"True?"
"Inescapable truth."
"Can we not fill the vats, store food, wait until the clouds open up and the sun shines again?"
"We can — and we will. Seed will be stored as well, to plant and regrow when the sun returns."
"This will be done. I will order it. When will the sun return?"
The response to this question was only silence. The Eistaa waited, her anger growing, until she could control it no longer.
"Speak, Akotolp! I order you to speak! When will the sun return?"
"I — we — do not know, Eistaa. And unless it returns soon the world as we know it is dead. Species once destroyed do not return. We are one of those species. We are important only to ourselves. In the totality of biology we are as important — or unimportant — as that clump of grass. It is of no help to us to know that even if the clouds remain forever life will go on. But it will not be the world we know. There exist life forms that are very persistent and can endure a great range of temperatures and environments. We cannot. We will not survive on this world unless things remain very much as they always were. I fear, Essokel and I have discussed this many times that we have already passed the time of survival…"
"That is not true! Yilane live."
"Yilane die," Essokel said with grim movements. "Fargi die already of cold. We have examined them."
"We have cloaks."
"The cloaks will die as well. It is already too cold for them to breed." There was a great feeling of despair in Akotolp's shuddered movements. "I fear that all will be ended, all Yilane dead, everything we are, everything that we have done, vanished. It will be as if we have never been. When the clouds break, if they ever break, it will be the ustuzou who will live."
"What? These vermin-crawling filthy things underfoot? Your speaking is an insult!"
As though in further insult an ustuzou scuttled through the dead grass close by, paused an instant to glance at them with tiny dark eyes, scratched quick claws through its fur. The Eistaa stamped out with her foot but crushed only dead stems as the creature vanished from sight.
"You say that these vile things will live — why?"
"Because of their nature," Essokel explained patiently. "All complex creatures require regularizing of body temperature, they are all warm-blooded. But there are two ways of staying warm. We Yilane are exothermic, which means we must live in a warm climate and take in heat from outside. This is very efficient. The ustuzou are very inefficient since they are endothermic, which means they must eat all of the time and turn their food into heat…"
"You speak like this only to confuse me — all this talk of hot or cold, inside and out."
"You must excuse my inefficiency-stupidity, Eistaa. I simplify. We will get cold, we will die. That small ustuzou will not get cold. When the air cools it will eat more. It will eat dead plants, dead bodies — it will eat our dead bodies. The corpses of our world will nourish these creatures for a long time. Perhaps until the clouds disperse and the sun returns. If this comes to pass then it will be an ustuzou world and the Yilane will not even be a memory. It will be as though we never were—"
"A thought I will not have!" the Eistaa roared with anger, tearing at the ground with her claws. "Leave me! Be silent in my presence hereafter. I will not hear these words again."
The scientists left, a cold rain fell, night descended. There was the movement of tiny, furry creatures through the grass and into the dead forest beyond. Tiny creatures that ate seeds, stems, bones, marrow, flesh, grass, insects — anything.
Warm-blooded animals that could survive when ninety percent of all other creatures died.
Survive and evolve for sixty million years. Whose descendants read these words.
An Honest Day's Work
"I do my job, that's all. And that's all that anyone can expect." Jerry's jaw set hard with these words, set as firmly as his voice as he bit deep into the scarred stem of the old pipe.
"I know that, Mr. Cruncher," the Lieutenant said. "No one is asking you to do anything more than that, or to do anything wrong." He was dusty and one of the pocket flaps had been torn off his uniform. There was a wild look in his eye and he had a tendency to talk too fast. "We tracked you down through BuRecCent and it wasn't easy, there were good men lost…" His voice started to rise and he drew himself up with an effort. "We would like your cooperation if we could get it."
"Not the sort of thing I like to do. It could lead to trouble."
The trouble was that no one had expected events to happen as they did. Or rather the people who expected it had expected something altogether different. They had made their plans accordingly and fed them to the computer which had drawn up programs covering all possible variations of the original. However the Betelgeuseans had a completely different plan in mind so they therefore succeeded far beyond what was possibly their own wildest dreams. The trade station they had set up in Tycho crater on the moon was just that, a trade station, and had nothing to do at all with the events that followed.
Records of the Disaster are confused, as well they might be under the circumstances, and the number of aliens involved in the first phase of the invasion was certainly only a fraction of the exaggerated figures that were being tossed around by excited newsmen, or worried military personnel who felt that there must be that number of attacking aliens to wreak the damage that was done. The chances are that there were no more than two, three maximum, ships involved; a few hundred Betelgeuseans at the most. A few hundred to subjugate an entire planet — and they came within a hair of succeeding.
"Colonel, this is Mr. Cruncher who has volunteered—"
"A civilian! Will you get him the hell out of here and blindfold him first, you unutterable fool! This headquarters is double-red-zed top security. .!"
"Sir, the security doesn't matter anymore. All of our communications are shut down, we're sealed off from the troops."
"Quiet, you fool!" The Colonel raised his clenched fists, his skin flushing, a wild light in his eyes. He still did not want to believe what had happened, possibly could not believe. The lieutenant was younger, a reserve officer; as much as he disliked it he could face the facts.
"Colonel, you must believe me. The situation is desperate, and desperate times call for desperate solutions…"
"Sergeant! Take this lieutenant and this civilian to the target range and shoot them for violating security during an emergency."
"Colonel, please—"
"Sergeant, that is an order!"
The Sergeant who was only four months short of retirement and had a potbelly to prove it, looked from one officer to the other. He was reluctant to make a decision but he had to. He finally rose and went to the toilet, locking the door behind him. The Colonel, who had been following his movements in eye-bulging silence, gasped, his face a bright scarlet, and groped for his sidearm. Even as he drew it from the holster he gurgled and fell face-first upon the desk, then slid slowly to the floor.
"Medic!" the Lieutenant shouted and ran and opened the Colonel's collar. The medic took one look and shook his head gloomily. "The big one. He's had it. Always had a dicey ticker."
The Sergeant came out of the toilet and helped the Lieutenant to pull a gas cape over the corpse. Jerry Cruncher stood to one side and looked on in silence, sucking on his pipe.
"Please, Mr. Cruncher," the Lieutenant said pleadingly, "you must help us. You're our last hope now."
Now when we look back at Black Sunday when the Disaster began, we can marvel at the simplicity of the Betelgeusean plan and understand why it came within a hair's breadth of succeeding. Our armies and space-borne tanks were poised and waiting, all instruments and attention firmly fixed on the massive bulk of the "so-called" trade station which was, indeed, just a trade station. On Earth a complex spiderweb of communication networks linked together the host of defenders, a multilevel net of radio and laser links, buried coaxial cables and land lines, microwave and heliograph connections.