Imperial Earth

Earth, filling half the sky and slowly sliding along the huge observation windows-themselves a famous tour de * force of space engineering. Duncan had no intention of calculating how many tons of air pressure they were resisting; as he walked, up to the nearest, it was easy to imagine that there was nothing protecting him from the vacuum of space. The sensation was both exhilarating and disturbing.

He had intended to go through the check list that the doctor had given him, but that awesome view made it impossible. He stood rooted to the spot, only shifting his unaccustomed weight from one foot to the other as hitherto unknown muscles registered their complaints.

Port Van Allen circled the globe every two hours, and also rotated on its own axis three times a minute. After a while, Duncan found that he could ignore the station’s own spin; his mind was able to cancel it out, like an irrelevant background noise or a persistent but neutral odor. Once he had achieved this mental attitude, he could imagine that he was alone in space, a human satellite racing along the Equator from night into day. For the

Earth was waxing visibly even as he watched, the curved line of dawn moving steadily away from him as he hurtled into the east.

As usual, there was little land visible, and what could be seen through or between the clouds seemed to have no relationship to any maps. And from this altitude there was not the slightest sign of life-still less of intelligence. it was very hard to believe that most of human history had taken place beneath that blanket of brilliant white, and that, until a mere three hundred years ago, no man had ever risen above it.

He was still searching for signs of life when the disc started to contrast to a crescent once more, and the public-address system called on all passengers for Earth to report to the shuttle embarkation area, Elevators

Two and Three.

He just had time to stop at the “Last Chance” toilet-almost as famous

as the lounge windows-and then he was down by elevator again, back into the weightless world of the station’s hub, where the Earth-to-orbit shuttle was being readied for its return journey.

There were no windows here, but each passenger had his own vision screen, on the back of the seat in front of hina, and could switch to forward, rear, or downward as preferred. The choice was not completely free, though this fact was not widely advertised. Images that were likely to be too disturbing like the final moments of docking or touchdown were thoughtfully censored by the ship’s computer.

It was pleasant to be weightless again-if only during the fifty minutes needed for the fall down to the edge of the atmosphere-and to watch the

Earth slowly changing from a planet to a world. The curve of the horizon became flatter and flatter; there were fleeting glimpses of islands and the spiral nebula of a great storm, raging in silence far below. Then at last a feature that Duncan could recognize-the characteristic narrow isthmus of the California coastline, as the shuttle dropped out of the Pacific skies for its final landfall, still the width of a continent away.

He felt himself sinking deeper and deeper into the superbly padded seat, which spread the load so evenly over his body that there was the minimum of discomfort. But it was hard to breathe, until he remembered the “Advice to

Passengers” he had finally managed to read. Don’t try to inhale deeply, it had said; take short, sharp pants, to reduce the strain on the chest muscles. He tried it, and it worked.

Now there was a gentle buffeting and a distant roar, and the vision screen flashed into momentary flame, then switched automatically from the fires of reentry to the view astern. The canyons and deserts dwindled behind, to be replaced by a group of lakes-obviously artificial, with the tiny white flecks of sailboats clearly visible. He caught a glimpse of the huge

V-shaped wake, kilometers long, of some vessel going at great speed over the water, although from this altitude it seemed completely motionless.

Then the scene changed with an abruptness that took him by surprise.

He might have been flying over the ocean once more, so uniform was the view below. Still so high that he could not see the individual trees, he was passing over the endless forests of the American Midwest.

Here indeed was proof of Life, on a scale such as he had never imagined. On all of Titan, there were fewer than a hundred trees, cherished and protected with loving care. Spread out beneath him now were incomputable millions.

Somewhere, Duncan had encountered the phrase “primeval forest,” and now it flashed again into his mind. So must the Earth have looked in the ancient days, before Man had set to work upon it with fire and axe. Now, with the ending of the brief Agricultural Age, much of the planet was reverting to something like its original state.