Nevertheless, the crew took comfort. Any number of technical things could have gone wrong. After the disappointment at Barnard, everyone secretly looked forward to the return voyage after the great swing around the star when they should be running into a regular blizzard of outgoing messages from earth.
But earth was silent. Even after repeated queries: JPL, do you read? Do you read? Respond on any or all of designated frequencies—and even after five years of allowing for responses: silence.
Everyone knew what had happened. The Richardson survey, from his The Statistics of Deadly Quarrels, had proved all too reliable. The only unknown quantity was the magnitude of the final war. Was it an M10—the end of human life on the planet? an M9? an M5?
The long voyage home was like a dream. Five more children were born. Carl Jung out of Tiffany, Siddhartha and Chomsky out of Kimberly, Sarah and Mary Ann out of Dr. Jane Smith.
Other than the begetting, the care and feeding of infants, the education of children and teens, the adults were mostly silent — silent, until, as the starship neared earth, there came the inevitable speculation:
How bad is it? or was it? Even if it were an M10, 90 percent of the Cesium 137 radiation would have decayed after a hundred years. But the nitrogen in the upper atmosphere would have been oxidized, destroying significant amounts of ozone. The resulting solar ultraviolet effect would last for years. Birds would go blind — blind birds can’t find insects and so they die. Blind bees can’t pollinate plants. Would it be an earth swarming with locusts, seas teeming with blind fish? Even if there were survivors, how many would develop skin cancers? All the light-skinned? How would crops and microorganisms be affected?
But the favorite, the endless, the obsessive speculation of which they never tired:
Where will you go? What will you do? What about the children?
There was only one agreement. After eighteen years of living together in a space the size of a 727 fuselage, they were all thoroughly sick of each other and wanted to go their separate ways. With two exceptions.
THE CAPTAIN: Where do you want to go?
TIFFANY: I’m going to the coast of Oregon, where I once spent the summer doing anthropology with an Indian tribe. They were fishermen. They lived well and simply. It should be the safest spot in the U.S. from fallout. And the first are least likely to be contaminated by radiation or ultraviolet.
KIMBERLY: I want to go to Uxmal in the Yucatan. I have an idea about deciphering the glyphs. I lived there once in a pyramid next to a lovely deep cenote. I have a feeling that if anything has survived, it has.
THE CAPTAIN: What about your kids?
TIFFANY-AND-KIMBERLY: Oh, they all think they’re Jane’s anyhow.
THE CAPTAIN: What about you, Jane? Where do you want to go?
DR. JANE SMITH: Lost Cove, Tennessee. I was born there. It’s a tiny valley of the Cumberland plateau sealed off by a ridge. No roads, no phones, no TV. Only three farms and a cave. Good water, sweet white corn, quail, squirrel, deer, fish, wild pig. I haven’t had pork sausage, grits, and collards in twenty years. All projections of East-West fallout patterns missed it. I think I’ll take my chances.
THE CAPTAIN: Would you take the children?
DR. JANE SMITH: Sure. Can you fly us there?
THE CAPTAIN: Yes, but we have to land in Utah first.
DR. JANE SMITH: What will you do, Captain?
THE CAPTAIN: (Why didn’t she invite me to come with her to Tennessee?) I’m going back to Long Island. I don’t care what they’ve done to it. I’m getting in my ketch and sailing to Montauk.
DR. JANE SMITH (shyly): Wouldn’t you rather come with me to Tennessee?
THE CAPTAIN: Yes.
The starship made two low orbits before landing at Bonneville: the first fly-by to see the Eastern Hemisphere by night; the second, the Western. Silently, like Lucifer in starlight, leaning on his great wings, they flew low over the dark northern continents.
London was dark. Europe was dark. Moscow was dark. China was dark. Japan was dark. San Francisco was dark. Chicago was dark. New York was dark.
At dawn on April 12, eighteen years after launch in starship time, 457 years in earth time, the starship Copernicus 4 set down on schedule on the salt flats at Bonneville, Utah, the captain landing at 190 knots as easily as an ancient airline pilot landing a 727. One does not forget how to ride a bicycle, swim, or fly an airplane.
After a long silence, the Captain requested an external radiation reading from Kimberly. Negative.
There was no one and nothing to be seen except the rusty shards of old steel maintenance sheds from the twenty-first century.
They stepped out into the sweet, heavy desert air. The problem was walking — but not for the children! Perhaps they were like the newborn of the Arctic tern who fly to the Dry Tortugas, never having been there before, yet land and know it for home.
Despite Dr. Jane Smith’s careful program of exercise and calcium maintenance, the adults were limber-legged as sailors and blind as bats in the dazzling Utah sun.
The children ran and fell and jumped and fell like the Beatles on a soccer field.
They made for the nearest shade and the nearest shelter — of all things, the ruins of a rest stop on old Interstate 80 between Salt Lake City and San Francisco.
They sat at a picnic table, the returning earthlings, speechless and bemused. The rusting hulks of ancient eighteen-wheelers, Airstreams, and twenty-first-century camper-choppers (helicopters-with-tents) littered the parking area. Close by, the broken concrete of old 1-80 was drifted by salt and sand like a Roman road in Cyrenaica. But a single aspen shaded them, its crisp new leaves shivering and glittering like new money in the rising sun. A single buzzard wheeled high in the sky. As they watched, a green lizard crawled on the table, elbows sprung, cocked an eye at them, and inflated a red bladder.
The earth was alive.
There were also human survivors. And an odd lot they were, the four who rescued the stranded astronauts.
One was Aristarchus Jones, an astronomer who lived in the old SAC headquarters under a mountain at Colorado Springs.
The other three were Benedictine monks from a nearby abbey where Jones had been living for a month.
What was he, Jones, doing here? Why, he had come to meet them. They were expected. Or rather, Jones had years ago come into possession of some documents from the old JPL in Pasadena and had made the calculation that if Copernicus 4 had failed to colonize Barnard’s P1, it would return to earth — ETA: some time in April of this year.
So here he was. In February he had ridden a horse out old I-80 from Denver, taking two weeks, and had been put up by the Benedictines while he searched the skies for Copernicus 4.
The Benedictines? They were even odder. The three were all that remained, the remnant of a thriving community which at its peak, a period of religious revival after the second of the great wars of the twentieth century, had as many as three hundred men.
Now there were three: the abbot, a dried-up old sourdough with a wisp of a beard and a nose like a buzzard’s beak, and a running sore on his forehead; and two black monks, not “black monks” as all black-robed Benedictines used to be called, but black men, Negroes in the old usage, who were monks. Four white monks had died within the decade, of assorted cancers. Black men, it seemed, had the skin melanin to withstand the noxious ultraviolet.
The community had managed to survive, if this odd trio could be called a community, thanks to the prescience of an abbot of the twenty-first century who had foreseen WWIII of the year 2069 and had excavated a huge shelter in the sandstone under the abbey deep enough and well-stocked enough to survive the hundred-year decay time of Cesium 137.