Between the Strokes of Night

In the air, the birds could not find enough food over the land. A few remaining species skimmed the surface of the tropical seas, competing with sea mammals for the diminished supply of fish. Their high energy-need killed them. The last flying bird on Earth fell from the skies within two years of the thermonuclear blast that obliterated Washington. The penguins alone lived on, moving north from the Antarctic to inhabit the coastlines of South America and Africa. Small colonies of emperor penguins still clung to the shores of the Java Sea and Indonesia.

The larger surface animals — including all surviving members of homo sapiens — were early victims. Long life spans permitted the build-up of lethal doses of radiation in body tissues.

The small burrowers, driven farther underground to seek out deep-lying roots and tubers, fared much better. One circumstance had assisted their survival. The hour of Armageddon came close to the winter solstice in the northern hemisphere, at a time when many animals were fat for the winter and preparing for hibernation. They had burrowed deeper and settled in for the hibernal sleep. The ones too far north had never wakened. Others, returning to consciousness in a cold, dark spring, foraged far and wide for food. The lucky ones moved steadily south, to the zone where a pale, sickly sunlight still permitted some plant growth. Of all Earth’s land mammals, only a few small rodents — mice, hamsters, ground squirrels, and woodchucks — lived on to inherit the earth.

Their competition had been formidable. The invertebrates were fighting for their own survival. Insect life dwindled at first, then adapted, mutated, grew, and multiplied. They had always dominated the tropical regions of Earth; now the larger ants and spiders, aided by their formidable mandibles and stings, strove to become the lords of creation.

The mammals took the only paths left to them. The invertebrates were limited in maximum size because of passive breathing mechanisms and their lack of an internal skeleton; and they were cold-blooded. The rodents grew in size to improve their heat retention, developed thick coats and hairy paws, and moved away from the equator to regions where there was no insect competition. Some of them were totally vegetarian, browsing on the sparse, chlorotic plant life that still grew in the dust-filtered twilight. They developed thick layers of blubber, for food storage and insulation. The other survivors became super-efficient predators, preying on their herbivorous relatives. As the nuclear winter slowly ended the insects moved north and south again, away from the tropics. But the mutated mice and woodchucks were ready for them. They had increased in size and ferocity, to become a match for any pre-civilization wolf; and now they wore thick coats of fur and protective fat that rendered impotent the fierce mandibles and poison stings. The insects were a new convenient source of protein. The carnivores followed them back into their tropic habitats, and on to the southern regions.

The changes to animal life on Earth were easiest to see; but the changes to the vegetation were in some ways more fundamental. The grasses were gone; in their place a dwarf form of eucalyptus covered millions of square kilometers with flat, bluish-green leaves. Waving fields of corn and wheat would never be seen again on Earth. Their nourishing seeds had been replaced by the red clusters of berries that hung from every euclypt stem. After being assured that it was safe to do so, Elissa sampled a couple. They were filled with a fatty syrup, and at their center sat an oval, impenetrable seed. The seeds, berries and roots of the euclypts sustained a thriving animal community beneath the foot-high canopy of their leaves, where in the blue-green gloom devolved mice fought finger-long giant ants for the best food and living space.

* * *

As they travelled on across the face of an Earth where no vestige of human works remained, Peron became gradually more silent and withdrawn. Elissa assumed that it was a reaction to their surroundings. She was reluctant to interfere with his thoughts. But as they skirted the barren western seaboard of South America, where the continuous line of glaciers stretched down to the Pacific, Peron’s need to discuss his worries became overwhelming.

They had landed in the Andean foothills to watch sunset over the Pacific. Neither spoke as the broad face of Sol, red in the evening twilight, sank steadily past a thin line of clouds far out over the western ocean. Even after the last of the light had faded, they could turn to the east and see the sun’s rays still caught by the summits of high, snow-covered peaks.

“We can’t stay here,” Peron said at last. “Even if we liked it better here than on Pentecost, even if we thought Earth was perfect, we’d have to go back — to S-space.”