"If you promise me faithfully to do better."
"Better than what?" asked Nick sensibly.
"Better than us old fogies."
Nick frowned up at him. "What's a fogies?"
"This young man is a budding philosopher," Chase said with a sigh. "Questions, questions, questions."
"He takes after his grandfather," Ruth said darkly.
"Is that a condemnation or a compliment, my dear?"
"I guess it all depends on the answers."
Chase kissed his grandson on the forehead. "Nick'll find them," he said quietly. "He's the perfect balance: tragedy and farce combined."
The island colonies ringed the earth like a swirling necklace of glittering white diamonds.
High above the gray-and-yellow miasma of the poisoned planet they spun like silver cartwheels in the vacuum, blackness and subzero temperature of space. Islands of warmth and light and humanity. Five million of the species
The umbilical cord had been cut: The last shuttle had departed. Now they were truly alone.
There was to be no return for many generations to come, Chase knew. It had taken the planet 300 million years to evolve a biosphere capable of supporting life. Every creature and plant had fitted in somewhere, each dependent on all the rest, all dependent on the cycles and rhythms of the complex interweave of forces that kept in equilibrium the land, the oceans, the air.
It might take ten thousand years for the planet to regenerate itself, or it might take as long as before, or it might never happen. There was no God-given guarantee that it would ever again be a habitable place for the human species.
From the window of his study he could view the sliding stars through the transparent panels several thousand feet above. The Great Bear drifted by, pointing to the unseen Pole Star. As with the other colonies, Canton Island's angle of declination was such that the earth couldn't be seen from inside the colony itself. It was possible to see the earth (in rather uncomfortable circumstances) by taking a stroll along one of the six-kilometer-long thruways that connected Globe City to the outer torus. But then the motion of the colony in its spinning orbit whirled the planet around and around, above and below the watcher in a series of dizzying spirals. Nobody experienced space sickness except when tempted to take a peek at the old homestead; Chase had tried it once, never again.
Actually, the sad part was, there was nothing to see. A muddy ball wreathed in haze. No brilliant blue oceans or dazzling white clouds. No landmasses or islands or polar caps. Just gray nothingness masking every feature, like a once-beautiful woman shamefully hiding her aged crumbling face behind a soiled veil.
Chase had often speculated about the forms of life that had taken possession of the planet. The mutants would continue to breed, of course, and evolve perhaps into a completely different and unrecognizable species, in much the same way that man had been transformed from fish to mammal, a fluke of evolutionary engineering. And there were the new breeds to take into account--the uncles--cross matches of plant and animal with a genetic blueprint quite unknown before. Would they become the new lords of Creation?
He could foresee wars between the rival groups. Small-scale tribal conflicts with primitive weaponry fought in stinking jungles and belching bogs. Straight out of a science-fiction writer's nightmare. With an atmosphere so thick you couldn't spit through it.
There would be victors and vanquished. The eternal law of survival of the fittest would still apply, though now the fittest would be those best able to thrive in an atmosphere with only the merest trace of oxygen. They would be methane-breathers perhaps, with a physiology as alien to the human as the earthworm's. Or they might feed off dioxin, the deadliest poison known to man, and produce offspring that drank sulfuric acid and breathed in sulfurous smog as if it were an invigorating sea breeze. There would be forms of life so bizarre--grotesque and horrific to human eyes--that it was beyond the wit of man to conjure them up, even in his most demented imaginings.
And all the while, as this was taking place, the species that had failed the course in planetary management would be gazing down at what had been theirs and was now lost, at what they had willfully thrown away, perhaps forever. The earth wouldn't care. Nature was amoral, impersonal, quite indifferent to the fate of a single species. The brute thrust of growth went on, unconcerned, in other directions, explored other avenues. As far as the planet was concerned, mankind was only one more to add to the long list of failed experiments.
True, mankind might have made a greater impact than all the rest, created more havoc, interfered like a spoiled ignorant brat in things he didn't understand, and yet the earth abided.
