THE OLD CIVILIZATION OR THE NEW WILDERNESS?
Simon Gamble, Earth's most brilliant
scientist, and Vincent Drega, the most successfully
aggressive tycoon the world had ever seen, were rivals in the battle for
supremacy over mans mind and life. Then Simon plunged the planet into thirty
centuries of suspended animation. When it awoke, a billion and a half people
were dead, civilization was a primitive rubble,
cannibalism stalked the devastated ruins. But awake, too, was the old
competition between Gamble and Drega. Gamble struggled to rebuild his world
with pure science; Drega relied on human resourcefulness and initiative.
The conflict of these two scientific
gladiators makes for an unusually thrilling and imaginative creation of worlds
we may one day come to know!
Turn this book over for second complete novel
CAST OF CHARACTERS
SIMON GAMBLE
His concept of pure science threatened to
poison society.
VINCENT DREGA
He
believed that man does not live by bread alone. But first he had to find bread
in order to live at all!
LUCKY FLAGHERTY
The first of the pioneers of a caveman
frontier.
LULU BELLE
She was all woman,
but the men around her were all science.
HERB OLIVER
His hangover lasted three thousand years.
LUCIUS
PRESCOTT
An ordinary man in a world of superminds, he
knew something they didn't.
THREE THOUSAND YEARS
THOMAS CALVERT McCLARY
ACE BOOKS A Division
of A. A. Wyn, Inc.
23 West 47th
Street, New York 36, N. Y.
THHEE THOUSAND YEARS
Copyright,
1954, by Fantasy Press, Inc.
An
Ace Book, by arrangement with Fantasy Press, Inc.
"Three
Thousand Years" is based on material originally copyrighted in 1938 by
Street & Smith Publications, Inc., and published in Astounding Science
Fiction. All Rights Reserved.
"Time's the king of men,
For he's their parent, and he is their grave,
And
gives them what he will, not what they crave."
—Shakespeare: Pericles
tile green queen
Copyright ©, 1956, by Margaret St. Clair
Printed in U. S. A.
PROLOGUE
How
can I tell this vast story of so many different facets? I can do it because I
am an instrument of graphs and charts, of multiple symbols and calculations and
deductions, that can be interpreted as words or
pictures, or even music, if you are so minded.
Some, who know of my existence, call me Simon
Gamble's Robot Brain. But they are wrong, for I do not think, I do not feel,
any more than a photographic plate. I simply record incident and time and place
in whatever terms or factors are strongest. I am a kind of glorified
calculator, such as the Pari-Mutuel machine that gives you your odds at race
tracks. The odds are accurate upon any given horse, but the machine does not
actually know or care what the odds are, nor what a horse is, nor the owner,
nor the weather, nor the jockey, nor the trainer, nor the emotions of the
bettors.
Simon Gamble invented and perfected me to
record history's greatest revolution—Mankind's coming of scientific age. And his own intellectual and moral victory over the traditional
human errors and avarice and lust for power of the mighty—particularly Vincent
Drega.
From different standpoints, both men once thought
knowledge of the truth a highly desirable objective. Gamble thought
the~truth would make for purity of concept and understanding; that in a general way it would bring the language of science, and the cold
analysis of science, to the whole world. Drega thought that a more private knowledge of truth would enhance his personal power and
achievements—that he could almost see men's secret minds work
ing under the masks of deception they raise
against the rest of mankind.
Now both men feel that the naked truth, too
much truth, can be disturbing, destructive, and dangerous.
Both men, in fact, have many parallel ways of
thinking toward different goals, and toward many of the same goals, but from
different viewpoints. Had they recognized that long ago, and the simple fact
that the world has two opposite poles, both men might have come nearer to
achieving their ultimate ambitions and avoiding great catastrophe.
It is not within my purely recording powers
to judge or estimate which man was wrong, or just how far men should be blamed
for the ambitions that supply much of
the force of their accomplishments. I
can only tell what men have said or thought or done during the time of my recording.
You,
who have not a millionth fraction of
my recorded knowledge, but who can feel and think, will decide the guilt or
error or compensating good that will rest upon the cataclysm of tliose terrible Three Thousand Years. .
. .
CHAPTER ONE
You have
to vision the two men as
they were then, that day of the argument that grew out of their private atomic
conference, and the policies they would pursue in meeting various world
problems.
More
strictly speaking, these were the policies of companies, corporations,
cartels, even of governments. But allowing for limitations, these two made the
decisions. Both were physically virile, intellectually dynamic, and in their
mid-forties. Each was in a position, in great part, to checkmate the other.
Vincent
Drega was shortish, muscular, a human juggernaut who had built an
international financial empire not upon cunning or diplomacy, but upon blunt
power. His human appetites were lusty, his emotions headstrong. He had started
as a construction boss, and it would always be about him. He was roughshod,
realistic, tough fibered. He liked to say that he had never seen a blueprint
that could be followed accurately—that problems would always arise that had to
be settled with the means and tools at hand right on the job.
Simon Gamble was tall, spare, iron-gray of hair, with black eyes that held a glint of ice.
He was a man dominated by his intellect, who liked to develop his myriad ideas
through the cold, analytical detachment of pure science. Humanity, to him, was
a simple scientific equation. He had no tolerance with human error and folly.
Five hundred years ahead of his time, he was a kind of Luther Burbank of
physics and electronics. And he was Drega's chief scientist.
The conference had begun quietly enough in a
discussion of the general dislocations and problems that the atomic age was
causing. The dissension started when Drega took the viewpoint that atomic
energy was, or should be, a mere tool of finance and commerce. Simon Gamble
contended it was at once root and branch of all modern
and future economies.
There
was a basic dissension here that had been building over the years. More and
more as Gamble's mastery of science produced miracles of progress, more and
more had Drega suppressed the fruits of Gamble's brilliance as premature.
There was the internal combustion engine the scientist had developed that would
produce ten times any present horsepower at less than one-tenth the present
fuel costs. Drega contended that the engine would wreck a dozen industries and
the model lay buried in his vaults.
It
was Drega's answer to a great many secret and buried formulae. Admittedly, they
were great steps of scientific progress. But one would wipe out the Bessemer
steel industry overnight. Another would crash the wool, cotton and pulpwood
industries. He had heavy investments in all, which perhaps, as Gamble claimed,
influenced his viewpoint.
Yet economic considerations were bagatelles
compared with the scope of Gamble's thoughts on atomic energy, which ran the
gamut from such matters as childbirth fatalities to an agricultural and
industrial complex that could be operated by a few score men. He could feed and
clothe and house the world and make every man a king with the equivalent of a
hundred servants. He could make the feebleminded brilliant, he could double or
triple or quadruple the life span of Man. He saw atomics as the end of the
age-long search for a universal catalyst that could make everything on this
earth good and wipe out all evils and poverties of mankind.
. .
. that was providing Drega would let him set up a
laboratory such as no project ever dreamed of had ever boasted, and would then
give him an unrestricted hand. What mattered dislocations of traditional
economics, of government boundaries, of political systems? There would no
longer be any need or use for such. The world would How with milk and honey.
Atomic energy would open the door to the promised land.
Drega
was not the calloused or merciless man the world commonly held him. He was
simply hard-headed. He took life and men as they came and made the most of
them. He made no attempt to crusade, for he had never found any lasting good that came of crusades. To his way of thought, crusading
monopolized and disconcerted a man until he stood in peril of losing what he
already had.
An utter pragmarist, he did believe in some
outside power that controlled man's surges of emotions and ways of life, both
good and bad, as the moon controls the tides. He did not believe a new world
could be designed and fashioned on a blueprint. A new world, a new way of
life, would merely bring new problems. Modern man might live longer and better
than his grandfather but progress had done nothing to reduce his worries.
Drega saw no indications that peace was a natural corollary of plenty. Things
had to evolve by natural laws and in due time, and by process of sweat, error
and combat.
At the same time he did not underrate
Gamble's brilliance. Gamble was no crackpot when it came to production. Given
time and money, in Drega's opinion, Gamble could work out any scientific
problem. But also, in Drega's opinion, his chief scientist was half-witted on
the score of economics. He disregarded or held in contempt the most vital
motivations of mankind. He regarded human incentives with the cold dispassion
of pure science.
In
Gamble's world was no room for ordinary human fallacies. He scoffed at
inefficiency as inexcusable stupidity, with compromise as muddleheadedness. Why
compromise when there was only one true mathematical answer to a problem? To Gamble, life was black or white . . . the simple true
equation—or confusion.
He
was not compromising now, but his own actions were proving him more human than
he knew. The quarrel had gone beyond the abstractions involved, had turned
bitter with the egos of two great men whose most cherished views had been
challenged. Cold theory faced recognition of human incompetence across that
table. But driving to two viewpoints were the personal egos of the two men.
While
they fought, a world of pride and prejudice and economic systems, evolved out
of ten thousand years of trial and error, hung in the balance. Civilization
teetered upon the outcome of two battling wills.
"Five
hundred million people sick and malnourished," the scientist snapped,
"while we have a tool to cure almost any disease known! I can grow pigs as
large as elephants, wheat the size of corn cobs, store the power of a hurricane
in a bottlel We do none of them! What kind of sense is
that, just to support an obsolete way of life?"
"Your
processes would require infinite cheap power and thousands of tons of gold
wire, among other things," Drega growled.
Gamble tossed his head with scom. "I can
produce power and gold cheaper than natural gas and iron ore!" he snorted.
"What does cost matter if you destroy money?"
Drega went white around the
lips. "Destroy the natural balances, the traditional incentives, the value
of profit and gold, and you destroy the economic systems of the world! This is
a world of trade and commerce, Gamble, and we aren't ready for a science
civilization."
"Economic systems!" Gamble sneered. "The
cancers of civilization! Gold was a resource of savages who lived on
worms and bugs. Science—intelligence—are the resources of tomorrow."
Drega
crashed the table with a muscular, flat-backed hand. "The traditions and
economic systems under which a civilization lives are the greatest resources
that it has! Strip the world of these and you leave the world with raw wealth
and no factories, or with factories and no men to run them. The give-and-take
of economic and political battle is the way to work things out. In time progress
and tradition adjust by compromise."
Gamble leaped to his feet shaking with fury.
His voice was a hoarse whisper. "You mean men like you adjust and
compromise! Invariably with war, Drega! Fifty million people can't be decendy
fed. But they can be annihilated at a cost that would keep them in peace and
decency."
"In
all building and progress there is waste and batde," Drega snapped.
"Waste, even death, is better than the disintegration of planned
slavery."
Gamble
controlled his shaking with difficulty. His face was bloodless, his lips blue.
"All right, Drega, take your waste and war and wreckage. Take your
cracking systems and rotten governments and bloodshed and stupidity. But I will
give the world the food it needs, the peace it wants. If it shatters every
economic system into atoms—good! Science will supply a new system that will workl"
"For scientists!" Drega commented acidly.
He watched with misgivings
as Gamble stalked from the room. There was no doubt in his mind that the
electronocist could do what he claimed, whatever struck his brilliant brain.
Drega gave him credit for accomplishment of anything he sought to do—except to
see Mankind in terms of mortal men.
He
thought of gold produced cheaper than iron, of giant wheat grown in chemical
solutions. Sweat broke out on his brow. Gold was not vital as money, was no
longer actually an element of great value. But gold had come to be endowed with
value by centuries of man's blood and sweat and worship and tradition. Gold
was something people believed in. It was a symbol, yet a symbol as necessary to
trade and government as plus or minus to mathematics. Nor was wheat a mere
food. It was a vital element of commerce, barter and exchange. It had a value
people were used to considering and using. Destroy the value and you destroyed
the economic basis of human existence.
With sincere fervor Gamble called a meeting
of scientists and issued a statement of his intentions. He was bitter at the
bungling of financiers and politicians. Millions starved —more millions were
living lives of economic and intellectual sterility merely to go on living.
Well, he could feed them—feed them cheaply
and plentifully and give them time and freedom to work out richer lives of
greater benefit to both themselves and science. Let the obsolescent economic
systems crash. What of that? They were always crashing into war or inflation or
depression anyway.
His dream lifted him to Olympian heights.
Talk was one thing, production something else. That had been the claim of the traditionalists
for centuries. But this time the talkers had the know
how and tools and learning for production. For once the dreamers held the
production secret, and the so-called practical men were doing the dreaming.
But
the world could not reach Gamble's intellectual heights nor grasp his
breast-burning vision. The press was forced to give him attention, but added
grave misgivings. The wheat market tumbled; the meat market followed.
Housewives were happy for a week and then the avalanche of the economic crash
caught them. A big steel company shut down to wait things out. Banks began to
close.
In
three weeks, seventy million workers were laid off around the world. Factories
idle and fanners left their plows in unfinished furrows. Politicians and
financiers were bewildered. Suddenly money seemed to have no value, but
paradoxically, from a drop to all-time lows, prices rocketed with the spread of
unemployment.
Farmers
marched on their capitals. Gamble's house was stoned by frenzied mobs. He was
called crazy, insane, a maniac, a menace. An
experimental pig, the size of an elephant, was tortured and ripped to shreds in
the crowd's violence. Even if his ideas were workable, look at the ruin they
had already brought about!
Word
came of his imminent arrest. Besieged and damned by the very people he had
sought to help, Gamble fled into bitter exile. Never after that day did he make
public an invention nor appear before the world. But he worked at a chastisement that would show the world the error of human folly and the
power of science when science willed it.
He
never realized that his own actions were utterly human—that his reactions were
the sort he would have expected of Vincent Drega.
CHAPTER TWO
Ace
reporter Lucky
Flagherty sat in his publisher's office flicking his ashes on the deep piled
rug, the gesture of his general rebellion against the pomposity and power of
such men as Lucius Prescott.
"Chief,"
he said, "this series would boost our circulation to the skies. We've had
nothing but troubles for years. People are softened up to expect the worst of
anything. Now the pyramidologists, who don't predict often, are predicting
world catastrophe—but they won't pin the prediction down. We can pin it for
them."
"The policy of this paper is never to
predict," the publisher intoned sanctimoniously. "We give the news
and quote only what qualified groups and persons say."
"That's
just the point," Lucky told him. "We can dig up the qualified groups
and experts to predict. We can offer quotations that will give readers more
insomnia than a TV horror mystery!"
Lucius Prescott tilted back to look at the
ceiling and made steeples of his carefully manicured fingers. "Rhhh-ummmmph!" he considered. "We're carrying news of
war, revolution, famine, unemployment, a dust storm and two floods today.
Conceivably we might be doing a public service by taking the public's mind off
its real troubles. I'll grant you there's nothing like a thriller to make
people forget their ills."
"And to boost circulation," Lucky
pointed out.
Prescott
scowled and wondered why he put up with this rebel. By rights Lucky should have
been a barker for a circus sideshow. He had ideas and he brought in stories,
though.
"This series," Prescott considered,
committing himself to an okay, "is> loaded with dynamite. Get names to cover it—big names. And let me know if any of
them say anything tiiat is really important."
Lucky
grinned and departed. He was back by mid-afternoon, keyed as a terrier on the
scent of his series, but his flippant irony was oddly subdued. "I
managed," he said, "to get interviews with both Simon Gamble and
Vincent Drega."
Prescott's
face showed interest. "Don't tell me those two are speaking againl"
Lucky shook his head negatively. "I
caught Gamble first, at that super-science fortress of his up the Hudson. There
are enough gadgets there to make ten movies of a new world. Except for the labs
the whole place is run by one electrician and he is merely a maintenance man.
Lunch was ordered, prepared, cooked, served, the table cleared, dishes washed,
everything put away, without a person touching it."
Prescott looked dubious. "I suppose he
just phoned some robot to fix up chicken a la king?"
"Not
much different," the reporter said. "He put a roller in an automatic
contraption. Like a roll in an old-fashioned player piano. And the floor I
stepped onto when I went through the front door carried me into the room where
he met me."
He
thought briefly about the ease of life at Gamble's castie but there wasn't
anything easy about those vast atomic labs nor the way
the scientists worked. One man had not been to bed for a year and four months,
Gamble had told him. He worked in a metallic suit, hooked up electronically,
that drew off the fatigue poisons as they formed and kept his vitality at top
efficiency peak.
"Well," Lucky erupted suddenly,
remembering himself, "I went in smirking. I told
Gamble that the pyramidologists were predicting world catastrophe at precisely
three-thirty E.S.T. on March fifteenth. I thought he'd snort with scientific
scorn and might even throw me out of the place."
"He should have,"
Prescott stated.
"Well,
he didn't. That's when he ordered lunch, in fact. Then he sat me down while he
did the interviewing. He got the name and address of the pyramidology groups
and every scrap of fact and hearsay that's come over the news tickers. I had to
call the morgue here and let him listen in.
"When
he got all the data there was to get he sat there, puzzling it out, and asked,
'How the devil could they have figured out a time prediction in the days of the
pyramids? How many lost secrets of science did they have?" He took it
seriously!"
Prescott
leaned forward on his desk. His face was visibly excited and impressed, but
then he covered his feelings with a newspaper publisher's cynicism and grunted,
"The pyramid builders have always impressed even the modem
super-scientists."
"Wait till you hear this," Lucky
said. "I asked what might alter the prediction of catastrophe and he said,
'Rain —a heavy rain—either here or in Estheenland.' That's where we're expecting
trouble to break wide open, isn't it?"
Prescott
nodded and Lucky paused to light a cigarette nervously.
"Then
I got in to see Drega," he continued. "And when I told Drega, it
broke his hard shell just as it had Gamble's. He asked most of the same questions
but slanted them politically. And when I asked him what might alter the predictions,
he said, 'Rain, heavy rains in Estheenland!' Then he grew a little ironic and
added, 'Or maybe Gamble claims he can bring
rain.'"
"Amazing!"
the publisher murmured. "Handle the story your way and tell our weatherman
to play it up."
He
watched Lucky out, tapped his desk with a cigar while his face settled into an
expression tinged with something predatory. He picked up his phone and called
his broker. If war broke out it would undoubtedly start in Es-theenland and now
that he had heard Drega's and Gamble's reactions to what he had considered a
pure stunt, he recalled that elections in Estheenland would be on March
fifteenth. Election riots might well precipitate a war. And one of the few
antidotes for riots was rain—torrential rain.
But why rains here in New York should affect
the world pattern he could not fathom. There were times like these when he
wished he had treated Simon Gamble a little better editorially. No doubt the
man was a genius. It was just too bad that the world was humdrum human,
Prescott thought, as he gave his broker orders on some war stocks. Then he
dictated a violent editorial denunciation of war.
Finished,
he phoned Drega. He had trouble getting through to him. Drega was handling half
a dozen overseas phone calls. Drega was guarded, cautious of statement, but
admitted that in his opinion, if there were election riots in Estheenland, they
might trigger the opening guns of war. Furthermore, that
heavy rains there on election day would keep people off the streets and
violence might be avoided for the moment.
Prescott
said, "You and Gamble have the same opinion on that. But why would rains
here in New York affect matters?"
"What?" Drega barked, and Prescott could hear him
breathing hard at the other end of the wire. Shortly, with controlled voice, he
added, "So Gamble included that? Flagherty didn't mention that item."
"Do
you think Gamble's foolish enough to try and take world peace into liis own hands
with some cockeyed threat or demonstration that he might pull here?"
Prescott asked.
"If
he should it will not be just a cockeyed threat," Drega stated. "And
it won't be foolish for him this time. That fortress of his is utterly
impregnable to anything short of a hydrogen bomb. He could stay cooped up
safely there for fifty years."
"But the rain?"
the publisher persisted.
"Local
rain," Drega said, "might effect some
electronic experiment of his but I can't see how it would ward off catastrophe.
From his standpoint, if it prevented some experiment, he'd consider rain or
any other delay the worst catastrophe that could happen. No, Lucius, that's the
big question that has me stumped."
In the city room Lucky batted out his story
at the typewriter next to the irrepressible Lulu Belle. "Great guy, that
Gamblel" he enthused while he wrote. "What a kitchen he'd fix up for
you. And gold for a buck or two a pound. Sweetheart,
you imagine what that would mean to us—a world without money. No debts, no
salary, no job to worry about!"
"I
can't imagine how you'd buy me a wedding ring or a trip to Florida every now
and then," Lulu Belle said pointedly, looking up from her Lovelorn column. "Besides, you'd be impossible to five
with if you didn't have a job that let you poke around into everybody else's
business."
"Oh,
I'd be off to Mars if men like Gamble ran things," he told her.
"It would just spoil you," she
sniffed, "The girls up there have eights legs. They do, tool I saw it in
your own story!"
He
turned to her seriously. "You know, there's no logical
reason Gamble's ideas wouldn't work if the world gave him a chance!"
"But
who else would work?" she demanded. "He'd give you every thing for
nothing. You'd have things too easy to keep you out of trouble."
The Ides of March was a great day for the
calamity howlers. Lurid stories of what might happen had attained an exciting
crescendo. For the most part, the public was taking things with that
make-believe horror that makes a horror movie or detective story so popular.
But here and there the gullible, the depressed, the guilty, the mentally
disturbed were reacting violentiy to the impact. The police stations and die
psychiatric wards would be glad when this day was over.
At three-twenty Lucky Flagherty drifted over to his editor's desk to grab a
first copy of the edition when it arrived. He stood beyond the desk, looking
out the window. Outside, the sun shone with a bright golden light. Gamble had
said it would almost certainly be good weather.
Traffic
streamed as usual along the avenue below him. Heavy traffic,
waterfront traffic. Opposite his vantage point was a row of covered
docks reaching out into the river. He watched a sailor on the top of a mast,
painting, and he considered the man's dexterity while moving around his
precarious perch.
The
boy hustled in the last edition and he grabbed one and read the headline:
WORLD'S END—OR RAIN. He grinned.
He read the condensed
reports of the Estheenland election probabilities. The local correspondent
didn't seem too excited. Riots were expected but the police said they were
prepared and had things well in hand. It crossed his mind that, if war did
come, this one would be a real lulu. There were a dozen new secret weapons but
there was one bomb in particular that gripped his imagination—a giant cockroach
bomb was what it amounted too except it would shatter the nervous system of
every human being in a four-hundred square-mile radius.
"Blown to hell by a bugl" he
thought. "A fine end for civilization!"
But at the moment he was more interested in
his final story, predicting every form of catastrophe from world explosion to
the conquest of civilization by giant snails. His editor hung up die phone with
a bang and gave him the old fish-eye.
"Did the world's greatest news-sleuth
have any trouble selling this cockeyed scare series to the boss?" he
inquired.
Lucky
polished his nails on one lapel. "Not with my persuasive
personality," he admitted modesdy.
The
editor leaned back with sudden rare good humor. "Seems that the governor
of the state has that same charming glamour," he allowed. "He has
just persuaded the boss that he may go to the clink for inciting mob violence.
They've had to put out the air-raid ambulance call to take care of the nuts
going whacky. There's been a week-long crime wave that has the commissioner on
the spot. Fourteen cult racketeers have been picked up getting rich with your
stories and promising suckers a special train through the pearly gates."
"I begin to suspect the axe," Lucky
said.
"Oh
don't get depressed," the editor advised pleasandy. "You might not
get fired. If the world does end in one minute eternity will remember you as
the greatest of scoop journalists I"
"The
circulation of the paper skyrockets and I get the gate for gross genius!"
Lucky yelped.
"Genius!"
the editor roared.
"Listen, Doomsday, that was the phoniest series
of . . ."
He
paused to cough. His throat was tight a*nd stuffy and queerly dry.
"Flagherty,
you're fi—" He stopped short, batting his eyes as a strange sensation of
unreality filled him.
It was difficult to open his eyes the last
time. They felt leaden. His thinking was confused. But he glared savagely out
of habit, determined to read the riot act if it killed himl
Then
he gasped and thought wildly, "Jeepers, creepers, he isn't firedl"
For
a motionless, naked, black-bodied Lucky Flagherty stood before him. He was alive,
but he was made of mud!
As the
clock crawled toward
three-thirty on the afternoon of March fifteenth, tension gripped the city, but
it was outweighed by curiosity and humor. Most of the world expected to have
its moment of laughs, then maybe relief, tiien to continue its normal round of
duties. Most serious of any predictions had been a threat of time-bombs from
some crank.
Among
the knowing, however, the gravest fear was of a blow-up in Estheenland. Few of
the general public gave that a second thought and many of the people in the
streets could not have told where the country was located. By and large, men,
women and children were continuing their various pursuits.
Up
the Hudson Simon Gamble had assembled his staff after inspecting the various
laboratories with extreme care, particularly for sundry chemicals that
vibration or intermixture might cause to explode.
"Just
by way of precaution," he told them. He looked at the big nuclear fission
and fusion apparatus. "A shame we can't completely insulate these big
rooms or sink the apparatus in oil," he thought aloud. "One of these
days well begin processing any type of insulation into
any material at the time of milling or finishing. It's really ridiculous that
the Earth, with no brain to think with, has insulated itself a million times
better than the men who five on it!"
The
thought moved beyond technicalities into human relations and gave him a momentary
scowl. Somewhere a shortwave set was crackling a private report from Estheen
land. The report promised serious trouble. The
riots were already out of hand.
This
was far from catastrophe, but catastrophe could grow out of it. The next world
war would be something too terrible and savage even to think about.
Particularly for scientists, who knew war's potential, who
had slaved and created the potential for the antithesis of war and suffering.
Then
he noted the time and lead his group into the main
conference room, where stood a blackboard covered with equations and
calculations. It was really a pretty simple problem, except that had it rained
today in the skyscrapered and tunnelled city of New York, an X-factor of
effectiveness might have been introduced and acted as a chain reactor on the
whole picture.
It
hadn't rained, so there was an end to worry. Gamble poured a round of wine as
the clock moved toward three-thirty, and raised his glass to the assembled
group. "Well, here's to science's mild chastisement," he toasted.
There were chuckles and smiles somewhat forced and strained, and the group
drank.
Five
minutes before the half hour they were all seated at the long table. He pressed
a button and watched the spit of colored trouble lights fill a panel board
before him. One flickered white twice, a few flickered green, then the panel
was solid red.
Gamble smiled and pressed a second button.
"To tomorrow!" he murmured.
At Drega Towers in New York, the financier
had called a policy meeting for three o'clock. It was like him that for all the
gravity of this meeting he could still think of lesser matters. He had dressed
five of his board of directors in suits of a new material that his laboratories
had perfected.
"Practically indestructible," he
told them. "Impervious to weather and all types of
fungus and rot. Left hanging unused, I believe these suits would last
quite literally forever."
Such material would not be sold to the
public, of course. It would ruin the replacement business and whole chains of
industries and merchandising establishments. But as a test and a boast it
pleased him to have a few suits made up. He had once done the same thing in
stockings with a supemylon and they were still wearable twenty years later.
He took a last-minute call from overseas and,
when he hung up, nodded at his group. "Riots have spread into the hill
country. It will be revolution by tomorrow, war with Danta by the day after.
That leaves no alternative save a glowing conflict. But I am happy to report
that the governments most likely to endure are friendly and under substantial
obligation to us."
He
was neither happy nor depressed at the news of war. It was simply another play
in the eternal chess game of international commerce and diplomacy. His job was
neither to foment wars nor to stop them—but to carry his companies through
whatever happened to their best advantage and to the best of his ability.
He
felt a wave of numbing brain fog, but it was momentary. In the next instant
his dynamic energy surged up from the very point where it had broken. In his
mind's eye he was picturing their holdings and connections in Estheenland.
What
might have astonished him was that Estheenland no longer existed. By then it
formed the floor of a clear blue sea.
Around the corner, in a different section of
the building, Tim Lanahan led a gang of trouble-shooters down into the
basement. "Hell, rum or high water," he chuckled at them, "if
the catastrophe wants us it will have to wait!"
He
ducked through a doorway and then he felt dizzy. Then he was struggling through
aeons of unreality to get his feet back on earth. His only clear thought came
out of instinct. He had been dead wrong in what he told the boys on the way
in. Catastrophe had not waited.
A a famed university a renowned philosopher
snorted his ire at a friend's harping on what might happen at any moment.
"Prophesies," he declared, "are just
another form of superstition!"—and he led the way into another room.
He
stopped dead, not sure that what he saw was real and yet
knowing that it was. The other room had become an open field. A brook
ran at his feet.
In a small neighborhood saloon Mr. Herb
Oliver, inebriate, was absorbing his day's second drink. He was not drunk but
feeling pleasantly aglow and not ashamed of it. For thirty years he had been
drinking much too much and had never misbehaved nor suffered even the most
minor delusions.
"Michael,"
he toasted the barkeep, "I have seen strange things in these quiet hills
during my life. Things that the gullible and ignorant called
curses, witchery and such. Yet strange as some of those things were
there was nothing that could not be explained. Had I not known that, had I believed
the obvious as many hereabouts are believing these
predictions, I would have been forced to give up the friendship of the bottle
long ago and become a very unhappy man indeed."
"You've never gone on the wagon even
once?" the bar-keep asked with respect.
"No sir!" Mr. Oliver stated emphatically. "And
nothing will ever make me commit that insult to man's finest artl"
He brought the glass to his lips but he did
not drink. Michael had suddenly developed an immense red beard, completely
covering his chest. His fingernails were ten inches long at least. There were
other things wrong but Mr. Oliver blocked any further consideration of such
absurdities from his mind.
"Nol" he chided some mischievous
spirit of the botde. "You will not do this to mel"
He
turned his attention toward the window to take it from this obviously
imaginative scene. He saw a gaunt cow grazing in a wilderness where a city had
been.
At
this point Mr. Oliver collapsed, weakly swearing the pledge for all time.
Overseas, in a country that had manipulated
the 'riots in Estheenland, a dictator had mobilized a single army of two
million men on a great plateau. Now he stood on a high table rock, watching
this greatest martial panoply of history. He thought of the predictions and
laughed to his aide. "There
is the world's catastrophe
but they picked the wrong date! Nothing can stop my army. It will sweep the
Himalayas before it."
Then
he stared with dismay. His army had been marching in one solid, square
maneuver. Now the broad cloud of its dust had vanished. So
had his army—almost, at least. Only the heads of his soldiers were left,
sitting like lines of fallen apples upon the very plains.
All over the world such incidents were man's
first bewildered knowledge that something cataclysmic had happend at
precisely three-thirty p.m., U.S.A., E.S.T. But what or how, or if they were
sane or crazy, they had no way of knowing.
Back in the Journal office Lucky Flagherty stared unbelievingly
at his city editor, crumpled amidst a pile of dirt upon the floor. "And
that is the so-and-so who was going to tell me offl" he thought.
His
mind began to function, not just from where his thoughts had been but from this
instant forward. The enormity of whatever had happened gripped him. Something had happened, that was clear—something
terrible. Something almost, maybe actually, beyond the power
of imagination to conceive.
"Maybe,"
he thought with a sense of panic, "I'm just a disintegrated idea floating
like a speck of dust in space!"
He had a sudden worry about Lulu Belle. If he
were just a disembodied idea what had happened to her?
But Lulu Belle was quite safe. She was across
the room, having her own first reactions. And they were much more to the point.
She was telling herself, "Just wait
until I get my hands on that Lucky Flagherty! I'll bet this is one of his great
circulation stunts that got all fouled up as usual!"
Then
she noticed her nails and murmured with real heartfelt horror, "Oh, dearl" Her nails were easily nine inches long. And filthy.
Out of long habit, her hands flew to touch
her newly cut hair. Her poodle bob was no more. Hair was tumbling all around
her. Why, it must be half again as long as she was tall.
If
she could have reached Lucky just at that instant of discovery she would gladly
have throttled him and expected a medal for it. This was too much like,the time
he had tried to cloud up a second-rate murder to keep the story running and as
a result, she had all but wound up in prison on the basis of his phony
circumstantial evidence! Or the time he set out to expose a hypnotist and
talked her into helping and had her running around, yapping and yelping like a
dog.
He was probably up to some side money in
this, creating some screwball publicity stunt for Gamble. Yes, everything
pointed to that now. All the buildup and news and feature angles—particularly
Gamble's remarks about rain.
She'd give Gamble credit. If he set out to
cover a city with some loco gas or fumes to give people a scare, he had the
mastery of science to do it. But she would have laid twenty to one it was Lucky
who had cooked up the idea and sold him on it!
It made perfectly good sense in her mind. She
had never had delirium tremens but she once had had tropical fever and the
hallucinations had been no crazier. The thing to do was just sit still, telling
herself what it was—and after a time the effects would
wear off.
But just wait until she was herself again!
Flagherty would wish she were only a figment of an
hallucination!
Nature
was kinder and more
conversant with her child, Man, than Simon Gamble had been. Gamble had suspended all life in direct
contact with earth at a given moment in such a way that the release from
suspended animation and return to normal body functioning would take place in
roughly the same way.
Gamble, who admitted no excuse for error, had
forgotten to consider what mankind's physical condition would be, his need for
gradual resuscitation. Nature, so profligate widi waste, so greedy at times, so
cruel at others, always so erring and inefficient—nature had prepared man aeons
ago with a process called shock as protection and insulation against the
violence of too-sudden acceleration.
So
what seemed to man's mind and, later, memory as happening immediately and with
direct continuity, actually took place over a period of days and sometimes weeks. Generally speaking, there was a
burst of clear thought and feeling and reaction as man came awake. Then he
would doze, like a man past the zenith of a fever, to waken in hazy, confused patches that grew longer and clearer
as his strength increased.
Had
nature not seen to this, probably not even Gamble himself would have survived
the Great Awakening.
The
group nature forgot was small. For those who did not immediately die the
horrible death of full circulation pouring back through withered veins and
arteries stiff with disuse—those few who survived this other kind of shock
still writhed and threw themselves about in agonies of pain. Their joints were
locked, their muscles arid, their very bones leached of marrow. Their bodies could not
withstand the beating and they literally mangled themselves to death.
Spasms
and violent muscular reflex, to the small ratio so gripped, were utterly fatal.
Some bodies broke open. Others shattered. Some stubbed their toes and saw
then-toes snap off like dried twigs. Some grabbed at a muscle to rub away the
stabbing pains and stripped away flesh clear to the bone.
The
great bulk of Mankind awoke for just long enough to start physical and nervous
and mental processes going, then slept a day, then moved slowly, like
three-toed sloths, in complete unconsciousness for two or three days.
Joints
unlocked creakily, veins expanded slowly. From some last well of reserve strength
the heart drew vitality into the blood and passed it out into dried,
strengthless muscles. On the fourth day nervous systems began to vibrate and
mend and Man's sight to return. Until the sixth day he looked about, receiving
impressions little by little in measurements of a few feet and few minutes. Not
sick impressions, but impressions grasped by a brain so feeble, so long
unused, that it could function but very slowly. Later Man would think of all
that had happened through a full six days as having happened in a term of
minutes.
The transcription of the record is being done
by men, for men, so it will be told as if it happened in the space of time men
think it happened, not in the symbols of science, which has the complete and
accurately documented records. What Man remembers, then, is awakening . . .
Lucky Flagherty tried to think. The eSort
sent violent pains through his head. It was daylight, he knew. He could see
matinal shafts of light slicing oblique gold bands through the window. At
least, he felt, the color should be gold. But he could see no color. He could
see clearly enough within a limited distance but everything showed in various
shades of gray.
This puzzled him. He had never seen gray
light in his whole life. Stormy days, gray shadows in deep canyons, odier
grays—yes. But not gray
light. Light was light until
it grew very dim and then it simply became increasing tones of darkness. When
it grew dark enough he could no longer see. But he could see perfectly and he
knew it was morning light—but it was gray.
It was worth a story but he put it aside for
future consideration. Just then a second thought surged out of his instinctive
senses, a frightening realization to a city man. There was no noise, no voice,
left in the city. Not just quiet in the way of a Sunday, but quiet in the way
of a desert. If it made sense the city sounded dead.
It struck him then that maybe he was dead. But no, he was thinking and feeling—damn
it, how he was feeling! And certainly the dead do not
think and feel. Clearly there were others about in his own condition, for he
could see them moving, hear them making sounds. Instinctively he knew that he
knew them. So he still had instincts.
His
instincts told him that he was still alive, still in New York, still Lucky
Flagherty. But instincts and mind were not always in tune and his mind was very
close to panic. He had to put a mental watch on himself. He knew he must get
himself oriented and straightened out before he could afford the luxury of
worry. So all right, something had happened. Just what could be decided later.
His
last recollection before—well, before this, was
of getting the gate at the instant of three-thirty. He glanced at die clock to
see what time it was now. There was no clock. The plaster had fallen from the
wall down to the laths and brick facing. It looked like the outside of a
building instead of the inside.
He
sucked a deep breath to steady himself and the sudden exertion caused him to
choke with pain. He felt as if, in drawing that breath, he had cracked every
rib. His lungs were quivering. He could see a little better after the incident,
however, which was something.
He decided to start again. It had been shortly
before three-thirty and he was standing by a corner of the city editor's desk
getting bawled out and . . .
There was no desk, no newspapers, no copy
paper, no phones, no news-tickers. There was a pile of
soggy dust reaching halfway to the armpits of the dirtiest, most heavily
bearded and physically most degenerate specimen he had ever seen. The man was
reaching out to him as if he, had palsy. His nails looked like talons set into
hands and arms so emaciated they made memories of Buchenwald and Belsen seem
like pretty postcards.
The
man's body was hairy and unutterably filthy. He was quite literally coated with thick grime. Some of it was dropping off his arms in flakes. He
probably stank but Lucky found he couldn't smell because his own nostrils were plugged
with dirt and he was breathing mostly through his mouth.
In
any case this refugee from a catacomb was his city editor, and he knew it. It
did not surprise him that he knew but he found no ready explanation of how he knew. Even drunk, sore and roaring, the old coot had never looked
like this.
The creature—oh, well, call him Jake for old
times' sake —Jake was making weird shrill cracked sounds as he reached for him.
Maybe it was the eyes that talked. It certainly was not the voice. Something talked anyway—maybe just Lucky's own intimacy
with Jake's mind, for Lucky knew Jake was gasping, "My God, LuckyI Is diat
you?"
The
question irritated Lucky's uncoordinated wits. Who else did Jake think it might
be? He gave an automatic sarcastic answer.
If
anything, worse sounds, even less intelligible, erupted from his
own throat. The effort of trying to speak made his larynx feel as if it
had been dragged with hot barbed wire. He realized suddenly that he was
thirsty. Not just for a drink, not just in his throat and mouth—his whole body
craved water. It wanted to dunk in a tub of cold water forever. It thirsted
for something else too. It thirsted for grease.
Every
new sensation or perception now set a chain of ideas shooting through his mind
with the violence of atomic fission. His faculties were unable to cope with
such complex shifts of divergent thought and he stood like a boy learning
ABC's, telling himself, "Keep
it simple!"
All
right, Jake was number-one item. There was Jake, needing help to pull himself
out of the rubbish pile—needing Lucky's help.
So far, so good. Now, how did he give him help?
That
took thinking, reaching back into memory. Like reaching for an old tune, once
known well—and remembering it all at once with a sense of half-shamed
ridicule.
He
walked over to help. At least that was his intention. But the ponderous,
awkward, unbalanced progress he made certainly could not be called walking.
Good Lord, was he crippled? Had the cataclysm . . .
Oh—oh!
His brain issued little warning signals. "Take it easy. Keep it
simple," it told him. "Worry later if you have to."
Okay.
He took a measured breath.
Not as deep as the one that had put him on fire but deeper than he had been
taking. He managed that. His brain was somehow ahead of his body. It was recovering
more rapidly.
Another
deep breath and a moment of calm and where was he? Ah, he had started for Jake.
In fact he had arrived close by him. He grabbed Jake's hands and braced
himself. He pulled. No good but the dirt moved a little. He tried again. Still no good. He had no strength or weight.
Jake
was babbling a flood of weird broken sounds but Lucky paid no heed. What did he
do now? Oh yes, drag him out. There was a sense of victory in thinking that
through. Something inside himself urged him to improve his thought before he
tried it. Well, drag was drag. What else was there?
Why,
Lucky me boy, drag him around in a circle until that dirt loosens! You're a
genius, fellow! You're
learning how to think! Yessir, victory was sweet. This was better than scooping
The Times.
Laboriously he pulled Jake around in a circle
a few times. The pile of dirt rolled off, then split. It didn't even require
thought now for Lucky to seize the moment to drag Jake out through the low
point in the pile, to brace himself again and, with
gruelling effort, get Jake to his feet. They stood there, panting and staring
at each other, and then they grinned. Call it that, for that is what was
intended.
Their coats of grime had flaked off during
this exertion, leaving them for the most part hairy, dirty, emaciated caricatures.
But caricatures of living men—Lucky's mind began to accept the fact that maybe
he was really living. He had known it but in the way of knowing that, while
ghosts can do no harm, it is still wise precaution to whistie when passing a
graveyard after dark.
His
brain was working much better now. He realized that he had been functioning
mostly by instinct. Real thoughts came stiffly, physically, with an effort like
that of lifting a wrenched arm. They came erratically, in spates, and then he
would have to stop and feel for a word-idea in the middle of a
thought-sentence.
He
knew, without knowing how he know, that he had no time sense. He could not
judge whether it took him five seconds or an hour to formulate an idea. He
moved his head in slow circles, as a boxer does to clear the effects of a hard
blow or to limber his neck muscles. This seemed to help but his head turned
slowly and the bones and cartilage sounded like a dog's rubber crackle bone. He
reached his hands back to rub his neck. He had to force his muscles and joints
to relinquish this position. The effort hurt him but he felt much better
afterward.
As
he rubbed his neck small bits of debris fell onto his shoulders. He examined
one bit, half by sight, half by touch. It was very
hard stuff and not like the dirt that had flaked off his body. He wondered if
it could possibly be part of himself and he picked a
few more lumps from beneath his ear with the uncomfortable thought that
possibly he did not have full feeling, that this was part of his own body.
Finally he tasted a bit—and caught the vague flavor of printers
ink. Long afterward he figured out that the stuff was just dirt and dust and
decomposed newsprint and that the ink had hardened it unduly.
He rubbed his neck as violently as he was
able but his most abrupt motions were peculiarly weak and slow. A small
multitude of chunks and flakes fell off his neck and after that he could move
his head and neck much more easily. Part of his rigidity had been a collar of
plain hard dirt.
He
hadn't had either time nor will nor perception until then to think of himself except in bursts of half-panicky and fearful wonder.
He moved his body slowly, systematically, testing to see that everything was in
place. He went through a series of simple careful exercises. His motions were
limited and uncertain but they gradually eased. He conquered many stabbing
cramps. But for a long time his body was afire with pricking stabbing
sensations, like those that beset a man
when first walking after a week or two abed.
He knew he should be in agony but his
sensations seemed very subdued and far away, as if they were felt in another
body. This raised new fear. Perhaps his body was one place,
say on earth, and his spirit or consciousness or some vital part of him
elsewhere—perhaps in that place the ancients had named so well with the one
word, Limbo.
That
would make him not thoroughly dead, at least, not accounted
for, yet not really alive. It was quite conceivable that Gamble had
figured out a time-split or personality-body split or almost anything else that
he thought would break up man's abortive massacre of his own land.
He
turned to careful inspection of himself. He was stark naked and oddly it was
the first time this had struck him. There were numereous questions as to how he
could have got that way but for the time being he simply accepted the fact. His
nostrils were completely lined with dirt but it was fine dirt and a few hard
blows cleared them. Places on his body still gave evidence that before his
exertion he must have been covered with a coat of filth varying in thickness
from a quarter-inch to two full inches.
The
hair on his legs was a full ten inches long but it was brittle and he could rub
most of it off with his hand. His skin was peculiarly colorless, except for
dirt, and dry. So dry that he scraped off a three-inch strip of flesh before
realizing it. Blood began to ooze through the raw gash. The blood of a dead man
might look like that, just as it was turning to water.
It was a macabre thought
that brought a primitive grimace to his mouth and the
gesture split his lips. He stuck his tongue out to wet them but his tongue was
dry. It felt like the smoked variety on a butcher-shop shelf. It reminded him
of his thirst again and he shambled off in search of water.
His thirst was real enough—more real than any
thirst he had ever experienced and he had been shot down on a waterless Pacific
atoll once, and again on a burning desert. But this wasn't the same thing. This
wasn't craving, yet it was urgent. It was something not so much of the tongue
and throat as of the whole body.
The
old water cooler wasn't where it had been and he wandered over to the window.
Actually it was no longer a window—it was a hole in the brickwork where a
window had been. There was a number of rust streaks
where the steel frame had been and there were broken pieces of window panes on
the floor and sill.
The
broken glass was light and lifeless. He could pulverize it in his fingers
without even scratching them. In the window ledge he found a weather-worn
hollow that held a small puddle. He stooped with difficulty, drank with difficulty.
The water was hot with sunlight but no water had ever tasted so sweet and good.
He thought that a dehydrated potato might feel something as he felt—if it could
feel at all.
He rinsed his face and felt as if his skin
were actually sucking the dampness in. His beard came off at the skin level in
his hand. He bathed it again and felt tone begin to creep back into his facial
muscles. He pinched his chin and could feel it numbly. A few minutes later he
could feel it quite plainly, much as sensation increases when novocaine wears
away.
He finished rubbing off his
beard and then tried the same trick on his head. His long head hair was
stronger and he could not rub it off, but he could pull out bunches with small
effort. The first bunch was snarled and filthy and somehow made him think of
the hair of exhumed cadavers he had seen. It was an unpleasant thought and he
pulled all of his hair out. Then he noticed that his recent activities had not
only broken his nails off to the quick but that several nails were gone now
altogether.
The remainder were dry, brittle, dead. In fact death was the
predominant tone of his whole body. It was a recurrent thought that struck him
now graphically and he stood there wondering again. Was it possible that
actually there was nothing left of him alive except some small segment of the
mind, perhaps the seed of energy called life that nobody could account for?
Lucky's mental processes were sharpening. They were
no-longer distorted in the way of a man coming out of ether. Quite consciously
he could now grasp and toil with an abstract idea such as the one he had just
had. It was not instinct now but reawakened rationality that cautioned him to
put off worries and complex thinking for a time.
He
drank again, splashed water on his face and neck and over his upper body. His
skin soaked it up like a blotter. He had an idea that he could have stood in a
bucket of water and literally sopped it right up. Each time he sluiced himself
he felt stronger, more right.
He could actually feel his
nervous system increasing in sensitivity and his perceptions were sharpening.
But direct light still hurt his eyes.
Something
about his feet had been bothering him, but up to this moment, his brain had
refused to interpret the irritation. Now he thought it had to do with the
floor. He squatted with difficulty and poked a finger at it. He drilled a
shallow hole with his finger and found he could scoop out a shallow trench.
Was this the land of cement they put into
buildings designed to withstand the terrific shaking and vibration of giant
printing presses?
"Dead
cement!" he
thought.
The
discovery shocked him. He himself might or might not be dead—but that cement
was. Time alone couldn't do that in the span of a man's lifetime. Yet, whatever
had happened had destroyed the life of an inorganic tough compound such as
cement. And glass. And steel desks. And, now
that he looked around, typewriters, which had
pretty good steel in them. Just about everything else too—it was a wonder that
the building was still standing.
"What
a storyl" he thought with excitement. Part of his mind was still back in
pre-catastrophe period. This had not been any atomic or hydrogen explosion, no
mere germ or nerve-destruction bomb, nothing like any of those. Whatever had
happened had been something so novel that not the slightest inkling of it had
been heard. Something that would "kill" steel and
glass but leave man alive—even though somewhat the worse for wear.
He
looked around now through the eyes of new discovery. The floor was covered by
an irregular mass of dirt and dust. Most of it was hardened and dark. He had
the unhappy idea that maybe nothing but ink was holding that cement intact,
much as paint sometimes holds,rotted wood. They were
in a twelve-story building, held up by nothing more than hardened printers
ink—if that were true. But even dead stuff had weight if it fell in on them.
There were irregular mounds of dirt where
desks had stood but he saw no sign of typewriters, unless one brittle oxidized
mass had been one. There were strands of varying hardness through the dirt
piles but that was all that remained to tell that any equipment or furniture
had ever stood there. Once there had been a circular iron stairway down to the
composing room, supported by a heavy iron pole in the middle. No sign of it
remained.
He wondered if things were the same in the
dry arid sections of the West. The thought jumped into his mind out of nowhere
and he was bothered by its presence. Some peculiar ray or wave or
disintegrating force of some kind had been let loose and had done its queer
job—but except for minor freaks and exceptions it would be the same everywhere.
It must have struck everywhere, of course. If other men were still alive in the
world and able to move under normal conditions, they must certainly have
visited New York. There were certain places that either
friend or foe would investigate immediately and one such place would be
a metropolitan newspaper.
He
was moving and cut his foot and his surprise interrupted his thoughts. He saw
something dirt-encrusted but sharp-edged and, picking it up, found it was part
of the heavy green glass water bottle. He could sense its lifeless-ness from
its weight and he managed to break off a piece. But compared to the rest it
seemed the only inorganic matter around with any life left. So heavy plate
glass might have life left in it too. At least this could cut. He could peel
potatoes if he could find potatoes to peel.
It
had taken him this period of orientation in a disoriented world to get his
mind functioning and to cast the spell of utter disbelief and unreality. He had
experienced bad fevers, delirium tremens and most of the pressures and diseases
that cause hallucinations. Whatever else this was, it was not hallucination.
This was the real McCoy and it would have to be dealt with that way.
He
remembered Lulu Belle suddenly and experienced a wild stab of guilt. His mental
apparatus was working reasonably well again but was still anemic and on a
single track. The complexity of thought to which modem man is accustomed was
lacking. Whatever took his mind at a given instant filled it. He had not, for
instance, been able to think of Lulu Belle while helping Jake or while drinking
or examining the physical aspects of the old city room.
Now he searched for her poodle-cut somewhere
in that big room—searched for her with rising dismay. All the men and women
present had a common cadaverous and dirty look. Men and women alike were black,
were dirty, hairy, naked, emaciated and made strange
garbled noises. The chief difference between them was the state of their motor
synchronization and muscular reflexes.
All
were skin and bone but there were variations in degree. Some had lost half
their weight, some three-quarters. Some had toenails no more than four inches
long, others had nails that reached three feet. Hair, too.
Some were twitching and jerking, some methodically loosening up as Lucky had
already done, some were sitting stupidly staring or muttering—some lying,
squatting or leaning in stiff and grotesque positions.
Yet
all had that common look and he grew panicky. Nobody could talk intelligibly
and he himself must be unrecognizable. He'd had a subconscious cue as to who
Jake was. Jake had been talking to him at three-thirty. He had no idea where
Lulu Belle had been at that instant. Suppose things went on like this, and he
never did learn which one she was—or even if she had survived?
His
instincts sought to calm his mounting waves of hysteria. He was saved by a
sudden memory of the way he'd been cut by glass while rambling. He moved among
the women, studying them, trying to sense out the one he loved. To a man whose
memory was not many hours old, fresh with pictures of gay and piquant faces,
what he now saw was terrible.
Whatever
had happened had effected only one marked distinction between the men and
women. In every case the women, most of whom had had short hair, now had hair
two to five times as long as the men's while the men had grown enormous beards.
There was one woman with by far the longest hair, whimpering her heart out as
she sat stroking a matted tress which broke and splintered with each stroke.
He
stood beside her and watched her cry. It was clear that her limited mental
processes were concerned entirely with her hair. He saw that his own recovery
was further advanced than any of the others. He thought perhaps the water had
done the trick. Or perhaps it was just a freak, or perhaps he had been helped
to orient himself by the incident of helping Jake. The first step of return
from any kind of shock was always the hardest. That first
foothold on the long, long ladder.
Their
mental conditions varied more than their physical. Some showed glimmerings of
comprehension. Others, utter lost bewilderment. There
was evidence of stark primitive fear, hysteria, uncertainty, disbelief. Some
brains were functioning oddly, others not functioning at all. This woman that
he stood by had her brain and emotions functioning with clarity, but seemed
limited to the overminor sadness of those long thick tresses that broke where
they were touched.
What
color her hair had been was impossible to tell. All of their hair had the same
drab dirty color. But this one had by far the longest hair, and the thickest,
and she was the only one crying over the lifelessness that made it britde to
the touch. Lulu Belle's hair had been her pride. He took this for a sign and
thought, "It must be . . ."
But
she looked up at him and there was no fight of hope, no caring, no recognition, in her -eyes. Grime had soaked deep into her
and covered her with a scaly shell. She had no figure left. She could hardly
have weighed more than forty pounds. Her face was impossible to make out for
dirt. Worse, it was wrinkled, withered and distorted.
Yet
he would have sworn it was his girl, and out of the shock of his initial
reaction, anger flared through him for the first time. If ever he found the
perpetrator of this thing —and if that man still lived—God help him!
He
looked at the girl again and his anger leaped into fury. She had been pretty,
shapely, vivacious enough to find a career in Hollywood if she had so desired.
Now she was a bag of dirty skin and sharp, grotesquely-angled bones. She was
old, a hag, something akin to a corpse, at best-ancient. Her youth gone . . .
He
stopped short in his anger. Youth ruined—Old and ancient. . .
A
thought groped for recognition in his mind. This hadn't been the demolition of
a momentary blast that had knocked them out for a matter of hours, even days.
This was something with a long time element. A period of time so long that a
sane man, giving it serious consideration, would accept the fact as proof that
he'd gone stark staring madl
Shocked
unconscious and into a low enough pulse rate the human body could conceivably
survive upon itself a month. Say even two months—maybe even three. But these
ravages would require a lifetime! Even if it were only memory that had blacked
out, how could they all have survived in here? There was no water, no food.
There was no heat for the long winters. At times winter gales must have raced
straight through here. And yet . . .
Wanting
contact with another human being as an antidote for the thoughts racing
through his mind, he put his hand on the head of the sobbing girl. "Lulu
Belle," he whispered sadly.
Not clearly, not distinctly, but with
sufficient vocal control to be intelligible. Where he pressed her hair, a big
thatch of it broke off and slipped down across her shoulder.
"Beastl" the girl snarled. Then she bit his leg.
This
action on her part was something which made him sure. He had found Lulu Bellel
Lulu Belle
looked up at him and
glared. She cackled in a cracked, crazy, fury-filled voice, "Well, I hope
you're satisfied with your brainstorm, Lucky Flagherty!"
For
all her withered, ancient appearance, he could have kissed her. At least her
temper hadn't changed! She was a foothold on reality. She was the first surety
he had felt certain of in a world gone mad. He was filled with a man's desire
to squat and talk this over.
Lulu
Belle was going straight to the point as usual. She fairly screeched. "I'm
thirsty! And you keep away from my hair!"
He helped her up. She was rickety, but not as
rickety as he had been when he first tried to walk. In fact none of the women
were as weak as the men and they seemed to be recuperating more rapidly than
the men. They were more limber and their flesh was firmer. The men were recuperating
slowly and were not classifiable by size or age, as Lucky managed to identify them, nor intellect certainly. The ones with the
thickest, longest beards seemed to recuperate more quickly than the others.
Hair apparently had something to do with their condition of survival.
Lucky
helped Lulu Belle over to the window. He showed her the shallow pool in which
there was water. His eyes were functioning better now and he studied this
trench. He remembered now that there had been a rain channel in the stone
ledge outside these windows and now the scooped-out pools that held water
looked like the potholes wind and rain and weather scoop out of open boulders
and buttes and rimrocks. This would be quite a reservoir immediately
after a rainstorm but sun and evaporation would
dry the holes up quickly.
Jake
joined them there, motivated either by primitive curiosity or the instinct of
the strong to join the other strong about them. So far these three were the
only ones in reasonable command of tiieir wits and bodies. All three drank and
rubbed themselves with water. With a woman's instinctive knowledge of her
looks, Lulu Belle very nearly scrubbed her face off. She was saved only when
Lucky grabbed her hand and demonstrated upon the back of her wrist how easily
her skin would strip.
It
was growing dark when they finished their drinking and clumsy washing but they
felt far better, far sharper, far more human, for
their wash. They were very tired, however. Lulu Belle suddenly sat down right
under the window.
Jake
was trying to talk but the vastness of his thoughts held him bogged down in
confusion. Lucky wanted to talk but it hurt him. Jake squatted to pour out a
flood of meaningless gibberish to Lulu Belle, who paid him not the slightest
attention, being fully occupied with gently pulling some of the worst of the
dirt and snarls out of her hair.
Lucky
stood off from them a little, watching the light grow dim. He wondered if it
were really this dark, this late, or if his eyesight were petering out. Maybe
he could only see by full daylight now, turning blind during the evening, night
and dawn hours of the day.
Others
though were sensing it and all of the atavistic traits of man were evident in
that room. Darkness was a tiling of danger and evil and they were afraid. Some
were whimpering widi fear, some growling like warning dogs. Some were sensing
each other out and banding into little groups. Others were crawling and
crabbing off into the deepest shadows to hide alone.
Lucky sat down by Lulu Belle and yawned. The
involuntary action and stretch of facial muscles nearly killed him. Lulu Belle
made him get up and move around to the far side from her tresses. She made
sounds, not words now, but her meaning was clear. She wasn't forgetting he had
pulled out a hank of her hair.
Sleep
overcame them—or coma. Lucky was only vaguely conscious that a storm broke and
rain was pelting through the window holes. Yet he was conscious enough to
smile— a smile of the whole body, for at long last his body was drinking,
soaking in the wetness and dampness that poured over it.
In
the morning he felt strong. It took no more than ten or so tries for him to get
up on his feet. Thirst was no longer gnawing at his body. It was specific. It
was a feeling in his mouth and throat.
He
stuck his head out the window and sucked at the gleaming pool of water. He
sucked too much for his condition and suffered a good old-fashioned bellyache.
But the pain was another reminder of reality, a thing he could connect with
green apples and too much watermelon and his childhood. When it was over he did
not regret the suffering.
Even
if his time sense was cockeyed, a man had to set up some kind of clock in his
mind to put his thoughts and the events around him in proper order. It might
have been ten o'clock or it might have been four in the afternoon. Lucky put
the time arbitrarily at noon. He had already learned not to argue with his
scrambled thinking processes.
It
was about noon, then, when he heard Jake yell. He had already learned to
distinguish Jake's cracked rusty tone. Jake was yelling like mad. He was
standing out in the center of the old city room, away from the pillars, and the
floor was bending under him like rubber. He was caught and sinking slowly down
through a hole.
That
rotted floor! Lucky
thought and his mind switched off Jake's prediciment entirely while it probed
the idea of whether or not you could call cement rotted. He looked for Lulu Belle to have a talk about
that. These things were important. Did you say dead cement or rotten cement? Or
decomposing, maybe? Disintegrating?
Lulu
Belle was sitting up on a window ledge, bathing her hair as she had been doing
all morning. It was beginning to regain its normal hue of black. A dull splotchy black, true, but still black. She was crooning
or humming or whatever it is a woman does with the sound they make on such
occasions. It didn't sound like that, of course. Her voice still grated like a
rusty iron shutter in a high wind. But normally Lucky would have said she was
humming.
He
went up to her, thinking about the cement. "Lulu Belle," he began
with excitement.
She
turned, smiling. It was beginning to look like a smile too.
"How
sweet of you to notice," she purred with her cracking screech. "The
rain did it. It needs lanolin badly and weeks of brushing, but at least it's strong enough now so I can wash it!"
"What?" He was puzzled.
Jake's
yells reached a tremulous unbroken high F, demanding attention. When they
looked he was up to his waist, half sunken through the hole, leaning forward, clutching
madly it the cement floor that was bending like a scaucer all around him.
"Dear
Lord!" Lucky muttered, startled now into action.
"A rope! A ladder! Find something for him!"
He couldn't run yet, as he
soon found out. But he moved as fast as he could, going hither and yon in
search of items that no longer existed except in his memory. When he came back,
breathless, from a futile search Lulu Belle was pulling Jake back onto safe
flooring. In the greatness of her heart she had cast Jake the ends of her hair.
Bunched as it was and just drawing his weight evenly, the hair held and only a
few of the tip ends were broken.
Jake
looked up from his safe but prone position and gasped, "III see you get a
raise and a bonus for this, Lulu Belle!"
"I think it's worth the night-club
column," she said. "I think Lucky would have let you just drop
through to keep from getting fired."
Jake's
eyes showed definite signs of some of his old tough fiber. "That is
something I'll take up at length when I see Prescott!" he growled.
Minds
were still working strangely. The physical evidences of catastrophe were clear
enough but numbed senses refused to grasp the fact of a strange new world. They
were all still involved with their thoughts of before three-thirty p.m. yesterday. Jerkily, it was true, yet in their thoughts
dieir mental tuning had picked up again at 3:31. Memory and custom, habit and
instinct, all kept crowding into their thinking. Modern man seldom pauses to
realize what a complex mechanism nature has built of his mind and body until
something goes awry.
Lucky
was miffed and he was an Irishman of some pride. He didn't even bother to make
excuses. But he did want to know how Lulu Belle had come to think of that trick
when he hadn't!
Sounds
were beginning to intrude upon their ears from above and below. Not loud, not
clear. What was left of the building was still thick if not strong. Lucky could discern voices, mostly raw yells or frightened
bursts of sound, some few issuing intelligible words. He judged others were in
about the same condition as their own group.
Then
voice sounds were masked by heavy irregular thumps. Even now, derelict as it
was, this building wouldn't shake, but looking at the hole Jake's weight had
made in the floor, Lucky could picture the cause of those thumping sounds.
Hysteria had broken loose somewhere above and frightened people were rushing
pellmell like a stampeding herd. One floor had fallen through, perhaps, started
another and, shortly the entire building would be caving inl
They
had to get out of there fast. But how? This floor was
two stories above the street and there was no rope, nothing usable by which to
get down. Their emaciated bodies could never survive a jump or fall from that
height. The elevators certainly would not be running.
Then,
as if the idea were quite remarkable, he thought of the stairways. Of course. They were there for emergencies like these. But
then his gaze crossed to the empty hole where the old iron stairway to the
composing room had been— and that had been probably the toughtest stairway in
the building.
Anxiety
tore at him. He stole out to the hall to look at the old fire stairs beside the
elevator shafts. He felt a surge of reliefl The stairs
were still—no, they
were not there! Just
the metal shells, broken and rusted, forming the vague shape of a stairway out
to the metal rails. Yes, that was itl The rails were there. And the rails were real. Rusted but still intact, solid as
Gibraltar! He was almost crying with relief as he grabbed the heavy metal post
that held rail to landing.
He
could have been grabbing the most ancient and delicate eggshell. The post
crumpled in his hand. It did not even make a crunching sound. There was not
enough strength in the whole length of rail to hold a pound. The mere vibration
of his action sent the entire structure crashing—or what should have been
crashing. It landed with a crackle like tissue paper. The smoke of its
disintegration came up in billows.
He
drifted morosely back to the city room. There was a babble of rasping imbecilic
conversation. The night's rain had done much to quench thirsty bodies. All of the group had drunk and there were only a few still
entirely blacked out with shock. Likewise there were only a few who approached
the recovery level of himself, Jake and Lulu Belle.
"Marooned
in a caving buildingl" he thought. But what could he tell them? Even to
those who understood it might do more harm than good.
Again,
the tocsins of yesterday beat out signals in his mind. "Do nothing . . . Wait a spell . . .
Keep cool."
Yes, above everything, keep cool. His mental
faculties were not strong yet and the nerve strain of recuperation must be
pulling them taut. It would not take much to send a mind into a tailspin.
Then Lucius Prescott came
through the door.
Not
a Prescott to be recognized physically. He looked worse than anybody else
present. But his thumb was in a vest that no longer existed and, from long habit, he was bristling to find something wrong as he
entered the room. Cracked as his voice was, he still came forward making the
boss' whip-sound of "Hmmrnp!
Hmmmmpl"
Yes,
it was Prescott. The more responsive knew it without question. His mere
arrival drew their confused thoughts into some order, acted as a brake upon
anxiety and panic.
He
stopped and grabbed the armhole of his missing vest a little tighter and
removed an absent cigar from his mouth. He drew himself as erect as his
physical condition permitted and struck his proclamation pose with one foot
forward.
He
had just one toenail left, Lucky noted, but this one curved up about a foot and
a half like a Turkish slipper. It gave his gaunt figure the final touch for a
completely ludicrous appearance. There was neither dignity nor power left to
his deflated withered stomach. But habit was strong and only yesterday, at
three-thirty, they had known him as boss. Even the more retarded quieted in
their mumblings.
He
looked them over one by one in his customary way before some tremendous
pronouncement. Then he piped, for that was the best his voice could do,
"My staff and fellow workers—something terrible has happened!"
In
spite of his voice they were impressed. They waited patiently. But apparently
he had no more to say. He was looking at them as if demanding to know what
information they were withholding.
There
was a dead silence, then, suddenly, a burst of hacking laughter. Prescott
scowled. He glowered. But his dignity was deflated. Who could look impressive
with a wrinkled stomach, with skin hanging like a sack over a starved body,
with one dirty toenail sticking up almost to his knee? And nudel It must have been the first boss who
invented togas and pants, Lucky thought.
Prescott's
staff laughed until they were crying with cramps. It was a contagious thing and
shortly even he was joining in. It was this new world's first burst of laughter
and it did for their minds what the night's rain and their first long drinks
had done for their bodies. It dispelled the terrible repressed fears and
panic, gave them back sanity and a sense of balance.
They
needed it, for from below sounded a thunderous dull boom. This time the whole
building shook and from the ceiling filtered down sheets of fine particles.
Prescott
said immediately, "The presses must have dropped through to the
basement."
That brought Lucky's mind back to the
stairway. He pointed to the gasping hole where they used to run down to the
composing room.
"Every stairway in this place is like
that. We're marooned."
Grim awareness washed away their remaining
mirth. But they wore the sober gravity of intelligent beings ready to face a
difficult fact and problem. Without that laugh they would have blown up like so
many skittish monkeys.
Prescott
looked at Lucky. "Nothing left like hose or rope?" He answered
himself. "No, of course not. No metal, no
wood."
Lucky remembered being cornered in a shell
hole once without so much as a knife in his entire outfit. They had been on
their way back, relieved. They had thought they were well behind their own
lines. It had felt like this.
Then
a strident deep-chested voice was advising, "Prescott, you'd best bring
your muckrakers out of there while you can get out!"
Heads
turned toward the voice. Drega, for it was certainly he, was half-framed in
the window. He wore no collar, tie or shirt but he wore a suitl
"Drega!" Prescott
crackled. "How'd you get up there? You got a ladder?"
"Why,"
Drega grunted, "I'm standing on the ground. Haven't you looked out the
window yet?"
Lucky
winced inwardly. He had looked right out of it. He had seen the salt-grass
slope but it hadn't registered. In his mind's eye there was a street there. It
had been there yesterday. Where had it gone?
The
sight of Drega standing
there in the window, dressed,
plus the information he
gave, momentarily stunned the group. They stood rooted, staring, some
disbelieving, some frozen with relief.
Drega
climbed in through the hole. He said to Prescott gently, "Can't you understand?"
"Of course!" The publisher nodded and moved to organize aid for the more feeble of the little group.
Somebody came unstuck and started to shriek
and run around wildly. Everybody else stopped again and panic signals spread in
their eyes. Nobody did anything about the berserk man until Drega caught him by
the arm and smashed his jaw. The man went silent and dropped in his tracks.
Drega simply nodded to Prescott to take care of him, then walked about,
examining various structural points of interest to him.
Lucky
decided that Drega was far and away more recovered than any of them. Mentally
he seemed almost normal. He had never liked Drega. He had never liked the
things he stood for. But he had to give him credit. It took chilled-steel guts
for a normal person to step into a crumbling building among what amounted to a
bunch of maniacs, just to examine something that might sometime prove useful
or profitable!
It
crossed his mind that if love of money or love of power gave a man that kind of
nerve, maybe it wasn't altogether evil. It was clear from Drega's actions that
he had come inside primarily on a selfish mission. Yet in the course of it he
had already probably saved them from death.
The ceiling was showering a steady hail of
rotten stuff upon them now. In one place it was sagging down, just as their own floor had sagged under Jake's weight. With a dry
rending noise a sizeable crack shot across one wall.
Drega
was walking around a pillar, studying it. With no more than a brief estimating
glance toward the crack, he pursued his interest until he had satisfied himself
on the point he wanted.
He joined the shambling crowd then, muttering
a word here, a word there, half-order half-encouragement, impersonal as a
chunk of ice, yet somehow sparking them up to double time. He made no physical
effort to help get the feeble out. Just once, when Jake's hand slipped and a
woman was going to crash her head, he stepped forward and caught her.
There
was another deafening boom from below and this time the building rocked. The
floors groaned and growled and shivered. There was a new ripping and sagging
movement in them. The drift of stuff from overhead came down like rain.
Panic threw its freezing shadow on them again
but Drega snapped, "All right. All outl Get moving!" And they moved.
Then came a
half-animal cry from back in the city room. They could see a figure stumbling
around in blind fear. Lucky was half out of the window and started back inside
to help whoever it might be.
Drega shook his head decisively. "No
time."
"To hell with
you!"
Lucky snarled and came on through.
Drega caught him under the armpit and
literally pitched him back outside. He came through the hole
himself, last man out, just as a rending roar told them that the whole floor
had gone down.
The slight fall and jar had hurt Lucky badly.
He was half numb with pain or he would have gone for Drega in sheer anger. It
was hours later before he would admit to himself that he would have gone down
with the floor, vainly trying to save that poor wrecked figure, had Drega not
judged things righdy and thrown him back outside. Yet never could Lucky feel
actually grateful. That kind of cold judgment was something that made a decent
ordinary fellow shiver.
There was a lot of activity outside. Somehow,
Drega had automatically taken command. There were about fifteen men there who
didn't belong to the newspaper at all. Five of them were dressed like Drega,
but none of them seemed to be in his mental or physical condition. The remainder
had the look of construction men. The head one Lucky would come to know as Tim
Lanahan.
All
of these men were standing around more or less idly when Drega appeared. He had
them hopping along with Prescott and his crowd almost on the instant.
"Get the feebles back out of the
way!" he ordered curtly and pointed. He had already sized up the landscape
better than Lucky, who had looked at it at least twenty times without seeing
it. Even now he had to turn and look.
Sand-topped dirt mounds ran out here for a
good way. As far, Lucky judged, as the end of the docks that should have been
there. Beyond that, the river ran, just as it always had. The shore line had
merely expanded to cover the old docks and piers.
The
front of the building was a terrible sight. It had been twelve stories high. Six were left above the one they had come from.
What had happened above he couldn't guess but
there were trees growing up there—big trees!
Below that point there was no sign of life on
one floor.
But
half the windows of the five remaining floors showed wildly gesticulating
shrieking people. Those on the fifth floor didn't have a chance. But the fourth
floor had been the telephone floor and technicians up there had found enough
serviceable cable to rig a cable to the ground. Lucky had seen a quarter-inch
piece of the stuff used for swing ropes when they had their insulation on. Now
there was no insulation left on the cable and the boys up there had woven a
rope of the raw wires—eight or ten inches in diameter. This gave Lucky an idea
of the strength it must have lost.
They
were coming down the rope as fast as they could, wearing slip-pads on their
hands made of woven wire. These were attached to a thin length of woven wire
and when they reached the ground they took off their "mittens" which
were pulled back up for the next user.
The
haulers brought down the last woman, who had probably been an operator, while
Lucky was working off the hurt of his fall. A man wearing the mittens got onto
the big cable rope first. Then the woman was set onto the cable above him,
bare-handed. She took her own weight on the way down, except when strength left
her. Then the man would sling a leg lock on the cable and let her rest against
his chest until they could go on.
When
they reached the bottom the woman's hands and breasts were badly cut and
scraped. The man was in pretty good shape, having been protected by the
mittens.
There
would be little chivalry while this new world was getting started! The first
work would fall upon the men. When it came to a choice women were expendable.
The men were not.
Lucky made a mental bet Drega had ordered
things done that way and he was right. When Drega had come on the scene he had
found the fourth floor boys being chivalrous. A woman was wearing the mittens
but she was frozen midway down the cable-rope, tying up its use. She could
cling there quite a while with the help of the wire mittens.
A man had been in the proper position below
her but he had had no mittens. She was frozen with fright and wouldn't move
further. The man had clung, pleading, as long as he could. Then his cut hands
couldn't grip any longer and he had fallen away and been killed. In the end the
woman fell and was killed too. And the fourth floor had lost half an hour
evacuation time.
Drega was standing back on the mound now,
hands locked behind his back, watching the wall, calling orders, keeping the
line of capable moving to help the feeble. Plenty of people were getting
hurt—plenty needed help. People on the third floor were swinging out onto the
cable rope and coming down bare-handed.
They seldom lasted the full length but it
gave them a start so that, when they fell, the distance was not too great.
People on the second floor were jumping and dropping or pushing out their own
weaklings. AH of them needed help to get back out of danger.
A
man jumped out of the third floor, bounced and twisted on the ground, moaning.
Two other men started toward him to give help.
Drega's
voice ripped out like a rusty saw. "Let him gol He's crippled too badly.
Lend your hand to that man coming down bare-handed!"
That's
the way it went—Drega's way. No pretense, no weakening, no humane kindness. Let
the badly hurt die, save only the strong. He was not concerned with the Kingdom
of Heaven. This was Earth—and he was Drega.
Lucky
could hobble now and he found a weakling who could still walk with help. He led
the man back over the mounds to where a camp of sorts was being formed. Shortly
there was a sound like distant thunder and above that a shrill chorus of human
cries, then a booming crash which shook the ground. Dust mushroomed up like a
small atomic blast. Then there was complete silence.
After a while Drega came over the ridge,
heading his work crew and the few evacuees who had escaped before the building
collapsed. He looked sturdy but he was almost dead on his feet. When he sat down
he quickly passed out.
Not
until then did Lucky realize that nothing but cold nerve and dynamic willpower
had put Drega's physical and mental recovery ahead of the rest of them. Outside
of his suit he had probably no advantage save a stubborn determination to
fight, to survive, to master, and to salvage what could be salvaged.
Conceivably, he might not have had as much good drinking water as Lucky.
However,
Drega's crew had enjoyed one advantage. Crossing from Drega Towers they had
found a shallow inlet from the river and were thus able to soak and clean themselves
comfortably in sun-warmed waters. There had been both good and bad in the fact
that the inlet was partially salt water. The salt had proved a curative remedy
for their bodies in general but it had been harsh upon parched skin with no
protective oils. Several of the crew, the suited men especially, were suffering from bad sores and skin abrasions as a
result.
The sim was still high but it had been a hard day for the whole group. They were
glad now merely to find water at the river's edge in which to bathe their
sores, or to sit in the sun's warmth, soaking in its healing rays. Quite a number
had regained the power of speech and more were finding tongue every minute.
It didn't matter what they said, either to
speaker or listener. They were realizing the full impact of the colossal
devastation that had smashed the world they knew. It was good to hear another
man's cracked voice, even without understanding a word spoken.
Lucky had been looking for Lulu Belle and
hadn't found her. Then is occurred to him that she might be down at the river,
bathing. He worried lest she might move in too deep or slip and not be able to
get back up in her weakened condition. Besides, he just wanted to be near her,
so he got up to search.
He
had been foggy or at least limited in his thinking until then. It had taken
time for him to adjust his vision to the outdoor glare. He stood still, trying
to focus on the scene around him, looking for familiar landmarks.
There had been, at around noon yesterday,
three bridges within sight. Now no span of any kind crossed the river. Where
the nearest had been he could see the river swirling and rippling like
treacherous old Hell's Gate before engineers blew the whirlpools and hidden
rocks out of it.
Southward,
where Wall Street's skyscrapers had piled one upon the other, no sign of a
tower any longer stood. A few broken tops of buildings, six or eight floors
high, poked up through forests which rimmed the plain that ran straight
southward. This plain was broken only by a few low buildings and inlets.
Northward the view was much the same.
Everywhere, on all sides, proud skyscrapers
of the city had been reduced to endless mounds. Not hills, just mounds, although
some were broad and bulky. An ancient oak forest crowned the highest mound in
sight, such trees as no one in American had seen for a hundred years or
more—before three-thirty, E.S.T., March 15th.
Something
was scratching persistendy at Lucky's foot and he balanced to brush it off—no
easy trick. His mind
was still on the vast age of visible forests all
around him when he felt the irritation again. Something about it this time was
decidedly uncomfortable. In fact, it was a pokel Something
cold and clammy and covered with fuzz suddenly hooked around his big toe.
Lucky gave a yelp and jerked free. He stole a
surreptitious glance at the ground. He couldn't yell again this time. Ice
coursed through revived veins. A finger—a real finger-was crooked and wiggling at him right out of the ground!
Just exactly as he might beckon a waiterl
Lucky's
yell drew quick attention
and Prescott came and stood beside him, staring not too happily at what he saw.
"Monstersl" he muttered hoarsely. "Right here in the earth
beneath us!"
"His
finger is green and furred," Jake informed them. "With
nails like flint!"
A second
finger wriggled through the earth and beckoned to them. Jake straightened and
drew back uncomfortably. "Do we disregard it, or just get out of
here?" he asked.
"You might help him," Lulu Belle
suggested through the crowd. "Can't you see he's buried?"
Lucky
stared over the crowd at her. "That's just it! If he's buried how come
he's alive—and what's he doing tickling my toe and beckoning at us?"
"Oh!"
she flared with disgust. "What are any of us doing here—naked, starved and
talking like crows! Go get a shovel and dig him
upl"
A great idea—except there was no shovel. But
it stirred action. A few of the men began to scrape around the fingers,
aimlessly at first. Then to their surprise, the earth turned out to be soft and
spongy and they began to rip it away with their hands. They uncovered a man's
head and then his shoulders. But what an exceedingly strange-looking man!
His
hair was a mass of matted roots. His entire body was covered with a dark green
mosslike fungus growth. Unlike the condition of his rescuers his nails were
hard as stone, could easily have been flint. There was a hard shell-like
covering over his closed eyes and more roots served
for a beard and where chest hair should have been.
They
pulled him free at last and laid him out on top the ground. He muttered
something that sounded like, "I'll finish the masthead in no time,
sir." Then he slipped into a coma as had the others at first.
"Could
you make that out?" Prescott demanded, self
conscious over his momentary qualms. "Did he say masthead?"
"The sailor!" Lucky exclaimed..
He looked back at the site of the newspaper building, mentally measuring the
distance. "This would be just about right," he added. "I think
it's the man who was painting the mast on the Valparaiso yesterday."
Prescott
snorted. "How could he get to look like that in one day?"
"Well
. . ." Lucky began uncertainly. Then they all stared at each other, the
still unanswered question vibrant among them. Drega had joined them now and
stood examining the sailor. He had nothing to contribute to the answer either,
apparently.
Then Lulu Belle was telling them, "Men
are so silly. What's it matter? I'd say we've been asleep two or three thousand
years if you asked me. What I'm worrying about now is dinner!"
"Three thousand years!" Prescott
repeated in dismay. He looked at Drega. "It's impossible! But—but so is thatl" He gestured at the sailor. "What do you
think?"
""No quotes," Drega told him. "I want to see what's happened in arid atmosphere
away from this coastal salt air. But we see trees growing all over town, trees
that must be nearly a thousand years old. And they're rooted in mounds that
must have been buildings, I feel
sure.
"One
mound, if I guess rightly, is the ruin of St. Genevieve's. I built that
church. It was built around steel but the stonework was solid masonry and at
the time we built it we stated that, short of earthquakes and A-bombs, it would
stand a good two thousand years."
"Two
plus one," Lucky said. "That sounds like three. But what happened?
What's happened to us in all that time?"
"I
got hungry—very, very hungry," stated Lulu Belle candidly. "Now,
Lucky Flagherty, are you going to find me a steak or just stand here showing
off your gorgeous physique?"
Lucky crimsoned. Of course, he had known he
was naked but it was the first time anyone had actually called attention to his
nudity—and to the sorry shape in which his body stood.
"You might get some decent covering on
yourself!" he barked.
"Oh, but Lucky," she purred,
"I've been dressed for hours!" She pushed through the crowd to show
off the sarong she had made of her long jet hair. She had woven it around her
in grass skirt fashion. The men looked and were suddenly aware of her sex. The
women looked and were suddenly aware that fashion was back and that they had
nothing on!
Cavalierly
Drega remarked, "Charming—but hardly enough to keep you warm!"
Signaling a man who wore one of his indestructible suits, he made Lulu Belle a
present of the fellow's jacket.
Lucky
glowered and filed away for future reference the fact that Lulu Belle, who had
ten or twelve feet of heavy hair to wrap around her, got the coat while some of
the women who had gone
completely bald in their survival struggles still shivered without attention.
He had disliked Drega since he first met him.
But Lulu ~ Belle obviously considered Drega a true gentleman and a bom master
of men. Furthermore he looked quite outstanding in his own suit.
It was strange, but the few men who wore
Drega's suits quickly won respect out of all proportion to their actual worth
during the first trying days of the new community. They received homage before
they contributed even a sensible word—save in the case of Drega, whose
leadership was undeniable. The fortunate few were also the objects of vast envy
and conniving, which reached Machiavellian level in the dignity-hungry person
of Lucius Prescott. Never, he knew, would he be able to command dignity again
until he could appear clad—at least in pantsl
Drega
glanced at the sun and announced, "Well, it's too late in the day to go
surveying. We can use the rest of the time to bathe and plan. Now has anyone
else here been abroad in the city?"
Nobody
answered. Drega waited, then said, "Then I'll tell you a few things I saw
coming from Drega Towers. First, not a building is left standing that was not
built of masonry. Some of those towers had steel in them, but in my opinion,
every scrap of steel and iron has been reduced to pure rust or oxidized beyond
recapture."
He
looked around. "Do you understand what that means? Do you, Prescott?"
"Well—err—hummmm—hwwwl" Prescott consider it ponderously. Then, like
a child solving his first two plus two, he answered, "Of course—it means
there is no iron."
Drega
nodded with a rare glint of humor. "And that means no iron tools if
true," He stretched his hands out before him, palms down, then palms up. "These are just about all
we've got to survive and rebuild with."
He
had a trick of looking about him as he talked. He looked at the grass, at the
sky, at the forests, at the wreckage of the city.
"As
far as I can guess it's late Spring. We shouldn't
suffer any more really cold weather for a while. Maybe the forest is our best
protection. There are plenty of vaulted caves within. We saw a few birds on the
way across the island but not too many. Practically all of them were water
birds.
"Water
is going to be our first and most serious problem. None of these inlets have
drinkable water and so far I've not seen any springs. It's possible there is
not a spring reaching the surface of this choked ground. This soil which we
are standing on is not soil at all in the usual sense. It is an enormous pile
of rubble and rubbish, composed mostly of disentegrated building material
permeated with all kinds of chemicals and inorganic subtance."
He
coughed and reached for his throat to massage it. It had been a long speech for
a man so long unaccustomed to speaking. After a pause, during which no one
spoke, he cleared his throat and continued.
"There
are many things to find out, many things to think about. Right now the two
foremost will suffice. Nobody is to leave camp at any time in parties of less
than six. The first tools to be made will be war tools. This city is coming
alive with starved and half-demented people. We have already witnessed
cannibalism on our trek across the island. We saw a man torn apart and eaten
while he was still alive."
He
let the full horror of that picture sink in. He let it wallop them right in
their empty stomachs. He wanted to shock them into using the utmost caution and
he took his usual blunt, harsh way of doing it. He accomplished what he had
intended to accomplish.
"Also," he added, "it may be
months before we find trails on which we can walk with perfect safety. The
wrecking of this city took thousands of years. Buildings gradually sank in
decay. Rubble and fill gradually heaped over them and formed the ground we'll
have to walk upon. But in the meantime the underlying
supports rotted and disintegrated and the surface is literally based upon
nothing but air many places."
He
paused again and then finished hoarsely, "That's all for now."
Lucky stood Ustening with grudging admiration. He and his companions had liked to think
they had some pretty good brains in their newspaper crowd. Prescott had been no
slouch at piling up a good living and building a good paper in his lifetime.
But now, while they were still trapped in a
frenzied chaos, Drega had already oriented himself, faced the problems of this
strange and bewildering new world and ventured from his cave of reawakening.
He had found a crew of men to back him, made a daring trek clear across the
island and noted important details as he came. Already he had taken command of
such survivors as he found, organized them roughly but effectively, and laid
down the primary problems, warnings, and rules.
As
for himself, Lucky admitted ruefully, he was still
wrapped up in fancies and questions about what had happened. Yes, it was easy
to see why men like Drega inevitably forged ahead. Like them or not, it was a
mighty lucky thing for mankind that there were a few like Drega.
By this time a number of the men had regained
sufficient strength for light chores. Drega sent several of them off as a
forage crew to pick up driftwood along the river. Lucky was not one of the crew
he selected.
Drega
was frowning, trying to figure something out. Finally he glanced around, caught
Lucky's eye and beckoned. "Were you ever a Boy Scout, Flagherty?" he
inquired.
Lucky
shook his head. Drega sighed, said. "Too bad.
I've got men here who can bankrupt a government and men who can trouble-«hoot a
million-volt high-tension wire in a blizzard. But I'll bet I haven't got one
man who knows how to build a fire without a matchl"
Lucky
thought for a moment. "Say," he said, "what condition is your
watch in?"
"Why," Drega grunted with surprise,
"I haven't lookedl"
He glanced
ruefully at his wrist. "This one just went! But out of sentiment I used to carry a pocket watch too."
He
reached into his watch-pocket carefully. Lucky held his breath. Drega would
have carried a most expensive type of watch, probably heavy platinum, with a
real crystal face-guard. Remembering the chunk of heavy water bottle which had
cut his foot, he thought there was just a chance.
Drega
pulled out his watch with extreme care. The case was oxidized into brittle
junk—but the crystal was still in-tactl
"Lord!" Lucky cried. "Don't touch that
crystal!" "No," Drega agreed. "In fact, I think 111 put it
down." He squatted and very carefully laid the object in a small patch of
sand.
"Now,"
he pointed out, "We have a problem. How are we going to get that glass out
of there without vibrating it?"
They
had no sharp-edged tool. H a knife remained in existence, which was extremely
doubtful, it would be oxidized more severely then the watchcase. Lulu Belle came over and listened to them discuss the
problem. Then she drifted off toward the river—doubtless to wash her hair
again, Lucky thought with masculine irritation. But shortly she returned with
two mussel shells. "Would these help?" she asked.
"Lady,
God bless you!" Drega said fervently. "YouTl be honorable custodian
of the fire for that idea!"
Drega
thoroughly respected a person, male or female, who didn't blabber and who made
the most of whatever was at hand. He started to reach and then stopped and
shook his head.
"At
best, I'm ham-handed. So is Tim and all his men. We
need a jeweler. This is too precious to take a chance."
A
sentinel shouted a warning from the ridge just then and shortly afterward a
lone figure drifted into camp. It was Mr. Herb Oliver, the inebriate who had
seen the cow. What he had seen since had not reassured him further-quite the
reverse.
He
looked them all over sadly. He realized, of course, that they were all part of
the hallucination that had attacked him. He was having a hangover three
thousand years delayed!
However,
the group were human beings and friendly figments of
the imagination, which afforded him some relief. He mentioned his name
formally and considered the watch with interest.
"I'm
afraid, sir," he told Drega, "you'll have
difficulty getting that
to run again."
"What makes you think
so?" sneered Lulu Belle.
"Well,
Madam"—he squinted around at her—"it happens to be my trade. I'm a
jewelry repair man, sirs and ladies, and never yet did whiskey cause me to
scratch a case or miss my correction on a balance spring."
Drega
beamed. He explained their problem. Mr. Oliver sat down cross-legged, examined
the shells and considered the infinitely delicate job presented him. It looked
as if he were designed to be a jewelry repair man even in delirium tremens.
He
picked up the watch. He held it direcüy before
his mouth and touched the crystal with his tongue. Just ever
so lightly but apparantly firmly enough to give him the information he sought.
"Remarkablel"
he commented. "This is a shell of crystal so thin that I doubt if the
most sensitive precision instrument we have could grind out its
duplicate!"
He felt of his throat with his free hand.
"Ahem! I don't suppose you would have just a jigger or two of whiskey
about? Purely a nerve tonic—by way of aiding this operation, you
understand!"
Drega
started to shake his head when Lulu Belle piped up blithely, "Why, of
course, we have a whole keg! You don't mind being served in a sea shell, Mr.
Oliver?"
"Not
in the least, my dear young lady," he assured her. He watched her move
away across the sand dunes. His eyes were brighter, worry was leaving him, there was a faint flush on his pale face. Most assuredly, if
the DT's supplied him with congenial company, a job, an excuse to break the
pledge and thoroughly enjoy a free conscience all at once— why, he was better
off than he had ever been as an upright citizen!
Lulu Belle returned shortly, bearing a clear
liquid in two large deep shells.
"I hope it isn't too raw," she said
to him. "It hasn't aged much. It's still white."
He
took the first shell from her hand and poised it. He took time to make an
appropriate answer and a toast. He tossed off the liquid, blew a resounding
breath of fiery satisfaction and smacked his hps. He permitted himself to be
urged, out of nothing but courtesy, of course, to drink the second potion.
Lucky watched this with complete
befuddlement. He didn't believe there was even
drinking water around, let alone whiskey. But Mr. Oliver had given evidence of
a rum-pot's true appreciation and now was showing both gratitude and the
effects of his potion. He had perked up, his senses were sharper, his
concentration keener. He sang a happy little tune inside himself—in a good mood
to do good work.
Mr.
Oliver shot cuffs that no longer existed, reached for a jeweler's glass that
likewise was missing. He murmured, "Tsk! Tsk!," adjusted his native vision and examined the
watch minutely. Then he said in high good humor, "There is only one
trouble, Mr. Drega. We can get the crystal out but it will probably
break."
Lucky gave him a disgusted look and would
have argued or just gone away. Drega sat quiedy, trying to probe the little
man, failed and finally asked, "What can you do then?"
"Well,
I can try," Mr. Oliver said. "The problem is this. It has not really
much to do with tools. We dare not cut through the casing, which is oxidized
solid in any case. What we can do is just cut the glass out, and the shells
will serve quite well. But should we be able to cut the crystal without
shattering it, we arrive at the end of the cut, Mr. Drega, and the crystal is
going to drop onto the corroded face."
"That short drop will
break it?" Drega questioned.
"Like
a cannon shot," Mr. Oliver nodded. "That crystal consists of nothing
whatever but the depth of pressure applied in the final polishing of the
surface. Such polishing is done with the most sensitive precision instrument,
turning the finest of chamois over the surface with the least pressure attainable
without prohibiting contact. In a manner of speaking that crystal has been
leached to little more than the original polish."
"And yet it survived some rough travel
and movementl" Drega mused.
"In its position in the case," Mr.
Oliver pointed out. "A miracle in any event. But
you're aware of the enormous properties of tension and pressure?"
"Once," Drega smiled ironically,
"I knew something about them." His face sobered. "But now what
would the chances be of making the final cutting upside down? Could you work from underneath?"
Mr. Oliver's neck stretched upward like an
ostrich's. He regarded Drega with rising respect.
"Sir," he said, "you are a man
of my own caliber. It will require but one stroke."
He cleared his throat and darted a glance at
Lulu Belle.
"But
of course," she nodded. "In the interests of the
project."
She smiled and picked up the shells and
started off. Lucky followed her.
"What the devil are you putting over on
this imbecile?"
"Why,"
she sniffed, "nothing at alll Except maybe, a
slight abuse of the word 'whiskey'."
"Well, what are you giving him that's
got him kidded?" he asked.
"T
won't tell you," she answered. "You might turn into a drunkard."
She shooed him off and went
on to the river alone.
He
followed her, Indian fashion. What he saw was Lulu Belle heading along an inlet
toward a brackish swamp of salt grass. She simply dipped up this half-stale,
half-salt water and came back where she caught sight of Lucky. She sniffed and
tossed her head at him.
"Well,
this water tastes like the devill Bad enough so nobody would believe it's water. And people with throats and tongues like ours
wouldn't know what they are drinking!"
In
any case, it had worked on Oliver. When they got back he was already busy with
several stones, sharpening his shells to a fine cutting point. By sundown he
had them finished. In the meanwhile a man who knew flint when he saw it had
been discovered and given the duty of finding it if any existed.
Drega
had hoped for a fire that night but there would be none. It was the first time
any of them had felt chilled and the second time that pangs of hunger began to
assault them. This interested Drega particularly for it indicated that nature
had protected them against eating until their bodies had soaked up sufficient
water. It showed they were again approaching normalcy if they now felt the
chill when they had not done so previously.
Shortly after dawn Drega was up and stirring,
although most of the camp was still deep in slumber. He had already been to the
river and bathed and finished his routine chores and taken a walk when Lucky
awakened. Lucky made a bet with himself that Drega would rouse the camp and
begin cracking the whip. Lucky lost the bet.
There
was nothing mean about Drega. He was simply tough. If men needed sleep to
regain strength he knew he would be a fool to waken them.
The difference between toughness and meanness
was an intangible one under the circumstances, and one which a man like Lucky
could not fathom, could never understand or believe. Maybe, as a Mr. Philip
Wylie once pointed out, "Momism" had thwarted men. Not even the
experiences of war could teach them what their great grandfathers knew at an
early age, that only the tough survive in this world.
Or that a tough man could make a pretty good friend.
Lucky
was irked at his own misjudgement when he got up and went down to the river for
a bath. He could move now without feeling like a puppet being jerked on
strings. His vision was better, there was tone in his
body. And hunger was like a wolf inside of him.
When
he came back Lulu Belle and Drega were talking and signaled him to join them.
He came up, scowling, jealous, imagining a conversation far from what was
actually under discussion—mussels and other shell-fish. Lulu Belle had found
plenty of shells along the shore but no signs of beds, even though the tide had
been out when she looked.
Drega
said, "I wouldn't know a mussel-bed from a flower-bed. Suppose we put you
in charge of a location crew?"
Lulu Belle smiled and pulled her coat tighdy
enough to have looked highly alluring if she had had anything to fill it with.
Lucky meant to go with her but Drega, acutely conscious of his limited
manpower, headed Lucky off before he could move.
"Lucky, you're a man with a peculiar
talent not only for observation, but with enough imagination to know what to
look for."
This
was a body blow to Lucky's determined truculence. It was hard to feel properly
pugnacious toward a man whose opinion agreed with yours.
"Now,"
continued Drega, "I'm sending Tim Lanahan and his crew to make a
preliminary survey of the island to see if there's anything salvageable there
we can use. If it's structural stuff Tim will find it. But he could step in a
pile of diamonds and now know it."
Lucky
nodded. "You want me to go as a sort of floating observer?"
"That's it," Drega said. "I
want a news report from you. But stick with the crew, do you get that? You
aren't exactly fat but you'd look like pretty good eating to some of the human
wolf-packs we saw coming over."
Lucky
thought Drega was pouring it on a bit thick but apparently Tim Lanahan didn't.
He had already picked a number of choice pieces out of the driftwood they had
collected and had his boys whittling out cudgels and clubs shaped like
fire-axes as best they could with shells and stones.
Lucky was in two frames of mind about Drega.
Grudgingly, he felt proud at having been chosen for this job. But he was not going to fall under the Drega spell! Shaping himself a cudgel he made a
point of letting go one gripe. He expressed the opinion that Drega might have
let them wait until they found something to eat, at least.
"We'll eat,"
Lanahan grunted.
Lucky stared at him. "How and what?"
"Fish—birds
too, maybe," the tough trouble-shooter told him.
"You find fishhooks and a few
lines?" Lucky asked sarcastically.
Lanahan flicked him with a glance. "Save
that chip on your shoulder for real fighting, fellow! There are a lot of inlets
below here. You can see 'em. When we find a shallow one, we'll probably find
fish in it, and if we can't dam it and pole the fish out, I'm a Rooshianl"
"And birds the same way?" Lucky
inquired.
Lanahan frowned. "Maybe
later—when we get the cooking going. Some of the sea-birds nest on the
inlets at night, and you can pick 'em right off the water after dark."
Lucky's beef wore off and he grinned.
"Okay,
Dan'l Boonel" he said. "It turns out to be a break to go with
you!"
"Drega's
idea," Lanahan said. "Ready? Our first stop is for chow."
Moving carefully because of the treacherous
terrain and keeping in a well-ordered group because of the danger of roving
bands driven to cannibalism by starvation, the Drega expeditionary force began
working its way southward, seeking rations. As they passed out of sight of the
rest of the group Lucky Flagherty felt a sudden sense of almost primeval
aloneness. He stopped and looked back at a pair of ragged1
near-naked sentinels, posted atop a low mound on the southernmost rim of the
camp.
As he looked he saw a slighter figure,
wearing what looked like a black skirt, appeared beside them. Lucky waved —and
Lulu Belle, for it was she, waved back. The reporter wondered if he was ever to
see her again. A sudden lump rose in his throat.
"Come on, fellow." Tim Lanahan's
stringy but still strong fingers closed about Lucky's bicep. "Do you want
to eat supper or serve as the main dish for some of those?" He nodded
toward a pair of scrawny naked figures, animals in human form, who slithered
out of sight behind a heap of rubble as they realized the foreman had spotted
them.
Lucky shivered and lagged
no longer.
It
was rugged going even after they found an inlet that seemed to be full of fish.
They flailed about with their clubs and managed, during an hour of cursing and
barked shins, to come up with half a dozen shad and mackerel. Tim tossed back
the shad. "Too bony," he said.
"What do we use for fire to cook
them?" asked a hungry-looking member of the party, an ex-stevedore.
"We do like the Japs," said Tim
briefly. "We eat 'em raw. And remember, there's plenty of fresh water in
raw fish."
Lucky, with South Pacific memories of the
Second World War, grinned and nodded. He had brought along his piece of
half-dead glass—which proved to be strong enough to scale and cut the
sea-creatures into chunks. It was not a very palatable meal but all of the party were hungry enough to get some of it down.
That
night it rained—and while he did his turn on watch Lucky shivered and
dripped—but did not curse, nor did the others. Their skins were still too
hungry for water and all knew that rain meant puddles of fresh water for the
day ahead.
Tim
stayed north of the dangerous canyons that had been the Wall Street district.
It was unlikely they would find anything of value, since there was little there
more valuable than gold—and at the moment gold was worth nothing to them.
Furthermore the overgrown man-made mountains, what was left of them, were
doubly dangerous, both with the prospect of instant cave-ins and the threat of
assault by surviving financial workers.
So
they spent the first full day of the expedition working their way westward
across the island. As they moved past what had once been City Hall Park, Lucky
found himself pondering the changes that had overtaken the once rolling,
fertile and tree-laden island of Manhattan, thanks to Man.
The original hills of its lower half had long
since been leveled by pick and shovel and machine. Its brooks had been buried
beneath masonry, its swamps and ponds filled in with the residue of its hills.
This portion of the island had been leveled by a man in the interests of
transportation.
Now,
again thanks to man, it was once more an island of hills and trees. Yet no
longer was the ground generally fertile or safe underfoot. It was soil over the
greatest pile of rubble the world had even seen, a greater trash-heap than
Berlin in 1945, a trash-heap honeycombed with treacherous caverns through which
a man might crash to his death hundreds of feet below the surface. Man had dug
deeply into the bedrock foundations of his favorite island.
A
herd of naked men and women, beards and hair waving like the yaktailed banners
of some febrile Tartar horde, assailed them as they crossed what had been
Broadway, hurling bits of debris and yelling in cracked ghoulish voices.
"Circle—form a circle and beat these
devils off 1" Tim Lanahan ordered sharply.
Lucky
felt a bit of rock graze the side of his neck, then swung his club fiercely as
his strength permitted at the clawing attackers. He felt it crack a head with
the soggy thock
of a rotten pumpkin, looked
down and saw that the creature so suddenly kicking its life out at his feet
was a woman —or the caricature of a woman.
He
would have been sick had he not reminded himself that it was absolutely
essential he keep down what he had on his stomach, lest he fall prey to such as
these. By the time the spasm of nausea had passed the attackers were limping or
crawling away in panic, mouthing unintelligible epithets as they
retreated—curses the more dreadful because of their weakness and the dreadful
hunger that lay behind it.
The
city was coming to life again—to a sort of life after death that was worse than
death. All around them they saw or heard the signs—here a mutilated corpse, or part of one, there Belsenlike figures avoiding
their comparative discip-plined order—and now and again a sound, a scream or a
curse, that usually faded quickly in a hoarse, thin scream of anguish.
There were even worse indications. For
Mankind, as usual, was disturbing the natural balance, such as it was. Renewed
human activity was taking its toll of such buildings as remained, ghost
buildings held erect only by the inaction within them.
A
hideous rending crash from downtown resembled the approach of a thunderstorm,
though the sky was clear and sunny. Pausing to seek its source, Lucky and the
others of Tim's party watched in horror as what had been the Cities Service
tower, third highest in Manhattan, appeared to be dropped through some immense
trapdoor, finally to totter and fall sideways from vision behind the
hill-covered lower buildings closer to them. The noise of the falling titan reminded
Lucky of what he had read of the death-struggles of mighty dinosaurs.
But
hard-headed Tim made an object lesson of the disaster. "Now maybe some of
you cubes will listen when I tel you to keep out of trouble," he told
them.
There were no answers.
When
at last they reached the Hudson, late that afternoon, it was a relief to Lucky
to be able to look upriver and see the Palisades in all their majesty. The
George Washington Bridge was gone, of course, but the barrier of the west bank of the river was changed only in the loss of tawdry apartment
houses on its brink, of grimy piers at its foot.
Their
progress was slow not only because of the perils of terrain and human
scavengers but because, in accord with his mission, Tim and his men called a
halt whenever one of them, out of his memory of the bones and nerves of the
city upon which they had all worked all their lives, recalled a possible useful object,
They
were the trouble-shooters—not seeking trouble but a way out of it—and if too
often what they sought was destroyed or inaccessible, yet invaluable finds of
lead, to which three thousand years was as nothing, and cable preserved in
grease were discovered and samples taken. It had not, Tim told Lucky as they
approached the camp on their return journey a day later, been an unprofitable
first foray.
"If
that dynamo in the Telephone Building had only come through," he moaned,
"we'd have power in a month if I had to crank her myself."
"Cheer
up," said Lucky. "You got those." He nodded at a pair of
beryllium-bronze pliers, just about the sole surviving artifact on the island
as far as they knew, which Tim had discovered in one
of the perilous basements they had explored, beneath a skyscraper.
Tim
looked more contented. "Yeah," he said, "they'll come in useful.
Now I hope Drega has some cooked food. Don't tell the boys but I got an awful
bellyache."
"111
keep mum if you will about mine," Lucky told him. From that time on the
two men, so dissimilar in every way during their former lives, became friends.
CHAPTER NINE
They
walked back into crisis. The
cooking problems of Drega's little world were far from satisfactorily solved
and bodies starved for three thousand years were demanding nourishment.
Lulu
Belle, who had apparently been waiting and watching for Lucky's return, ran up
to him as they topped the western ridge of the area Drega had staked out and
said, "I'm so glad you're back. There's trouble."
That
was immediately obvious from the way the population was milling angrily about.
Nor was its source hard to> find. Apparently Herb Oliver, of all people, had
found a horse—a live horse. As Lucky worked his way closer, with Lulu Belle at
his side and Tim and the others at his heels, he learned from the mutterings
around him that most of the people wanted to kill and eat the half-starved
animal. To them it was meat on the table.
But
there was opposition to their craving the meat; powerful opposition focussed in
a single man who, though as hungry looking at the others, yet managed somehow
to project an appearance of burly power.
"I
think well save the horse," Drega announced in an authoritative voice.
"That may be the only "horse power' left in the world."
Muttering
swelled into open defiance. Drega's chin squared. The trouble shooters had
looked on the verge of defying Drega. But they bristled at the newcomers. Tim
looked at Drega. Drega said, "Get the horse. Put this man out of camp if
he makes trouble."
The trouble shooters raced
toward the horse, unruly spirits in chase. There is no discipline for hunger.
At the top of the rise the trouble shooters surrounded the dull-eyed animal.
Holding a piece of rock, a burly giant came up, followed by ten times their
number.
The
leader stopped, breasting his heavy body close to Tim's. "Gimme that horse
or I'll conk you like an egg!"
Tim's hand lea'ped out. Lucky thought. "There isn't enough strength in bodies yet, nor
enough coordination, to knock out a brute like
that!"
But
Tim did not try to knock him out. He grabbed his nose with the bronze pliers,
their one tool. With a merciless wrench he brought the brute to his knees. The
crowd stood back uncertain, muttering. A second time Lucky felt the crisis. One
of the objectors was preparing to slam Tim's wrist so that the pliers would be
knocked loose.
Drega
came up holding a flat club. He whanged down on the heads of the two ring
leaders. The gorilla men pitched forward onto their faces. Tim and Drega
grinned at each other.
But the thought of food had crystallized. The
crowd did not open to let the horse through. In ugly silence the seconds
passed. Again the muttering began. Lucky, Drega and Tim knew what it meant.
This time there would be no leaders. The crowd would rush forward in one of
those unexplainable bursts of mob impulse.
The muttering reached a timed mumble like the
tramp of feet. Lucky thought, "They'll tear Drega to pieces as well as the
horse!"
A
nautical voice piped up. "What's got barnacles under them lubbers?"
The
crowd turned, for the voice cut the mumble with peculiar deep-sea clarity. The
sailor stood there holding in his hand a three-pound flounder. The crowd was
intrigued but its mind was still on the horse.
"Plenty more waiting to be picked
up," the sailor told them.
Then they looked at the plump fish. The
tension broke. The crowd turned back to camp. Who wanted to kill a horse when there was other food around? Besides, there wasn't enough
flesh on his bony shanks to make one good chopl
So the horse was saved—the folk of Drega's
camp ate fish and liked it. Afterward, most of them fell into a sort of
stupefaction from overeating, but not Drega, who conversed at length with Tim
Lanahan over a flickering fire about the results of the first expeditionary
trip.
Nor
were Lucky and Lulu Belle among the sleepers. Tired as he was, Lucky offered to
take an early watch along the north border shoreline—and the erstwhile Lovelorn columnist came with him, her hair-skirt rustling
softly as she moved beside him through the twilight.
"I
was sure you'd been killed, Lucky," she told him softly. "I've been
half-sick with worry."
"I
had an idea you were more concerned with Drega since—well, since all this
happened," Lucky told her.
Lulu
Belle shivered though the spring evening was warm. "I was—fascinated by
him. I still am," she admitted. "Any woman, especially in a time of
trouble like this, feels an impulse to tarn toward a man who offers protection,
who shows power."
"Drega's a powerhouse, all right,"
said Lucky with a trace of envy. "We'd really be lost
without him."
"You've
changed, Lucky," said Lulu Belle, eyeing his gaunt form appraisingly.
"A couple of days ago"—she paused, added, "I mean a few thousand years ago you'd have resented him and refused to see his
good points. I could sense you were different when you got back."
"The old Lucky no good?" he asked
her.
"It's not that—the old Lucky wasn't
quite grown up."
"But
you waited for him—and worried about him," Lucky reminded her.
"Call it maternal, maybe—though it
wasn't just that," she said. "But it was partly that."
"Not
any more though?" he asked her, moving close by her side.
"Not any more," she replied firmly.
"What about Drega
now?" he asked.
"Not any more," she repeated.
"I only turned toward him because I wasn't sure of your strength. Besides,
what woman wants to be merely a feeder
to a powerhouse? Is that good enough, Lucky?"
"Talk,
talk—always talk," he said, pulling her into the circle of a still-weak
arm. He felt a pang of compassion as her bones were sharp against his side.
They were silent for a little while and knew their first happiness of this
alien new world.
No untoward incident marred the idyll of
their watch. When their relief at last showed up he said to Lucky, "Drega
wants to see you when you get in."
They
found him sitting beside the fire, in deep cosul-tation with shaggy wrecks of
men who had once been powers in the city and had wandered into the camp. Yet,
abandoning them when Lucky appeared, he asked the ex-reporter about the
trip—where they had gone, what his impression was of this or that happening,
how he thought conditions stood in such of the city as he had seen.
Although
he was drooping with fatigue, Lucky rallied to reply as fully and clearly as he
could. When he was through the financier said, "Lucky, we've got to have
an agreement. You're working for me—for this community—and you should be paid.
"I haven't any money—if I had it would be
worthless —but youll get ten bucks a day for your toil, starting the day you
set off. We can make our own wage scales and ten bucks a day is going to be
high. Tell your—tell Lulu Belle to keep track of what I owe you. Some day
you'll get paid."
To
his amazement Lucky heard himself saying, "That's all right with me.
What's my next assignment?"
Looking
around at the sleeping forms that surrounded the fire, Lucky realized that the
community had grown since he had crossed the island with Tim Lanahan's crew.
The first anarchy of survival was already passing. He knew, somehow, that he
was no longer to be a key figure in the community that under Drega's aegis the
survivors were reforming for rebuilding into a competitive society. And somehow
he was not sorry.
He
had his work, he had Lulu Belle, even now nestled
sleepily against him on the cool ground. It was going to be hard sledding,
perhaps dangerous, brutal sledding, but it was going to be enough. He was going
to be a cog again, but a cog aware of its importance and responsibility to its
fellows, however unimportant in tide.
"You're
going to go out with more of the exploration gangs," Drega told him.
"You're going to be my eyes until I can figure out some way to get around
myself. Tomorrow Tim is going to put each of his gang in charge of a new group
of trouble shooters. We're going to comb this island, from the Battery to
Spuyten Duyvil—if they still exist.
"You're
going to see the whole slow business of getting a wrecked civilization back on
its feet," Drega went on, his eyes shining in the firelight. "You're
going to be my eyes."
He
paused, glancing at Lulu Belle, added, "And don't worry about the girl.
She's going to handle personnel problems-female—for me."
ApparenÜy he sensed the small
cloud of worry, of jealousy, within Lucky Flagherty, for he laughed and said,
"Don't be jealous, boy. Your girl's all yours. I
only want her brains." He paused. "I seem to have picked up an old
flame." He directed his gaze across the firelight to a sleeping woman with
bright red hair as long as Lulu Belle's dark tresses and with a necklace of
sparkling diamonds that glittered its reflections of
the fire.
"She
was beautiful once," he said musingly. "And by God she's going to be
beautiful again." He turned back to the reporter, chuckling at his own
vehemence and said, "Don't worry about Lulu Belle. You weren't given your
nickname for nothing. Now get some sleep—you're going to be plenty busy
tomorrow."
Drega spoke no more than the truth. At sunrise
he was up and issuing his orders for the day—and for the days to follow.
Each
of the trouble shooters was put in charge of exploration gangs. Remaining
ruins and buildings were to be investigated throughly. Food sources must be
trailed down. Other people were living to the northward and before long the
river would become polluted. It was vital to find out if there were available
supplies of fresh water and, if not, how and where the clan could best move.
It
was important to know how many people were left on the lower end of the island,
for each new head meant another mouth to feed. Drega looked at new arrivals and
saw how much better off his own people were. These others were still covered
with dirt and patches of filthy hair. Most of them were half dead from thirst.
None of them had eaten.
Drega's clan paid him a growing respect.
There were other men of brains in that throng. Other names, other faces, were constantly entering the community picture—but none thought
to challenge Drega's right to rule. It was the student of the clan who
remarked, "Drega's greatest right to rule is that he simply took over
without question."
Lucky
said, "But on a basis of knowledege Drega would be your lieutenant."
The
student shook his head. "No. I am still pondering what happened. Drega is
a builder. Now he's building a social system. For the past two hours I am
probably the only person on this ridge who has thought of that unanswered
riddle."
Fourteen
days passed and no word of
his second group of explorers, again under Tim's command, had come to Drega.
But in a way this was well. The camp grew ordered. Weaker individuals had time
to get bodies functioning.
Lean-tos
and bricked-in cover had been built along the ridge. A very poor grade of
cement was made from sand, residue, and raw, crumbled limestone. There was
plenty of high-quality limestone where the oyster houses and marble buildings
had stood.
But
there was a difficulty. The authority who had once written a book on kilns and
calcination supervised the building of a kiln. It looked swell.
But somehow it didn't work.
The
fish pools had been stretched for two miles, with lengthy necks reaching into
the river. At high tide these necks were bottled up. Birch and some sugar maple
had been found. A poor grade of clay yielded a few pots which did not leak too
badly. Birch and maple tea were the camp drink, both made by steaming twigs.
There was no way to boil as yet. The inferior clay pots couldn't stand it. A
litde coal had been discovered, buried beneath hard packed mud. It was dug out
with sticks and broken laboriously with heavy stones.
Drega's clan had grown to two thousand but
increasing deaths from colds and infection threatened to reduce the number. The
meager diet of fish and roots and dandelion greens was not sufficient to build
up starved bodies. There had been an attempt to eat green berries which proved
almost fatal. Some oysters and clams had been discovered.
For
the first time a bird had been caught with enough meat on its bones to eat.
No
dogs had come to this camp but five cats were protected by Drega's order. An
onslaught of rats had threatened the camp's very existence and not until the
arrival of the cats had this menace been curbed.
At
high tide, seawater was scooped into flat trenches, where it exaporated,
leaving a thin coating of salt. It was a a vital food
but their only preservative and antiseptic. A bed of particularly oozy clay had
been set aside for the laborious task, but life depended up it. Salt was not
only treatment of open cuts and infections.
More
bronze had been found and one very large deposit of oxidized silver lay open
to the sun.
Among
the clan were crack metal workers. But nobody knew how to work the metal
without furnaces and tools and pots. It was numbing to find the number of
simple processes which reached back to good quality lime and a lime kiln. Until
they had those, they could not even build reasonably good molds. And the
authority on lime kilns talked of blowers and motors and steel cranes. He had
never built a kiln of less than ten ton capacity.
Several
dogs had been killed to the northward in the woods, their hides scraped with
clam-shells soaked in salt water, smoked lighdy and treated with oak. A light
harness had been built for the horse. Four thongs had been allocated to Lulu
Belle's cooking division on which to hang fish for smoking.
All
shells and fish bones were carefully cherished. Crude needles had been
fashioned out of some, for use as soon as there was something to sew. Newspaper
people had proved very adept at small weaving, pottery making, stringing shrubs
and roots into short lengths of rope. Edible herbs had been found in small
quantity, and a bronze and two plastic pesdes had been found. A large block of
marble limestone had been scooped out with sand and hard rock and supplied a
mortar.
The
most important functions in camp concerned food. A series of brick ovens had
proved failures, due to poor cement more than anything else. But a dugout
chimney with a shelf supplied baked items. Roasting was possible on a stick,
steaming could be accomplished in clay pots.
All
of this had taken an immense amount of work for weak people without tools. Some
wooden tools such as clubs, fish spears, poles and two shovels had been
fashioned out of fire-hardened wood. But this required much time and a great
waste of fuel. Much of the wood at hand was green and would burn only on very
hot fires.
For
further progress three things were vitally needed-lifting power, transportation
and common sense. Drega had sent his most practical men out on Tim's survey.
The few others had their time occupied with the details of everyday life.
Drega
was thinking of these thing when a cry went up from
the outpost. An amazing sight broke out of the forest —two of Tim's men,
Marillo and Turpine, astride an elephant! Held in the elephant's trunk was a
large bronze door. Behind them came a second elephant, limping, also bearing a
bronze door. Both men were weak and sick: Marillo with his arm in a sling of
skin, Turpine banged up all over.
Turpine
grinned and handed down two large pots, their tops covered with a hard crust.
They also had with them an assortment of objects, invaluable to the clan. Three
bronze knives, a bronze scythe and four hard porcelain pots. A bronze spear,
two extremely hard plastic molds for cooking pans, two empty pots of some clay
substance and two wrought-iron wheels. On the second elephant were piled skins,
one filled with gold trinkets and plate, a second with rock-hard beeswax, a
third holding a dried-up gob of tar and others stuffed with fresh meat.
"And!"—Marillo
grinned, handing down fifteen bronze fishhooks and a length of real fishline.
"All
from the Museum of Natural History," Turpine explained. "Just to make
sure nobody else got in we shoved a few tons of stone back over the
entrance."
Drega asked for their report.
Their
first adventure had come as they left the woods immediately north. Llewellyn, a
miner, used to working amid gas and slides, had stopped and counted heads. They
were a man short, Randolph, their civil engineer, was missing. They had found
him fallen into a deep hole beneath a tree. His leg was broken,
"We
couldn't reach him," Marillo said grimly. "He was down ninety feet
and the sides were too steep to climb. There was nothing to make a rope of. We
could see him in the light of flares we let down on thin vines. We had to sleep
there that night, listening to his groans and not able to do a thing about
it."
At a conference next day they had decided to
push on. It was a hard but necessary decision to make.
North
of the woods the city was in complete ruins. There were many signs of
buildings, but most of them had long since tumbled on themselves, and grassy
and wooded hills had formed over their skeletons.
Atop
a very high hilL Tim had laughed sharply without humor. "I think this is
Tudor City." After a moment he added. "I had a brother who lived
here."
They wondered if, down in those depths of
earth and debris, people might still be living. It was not impossible.
"Seeds"
had wandered into camp to tell of being on the sixteenth story of a skyscraper
at three-thirty on March fifteenth. The next thing he knew he was climbing out
of a hole midway up a hill.
No words could explain the utter desolation
of what had been 42nd Street. It was leveled and piled into sullen featureless
hills. There were shrubs and trees in spots but most of the country was dead
with the deadness of raw earth when topsoil is sheared away. There had been
explosions underground. A few thin columns of smoke wove upward from deposits
of burning material.
A woman's voice had shrieked at them from a
pile that must have been the Brinton Tower. Lucky had found her, a former
society beauty, hideous with privations and trapped behind a large block of
granite.
"I
want to tell you exacdy what happened," Mariillo said with a hard face,
"because it shows what we're up against. The woman was scared we'd leave
without getting her out. She didn't get the drift of things yet. She offered us
a million dollars to get her out!"
The
men could hear her sobbing inside. Her hand came through the hole and held out
a diamond the size of a half dollar.
Michael, the mineralogist, had gasped,
"The Rockland diamond!" Story, a tool dresser, muttered, "That
would make a thousand diamond drills!"
Einstein,
the junk man, stood goggle-eyed repeating, "Ooh, ha!" at intervals.
Llewellyn
had been inspecting the hill and suddenly announced that it wasn't safe to
attempt the woman's rescue. "There's about forty tons sitting right above
the keystone," he told them. "And all that's holding it there is a
little limestone and balance. If you move that granite block to get her
Out you're going to cut-out the footing you're working on."
Michael
had disagreed. Llewllyn had tried heatedly to explain but he couldn't. It was
something a miner simply knew without
knowing how he knew. He had cursed and refused to be one of the rescue party.
They
had located some uprooted and bumed-down logs and set to work to swivel the big
granite keystone. Lucky Flagherty had squatted on another block beside the hole
holding the woman's hand. Three times while they heaved Llewellyn had started
to join them, then had gone back swearing bloody
murder. But he couldn't listen to his own advice. He came and stood near by.
Another
foot on the pry log would give a big enough opening. Not a suspicious tremble
or warning of danger had been felt. But suddenly Llewellyn shouted, "She's going out!"
In the fraction of that second the big stone
spun like a top. The pry men were catapulted onto their faces. Lucky jerked the
woman through the hole. Forty tons resting atop the keystone crashed through
some thin flooring beneath. It carried the footing out from under eighteen men.
They dropped without a cry into the gaping hole beneath.
The
woman had flown clear of Lucky's sudden jerk but Llewellyn had caught her. She
hung by one foot over the black hole. Llewellyn's stone was slipping. He tossed
the woman to Tim and jumped clear as it crashed beneath.
Something
very hard had happened inside Tim in that brief instant. He said grimly, 'Tour
prime men and eighteen good ones gone—for what? A
woman!"
There would be no more rescue work attempted.
Llewellyn
had mumbled for hours after, "If I'd thought there was a chance—but I
knew, see? / knew!"
They listened to his advice after that.
They
had discovered a large body of men, their leader a friend of Tim's,
trapped in the tunnels of the old Grand Central Station district. They had not
been able to get them out for fear of bringing down treacherous ruins above.
With a few tools they could have released the people.
Wherever
there had been great buildings were hills punctured with natural limestone
caves. In a spot which must have been the old Commodore kitchen Einstein's junkman's
eye had detected a glitter. They had found an aluminum pan coated with emerald
crystals. It was also Einstein who discovered a large copper frying pan, one of
the heavy kind, large enough to cook a hundred eggs at
once. It had been heavily coated with grease and was in almost perfect
condition.
In
this part of town they had seen a wild savage horde of men pursue five helpless
men and women and rip them limb from limb— and eat the -flesh Taw!
"Good Godl" Drega
uttered.
"Wait,"
Marillo answered and his lips trembled. "You people down here were eating.
Our food ran out and except for birch tea made in a pyrex
dish Tim found, we had nothing for many days. We had to pause five days by the
old library to wash our feet and legs and let them heal."
The
terrible food demands of bodies which had lived upon themselves for three
thousand years attacked the men. Tim turned south to locate the old warehouses
but most of the party went northward toward the park. Lucky had made friends
with a gigantic sheep dog. It suddenly ran ahead of them and stood stiff and
growling. It was fortunate it warned them. A band three times their size
swooped around a hill brandishing clubs.
Tim
had found a sheet of lead earlier and they had worked the molten metal into
cracks and crevices in their own clubs. They were better armed. Yet they would
have lost the batde had not Tuxpine, the circus roustabout, started them
running up a hill as if defeated.
The
enemy followed, with savage hunger and murder in their roars. Turpine tripped
them with a stick, sprawling them into a deep pit where they split open on
sharp rocks.
Exhausted
from the fight they had slept amidst the dead that night. Lucky's dog fed upon
an enemy body. Nobody stopped him. He did not touch any of their own dead. During
the night there was much stealthy movement. But not once did the dog bark. The
next morning, six enemy bodies had disappeared.
"And the dog didn't
bark?" Drega asked.
Marillo's
face was like iron. "No." He looked straight into Drega's eyes and
the two men understood one another. No reference was ever made to that incident
again.
"We
had lost half of our remaining party," Marillo continued, "and pushed
on for the park. We saw a dozen bands, numbering around ten thousand
altogether. They were fighting each other for the right to kill the loose animals,
but as soon as a man would go down, other men would leap upon him with insane
hunger. None of the bands could kill the animals. They were unarmed. The
elephants alone must have slaughtred a thousand men and women when they went on
a blood-rampage.
"There
were four elephants and Turpine recognized one. He had been its keeper. He
finally calmed it down. By luck it was the leader."
He told about charging the lions and tigers,
the elephants stamping them dead. The bears had not been so easy, and they had
lost Stokes when he tumbled down among them. They thought of possible old
weapons and went to the museum to investigate. One elephant got bogged down in
a swamp and they had to desert it.
The
old museum was an immense mound but there were openings beneath great blocks of
stone and it had been no trick for the elephants to pull the stones free. For
two days they had searched for an entrance but found only dirt and rubble. On
the third day they pulled aside a gigantic slab and found a vaulted room almost
undisturbed by time. It had been one of the Egyptian display rooms.
"We
had a number of spears and swords but we went back to kill the other
animals," Turbine said. "The hyenas, jackals, bears, and wolves were
still around. I'll bet there are a couple of camels they won't kill for a long
time either. We used most of the weapons killing what we got. Some of them
broke and some we dropped. We didn't dare to go after them because of the bands
of people."
"We've
had some bad skirmishes here," said Drega. "That's why we don't dare
go far from camp."
"It's
a regular battlefield of cannibals uptown. Everybody kills and eats anything
they can get."
After
skinning enough
animals to hold the other carcasses, they had stolen across town through thick
brush in the dead of night. They headed down the river bank, charging crowds
mercilessly. A band had followed and they had had to turn
and fight. They lost nine of tiieir remaining party. Lucky and Carter had taken
a chance- and headed uptown to the old university section before that.
"We lost another elephant, the one widi
most of the meat, yesterday. She dropped through into a cavern. We spent the
day trying to figure a way to get her out—at least to get the meat out. But
she'd busted a leg and was kicking. It wasn't safe to go down. We can go back
after the meat and her hide and flesh."
That
night Drega's band ate meat stew for the first time in three thousand years.
The meat was tough and probably impure. But the animals had had two weeks to
feed up and were not as stringy as they might have been, i
Late
that night Llewellyn staggered in, bloody and half dead. He had fought his way
clear of the last skirmish but the men abroad the elephants were already
trampling through the crowd and he couldn't reach them.
Next
day the camp went back to where the elephant had fallen through. The elephant
was still alive. It was a problem how to kill an elephant.
Drega said, "Find the heaviest block of
stone you can."
Without
the elephants, finding such a block might have involved considerable search.
But Turpine simply rode the lead cow around, fifting up rubble. He found a
tremendous square block and had the two elephants roll it across the
space. It was about sixty feet to the bottom of
the pit. When the block struck, the elephant died without a sound.
It
took five days for men working with bronze tools and burning brands to get the
flesh of the beast worked off. There was no way to cut off feet, and the
ponderous head delayed things further. The crew were
worn out and pessimistic. There were demands of why they should slave at
Drega's bidding.
Drega snapped, "So
that you can eatl"
He ordered vine and skin ropes brought, and himself got into the pit to supervise. It was a simple trick
for the elephants on the surface to strip the flesh from their sister's bones.
The
flesh was succulent and healthy. The pachyderms had spent two weeks gorging on
luscious vegetation in the park. The skin alone was worth a fortune under new
values. From those bones, in time, came not only soup but some of die new
civilization's most valuable tools.
When
they returned to camp they found Tim there, sleeping with complete exhaustion.
His feet were swollen dangerously but he had hauled, somehow, a length of cable
and two coils of lead wire he had found immersed in pitch.
With
him was one remaining man and the woman they had
rescued. Six men had been lost getting into the ruins of the warehouse. Yet
these two had not lost the aluminum and copper pan, the lead, the bronze bust
and the three blueberry plants they had found] As if proud of such grim
determination the plants lived to flourish.
The
next day Lucky, Carter and the dog arrived. They were worn and spent and great
sores covered their bodies. But each carried a large woven root-hamper filled
with small round cylinders of rust.
"Old cans?" Drega asked. "Amazingl" He recalled a tin-plating process which Simon Gamble had worked out.
"Food!" exclaimed Lucky. "It
may be poison but we've lived on it for ten days! Canned
beans!"
Except for small punctures the copper pan was
perfect beneath a crusty coat. The punctures were imperfecdy mended with bits
of lead, after the coating and ancient hardened grease—itself almost as hard as
the copper—had been scoured off. It was the only utensil in which they could
melt the lean animal fat from Turpine's kills.
The
bands to the north were growing more daring and increased precautions had to be
taken against attack. Nobody could imagine what the northerners were existing on but they grew in numbers daily.
Lucky reported a large clan of college students and teachers living near
the Columbia University, parts of which were in comparatively good condition
but deeply buried in places of many feet of accumulated dirt. The buildings that had resisted time were
those of old-fashioned masonry.
There were groves of woods and herb swamps
near the university. The clan there was living well on a vegetarian diet. They
had some tools and more utensils than Drega's clan, which they had combed out
of the university ruins.
From
the university north and south and east, mankind had degenerated into savagery
of the lowest order. The Bronx River had widened and the city lifted
considerably at that point. It was now a river of vicious currents, impossible
to traverse.
Groups
had tried, with crudely constructed cable rafts, to get across the East and
North Rivers. The clumsy crafts had been ripped apart like boxwood in
midstream. There was a long line of whirlpools where old bridges had crossed
the East River. There was a tremendous suck-hole where the upper tunnel had
existed under the North River.
Drega was considering possible moves for his
clan. "What about Central Park? Our strength is sufficient to conquer the
territory."
It
was sailor who advised against it. "You've got most of the animals and
there'd be no fish in any quanity that far up the river. You'd have to keep a
fish camp down here."
Drega
said, "It would divide our forces. Tim. What's in this part of the
city?"
"Everything
that's left," Tim said, "Including people. Thousands are trapped
underground. What they're living on I don't know. But they've all got fire from
explosions and most of them seem to have water and something to bum."
He
had traveled rapidly after leaving the others. For a long stretch he had seen little evidence of anything useful other than
one section of granite blocks. About opposite their own
camp he had discovered a goodly sized sweet-water river gushing from the
ground. There was plenty of good grass over there and a grove of straight
timber. Many trees had been torn up by their roots and lay drying.
The
city in between was undermined with caves and passages of two types. One, the remains of old cellars and subways. The other, natural formations, which had arched over streets when
buildings tumbled, or natural growth of rock from the debris of old buildings.
It was a highly dangerous country, with firm-looking turf growing over deep
holes.
"There
are plenty of warehouses," Tim said. "All ruins and most of them look
like hills. But I think there's good material in them. They'll have to be
mined—just like drifting a tunnel through loose rubble. Two hills covered with
old trees fell in while we watched.
"The telephone warehouse is the best
bet. There was a lot of tar and pitch and oil and wax in
there. The next block was a power station with four large transformers. There
must be plenty of metal and wire protected. Those transformers are sunk in oil
and covered by thickly enamelled armatures. The armatures are shot but the
transformers should be solid metal if we can get them out of the oil."
"Why can't we?" asked Drega.
Tim
gave a pessimistic blow. "That oil's hard as rock. We'd need picks. We
need iron to work with. And there's no iron to use in the city. Unless we can
find some way to smelt rust and get ore that's grown through old stone. But
even before we get it, we've got to have lifting power to clear the way."
"We've got the
elephants," Lucky pointed out.
Turpine
had not joined in the conversation, still regarding his position in life as
that of a roustabout. In the flood of suggestions from artisans, technicians
and businessmen he might have been overlooked. It was Drega who spotted his
desire to speak.
Turpine
said, "I wouldn't want to take the elephants back even the way we came.
What you're talking about sounds like worse country than that."
Drega nodded "We've got to have
immediate supplies to assure daily existence. Our pools are running shy. We
need cooking utensils. We must have tools. In the meantime the clans up north
are getting bolder and more savage. And we need to break through and rescue
Tim's
friends."
"I thought rescue was out,"
Prescott interposed.
Drega
said, "It is—under ordinary circumstances. But those men are technicians
and know what's left below ground in this part of town. Carter,
how about transportation?"
"I agree with Turpine. We can't afford
to lose another elephant. We need a safe road across the island."
"To
build a road we have to be safe from attack." Drega was silent with deep
thought. He nodded to himself. The clan waited to hear their fate decided.
"We'll
build a wall straight across," Drega decided. "Steep on the north side. We'll use the wall for a
road. It'll be tough work. We will be fighting against time. We need fish-nets
urgentiy. We can make them with pitch and vine and wire but we need something
to boil fish in."
Always, for the next three months, immediate
problems came back to the lack of iron and lime.
A
small expedition including Marillo, Tim arid Llewellyn made a northward dash
under cover of night to rescue Steve, Tim's trapped friend. Twice they nearly
stumbled into savage camps. Once they had to beat off a pack of dogs.
It
was the horse and cable—Drega's foresight—which made the rescue work possible.
Drega, ever thinking in terms of construction, had his camp fashion wedges and
poles, short beams and scoop shovels by burning and fire-hardening available
wood. It was unsafe to trust stone for support work. It had a way of crumbling
even if it looked sound.
No
answer came from Steve but the men drove ahead under Llewellyn's direction. If
any had felt he lacked fiver, they no longer thought so. They saw him working
in his element—sure, careful, willing to risk falling
tons so long as there was one chance in fifty of surviving. Three times he
missed being crushed by inches.
The widening of the hole
was a tremendous task. Nineteen times they dug away loose shale and rubble and
growing stone. Ninteen times they had the hole almost large enough to wriggle
through.
And
nineteen times some infinitesimal vibration knocked loose a rock and the room
pounded down to fill the hole.
The
twentieth time they were successful. For eighty feet they wriggled through a
natural tunnel barely large enough to clear. Every inch brought a rain of roof
and walls about them, and they realized the great difficulty which had thwarted
Steve's men, trying to tunnel out from the inside.
They
paused at the tunnel end to breathe their torch. They were in an immense eavem,
great streaks of rust shooting across walls and ceiling and growing in
strangely shaped clusters and stalactites. The cavern was filled with colored
formations, most of them like dull, raw ores.
The
floor of die cavern was lined with ridges and projections. But comers were
softened as if considerable amounts of water had drained through the roof,
filling in crevices with fine sand and wearing down sharp surfaces.
Llewellyn led the way with instinctive
knowledge of dangerous slides and pitfalls under foot. He kept stopping to
examine walls and ceiling, his technical interest aroused in the artificially
created caverns and formations.
"Anything
worthwhile?" Tim
asked, finally.
"Plenty,"
Llewellyn nodded. "Iron and coal drifts, and some small veins that look
like aluminum and dura metals. Must have crushed into the rubble and
crawled."
"Crawled?" asked
Marillo, doubtfully.
"Sure.
Metal likes its own company. There's plenty of copper in spots. And here's some
stuff that looks like hardened pitch."
Tim scraped the surface with his bronze
knife. "Tar," he grunted. "Considerable
quantity of it."
Marillo said, "All we got to do with a
lot of this rubble is toss it into a vat and break it down." He paused and
scratched his head. "Only where we going to get tine
vat?"
"Hot
dogl" Llewellyn yelled. He held his flare up to a mottled spot, tinged
with green and brown. "Leadl A solid nugget as big as a
boxcar!"
"We're
in the old switch tunnels," Tim decided. "My gang wired 'em. There's
probably just about an orecar of lead there." He was picking a long thin
streak in the surface of one wall. "Plenty of cable left in here
too."
Llewellyn
suddenly hissed, "shut up!" He stood listening
intently. They heard the barest rumble from a great distance. Llewellyn glanced
quickly at the walls and roof and darted toward the opposite wall. The floor
began to shake. It felt as if it crawled beneath their feet. Llewellyn warned,
"Stand back here."
They
were under a particularly jagged section of the roof, the type any of the others
would have avoided. They waited an mterrninable ten minutes. Suddenly the wall
beside which they had stood bulged out. For a minute it spewed dust and small
rock, then stopped.
"Okay,"
Llewellyn grinned. He gestured toward a granite comer projecting from the
ceiling. "That's probably holding all Park Avenue up."
The tunnel broadened so that they could not
distinguish its edges. Rats became more profuse, and in the distance they saw
fires burning. They approached cautiously, hiding their own torches and feeling
their way ahead. They were studying a group of naked men and women around a
fire when stout hands caught them from behind. Without ceremony they were
thumped on the head and dragged.
Tim came to looking up into Steve's thin but
grinning
face. "So you came back and got
through!" Steve was trying to laugh off the emotion in his voice.
"Well, you old tunnel rat, I thought maybe seeing you again was a nightmare!"
Tim suddenly sniffed and said, "Food! Real food!"
CHAPTER TWELVE
"We've got plenty of food," Steve said. "Only
trouble, it's about half poison."
Tim
ate a dinner he never forgot. Jerked beef—tough but good—Eggs, com-meal mush,
honey, a kind of bean cake and hot chocolate sweetened with maple sugar.
"How come?" Tim asked unbelievingly. "Are there
stores of this stuff left?"
"Only maple sugar. This supply was a freak. I knew there was a trainload of specially
cased food around here. It was for some polar expedition to take and bury for
test purposes."
"But even then—" Tim began.
"Well,
it was all carefully dried and packed in vacuum. This was copper and lead
covered and over that was a large sheet of heavier lead. And that was covered
with a blanket of tar."
Steve went on grimly. "We'd given up
hope of getting out of here. We had a fire—some of this solid material
burns—and plenty of water. But we'd gotten down to eating rats. Then things got
worse."
"Each
other?" Tim
asked softly.
Steve
nodded, his face strained. "Our number had grown to about four thousand. A
lot of them were God knows what. They didn't even know how they got here. Some
of them were pretty tough and every few hours somebody—began to disappear.
"We
didn't know who to knock off for law and order, because nearly everyone of us
was at the point where we were thinking of each other as food. Just about then
we located this train. Or what we located was the food that had been in the
train. It was buried solid in walls and floor."
He
sucked on a piece of almost-black substance as hard as rock—maple sugar.
"We
couldn't locate enough to keep four thousand people alive more than a week. But
we had a—lucky break." Steve laughed harshly, softly. "The first meat
we found was rock but after it was soaked, and boiled it looked good. Only it
wasn't. About three thousand people died in three days."
"That was luck, all right," Tim
agreed with hard irony. "We just dumped them down a bottomless pit and moved
our supplies to another tunnel." "How about boiling?"
"All
fixed for us. There were fires burning down here somehow. Every once in a while
one of them breaks loose underneath us. We found a place where some water was
boiling in a hollow. There was a short tunnel under it, all afire."
"I
don't understand the egg, though," Tim said. "Like Chinese buried
eggs?"
"Powder,"
Steve smiled. "Egg powder. I guess it would keep
forever. We're almost out of it."
For
a day Tim's gang rested. Then the clan, numbering now around eight hundred,
followed Llewellyn back out. They had found a big deposit of mixed coal and oil
and tar which had been crushed together long ago. They had mined a considerable
quantity loose with fire-blasting. Each person took a chunk of this to carry
back to Drega's. They carried the rest of their food supply and some stone containers
they had fashioned to keep themselves occupied.
Later
this supply of fuel was to save Drega's civilization. It burned into clinkers
and produced a high heat. It was the only fuel Dega's people were to know for a
long time with which they could melt bronze and run it through cinders into
channels and moulds beneath.
Drega
had thrown his entire camp into the duties of food and wood gathering, wood
burning to make tools and building the wall. "We might flounder around
trying to do this and that and get caught by winter. Let's go at this problem
as we can, without worrying about the things we are not doing."
Once
already they had had to fight off a large horde from the north and their
casualties had been heavy. The elephants had saved the day.
More
valuable than manpower, the elephants were not allowed to tread over a foot of
ground until the March Detail had tested it before them. This detail consisted
of four hundred heavy men, already trained to march with a heavy goose-step in
perfect rhythm.
Drums
had been fashioned out of hollow logs and skins from seals Lucky had
discovered. Each morning they marched heavily back and forth over the territory
the elephants would cover that day. Eight times the ground had given way
beneath their tread. Thirty of their ranks had died. A hundred and more were on
the sick or injured list.
It
was a heavy price. But daily the elephants heaved great blocks of stone and
logs into place. The solid barrier rampart was pushed ahead. Behind the
elephants men and women worked to exhaustion, filling in and piling smaller
rocks. Wooden scoops and shovels were used for dirt work.
At
the outset Drega had stated, "We need good cement," and called a former
cement manufacturer into conference. But with no supplies at hand the man was
defeated.
"I
thought you were the biggest cement man in the world," Prescott growled.
"I am—at least I was," the man
said, bewildered. "But we made our product by the thousands of tons. We imported
raw materials from twenty States. There's not even lime herel The kilns won't work."
"No
lime?" roared Drega. What, he wondered, were all these former experts good
for? "Well, I can't make a kiln work either, but I can damned well get
lime of some sortl"
He had a large clay pot baked, a vessel with
a hole in one side. A crude bellows with a flap intake was made from a sealskin. This was made fast to the hole and a fire built
in the bottom of the pot. Large stones were placed in the fire to give a land
of grating and limestone was laid across the rocks. In forty-eight hours he was
getting chunk lime.
Drega
ordered the lime pulverized after that. It was done at tremendous effort by men
and women using rocks in smashing pits. It was mixed with sand and carried dry
on pole trays covered with clay.
If
streams, backwaters, springs or potholes were handy it was wetted laboriously
from containers made of clay and brush or by ditch. Birch bark was too precious
to be used for heavy work. If no water was available it was left dry and the
clan prayed for a very fight rainfall.
So
the summer passed with men and women wearing themselves to the bone to maintain
the necessary daily food supply—fighting off the fierce clans from the
north—building the great wall and road so that it would be finished by
winter—and making crude tools from wood.
There
was little time for further exploration or metal working. Only one gang could
be spared to bring cable across the island and the cable was urgendy needed for
harness and lifting and fish nets. Only three women could be spared to melt
and peel the tar covering the cable. It was a dangerous and laborious task, the
only melting pit a natural rock formation which resisted heat fairly well and
beneath which huge fires were built.
The
greatest find of those months was when the elephants tugged a huge block aside
and exposed an old elevator cable almost perfect beneath its heavy coating of
grease. But it was dry and stiff and required three weeks to fire it back to
life.
Oddly
it was the need for money which gave birth to a feeble metallurgical industry.
Sailor began to demand his wages. "It ain't that I don't trust you,"
he said to Drega, "but you got so many people on your payroll I don't see
how you can remember all you owe me. I want something says you owe me so
much."
Drega
smiled appreciately. There were crack metallurgists among the clan. Many jewel
and metal workers had been in that district. But experiments to work metal had
not proved successful. Lead they had melted much earlier—at a terrific cost of
fuel and loss of metal.
But
money was even more important than tools. Money was morale—the thing which kept
the grumbling, surly and bad-humored tribe fighting their way through. And tempers
were getting sharper as food became more limited. The only bright outlook was
the hope of early berries and summer roots.
Drega
called a conference of pitman and metal workers. They had just discovered the
intense heat of the fuel brought by Steve's clan. The cement men were called
in. They had learned where certain beds of lime, better lime, and sand existed.
The outcome was an open-fire pit, crossed midway down by blocks of granite.
Beneath the blocks narrow tunnels opened into the pit. The tunnels opened at
their other extremities giving some draft. A large bellows was made from the
elephant hide. At the very bottom of the pit a channel was made of clay. This
channel led to molds of hardened sand carefully packed by hand, then wetted and
dried with fresh water for several days.
The
channel and the molds nearly drove the metal workers to distraction. Even the
copper man shook his head hopelessly at the channel and the forms.
"What's wrong with
them?" Drega wanted to know.
"Well,
for one thing, when the molten lead hits that lime it's going to raise
hell."
"Then we can use plain sand at the
pit."
"We
can't find any. No molder's sand. That's better than the sand around here. But when the metal gets out to those forms the sand's still no
good. It's full of dirt and minerals and it's going to work in with the
metal."
They
tried the experiment anyway. The fuel was piled upon the granite stones. Hunks
and sheets of lead were laid atop these. The fuel was fired, the bellows
worked. The lead melted and dropped, working through the hard cinders. In the
pit the lime sputtered and bubbled and filled the metal with gas. The clay
channel cracked. In the molds the impure sand worked as the metal workers had
predicted.
Had
there been an old-fashioned blacksmith in the clan he could have saved the
situation. All these men were experts, artisans knowing only one branch of
their trade and used to working with the finest industrial materials and tools.
But the lead cooled and Drega had tokens to
give out for pay.
The
tokens were pitted. Many of
them were cracked and filled with foreign matter. But they were moneyl For a few weeks tension eased. People had
something negotiable with which to barter and gamble.
Then
too, money was a whip to hold over the heads of shirkers and the lazy. A scale
of wages was now worked out on a much closer basis than before. The matter of a
few cents' difference in actual lead money made a sharper impression on wage
earners than a matter of dollars in promises before.
The great wall across the island was finished
on the first cold day. But it was a weather freak and there followed two weeks
of wonderful Indian Summer, during which the clan
rested. There were berries and herbs in quantity and a semblance of crude
alcohol was concocted by fermentation.
The
tough grasses of the lower island had grown long and the women set about
braiding and weaving skirts and brassieres. Their hair had grown during the
months and the hard work had given lithe lines to their rounded bodies. With a
rest they were a handsome lot, including many of the best-looking secretaries
from the former Wall Street district. For the first time men paid them serious
attention.
It
was Turpine who brought sharply into focus the additional work to be done.
"I've got to have a solid warm cave for my elephants for winter," he
informed Drega, "and a lot of hay. They're no shaggy mammoths."
Drega
looked over their cutting utensils, the bronze knives and scythe and a few
sharp stones. They had not been able to do anything with the bronze as yet. The
metal
was now melted in the clay-pot lime kiln. A
small pot was placed inside, with a lead-off for the molten metal. Clay molds
were tried and worked reasonably well. Blunt instruments were then sharpened
by honing.
Drega called the clan out to cut hay for the
elephants and to build winter hovels along the inner edge of the walL both for
protection from the enemy and from the winter winds which would sweep the
ridge.
The
clan did not respond with enthusiasm. There was a great weariness. For the
first time they were enjoying leisure and good weather. A few caches of canned
goods had been discovered. About one can in twenty was safe to eat. They could
tell when they smashed one on a rock. If it exploded, then it was poison.
Otherwise their systems seemed to manage it.
Drega
called out his faithfuls. Largely they were workers from the building and
maintenance trades but there was a scattering of artisans and technicians who
worked with their hands. Drega had a fundamental respect for people who could
make things. This group policed the camp, driving people to work, at first by
coaxing, then shortly by physical dominance, for the mass grew surly and hard
to handle.
"So you've become a dictator
again?" Lucky said to Drega.
Drega sighed wearily, "It's no
pleasure." He went off personally to help in the construction of the
elephant quarters, for the building must contain three chimneys and a broad
roof with no cracks.
The
clan irked under Drega's drive. When the winter housing was finished, still he
drove them on to exploration, to clear the old warehouse across the island, to
salt and smoke fish. They began to turn against him.
It was in a September chill that Drega called
them together and said, "I cannot hold this from you any longer. We have
no food for winter. We have been going into our preserved stores. We are almost
out of food now.
"In
five days we have caught only three hundred and sixty fish and crabs in nets
and pools combined. The situation is serious. We must crack some of the
warehouses and hope to heaven they still hold some edible food—or starvel"
"There
are still the elephants!" somebody in the crowd growled.
Mass bitterness at their condition turned
against the elephants. With a sudden roar the crowd swept toward the elephant
house. Leading his small bodyguard, Drega raced along the wall to head them
off. He won through to the house by yards. A bitter club fight ensued. Nine
people fell to the metal-tipped cudgels of Drega's men.
Day
by day the bitterness against Drega grew deeper in the rank and file. There was
muttering around the fires at night. Men who should have been working began to
fashion themselves fighting weapons of hardened wood and stone and what metal
they could steal from Drega's stores.
It
was at this time that Drega told Lucky, "I've worked out a real lime kiln!
That idiot who used to write about them forgot the chimney slope and his pit
was shallow."
"Does that save
us?" Lucky asked.
Drega
said, "If we can find a way to work iron it would keep them busy through
the winter. We might pull through, because with lime we could make the houses
warmer and fires hotter. And with iron, even the crudest implements,
we could get into those warehouse hills."
"I
thought Man made iron very early," said Lucky. "Why haven't we been
smelting ore?"
Drega
gave him a sardonic look. "Because we have no blast
furnace! We've got the foremost metallurgist in the country and three
crack fumace-men. But they don't know how to work ore without a blast furnace
and dolomite! Lord deliver me from civilization."
He took a piece of dried fish off a crude silver dish and crushed it savagely
between strong teeth.
Tim came up, two of his men holding a surly
clansman between them. Once he had been a leading importer, "Broaching
stores," Tim reported succincdy.
"What kind?"
Tim wet his Hps.
"About sixty pounds of dried fish."
Drega
got up and walked around morosely while the council was called. The discussion
was short. There could be no alternative with winter this close. It was
death—or its equivalent. The man was dropped over the wall, left to the mercy
of the prowling cannibal clans.
But
the sentence was not approved by the clan. Many fomenting spirits had eaten of
those stolen stores. Others had been planning on the same thing. For many days
now the rations had become shorter and shorter and their stomachs were empty.
Toward
the end of October the clan revolted against Drega's enforced command to work.
The week had been one of broken heads, of flogged bodies, of heavy financial
fines, of fines in the way of withheld meals. It was the money penalties on
which their bitterness settled. Oddly enough they planned to kill the man who
stood behind the money. Without Drega it was worthless.
In
the dark of midnight a large body crept upon his hovel. They passed Lucky's and
he was awakened by his dog's growling. From the muttering and the stealth of
the band, he knew what was afoot.
It
was possible to reach Drega's from his place over the brow of die ridge, out of
sight of the plotters. Madly, Lucky raced to give warning. The mob had stopped
to reassure itself of its hatred, for all knew that taking Drega would not be
easy. His house was placed for strategic command and the houses of his trusted
men surrounded him.
Lucky
rushed in Drega's back door and panted the warning. Drega leaped from his bed
of branches slamming a heavy silver mallet upon a small bronze ring. In the
dark of the night its clear voice rang out, telling of danger to the clan.
Drega's
bodyguard rushed from their sleep. But they were outnumbered and forced up the
wall. It was a terrible and lengthy riot that night, with many who might have
assisted Drega uncertain what to do behind the ranks of the insurrectionists.
During
the frenzy of batde someone broke into the one well-made house except the
elephant stable—the food supply house. News spread through the mob. Defeated by
the organized army of loyal men, it broke and tumbled through the supply house
grabbing food.
There
was no way for the smaller body of men to investigate in the dark of the
night. Until dawn they huddled around Drega's, expecting a fresh attack every
minute, their eyes glued to the fires springing up at the far end of the camp.
At
dawn they went through the wrecked supply house. Not a bit of food was left.
The clansmen had gorged themselves as only starved people, worked to the bone
an entire summer, could gorge. They lay in heavy slumber around the charred
embers of their fires. They awakened as if they had been drunk, hysteria gone, their wits dull, many not knowing why they had attacked
Drega the night before. They were not sorry. They simply did not understand
their own actions.
That day the fish pools petered out and the
nets brought almost no catch. Possibly the fish had been
fished out or simply grown wary of that shoreline. Within a few days the
clan was famished and ugly again. But they would not risk another attack on
Drega. They came up in the light of day, demanding to know what he would do
with them that winter. The story had spread that he had vast stores of food
beneath his house.
"There
is nothing I can do," Drega said simply. "We have not even sufficient
food for an expedition out beyond the wall."
This
was true but he partly spoke for effect. Drega believed in his destiny.
Somehow he would find a way to take care of his obstreperous clan. But he
wanted them to get a good lesson, for the winter would be severe. He did not
mind the muttering and hatred of the moment. They would get over that—when they
got hungry enough. Well he knew the way of mobs.
And at that moment there was a throbbing in
the air. They looked toward the river. A large motor boat turned in toward
shore!
White-haired
and forceful, Simon Gamble
leaped ashore. Without hesitation, he walked up to Drega, his boots holding
chief regard of the clansmen.
Drega
smiled cynically. "So it was you, Gamble? I thought so. Your great hobby
was always suspended animation. But why so long?"
Gamble
colored slighdy. "We had our own place to order first—food to grow."
He
smoked a cigarette. The pungent smoke drew the clan into one mind encompassed
by memory of—yesterday.
"It
took you eight months," Drega noted. "That's a long time in your
world, Gamble. It isn't possible you intended suspended animation for, say, a
hundred years—and something went out of whack?"
Gamble said abrupdy, "That's neither
here nor there!" He flicked a glance over the naked horde, his mind
classifying them in various conditions of health and disease and malnutrition.
"You haven't done badly," he admitted grudgingly. "We'll send
down clothing and get things back in order."
"Thanks," Drega said. His hps were
curled in a peculiar smile. Gamble's assistants were tossing small boxes
ashore-sweet chocolate, cigarettes, malted milk, things a starved people craved
more than real food.
"I
suppose you're ready to admit the error of the old economic system now?"
Gamble asked. "You've had time enough without your gold. Or did you find
some?"
"No, we didn't look for it," Drega
said. "But what particular error of the many you deplored in the old
system do you wish me to admit?"
Gamble
snorted. "Money—corporations—ownership—war-inefficiency—compromise."
"I don't think they were errors."
Drega's tone hardened. "We may not look like much, Gamble, but little
pieces of lead money built this walll And this wall is
the difference between us and savage cannibals."
Gamble's
eyes hardened perceptibly. "You haven't changed, Drega. I thought this
might be a lesson. You still want power to run things, to own people."
Drega said softly,
"And you?"
"I
want to give them science," Gamble roared. "Science and your kind of
money can't get along in the same world."
"Then there's no room
for us in your world, Gamble."
Gamble's lips curled. He had caught the
slight hesitation on the word us. He
turned to the people. They gave him a joyous cheer through mouths full of
chocolate and from lungs choking by their first cigarettes since the awakening.
Passionately, he gave them a picture of the
world science could create for them—com as high as their wall five days after
planting. Clothing in such quantity they could throw it into refabrication
machines when it grew shoddy. Cars and private baths for
every member of the family, luxuries for all and poverty for none. It
was a beautiful picture. It left them silent and stunned.
"It
will take a litde time," Gamble said. "But not long. There is only
one condition. You all work and there is no money—at least money of the kind you know. In return
you get everything you can wish for. There will be no need for moneyl"
A cheer rose and fell dead into stunned
silence. There could be no doubt Gamble spoke at least some truth. A look at
his shining boots—and the presents he had brought" proved it. Even the
bolts of fabricated silks and woolensl "Mr. Drega," Gamble went on,
"does not agree with my views. He will probably wish to withdraw from any
part of them."
If Gamble had expected Drega to capitulate he
was disappointed. Drega was white but firm. He said to his people, "A
world cannot exist without moneyl There must be
trade."
His clan was silent.
Gamble
said, "You only trade for what you do not have. But you will have
everything. You will have a hot dinner cooked as you used to know
it—tonight!"
That clinched it! A mighty cheer went up and
echoed! The people burst into a frenzy of dancing, yelling, and crying.
Drega shouted through the din at Gamble,
"You'll want the minerals on this island. Will you take me to
Jersey?"
Gamble said with some disappointment,
"You fool! You could be useful too." He lit a fresh cigarette and
nodded. "Of course. And whatever you want to
take. If you change your mind you may come back—under scientific
economics."
The
leaders of Drega's clan were standing around silently, lost in their own
thoughts. Sailor scratched and twisted and finally mumbled, "You owe me a
lot of money, Drega, and I couldn't collect if I stayed here. Ill be going with you."
A
former merchant prince was undecided, then spread his
hands, "Vat, no trade? But where am I? Mr. Drega, I stay by you. I am not
very hungry this winter anyway."
Llewellyn
studied Gamble a long time. Then he swaggered over to Drega. "I was bom
sweating in a mine and I been fighting for them sort of hours too long to want
to get 'em nov^."
Marillo
and Carter both blew their noses and moved behind their chief. The judge
scratched his head three times. "That dinner sounds good," he
mumbled. He held his arm up and glanced at the frayed cloth of the suit Drega
had given him. "But there wouldn't be any constitutional law under you,
Gamble." He moved behind Drega.
A
former confidence man flipped a lead coin a few minutes, then snapped his
fingers, pitched the coin into the river and came over. "I was bom a
sucker," he grinned.
Tim
was talking in a low voice to the bodyguard. One of them laughed at him. Tim
smashed him down, yelled. "All right!" Black
with rage he went over to his boss. About one third of the bodyguard followed
him.
Turpine
was picking his nose, and wiping his eyes with the back of his wrist.
"Nuts!" he snapped savagely. "Lizzie wouldn't get along without
you, Mr. Drega."
Drega
swallowed. "Lizzie's an elephant. But she belongs to the clan," he
explained to Gamble.
Gamble
laughed. "There's a bulldozer engine aboard that ship that could pull a
dozen elephants! Take the beast. Take everything you want, Drega. Ill toss in
food and clothing for the winter and tools."
Drega stiffened.
Gamble's
eyes twinkled. He almost felt friendly. "You used to believe it was worth
a price to buy a man off!"
Drega began to laugh. "So it isl I'll
make it stiff. I want complete equipment to set up a town."
Gamble
nodded and called his men to give Drega a hand.
The elephants and Drega's men were aboard.
Drega was marching down to the boat A beautiful woman
with blazing diamonds around her neck walked over to him. "And I?"
she asked sofdy.
Drega said, "Marian,
it will be—"
She
shrugged her shoulders which hard work had returned to beauty. She stepped
aboard the boat.
"You're
an idiot, Dregal" Prescott said. He was furious with Drega for forcing him
to the decision to stay. "This is progress!"
Drega
grinned. He pointed toward Jersey. "Over there well have money."
Lulu
Belle nudged Lucky. "Maybe they'll have two-dollar weddings."
Lucky
looked grimly ill at ease. He had risked his life a dozen times for Drega. He
liked him—he almost hated himself for it, yet he could not deny his emotions.
But Lucky was a newspaper man at heart. The story was with
Gamble for now. Drega was rebuilding a shattered world. Gamble was making a new
one.
The
clan had suddenly fallen silent. A few looked hesitant. Thirteen artisans and
technicians suddenly rail aboard the boat.
"A good number,"
Drega stated. "Any more?"
There
was shuffling but nobody moved. Silendy the clan watched the boat pull into the
swift currents of the river. Currents which had broken rafts
but barely swung the powerful ship.
Prescott
growled. "I hope you don't forget that dinner, Gamble. We ought to have it
down here as a farewell."
"Oh,
it won't be a farewell," Gamble said. "But I almost forgot about it.
Ill radio the ship to pick up food and cookers before
it comes back."
"Radio?" Prescott asked.
"The scientific way," Gamble said.
Already his mind was lost in a tremendous,
efficient scientific future for these people. Abstractedly he drew a device
the size of a watch from his pocket. Two short wisps of wire trailed from it.
He hooked one onto his belt. It was his own invention and infinitely superior
to the type of radio used in the yesterday of three thousand years before.
"Where's a water pipe?" he asked,
still abstracted. "I need a running water pipe for this radio."
Prescott
swore for one of the few times in his life. He pointed to the swiftly
disappearing boat. "Out there! Water pipe! Oh,
hell and damnationl" Then he looked at Gamble hesitantly, speculatively.
He began to wonder.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Gamble
and Drega were more alike
than they imagined. Gamble too had the dynamic urge to do things. He too was an
organizer. But where Drega organized and drove men, Gamble organized and drove
science.
It
was with cold detachment that he had put mankind into suspended
animation—planned for between fifty and seventy-five years. Somehow—it shocked
him to think this even possible—his calculations had erred. Three thousand
years had slipped by. Only a time-resisting blanket of pure hydrogen had saved
his laboratories.
Yet, from a scientific standpoint, the error
was a benefit.
Take
gold—Drega had said cheap gold would shatter the world's economic system. Well,
the system was shattered —completely. There was no longer reason for Man to
think of money
or investments. They could build a new civilization free of
the inherent traditions and weaknesses of the old.
This would be a civilization
of pure science!
Gamble
delivered his promised feast to the clan—fourteen cases of food. Three
thousand people looked at the small pile with astonishment.
Gamble smiled. "Concentrated.
I assure you, it is sufficient."
His four assistants prepared the lavish feast
in a special catalytic stove. Twenty-three hors d'oeuvres occupied a space
about an inch square!
But—the
course was delicious. So was the half gill of soup. At the end came a striped
pill about the size of a peanut.
"What's this?" Prescott grunted
skeptically.
Gamble smiled, "A complete banana split.
Twelve trimmings."
The copper man leaned over to Lucky.
"I'm not hungry but I'll be damned if I et yetl A
dinner just don't seem right unless you got something to wade into."
Later
Lucky found him nibbling joyously on a piece of dried fish.
Early
the next day Gamble began classifying people, picking out leading
mathematicians, architects, metallurgical and viscose chemists,
electronocists, engineers, artisans and technicians. He gave the afternoon over
to physical inspection.
"Terrible," he muttered.
Lucky
Flagherty, who had decided to stay on, smiled and said, "The white-collar
workers are healthier than ever before! Lilly Peters, who used to keep our
books, knocked the tar out of a coal heaver last week!"
"Oh, physically the clan's all
right," Gamble said negligently. "But I fear malnutrition of
carbohydrates has reduced the capicity for acute concentration. How long can
you think of one thing?''
Lucky's
eyes fell on Lulu Belle. "I've been thinking about one thing for these
three thousand years."
Gamble
examined him at he would study a bug. "Amazing! Perfect case of arrested adolescence."
Lucky said,
"Huh?"
"Emotionally about thirteen, I'd
judge," Gamble said.
Lulu
Belle eyed Lucky suspiciously. "You'd better be more than thirteen if you
want to marry me, Lucky Flagherty!"
"Oh, well treat his adrenal glands and
bring him up to age," Gamble announced. "As soon as he matures he'll
realize that you're the wrong girl for him eugenically in any event."
Lulu Belle glowered at Gamble's receding
back.
Material
for clothing appeared but it was a heavy mottled-gray pulp composition. The
women looked at it doubtfully.
"Oh, the silk was just a test
product," Gamble explained. "It's obsolete. This is warm and cool and
waterproof. It allows the skin to breathe. It can be discarded like paper.
Youll notice seams along the edges. Wet them and press them together and your
clothing is made."
"But it won't be stylishl" Lulu
Belle complained. "It looks like mud."
"Styles
and color are anachronisms," Gamble said. "They have meaning only to
the savage."
"But I'm still a savage!" Lulu
Belle announced.
"As
soon as we have time," Gamble told her tolerantly, "we'll treat
glands to rid you to such hangovers."
"Well,
it looks as if progress were here in person," Lulu Belle noted
sarcastically to Prescott.
Prescott
said, 'There's a lot in what he says. We're still thinking with the minds and
memories of three thousand years ago."
Gamble
was highly disappointed with reports on the city. "Well need comprehensive
mineralogical and chemical surveys immediately," he announced.
"But the cannibals are still out
there!" Lucky said.
"Highly interesting! The human body's ability to adapt itself to violent changes is one of
the mysteries of science. We will have sufficient specimens of cannibalism and
mineral diet to make real studies."
"Are you going to kill
them?" Prescott asked hesitantly.
"Oh, by no means! Live
specimens are more valuable.
We'll
simply paralyze all animal activity in the cannibal belt for a few days."
His
next step with the clan was an antiseptic chemical bath, running them all
through a contraption like a sheep dip. After that, an electric treatment toned
up their glands and vitality. It had a miraculous effect. Wounds, cuts and
colds some of which had been weeks healing, were cured in twenty-four hours.
But
a wiser Gamble might have foreseen much from the clan's reaction. Mild ailments
had given individuals something to think and grumble about. They had nothing
wrong with themselves now and their minds turned to whatever else they could
find.
There
was much jibing about the pump and endless pipe Gamble had to use for his
"super" radio, which had to be hooked up to a running-water pipe for
transmission.
Becker, a radio operator, snorted,
"That's progress?"
Gamble's
laboratory was lighted by highly advanced methods but he kept a supply of
"electric bottles" which he presented to the clan. A twist of the top
caused the bottle to shine. Small appliances could be plugged in and run from
their energy.
Preliminary
surveys showed heavy surface ores and the exact location of tantalum, silver,
bronze, gold and heavy copper supplies. Soaps, tars, glues and waxes had been
located. A large chunk of heavy purple metal was brought back.
"Gold-aluminum alloy," Gamble noted
with interest. "I've always wanted a set of gold dishes," Lulu Belle
enthused.
Gamble sighed. "A set of iron dishes
would be more valuable right now."
The metallurgists were excited over the
possibilities of
unknown metals and alloys as the result of chemical action, pressure and the
passage of time. Never before, for instance, had copper been soaked with
formaldehyde or prussic acid and left to corrode in salt atmosphere for three
thousand years.
Gamble
called a meeting. "We're going to build an entirely new civilization for the first time in history! All previous cycles have grown out of the
traditions of dying peoples!"
The
architects in particular grasped the immensity of the vision. "We need
steel in large quantities," noted Phillips, most visionary of the group.
Gamble shook his head. "Steel passed
with the world's slumber. A much better material is tantalectron, tested for years and its technique of
production secretly perfected. It was withheld for fear of wrecking the
open-hearth steel industry. Three hundred tons of mild steel would be required
to give the equivalent tensile strength of one ton of tantalectron."
"Is that a theoretical comparison?"
Phillips asked.
Gamble's
eyes lit with pardonable pride. "No, it's a practical working
comparison!"
"Could open-hearth furnaces be
converted?"
Gamble
looked boyishly embarrassed. "There is a
slight difficulty. Nitrate is needed from Chile. And special glass furnaces are
needed for smelting. We knew how to make glass but so far we don't know of any
substance in which glass can be made in quantity."
Phillips
sprang into the awkward silence. "What's the first vital necessity,
Gamble?"
"Gold." And the scientist explained, "We need
considerable quantities of gold wire to maintain our food supply. But there is
one thing even more important."
What could be more
important than food?
"We can transmute gold
into highly resistant steel!"
"Is there enough
gold?" Steig asked.
"The
process results in expansion by both weight and volume. All the dura metals
should be Jeft. We'll make a new alloy."
LucJ:y whispered to Prescott. "This is getting a little
complicated."
Prescot snapped, "You're not on the
editorial page!
That reminds me, I must put in a bid for presses. No
protection of public interests without a free press. Harrummm!" , Gamble was saying, "There is more free
gold available than any other metal. It should be a simple matter to get into
the sub-Treasury and Drega vaults. Another point is that most of the power
equipment I can give you operates on atomic energy. Inversely from
transmutation of iron into gold, with a high production energy cost, when
transmuting gold into iron, there is a high atomic energy by-product."
CHAPTER
SIXTEEN
r
It
was Talfis of the Tallis
vault works who pointed out; "You're going to have difficulty getting into
those vaults. It will surprise me if there is any noticeable corrosion."
Gamble
said, "We have electronic torches which can cut any vault by
disintegration. But they use radio-active substance of exceptionally high wave
length." •
Pritchlard,
an electronics expert, nodded. "It would break down the vaults all right.
But—also the gold before you ever got to it."
Salter
of the Corinth Glass Works spoke up hesitantly. "We haven't acids or
explosives. What we need is some solvent powerful enough to take concrete,
iron, copper or lead in its stride. An acid glass—one with excess silica—is the
nearest approach to the universal solvent I know of. But for that we need
clay."
Gamble was shaken with growing doubts. Was
civilization, science,
to crumble for want of
clay? Good crucible clay was almost a treasure and came from distant places.
Salter
said grimly, "We can try local clay and prayers. The clay by itself won't
make Indian pottery."
They
knew their clays and sands intimately, these lean liquid-death challengers.
Using Gamble's boat they searched the shores. But they did not find their clay
along the shoreline. They found it when Gamble came back from inspection and
Salter picked a piece off his boot.
"Now
we need potash and lead oxide," Salter said energetically. "We found
a course sand that will do."
Gamble
said relievedly, "I can make the potash and lead oxide for you. How much
do you need?"
"About two tons of
high-grade ash and five of lead."
Gamble
stared. Salter was serious. "That would be two months' work for the
laboratory's combined kilnsl And this new kiln won't
be finished for weeks."
Leading
men of the new world, glass-makers, electron-ocists, chemists, engineers,
scientists, stood with set faces. In that clan there were men who knew how to
direct any activity of industry or science.
But
not one man could work from the ground up! They thought in terms of millions of
kilowatts or volts, hundred-ton lots, hundred-horsepower equipment. They had
risen above the raw earth and nature, were unable to get down.
Drega had recognized this
and started at the bottom.
Lucky
whispered to Prescott, "Remember Abe Lincoln? Here's the gang whose legs
aren't quite long enough to reach the ground."
"You,"
Prescot said, "are going to get fired—hmmm— as soon as I can liire you again!" He was thoroughly sold on
progress in big jumps. He wanted a printing press again.
The first snow-flurried that morning. A cold wind blew off the river. But Gamble's
clan were in excellent spirits. They had warm
clothing.
It
was unnecessary with the new plastic clothing to wear outer garments. - It was
windproof and the inner finishing acted automatically to hold heat close to
normal body temperature. It was an inherent property of the material.
Gamble's face was hard as they commenced
operations on the sub-Treasury vault. His laboratory had not been set up to
produce supplies in industrial quantities. He had taken a risk which he had not
mentioned to anybody. For the three utility machines—they could be used for
almost any-diing from hoists to drilling—he had taken fully three-quarters of
his remainiiig supply of atomic fuel.
Unless
they got at that gold, his laboratory was going to become a finely keyed
mechanism without fuel. And to get more fuel out of the ground they needed some
of the gold transmuted into iron and steel and energy.
They
had, they all fervently prayed, solved the problem of getting the vault open.
They would tackle it widi limited glass operations.
Gamble
had brought down his one tractor, a heavy steamer which he considered the most
efficient motive power for this type of work. "I have never seen an
obstacle other than a sheer rock face it could not surmount," he said. He
was pleased with the way it was hauling a load of clay.
Fate
presented the other obstacle. No March Detail had goose-stepped ahead of the
heavy unit. No Drega had foreseen catastrophe. The tractor suddenly dropped
from sight. There was a splash and a jet of water. When they grappled they
found it jammed soldily amid submerged rubble beneath thirty feet of water.
So
sand, potash, lead oxide, clay for the crucible and lime to aid the coke fife
had to be hauled slowly, painfully, by hand. The coke
came from Gamble's precious laboratory supply. Gamble himself had treated it
w/th a special hydrogen process.
With
materials in place and fire pit and chimney fashioned, Salter signalled
Gamble. "I'm not sure this can be done. It wasn't in the textbooks."
He smiled wryly. "It takes exceedingly good clay to hold molten glass. If
we tried making a hard crucible first we might waste ten to twenty weeks. So
we've left blowholes in this clay form."
Gamble
nodded. "You'll melt your primary mixture and hope the form doesn't break
up before it coats."
Salter
shook his head. "The clay is mostly a mold' for glass reinforcement. If
the reinforcement holds and the clay doesn't crack away from the blowholes, we'll have glass."
Salter looked at his gang, nervous with
unfamiliar units and materials. They had to work down in the trench beside the
vault. If that form failed—molten glass was going to flow out knee-deep.
Silent,
the clan stood around while Salter studied every wisp of vapor that steamed
from the form. "Drag fire!" he yelled as the steam suddenly changed
hue.
In
the pit there was furious scrambling to drag the searing fire. Fascinated, the
clan watched the skin of the glass workers blister and peel back from the
raging heat. Within five minutes somebody had to get beneath that precarious
form and knock loose a bung to dump the molten overlay within.
The
pit was raked, chemicals to cool it thrown in. Water got into the pit. There
was a spot of ice not two feet from where the ground itself burned.
"She's
clear!" the gang foreman called. "Knock the bung?"
His eyes were too puffed and his voice too
thick to reveal the emotion behind it. But Rumplemeyer knew he was asking for
a quick and terrible exodus from this Earth. Ordinarily a reliable crucible was
lifted by automatic crane and carried to a safe distance for dumping.
"No,"
said Salter, "come up." He waited for the tired men to clamber from
the pit. He signalled Rumplemeyer. "You understand the mixture for
tomorrow? You'll have to gauge your heat. There are no- pyrometers."
Rumplemeyer
said dizzily, "Yes, I understand. But you'll be here."
Salter said, "Don't forget to add lime
silica immediately when the vapors turn deep yellow."
Calmly he picked up a heavy
sledge and climbed down the
ladder. Carefully he studied the trench flooring and the bottom of the clay
form. A tiny jet of milky substance broke out of a hole and spurted past his
shoulder.
Salter looked up at the crowd once.
Lucky said, "Jumping
Judas, you can't . . ."
Salter
swung the sledge. A shower of molten glass flew. Again he swung. A thick milky
jet spurted out from the bottom of the form. It looked beautiful and harmless.
Its vapors spread heavily.
Lucky's
glance switched back to Salter. The vapors were reaching out thickly to hide
the man. But Lucky saw the white stuff rising around him.
Only
it wasn't rising. It was eating him down from beneath. Salter's one shriek
rang as his head disappeared in the molten liquid. Then the trench was filled
with smoke and vapor and fumes.
Only
once that night did Lucky speak to Rumplemeyer. "Was it necessary to stay
down for that last strike?"
Rumplemeyer
nodded heavily. "The form was beginning to go. He had to get that weight
out of there quick. It would have been the same if the whole bung had gone on
the first strike. But he should have let me do it."
Gamble
too spoke only once, softly to himself. "For science," he said in
tribute. "Ah, that is the way to gol" He did not know that Lucky was
listening. The reporter wondered vaguely whether . . .
In
the cold light of dawn, Rumplemeyer took tools into the trench and climbed onto
its slick, bluish-tinted floor. Carefully he broke off one of the milky jets
that hung like icicles from the clay mold. Then he broke out a measured section
of clouded glass beneath the mold and carried the chunks above.
The sun was just rising as they dropped these
chunks
into an ancient Ming vase and lowered the vase
carefully into hallowed ground behind the remaining cathedral. Rumplemeyer
smiled through his tears. He did not know the vase's museum value but he
recognized the skill of a great artisan.
"It is good," he said simply.
"It is the way he would have liked."
An
hour later Rumplemeyer was swearing at crazy descendants of apes who didn't
know how to give a glass man the things he called for.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Not
until years later, when the
bits of the puzzle of those days fell into place, did Lucky fully understand
Gamble's panic that bleak morning.
Gamble
was frightened, frightened of an abstract thing —failure. He did not think of himself, or the millions
of lives depending upon that gold. He did not think of the bitter struggle back
to civilization.
He
thought of Salter dying knowingly and horribly— for success. What if there were no
success? What if Salter had made his sacrifice in vain?
New
determination fired the glass gang. They were to need it in the coming hours.
Rumplemeyer had sounded the filled crucible from twenty directions with a
bronze rod. It was too soft to be sure of. It would not be so liable to split.
Without
hesitation the gang mixed materials, saw to their working room, inspected every
inch of the vault against which they would try to boil glass so that if one man
went another could instantly take his place.
It
was not unusual to
go in that trade. A
dizzy moment from heat or fumes, a slip, a second of unwariness—there was no
rescue for a glass man.
In
spite of the shock of Salter's death, Tallis felt glad that he had lived to see
his own handiwork. The vault cement was solid. Not as solid as it had once been
but more solid than any other cement in the city. That was because of the
intricate design of the reinforcement and the special chemical nature of the
cement. The iron reinforcements had corroded very little and the cement had
given to the growth within. It was still sound.
It
was not until later that night that the molten glass began to form. With great
care Rumplemeyer nursed it along. There was a trick to the cooking of glass,
the holding of an even temperature throughout. Now, though, he needed an acid
glass.
At
daylight they added the final mixtures. At noon Rumplemeyer got so close to the
vapors that heat peeled flesh off his nose and hps. Sudden puffs began to issue
from the crucible and he nodded.
"It's ready," he
said quietly.
He
turned below personally to knock the outlet against the bank vault. It was
tricky, working with molten glass spattering down beside their very sides. Each
shift of the crucible spelled possible destruction."
Slicing
out like a thin milk-white snake, the molten glass ate against the vault. It
flowed through cement and rust and iron like butter. But Willis shook his head.
Beyond that were twenty-two plies of crosed steel. And beyond
that, still more solid steel.
But even this might be negotiated. The most
difficult barrier lay still beyond—four separate two-inch plates of copper with
heavy ply and woven layers of lead between. Willis remembered that there were
forty-eight thousand cubic feet of copper and ninety-six of lead.
For
three solid days the glass gang worked. Hourly they were, carried from the pit
and returned when they came to. Their bodies looked like raw meat and then
began to turn black. On the third day Rumplemeyer staggered out of the pit. He
had lost one third of his weight, and he had been solid bone and muscles to
start with.
"We have a hole through the steel block
packing and the next steel plate."
Gamble said, "Magnificent!"
Rumplemeyer said, "No—the heat is
melting the copper and lead inside. It comes through the hole as fast as we
burn. But if we stop it hardens and we're nowhere. All that inner lining will
have to be coolced out. And when we finish, the entire space will be filled
with pressure glass."
Gamble
whitened. Willis nodded. Gamble said, "What can we do?" Never had he
asked that of man before. And he was asking a pit foreman!
Rumplemeyer shook his head. Salter had . . .
"We'll
get through, sir." His voice was grim. "It ain't going to be easy,
but we've got only about three feet of copper and lead to cut. The copper goes
into solution in that hot glass pretty easy. Lead'il run.
If we once get a hole into that lead, let it harden again, then
run some more glass, we'll have a glass-fined hole. That way, we'll reach the
steel beyond."
"How long?" asked Gamble tighdy.
"Six weeks—workin' like hell."
Gamble
sat back heavily. "Work like hell then, Rumplemeyer.
We've got to get that gold. Gold!" He laughed
grimly and rather unsteadily. He had brought about this suspension—this
ruin—because he hated gold and the compromises gold and the love of gold had
forced on that long-gone civilization. And he . . . "Yes," he
repeated somberly, "work like hell!"
Work
had been called off, and only a fire-crew was on duty. The others were being
treated by Gamble's experts. Queer radiations that accompanied some of his
atomic release experiments were utterly deadly to infection, fearfully and
wonderfully stimulating to healing. But they exhausted the patient's body so
that he must sleep twelve full hours to arise sound and fit.
It was miraculous but Gamble could find now
no gratification in this knowledge that made it possible to turn baked meat
back to sound, living manhood. For Gamble accepted automatically the advanced
tools of a great civilization. It was the lack of them—the boring through
stubborn concrete and steel with molten glass—that paralyzed his imagination.
Gamble was incapable of understanding how men
had first built their weary way through ten thousand years from the treetops
and caves to civilization. Gamble could not find that road again nor could his
experts. If the gold vault defied them—if the slim chain of vast science his
laboratory preserved should break—Gamble would be broken. He had no second
string. Drega could work with raw rock and brute power, could build again.
Gamble could not. He knew it—now.
Tallis had been watching the glass workers,
watching the efforts to break the mighty fortress of wealth he had built. It
was a grim satisfaction to him to see the impregnable solidity of it withstanding
these assaults as it had weathered the three thousand years of time. He moved
over now toward Gamble and Rumplemeyer, near the healing radiations.
"They're digging a trench around toward
the front of the vault. What's the plan now, Rumplemeyer?" he asked
curiously.
"Shunt the cooling glass away before it
hardens in place and plugs the hole it cuts. We've been breaking it out with
sledges but it's too far in to swing now."
"You stopped just short of the
lime-layer, I noticed. There's—"
Rumplemeyer turned sharply. " 'Lime-layer?' What the hell! What do you mean,
'lime-layer'?"
Tallis stepped back
started. "Why, between two layers of two-inch copper there's that layer of
lime—lime-cement —I told you about!"
"What's 'lime-cement'?" snapped the
glass man.
"Quicklime
and water mixed and pounded into place. It stops oxygen torches. It won't melt
and drinks the heat."
Rumplemeyer
sat down weakly. "Oh, Lord—lime!" He shook his head slowly. "One
of the few things on Earth that glass can't cut. Lime glass is basic. It won't
cut steel. It won't cut copper. And it won't melt."
Gamble
took a hesitant step toward the steaming pit, where men still worked. Some of
the others of the clan were digging there. Shovels threw dirt up to a mound of
raw earth.
There
was a shout down there suddenly—then a lurid cursing, and sudden silence. Two
of Gamble's medical assistants started forward on the run. Six of the glass
workers mounted from the pit, cold fury glazing in their eyes, from their
blistered faces. They walked past the medical men unheeding, their eyes on
Gamble. The biggest of them halted menacingly before the scientist, a heavy
pick-handle clenched in white-knuckled hands.
"Listen,
you run-down genius, did you know about that vault?"
"Know—know
about . . . P You mean the lime? No." Gamble shook his head despondentiy.
The slim thread— the chain to the past—was broken.
"Lime, hell! The door, you ■ damned crackpot! You let Salter die—and the door
. . . !"
"Oh," said Tallis
softly. "The time lock would go off."
Duega
was later to laugh about
this. It was the very gold that Gamble condemned that made possible his
resurrection of civilization. Without it he could not have sustained the food
supply nor mined iron in time. For Gamble's world simply did not understand the
simple ways of their forefathers.
Gold
gave to the artisans and technicians the tool they understood and needed and
had confidence in. It gave them power. It
made possible again the correlation of experts and specialists, for many men
knew only division of their trade.
Phillips, for instance, could not cut and
join pipe, although he could figure the total pipe length in a huge building
to the inch. Foundation masons were lost on precise chimney work.
But
it was not possible to jump immediately into the world Gamble dreamed of. His
laboratory worked at peak capacity. He had expert help. Many of die scientists,
professors and post-graduate students of the university had survived.
He
had reclaimed the cannibal tribes and released a surprisingly large number of the
people still living underground. From the eighty-four thousand people who had
survived in Manhattan he could select specialists in almost any line.
His first major work was to reclaim the
spoils of the dead city. But equipment was terribly limited. They needed
tremendous amounts of lime and coke and charcoal.
To Gamble, charcoal had always been something
one
telephoned for and received. Occasionally, for
exceedingly delicate work, he had made his
own in small quantities, but in a special electric oven designed for just that
purpose. There was no material to make a larger oven of that order.
Thornton
was a former owner of a vast charcoal works supplying the whole alloy-steel
industry. But Thornton had never made anything except specified high qualities
of charcoal. He had ordered special woods from one locality, clays from
another. He had used chemicals which were not now available.
His pits had been specially prepared for
draft. He simply said to the foreman, "Wouldn't it improve the char combustion
if we used forced draft and increased the pressure?" Exactly what the
foreman had done, or how, Thornton did not know.
Now he took the woods and clay at hand. The
clays he knew but die wood grading he had to take on another's say-so. Except
that it was wood of a quality and type his works never would have considered,
he knew nothing about it.
There was a battle over the use of the five
power-saws between Phillips and Thornton. Phillips was busily constructing
urgently needed work houses. Thornton Wanted wood for fires immediately. Both of them had to wait. There was a slide
at surface mine No. Six and Richards got the saws to
cut emergency reinforcing timbers.
Gamble
considered handsaws archaic but to supply the present shortage of machines he
made one hundred crosscut saws at his laboratory. Carpenters" and
woodsmen felt and sprang and tuned them with admiration. Never had they seen
finer steel.
The
only trouble was they wouldn't saw. They squealed and jammed. There was no
kerosene and sawing was difficult
at best. A lumberman said, "You set the teeth wrong. They shouldn't be
even."
Gamble
colored. The type and tempering of that steel was such that the teeth couldn't
be changed. He had made the steel purposely to spring back into original shape.
Re-forging ruined the perfect quality of the steel. But the saws worked.
Thorton
superintended the piling and smothering of charcoal piles himself. He knew the
piles were right, the proper amounts of clay laid on.
How often had he worked on graphs and blueprints far into the night to get the
right angles, the best positions for blowholes, the right amounts of clay and
pressure?
But
his furnaces had been a hundred times the size of these. They had heat and
pressure meters, and intricate mazes of drafts. If he said, "Force sixteen
draft," the foreman carried out the rest. It was
the foreman who arranged the draft vents, the damping, the
piling. And the foreman was not there.
A talkative old man watched Thornton's gang.
He talked incessantly about potato farming. When asked his opinion on anything
he would go off into long-winded details of why it wouldn't work. "The
charcoal will never cook," he said.
It didn't.
Three
times Thornton tried his luck. The last time he got a poor quality charcoal.
Why, he didn't know. He had built his furnaces exactly as before. The garrulous
old man shook his head.
"Well," Thornton snapped,
"maybe you can make it?"
The
old man chortled. "Make it? I been making it for
nigh on sixty years."
Thornton glared. "Why didn't you say
so?"
"Nobody asked me."
The
old man blew his nose, picked a tooth and regarded a bit of food on the end of
his fingernail. "Why back before there was automobiles
. . ." he began.
Thornton
forced himself to listen. Twenty minutes later the old man said, "With a
small furnace like these you got .to burn your wood three days before
smothering."
Thornton
snapped, "You idiot! The wood would bum up!"
"Not
if you do it right. You lay on your first blankets, but you don't put on your
pressure cover. Then your vents aren't big enough for a small furnace. I reckon
you just reduced the size of a regular furnace but it don't
work that way."
The old man built the next fire. It made
prime charcoal. The winter cut into charcoal operations. It froze the clay
beds.
Gamble's
laboratories were working day and night. There was the food supply to be
maintained, which took up a large part of the staff's time. There were
compounds to make and surface ores to be tested.
Gamble himself was busy on the perfection of
new alloys which could be made out of reclaimed metals. These required entirely
new treatments, since the original metal had had strange alloy-elements that
had to be allowed for. Each new process required experiment with chemicals
which could be made from the materials at hand.
Surrounding
communities had not entered into the spirit of the new civilization. Many of
them were savage and people either attacked or hid at Gamble's approach. Gamble
was more bitter than ever at Drega. He had sent across
the river and asked for fifteen tons of a common but particular type of mica. He had offered tools,
equipment, explosives to mine it with.
Drega
had held him up for fifteen tons of prime cement and kept the tools to boot.
For a week the entire clan had had to stop work and concentrate on machinery
and materials to make that cement.
By mid-winter it became apparent that the new
type of atomic power would not meet all needs. Men did not yet know how to make
machines which it could operate and they were careless with it. A crack
electronocist had been blown to bits. Rushed and unable to find a meter handy,
he had trusted to judgment to adjust the flow.
Others
were afraid of the atomic power, even though hard radiation was perfectly
screened. The lowest units ran a quarter of a million volts of d.c. which could not be transformed, and they had no
insulation against the charges of mutilating death. Half a dozen men had been
killed while setting up power lines of iron wire, charred to cinders by the
giant arcs which burst across insulators. Oddly, one blast of rampant power had
knocked a lineman three hundred feet—but except for a badly burned spot on one
shoulder he had suffered no • great injury.
Morosely, Gamble ordered hydro-electric and
coal plants. It meant a decided change in plans. It meant bulky, cumbersome
and heavy machines were needed in quantity. It meant cable and insulation and
tremendous man power It meant time and work investment for an obsolete type of
power which would not be used for more than four or five years at the most.
"Cheer up," said Phillips.
"The men know how to handle them. With power they're familiar with they
can quickly make equipment for atomic power."
But Gamble did not cheer.
Why couldn't these men
leam to use a new power which simply required caution and respect? The old forms
of electricity, like old steel, were a compromise. Compromise was the basic
fault of Drega's world, the very core of the old civilization's canker.
The
great coal stores were across the East River by the Brooklyn shipyards. A
savage clan of cannibals held that area. A sizable expedition set out with a
paralyzing ray machine but it was delicate and could not be transported
easily. It took them five days to find the tunnel in which the most important
tribe lived. Gamble's men were almost struck down from behind before they knew
their danger. But a heavy shock of the released rays put all except the
insulated party into a state of physical paralysis.
Gamble
found the leader, evident because of his three fur pieces, one of them a
horsehide. They were not well tanned and their warmth-value was doubtful.
Gamble briefly stated his wants.
The
savage leader studied him and his people shrewdly. Once he had been a
longshoreman. He saw that Gamble's people had things he wanted. What mattered
how he got them? As soon as he found out he planned to kill them off and take
everything. He agreed.
The
need was for transport boats. A flat service type was decided upon. Gamble
produced in one evening the specifications for an easily made plastic which
would serve for hulls. It required wood and asbetos and tar. All were available
on the island but it threw the heavy work back on the lumber and mine
departments. In the bitter wet cold of a seaboard winter, these divisions
sweated and froze while others took things easy or worked in comfort in heated
buildings. There was grumbling.
But
with the coming of old-type electricity there was satisfaction. Artists and
technicians were busy, absorbed in their work. They began to catch something of
Gamble's vast dream. They spent hours working out ideas and problems which
were child's play to the leaders but represented tremendous strides in
viewpoint for them.
After
one outbreak in which they were badly shocked, the Brooklyn clans settled down.
Prescott noticed their increasing lethargy. They had been wild and strongly
tainted with criminal instincts but they had been vital. After electrotherapy
had brought their glands in harmony they became listless, a passive group.
They were better citizens.
"But their spark is gone," Prescott
said.
"It
will take three or four generations of scientific breeding to build up their
brain capacity," Gamble said.
Prescott
looked at the men building the new civilization and was not sure the change was
worth the cost. They were a brilliant lot, these new leaders, consumed with
scientific zeal. And most of them were about as colorful as the clothing
Gamble had supplied. Privately Prescott was still thrilled by swashbuckling
pirates.
The
major catastrophe of the year came in the spring. Gamble's big boat had been
left out in the East River. In the spring break-up it was crushed and much
valuable equipment went down with it. But most valuable was the motor. Although
of a radically advanced type it had been made of the finest crucible steel.
No
other steel would do and it was impossible to duplicate without the original
workers.
Gamble
sent an expedition across the Hudson aboard a scow. They had with them his
atomic-powered automobile and they were to get through to Pittsburgh and bring
back die men who had made that fine steel.
Amused, Drega let them through for a price.
Gamble had to supply him with a complete electro-power plant. There was no
choice as Drega held several of Gamble's best men hostages.
Twenty
miles past the crude town Drega was building, the car broke down in the rough
country. The expedition got out and hiked. Drega found the car, dismantled the
motor and used it for hoisting.
Five
months later the expedition returned. They had traversed grimly savage country,
although the rural sections seemed to be building farms just like those they
had known. Two of the expedition brought back no ears.
Gamble
was livid with outrage. They had found the manufacturer who made the steel.
When they told him about the boat his eyes darkened.
"Tell
Gamble," he gritted, "that any man who managed to bring a boat and
laboratory safely through what happened can do no business with
Pittsburgh."
Only
fifty percent of the population in that district had died. But of the
remaining, sixty-one percent were maimed.
Gamble said, "They don't
understand."
Prescott
calmed him. "It will take a little time for them to get the significance
of this. As soon as they see what you are aiming at they'll fall in line."
Prescott was in very good standing these
days. He was a good outlet valve. He blew his nose on a paper handkerchief.
"By the way, Simon, the new presses are almost ready. It will seem funny,
printing by light, but it makes a better looking format. What are we going to
do for paper?"
"Minerals," said Gamble. "It's
quite practical."
The legitimate excuse to experiment with a
mineral paper
was what had motivated Gamble into having the
photo-presses made for Prescott during these busy days. Personally he
considered newspapers obsolete. Soon now they would have television again.
It
did not strike him that his rationalization was particularly human. Gamble had
little sense of humor.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
The
following ten
years made a tremendous change in life under Gamble. The supreme crisis had
come in the third year, when the work requirements overtaxed all possible power
supplies. They had harnessed their whole side of the river and made the tides
toil for them but still there was not enough power. For Gamble wanted to do
more than simply give back a civilization. He wanted to see the new civilization
working.
He found himself seriously overburdened with
the transmutation of energy. The simple things, catalytic action of sea water,
increasing the efficiency of engines, perfecting the quality and strength of
various products—these things his division chiefs could handle. But the
transmutation of energy was beyond most. He worked with a handful of
scientists.
Now
he saw he must take the time to teach others. It meant months of instructing
men to handle this leashed lightning of atomic power. A new generation of young
atomic-power engineers grew up, however. They understood and handled Gamble's
mechanisms.
With
the solution of the energy problem Gamble's civilization began to spurt ahead.
But it did not help to extend his influence. He now controlled Long Island and
the former five boroughs of Manhattan. He was on friendly terms with clans to
the north as far as Albany. This terminated his sphere of power.
The
new civilization was using plastics heavily. All clothing was made of plastics,
as were many building materials and even machines. But the products of other
climates were missing. Expeditions had been sent to tropical countries with
building materials and metals for barter. They returned empty-handed. The
natives weren't interested in work. The white men who had driven them before
weren't interested in the materials offered.
Substitutes
had been found but the problem of wood pulp grew more serious daily. Most of
the timber on Gamble's land had been utilized in making plastics of various
kinds. Gamble had saturated the country to the north with iron, shovels, plows,
crowbars, saws, glass and building materials in
exchange for wood pulp. Now that rural communities were beginning to find
their feet again, they had become shrewd, hard bargainers.
There
were shrewd and hard bargainers in Gamble's clan but they had not shown great
interest in their talents. What did it get them? They already had everything
the new civilization had to offer. It was not pleasant going up into the woods
for extended periods of trade. They didn't go.
Gamble himself had made one trip, consumed
with a desire to offer the people the great benefits of his civilization. He
had almost been lynched three times. The citizens up country had no desire for
his world of science. They were interested, they
listened to what was being done. A few would have liked radios, movies and
television machines. But he could have won more real interest with plugs of
good old-fashioned tobacco.
"All
I know about you, mister, it that you're making cheap gold and all my fife
savings in insurance aren't worth a split rail!" a venerable farmer
shouted.
"But you don't need insurance,"
Gamble explained. "Whatever you need, civilization will give you."
"It
won't give me back my life savings," the old man insisted.
Gamble tried another group. "Don't you
want the benefits of science?" he queried.
"We're doing all
right," they said.
Gamble
controlled his exasperation. "Here, take a simple case. Wouldn't you like
hot and cold water without walking to the spring or chopping wood? Just by pressing a button!"
"What's the sense of that when we got
the spring and the wood?" asked Jed Hawkins. "My old lady ain't got
enough to keep her mind off other people's business the way it is!"
Gamble
returned, nettled and vexed by human stupidity. Utter cretinism! He couldn't
understand such bullheaded-ness. He had lain down in a patch of poison ivy and
couldn't treat it until his return, which made his mood worse.
Occasionally
there were dealings with Drega, always at a staggering cost to Gamble. Gamble's
ships were forbidden to land on Drega's property except on notice. Those of
Drega's clan who wanted to could join Gamble's people —but they couldn't come
back.
At
first this had piqued Gamble. But slowly he saw that he was winning out. There
were occasional desertions from Drega's harsh rule. People heard about Gamble and
the new community and wandered in from distant places. This pleased him. But he
would have preferred it if they had been people of a different type. Those who
came to stay showed a marked tendency toward laziness or
pseudo-philosophy—particularly those who left Drega. They wanted to be honored
for having an idea. Gamble's people had countless ideas as a matter of course.
Gamble
had made one attempt to make peace with Drega! He had done this in spite of
their mutual personal antipathy and bitterness. He thought his civilization
owed it to others to offer them its fruits. The answer came
hack that Drega liked the toil and struggle of old-fashioned existence.
Gamble
learned that Drega had opened trade with the whole interior. He had clumsy
wooden boats in operation and two steel boats were being made at Pittsburgh.
But the backbone of Drega's trade was whiskey.
Gamble
would not stoop to this. But it annoyed him to look across the river and see a
tower of good steel rise and form itself into a replica of the old Drega tower.
It
was typical of Drega that his tower dominated the Hudson while men and women
within fifty miles starved and went without clothing. But it worked. Word went
far and wide. People began to stream to Drega's town for trade and celebration.
The city flourished and Drega's influence grew.
Drega
was hampered by Gamble's work in one way. As fast as a new
standard—platinum—silver—wheat—was selected, Gamble's
transmutation or trick production methods upset it. Since there was no
definite yardstick for value he had to do much business in barter. It annoyed
him but his real interest was the cheap labor possible under current
conditions.
With
cheap labor he could build—build endlessly. He was already arranging to put
through the railroad to the west coast again. Word had come there still was a
west coast. It was a thousand miles farther away than it had been.
But all in all, Gamble could be pleased on
the tenth anniversary of his rule. Around him, the city stretched in perfect
plan. Broad parks which would bloom with flowers were already surveyed. There
was a stretch down one side of the city where airplanes could land. Beneath
there would be ground conveyance, beneath that fast freight transportation.
The city plan was perfect. It began with deep
mines. The island was a mineralogical treasure house. On lower levels were
refineries and factories. There was a general utility level above that,
including depots for food, clothing, material, theaters, etc. Endless platforms
would eventually carry the people along this level.
Towering
above-ground would be giant skyscrapers, but of an entirely new design and
construction and conception. Six of them were already built. Not perfect, they
represented vast scientific advancement. For one thing they had no windows.
Why should they? They were properly lighted and air-conditioned inside.
It was true that people did not like working
in them. But that was an anachronism—a hangover of memory. The one tower
of'glass which admitted natural light Gamble allowed Phillips to build because
the idea amused him.
In
colonies around the city were small apartment houses and private homes.
Citizens could have whichever they desired, as quickly as construction could
take care of them. Gamble had been surprised at their choice. In spite of every
conceivable appliance to make life easy, most workers chose apartments.
He had envisaged a city of comfortable cozy
homes with green lawns" and the inhabitants spending much of their leisure
time—they worked a twenty hour week now—enhancing their gardens. Some had done
this. Most had let their lawns run down. There was a growing demand that the
city government furnish garden and lawn service. It was too much work to care
for their own property.
Of
course, the rebuilding of the city had only just begun. Until two years
previously the clan had been barely able to keep abreast of pressing basic work
for survival. There had been keen interest in the future and Gamble had thought
his people would take great pride in their personal lives.
But
the first radical slash of working hours had not brought this expected
reaction. He could not quite put his finger on which glands were responsible.
With ample time, security, all the necessities and many luxuries of like provided—his
people seemed to forget progress. They were not even living up to their present
station.
And
the new arrivals from outside, who had come in since
the building work was done, were not at all cooperative. More and more were
accepting Gamble's offer of a civilization that gave no pay, no money, but did
not demand any for food, clothing or shelter either.
During
the most hectic periods of driving work there had been sharp vital debates, a
flood of new ideas. People had been keen and active and interested in fife.
Some of the most progressive ideas, brilliant scientific work and best
literature had been produced then.
" But now they had leisure they did nothing. Gamble had reports that there
was even a falling off in tri-di movie attendance and the television fan-mail was
dropping. The increasing demand for slushy, claptrap entertainment was
startling.
"A matter of orientation," Prescott
said. "This older generation has been through too much. The younger will
be able to take hold."
Prescott was now in charge of the press and
news televising. He could not get much enthusiasm about the newer types of
news dissemination. There was no way to see what had been done or said after it
had happened. It wasn't newsprint.
Gamble
sighed. "Our first ship got back from Chile today."
"Ah, the nitrates! Now well get that tantalectron, eh?"
Gamble's
eyes fired moodily. "The Chileans won't do business with us. I sent word
that we would send them whatever tantalectron they
needed as soon as production got under ■ way. They replied they wouldn't
know what to do with it."
"That's Drega fighting you, of
course," Prescott said. "Still—its amazing
the number of people who would rather starve than be benefited."
"It's
getting serious," Gamble stated. "We have a good many minerals here,
but we need many from outside. We've consumed all the surface ores left from
the old city. We need copper, radium, oil, chemicals and vanadium. The atoms of
some metals are so unstable my transmutation won't make them. Pittsburgh turned
us down on vanadium pent-oxide again. On the Gulf it's a serious offense to
ship us sulphur."
"Of course, you could get it by
old-fashioned trade," Prescott offered.
Gamble
smashed his hand on a plastic table. "That's exactly what we can't do!
We've proved the practicability of a scientific civilization. Now we need it on
a world basis."
He strode around an electrode and glared at
Prescott. "That coyote, Macken, was down from upstate yesterday. He's got
a comer on all the ginseng available and he won't let it go. He's holding out
for a market. We need that supply for gland stimulation. Our people are
getting lazy."
"What did he say when
he saw the new city?"
Gamble
became almost unintelligible with fury. "He said the old city had mSre
skyscrapers and he missed the night-clubs and burlesque shows!"
"You should have given him an electric
treatment for generosity and logic."
"I
did," Gamble gritted. "I gave him enough to kill a man. The old
Yankee skinflint gave me a pound of blueberry cobbler and told me to forget
this civilization business and come up and go fishing!"
"Well,
here's some good news," Prescott said. "The ten-year-old class in
school passed one hundred percent in trigonometry."
"They
ought to be doing calculus!" Gamble snapped. He collected himself with
effort. "By the way, I'll have to shut down your paper."
Prescott licked dry lips.
"I'm
sorry," Gamble said. "We're short of materials and need that
photo-electronic equipment for conversion to astronomical uses."
"But the public—" blurted Prescott.
"Oh,
they have television. Newspapers are really obsolete," Gamble said.
Prescott went back to -the one glass building and sat looking through the single foot-square clear
glass window which he had secretly bribed Phillips into installing. Phillips'
one weakness was publicity. He loved to see his picture in the paper.
Prescott thought, "Maybe I've lived too
long, but I can't conceive of a healthy civilization without a press."
Phescott
said, "Send
Flagherty." He did not have to move. A highly sensitive cell oscillated to
his desire to see one of the staff and threw the speaker open.
Lucky came in, wearing a bored expression. There wasn't much'news any more. All the
insane and criminals were cured by treatment. There were very few accidents.
There were no fires or explosions. There was no gambling or night-club life or
underworld.
"What's die late
news?" Prescott asked.
"A
dog bit a man. They treated the dog's thyroid and inoculated him with some
mouse serum. Now he's chasing cheeses and running away from cats."
"Nothing
else?"
"Page one headline is that a grave error
has existed in estimated diameter of the Earth's orbit. It is now established
at one thousand thirty-six miles short of previous estimates."
"Any
building news?"
"Some
swell stuff, but you ordered me not to print it. Phillips has completed his
final detailed city plan and it's a honey. But it involves the use of a number
of chemicals and minerals we haven't got. Outside of that Copper just ate some
crabs, which are off the diet, and it upset his metabolic count. He got out of
control and swiped a scow and was last seen heading toward Drega's."
Prescott grinned.
"What's wrong? Too much work?"
"Not
enough. He said the only thing he ever really enjoyed was eating and sleeping.
Now he doesn't work enough to get an appetite, and this formula food keeps him
so pepped up he doesn't need the sleep. He's going over where
the smelter men are sweating nine hours a day
instead of sitting beside a bunch of buttons behind an insulated shield for
four hours."
"Anyone go with him?"
"Rogers, the police captain. He's fed up with taking hoodlums to a
chemical psychopathic ward. Anyway, he hadn't had a case in three weeks."
Lulu
Belle burst in, unannounced as usual. She said, "I Just heard Copper went
over to Drega's and I think it's a good idea. I don't know why I didn't think
of it before."
Lucky
looked at her face and gulped. "Why honey, what's wrong here?"
Lulu
Belle swept a hand over a very serviceable—and frowzy—looking dress.
"What's wrong?
I look like a sack of
potatoes and he asks what's wrongl You can't get a decent
dress in this town for love or money. There's no money and all the men are too
dopey to be interested in love!"
"That's
a fine way to talk just when we've finally decided to get married," Lucky
told her.
Lulu
Belle took a deep breath and said very steadily, "Lucky, I'm not marrying
you. You're getting as bad as the rest."
"What rest—whaddya mean?"
"The
men in this damned city. You're not human any more. You sound like a
calculating machine when you begin one of your dazzling conversations. You
spent four hours last night spouting an explanation of what this new elex-zerces force is and how it will improve brain
capacity. I don't want to marry a brain, Lucky—I want a man. I'm going over to Drega's too. He's still got men, I hear." She
stamped out of the room.
Lucky yelled at the microphone. "Gimme Doc Whipple!" The doctor's voice came on
and Lucky nervously told what Lulu had said. The doctor laughed. "Well
pick her up. Don't worry. She's short on her vitamin X and her endocrine
balance is a little upset."
Prescott
was studying Lucky intently. "Would you have called the police to pick her
up in the old days? Or paddled her little posterior?"
"Well—"
Lucky stopped. "You're right. Hell, she's right,
Chief!"
Prescott
said, "I still believe in progress and the stupidity of our old society.
But I don't think this new one is complete.
Something's missing. Something's wrong when a man as big as Gamble can't raise
enough trust to get minerals and chemicals. Um-m-m—and
photo-electric equipment."
Lucky
said, "Chief, there's going to be a break. Things happened too quick for people to adjust to - the changes. And the kids
growing up can't take it either. The school system here is perfect. It's had
more thought and research poured into it than anything else except the power
project. It's so perfect these kids are looking a hundred years ahead."
Prescott lit a cigar.
"What do they see?"
"A twelve-year-old in the graduating
class at Murray High got up and walked out of the room this morning. He said he
was depressed. They started to give him a stomach toner but he said it wasn't
that. He was just thinking that in another hundred years there wouldn't be any
need for men!"
Prescott said thoughtfully, "That's not
as far-fetched as it sounds."
Lucky
dropped his voice. "Listen, Chief, it isn't farfetched at all. If we were
getting the supplies here we need, they'd cut the work week to five hours
tomorrow. They've got machines to do damned near everything now except
think."
"Men will always to do that,"
Prescott said.
Lucky
shook Jus head. "Last night I was over at Pola-tov's. He had a break with
Gamble a couple of weeks ago and is living on minimum rations. We've been
taking him bits of equipment and things. Do you know why he had the break?
Because Gamble wouldn't give him time to work on an automatic brain! Now he's
finished the thing—and
it works!"
Prescott muttered, "Good Lord!"
Lucky
nodded. "He isn't making this public. He just wanted to prove an automatic
brain could direct a mechanism without outside help. It was a cat's brain and
had real cat's eyes, alive in solution and nerves intact. He attached it to a
static vacuum and let a mouse loose. The vacuum chased the mouse and caught
it!"
"That
would be funny if it wasn't Polatov. In many ways he's a greater genius than
Gamble."
"He's going to kill this secret. But it
won't be long before somebody else digs it up. What's going to happen if a
bunch of those brains get loose on a civilization completely supported and
controlled by machines?"
"At least they can't
reproduce."
"Unless they get some scientist into their power to make them. There are a few good scientists in this city
who would like to help take Gamble's place. Maybe some of those brains would
pan out smarter than the man who" made them."
Walters, the astronomer, came in looking gray
and haggard.
"Good Lord! Get him a shot of
eltcor-stimulant," Pres cott said.
Walters said, "No more. It's these
damned scientific gadgets that wrecked me." He blew his nose. "My
wife just ran off with another man. It's my fault."
"What are you going to
do?"
"Drega's offered me a new observatory
they're building. And"—Walters was a teetotaler and he smiled cynically—
"the equivalent of two thousand cases of malt whiskey per annum. I
understand that whiskey's quite a valuable commodity over there."
The news ticker announced, "Polatov
commits suicide. Explodes laboratory. Gamble say
undoubtedly short on vitamin . . ."
The
closing of
the paper marked an era in Gamble's civilization. Long afterward Prescott
wondered whether the people actually missed the paper or whether trouble was
brewing in any event and he had simply fanned it by his own uncertainty and
troubled state of mind.
Probably
Phillips missed the paper most. He still appeared often on television. He was
constantly in the public eye. But he missed the printed page. He had been wont,
in the privacy of his office, to take out his scrapbook and read the most
recent stories about him between sieges of intense work. It gratified his
vanity and stimulated him to new endeavors.
On
the day when Drega's paper ran a two-page story on Phillips' architectural
mastery and gave details of the new city, Phillips began to wonder whether
Gamble's civilization was as perfect as, say, his own city plans. There were
annoyances. Phillips was not a grasping man but it had been something of a
let-down to win the third consecutive architectural price and realize there
was no greater reward than glory. He had the reputation and glory to start
with.
For
all that civilization, a very peculiar thing happened to Mr. Phillips as he
read Drega's glowing account the third time. He suddenly thought of the vast
opportunities for an architect of his abilities in Drega's world. Here
everything was so neady ordered that any architect could supply requirements.
But over there—ah, there
were problems and dangers
of building! There,
it was the old grim
battle to get a building up, something a man could
get his teeth into and tussle with.
Phillips
realized that this was the battle urge and that gland 2207 must be
over-secreting. A second very peculiar thing happened. He did not take the
required gland balancer. He rather enjoyed his imaginative thoughts of danger
and difficulties.
A month later Phillips went to Drega's. He had let his diet go to the devil during
that time and he was filled with toxins that made him outrageously old-world
drunk. He was also contented.
He
said to Steig, "I'm sick of this perfect system. I want some excitementl I
want to know again that a crummy architect may get my-job because somebody in
power likes him. I want to see my building going up with bum materials and have
the sport of getting them by the building inspectors. I want to fight to get
materials ahead of some prior order and scheme to get some city ordinance
overlooked."
Steig said, "You're sick,
Phillips." But his own mind began to work.
"It is sort of quiet around her, though. Lordl I
remember back - in the old Stevens plant it was so noisy you had to yell. One
day I miscalculated a cylinder expansion on a test model and it almost blew the
plant up."
He never miscalculated now. He had a machine
to do his calculating for him.
Phillips
said, "Well, I'm leaving. I hope Gamble understands."
"He'll
make a case study of -your diet," said Steig sourly. "That's all it
will mean to him." Steig was silent a moment. Then abruptly, grinning like
a runaway boy, "I'm going with youl"
But these were scattered cases, unnoticed in
the ponderous onward march of that highly-geared civilization. These men's
brains were missed—but not the men themselves.
During
these days, serious supply problems kept Gamble at his laboratory in search of
substitutes. If he had got out among his people more he might have heard and
worked out a scientific solution to the problem. But even in his laboratory,
certain monthly figures should have told him something was amiss.
The
birth rate was up thirty percent from the previous year and seventy percent
from five years before. This was due to no family desire. It was due to sheer
boredom. There were no longer danger and stimulus to fife. The public was fed
up with itself. There was plenty of amusement—which the public did not attend
very heavily. And there was a growing clamor against Gamble. What did he expect
them to do with their time? He should provide something to stimulate their
desires 1
Gamble
had thought that with the reduction of lower scale work the people would turn
to more play and relaxation and study to climb into the upper brackets. But
not all men were bom with the desire to climb into the upper brackets. Many
simply wished for some work they could do well and keep occupied. Others—many
such had conie —wanted only to be fed.
The laborers were always squawking on
principle, of course, but it was the artisans who first felt fear of the civilization.
Forge men sat on comfortable seats and watched iron claws and mechanical
contrivances do their work for them. The plastic molders put three-dimensional
photographs in a frame and11 smoked while the product was being
molded. Rumplemeyer sat in a glass turret of a vast glass factory and touched
levers and buttons which ran the entire place. There were three other men on his shift. Two of them never saw a
bit either of the material or product!
"Salter
would not have liked this," Rumplemeyer grumbled. "How can you know
a product is good when you don't handle it?"
The
product was good but his thought was sound. The civilization behind the product
was crumbling because men did not have a personal interest left. Men grew
subconsciously jealous of these machines which had stolen their work. Hazily
they felt that perhaps Man was not bom not to struggle. They felt the importance of being important. What did they mean here?
They were not even important to themselves.
It was a small thing which
brought matters to a climax.
For
four consecutive months the production of colored enamelware had been thrown
out of kilter by an inexplicable demand for the product. All production was on
a basis of a careful study of public needs. But in this one item the surplus
had been wiped out and there was a clamor for all the enamelware available.
An
investigation disclosed that Ross, the city comptroller, was hoarding. This
brought out the fact that he was holding five additional jobs under various
names and using die credits of those jobs for his peculiar acquisition. He had
no use for the hoarded treasures—the products were not even valuable. Yet he
was working eighteen hours daily to support his quirk.
He
was an invaluable man and every effort was put into his glandular treatment.
His diet was changed. He was treated with short waves. He was cured.
But
somehow—his brilliance was gone. He still did a good job but his genius for
probing out unsolved problems had disappeared. They had taken away his stimulus
in life.
Ross
was smart enough to realize what had happened and to resent it.
In
the big laboratory which crouched above the city these were hectic days with vital
supplies beginning to run out. Tension was high, and during a minor controversy
Gamble snapped at a small fault of Ross'.
It
was Ross who gave Lucky the story of the terrible stortage of sulphur and
vanadium which was driving Gamble's civilization into veritable bankruptcy.
Sulphur for acid —vanadium for catalysts and special steels. It would be a
terrible bankruptcy for those who depended upon Gamble's civilization, for it
would fall like a knife, utterly unexpected. And upon the breaking down of a single
unit of that complex machine the whole structure would tumble.
Nor was there any way of borrowing for these people. Gamble was accused of having broken down the
economic systems of the world. Outside of his own territory he was hated. None
who lived under him could expect compassion or help from people who were still
struggling for bare existence.
Lucky, galled by another outburst from Lulu
Belle, broke the story in screaming dramatic headlines over the televisor that
night. He spoke only of the shortage faced by the nation. But the people
concentrated their fear and hatred on Gamble.
It was recalled that once before this man had
nearly wrecked the world with his talk of cheap gold and cheap wheat. Word
leaked out from the cold, abstract theoreticians that he was responsible for
the world's suspension in time. The masses had only vaguely suspected that—had
half thought that, possibly foreseeing what was going to happen, he had simply
protected himself.
Wild with the frenzied fear
of people who could no longer stand alone, they rushed to his laboratories,
thirsty for his blood. Not because he had given them this something-for-nothing
world, but because his failure was taking it away —this is what was in their
minds.
Gamble
could have protected himself, beaten them into submission by cutting off their
food supply and touching the city's master switch. But he was not wise in the
ways of human nature. He still believed in cold logic. He went down to meet the
people and explain.
They would have ripped him to shreds, had it
not been for Prescott. Every one of them had lost people dear to them while
they went on living. They were shouting it against him now. But Prescott knew
human nature and the power of tradition. There were no courts in this new
civilization, only hospitals and clinics. Yet the masses still had respect for
the old laws.
"A
trial," Prescott called upon the mob. "He is entided to it under the
Constitution!"
There
was a pause in the mob's heat. "Get Drega!"
Prescott snapped softly at Lucky. Then molb hysteria blazed up again, blazed
doubly high as the artifical controls of the body toxins were smashed through.
It
was touch and go. Fortunately a small platoon of Gamble's ablest young
scientists managed to slip up from a little-used passage behind the platform on
which their leader stood at bay in one of the rebuilt city's great new plazas,
facing the mindless, passionate horde that cried out for his blood.
They
carried electronic ray neutralizers with them, hastily culled from the
community's small arsenal—weapons, being scientifically wasteful, were not an
important factor in Gamble's creed—and were able to ring the platform before
the mob hysteria got completely out of hand.
"Thank God you got here in time,"
said Prescott, mopping a steaming brow with a handkerchief that dissolved
while in use.
"We haven't much time left if we're to
handle them," said the leader of the young scientists,
looking meaningfully out over the surging sea of heads that filled the vast
plaza. "Better get him out of here—quick. Use the tunnel we did and take
him to Science Center. We have that area guarded."
Even as he spoke a ringleader of the crowd
below shouted something that brought a rising
answering roar from the mob. Like a wave of lava the outraged citizenry swept
against the base of the platform, the cadence of their feet making the whole
square tremble.
"Stand
back—stand back or get hurtl" shouted the leader of the scientists, a
prematurely bald young man named Marlin, his voice carried throughout the plaza
by an amplifier system.
The
roar of the crowd merely grew louder in answer and its vanguard'began the
process of scaling the platform. A shower of missiles arched through the air to
bombard Gamble and his defenders. One of the young scientists dropped and
Prescott felt a lump of mineral strike his shoulder, numbing it.
"Let
them have it," Marlin ordered and, tight-lipped, the cool headed young
scientists turned on their electronic ray weapons and sprayed the front of the
crowd as if it were a swarm of locusts. A low moaning sound arose from tens of
thousands of throats as the vanguard was mowed down in a state of paralysis
and, inevitably, trampled by the irresistible surge behind them.
A
huge Irishwoman, who had been a baker before the long sleep, managed to avoid
the rays and, boosted by strong arms beneath her, actually scrambled up on the
platform, where a discharge from Marlins gun struck her amidships.
Her
mouth was opened wide to shout imprecations—but no sound came from it. For a
moment she stood still and silent upon the platform's rim, in full view of the
entire assemblage. Then, slowly, she tottered. Marlin made a grab for her but
too late—and she fell back to the plaza, where her head struck the pavement and
burst sickeningly.
At
this horrid spectacle, the roar of the crowd became a scream of rage. Prescott
came out of the lethargy that seemed to have overwhelmed him, perhaps spurred
further by the pain of his shoulder. He grabbed Gamble, who stood stunned,
looking with unbelief at the crowd after his blood, a trickle of gore running
down from a cut on one cheekbone where a missile had struck him.
"They
don't seem to want me," he muttered half-ration-ally as Prescott steered
him down the ramp at the rear of the platform, into the tunnel and thence, by a
maze of passages, to the basement elevator of the, huge building complex called
Science Center. Behind him, as he led his semi-conscious leader, he could hear
the sound and voice of the mob like the roar of some huge antedeluvian giant
reptile trapped in a tar pit.
Once in the safety of his office, impregnably
high in the huge edifice, Gamble seemed to recover himself a little while
advisors urged him to take disciplinary action against those who had so
thanklessly sought to do him harm.
"No,"
he said, his voice low. "That would be war. And war, above all else, is
the ultimate criminal stupidity of the civilization we have worked so hard and
successfully to destroy. No, there can be no physical' reprisals. Not
now."
He
walked to a vision screen on which could be seen a view of the rioters still
milling aimlessly about in the plaza, regarded it long and silently, an
expression of utter bewilderment on his intelligent face. '"They must be
mad," he murmured.
"Of
course they're mad," said Marlin, who had rejoined his chief.
"They're incapable of thinking. All they can do is feel.
They're like animals and should be tfeated as such."
"No."
Gamble shook his head slowly and looked at the men about him. "They're not
animals. They have simply not been taught to think. And that is perhaps our
greatest failure."
"But we've got to do something to remedy
this situation," said Marlin, his eyes glittering behind their contact
lenses. "Surely you don't intend for us to sit here and be slaughtered."
Gamble's laugh was short and dry. "That
would scarcely be intelligent either, would it, my friend?" he countered.
Then, after taking a deep breath, "No, there has been too much slaughter
already. Ours would scarcely help solve the situation." He looked around
again at fcis staff. "Consider," he said quietly, "the total I.Q. count of all of us here. Except for Prescott—apologies, old man—we
are all above two hundred. We have put the world to sleep for three millenia.
We have created, out of the ruins, a civilization in which the long-sought
dreams of the alchemists are in everyday use.
"But"—he
paused regretfully—"we have failed, gentlemen, failed because we have
lost touch completely with the key to human emotional needs. The lowest-grade
pre-Sleep politician understood die problems of people
and what they want better than we."
"What are you going to do, Gamble?"
a plump psychiatrist asked. "You aren't going to ask us to sit here and
die. . . P"
Gamble was silent again, then
sighed. He said, his voice low, "We're going to have to send for the one
man who can help us, the one man who, while he despises pure science unless it
can be turned to his individual profit, knows how to handle men and women.
We're going to have to send for Drega."
"Drega!" The word was a sound of shock in those anti-Drega surroundings. Marlin
said, "But to send for him is to admit—"
"Admit defeat," Gamble finished
tonelessly. "And why not? Aren't we defeated? And
isn't it the very basis of science to face facts as they are, not as the
viewer would have them? I should have sent for Drega weeks ago. Then none of
this—this mess, these deaths, would have happened."
"Will he come?"
Marlin asked. "After all, why should
he. . . r
"He'll come," said Gamble grimly.
"Remember, I know him. The whole problem now boils down to how to get him
here quickly enough."
Prescott stepped forward. "I've already
sent for him," he said.
Gamble
looked at the newspaper publisher curiously for a moment. Then a rare but grim
smile turned upward the comers of his lips. He said, "Thank you, Prescott.
I suppose it was asking too much of any of these super
I.Q.'s to take such positive action. It had to be you, of course."
"I
merely did what I hoped might help," said Prescott, lowering his eyes and
flicking imaginary dust off a sleeve in a perfect pose of perfectly false
modesty.
Meanwhile,
thanks to the
disorganization of Manhattan, Lucky was having his troubles in getting to
Drega. His first plan had been to take one of the new helicopters but when he
reached the city airport he found it deserted—and he was in no way qualified to
put a ship into operation and fly it himself.
He
was engaged in cursing an aged watchman on duty, whose apparent deafness made
communication virtually impossible, when a small surface car skidded to a halt
at the entrance. Lulu Belle got out of it and came running toward him, her
blue-black hair streaming like a plume behind her.
She
said, "Lucky Flagherty, if you think for a moment you're leaving this city
without me . . ."
"You
were going to leave it without me a few days ago," he told her, gazing
with wonder upon the color in her cheeks, the spark of excitement in her eyes.
He almost forgot the shapelessness of the fabric dress she was wearing.
"That was different," she replied
with shameless illogic. "This is the first excitement we've had in
years."
He
felt a grin tugging at his lips, said, "All right—come along. But just now
it doesn't look at if we're going to get very far. How did you know where to
find me, honey?"
"After
all the years you've been showing your conceited mug on television, you think
you're hard to follow?" she asked rhetorically. Then, as the import of his
remark sank home, "What's wrong?"
"Nobody here to fly us across to
Jersey," he said bitterly.
"And
old Pootz doesn't seem to know which way is up. How are things back at the
plaza?"
"Gamble
got away," she said. "Rumor has it he's hiding in Science
Center." Then, "Come on, I'll fly you."
"Since
when did you learn to handle one of these egg-beaters?" he asked,
astonished.
"Since
a lot of things you've been too lazy and too disinterested to know about
me," she said, leading the way toward a machine parked with drooping vanes
on the runway. The aged guard tried to get in her way, but Lulu Belle gently
but firmly pushed him aside, saying, "You wouldn't get in a lady's way,
would you, young man?"
The
guardian might have been deaf but apparently he could hear what he wanted to
hear. Her 'young man' did the trick. Moments later Lucky found himself sitting
beside Lulu Belle while she did the things needed to bring the 'copter to life.
She
got it going, took them up with a rush that caused the engine to stutter and
halt. Gripping the edge of his seat tightly while he calculated just how far
they had to drop, Lucky muttered, "I would draw a woman driver!"
"You're lucky—as usual—to draw any at
all, my utterly useless male," replied Lulu Belle as the engine caught
once more and roared in triumphant efficiency.
As they passed over the rebuilt city they
could see that the riot was spreading. Running mobs of people were branching
out from the plaza in dark streams tlirough the radiating streets, with no
police or soldiery to stop them. Manhattan was as surely in the hands of the
maddened crowd as was Paris in 1789* or Rome after Nero's holocaust.
"Poor
Gamble!" said Lucky. "What a lousy return for all he's done for
them."
"Poor people!" countered Lulu
Belle. "What a small revenge for the unhappiness he's given them."
Looking
at her, Lucky changed the subject. "You know you look about sixteen,"
he told his fiancee. "You've dropped fifteen years overnight, honey."
"Not
exactly flattering to a lady," Lulu Belle said drily. "Shut up and
let me drive."
But
Lucky could see by the added glow in her near cheek that she was not exactly
displeased. He slipped an arm across her shoulders and she made no move to stop
him.
All
at once, as they found the Hudson beneath them, Lucky began to feel alive as he
had not felt in years. Perhaps, behind them, the greatest scientific adventure,
the greatest experiment in human history, was collapsing in failure. But things
were happening, people were feeling once more, the
deadening opiate of technocratic perfection was slipping from over them.
Lulu
Belle cast him a quick sidelong glance and said, "You're singing, Lucky.
What have you to be so happy about?"
He
looked at her inquiringly, said, "Are you kidding, honey?"
After a moment she said, "Sing some
more. You've got a voice like a cracked calliope tube but I haven't heard anyone
sing in years.
So
he sang until Drega's palisade-topping tower slid beneath them and they hovered
over the landing field. Once they touched down there was no longer time for
singing or personal feelings. The full urgency of their mission was once more
upon them.
The builder received them in a luxurious and
thoroughly unscientific-looking office atop his tower—whence he could look
across the river at the towering Science Center in which his arch-rival was
currently finding refuge from the folk he had enraged.
Drega
listened to Lucky's story, which was delivered with all the concise accuracy of
the trained reporter. Then he turned to Lulu Belle, said, "Anything to add
to it, Lulu Belle?"
"That's
about it—except that according to the last rumors I heard, Gamble had shut
himself up in his tower."
The
builder shook his head and ran a hand through thinning hair atop his broad
powerful head. He did not smile. Instead, "It's a damned shame they don't
appreciate him. I always have, even though I knew his way was not mine—or
anyone else's. But he's given them a lot."
Drega
got up out of his swivel chair and said, "Well, since he seems to have got
himself into this mess I guess it's up to us to pull him out." He paused,
looked across the river at his rival's tower, added, "Wonder how he's
taking it. It must be a shock."
Then,
all efficiency, he led the way from his tower to the airport, conducted Lucky
and Lulu Belle to the 'copter that had brought them across the river. He looked
at it curiously for a moment, said, "We haven't advanced to these things
yet," then got in.
Only once did he speak during the trip back.
That was to ask his host and hostess, "You two must have children by this
time."
"We
aren't married yet," said Lucky. Lulu Belle, who had turned a bright red,
said nothing.
"Penalty
of the fife of pure science, I suppose," murmured the builder with a
grunt of distaste. "You should have come with me."
"We
may yet," said Lulu Belle without looking around. "I hear there are men in your realm."
"There are a few," said Drega
quietly. "None better than Lucky, though. Why don't the two of you pay us
a visit when this is over? You could make it a honeymoon if you want to."
"That,"
said Lulu Belle with finality, "is a date.
Thanks, Drega. You should have been running the Lovelorn
column in the old days, not me."
It was Drega's turn to
blush.
Shortly
afterward they landed and with difficulty, using the underground passages of
the island city, made their way into Gamble's tower refuge. Already the crowd
was milling around the building, threatening to set it on fire if their enemy
didn't come down to face them.
The
builder took charge of things at once, was soon facing the mob himself, with
nothing more than a loudspeaker for a weapon.
"I will be judge," he roared.
"You want a trial? This will be a trial by jury—you, citizens, are the
jury. Van Wyke, take Gamble's defense."
The crowd was beaten and bullied and
overridden by the builder. They feared him now more than ever before. He glowed
with a fierce animal spirit they had almost lost. Here was the man they had not
followed. But he had survived, and across the river he had reared a city
greater than theirs. True, it was not comparable in scientific ways. But
neither was he faced with extermination because of' the needs of that science.
"By what right do you condemn this
man?" Drega asked.
They could not hold Gamble responsible for a
civilization of their own making. They picked the older charge, the guilt of
throwing mankind into suspended animation and the millions of deaths which had
resulted.
It was a grave charge and the arguments ran
high into the night. Van Wyke waited until the opposition made it clear that
they accused Gamble of mass murder.
"Where,"
asked the jurist in a quiet voice, "are the corpora delicti?"
There
was a moment of silence, then an enraged outburst from those who would hang
Gamble. The bodies had disintegrated, of course, in three thousand years!
Van Wyke gave forth an eloquent defence. How
could a man be accused of murder of people who would not exist if they had
lived normally? Suppose the world had gone ahead without suspension of life.
Would any of these called murdered be alive today? "He killed no
one—instead, he gave you life three thousand years beyond your time!" Van
Wyke thundered.
"That's legal
side-stepping!" somebody called.
Van
Wyke said, "Law is law. This is deeper than the life or death of one man.
This reaches down to the very roots of civilization!"
Drega called out, "Will you condone mob
murder or give this man his rights?"
It took all night and much more talk for that
decision which gave Gamble his freedom. He had raised many to mighty power in
the sciences, many who were jealous and would have liked to see him gone. At
sunrise, an emotionally exhausted people gave him freedom and turned home. But
first, Drega promised to take them into his community.
Drega
and Van Wyke took Gamble home. He was a tired and disillusioned man. Without
thinking he ate a chicken leg and drank some milk Drega offered him, his first
normal food in many years.
"How
have you done so well with nothing, and I so badly with so much?" he asked
Drega.
"Well, Simon," Drega admitted,
"we haven't done so well. In fact, if someone doesn't straighten out some
electrical technicalities for us and give us a chemical to fight the locusts,
the whole country's liable to be in your boots."
"Oh,
locusts," Gamble said reminiscently. "There was that gold gas we
perfected once but it was too expensive. We have plenty of gold if you want
it."
Drega
said, "We might buy it but you don't use money, do you?"
"What is your money
now that gold is gone?"
Drega
grinned and winked at Van Wyke. "It's a little embarrassing. We haven't
decided yet. I've simply issued 'prods'—promises to pay something when a
monetary base is decided, it's rather difficult to find one with you transmuting
all over the map, slashing working hours and skyrocketing production."
"You
might set man's mental output as the base," Gamble suggested absently. He
was too tired to be angry any more.
Drega said, "Well, that would be all
right but I have no output myself. Now if I had you to represent my capital so
I could pay my debts . . ."
Gamble suddenly came awake and stared at this
man who had been both his closest friend and bitter enemy. Well, why not?
Apparently people did not know what to do with complete freedom from
responsibility when they got it. He, who had given them so much, had nearly
been slaughtered. Drega, who would sweat them to death, got their respect. Or at least their fear and obedience.
Gamble nodded a bit unhappily. "All
right, Vincent, I guess my attempt at progress was a great failure."
Drega signalled for a bottle and clapped him
on the shoulder. "Simon, it was the gesture of the ages! It saved the
world from itself. We can have progress now. We can really build—together!"
He
scratched his chin reflectively. "By the way, that sulphur, vanadium and
sulphate you wanted is all waiting over at Bayonne."
Gamble said, "How did
you know?"
Drega
grinned, "It was my agents who wouldn't give it to you."
Gamble
chortled into his mug of whiskey. Scientifically speaking Drega was an
exceedingly great sinner, God bless him!
Drega
spoke again. 'That ginseng you wanted is also over at Bayonne."
Gamble
said, "How did you get it? I offered him all sorts of valuables in trade
and he turned me down."
"He
wanted too much," Drega said. "We thought, in the interests of the
people, we'd better just take it. I'm not certain of the details. I believe he
made it a bit difficult. But he was defeating the inalienable rights of the
people to pursue happiness or something."
Van Wyke said piously,
"God rest his soul!"
"Of
course, we'll have to thrash out our views on money," Drega was saying.
But
Gamble was already lost in thoughts of locusts and the great things to be done.
Running the world was a full time job in itself. And a
disagreeable one. It interfered considerably with more important work,
the work of progress.
Looking
on, Lulu Belle turned to Lucky Flagherty and said, "Lucky, you and I are
going to have to go prospecting. After this honeymoon of
ours."
"I
know you're fed to the teeth with this, "Lucky told her, "but why
prospecting?"
"Because," she said with a
perfectly grave face, "Well have to find something as valuable as gold
used to be—or uranium. I'll be hanged if I'm going to stay married to a man who
drinks up all his liquid assets!"
That
evening, for the first time,
Gamble visited Drega's realm across the Hudson. If much of this construction and most of the facilities he saw struck him
as crude, he said little about it. His attitude, for once, was humble as the
builder told him of the shrewdly directed efforts that had gone. into the rearing of this man, not machine-made metropolis.
And
if the buildings and pavements and other devices fell far short of the
super-scientific perfection of Gamble's Manhattan, the men and women looked
healthy and happy and packed with energy long lost to their cousins across the
river.
After a diner of excellent and
non-concentrated foods and wines, and even some miraculously unevaporated
pre-Sleep brandy Drega had uncovered outside of Philiadelphia —"had to
give up a couple of our first home-made tractors for it, the fellow knew how to
drive a hard bargain"— Gamble mentioned to his host the difference in the
appearance and behavior of their respective citizenry.
Drega
chuckled, knocked ashes from a good, if not fine, Havana cigar, and said, "I
was beginning to get really
worried about those folks of yours, Gamble, until they kicked up their heels
today. I was afraid they didn't have enough spirit left in them to revolt against
anything."
"But
why against me?" Gamble asked. "Everything I have done, everything I have worked for, has been in tiieir
interest."
"Are
you sure?" the builder asked keenly. "Are you sure it was for them?
Don't worry. I'm not accusing you of
selfishness or any archaic yen for mere power. But are
you sure you weren't merely using them as laboratory animals to prove your
theories?"
There
was a long and pregnant pause. Finally Gamble, looking troubled, said, "I
don't know, Drega—not anymore. I just don't know. Perhaps . . ." He made a
helpless gesture.
"Well,
you're beginning to act like a human being anyway," Drega told him.
"You've just had a most humiliating experience—and being humiliated once
in a while is part of being human. When I think back to the time I wanted to
float a loan to build my first Drega tower and the banks told me I was a bad
risk I . . ." He shook his head, then added,
"It taught me a lot even though I hated it."
"What
did you do?" asked the scientist, for the first time showing interest in
such mere mundane affairs.
Drega
chuckled again. "I got my girl—she's my wife now, of course—to hock those
diamonds of hers and put them on a sure thing at Jamaica. I lost, of course,
but the bet made my credit with the bookies good enough so I could pyramid.
Before the day was out I had forty grand above the ten grand I got for the
jewels. I put that into some oil stock I knew was coming in and two days later
there was a strike. By the end of the week I had a quarter of a million bucks
and could start the steam shovels digging."
"And this made you a good risk?"
Gamble asked, marveling a little at a man who could refuse to be balked,
either by bankers or horses that refused to win for him.
"It
enabled me to get enough work started so that I had collateral for the loan I ultimately
needed," the builder told him. "From then on I was never headed—until
you pulled a stopwatch on the entire world. And I haven't been headed
since."
Gamble
smiled faintly. "At least," he said, "I was able to stop you for
awhile."
"Three
thousand years!" Drega snorted, studied his guest. "Gamble," he
said, "I've never underrated you or your talents. I may have been a block
to your progress but it was only because I knew the world wasn't ready for you."
"So it would
seem," Gamble said quietly.
Drega
made a gesture dismissing the subject, then continued slowly, "But I
never thought you were insane—I don't think so now."
"Thank you," the
scientist put in icily.
"Dammit,
manl" the builder roared, "What in hades possessed you to put the world
to sleep as you did? You may have been acquitted of murder but you and I both
know you're responsible for the deaths of a billion and a half people—men,
women and children.
"I'm
not the man to quibble about what's gone," Drega went on, "but I
would like to know what caused you to undertake such an appalling responsibility? Why'd you do it, Gamble? And don't tell me
it was either through pure ego or pure science. You're too big a man, too
disinterested, to let your ego run that wild—and no scientist would undertake
such an experiment without far more safeguards than you seem to have had."
Gamble got up from the table and went to the
window. Across the Hudson the lights of the city he had built on the ruins of
old Manhattan glowed cheerfully, peacefully, against the starlit background of
the night sky. Finally he turned, his face drawn and
white.
"You must recall," he "said, "how, before the—Sleep, cybernetics was
obtaining an increased grip upon civilization. You remember the giant
calculators that were being used, not only to solve scientific mathematical
problems but business coordinates. Even the parimutual machines at the
racetracks were robot brains of a sort."
"Never
used em when I could get better odds from a bookie," stated Drega? Then,
curiously, "I've wondered about that once or twice—why you never went in
for computers in the old days, why you haven't packed your nice tight little
world with them since."
Gamble
sat down again, rested his forearms on the tablecloth. He said quietly,
"I did build a computer—perhaps the most advanced this world has ever
known. It's still up there on my island below West Point, where I hid out
during the panic that preceded the Sleep.
"This
was far more, complex and more accurate than any calculator even built before—or
since," he went on. "It even invaded the fields of symbolic
logic."
"What the devil's that?" Drega asked-.
"Symbolic logic?" Gamble countered. "It was invented by a man named Poole back in
the nineteenth century. Dodgson worked on it with him—Lewis Carroll, the Alice in Wonderland fellow, you know."
"I didn't," said Drega, interested.
"The
idea was to reduce all intangibles to mathematical terms, so that all problems could be solved by mathematical equations," the scientist
told him. "It was probably, along with nuclear physics, the coming thing
back then.
"I
built what is probably the only workable symbolic
logic calculator and recorder ever made, Drega." Gamble paused to sip his
brandy, then added, "I fed it every bit of information I could find about
humanity and its probable fate. I learned that the world, as it was then
constituted, was headed straight for irretrievable ruin—which confirmed the
ideas I already had."
"You
mean. . . P" Drega hesitated as the enormity of his guest's confession
sank home to him. "You mean you put the world into its three-thousand-year
trance on the say-so of a machine?"
Gamble's
silence was answer enough. It was Drega's turn to spring to his feet, to pace
to the windows and back again. "But good Lord, man!" he exploded.
"Don't you realize that any mechanical or electronic brain or calculator,
or whatever.you choose to call it, is worth only the information it gets? How
could you be sure you had given it all the facts?
"I
was at least as aware of world trends as you were. I knew what the Estheenland
explosion could mean if it were allowed to spread unchecked. I stood to lose a
lot more than you'll ever have if it wasn't checked. And I had taken steps to
check it. Did you put that
in your symbolic logic
scrambler?"
"I
didn't know," Gamble confessed, his head down.
"What's more I didn't intend to put the world the sleep for three
millenia. It was not planned to last more than seventy-five years."
"You didn't know!" mocked Drega
angrily. "So fifteen hundred million people had to die.
And it didn't even give you the right answer for the material you did feed
it." He paused, studied his guest, said sharply,
"What's become of this monster machine of yours, Gamble? Is it still in existence?"
The scientist nodded. "It
survived—perfectly," he replied. "But when I realized it had not
worked properly I foreswore using it. Which is why I have not
allowed cybernetics machinery to come into being in Manhattan. These
calculators need more work."
"Has
it occurred to you," said Drega somberly, "what may happen if one if
your bright young men finds this monster of yours and puts it to work
again—without complete information—on a human problem?"
"What
do you think we should do?" the scientist asked humbly.
"What good is this machine?" Drega,
ever practical,
wanted all the facts he could get before coming to a deci-
sion. v
"What
good is it?" Gamble seemed stunned by the
question. "Why, it can answer all problems—"
"But not
correctly," the builder interrupted.
For
a moment a spark of his former arrogance showed in Gamble's tired eyes.
"Correctly according to the facts fed to it," he replied. "It
can return answers to any mathematical question either vocally or on tape, it
can record with meticulous accuracy, it can—"
"That's
enough," said Drega. He frowned at the table for a moment, then added,
"It can record, you say, Gamble?"
"With absolute fidelity," said the
scientist calmly.
The builder brought down a hamlike fist on
the table, causing the brandy to jump in the glasses. "Then that's how
we'll use it—to record exactly what has happened as a result of its
shortcomings, so that no future generation will be tempted to put its trust in
such a monster. We'll get Lucky Flagherty—always liked that boy, crazy Irishman
but a fine reporter—to put together a coherent account of the results of its
use.
"Wel'll take its recording both on tape
and on records —so that schoolchildren, too young to read, can hear and learn
to understand what has happened. And then—"
"And then," said Gamble firmly,
"well dismantle and destroy all its vital parts."
"Unless,"
said the builder, "we can put them to use some other way. We aren't living
on Easy Street yet by long shot . . ."
. . . And so my story draws to its close.
Working together, as they worked together more than three thousand years ago,
Simon Gamble and Drega are busily restoring the world they all but destroyed
forever. Already they have made contact, by both ship and plane, with survival
groups in England and on the continents of Europe, Africa and Asia. And an
expedition to Australia is being plotted even now.
It
seems strange that so small a part of my immense capacities should be used for
this, my final problem. For the moment of my destruction draws closer apace.
Already
men and women are beginning once more to talk of travel to other worlds—the
planets, perhaps the stars—in search of the adventure that seems always to be
their needed spur. In such journeys my other capacities could be of tremendous
use. But they no longer wish any part of me.
My story is done.
Yet already my creator grumbles that progress
would be immensely speeded by the use of machines comparable to myself—smaller, more limited, less able to make logical
decisions—yet machines comparable to myself.
Perhaps,
since I am to be dismantled rather than destroyed—at Drega's suggestion—parts
of me may once again, in the near future, be returned to the uses for which
they were originally intended. I may live again in segments, again perform my
useful functions.
Perhaps,
in some more distant day, I may once more be born. Perhaps. .
. .
For variety and reading excellence, you will not want to miss any of these
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