Lost in the Cosmos

earth—ETA: some time in April of this year.
    So here he was. In February he had ridden a horse out old I-80 from Denver, taking two weeks, and had been put up by the Benedictines while he searched the skies for Copernicus 4.
    The Benedictines? They were even odder. The three were all that remained, the remnant of a thriving community which at its peak, a period of religious revival after the second of the great wars of the twentieth century, had as many as three hundred men.
    Now there were three: the abbot, a dried-up old sourdough with a wisp of a beard and a nose like a buzzard’s beak, and a running sore on his forehead; and two black monks, not “black monks” as all black-robed Benedictines used to be called, but black men, Negroes in the old usage, who were monks. Four white monks had died within the decade, of assorted cancers. Black men, it seemed, had the skin melanin to withstand the noxious ultraviolet.
    The community had managed to survive, if this odd trio could be called a community, thanks to the prescience of an abbot of the twenty-first century who had foreseen WWIII of the year 2069 and had excavated a huge shelter in the sandstone under the abbey deep enough and well-stocked enough to survive the hundred-year decay time of Cesium 137.
    The eighteen astronauts, young and old—the youngest, Sarah, a babe in arms, in the arms of Dr. Jane Smith—took their ease in the monastery garden next to an undistinguished barracks-like church and cloister built of twentieth-century cinder blocks, ugly but durable. The children watched in astonishment as the monks walked in tiny procession, bearing aloft fronds of a desert plant. It was Palm Sunday.
    There were also children at the abbey, a dozen or so, mostly genetically malformed and misbegotten: retardates, dolichocephalics (“steeple-heads”) bilateral cleft palates (“wolf-snouts”), armless, legless, depigmented, multipigmented (“harlequins”)—yet a remarkably cheerful and playful lot.
    The two groups eyed each other. The first, the earthlings, looking more like visitors from space than the visitors from space: three monks in black, and Aristarchus Jones, a young blond Californian who wore a loose white garment fitted with a hood with eyeholes which protected him from the ultraviolet but made him look like a Ku Kluxer from olden time.
    Abbot Leibowitz, ex-physicist, ex-Brooklynite, looked like a shtetl shopkeeper stranded in the Sinai desert for forty years.
    The two black monks looked like Amos ‘n’ Andy, one small and sober and smart as Sidney Poitier; the other ponderous, windy, and funny.
    The Captain had some questions, while the space children, who after a week had got the hang of earth, climbed trees, pulled grass, shied rocks as if they’d been born to it. They, the space children, after their initial astonishment, got along fine with the “misbegotten,” learned baseball from them, took them aboard Copernicus 4, taught them video-computer games.
    T HE C APTAIN: What was it, an M7?
    A BBOT: The old war? An M9, I’m afraid.
    T HE C APTAIN: How many are left?
    J ONES AND A BBOT (looking at each other): You mean people?
    T HE C APTAIN: Yes,
    J ONES: We don’t know. Not enough.
    T HE C APTAIN: Not enough for what?
    J ONES: Tosustain civilization.
    T HE C APTAIN: Well, who do you know for a fact to have survived?
    J ONES: A couple of thousand in California. Six in Colorado Springs.
    T HE C APTAIN: New York?
    A BBOT: Don’t know. The last courier on his way to the West Coast said there were a hundred or so on Long Island.
    T HE C APTAIN (to Abbot ):What about Asia? Europe? Don’t you have communication with other monasteries? Churches?
    A BBOT (shrugging) :Don’t know about Europe. A few Catholics here and there in North America, a few churches, but no bishops.
    T HE C APTAIN: The Pope?
    A BBOT: Don’t know.
    D R. J ANE S MITH: Any Methodists?
    A BBOT: Very few Methodists.
    D R. J ANE S MITH (eyeing him) :Jews?
    A BBOT (reviving) :Yeah. A young Israeli came through here several years ago looking for his family in San Francisco. He had made a boat and sailed from Tyre, all alone. He said there were several hundred Israelis holed up in the caves of Qumran.
    T HE C APTAIN: Toget away from the radiation?
    A BBOT: No, to get away from the Arabs.
    T HE C APTAIN: Are they still fighting?
    A BBOT: Yes. But radiation is no longer a danger. Cesium 137 radiation became minimal a hundred years ago.
    T HE C APTAIN: Then why hasn’t the