The Deep One

By NEIL P. RUZIC
Illustrated by DILLON
There wasn't a single mistake in the plan for survival—and that was the biggest mistake!
For centuries, the rains swept eight million daily tons of land into the sea. Mountains slowly crumpled to ocean floors. Summits rose again to see new civilizations heaped upon fossils of the old.
It was the way of the Earth and men knew it and did not worry. The end was always in the future. Ever since men first learned to make marks on cave walls, the end remained in the future.
Then the future came. The records told men how the Sun was before, so they knew it was swollen now. They knew the heat was not always this hot, or the glacier waters so fast, the seas so high.
They adapted—they grew tanner and moved farther pole-ward.
When the steam finally rose over equatorial waters, they moved to the last planet, Pluto, and their descendants lived and died and came to know the same heat and red skies. Finally there came the day when they couldn't adapt—not, at least, in the usual way.
But they had the knowledge of all the great civilizations on Earth, so they built the last spaceship.
They built it very slowly and carefully. Their will to live became the will to leave this final, perfect monument. It took a hundred and fifty years and during all that time they planned every facet of its operation, every detail of its complex mechanisms. Because the ship had a big job to do, they named it Destiny and people began to think of it not as the last of the spaceships, but as the first.
The dying race sowed the ship with human seed and hopefully named its unborn passengers Adam, Eve, Joseph and Mary. Then they launched it toward the middle of the Milky Way and lay back in the red light of their burning planet.
All this was only a memory now, conserved in the think-tank of a machine that raced through speckled space, dodging, examining, classifying, charting what it saw. Behind, the Sun shrank as once it swelled, and the planets that were not consumed turned cold in their orbits. The Sun grew fainter and went out, and still the ship sped forward, century after century, cometlike, but with a purpose.