Free A Handful of Darkness by Philip K. Dick Page A

snow pouring off him. The roar was growing, getting louder. His heart began to hammer wildly. He peered around, his beam flashing through the night.
    The ground shook, vibrating through him, rattling his almost empty oxygen tank. He gazed up at the sky—and gasped.
    A glowing trail slashed across the sky, igniting the early morning darkness. A deep red, swelling each second. He watched it, open-mouthed.
    Something was coming down—landing.
    A rocket.
    The long metal hull glittered in the morning sun. Men were working busily, loading supplies and equipment. Tunnel cars raced up and down, hauling material from the under-surface levels to the waiting ship. The men worked carefully and efficiently, each in his metal-and-plastic suit, in his carefully sealed lead-lined protection shield.
    “How many back at your Mine?” Norris asked quietly.
    “About thirty.” Trent’s eyes were on the ship. “Thirty-three, including all those out.”
    “Out?”
    “Looking. Like me. A couple are on their way here. They should arrive soon. Late today or tomorrow.”
    Norris made some notes on his chart. “We can handle about fifteen with this load. We’ll catch the rest next time. They can hold out another week?”
    “Yes.”
    Norris eyed him curiously. “How did you find us? This is a long way from Pennsylvania. We’re making our last stop. If you had come a couple days later…”
    “Some runners sent me this way. They said you had gone they didn’t know where.”
    Norris laughed. “We didn’t know where either.”
    “You must be taking all this stuff some place. This ship. It’s old, isn’t it? Fixed up.”
    “Originally it was some kind of bomb. We located it and repaired it—worked on it from time to time. We weren’t sure what we wanted to do. We’re not sure yet. But we know we have to leave.”
    “Leave? Leave Earth?”
    “Of course.” Norris motioned him towards the ship. They made their way up the ramp to one of the hatches. Norris pointed back down. “Look down there—at the men loading.”
    The men were almost finished. The last cars were half empty, bringing up the final remains from underground. Books, records, pictures, artifacts—the remains of a culture. A multitude of representative objects, shot into the hold of the ship to be carried off, away from Earth.
    “Where?” Trent asked.
    “To Mars for the time being. But we’re not staying there. We’ll probably go on out, towards the moons of Jupiter and Saturn. Ganymede may turn out to be something. If not Ganymede, one of the others. If worst comes to worst we can stay on Mars. It’s pretty dry and barren but it’s not radio-active.”
    “There’s no chance here—no possibility of reclaiming the radio-active areas? If we could cool off Earth, neutralize the hot clouds and—”
    “If we did that,” Norris said, “They’d all die.”
    “They?”
    “Rollers, runners, worm, toads, bugs, all the rest. The endless varieties of life. Countless forms adapted to this Earth—this hot Earth. These plants and animals use the radio-active metals. Essentially the new basis of life here is an assimilation of hot metallic salts. Salts which are utterly lethal to us.”
    “But even so—”
    “Even so, it’s not really our world.”
    “We’re the true humans,” Trent said.
    “Not any more. Earth is alive, teeming with life. Growing wildly—in all directions. We’re one form, an old form. To live here, we’d have to restore the old conditions, the old factors, the balance as it was three hundred and fifty years ago. A colossal job. And if we succeeded, if we managed to cool Earth, none of this would remain.”
    Norris pointed at the great brown forests. And beyond it, towards the south, at the beginning of the steaming jungle that continued all the way to the Straits of Magellan.
    “In a way it’s what we deserve. We brought the War. We changed Earth. Not destroyed—changed. Made it so different we can’t live here any longer.”
    Norris