Lost in the Cosmos

Where do you want to go?
    T IFFANY: I’m going to the coast of Oregon, where I once spent the summer doing anthropology with an Indian tribe. They were fishermen. They lived well and simply. It should be the safest spot in the U.S. from fallout. And the first are least likely to be contaminated by radiation or ultraviolet.
    K IMBERLY: I want to go to Uxmal in the Yucatan. I have an idea about deciphering the glyphs. I lived there once in a pyramid next to a lovely deep cenote. I have a feeling that if anything has survived, it has.
    T HE C APTAIN: What about your kids?
    T IFFANY-AND -K IMBERLY: Oh, they all think they’re Jane’s anyhow.
    T HE C APTAIN: What about you, Jane? Where do you want to go?
    D R. J ANE S MITH: Lost Cove, Tennessee. I was born there. It’s a tiny valley of the Cumberland plateau sealed off by a ridge. No roads, no phones, no TV. Only three farms and a cave. Good water, sweet white corn, quail, squirrel, deer, fish, wild pig. I haven’t had pork sausage, grits, and collards in twenty years. All projections of East-West fallout patterns missed it. I think I’ll take my chances.
    T HE C APTAIN: Would you take the children?
    D R. J ANE S MITH: Sure. Can you fly us there?
    T HE C APTAIN: Yes, but we have to land in Utah first.
    D R. J ANE S MITH: What will you do, Captain?
    T HE C APTAIN: (Why didn’t she invite me to come with her to Tennessee?) I’m going back to Long Island. I don’t care what they’ve done to it. I’m getting in my ketch and sailing to Montauk.
    D R. J ANE S MITH (shyly) :Wouldn’t you rather come with me to Tennessee?
    T HE C APTAIN: Yes.
    The starship made two low orbits before landing at Bonneville: the first fly-by to see the Eastern Hemisphere by night; the second, the Western. Silently, like Lucifer in starlight, leaning on his great wings, they flew low over the dark northern continents.
    London was dark. Europe was dark. Moscow was dark. China was dark. Japan was dark. San Francisco was dark. Chicago was dark. New York was dark.
    At dawn on April 12, eighteen years after launch in starship time, 457 years in earth time, the starship Copernicus 4 set down on schedule on the salt flats at Bonneville, Utah, the captain landing at 190 knots as easily as an ancient airline pilot landing a 727. One does not forget how to ride a bicycle, swim, or fly an airplane.
    After a long silence, the Captain requested an external radiation reading from Kimberly. Negative.
    There was no one and nothing to be seen except the rusty shards of old steel maintenance sheds from the twenty-first century.
    They stepped out into the sweet, heavy desert air. The problem was walking—but not for the children! Perhaps they were like the newborn of the Arctic tern who fly to the Dry Tortugas, never having been there before, yet land and know it for home.
    Despite Dr. Jane Smith’s careful program of exercise and calcium maintenance, the adults were limber-legged as sailors and blind as bats in the dazzling Utah sun.
    The children ran and fell and jumped and fell like the Beatles on a soccer field.
    They made for the nearest shade and the nearest shelter—of all things, the ruins of a rest stop on old Interstate 80 between Salt Lake City and San Francisco.
    They sat at a picnic table, the returning earthlings, speechless and bemused. The rusting hulks of ancient eighteen-wheelers, Airstreams, and twenty-first-century camper-choppers (helicopters-with-tents) littered the parking area. Close by, the broken concrete of old 1-80 was drifted by salt and sand like a Roman road in Cyrenaica. But a single aspen shaded them, its crisp new leaves shivering and glittering like new money in the rising sun. A single buzzard wheeled high in the sky. As they watched, a green lizard crawled on the table, elbows sprung, cocked an eye at them, and inflated a red bladder.
    The earth was alive.
    There were also human survivors. And an odd lot they were, the four who rescued the stranded astronauts.
    One was Aristarchus Jones, an astronomer who lived in the old SAC headquarters under a mountain at Colorado Springs.
    The other three were Benedictine monks from a nearby abbey where Jones had been living for a month.
    What was he, Jones, doing here? Why, he had come to meet them. They were expected. Or rather, Jones had years ago come into possession of some documents from the old JPL in Pasadena and had made the calculation that if Copernicus 4 had failed to colonize Barnard’s P1, it would return to