Again a huge fish lazily surfaced; Salter regarded it thoughtfully. He said: "They'll propose scavenging bronze ashore and fashioning another net and going on just as if nothing had happened. And really, we could do that, you know."
Jewel Flyte said: "No, Not forever. This time it was the net, at the end of harvest. What if it were three masts in midwinter, in mid-Atlantic?"
"Or," said the captain, "the rudder-anytime. Anywhere. But can you imagine telling the Council they've got to walk off the ship onto land, take up quarters in those brick cabins, change everything? And fight maniacs, and learn to farm?"
"There must be a way," said Jewel Flyte. "Just as Merdeka, whatever it was, was a way. There were too many people, and Merdeka was the answer to too many people.
There's always an answer, Man is a land mammal in spite of brief excursions at sea. We were seed stock put aside, wait ing for the land to be cleared so we could return. Just as these offshore fish are waiting very patiently for us to step har vesting twice a year so they can return to deep water and multiply. What's the way, captain?" "
He thought hard. "We eould," he said slowly, "begin by simply sailing in close and fishing the offshore waters for big stuff. Then tie up and build a sort of bridge from the ship to the shore. We'd continue to live aboard the ship but we'd go out during daylight to try farming."
"It sounds right,"
"And keep improving the bridge, making it more and more solid, until before they notice it it's really a solid part of the ship and a solid part of the shore. It might take… mmm,., ten years?"
"Time enough for the old shellbacks to make up their minds," Mrs. Graves unexpectedly snorted.
"And we'd relax the one-to-one reproduction rule, and some young adults will simply be crowded over the bridge to live on the land-" His face suddenly fell. "And then the whole damned farce starts all over again, I suppose. I pointed out that it takes thirty-two generations bearing one child apiece to run a population of two billion into zero. Well, I should have mentioned that it takes thirty-two generations bearing four children apiece to run a population of two into two billion. Oh, what's the use, Jewel?"
She chuckled. "There was an answer last time," she said. "There will be an answer the next time."
"It won't be the same answer as Merdeka," he vowed. "We grew up a little at sea. This time we can do it with brains and not with nightmares and superstition."
"I don't know," she said. "Our ship will be the first, and then the other ships will have their accidents one by one and come and tie up and build their bridges hating every minute of it for the first two generations and then not hating it, just living it… and who will be the greatest man who ever lived?"
The captain looked horrified.
"Yes, you! Salter, the Builder of the Bridge; Tommy, do you know an old word for 'bridge-builder'? Pontifex."
"Oh, my God!" Tommy Salter said in despair.
A flicker of consciousness was passing through the wounded chaplain; he heard the words and was pleased that somebody aboard was praying.
Afterword
Despite the gloom of potential catastrophe that we mast face, there is no reason to give up. If we think about catastrophes with the sober scientific speculation of A Choice of Catastrophes, we must conclude that:
1) Some catastrophes are high-probability and even in evitable, but will take place so far in the future that it makes no sense to worry about them now,
2) Some catastrophes may take place in the near future, even tomorrow, but are so extremely low-probability that it makes no sense to worry about them excessively.
3) Some catastrophes are high-probability and may take place in the near-future, even tomorrow. It is only these which must concern us now.
In every case, however, the catastrophes that are both high-probability and near-future are human-caused: nuclear war, overpopulation, overpollution, resource depletion, and so on. And if they are human-caused, they could, conceivably, be human-cured.
As Isaac Asimov stated in A Choice of Catastrophes, the most significant meaning of the title is that "We can deliberately choose to have no catastrophes at all."