Cornucopia

a short story by Paul Trammell

Belmont lost his left arm at work, which wasn’t so odd on the high steel, but it happened while he was on break. The circumstances of the accident often replayed in his head along with a hint of suspicion. He had just eaten lunch and was reclining with his eyes closed, catching what rest he could during the long and hard day on the job. His arms were both splayed out to his sides when a steel fell from a lifter and landed on his left arm.

His employer, Progress One, took care of all his medical bills and offered him a prosthetic arm that represented new technology. They claimed the new prosthetic would be better than the original, which they called a “meat limb.” This was the first time he had heard that term, and he was surprised at its derogatory nature, but the term became commonplace soon after, and of this he was not surprised, because prosthetic limbs became commonplace at work, and most of them were voluntary.

The arm they described to him sounded more robotic than prosthetic, but he accepted. His acceptance would allow him to keep his job and, curiously, they offered him a 10% raise if he accepted the prosthetic. He had a child to support, so he didn’t have to think about it. He was a single dad. His wife had died years ago of lung cancer, which was epidemic in the city, where everyone besides rich people lived.

The arm he woke up with after surgery looked like a robotic arm, but instead of a hand, a selection of tools, triggered by mere thought, could emerge from the end. It took practice to learn the arm and its ways, but he soon mastered them and became much more efficient at work than he was with two meat arms.

Belmont came home after sunset and his clothes bore the hallmarks of his work in metal shavings and concrete dust. The apartment was on the 97^th floor and one of countless units in the building. It had no windows and the entire apartment was twelve feet by eight. Two bunks folded up to the wall when not in use and a table folded down from the opposite wall. Folding down the table automatically turned on the television, which was on the wall behind the table. The only way to turn it off was to fold the table up. The apartment was so narrow that in order to walk through it either the table or the bunks had to be folded up. On the back wall was a sink, a stove and a refrigerator. The bathrooms were down the hall.

Belmont held a brown paper bag and set it on the table. Andy, his seven-year-old son, looked up at him. Andy was thin but wore a smile on his gaunt face. Belmont took from the bag a brown square the size of a deck of playing cards and set it on a plate. There was nothing else in the bag.

“What kind id it?” Andy asked.

“Yardbird-Yum,” Belmont said.

“Single-yum again? Don’t they have any double-yum at the store?”

“They did, but it was terrestrial arthropod.”

“Gross.”

“Yep.”

He set the brown square on the table and a knife blade flicked out from the end of his prosthetic. He cut the food in half, one piece a little bigger than the other. He gave this piece to Andy.

Andy switched on the television and they both watched “Cornucopia,” a show about a family that lived on another planet by that name. On this fictitious planet, two suns kept the planet in perpetual daylight. The family lived in a house built in a bent, a stationary creature somewhere between a tree and an octopus. The bent was both holder of the house, as a tree might be, and friend, like a family pet.

Giant flowers bloomed on vines that climbed the bent and produced fruit that Jimmy and Edna casually picked and ate as they watched their children play with and in the bent. After dining on fruit, the family walked along a ridge and watched simultaneously one sun set and one rise, then beside a stream of clear clean water, where they stopped and drank. Everyone was fit and beautiful. A strange fish leaped out of the stream and landed in the green groundcover in which tiny purple flowers bloomed. Shelly, the daughter, picked it up and put it in a basket she carried which already contained fruit.

Andy and Belmont were chewing their last bites of yardbird-yum when a commercial came on that got their attention. It was Jimmy, the character from the show they were watching.

“Unless you’re a Farsider, you already know that Progress One and Space Brother have developed lightspeed travel. This means we can and will colonize other planets,” he smiled big and opened his arms as if to display the surroundings, “like Cornucopia!” then with a wink, “or so we hope. And guess what? You can be a colonizer! That’s right, just apply at space Brother dot I wanna be a colonizer dot com and if selected you will be a contestant on a TV show called,” he paused and the camera zoomed in on his face, “can you guess the name?” The camera zoomed out and he shouted with the cast of Cornucopia, now standing behind him, all throwing one fist in the air, “I Wanna Be a Colonizer!” He continued, “One hundred winners will fly to another planet and be real interstellar colonizers!”

Andy and Belmont had both stopped chewing their single-yum meal and looked at each other. Andy swallowed and shouted, “let’s do it Dad!”

“Why the heck not?” Belmont said. Andy went to the website and applied him and his father as a family team. A week later, they won a spot on the show. A driverless white van picked them up. They rode through their borough, past Belmont’s jobsite and two other buildings he had built, through a part of the city even worse than their own, and on beyond where either of them had ever been. When the buildings gave way to empty sky and the road ahead rose up, Andy asked his father what it was.

“I think it’s the Big Bridge. Neither father nor son nor anyone they knew had ever crossed the Big Bridge. The buildings passed behind them and the sky opened up, though smog still obscured everything above it, the sensation was still one of awe and wonder for Belmont and Andy as they passed over the wide and flat Progress River.

When they reached the other side, they were swallowed up again by skyscrapers.

“Is this The Outside?” Andy said.

“I guess so.”

“It’s just more buildings,” Andy said with a sigh.

“Just more of the same,” Belmont said.

But the van drove on for three more hours, and the building grew short and wide, and then the spaces between them increased, and then there were trees.

“Bents?” Andy said.

“Trees, son. Trees.”

“Wow! Cool! Are there houses in the trees? Do they make fruit? Are they friendly?”

“I don’t know, son.”

“Is this still The Outside, or is it the Far Outside?” Andy said.

“It can’t be the Far Outside. It’s too clean, and I don’t see any Farsiders.”

“The Outside is big. How much further do you think it goes, before it’s the Far Outside?”

“There’s no telling, son. This is all new to me. But I don’t think Space Brother would have a building in the Far Outside.”

“It’s all trash and poopy, isn’t it?”

“I think it’s all bad stuff. Farsiders, beasts, and garbage. I think it’s where all of our garbage goes.”

“And the Farsiders eat it?”

“That’s what they say.”

They approached a tall white gate that opened before the van got there and they passed through. Along the road were expanses of green fields and clusters of trees and the van passed over a stream on a stone bridge and both Belmont and Andy felt like they were on Cornucopia already.

They were shown to a room with two beds, a private bathroom, and a window looking out over the yard. Dinner was Yardbird yum-yum and breakfast was Down-on-the-Farm triple-yum.

“This is the best breakfast I’ve ever had!” Andy said.

“I’ve got a good feeling about this,” Belmont said.

“Are they going to send us to Cornucopia if we win?”

“Cornucopia isn’t a real planet. It’s just a TV show.”

Andy looked at him with suspicion.

“Where are we going, then?”

“It’s called Proxima Centauri B.”

Andy looked at him with confusion.

“That’s a funny name.”

“I didn’t name it.”

“If you did, what would you name it?”

“Corn-U-Andy.”

Andy laughed.

During their stay, they came to learn that one of the many obstacles the colonists would face on Proxima Centauri B was that the planet did not spin, so the same side faced its star, Proxima Centauri, a red dwarf. The planet was a distance from the star to have a reasonable temperature, and it had an atmosphere that Space Brother scientists gave a chance of being breathable at 95%. Unfortunately, the star frequently bombarded the planet with radiation flares that the probes calculated would instantly kill a human.

The simple solution was to colonize the dark side of the planet and visit the other side only in between flares, assuming they could be predicted.

Video from the planet was promising, and simple lifeforms were spotted on the light side of the planet.

On the dark side, water ran in streams and collected in pools, and the videos showed dark figures moving beneath the surface.

On the light side of the planet, small featureless plant-like organisms were common, yet no creature was seen to move. It was predicted that the colonists could harvest these creatures easily and convert them to food. The colonists were to set up solar farms in the twilight zone, between the light and dark sides, but they were to live on the dark side, as close as possible to the light side without being incinerated by the radiation flares.

The first contest of I Wanna Be a Colonizer took place outside and the contestants stood on a green expanse of manicured grass before trees in rows.

“Is that fruit? Like on Cornucopia?” Andy said.

“I think those are apples,” Belmont said.

“Like apple yum-yum?”

“Yep. But this is the real thing.”

“Apples come from trees?”

“Yep. Just like this. But I’ve never seen it before. Never seen anything like this.”

They both stared in awe at the impossibly vast apple orchard before them. Eleven other family teams stared as well. Most were couples. Some were one parent and one child. Some were two parents and one child. Each was given a large bag and the goal was to fill it with apples as quickly as possible. They all lined up fifty yards from the trees.

“Stay on the ground and fill the bag, as fast as you can.” Belmont said. He winked at Andy and tapped his prosthetic arm and flicked out a hook.

At the sound of a gun, they all ran to the trees. Belmont leaped for a low branch and grabbed it with the hook on his robotic arm, which heaved him up in a flash. He stood on a thick low branch and held the one above with his meat hand. His hook folded in, a small electric saw flicked out, and he got to work.

The apples fell like rain, and Andy had the bag filled before most of the other contestants had even climbed into the other trees. Belmont swung back down on a hook that replaced the saw, picked up the bag, and the two of them ran to the finish line, winning the contest.

The characters who played Jimmy and Edna on Cornucopia gave a presentation that night. They explained some of the details of Proxima Centauri B, and that it would take five years to get there. But the ship was both enormous, and really, what did five years matter when they would have no work to do and they would be living in luxury compared to their previous homes.

They showed a video of the ship, and Belmont was convinced that five years on that ship with ample food and clean water would be paradise compared to life at home on the 97^th floor.

“Are we going to live in a big house up in a bent when we get there?” And asked his father.

“There aren’t any such thing as bents, Andy. Those are only on Cornucopia, on TV.”

“But Cornucopia is about living on other planets.”

“It’s just a TV show. It’s not real.”

“But we met Jimmy and Edna. They’re real.”

“They’re real people, but they’re actors. Their names aren’t even Jimmy and Edna. William Henry and Susannah Burlington are their real names.”

“Oh. Can we fish when we get there? There’s streams, right? With fish in them?”

“They said there’s streams, and something lives in them. But we don’t know what.”

“And we can drink out of the streams, right? Like Jimmy and Edna, on Cornucopia?”
“I hope so.”

“But they said it was good fresh water, so why wouldn’t we be able to drink it?”

“Well, Space Brother did tell us it was most likely good fresh water, but we have to be careful about what to expect, about what we hope for.”

“Why?”

“Because too much hope can strike you down.”

Space Brother gave everyone hope, and plenty of it. If humans could colonize other planets, and Proxima Centauri B was to be the first of many, mankind could escape the degrading conditions on Earth. But of course, only 112 of the ten billion people on Earth would be going, and the planet they were to colonize, even if the videos and data were accurate, made the outback look like easy living. But to the masses, statements like “95% chance of breathability” and “teaming with life” and “flowing streams of water” made Proxima Centauri B sound better than where they lived, which to most people was a concrete city beridden with crime and filth, air that stank and made people sick, food richer in man-made chemicals than actual food, and neighbors that might as well have been aliens.

All the dumbed-down details were explained in fun and educational Space Brother videos promoting the mission. Space Brother secured the funding, which was more money than the average person could conceive of, and built a ship. The name of the ship was crowd-selected in an online game in which more of the country’s population participated than voted for president in the last election. The name they selected was not one that any but the fools who voted for it liked, and to them it was a joke, and even to them, it was only funny for a day or two. Regardless, Space Brother lived up to their word and named the world’s first interstellar lightspeed ship Biggus Shippus, an homage to a Monty Python character in the classic movie “The Life of Brian.”

Biggus Shippus was fitted out to carry one hundred colonists – the winners of I Wanna be a Colonist! It was the largest-grossing show of all four years the project was in development. Hundreds of people from four cities had competed in various games and contests, none of which had anything to do with selecting people who might actually succeed in colonizing an exoplanet, but Max Priestly, the CEO of Space Brother, knew that person didn’t exist anyway.

Finally, after four years of development, Biggus Shippus was ready. The colonists were trained, and the world was ready to see the human race expand to new territory. Life on Earth had been degrading as natural resources were sold off, polluted, exploited for profit, destroyed in war, or simply wasted at the whims of the wealthy.

As the ship was developed, hundreds of well-connected people became fabulously rich, and yet everything else suffered. One third of the GDP spent on this project meant dramatic cuts in domestic spending. It meant further austerity, the dismantling of social safety-nets, dramatic cuts in healthcare, a halting of any new infrastructure, and huge cuts in education. Potholes grew and multiplied, bridges rusted, and student-to-teacher ratios skyrocketed. Infant mortality tripled. But the military was kept intact, so everyone could at least feel like a foreign country would not invade (though none ever had).

The ship with the unfortunate name left Earth, reached light speed, and five years later, it arrived at Proxima Centauri B where it burned the last of its fuel in deceleration. There would be no return trip. It landed successfully, on the dark side, just at the edge of the twilight zone. Lightspeed travel was real, if nothing else Space Brother said.

The colonists now numbered 378, as with little else to do, the couples had reproduced. However, 63 had also died. Of these, 47 were murdered, but these statistics would never make it to Earth.

Andy was the first human ever to step onto a planet outside the solar system. He wasn’t chosen for this accolade, but merely rushed past his father and out between the hesitant adults. He was 12 years old and he had been waiting for this moment for five years. Five years in Biggus Shippus. Five years of boredom in between watching Space Brother “How to Colonize PCB” videos. Five years of circadian malfunction. Five years of confinement. Five years of watching the adults go crazy, fight, and even kill each other. Five years of existing outside of any sense of the accurate passage of time.

Nobody on the ship was the same at arrival as they were at departure, and Andy wanted one thing. He wanted to drink from a stream. The videos showed people doing it. The characters on Cornucopia did it, and he had decided long ago that he was going to do it, and that he was going to be the first. The first human to drink from a stream on another planet. If he amounted to nothing else in the world, he would have that, and no one could stop him.

The ground was solid, but the air smelled like cleaning fluid. A stream of water was only a short distance away. He ran towards the water, though Belmont yelled and told him to wait. He ran the short distance, coughed, and knelt by the stream. Before he drank, he couldn’t help staring at the reflections of the stars on the dark water. They would live the rest of their lives illuminated only by the stars. But there were plenty of stars, and the rest of Andy’s life would only last a few more minutes.

While Belmont ran to him, Andy drank from the stream. It was clear and cool just as he had dreamed, and it had no taste, and he drank deeply with his face in the water. He hoped the water would soothe the burning in his lungs. He sat back up.

Belmont reached him. Andy leaned back and lay on the surface of the dark planet look out at the stars, which looked much like they did on Earth and not at all like the miasma of colors and motion viewed from the ship while it traveled at light speed. He looked up, and his father held him in his arms, and his breathing slowed, and though his eyes remained open and his face remained smiling, he quit breathing, his body became still, and he died.

Andy was Proxima Centauri B’s first victim of butylated-hydroxytoluene poisoning. The water was full of it. Belmont held his dead son in his arms and cursed the sky, the planet, Space Brother, Progress One, and his own sense of hope.

Nobody else drank the water, and luckily, Space Brother had foreseen this possibility and supplied the ship with a Water Brother, a machine that converted butylated hydroxytoluene into its gasses that bubbled out of the water, rendering it drinkable. Some thought this was a convenient coincidence, to others it was benevolent prescience, others evidence of the omission of important facts about the planet, and to others evidence of an outright and malicious lie. Another such coincidence was the stock of portable air filters that removed chlorine gas from the air. Everyone wore one after stepping outside only once without one.

Back on Earth, Max Priestly had become, by far, the richest man in the world, and all of his friends – who were not really friends, but more like business associates – were millionaires and billionaires, largely thanks to his success and suggestions of where to invest. The colonization scheme had been very good for them, though bad for everyone else.

Space Brother had determined that the dark side of Proxima Centauri B had similarities, however vague, in soil and climate to Australia’s Outback. Much of the funding secured for the colonization mission was earmarked for the development of technologies for terraforming Proxima Centauri B. In order to conduct proper tests of this technology, shell companies controlled by Space Brother began buying all the land for sale in the Outback.

They wanted all of the red center, and especially the Uluru-Kata Tjuta National Park. This was not something the government would even consider, at first. But Space Brother had long arms and short ethics. Politicians were bribed, and those who would not accept bribes were subjected to horrific blackmail that immediately destroyed their careers. Eventually, the national park was sold under a complicated land deal that the government convinced the people was in their best interest.

The Aborigines were not convinced, and they staged long protests. The mountain Uluru Kata was sacred to them, but they were powerless when Space Brother moved in via helicopter and landed on the top of the sacred mountain. Tear gas was effective in clearing out most of the protestors and the rest were arrested for trespassing.

The terraforming projects marched forward, and the scalding empty red-dirt desert of the outback began to produce trees. The trees provided shade and a microclimate, which allowed for water to remain on the soil long enough to penetrate before evaporating, and more plants began to grow. Real Estate values went from almost nothing to those of exclusive gated communities, which began popping up.

Max Priestly built a compound on the top of the sacred mountain. A walled compound below housed all the terraforming-development projects. Around the compound, life was developing, as he loudly proclaimed to the media, much like it was now on Proxima Centauri B. The colony, he frequently declared, was a success, though nobody had any way of knowing if this was the case, nor would they, ever.

The glorious arrival of mankind on the first exoplanet was off to a dark and depressing start. The first person to set foot on the planet, or on any planet outside the solar system, died immediately after sampling the resource that should have been a cornerstone of their survival. All of them capable of critical thinking in difficult moments developed grave doubts about everything they had been told about the planet. Others who had blind faith in the mission believed that the boy had been the chosen one to remind them that salvation came not from the planet, but from Space Brother, as evidenced by the presence of the Water Brother.

The colonists quickly set up the machine, and Belmont volunteered to be the first to drink from its product. He secretly hoped to die and see Andy when he drank the water, but it was good enough not to make him sick, and everyone but him felt a little better.

Moments later, the horizon flashed and moments later again a rumble shook the ground beneath them. All agreed it must have been a radiation flare hitting the bright side of the planet. It all happened again a few minutes later, and then a third time. Anyone who had previously thought about visiting the sunny side no longer felt any such desire.

They began setting up the prefabricated buildings stored in the ship, and it was agreed that the families with new children would live in them. This way the inside of the ship, where everyone already had quarters, would finally be free of crying babies, and all the childless colonists appreciated this.

The colonists set up the Soil Brother and connected it to the ship’s waste system, and soon the machine was producing soil. Mounds of soil were carried across the twilight zone, in between the dark and light sides of the planet, where they hoped plants might find enough light to grow but not so much radiation from the flares as to be killed. Both were wishful thinking.

When no plants grew at all, the colonists knew that their only hope for survival was to eat the local flora and fauna. The only life they knew of on the dark side, where they lived, was underwater, and they had little idea what the creatures were, whether they were edible, or how to catch them. They stared into the water and occasionally saw dark shapes moving beneath. The ship had been supplied with fishing rods and lures, and the colonists stood on the edge of the stream and cast in the dark. They never caught anything. Most were convinced the creatures, whatever they were, would be full of butylated hydroxytoluene anyway.

The videos they all watched from the Space Brother probes showed plant-like organisms on the light side of the planet, and it became clear that someone was going to have to take the risk of going there and bringing one back to see if it was edible.

Again, Belmont, volunteered. On the ship were three Space Brother radiation suits, complete with dark visors on the helmets. He put on a suit and a large backpack with food and water and started walking lightward.

He walked through the twilight zone until he could walk no more, and he lay down in the shade of a rock and slept. He ate and walked and slept, and this went on for what would have been days on Earth, but he had no way to keep track of time, and he didn’t care anyway.

The light had only gradually increased when he came upon a purple mound about the size of a tea saucer on a rock. He scraped it off and put to his face, and sniffed. It smelled noxious. He touched his tongue to it and recoiled from a burning sensation. He dropped it into his bag anyway.

As he walked, the purple-mound creatures increased in number, but he left the rest of them alone. He had seen in the Space Brother videos a green fruit with dark horizontal stripes. It was round and oblong and the inside was red. It had looked like something that might change his mind about this planet, and this was what he wanted. But the more he looked and the more he recalled the details of the video, the less convinced he was that he was going to find the mystery fruit, and the more convinced he became that it existed on Earth and the video was a sham. Here, the only things resembling life were the clearly toxic purple mounds. Nothing could be farther from fruit.

Only the rich ate real fruit back home, and it occurred to him that none of the colonists were rich people, but were inner-city workers, like himself, and then it occurred to him that Earth was “home,” and this place in no way resembled it. Didn’t all man-made things eventually quit working? And what would happen when their facemasks wore out and the Water Brother quit working? What would happen when the ship’s medical facilities quit?

He continued walking into the light and began listing the problems they faced. The water was poisoned with butylated hydroxytoluene. The dark side of the planet was unable to grow plants, even with the stupid Soil Brother machine. The vague and uncatchable creatures in the water were probably poisonous anyway. The purple-mound plants were inedible. They relied on various machines for survival. But Space Brother must have known about the butylated hydroxytoluene in the streams, since it had supplied them with a machine that removed it from the water. Why were they told the water was “fresh and clear” and not poisonous? He couldn’t figure it out, but it had taken his son and nothing would bring him back.

The sun, which was not the sun at all, rather Proxima Centauri, appeared over the horizon as he walked. It was enormous and red-orange and Belmont welcomed its implied danger. He missed his son, and his sun.

To his left, movement caught his attention, and he turned and walked that way. In the red sand were curious tracks of vaguely round prints in line with each other, as if each foot was placed directly in front of the other, or others. He followed the tracks around a shelf of rock and stopped. Before him on the plain of red sand and rock, a dozen creatures roughly the size of dogs ran towards a common location. Somehow, they didn’t look dangerous, and Belmont resumed walking. The hunter-instinct in him awakened. This is what he was looking for – a food source for the colony. This might be what saved them all. But for how long?

The creatures all disappeared into a cave. Belmont was almost there when he noticed the sky had changed from yellow and red to electric blue. Instinctively, he ran into the cave.

Earth, at this time, was controlled by Space Brother, at first through the blackmail of politicians, and finally through the placing of agents of the company in positions of power. Though Max Priestly was not above assassination, he never had to go there. Everyone had either been bought or blackmailed.

Space Brother controlled space and therefore looked down on all of Earth. Communications systems, the internet, satellite solar farms, and weaponized satellites were all owned by Space Brother. Any deviation from Max Priestly’s orders brought instant ruin to any country, company, or individual.

Max Priestly had converted the entire outback, including the Uluru-Kata Tjuta National Park, into his own fiefdom. The mountain the park was named for held a secret inside. The Aborigines knew about it, but they did not have the political or military power to stop Max Priestly from harvesting it.

Inside the mountain was the world’s largest reserve of palladium, which Max used in developing the super-high multi-variance boson capacitor, which allowed him to build both the lightspeed thrusters on Biggus Shippus and particle-beam weapons which were small enough to mount on satellites, but powerful enough to lay waste to entire cities in minutes. Lightspeed travel was never Priestly’s main concern.

Biggus Shippus and the Proxima Centauri B colony fell into the dustbins of history. No one wanted to think about it anymore. The entire world had been fooled by the project, and forgetting about it, or at least never mentioning it, was the most comfortable solution for everyone. It had become clear that the entire mission never had anything to do with spreading the human race beyond the solar system. Max Priestly, and all the scientists who actually thought about it, knew what would become of the mission, or any mission to colonize another planet. Any and all would fail. They all knew that humans need far too many specifics of Earth’s characteristics to survive anywhere else, and any civilization reliant on technology is living on borrowed time.

The entire mission was simply a charade to funnel huge amounts of money from the taxpayers to Space Brother and its affiliates. A certain percentage of the world’s population knew this to be the clear truth all along, but the masses were never convinced by boring things like logic and math. Much more compelling were the colonization-promoting reality-TV shows, slick social-media influencers, and blunderbuss politicians who “spoke their language.”

On the same day that Max Priestly shocked the world by annihilating the city of Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, for having the gall to deny his request for a land grant to open a Thallium, Lead, and Bismuth mine, a radiation flare erupted on Proxima Centauri and headed for the ill-fated colonist.

The world behind Belmont and outside the cave lit up and the light was followed by a deep and loud boom much like thunder. He was blown forward by the shockwave and he landed prone. He thought he might be dead, and his next thought was that he might see Andy. But when he looked up, he saw the faces of the creatures who had lumbered into the cave. They were all looking at him.

He felt no fear, for they inspired none. The creatures looked as if they had no predators. They had nothing like claws or barbs, stingers, armor or horns. They just looked like blobs of meat with vague sensory organs on one end and two fat legs, one fore and one aft. They looked like easy prey. Meat. Food for the colonists.

They looked at him, then turned to face each other and made sounds and movements. They looked back at him and made more sounds and movements. It was clear to Belmont that these things were trying to communicate with him. They were sentient.

They would be so easy to kill, and he almost flicked the knife blade from his prosthetic. But he couldn’t do it. This was their planet, and he was an invader. They were sentient, probably intelligent, and this was the first encounter between man and intelligent life on another planet. To be the first human to contact intelligent extraterrestrial life and then to kill it struck him suddenly as disgusting and evil. He would not be evil. He would not spread the worst characteristic of mankind to this place. He couldn’t kill them.

What would he tell the others? The colony was clearly doomed anyway. They might survive here for a while, but why needlessly kill these creatures when they would all die when the Water Brother quit working anyway. Or they would die when their air filters quit filtering, or when the solar farms quit working, or any other number of systems they relied on failed. What was the point?

He put down the bag and walked back towards the cave entrance. The creatures chattered, one lumbered ahead of him and stood in his way. He flicked out the knife and slashed the air in front of the creature to scare it, hoping to let it know that humans were dangerous and to be avoided, but the creature stood its ground. Belmont held the knife to the palm of his hand and drew it across. Red blood seeped out and he winced in pain. He held out his bleeding hand and the creature stepped back. He slashed at it again, closer this time, and the creature moved out of his way.

Belmont walked back outside. The sky was still blue and crackling and a moment later it brightened quickly, brighter still, brighter it grew than any other light he had ever seen and the warmth became heat and the heat became a numbness that enveloped his entire being.

Andy was there, beckoning him to a still-brighter light, but this light was cool and welcoming, and Andy was a grown man, and Belmont’s wife was there too, and his parents and grandparents, and others that he recognized, all beckoning him into the light, and he went.