"I wonder why they attacked us?" Bernard went on. "Primitives usually run. We must have been an unbelievable sight to them, spiraling down out of the sky."
"I don't know," Rossiter replied wearily. "And we can't ask them. They're dead, all five of them. That wind's cold." He was shivering.
"You could go back inside the ship," Bernard said half-humorously.
"I'm sick of the Elpis. We all are. Eight years of it—it's too much. We'll get used to the wind, I suppose. There's going to be lots of wind, with so much water and only this one land mass on our new world. It's not like Earth."
Bernard made an involuntary movement. Then he relaxed. "I suppose the taboo is lifted now that we've landed," he said heavily. "We can talk about Earth again, and wonder, and speculate. I wonder what they're doing now on Earth."
"Starving. Freezing. Burrowing into the ground for coal and warmth. They must be living a good many hundred feet down now, those that are left. And the seas are frozen. There's an ice sheet from pole to pole.
"We astronomers paid you back finely, didn't we, Bernard, for all the appropriations you got us in committee meeting. You were always generous with us and the physicists. But when the catastrophe happened, the mystery, the debacle, we couldn't help. We didn't know the answer. We didn't know."
"I remember—" Bernard answered, choking a little, "—I remember the day before it happened. There was a report on my desk about some tribe of Indians high in the Andes. The report said that the parents had been persuaded to send their children to the school in the foothills, that even among the adults illiteracy and ignorance were being eliminated. It was the last of the ignorant tribes.
"I looked up at the sign over my desk and read the motto, 'There is nothing unknowable. There are only things not yet known,' and I thought, 'Yes, we're getting near our goal. We've conquered ignorance and superstition and illiteracy. And as time goes on we'll know more and more things. The area of the unknown will constantly diminish. Knowledge is like an expanding circle of light that eats into the darkness.' Then the darkness came. And you didn't know."