Jach Williamson - The Ultimate Earth

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"The Ultimate Earth" by Jack Williamson
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The Ultimate Earth Jack Williamson
1.
We loved Uncle Pen. The name he gave us was too hard for us to say, and we made it Sandor Pen. As early as we could
understand, the robots had told us that we were clones, created to watch the skies for danger and rescue Earth from any harm.
They had kept us busy with our lessons and our chores and our workouts in the big centrifuge, but life in our little burrow left us
little else to do. His visits were our best excitement.
He never told us when he was coming. We used to watch for him, looking from the high dome on the Tycho rim, down across the
field of Moondust the digging machines had leveled. Standing huge on the edge of it, they were metal monsters out of space,
casting long black shadows across the gray waste of rocks and dust and crater pits.
His visit on our seventh birthday was a wonderful surprise. Tanya saw him landing and called us up to the dome. His ship was a
bright teardrop, shining in the black shadow of a gigantic metal insect. He jumped out of it in a sleek silvery suit that fitted like his
skin. We waited inside the airlock to watch him peel it off. He was a small lean man, who looked graceful as a girl but still very
strong. Even his body was exciting to see, though Dian ran and hid because he looked so strange.
Naked, his body had a light tan that darkened in the sunlit dome and faded fast when he went below. His face was a narrow heart-
shape, his golden eyes enormous. Instead of hair like ours, his head was capped with sleek, red-brown fur. He needed no
clothing, he told us, because his sex organs were internal.
He called Dian when he missed her, and she crept back to share the gifts he had brought from Earth. There were sweet fruits we
had never tasted, strange toys, stranger games that he had to show us how to play. For Tanya and Dian there were dolls that
sang strange songs in voices we couldn’t understand and played loud music on tiny instruments we had never heard.
The best part was just the visit with him in the dome. Pepe and Casey had eager questions about life on the new Earth. Were
there cities? Wild animals? Alien creatures? Did people live in houses, or underground in tunnels like ours? What did he do for a
living? Did he have a wife? Children like us?
He wouldn’t tell us much. Earth, he said, had changed since our parents knew it. It was now so different that he wouldn’t know
where to begin, but he let us take turns looking at it through the big telescope. Later, he promised, if he could find space gear to
fit us, he would take us up to orbit the Moon and loop toward it for a closer look. Now, however, he was working to learn all he
could about the old Earth, the way it had been ages ago, before the great impacts.
He showed it to us in the holo tanks and the brittle old paper books, the way it was with white ice caps over the poles and bare
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brown deserts on the continents. Terraformed, the new Earth had no deserts and no ice. Under the bright cloud spirals, the land
was green where the sun struck it, all the way over the poles. It looked so wonderful that Casey and Pepe begged him to take us
back with him to let us see it for ourselves.
"I’m sorry." He shook his neat, fur-crowned head. "Terribly sorry, but you can’t even think of a trip to Earth."
We were looking from the dome. Earth stood high in the black north, where it always stood. Low in the west, the slow Sun blazed
hot on the new mountains the machines had piled up around the spaceport, and filled the craters with ink.
Dian had learned by now to trust him. She sat on his knee, gazing up in adoration at his quirky face. Tanya stood behind him,
playing a little game. She held her hand against his back to bleach the golden tan, and took it away to watch the Sun erase the
print.
Looking hurt, Casey asked why we couldn’t think of a trip to Earth.
"You aren’t like me." That was very true. Casey has a wide black face with narrow Chinese eyes and straight black hair. "And you
belong right here."
"I don’t look like anybody." Casey shrugged. "Or belong to you."
"Of course you don’t." Uncle Pen was gently patient. "But you do belong to the station and your great mission." He looked at me.
"Remind him, Dunk."
My clone father was Duncan Yarrow. The master computer that runs the station often spoke with his holo voice. He had told us
how we had been cloned again and again from the tissue cells left frozen in the cryostat.
"Sir, that’s true." I felt a little afraid of Uncle Pen, but proud of all the station had done. "My holo father has told us how the big
impacts killed Earth and killed it again. We have always brought it back to life." My throat felt dry. I had to gulp, but I went on. "If
Earth’s alive now, that’s because of us."
"True. Very true." He nodded, with an odd little smile. "But perhaps you don’t know that your little Moon has suffered a heavy
impact of his own. If you are alive today, you owe your lives to me."
"To you?" We all stared at him, but Casey was nodding. "To you and the digging machines? I’ve watched them and wondered
what they were digging for. When did that object hit the Moon?"
"¿Quién sabe?" He shrugged at Pepe, imitating the gesture and the voice Pepe had learned from his holo father. "It was long
ago. Perhaps a hundred thousand years, perhaps a million. I haven’t found a clue."
"The object?" Pepe frowned. "Something hit the station?"
"A narrow miss." Uncle Pen nodded at the great dark pit in the crater rim just west of us. "The ejecta smashed the dome and
buried everything. The station was lost and almost forgotten. Only a myth till I happened on it."
"The diggers?" Casey turned to stare down at the landing field where Uncle Pen had left his flyer in the shadows of those great
machines and the mountains they had built. "How did you know where to dig?"
"The power plant was still running," Uncle Pen said. "Keeping the computer alive. I was able to detect its metal shielding and then
its radiation."
"We thank you." Pepe came gravely to shake his hand. "I’m glad to be alive."
"So am I," Casey said. "If I can get to Earth." He saw Uncle Pen beginning to shake his head, and went on quickly, "Tell us what
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you know about the Earth impacts and how we came down to terraform the Earth and terraform it again when it was killed again."
"I don’t know what you did."
"You have showed us the difference we made," Casey said. "The land is all green now, with no deserts or ice."
"Certainly it has been transformed." Nodding, Uncle Pen stopped to smile at Tanya as she left her game with the sun on his back
and came to sit crosslegged at his feet. "Whatever you did was ages ago. Our historians are convinced that we’ve done more
ourselves."
"You changed the Earth?" Casey was disappointed and a little doubtful. "How?"
"We removed undersea ledges and widened straits to reroute the ocean circulation and warm the poles. We diverted rivers to fill
new lakes and bring rain to deserts. We engineered new life-forms that improved the whole biocosm."
"But still you owe us something. We put you there."
"Of course." Uncle Pen shrugged. "Excavating the station, I uncovered evidence that the last impact annihilated life on Earth. The
planet had been reseeded sometime before the lunar impact occurred."
"We did it." Casey grinned. "You’re lucky we were here."
?????
"Your ship?" Pepe had gone to stand at the edge of the dome, looking down at the monster machines and Uncle Pen’s neat little
flyer, so different from the rocket spaceplanes we had seen in the old video holos. "Can it go to other planets?"
"It can." He nodded. "The planets of other suns."
Tanya’s eyes went wide, and Pepe asked, "How does it fly in space with no rocket engines?"
"It doesn’t," he said. "It’s called a slider. It slides around space, not through it."
"To the stars?" Tanya whispered. "You’ve been to other stars?"
"To the planets of other stars." He nodded gravely. "I hope to go again when my work here is finished."
"Across the light-years?" Casey was awed. "How long does it take?"
"No time at all." He smiled at our wonderment. "Not in slider flight. Outside of space-time, there is no time. But there are laws of
nature, and time plays tricks that may surprise you. I could fly across a hundred light-years to another star in an instant of my own
time and come back in another instant, but two hundred years would pass here on Earth while I was away."
"I didn’t know." Tanya’s eyes went wider still. "Your friends would all be dead."
"We don’t die."
She shrank away as if suddenly afraid of him. Pepe opened his mouth to ask something, and shut it without a word.
He chucked at our startlement. "We’ve engineered ourselves, you see, more than we’ve engineered the Earth."
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Casey turned to look out across the shadowed craters at the huge globe of Earth, the green Americas blazing on the sunlit face,
Europe and Africa only a shadow against the dark. He stood there a long time and came slowly back to stand in front of Uncle
Pen.
"I’m going down to see the new Earth when I grow up." His face set stubbornly. "No matter what you say."
"Are you growing wings?" Uncle Pen laughed and reached a golden arm to pat him on the head. "If you didn’t know, the impact
smashed all your old rocket craft to junk."
He drew quickly back.
"Really, my boy, you do belong here." Seeing his hurt, Uncle Pen spoke more gently. "You were cloned for your work here at the
station. A job that ought to make you proud."
Casey made an angry swipe across his eyes with the back of his hand and swallowed hard, but he kept his voice even.
"Maybe so. But where’s any danger now?"
Uncle Pen had an odd look. He took a long moment to answer.
"We are not aware of any actual threat from another impacting bolide. All the asteroids that used to approach Earth’s orbit have
been diverted, most of them steered into the Sun."
"So?" Casey’s dark chin had a defiant jut. "Why did you want to dig us up?"
"For history." Uncle Pen looked away from us, up at the huge, far-off Earth. "I hope you’re try to understand what that means. The
resurfaced Earth had lost nearly every trace of our beginning. Historians were trying to prove that we had evolved on some other
planet and migrated here. Tycho Station is proof that Earth is the actual mother world. I’ve found our roots here under the rubble."
"I guess you can be proud of that," Casey said, "but who needs the station now?"
"Nobody, really." He shrugged, with an odd little twist of his golden lips, and I thought he felt sorry for Casey. "If another disaster
did strike the Earth, which isn’t likely at all, it could be repeopled by the colonies."
"So you dug us up for nothing?"
"If you knew what I have done," Pen leaned and reached as if to hug him, but he shrank farther away. "It wasn’t easy! We’ve had
to invent and improvise. We had to test the tissue cells still preserved in the cryostat, and build new equipment in the maternity
lab. A complex system. It had to be tested." He smiled down into Tanya’s beaming devotion. "The tests have turned out well."
"So we are just an experiment?"
"Aren’t you glad to be alive?"
"Maybe," Casey muttered bitterly. "If I can get off the Moon. I don’t want to sit here till I die, waiting for nothing at all?"
Looking uncomfortable, Pen just reached down to lift Tanya up in his arms.
"We were meant for more than that," Casey told him. "I want a life."
"Please, my dear boy, you must try to understand." Patiently, Uncle Pen shook his furry head. "The station is a precious historic
monument, our sole surviving relic of the early Earth and early man. You are part of it. I’m sorry if you take that for a misfortune,
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but there is certainly no place for you on Earth."
2.
Sandor Pen kept coming to the Moon as we grew up, though not so often. He brought tantalizing gifts. Exotic fruits that had to be
eaten before they spoiled. New games and difficult puzzles. Little holo cubes that had held living pictures of us, caught us year
after year as we grew up from babies in the maternity lab. He was always genial and kind, though I thought he came to care less
for us as we grew older.
His main concern was clearly the station itself. He cleared junk and debris out of the deepest tunnels, which had been used for
workshops and storage, and stocked them again with new tools and spare parts that the robots could use to repair themselves
and maintain the station.
Most of his time on the visits was spent in the library and museum with Dian and her holo mother. He studied the old books and
holos and paintings and sculptures, carried them away to be restored, and brought identical copies back to replace them. For a
time he had the digging machines busy again, removing rubble from around the station and grinding it up to make concrete for a
massive new retaining wall that they poured to reinforce the station foundation.
For our twenty-first birthday, he had the robots measure us for space suits like his own. Sleek and mirror-bright, they fitted like
our skins and let us feel at home outside the dome. We wore them down to see one of our old rocket spaceplanes, standing on
the field beside his little slipship. His robots had dug it out of a smashed hangar, and he now had them rebuilding it with new parts
from Earth.
One of the great digging machines had extended a leverlike arm to hold it upright. A robot was replacing a broken landing strut,
fusing it smoothly in place with some process that made no glow of heat. Casey spoke to the robot, but it ignored him. He climbed
up to knock on the door. It responded with a brittle computer voice that was only a rattle in our helmets.
"Open up," he told it. "Let us in."
"Admission denied." Its hard machine voice had Pen’s accent.
"By what authority?"
"By the authority of Director Sandor Pen, Lunar Research Site."
"Ask the director to let us in."
"Admission denied."
"So you think." Casey shook his head, his words a sardonic whisper in my helmet. "If you know how to think."
?????
Back inside the air lock, Pen had waited to help us shuck off the mirror suits. Casey thanked him for the gift and asked if the old
spaceplane would be left here on the Moon.
"Forget what you’re thinking." He gave Casey a penetrating glance. "We’re taking it down to Earth."
"I wish I could come."
"I’m sorry you can’t." His face was firmly set, but a flush of pleasure turned it a richer gold. "It’s to stand at the center of our new
historic memorial, located on the Australian subcontinent. It presents our reconstruction of the prehistoric past. The whole story of
the pre-impact planet and pre-impact man."
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He paused to smile at Tanya. Flushed pink, she smiled back at him.
"It’s really magnificent! Finding the lunar site was my great good fortune, and working it has been my life for many years. It has
filled a gap in human history. Answered questions that scholars had fought over for ages. You yourselves have a place there,
with a holographic diorama of your childhood."
Casey asked again why we couldn’t see it."Because you belong here." Impatience edged his voice. "And because of the charter
that allowed us to work the site. We agreed to restore the station to its original state, and to import no genetic materials from it
that might contaminate the Earth. We are to leave the site exactly as it was before the impact, protected and secured from any
future trespass."
* * *
We all felt sick with loss on the day he told us his work at the site was done. As a farewell gift, he took us two by two to orbit the
Moon. Casey and I went up together, sitting behind him in his tiny slipship. We had seen space and Earth from the dome all our
lives, but the flight was still an exciting adventure.
The mirror hull was invisible from inside, so that our seats seemed to float free in open space. The Moon’s gray desolation spread
wider beneath us, and dwindled again to a bright bubble floating in a gulf of darkness. Though Pen touched nothing I saw, the
stars blazed suddenly brighter, the Milky Way a broad belt of gem-strewn splendor all around us. The sun was dimmed and
hugely magnified to let us see the dark spots across its face.
Still he touched nothing and I felt no new motion, but now Australia expanded. The deserts were gone. A long new sea lay across
the center of the continent, crescent-shaped and vividly blue.
"The memorial." He pointed to a broad tongue of green land thrust into the crescent. "If you ever get to Earth–which I don’t
expect–you could meet your doubles there in the Tycho exhibit."
Casey asked, "Is Mona there?"
Mona Lisa Live was the professional name of the woman Casey’s father brought with him when he forced his way aboard the
escape plane just ahead of the first impact. We knew them only from their holo images, he with the name "El Chino" and the
crossed flags of Mexico and China tattooed across his black chest, she with the Leonardo painting on her belly.
Those ancient images had been enough to let us all catch the daring spirit and desperate devotion that had brought them finally
to the Moon from the Medellin nightclub where he found her. From his first glimpse of her holo, Casey had loved her and
dreamed of a day when they might be together again. I’d heard him ask my holo father why she had not been cloned with us.
"Ask the computer." He shrugged in the fatalistic way he had when his voice had its dry computer undertone. "It could have been
done. Her tissue specimens are still preserved in the cryostat."
"Do you know why she wasn’t cloned?"
"The computer seldom explains." He shrugged again. "If you want my own guess, she and Kell reached the Moon as unexpected
intruders. The maternity lab was not prepared to care for them or their clones."
"Intruders?" Casey’s dark face turned darker. "At least DeFort thought their genes were worth preserving. If I’m worth cloning,
Mona ought to be. Someday she will be."
* * *
Back in the station dome, Pen made his final farewell. We thanked him for that exciting glimpse of the far-off Earth, for the space
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suits and all his gifts, for restoring us to life. A trifling repayment, he said, for all he had found at the station. He shook our hands,
kissed Tanya and Dian, and got into his silvery suit. We followed him down to the air lock. Tanya must have loved him more than
I knew. She broke into tears and ran off to her room as the rest of us watched his bright little teardrop float away toward Earth.
"We put them down there," Casey muttered. "We have a right to see what we have done."
* * *
When the robots left the restored spaceplane standing on its own landing gear, the digging machine crept away to join the others.
Busy again, they were digging a row of deep pits. We watched them bury themselves under the rubble, leaving only a row of new
craters that might become a puzzle, I thought, to later astronomers. Casey called us back to the dome to watch a tank truck
crawling out of the underground hangar dug into the crater rim.
"We’re off to Earth!" He slid his arm around Pepe. "Who’s with us?"
Arne scowled at him. "Didn’t you hear Sandor?"
"Sandor’s gone." He grinned at Pepe. "We have a plan of our own."
They hadn’t talked about it, but I had heard their whispers and seen them busy in the shops. Though the space-bending science
of the slipship was still a mystery to us, I knew the robots had taught them astronautics and electronics. I knew they had made
holos of Pen, begging him to say more about the new Earth than he ever would.
"I don’t know your plan." Arne made a guttural grunt. "But I have seen the reports of people who went down to evaluate our
terraforming. They’ve never found anything they liked, and never got back to the Moon."
"¿Qué importa?" Pepe shrugged. "Better that than wasting our lives waiting por nada."
"We belong here." Stubbornly, Arne echoed what Pen had said. "Our mission is just to keep the station alive. Certainly not to
throw ourselves away on insane adventures. I’m staying here."
Dian chose to stay with him, though I don’t think they were in love. Her love was the station itself, with all its relics of the old
Earth. Even as a little child, she had always wanted to work with her holo mother, recording everything that Pen took away to be
copied and returned.
Tanya had set her heart on Sandor Pen. I think she had always dreamed that someday he would take her with him back to Earth.
She was desolate and bitter when he left without her, her pride in herself deeply hurt.
"He did love us when we were little," she sobbed when Pepe begged her to join him and Casey. "But just because we were
children. Or just interesting pets. Interesting because we aren’t his kind of human, and people that live forever don’t have
children."
Pepe begged again, I think because he loved her. Whatever they found on Earth, it would be bigger than our tunnels, and surely
more exciting. She cried and kissed him and chose to stay. The new Earth had no place for her. Sandor wouldn’t want her, even
if she found him. She promised to listen for their radio and pray they came back safe.
I had always been the station historian. Earth was where history was happening. I shook hands with Pepe and Casey and agreed
to go with them.
"You won’t belong," Tanya warned us. "You’ll have to look out for yourselves."
She found water canteens and ration packs for us, and reminded us to pack safari garments to wear when we got out of our
space gear. We took turns in the dome, watching the tank truck till it reached the plane and the robots began pumping fuel.
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"Time." Casey wore a grin of eager expectation. "Time to say good-bye."
Dian and Arne shook our hands, wearing very solemn faces. Tanya clung a long time to Pepe and kissed me and Casey, her
face so tear-stained and drawn that I ached with pity for her. We got into our shining suits, went out to the plane, climbed the
landing stair. Again the door refused to open.
Casey stepped back to speak on his helmet radio.
"Priority message from Director Sandor Pen." His crackling voice was almost Pen’s. "Special orders for restored spaceplane
SP2469."
The door responded with a clatter of speech that was alien to me.
"Orders effective now," Casey snapped. "Tycho Station personnel K. C. Kell, Pedro Navarro, and Duncan Yare are authorized to
board for immediate passage to Earth."
Silently, the door swung open.
I had expected to find a robot at the controls, but we found ourselves alone in the nose cone, the pilot seat empty. Awed by
whatever the plane had become, we watched it operate itself. The door swung shut. Air seals hissed. The engines snorted and
roared. The ship trembled, and we lifted off the Moon.
Looking back for the station, all I found was the dome, a bright little eye peering into space from the rugged gray peaks of the
crater rim. It shrank till I lost it in the great lake of black shadow and the bright black peak at the center of the Tycho crater. The
Moon dwindled till we saw it whole, gray and impact-battered, dropping behind us into a black and bottomless pit.
Pen’s flight in the slipship may have taken an hour or an instant. In the old rocket ship, we had time to watch three full rotations of
the slowly swelling planet ahead. The jets were silent through most of the flight, with only an occasional whisper to correct our
course. We floated in free fall, careful not to blunder against the controls. Taking turns belted in the seats, we tried to sleep but
seldom did. Most of the time we spent searching Earth with binoculars, searching for signs of civilization.
"Nothing," Casey muttered again and again. "Nothing that looks like a city, a railway, a canal, a dam. Nothing but green. Only
forest, jungle, grassland. Have they let the planet return to nature?"
"Tal vez." Pepe always shrugged. "Pero o no. We are still too high to tell."
At last the jets came back to life, steering us down into air-breaking orbit. Twice around the puzzling planet, and Australia
exploded ahead. The jets thundered. We fell again, toward the wide tongue of green land between the narrow cusps of that long
crescent lake.
3.
Looking from the windows, we found the spaceplane standing on an elevated pad at the center of a long quadrangle covered with
tended lawns, shrubs and banks of brilliant flowers. Wide avenues all around it were walled with buildings that awed and amazed
me.
"Sandor’s Tycho Memorial!" Pepe jogged my ribs. "There’s the old monument at the American capital! I know it from Dian’s
videos."
"Ancient history." Casey shrugged as if it hardly mattered. "I want to see Earth today."
Pepe opened the door. In our safari suits, we went out on the landing for a better view. The door shut. I heard it hiss behind us,
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sealing itself. He turned to stare again. The monument stood at the end of the quadrangle, towering above its image in a long
reflecting pool, flanked on one side by a Stonehenge in gleaming silver, on the other by a sand-banked Sphinx with the nose
restored.
We stood goggling at the old American capital at the other end of the mall, the British Houses of Parliament to its right, and the
Big Ben tolling the time. The Kremlin adjoined them, gilded onion domes gleaming above the grim red-brick walls. The
Parthenon, roofed and new and magnificent as ever, stood beyond them on a rocky hill.
Across the quadrangle I found the splendid domes of the Taj Mahal, Saint Peter’s Basilica, the Hagia Sophia from ancient
Istanbul. On higher ground in the distance, I recognized the Chrysler Building from old New York, the Eiffel Tower from Paris, a
Chinese pagoda, the Great Pyramid clad once again in smooth white marble. Farther off, I found a gray mountain ridge that
copied the familiar curve of Tycho’s rim, topped with the shine of our own native dome.
"We got here!" Elated, Pepe slapped Casey’s back. "Now what?"
"They owe us." Casey turned to look again. "We put them here, whenever it was. This ought to remind them how they got here
and what we’ve given them."
"If they care." Pepe turned back to the door. "Let’s see if we can call Sandor."
"Facility closed." We heard the door’s toneless robot voice. "Admission denied by order of Tycho Authority."
"Let us in!" Casey shouted. "We want the stuff we left aboard. Clothing, backpacks, canteens. Open the door so we can get
them."
"Admission denied."
He hit the door with his fist and kissed his bruised knuckles.
"Admission denied."
"We’re here, anyhow."
Pepe shrugged and started down the landing stair. A strange bellow stopped him, rolling back from the walls around. It took us a
moment to see that it came from a locomotive chuffing slowly past the Washington Monument, puffing white steam. Hauling a
train of open cars filled with seated passengers, it crept around the quadrangle, stopping often to let riders off and on.
The Sun was high, and we shaded our eyes to study them. All as lean and trim as Sandor, and often nude, they had the same
nut-brown skins. Many carried bags or backpacks. A few scattered across the lawns and gardens, most waited at the corners for
signal lights to let them cross the avenue.
"Tourists, maybe?" I guessed. "Here to see Sandor’s recovered history?"
"But I see no children." Casey shook his head. "You’d think they’d bring the children."
"They’re people, anyhow." Pepe grinned hopefully. "We’ll find somebody to tell us more than Sandor did."
* * *
We climbed down the stairs, on down a wide flight of steps to a walk that curved through banks of strange and fragrant blooms.
Ahead of us a couple had stopped. The woman looked a little odd, I thought, with her head of short ginger-hued fur instead of
hair, yet as lovely as Mona had looked in the holos made when she and El Chino reached the Moon. The man was youthful and
handsome as Sandor. I thought they were in love.
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Laughing at something he had said, she ran a little way ahead and turned to pose for his camera, framed between the monument
and the Sphinx. She had worn a scarlet shawl around her shoulders. At a word from him, she whipped it off and smiled for his
lens. Her daintily nippled breasts had been pale beneath the shawl, and he waited for the sun to color them.
We watched till he had snapped the camera. Laughing again, she ran back to toss the shawl around his shoulders and throw her
arms around him. They clung together for a long kiss. We had stopped a dozen yards away. Casey spoke hopefully when they
turned to face us.
"Hello?"
They stared blankly at us. Case managed an uncertain smile, but a nervous sweat had filmed his dark Oriental face.
"Forgive us, please. Do you speak English? Français? ¿Español?"
They frowned at him, and the man answered with a stream of vowels that were almost music and a rattle of consonants I knew I
could never learn to imitate. I caught a hint of Sandor’s odd accent but nothing like our English. They moved closer. The man
pulled the little camera out of his bag, clicked it at Casey, stepped nearer to get his head. Laughing at him, the woman came to
pose again beside Casey, slipping a golden arm around him for a final shot.
"We came in that machine. Down from the Moon!" Desperation on his face, he gestured at the spaceplane behind us, turned to
point toward the Moon’s pale disk in the sky above the Parthenon, waved to show our flight from it to the pedestal. "We’ve just
landed from Tycho Station. If you understand–"
Laughing at him, they caught hands and ran on toward the Sphinx.
"What the hell!" Staring after them, he shook his head. "What the bloody hell!"
"They don’t know we’re real." Pepe chuckled bitterly. "They take us for dummies. Part of the show."
* * *
We followed a path that led toward the Parthenon and stopped at the curb to watch the traffic flowing around the quadrangle.
Cars, buses, vans, occasional trucks; they reminded me of street scenes in pre-impact videos. A Yellow Cab pulled up beside us.
A woman sprang out. Slim and golden-skinned, she was almost a twin of the tourist who had posed with Casey.
The driver, however, might have been an unlikely survivor from the old Earth. Heavy, swarthy, wheezing for his breath, he wore
dark glasses and a grimy leather jacket. Lighting a cigarette, he hauled himself out of the cab, waddled around to open the trunk,
handed the woman a folded tripod, and grunted sullenly when she tipped him.
Casey walked up to him as he was climbing back into the cab.
"Sir!" He seemed not to hear, and Casey called louder. "Sir!"
Ignoring us, he got into the cab and pulled away. Casey turned with a baffled frown to Pepe and me.
"Did you see his face? It was dead! Some stiff plastic. His eyes are blind, behind those glasses. He’s some kind of robot, no more
alive than our robots on the Moon."
Keeping a cautious distance, we followed the woman with the tripod. Ignoring us, she stopped to set it up to support a flat round
plate of some black stuff. As she stepped away, a big transparent bubble swelled out of the plate, clouded, turned to silver. She
leaned to peer into it.
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