it.
He looked the other way, instead. Behind him and down, in his landlubber’s way of seeing things: downward to the Earth.
How beautiful it was!
A perfect blue ball, gleaming brightly, mottled with bands of white. The wounds mankind had inflicted were invisible. There was no way to see, from this altitude, the squalor, the ruination, the foulness. The bleak new desert zones that had been fertile agricultural areas a few generations back, the steaming fungoid forests covering the sites of abandoned cities, the drowned shorelines, the clotted garbage in the seas, the colorful patches of poisoned air, the long dreary miles of blackened and withered wasteland that he had passed through during his feverish trip to Chicago and back. No, the view from up here beyond the stratosphere was altogether superb.
A lovely world. A jewel among planets.
Too bad we messed it up so badly, Carpenter thought. Fouled our own nest in a glorious centuries-long orgy of stupidity, transformed our wondrous and perhaps unique world into a thing of horror. Which now is continuing the transformation itself, with a power that is beyond our control, so that we have little choice now but to transform ourselves as well if we want to go on living there.
What else could you feel, looking down at that blue globe of seeming perfection and thinking of the Eden it once had been and what we had made out of it, but rage, pain, fury, anguish, despair? What else could you do but cry and howl and beat your breast?
And yet—yet—
Take the long view, Carpenter told himself.
The damage was only temporary. All would be well. Not soon, of course. There were those who said that the planet had been wounded; well, then, the planet would eventually heal. There were some who felt that it had merely been stained; if that was the case, the planet would need some time to cleanse itself. But it would. It would. Everything would be repaired. A hundred years, a thousand, a million, however long it took: but it would clean itself up. The planet had plenty of time. We don’t, Carpenter thought, but it does. Life would go on. Not necessarily ours, but life of some sort If we must be replaced on Earth by another kind of life, because we were such poor stewards of our domain, so be it. So be it. One kind fails, another kind eventually takes over. Life is persistent. Life is resilient.
“Passengers bound for Cornucopia, prepare for docking,” a loudspeaker voice said.
The Kyocera research satellite’s shimmering spokes came looming up. Carpenter glanced at it indifferently. He was still looking back at Earth, lost in what felt to him like some kind of mystic revelation.
A visionary glimpse came to him now of the new race that Nick Rhodes would create. Monstrous, yes, scales and goggle eyes and webbed feet and green blood. But what of it? To themselves they would look beautiful; and to themselves they would be. In the new and strangely transformed Earth of a hundred years to come they would be perfectly at home, comfortable in the different air, altogether at ease in the furnace heat.
He could see Rhodes and Isabella down there, at peace with each other at last, a lovely couple man and wife, holding hands, growing old together. Children, even. Little monsters. A burgeoning tribe. Life goes on.
The shuttle was docking now. Three or four Cornucopia-bound passengers were getting off. Carpenter went up front when his name was called and passed through the hatch.
Cornucopia, what he could see of it, looked a lot like the Port of Oakland: no fancy carpeting or wall coverings, no landscape plants, no decoration of any kind, just miles of metal everywhere, a gridwork of bare structural members. Everything strictly functional. Utilitarian. That was all right. He hadn’t come here for a vacation.
“Mr. Carpenter? This way, please.”
A couple of Kyocera salarymen waiting for him. Leading him down bleak hallways, through stark corridors.
A door, finally, labeled in glowing luminous letters:
PROJECT LONG JUMP
AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY
This must be the place, Carpenter thought.
A long jump indeed. All the way to some other star.
Well, he was ready for it. He felt calm, determined, fully committed: he reached that point beyond all caring, now, and was entering this place the way, in some earlier century, he might have entered a monastery.
Of his own free choice he was leaving the world behind him, and good riddance to it.
That world had become an excessively difficult place. Breathing itself was a problem; so was dealing with ordinary sunshine, which was no longer ordinary, and so was the question of doing the right thing, Carpenter thought. He had tried to do the right thing most of his life, and had only fitfully succeeded at it. Not his fault: he had tried. Then he had involved himself in a wrong thing, with catastrophic results. And Enron? Jolanda? They too had tried to do the right thing, according to their own lights. And in the course of doing it they had sought to make their individual accommodations to life in this difficult era, and eventually they had made one accommodation too many, and they had died for it.
A tough proposition, life in this difficult era. Carpenter wanted a fresh start.
And he knew he would get it here. They would take him and change him and send him to the far reaches of the universe. Fine. Fine. He, too, could be persistent and resilient. You fail on one world, you pick yourself up and go on to another one. Rebirth, always rebirth: that was the way. As one of the Kyocera men put his hand to the door plate Carpenter allowed himself another vision. This one was brief, redemptive: a golden-green sun, a shimmering lemon sky, a forest of glistening fronds, a lake of pure pearly water. The new Eden, an untarnished paradise, waiting to be found and settled by the chastened, humbled race of man. Of whose vanguard into interstellar space he would be a member.
No, he told himself.
Allow yourself no dreams, and then there will be no disillusionments. Make the voyage; see what happens; hope for the best, but count on nothing. And perhaps this time we will do a better job of it.
Or perhaps not.
The door opened and a face peered out. For one astonished moment Carpenter thought that the ghost of Victor Farkas was standing there, waiting in the doorway to receive him.
But no—no, this wasn’t Farkas. The same eerie, eyeless domed head, yes. But this was a youngish, wiry man, much shorter than Farkas had been, olive skin, narrow shoulders, wide ironic mouth, a general expression of cool youthful insolence. Not Farkas.
Carpenter said, “I’m the new starship crewman. Paul Carpenter.”
The eyeless man nodded. “Come on in, and welcome to Project Long Jump,” he said. He put out his hand. “My name is Juanito.”
