Tom tried not to laugh. «I guess I surprised you, instead.»
«I guess you did.»
Dad spent almost half an hour studying Tom’s discovery.
«Well, it’s not like Earth is now,» he said at last, «but Earth had a lot of methane in its atmosphere a few billion years ago.»
«It did?» Tom brightened a little.
«Yes, back when life first began on our world.»
«So this world is like ours was, way back then?»
«Perhaps,» his father said. «You’ve made a real discovery, Thomas. This is the first world we’ve found that could become Earthlike, in a few billion years. By studying this world we might be able to learn a lot more about our own.»
«Really?»
Dad was grinning broadly now. «We’ll have to write a paper for the journal about this.»
«We? You mean, us?»
«You made the discovery, didn’t you? Daniels and Daniels, coauthors.»
«Wow!»
The two of them worked side by side for several more hours, using the telescope’s sensors to measure as much as they could about this distant new world.
Finally, as the morning shift started coming into the center, Tom asked, «Have you ever made a big discovery, Dad?»
His father shook his head and smiled sorrowfully. «Can’t say that I have, Tom. I’ve put my whole life into astronomy, but I’ve never made what you could call a big discovery.»
Tom nodded glumly.
«But here you are, fifteen years old, and you’ve already made a significant discovery. You’re going to make a fine astronomer, my boy.»
«I don’t know if I want to be an astronomer,» Tommy said.
His father looked shocked. «Why not?»
«I don’t know,» said Tom. «I was lucky tonight, I guess. But is it really worth all the work? Night after night, day after day? I mean, you’ve spent your whole life being an astronomer, and it hasn’t made you rich or famous, has it?»
«No, it hasn’t,» his father admitted.
«And it keeps you away from Mom and us kids a lot of the time. Far away.»
«That’s true enough.»
«So what good is it? What does astronomy do for us?»
Dad gave him a funny look. Getting up from the computer, he said, «Let’s take a walk outside.»
«Outside?» That surprised Tom.
He followed his father down the bare concrete corridor and they struggled into their outdoor suits.
«Science is like a great building, Tom,» Dad said as he opened the inner hatch. «Like a cathedral that’s still being built, one brick at a time. You added a new brick tonight.»
«One little brick,» Tom mumbled.
«That’s the way it’s built, son. One little brick adds to all the others.»
Dad swung the outer hatch open. «But there’s always so much more to learn. The cathedral isn’t finished yet. Perhaps it never will be.»
They stepped outside onto the barren dusty ground. Through the visor of his helmet Tom saw the spidery frameworks of the Lunar Farside Observatory’s giant telescopes rising all around them. And beyond stretched the universe of stars, thousands, millions of stars glowing in the eternal night of deep space, looking down on the battered face of the Moon where they stood.
Tom felt a lump in his throat. «Maybe I’ll stick with astronomy, after all,» he said to his father. And he thought it might be fun to add a few more bricks to the cathedral.
STARS, WON’T YOU HIDE ME?
Anybody can write about the end of the world. The first time I heard the old folk song, «Sinner Man,» I got a vision of a story about the end of the universe.
What more is there to say?
The ship was hurt, and Holman could feel its pain. He lay fetal-like in the contoured couch, his silvery uniform spider-webbed by dozens of contact and probe wires connecting him to the ship so thoroughly that it was hard to tell where his own nervous system ended and the electronic networks of the ship began.
Holman felt the throb of the ship’s mighty engines as his own pulse, and the gaping wounds in the generator section, where the enemy beams had struck, were searing his flesh. Breathing was difficult, labored, even though the ship was working hard to repair itself.
They were fleeing, he and the ship; hurtling through the star lanes to a refuge. But where?
The main computer flashed its lights to get his attention. Holman rubbed his eyes wearily and said:
«Okay, what is it?»
YOU HAVE NOT SELECTED A COURSE, the computer said aloud, while printing the words on its viewscreen at the same time.
Holman stared at the screen. «Just away from here,» he said at last. «Anyplace, as long as it’s far away.»
The computer blinked thoughtfully for a moment. SPECIFIC COURSE INSTRUCTION IS REQUIRED.
«What difference does it make?» Holman snapped. «It’s over. Everything finished. Leave me alone.»
IN LIEU OF SPECIFIC INSTRUCTIONS, IT IS NECESSARY TO TAP SUBCONSCIOUS SOURCES.
«Tap away.»
The computer did just that. And if it could have been surprised, it would have been at the wishes buried deep in Holman’s inner mind. But instead, it merely correlated those wishes to its single-minded purpose of the moment, and relayed a set of navigational instructions to the ship’s guidance system.
The Final Battle had been lost. On a million million planets across the galaxy-studded universe, mankind had been blasted into defeat and annihilation. The Others had returned from across the edge of the observable world, just as man had always feared. They had returned and ruthlessly exterminated the race from Earth.
It had taken eons, but time twisted strangely in a civilization of light-speed ships. Holman himself, barely thirty years old subjectively, had seen both the beginning of the ultimate war and its tragic end. He had gone from school into the military. And lighting inside a ship that could span the known universe in a few decades while he slept in cryogenic suspension, he had aged only ten years during the billions of years that the universe had ticked off in its stately, objective time-flow.
The Final Battle, from which Holman was fleeing, had been fought near an exploded galaxy billions of light-years from the Milky Way and Earth. There, with the ghastly bluish glare of uncountable shattered stars as a backdrop, the once-mighty fleets of mankind had been arrayed. Mortals and Immortals alike, men drew themselves up to face the implacable Others.
The enemy won. Not easily, but completely. Mankind was crushed, totally. A few fleeing men in a few battered ships was all that remained. Even the Immortals, Holman thought wryly, had not escaped. The Others had taken special care to make certain that they were definitely killed.
So it was over.
Hotman’s mind pictured the blood-soaked planets he had seen during his brief, ageless lifetime of violence. His thoughts drifted back to his own homeworld, his own family: gone long, long centuries ago. Crumbled into dust by geological time or blasted suddenly by the overpowering Others. Either way, the remorseless flow of time had covered them over completely, obliterated them, in the span of a few of Holman’s heartbeats.
All gone now. All the people he knew, all the planets he had seen through the ship’s electroptical eyes, all of mankind… extinct.