And the Darkness (by Lester del Rey) There was no space in the tiny cabin for nervous pacing. A scant eight feet separated the hallway entrance from the small porthole that showed the dull black of space; and across, the distance from the locked door on one sidewall to that on the other could have been spanned by the young man's arms. Only his eyes were free to roam the narrow room, and they were tired with endless repetition. For a moment, his gaze rested idly on the porthole, and he stared outward through the cold and the darkness to the tiny point of light that was Earth; but there was no conscious recognition of what he saw. His eyes dropped back to the shelf that held his manuscript, his ink, and the purple, untouched candle. And it was only as he picked up the lump of wax with slow, reluctant fingers that he thought of the valley in the hell world that had produced it. . . . The man's shoulders were bowed under the grim weight on his back, and the alpine stock trembled in his grasp. But he fought upward over the last remaining feet until he was at the top of the pass and the wastelands were behind. Even then, he could not trust the weight of his burden to his shaking hands, but sank carefully to a sitting posture until it touched the ground and he could ease his arms out from the straps. Finding a reasonably portable generator to replace the one they could patch no more had been a miracle, and he had no faith in a second one. For a time he lay quietly, breathing in ragged gasps and staring into the valley that was cut off completely from the world by the surrounding mountains, except for this one narrow pass. Dirty snow straggled down to blend with leprous, distorted scrub trees and run down to flat land. And there a few log and stone buildings stuck up uncertainly among the crumbling ruins, to mark the last failing outpost of the human race, three centuries after the Cataclysm. The man grimaced and began to pull himself to his feet. Then an answering clatter of stones sounded from around a rock, and Gram was beside him, pulling him upright and massaging his still trembling shoulders with gentle hands. Her seamed old face broke into a brief flicker of perfect teeth, and her fingers were unsteady, but there was no emotionalism in her voice. "I saw your smoke signal last night, so I've been waiting. I guess I must have been catching a catnap, though. You've been gone a long time, Omega. Okay?" "Okay, Gram. The generator's in there, and enough fluorobulbs to light all the huts. But I'm glad I didn't have to stretch rations another day. I had to work my way clear to old Fairbanks to find it. That wasn't pretty! They knew it was coming hours before the stuff hit them!" "Umm. Here! I figured you'd be hungry. As for the bulbs?" She shrugged and pointed to the purplish plants that grew all around, a mutation as deadly as the hard radiations that had produced them. "I'll stick to sprayberry-wax candles. They have other uses; or at least Peter thought so." So gentle, patient old Peter was dead, and there was only an even dozen of them nowl But Omega was too tired to care much about any- thing except the food Gram held out. She watched him wolf it down, and her face lighted faintly as she dropped beside him. "Eleven worn-out old people and you, now. The last dozen poor supermen," she said with a nod toward the valley; and her voice was filled with the same grim humor that had made her christen him Omega when his mother committed suicide over the rock-mangled body of his father. But Omega knew it was more than humor. In a normal world, with a decent background and half a chance, they might almost have passed for supermen; except that no such world could have produced them. That had required an Earth left wrecked by the Cataclysm from a cold and casually unjust universe?a world where hard radiations made every birth a mutation and where every undesirable change was savagely purged from the race. In a way, it was ironic that men had barely avoided wrecking the planet themselves with plutonium, the lithium chain reaction, or the final discovery of a modified solar-phoenix bomb. But somehow they had eliminated that danger at last?and found their triumph useless. It had been a simple communique" from the new Lunar Observatory, at first; they had spotted a meteor having a paradoxically weak but impossibly hot level of radiation that indicated contra-terrene, or "inside-out" matter. The second announcement spoke guardedly of the danger of grazing contact. And fifteen minutes later, the moon ripped apart as electrons canceled out positrons into energy and left a great flood of unattached and destructive neutrons. Surprisingly, there were survivors of the rain of hell-fragments that fell to the earth. Near the poles, a few deep and narrow valleys were only grazed slightly, and where three contained mines or caverns to offer some protection against the radioactive dust that fell everywhere, a measure of life went on after a fashion, and a thousand or so survived. Now three centuries had whittled down the number, and wild mutations and ruthless survival of the fit had compressed a thousand generations of evolution into one. There was Gram, who might have saved the race, if her cell structure had appeared in time. Like the wolves and the rabbits that had inherited the Earth, her cells had finally found the mutation of to-tipotency that defied all but the most intense concentration of radiation to burn them or cause further mutations. When a wild new plague had wiped out her people in another valley, she had taken the boy who was to become Omega's father, a rifle, and a sled, and set out through a roaring blizzard to cross four hundred miles of hell to this place. Now, sixty years later, she could still outwork any man in the valley, except for Omega's maternal uncle Adam, on the rare occasions when he exerted himself. For Adam had specialized in pure laziness and purer logic that seemed to leap from isolated hints of facts to full-grown knowledge without effort. He had slouched in when Omega was fumbling over calculus and his eyes had lightened with sudden interest in the books he had never troubled to read. Hours later, he had been explaining and making clear the complex mathematics which his mind had carried beyond the wildest dreams of the prechaos scientists. With the same ease, he had seized upon the French books Omega brought back from a trip. Even if there had been a grammar or dictionary, he would have regarded them as too much trouble to use. But it required more than such wild talents to separate a group of freaks from supermen; it took background, opportunity, racial culture, and a future. And in those things, the wolves were their superiors. Sudden light flashed from the valley, disappeared, and returned to hover beside them. Then the spot wobbled erratically across the pass and came to rest against a flat, shaded rock, danced crazily, and steadied down to business. Below, the thin, lanky hands of old Eli must have been using the big mirror on a long board to give the microscopic leverage that was all he needed. His talent lay in a coordination and control of nerves and muscles so nearly perfect that he could shape and handle the infinitesimal tools needed to manipulate individual micro-organisms within the field of a microscope. Now the spot of light fluttered, but its motions were clear enough to spell out letters. "Hurry, need generator," Gram read, and chuckled. "Sure you found one, eh? Let them?uh . . . WoZf girl located!" A gamut of expressions washed over her face, giving place to sudden determination. "Come on, Omega! You can rest later. Here, let me help you with that pack." "Why the hurry, and what's all this wolf-girl stuff about?" After the short rest, the pack weighed a ton, and the pass looked ten miles long. No wolf was that important, whatever it had done. Gram slowed up a little. "Something we never meant to bother you with?Ellen's baby, your cousin. Grown up now, must be. We saw her with a wolf pack once before when you were away, but thought she'd died later. Oh, come on, before they start a search without shields. I'll tell you some other time." "They won't start without shields," he assured her. "She was living with wolves, Gram?" "Must have been. And they'd start, all right. Tom and Ed died out there last time, before you invented the shields! When it comes to race preservation, they'd rather all burn than see you go unmated! Will you hurry?" He hurried; nobody disobeyed Gram. But there was a picture of what a wolf-girl must be in his mind, and the idea of such a mating sat heavier on him than the pack. And he'd thought the old fires of racial preservation were dead! Adam met them, took the pack, kicked aside one of the shaggy, huge-eared pigs, and paced beside Gram without a trace of laziness. Its squeals gave the boy time to get over the shock of that before his uncle answered Gram's questions. "Jenkins?off by himself as usual?went to sleep at the far end. Early morning a howling woke him, and there she was with a couple of wolves. He got a good look?seemed human, all right, a stick in her hand. Time he got there, she was gone, but he saw the direction; reckon I know where she lairs. He came in half an hour ago, fagged out. Soon as we got it out of him, we signaled." "Umm. Wonder where she's been since we saw her the other time, Adam?" "Off somewhere. Studied wolves when I was a kid?they wandered all over. And with your blood, so could she. Lucky she's back." They reached the powerhouse and Adam shut up, while Eli began bolting down the generator on a rough base and connecting it to the old waterwheel. There was a glow to his face that was new to Om...
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