear when they fell silent and watched through the dark
filter-windows as he was watching, as the camera and the galaxy was
watching.
And what was there to see but a dark dot almost engulfed in the shining
veils of the sun? He thought that already the stones of the old house
must be beginning to vaporize. And now the veils of light and fire
almost concealed the little planet, as the star gathered in its own.
All the atoms of old Earth, Kellon thought, in this moment bursting
free to mingle with the solar being, all that had been Ross and
Jennie, all that had been Shakespeare and Schubert, gay flowers and
running streams, oceans and rocks and the wind of the air, received
into the brightness that had given them life.
They watched in silence, but there was nothing more to see, nothing at
all. Silently the camera was turned off.
Kellon gave an order, and presently the ship was pulling out of orbit,
starting on the long voyage back. By that time the others had gone,
all but Borrodale. He said to Borrodale, without turning,
"Now go ahead and send your complaint to headquarters."
Borrodale shook his head. "Silence can be the best requiem of all.
There'll be no complaint. I'm glad now, Captain."
"Glad?"
"Yes," said Borrodale. "I'm glad that Earth had one true mourner, at
the last."
THE END
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