Outside

Genesis, PART ONE, V.

There are green hills, wildflowers, trees and a breeze:

"Looking out, Laurinda Ashcroft could almost feel warmth and wind, hear birdsong, breathe odors of growth.

"But the view was electronic, for her house and its few neighbors lay underground." (p. 36)

Poul Anderson appeals to his readers' senses of touch, hearing and smell even though Laurinda merely sees.

Later, when she walks outside, low evening light goldens grass and leaves, rooks call while flying home and a breeze cools the air. More of Laurinda's senses are engaged. She glimpses machines tending the church and imagines devout ghosts inside it. Someone I knew believed that the whole Church, living and dead, was present when Mass was celebrated. HG Wells' Time Traveller, glimpsing a Morlock at night, imagined that he was seeing a ghost and wondered how many ghosts might have accumulated by 802,701 AD. In Clifford Simak's The Goblin Reservation, a University Time Travel Department hosted a talk by Shakespeare while the Supernatural Department conjured Shakespeare's ghost. I have digressed but that is because sf stories, like jokes, recall each other. ("Wasn't there a Star Trek like this?") For now, I am content to remain with Laurinda Ashcroft in the church, then back in her underground home: a quiet before the storm moment. Laurinda has anticipated the next two "storms": an imminent Ice Age and a radiation storm nine millennia hence. We miss the Ice Age because, between Chapters V and VI, the narrative jumps forward to a different civilization seventeen hundred years later.