The eighteen astronauts, young and old — the youngest, Sarah, a babe in arms, in the arms of Dr. Jane Smith — took their ease in the monastery garden next to an undistinguished barracks-like church and cloister built of twentieth-century cinder blocks, ugly but durable. The children watched in astonishment as the monks walked in tiny procession, bearing aloft fronds of a desert plant. It was Palm Sunday.
There were also children at the abbey, a dozen or so, mostly genetically malformed and misbegotten: retardates, dolichocephalics (“steeple-heads”) bilateral cleft palates (“wolf-snouts”), armless, legless, depigmented, multipigmented (“harlequins”) — yet a remarkably cheerful and playful lot.
The two groups eyed each other. The first, the earthlings, looking more like visitors from space than the visitors from space: three monks in black, and Aristarchus Jones, a young blond Californian who wore a loose white garment fitted with a hood with eyeholes which protected him from the ultraviolet but made him look like a Ku Kluxer from olden time.
Abbot Leibowitz, ex-physicist, ex-Brooklynite, looked like a shtetl shopkeeper stranded in the Sinai desert for forty years.
The two black monks looked like Amos ‘n’ Andy, one small and sober and smart as Sidney Poitier; the other ponderous, windy, and funny.
The Captain had some questions, while the space children, who after a week had got the hang of earth, climbed trees, pulled grass, shied rocks as if they’d been born to it. They, the space children, after their initial astonishment, got along fine with the “misbegotten,” learned baseball from them, took them aboard Copernicus 4, taught them video-computer games.
THE CAPTAIN: What was it, an M7?
ABBOT: The old war? An M9, I’m afraid.
THE CAPTAIN: How many are left?
JONES AND ABBOT (looking at each other): You mean people?
THE CAPTAIN: Yes,
JONES: We don’t know. Not enough.
THE CAPTAIN: Not enough for what?
JONES: To sustain civilization.
THE CAPTAIN: Well, who do you know for a fact to have survived?
JONES: A couple of thousand in California. Six in Colorado Springs.
THE CAPTAIN: New York?
ABBOT: Don’t know. The last courier on his way to the West Coast said there were a hundred or so on Long Island.
THE CAPTAIN (to Abbot): What about Asia? Europe? Don’t you have communication with other monasteries? Churches?
ABBOT (shrugging): Don’t know about Europe. A few Catholics here and there in North America, a few churches, but no bishops.
THE CAPTAIN: The Pope?
ABBOT: Don’t know.
DR. JANE SMITH: Any Methodists?
ABBOT: Very few Methodists.
DR. JANE SMITH (eyeing him): Jews?
ABBOT (reviving): Yeah. A young Israeli came through here several years ago looking for his family in San Francisco. He had made a boat and sailed from Tyre, all alone. He said there were several hundred Israelis holed up in the caves of Qumran.
THE CAPTAIN: To get away from the radiation?
ABBOT: No, to get away from the Arabs.
THE CAPTAIN: Are they still fighting?
ABBOT: Yes. But radiation is no longer a danger. Cesium 137 radiation became minimal a hundred years ago.
THE CAPTAIN: Then why hasn’t the species replenished or begun to replenish? Or has it?
ABBOT AND JONES look at each other.
JONES: There’s another problem.
THE CAPTAIN: What?
JONES: Sterility.
THE CAPTAIN: From the Cesium? How could that be? Your parents were not sterile. The lizards and buzzards are not sterile.
JONES: We don’t really know. Maybe a cumulative effect of Cesium in the food chain. Maybe the ultraviolet, maybe a delayed effect of the chemical warfare. Anyhow, it has been slowly progressive until now—
THE CAPTAIN: Now what?
ABBOT: Now we estimate an incidence of 98 percent sterility in humans. There has not been a recorded birth in Utah, Colorado, or California in more than a year.
THE CAPTAIN (looking at Jones): And you?
JONES: Viable sperm count: zero.
THE CAPTAIN (looking at monks, thinks better of it, looks at Jones): You married?
JONES (looking at Tiffany, another blond Californian): No.
MONK AMOS (solemn and a bit platitudinous, like Amos in Amos 'n’ Andy): It’s tragic to see people want children and not be able to have them. What a joy to see these children!
THE CAPTAIN: How about the sexual drive? Is that affected, too, in some people?
MONK ANDY: In very few white folks and no niggers at all.
THE CAPTAIN: Let me get this straight. What you’re saying is that you’re probably the last generation on earth.
JONES: If not this, then the next is the last, surely.
ABBOT (brightening): Until you came along.
THE CAPTAIN (after a long pause): Do you have a plan?
ABBOT AND JONES: We have two plans. Two irreconcilable plans. Each involves you. I’m afraid you’re going to have to decide.
THE CAPTAIN: Let’s hear them.
Dr. Aristarchus Jones’s Proposal
Here are the facts:
The human species is finished on earth. Due to the delayed and cumulative effect of Ce 137 radiation or the reduction of ozone in the atmosphere by nitrous oxides and the resulting ultraviolet flare, male sterility is approaching 100 percent, and female is not far behind. In a word, we are either the last generation on earth or the next to last. You, Captain, and your crew are obviously fertile, but it is problematical how long you will remain so — a year? a month? And do you imagine that when your children mature sexually, they will be fertile?
My proposaclass="underline" that we colonize Europa, one of the Galilean satellites of Jupiter. You, Captain, made a fly-by eighteen years ago and know better than I that it is probably habitable: planet-size, covered by water ice, evidence of newly emerging land — the famous greening seen nowhere else but here on earth — no vulcanism, no impact craters, what appears to be a river system and, most important of all, an atmosphere of 10 percent oxygen.
Your starship has sufficient reactor fuel for launch and to attain sufficient ramjet speeds to activate the hydrogen scoop. Hence, a journey of weeks.
Here in the good monks’ cellar I have found a supply of seeds, algae, plants, small mammals, and even insects. I have books, music, Shakespeare on cassettes.
As a matter of fact, we have no choice except to stay here and die. I will go along — you will need me as a technical adviser. Moreover, Tiffany and I already have a relationship. Who knows, I may not be totally sterile — no one ever is 100 percent. After all, it only takes one spermatozoon.
With a bit of luck, we can colonize Europa in much the same way as Europe colonized the New World, except that—and here is the exciting part! — there is no reason why we cannot develop a society such as the one my namesake lived in in ancient Ionia, a society based on reason and science, and do so without repeating the mistakes of the past, for example, the Dark Ages, two thousand years of Plato and Judaism and Christianity — a sexually free and peace-loving society where the sciences and arts can flourish freed from the superstitions and repressions of religion — no offense to the good monks, who are in fact invited to come along. I think it appropriate, with your permission, to change the name of Europa to New Ionia. At long last, we are going to put behind us forever the interminable quarrels of the people of the Book — first the Jews, then the Christians, then Islam. There will be no Middle East on Ionia, no Christian vs. Jew, no Christian vs. Moslem, Shi-ite vs. Sunnite, Moslem vs. Jew, Protestant vs. Catholic.