"Never mind that." The lawyer groaned. He really did.
Lois was not happy and developed a case of severe frigidity. She was not only married to a man confronting bankruptcy, but she was also the wife of a Master Criminal. It does imperil one's social position.
(There was no way to keep it quiet, naturally, Sam had known that. Too many people were involved.)
They had a great time, the venom-spewers: senators and editorialists, presidents and kings, cops and commissions, professors and assorted hotshots. All the Good People.
Sam had. to put it mildly, violated a public trust. (Translation: he hadn't spent his money on what they wanted.)
He was guilty of a crime against humanity. (Judge and jury, definer of crime? Humanity. All heart.)
It did not matter in the least that twenty billion dollars (or twenty-two, or twenty-three, or a hundred) could not have saved the earth. Earth was finished, smothered by her most illustrious spawn. It would take a few years yet, while she gasped for breath and filled the bedpan. But she was through.
Man had never cared overmuch for facts.
He believed what he wanted to believe.
("Things may be bad, but they are getting better. All we have to do is like be relevant, you know? Enforce the Law. Consult the swami Have a hearing. Salvation through architecture. When the going gets tough the tough get going. All problems have solutions.")
There was one other thing that made Sam's sin inexcusable.
You see, animals have no votes.
The defense?
It was clear, simple, correct, and beyond dispute. It was therefore doomed.
("We'll give him a fair trial, then hang him.")
Way down deep where convictions solidify, Big Man had expected to meet his counterpart on other worlds. ("Ah, Earthling, you surprise I speak your language so good.") He had failed. He had found only barren rocks at the end of the road.
From this, he had drawn a characteristically modest conclusion.
Man, he decided, was alone in the accessible universe.
This was a slight error. There were primitive men who would not have made it, but there were no more primitive men.
The plain truth was that it was Earth that was unique and alone. Earth had produced life. Not just self-styled Number One, not just Superprimate. No. He was a late arrival, the final guest.
("All these goodies just for me!")
Alone? Man?
Well, not quite.
There were a million different species of insects. (Get the spray-gun, Henry.) Twenty thousand kinds of fish. (I got one, I got one!) Nine thousand types of birds. (You can still see a stuffed owl in a museum.) Fifteen thousand species of mammals. (You take this arrow, see, and fit the string into the notch…)
Alone? Sure, except for the kangaroos and bandicoots, shrews and skunks, bats and elephants, armadillos and rabbits, pigs and foxes, raccoons and whales, beavers and lions, moose and mice, oryx and otter and opossum-
Oh well, them.
Yes.
They too had come from the earth. Incredible, each of them. Important? Only if you happened to think that the only known life in the universe was important.
Man didn't think so. Not him.
Not the old perfected end-product of evolution.
He didn't kill them all, of course. He hadn't been around that long. The dinosaurs had managed to become extinct without his help. There were others.
He did pretty well, though. He could be efficient, give him that.
He started early. Remember the ground sloth, the mam-moth, the mastodon? You don't? Odd.
He kept at it. He was remarkably objective about it, really. He murdered his own kin as readily as the others. The orang had gone down the tube when Sam was a boy, the gorilla and the chimp and the gibbon a little later.
Sorry about that, gang.
In time, he got them all. It was better than in the old days. He took no risks, dug no traps, fired no guns. He simply crowded them out. When there were billions upon billions of naked apes stacked in layers over the earth, there was no room for anything else.
Goodbye, Old Paint,
So long. Rover.
Farewell, Kitty-cat,
Nothing personal, you understand.
All in the name of humanity. What higher motive can there be?
This is a defense?
What in hell did Sam do?
In hell, he did this:
Sam Gregg decided that mankind could not be saved. Not should not (although Sam, it must be confessed, did not get all choked up at the thought of human flesh) but could not, It was too late, too late when Sam was born. Man had poisoned his world and there were no fresh Earths,
Man could not survive on other planets, not without drastic genetic modifications.
And man would not change, not voluntarily.
After all, he was perfect, wasn't he?
That left the animals. Earth's other children, the ones pushed aside. The dumb ones. The losers. The powerless.
You might call it the art of the possible.
Did they matter? If they were the only life in the universe? Who knew? Who decided?
Well, there was Sam, A nut, probably. Still, he could play God as well as the next man. He had the money.
Pick a world, then. Not Mars. Too close, and there were still those ex-human beings running around there. Don't want to interfere with them.
Sam chose Titan, the sixth moon of Saturn. It was plenty big enough; it had a diameter of 3650 miles. It had an atmosphere of sorts, mostly methane. He liked the name.
Besides, think of the view.
It was beyond human engineering skill to convert Titan into a replica of Mother Earth in her better days. Tough, but that's the way the spheroid rebounds.
However, with atomic power generated on Titan a great deal could be done. It was, in fact, titanic.
The life-support pods-enormous energy shields-made it possible to create pockets in which breathable air could be born. It just required heat and water and chemical triggers and doctored plants-
A few little things.
A bit of the old technological razzle-dazzle.
Men could not live there, even under the pods. Neither could the animals that had once roamed the earth.
Sam's animals were different, though. He cut them to fit. That was one thing about genetics. When you knew enough about it, you couldmake alterations. Not many, perhaps. But enough.
Getting the picture?
Sam did not line the critters up two by two and load them into the Ark. (Noah, indeed.) He could not save them all. Some were totally gone, some were too delicate, some were outside the range of Sam's compassion. (Who needs a million kinds of bugs?) He did what he could, within the time he had.
He sent sex cells, sperm and ova, one hundred sets for each species. (Was that what was in the box? Yes, Junior.) Animals learn some things, some more than others, but most of what they do is born into them. Instinct, if you like. There was a staggering amount of information in that little box.
The problem was to get it out.
Parents have their uses, sometimes.
But robots will do, if you build them right. You can build a long, long program into a computer. You can stockpile food for a few years.
So-get the joint ready. Then bring down the ship and reseal the pods. Activate-the mechanisms. Fertilize the eggs Subdivide the zygotes. Put out the incubators. Pill the pens.
And turn 'em loose.
Look out, world.
That was what Sam Gregg did with his money.
They didn't actually execute him, the good people of Earth. There was not even a formal trial. They just confiscated what was left of his money and put him away in a Nice Place with the other crazies.
It would be pleasant to report that Sam died happy and that his dust was peaceful in its urn. In fact, Sam was sorry to go and he was even a little bitter.
If he could have known somehow, he might-or might not-have been more pleased.