“You don’t think we can get out of this?” I asked.
“We might. But probably not. I’ve never been much of a pessimist, but I think we may already be finished as a race. Have you thought about how quickly things fell apart? Use what happened in Hopkinsville as an example. If the wolves landed everywhere on the planet, you’ve got half the human race dead or metamorphosed the first night. By the second night, three quarters of those remaining are gone. By the third, nearly all the rest. We started out with seven hundred in Hopkinsville. We barely got out with four. Those are bad odds. Couple that with the fact that the first thing the beasts destroyed was the technology, especially communications, and I don’t see much to sing about.”
“But maybe—”
His anger flared. “I don’t like maybes. They only make you think too much. It’s either yes or no.”
“What about Amy? Don’t you think she needs you now a lot more than she ever did? Don’t you owe it to her to keep going?”
“I owe her more than that. And I’ll never stop going,” he said. “I just don’t know if we’ll be able to squeeze out of this as a race.”
“I’m still counting on signing that copy of my book for you,” I said.
“Okay,” he said, a little of his frustration and anger subsiding. “No maybes on that.”
We reached the garage. My own despair surfaced at what we found. The door had been bashed in. But once again luck had been on our side; when we cleared the debris and camouflage away we found the van undamaged.
I helped him clear the van and empty our spare gas cans into the tank. This time I checked the back before getting in. Pettis backed it out and brought it around to the front of the observatory.
The others were waiting, Wyatt clutching his charts, Doc his canister of Earl Grey. Pettis rummaged around in the bags we had loaded in Hopkinsville the day before, coming up with the packets of seeds. He pressed them into Amy’s hand. “When we get out of this,” he told her, “I’ll help you grow a garden just like your mother’s. We’ll remember her by it.”
She held him, tearfully. This time it was Amy who broke the embrace.
“Let’s get out of here, Dad.”
He let her go, and we loaded into the van.
“Going to be warm today,” Wyatt remarked, studying the sky as Pettis backed the vehicle out of the garage and pulled it slowly down the mountain.
Pettis nodded, switching on the air-conditioning. “We’ll reach Kramer Air Force Base in a couple of hours.”
Doc echoed quietly, “A couple of hours.”
There was silence. Doc didn’t have to elaborate. In a couple of hours we’d know whether or not the human race stood a chance to continue.
CHAPTER 20
The Harsh Country
Southwest desert is lonely. We saw little but macadam before and behind us; to either side, gray-brown sand spotted with low cactus, an occasional stunted Cottonwood and other trees, and brush barely hanging on. I thought of the cities, the wide suburban streets now empty of people, the remnants of humanity hiding like rats in the four corners of the world. The desert seemed an infinitely better place to be than those lonely places. The desert had retained its nature, had not been transformed into something desolate, had preserved its austere beauty—the occasional flash of blue creek water, the surprising tiny bloom of a bright red desert flower. All of this now was more precious in comparison with what the rest of the Earth must look like. I thought of a haiku I had written:
Water bead on leaf
Drifting green on crystal pool
Bursts white in sunbeam.
When I had written that, years before in the East, I would not have found much beauty in a desert landscape. My heart was in the streams and pond pools of Connecticut, the deep green springs, the cool crisp Halloween autumns, ice-white winters. That was where my blood belonged.
But now, gazing at this new beauty, I felt some of it run into my blood and realized that I had found a new home, finally.
And I realized, suddenly, and with startling clarity, that I did want to work again, that, despite everything, I wanted not only to live, but to continue to experience life.
The landscape hypnotized me; I began to form images in my mind, mesmerized by the desert flower—something that, in effect, the human race had become:
~ * ~
Death owns not even sand,
Life bursts and cries between the rocks…
~ * ~
I was so absorbed that I was barely aware of the discussion going on around me. But, eventually, the conversation grew so interesting, and loud, that it intruded into my thoughts, pushing all hope of poetry aside. I turned from the window to find Wyatt smiling broadly at me.
“We were beginning to wonder if you were still with us, the way you were staring into space,” he drawled.
“Did I hear something about werewolves actually living on the Moon?” I asked innocently.
Doc and Wyatt exchanged glances. “That was about forty minutes ago,” Wyatt laughed. “Doc here thinks there may have been an atmosphere on the Moon at one time.”
“A very tenuous one,” Doc said. “We have to account for the wolves’ presence on the Moon in one way or another. The most logical conclusion is that they evolved there. It’s obvious we’ve been very wrong in our assumptions about the Moon. It must have had a much more active volcanic life than we supposed. And, somewhere in the deep past, the degassing from all of this volcanic activity formed an atmosphere. We can theorize that much the same thing happened on the Moon as happened on Earth, that primitive plant life turned, through photosynthesis, a basically poisonous environment suffused with carbon dioxide into one friendly toward animal life. Eventually, the wolves evolved. It may seem fantastic, but at one time the Moon must have been covered with shallow seas and sparse forests. This was the world the wolves knew. But there was a problem. Due to low gravity, the escape velocity is much lower on the Moon than on Earth, and the atmosphere began to leak away into space. Perhaps the wolves’ civilization lasted thousands, perhaps millions, of years, but, eventually, they saw their doom. Perhaps they even thought of the regal blue Earth, which dominated their night sky, as stealing their life-giving oxygen away.
“What they must have done is gone into a kind of hibernation stage. What then happened is that volcanic activity greatly increased. The atmosphere was gone, and now a new Moon emerged, burying the old. The real seas were filled with lava, the highlands scorched by heat and pocked with meteor impacts. You must remember that all of this happened eons ago, giving us the dead lunar world we know today, and that the deepest any of the Apollo missions probed in the 1970s was four feet. I think the wolves were buried much deeper than that. Their bodily functions were effectively frozen, keeping them perfectly preserved.”
Doc’s face glowed with enthusiasm for his topic. “Now this is where things get interesting. You know we’ve had stories of so-called werewolves throughout history. Some are not very easy to dismiss, and there are very well-documented cases as far back as the 1300s.”
He held one hand away from his body, as if it were cradling his theory. “Here is one mystery, the appearance of werewolves on Earth.” He held his other hand away from his body. “Now we have another mystery. There is a class of non-Earth geologies called tektites that have stumped scientists for two centuries. They’re fused glass, of different colors; they’re found in only a few places on Earth, such as Southeast Asia and the state of Georgia in the United States. It’s been determined that they’ve definitely made a trip through the Earth’s atmosphere. At one time it was a very popular theory that they were volcanic material from the Moon, ejected during meteoric impacts or volcanic eruptions and making their way to Earth. The fact that they were scattered in patches in specific areas tended to support their extraterrestrial origin. But this theory lost its popularity after the Apollo missions, which found no such rocks on the Moon.”