OLD FRIENDS ARE THE BEST
By JACK SHARKEY
[Transcriber note: This etext was produced from Amazing Stories March1960. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S.copyright on this publication was renewed.]
It had no awareness of time, and so did not know nor concern itself withthe millennia that passed since it first drew up the dissolved silicatesfrom the shifting grey remnants of soil and arranged them inside thewalls of the thousand green pods that were its body cells, and settleddown to wait. Somewhere within its fragile cortex, a tiny pulse of lifebeat. It was a feeble pulse, to be sure, and one that a man, unless hecould observe it for a thousand years without blinking, would not beaware of. As the normal human heart beats seventy-two times a minute, sodid this tiny swelling of tube contract once each hundred years; fiftytireless years of contraction, then fifty soothing years of relaxation,bringing the walls of the slender tube together, then letting them easeapart.
But it was sufficient for its life.
The pallid yellow sap was moved about inside the plant, once eachhundred years, and the plasm of the silicon-protected cellular structureabsorbed just the needed amount, bleeding off the waste products betweenthe very molecules of the silicon buttresses, and patiently waiting thecentury out till the second helping came oozing around.
And so it lay dormant, through heat that could send a man intoconvulsions of agony in seconds, through cold that fractional degreelower than can be achieved in a scientific laboratory. It did not knowwhere it was, nor what it was, nor how precarious—by cosmicstandards—was its chance of survival, with sap enough stored in thestiff, coarse roots for only a few more million years.
It simply was, and knew that it was, and was satisfied.
Such a tiny organism can have only the most rudimentary of memories, butit remembered. Once—Once long before, there had been ... more.
Life had been the same, but somehow fuller. When it tried to recallexactly in what this fullness lay, the memory just was not there; only avague recollection of comfort, motion, satiation.
When the men landed upon the moon in the twentieth century, they did notfind it at first. Locating it would have been comparable to stumblingupon a solitary blade of grass, imbedded in ice at the South Pole. Mencame to the moon, though, and began to settle there. The first homesthey knew were mere metal shacks, filled with life-giving gases of theirplanetary atmosphere, and devoid of all comforts save those necessaryfor maintenance of life.
But men have a way of rising above the status quo, and so, within half apulsebeat of the plant, the surface of the moon became dotted with theseiglooic shacks, then pressurized tunnels radiated out in a unifyingnetwork, and soon the Domes began to grow; immense translucentlight-weight structures of enormous strength bubbled up on the moon, andsoon cities were being built beneath them, strange towering fairylandcities on this satellite where people and architecture alike boasted sixtimes the power possessed on Earth. The cities soared upward inglinting, stalagmitic pinnacles whose tapering ends seemed to threatenthe fabric of the Domes themselves, but were in reality still far belowthe blue-white curving surface.
Machines lay buried now in the