The New Earthers were like neutered animals. Something vital and rebellious had gone from their spirits. They had no aspirations, no feeling for the immensities of space, no love for the world that was their home, no tremulous intimations at dawn and sunset. The degenerate language they spoke had no conditional tense. Music had been entirely lost as an art.
Hardly surprising. Their world was without spirit.
These New Earthers occasionally visited the shores of their salt sea. The visits were not to refresh themselves but to collect cartloads of the kelp which grew in the sea. The kelp was one of the few living things on the planet. The people of New Earth spread it on their fields, growing cereals brought from Earth ages previously.
They did not dream because they existed on a world which had never nurtured a Gaia figure. But they had a myth. They believed that they lived in a giant egg, of which the desert was the yolk and the cloudless sky was the shell. One day, said the myth, the sky would crack and fall. Then they would be born. They would acquire yellow wings and white tails, and they would fly to a better place, where trees like giant seaweeds grew everywhere in pleasant vales and it always rained.
When the Outlanders arrived, they did not like New Earth much.
They flew to examine the neighbouring planet, like New Earth the size of a terrestrial planet.
Whereas New Earth was a world of sand, its sister was a world of ice.
An observation drone was sent out to take computer-corrected photographs of the surface and of what lay below the ice.
It was a forbidding world. Glaciers engulfed mountain ranges. Trackless snowfields filled the lowlands. Helliconia in the grip of apastron winter was never as dead as this rigid globe.
The reconnaissance photographs showed frozen oceans beneath the ice. More. They showed the ruins of great cities and the routes of astonishingly wide roads.
The Outlanders descended to the surface. Below an icefield remains of a vast building could be glimpsed. Fragments of it lay about the surface; some fragments had been carried far from source by the glacier. By blasting, the men got down to a sector of the ruins.
One of the first artefacts they brought up was a head, carved in a durable artificial material. The head was of an inhuman creature. In a slender tapering skull four eyes were set, lidless. Small feathers lay under the eyes. A short beak counterbalanced the backward thrust of the skull.
One side of the head was blackened.
‘It’s beautiful,’ a robot partner said.
‘Ugly, you mean.’
‘It was once beautiful to someone’
Dating was not difficult. The city had been destroyed 3.2 thousand years earlier, at a time when New Earth was being strenuously colonised.
The whole planet had been destroyed by nuclear bombardment, and the avian race had perished with it.
The Outlanders called this planet Armageddon. They remained on the frigid surface for some while, discussing what should be done, spellbound by melancholy.
One of the powerful leaders spoke. ‘I think we might agree that we have found here on Armageddon an answer to one of the questions which have plagued mankind for many generations.
‘How was it that when man went into space, he found no other intelligent species? It was always assumed that the galaxy would be full of life. Not so. How was it that there were scarcely any other planets like Earth?
‘Well, we do realise that Earth is a pretty unusual place, where a number of fine specifications are met. Take just one example — the amount of oxygen in Earth’s atmosphere is close to twenty-one percent. If it was twenty-five percent or over, forest fires would be started by lightning — even damp vegetation would burn. On New Earth, the oxygen percentage is eighteen; there are no plants to lock away the carbon dioxide and release oxygen molecules. No wonder the poor boobies there live in a dream.
‘Nevertheless, statistics suggest that there must be other planets like Earth. Maybe Armageddon was one. Suppose a race with a wide-ranging diet reaches supremacy and dominates the planet, as happened on Earth before the nuclear war. That race must use technology to do so — from the club and bow-and-arrow onwards. It masters the laws of nature.
‘The time comes when technology is advanced enough for the race to choose alternatives. It can put out into space, or it can destroy its enemies with nuclear weapons.’
‘Suppose there are no enemies on the planet?’ someone called.
‘Then the race invents them. The pressure of competition which technologies generate makes enemies necessary, as we know. And there’s my point. At that stage, poised for a whole new way of life, no longer to be confined to the planet of its birth, on the brink of major discoveries — right then that race is set the big examination question: Can I develop the international social skills required to bring my aggression under control? Can I excel myself and make a lasting truce with my enemies, so that we throw away these vile weapons for good and all?
‘You see what I mean? If the race fails the exam, it destroys its planet and itself, and shows that it was unfit to cross that vital quarantine area space provides.
‘Armageddon was unfit. Its people failed the exam. They destroyed themselves.’
‘But you’re saying everyone everywhere was unfit. We never have found another space-going race.’
The leader laughed. ‘We’re still only on Earth’s doorstep, don’t forget. Nobody is going to come looking for us until they know we’re trustworthy.’
‘And are we trustworthy?’
Amid general laughter, the leader said, ‘Lets tackle Armageddon first. Maybe we can get the old place going again, if we press the right button.’
Further surveys showed what the world had once been. One notable feature was a considerable high-latitude sea which — before the nuclear disaster — had been only partially ice-covered. After the disaster, atmospheric contamination had cooled the umbrella of air, leaving the water of the high-latitude sea warmer than its overlying air. The air was in consequence heated from below, and moisture drawn upwards. Violent high-latitude storms had resulted, probably enough in themselves to finish off any survivors of the nuclear strike. Plentiful snow fell on middle-altitude ground, a plateau once covered by urbanisation. The major glaciation which set in became self-sustaining.
The Outlanders decided to drop what the leader had called vile weapons on the frozen high-altitude sea, in order to ‘get things started’ again. But the ice wilderness remained an ice wilderness. Here, the local tutelary spirit, the biospheric gestalt, was dead.
They were now almost out of fuel. They decided to return to New Earth and conquer it. Their discoveries on Armageddon had provided them with a strategy. Their idea was that one — just one — thermonuclear device dropped over New Earth’s north pole would cause heavy rainfall, transforming the planet. The sea could be enlarged; the local zombies could make themselves useful by cutting canals. More kelp could be encouraged to grow, and eventually more oxygen released into the air. The calculations looked good. To the Outlanders, the decision to try just one more nuclear bomb was a sane one.