The steady march of the glaciers had been more effective in the northern hemisphere. In Africa, Australia, and South America, the great oceans had moderated temperatures and checked the spread from polar regions. Occasional snow-free pockets could be found as far as forty degrees south of the equator. But in the north, the glaciers ruled everywhere past latitude thirty-five.
Even at Skydown the temperature was chilly. Peron and Elissa emerged from the cable car at the foot of the Beanstalk to bright sunshine and clear skies, but they stood in a blustery east wind that encouraged warm clothing. While most of the visitors headed for a briefing on the sights of Earth, the two took an aircar and flew north.
They spent the first evening on the lush southern shore of the Mediterranean Sea near the ancient site of Tripoli. The information service computer informed them that they had reached the border for true forest land. Farther north, in what had once been Europe, only stunted stands of spruce and juniper persisted, clinging to south-facing slopes.
Night came quickly, sweeping in with a scented darkness across the white sandy beach. The aircar contained two bunks, but they were on opposite sides of the cabin. Peron and Elissa chose to sleep outside, protected by automatic sensors and the car's warning system. Holding each other close beneath a moonless sky, they watched the wheel of unfamiliar constellations. Against that slow-moving backdrop, the space stations swept constantly overhead, one or more of them always visible. Sleep would not come easily. They whispered for a long time, of Pentecost, Planetfest, and Whirlygig, and of the accident to Peron that had plunged them across light-years and centuries.
The night was full of unfamiliar sounds. There was wind rustling in tall trees, and the steady beat of waves on the seashore. Somewhere to the south a group of animals called to each other, their voices tantalizingly familiar, like humans sobbing and crying out in some foreign tongue. When Peron at last fell asleep, it was to unpleasant dreams. The voices called to him through the night; but now he imagined he could understand their lamenting message.
Your visit to Earth is a delusion. You are hiding from the truth, trying to put off unpleasant actions. But they cannot be put aside. You must return to S-space . . . and go farther yet.
The next morning they took to the air again and headed north and east into Asia. Two days' travel convinced Peron and Elissa of two things. Apart from the general location of the land masses, Earth bore no resemblance to the fabled planet described in the old records of Pentecost and the library records on the ship. And there was no chance that they would choose to live on Earth, even if it were to be colonized again in the near future. Pentecost was more beautiful in every way.
They left the information service on all the time. It described a link between the old, fertile Earth of legend and the present wilderness.
The post-nuclear winter had been the first cause of the trouble. It was far more influential as an agent of change than the Ice Age that now held Earth in a frozen grasp. Immediately after the thermonuclear explosions, temperatures below the thick clouds of radioactive dust dropped drastically. Plants and animals that fought for survival in the sunless gloom of the surface did so in a poisoned environment that forced rapid mutation or extinction.
In the air, the birds could not find enough food over the land. A few remaining species skimmed the surface of the tropical seas, competing with sea mammals for the diminished supply of fish. Their high energy-need killed them. The last flying bird on Earth fell from the skies within two years of the thermonuclear blast that obliterated Washington. The penguins alone lived on, moving north from the Antarctic to inhabit the coastlines of South America and Africa. Small colonies of emperor penguins still clung to the shores of the Java Sea and Indonesia.
The larger surface animalsincluding all surviving members of homo sapienswere early victims. Long life spans permitted the build-up of lethal doses of radiation in body tissues.
The small burrowers, driven farther underground to seek out deep-lying roots and tubers, fared much better. One circumstance had assisted their survival. The hour of Armageddon came close to the winter solstice in the northern hemisphere, at a time when many animals were fat for the winter and preparing for hibernation. They had burrowed deeper and settled in for the hibernal sleep. The ones too far north had never wakened. Others, returning to consciousness in a cold, dark spring, foraged far and wide for food. The lucky ones moved steadily south, to the zone where a pale, sickly sunlight still permitted some plant growth. Of all Earth's land mammals, only a few small rodentsmice, hamsters, ground squirrels, and woodchuckslived on to inherit the earth.
Their competition had been formidable. The invertebrates were fighting for their own survival. Insect life dwindled at first, then adapted, mutated, grew, and multiplied. They had always dominated the tropical regions of Earth; now the larger ants and spiders, aided by their formidable mandibles and stings, strove to become the lords of creation.
The mammals took the only paths left to them. The invertebrates were limited in maximum size because of passive breathing mechanisms and their lack of an internal skeleton; and they were cold-blooded. The rodents grew in size to improve their heat retention, developed thick coats and hairy paws, and moved away from the equator to regions where there was no insect competition. Some of them were totally vegetarian, browsing on the sparse, chlorotic plant life that still grew in the dust-filtered twilight. They developed thick layers of blubber, for food storage and insulation. The other survivors became super-efficient predators, preying on their herbivorous relatives.
As the nuclear winter slowly ended the insects moved north and south again, away from the tropics. But the mutated mice and woodchucks were ready for them. They had increased in size and ferocity, to become a match for any pre-civilization wolf; and now they wore thick coats of fur and protective fat that rendered impotent the fierce mandibles and poison stings. The insects were a new convenient source of protein. The carnivores followed them back into their tropic habitats, and on to the southern regions.
The changes to animal life on Earth were easiest to see; but the changes to the vegetation were in some ways more fundamental. The grasses were gone; in their place a dwarf form of eucalyptus covered millions of square kilometers with flat, bluish-green leaves. Waving fields of corn and wheat would never be seen again on Earth. Their nourishing seeds had been replaced by the red clusters of berries that hung from every euclypt stem. After being assured that it was safe to do so, Elissa sampled a couple. They were filled with a fatty syrup, and at their center sat an oval, impenetrable seed. The seeds, berries and roots of the euclypts sustained a thriving animal community beneath the foot-high canopy of their leaves, where in the blue-green gloom devolved mice fought finger-long giant ants for the best food and living space.
As they travelled on across the face of an Earth where no vestige of human works remained, Peron became gradually more silent and withdrawn. Elissa assumed that it was a reaction to their surroundings. She was reluctant to interfere with his thoughts. But as they skirted the barren western seaboard of South America, where the continuous line of glaciers stretched down to the Pacific, Peron's need to discuss his worries became overwhelming.
They had landed in the Andean foothills to watch sunset over the Pacific. Neither spoke as the broad face of Sol, red in the evening twilight, sank steadily past a thin line of clouds far out over the western ocean. Even after the last of the light had faded, they could turn to the east and see the sun's rays still caught by the summits of high, snow-covered peaks.
"We can't stay here," Peron said at last. "Even if we liked it better here than on Pentecost, even if we thought Earth was perfect, we'd have to go backto S-space."
Elissa remained silent. She knew Peron. He had to be allowed the time to work his way into a subject, without pressure and with minimal coaxing. That was the way that he had first managed to speak to her of their own relationship, and the way that she had finally learned of his continued doubts over leaving his family to take part in Planetfest.
The last of the light vanished, leaving them sitting side by side on the soft earth next to the aircar. Stars were appearing, one by one, twinkling brightly in the crisp night air.
"We've had a great time here," Peron went on at last, "but for the past two days I've had trouble getting a thought out of my head. Remember the colony of mouse-monkeys, the black ones with the fat tails?"
Elissa squeezed his hand without speaking.
"You asked me how the head of the colony could control the others so easily," he continued. "He didn't seem to fight them, or bully them, or try to dominate them at all. But they climbed the trees, and brought him food, and groomed him, and he didn't even have to move to live in comfort. Well, for some reason that reminded me of something my father said to me when I was only ten years old. He asked me, who controlled Pentecost? He said that was the third most important question to answer in a society, and the most important ones were, how did they control, and why did they control? If you knew all three, masters, mechanisms, and motives, you were in a position to make changes."
"Did he ever tell you the answers?"
"He never knew them. He spent his life looking. The answers were not on Pentecostwe know now that the true controllers of Pentecost are the Immortals, with the cooperation of a nervous planetary government. They control through superior knowledge, and they use the planetso they sayas a source of new Immortals. Those ideas were beyond my father's imaginings. But he was right about the important questions."
Elissa stirred at his side. She was lightly dressed, and the air was cold on her bare arms, but she was reluctant to suggest a move.
"I finally tried to ask the important questions myself," said Peron at last. "Not about Pentecostabout the Immortals themselves. They have a well-developed society. But who runs it? How, and most of all why? At first I thought we had the answer to the first question: the Immortals were run from The Ship. As soon as I was in S-space, I found that wasn't true. Then I thought we would have the answer at Sector Headquarters. But we learned that was falseheadquarters is nothing but an administrative center with a switching station and cargo pickup point for travelling starships. So what next? We decided control had to be back at Sol, and we came here. But we have no more answers. Who runs the show in the Sol system? Not Jan de Vries, I'll bet my life on it. He's a good follower, but he's not a leader. And even if we find out who, that still leaves how and why."
"So what do you want to do?"
"I don't know. Look harder, I suppose. Elissa, we've been on Earth for nearly five days now. How do you feel?"
"Physically? I feel absolutely wonderful. Don't you?"
"I do. Do you know why?"
"I've wondered. I think maybe part of the reason is our ancestry. We come from millions of years of adaptation to Earth as the natural environmentgravity, air pressure, sunlight. We ought to feel good here."
"I know all that. But Elissa, I think there's another reason. I think everything is relative, and we had spent over a month in S-space before we came here. I'll tell you my theory, and it's one that makes me uncomfortable. I think that S-space isn't right for humans, in ways that we haven't been told."
"Even though we will live many times as long there? I don't just mean long in S-time, I mean live subjectively longer. Doesn't that suggest S-space is good for our bodies?"
Peron sighed. Elissa didn't know it, but she was presenting arguments to him that he had wrestled with for days, and found no satisfactory answers.
"It looks that way. It seems so logical: we live longer there, so it must be good for us. But I don't believe it. Think of the way you feel. S-space didn't give you the same sense of vitality. Think of our love-making. Wasn't it wonderful on Pentecost, and hasn't it been even better in the last few days on Earth?"
Elissa reached out and ran her fingers gently up Peron's thigh. "You know the answer to that without asking. Be careful now, or you'll give me ideas."
He placed his hand gently over hers, but his voice remained thoughtful and unhappy. "So you agree, some things just don't feel right in S-space. We've known that, deep inside, but I assumed it was all part of the adjustment process. Now I feel just as sure that's not the case. And everybody who has lived in S-space for any length of time must know it, too."
Peron rose slowly to his feet. Elissa followed suit, and they both stood there for a few moments, shivering in the seaward night wind sweeping off the snowy eastern peaks.
"Suppose you're right," said Elissa. "And you have me fairly well persuaded. What can we do about it?"
Peron hugged her close to him, sharing their warmth; but when he spoke his voice was as cold as the wind. "Love, I'm tired of being manipulated, and I'm tired of blind guesswork. We must go back to orbit now. We must stop allowing ourselves to be fobbed off with sweet reasonableness and bland answers, from Olivia, or Jan de Vries, or anyone else. And we have to push as hard as we can for the real answers about S-space civilization: who, how, and why?"