It was the flattest sort of ending you ever heard. Joe made a noise in his throat. ‘Well, what happened to the dinosaurs?’
‘Oh, you don’t see? I thought it was plain enough. – It was those little intelligent lizards that did it. They were hunters – by instinct and by choice. It was their hobby in life. It wasn’t for food; it was for fun.’
‘And they just wiped out all the dinosaurs on the Earth?’
‘All that lived at the time, anyway; all the contemporary species. Don’t you think it’s possible? How long did it take us to wipe out bison herds by the hundred million? What happened to the dodo in a few years? Supposing we really put our minds to it, how long would the lions and the tigers and the giraffes last? Why, by the time I saw those lizards there wasn’t any big game left – no reptile more than fifteen feet maybe. All gone. Those little demons were chasing the little, scurrying ones, and probably crying their hearts out for the good old days.’
And we all kept quiet and looked at our empty beer bottles and thought about it. All those dinosaurs – big as houses – killed by little lizards with guns. Killed for fun.
Then Joe leaned over and put his hand on the professor’s shoulder, easylike, and shook it. He said, ‘Hey, P’fessor, but if that’s so, what happened to the little lizards with the guns? Huh? – Did you ever go back to find out?’
The professor looked up with the kind of look in his eyes that he’d have if he were lost.
‘You still don’t see! It was already beginning to happen to them. I saw it in their eyes. They were running out of big game – the fun was going out of it. So what did you expect them to do? They turned to other game – the biggest and most dangerous of all-and really had fun. They hunted that game to the end.’
‘What game?’ asked Ray. He didn’t get it, but Joe and I did.
‘Themselves,’ said the professor in a loud voice. ‘They finished off all the others and began on themselves – till not one was left.’
And again we stopped and thought about those dinosaurs – big as houses – all finished off by little lizards with guns. Then we thought about the little lizards and how they had to keep the guns going even when there was nothing to use them on but themselves.
Joe said, ‘Poor dumb lizards.’
‘Yeah,’ said Ray, ‘poor crackpot lizards.’
And then what happened really scared us. Because the professor jumped up with eyes that looked as if they were trying to climb right out of their sockets and leap at us. He shouted, ‘You damned fools. Why do you sit there slobbering over reptiles dead a hundred million years. That was the first intelligence on Earth and that’s how it ended. That’s done. But we’re the second intelligence – and how the devil do you think we’re going to end?’
He pushed the chair over and headed for the door. But then he stood there just before leaving altogether and said: ‘Poor dumb humanity! Go ahead and cry about that.’
The Deep
In the end, any particular planet must die. It may be a quick death as its sun explodes. It may be a slow death, as its sun sinks into decay and its oceans lock in ice. In the latter case, at least, intelligent life has a chance of survival.
The direction of survival may be outward into space, to a planet closer to the cooling sun or to a planet of another sun altogether. This particular avenue is closed if the planet is unfortunate enough to be the only significant body rotating about its primary and if, at the time, no other star is within half a thousand light-years.
The direction of survival may be inward, into the crust of the planet. This is always available. A new home can be built underground and the heat of the planet’s core can be tapped for energy. Thousands of years may be necessary for the task, but a dying sun cools slowly.
But planetary warmth dies, too, with time. Burrows must be dug deeper and deeper until the planet is dead through and through.
The time was coming.
On the surface of the planet, wisps of neon blew listlessly, barely able to stir the pools of oxygen that collected in the lowlands. Occasionally, during the long day, the crusted sun would flare briefly into a dull red glow and the oxygen pools would bubble a little.
During the long night, a blue-white oxygen frost formed over the pools and on the bare rock, a neon dew formed.
Eight hundred miles below the surface, a last bubble of warmth and life existed.
2
Wenda’s relationship to Roi was as close as one could imagine, closer by far than it was decent for her to know.
She had been allowed to enter the ovarium only once m her hfe and it had been made quite clear to her that it was to be only that once.
The Raceologist had said, ‘You don’t quite meet the standards, Wenda, but you are fertiie and we’ll try you once. It may w rk out.’.
She wanted it to work out. She wanted it desperately. Qmte early m her life she had known that she was deficient in intelligence, that she would never be more than a Manual. It embarrassed her that she should fail the Race and she longed for even a single chance to help create another being. It became an obsession.
She secreted her egg in an angle of the structure and then returned to I watch. The ‘randoming’ process that moved the eggs gently about during mechanical insemination (to insure even gene distribution) did not, by some good fortune, do more than make her own wedged-in egg wobble a bit.
Unobtrusively she maintained her watch during the period of maturation observed the little one who emerged from the particular egg that was hers noted his physical markings, watched him grow.
He w;s a healthy youngster and the Raceologist approved of him.
She had said once, very casually, ‘Look at that one, the one sittmg there. Is he sick?’
‘Which one?’ The Raceologist was startled. Visibly sick infants at this stage would be a strong reflection upon his ow? competen. ‘You mean Roi? Nonsense. I wish all our young were hke that one.
At first, she was only pleased with herself, then frightened, finally horrified. She found herself haunting the youngster, taking an interest in his schooling, watching him at play. She was happy when he w s near, dull and unhappy otherwise. She had never heard of such a thmg, and she was ashamed.
She should have visited the Mentalist, but she knew better. She was not so dull as not to know that this was not a mild aberration to be cured at the twitch of a brain cell. It was a truly psychotic manifestation. She was certain of that. They would confine her if they found out. They would euthanase her, perhaps, as a useless drain on the strictly limited energy available to the race. They might even euthanase the offspring of her egg if they found out who it was.
She fought the abnormality through the years and, to a measure, succeeded. Then she first heard the news that Roi had been chosen for the long trip and was filled with aching misery.
She followed him to one of the empty corridors of the cavern some miles from the city center. The city! There was only one.
This particular cavern had been closed down within Wenda’s own memory. The Elders had paced its length, considered its population and the energy necessary to keep it powered, then decided to darken it. The population, not many to be sure, had been moved closer toward the center and the quota for the next session at the ovarium had been cut.
Wenda found Roi’s convers tional level of thinking shallow, as though most of his mmd had drawn mward contemplatively.
