Why call them back from heaven? by Clifford D Simak

Author:Clifford D Simak [Simak, Clifford D]
Format: epub
Tags: Science fiction, General, Fiction, Space Opera, Adventure, Science fiction; American, Short Stories
Publisher: Doubleday
Published: 1967-05-15T00:00:00+00:00

23

Would the lilacs smell as sweet, Mona Campbell wondered, when spring came around a thousand years from now? Could one still catch the breath in wonder at the sight of a meadow filled with daffodils, a thousand years from now? If there were, a thousand years from now, any room on earth for lilac or for daffodil.

She sat, rocking gently back and forth, in the rocker she'd found up in the attic and had carried down the stairs to wipe the dust and cobwebs off it, looking out the window at the full-leafed wonder of a late June dusk. In a little while there would be lightning bugs and the first faint smell of fog from the river valley.

She sat and rocked and the soft benediction of the summer evening fell in all its fullness on her, and in all the world, for this moment, there was nothing more important than just sitting there, rocking back and forth, looking out the window at the green that turned to black as the shadows deepened and the cool of the night hours settled down to chase away all but the memory of the hot blast of the daytime sun.

But here, right now, whispered one small portion of her brain that fought to stay efficient, was the place and time to start forming the decision that she had to make.

But the whisper died in the silence and the deepening darkness. And the fantasy, although it was far from fantasy, crept in to take the place of the brain's efficiency.

A fantasy, she thought—of course it's fantasy, it must be fantasy. For in this place and time, in this dusk, in this smell of new and damp and reawakened earth, it could never be. For here the smell of vital earth, the flitting lantern of the firefly, the appointed fall of dusk and the appointed brightening of the dawn spoke of cycles, and life and death must also be an intrinsic part of such a cosmic cycling. And this was the thought, she told herself, that she must remember through all the aeons that stretched ahead of mankind—not as a race, not as a species, but as individuals. But it was a thought, she knew, that she would not remember. For it was not a thought of youth. Rather, it was the thought of someone such as she—a middle-aged and dowdy woman who too long had been concerned with matters that were unwomanly. Mathematics—what had a woman to do with mathematics other than the basic arithmetic of fitting the family's budget to the family's need? And what had a woman to do with life other than the giving and the rearing of new life? And why must she, Mona Campbell, be compelled to reach a decision, all alone, that only God Himself (if, indeed, there were such an entity as God) should be called upon to make?

If she could only know what the world might be like a thousand years from now—not in its external

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