A Touch of Infinity (20 page)

His research and expectations had not played him false. The place was precisely what he had expected it to be, an institution for the freezing and preservation of human beings.

They entered chamber after chamber where the refrigeration caskets lay row upon row, like the Christian catacombs of a barely remembered past, but the power that drove the compressors had failed three millenniums ago and even the skeletons in the bottom of the caskets had crumbled to dust.

“So goes man's dream of immortality,” Souvan thought to himself, wondering who these poor devils had been and what their last thoughts were as they lay down to be frozen, defying that most elusive of all things in the universe, time itself. His students were chattering with excitement, and while Souvan knew that this would be hailed as one of the most important and exciting discoveries of his time, he was nevertheless deeply disappointed. Somewhere, somehow, he had hoped to find a well-preserved body, and with the aid of their medicine, compared to which the medicine of the twentieth century was rather primitive, restore it to life and thereby gain at firsthand an account of those mysterious decades when the human race, in a worldwide fit of insanity, had turned upon itself and destroyed not only 99 percent of mankind but every form of animal and bird life that existed. Only the most fragmentary records of those forms of life had survived, and so much less of the birds than of the animals that those airy, wonderful creatures that rode the winds of heaven were much more the substance of myth than of fact.

But to find a man or a woman—one articulate being who might shed light upon the origin of the fire storms that the nations of mankind had loosed upon each other—that was Souvan's cherished dream, now shattered. Here and there important parts of skeletons remained intact, a skull with marvelous restoration work on the teeth—Souvan was in awe of the technical proficiency of these ancient men—a femur, a foot, and in one casket, strangely enough, a mummified arm. All this was fascinating and important, but of absolutely no consequence compared to the possibilities inherent in his shattered dream.

Yet Souvan was thorough. He led his students through the ruins, and they missed nothing. Over twelve hundred caskets were examined, and all of them yielded nothing but the dust of time and death. But the very fact that this installation had been constructed so deep underground suggested that it had been built during the latter part of the atomic age. Surely the scientists of that time would have realized the vulnerability of electric power that did not have an atomic source, and unless the historians were mistaken, atomic power was already in use for the production of electricity. But what kind of atomic power? How long could it function? And where had their power plant been located? Did they use water as a cooling agent? If so, the power plant would be on the shore of the lake—a shoreline that had been turned into glass and lava. Possibly they had never discovered how to construct a self-contained atomic unit, one that might provide a flow of power for at least five thousand years. It is true that no such plant had ever been found in any of the ruins, but so much of ancient civilization had been destroyed by the fire storms that only fragments of their culture had survived.

At that moment in his musings, he was interrupted by a cry from one of the students assigned to radiation detection.

“We have radiation, sir.”

Not at all unusual in a ground-level excavation; most unusual so deep in the earth.

“What count?”

“Point 003—very low.”

“All right,” Souvan said. “Take the lead and proceed slowly.”

There was only one chamber left to examine, a laboratory of sorts. Strange how the bones perished but machinery and equipment survived! Souvan walked behind the radiation detector, the students behind them—all moving very slowly.

“It's atomic power, sir—point 007 now—but still harmless. I think that's the unit, there in the corner, sir.”

A very faint hum came from the corner, where a large, sealed unit was connected by cable to a box which was about a foot square. The box, constructed of stainless steel, and still gleaming here and there, emitted an almost inaudible sound.

Souvan turned to another of his students. “Analysis of the sounds, please.”

The student opened a case he carried, set it on the floor, adjusted his dials, and read the results. “The unit's a generator,” he said with excitement. “Atomic-powered, sealed, rather simple and primitive, but incredible. Not too much power, but the flow is steady. How long has it been since this chamber was last entered?”

“Three thousand years.”

“And the box?”

“That poses some problems,” the student said. “There appears to be a pump, a circulating system, and perhaps a compressor. The system is in motion, which would indicate refrigeration of some sort. It's a sealed unit, sir.”

Souvan touched the box. It was cold, but no colder than other metal objects in the ruins. Well insulated, he thought, marveling again at the technical genius of these ancients. “How much of it,” he asked the student, “do you estimate is devoted to the machinery?”

Again the student worked at his dials and studied the fluttering needles of his sound detector. “It's hard to say, sir. If you want a guess, I would say about eighty percent.”

“Then if it does contain a frozen object, it's a very small one, isn't it?” Souvan asked, trying to keep his voice from trembling with eagerness.

“A very small one, yes, sir.”

Two weeks later Souvan spoke to the people on television. The people were simply the people. With the end of the great atomic fire storms of three thousand years past had come the end of nations and races and tongues. The handful of people who survived gathered together and intermarried among themselves, and out of their tongues came a single language, and in time they spread over the five continents of the earth; and now there were half a billion of them. Once again there were wheatfields, forests and orchards, and fish in the sea. But no song of birds and no cry of any beast; of those, no single one had survived.

“Yet we know something of birds,” Souvan said, somewhat awed at speaking for the first time over the worldwide circuit. He had already told them of his calculations, his dig, and his find. “Not a great deal, unfortunately, for no picture or image of a bird survived the fire storms. Yet here and there we were rewarded with a book that mentioned birds, a line of verse, a reference in a novel. We know that their habitat was the air, where they soared on outstretched wings, not as our airplanes fly with the drive of their atomic jets, but as the fish swim, with ease and grace and beauty. We know that some of them were small, some quite large, and we know that their wings were covered with downy things called feathers. But what in all truth a bird or a wing or a feather was like, we do not know—except out of the imaginations of our artists who have created so many of their dreams of what birds were.

“Now, in the last room we examined in the strange resurrection place that the ancient people built in America, in the single refrigeration cell that was still operative, we discovered a small ovoid thing which we believe is the egg of a bird. As you know, there has been a dispute among naturalists as to whether any warm-blooded creature could reproduce itself through eggs, as insects and fish do, and that dispute has still not been finally resolved. Many scientists of fine reputation believe that the egg of the bird was simply a symbol, a mythological symbol. Others state just as emphatically that the laying of eggs was the means of reproduction among all birds. Perhaps this dispute will finally be resolved.

“In any case, you will now see a picture of the egg.”

A small white thing, perhaps an inch in length, appeared upon the television screens, and the people of the earth looked upon it.

“This is the egg. We have taken the greatest of pains in removing it from the refrigeration chamber, and now it rests in an incubator that was constructed for it. We have analyzed every factor that might indicate the proper heat, and now having done what we can do, we must wait and see. We have no idea how long the incubation will take. The machine which was used to freeze it and maintain it was probably the first of its kind ever to be built—perhaps the only one of its kind ever to be built—and certainly its builders planned to freeze the egg for only a very short while, perhaps to test the efficiency of the machine. That a germ of living life remains now, three thousand years later, we can only hope.”

But with Souvan it was more than a hope. The egg had been turned over to a committee of naturalists and biologists, but with his privileges as the discoverer, Souvan was allowed to remain on the scene. His friends, his family saw nothing of him; he remained in the laboratory, had his meals there, and slept on a cot he had fixed up for himself. Television cameras, trained on the tiny white objects in its glass incubator, reported to the world on the hour, but Souvan—and the committee of scientists as well—could not tear himself away. He awakened from his sleep to prowl through the silent corridors and look at the egg. When he slept, he dreamed about the egg. He pored over pictures of artists' conceptions of birds, and he recalled ancient legends of metaphysical beings called angels, wondering whether these had not derived from some species of bird.

He was not alone in his fanatical interest. In a world without boundaries, wars, disease, and to a large degree without hatred, nothing in living man's memory as exciting as the discovery of the egg had ever happened. Millions and millions of viewers watched the egg through their televisions; millions of them dreamed of what the egg might become.

And then it happened. Fourteen days had gone by when Souvan was shaken awake by one of the laboratory assistants.

“It's hatching!” she cried. “Come on, Souvan, it's hatching.”

In his nightclothes, Souvan raced to the incubator room, where the naturalists and biologists had already gathered about the incubator. Amid the hubbub of their voices, he heard the pleas of the cameramen to allow some space for pictures; but he ignored this as he pushed through to see for himself.

It was happening. The shell of the egg was already cracked, and as he watched, a tiny beak pecked its way free, to be followed by a little ball of downy yellow feathers. His first response was one of intense disappointment; was this then the bird? This tiny shapeless ball of life that stood on two tiny legs, barely able to walk and obviously unable to fly? Then reason and scientific training reassured him that the infant need not resemble the adult, and that the very fact of life emerging from the ancient frozen egg was more miracle than he had ever known in his lifetime.

Now the naturalists and biologists took over. They had already determined, piecing together every fragment of information they possessed and using their own wit as well, that the diet of most birds must have consisted of grubs and insects, and they had all the various possible diets ready—so that they might discover which was most congenial to the tiny yellow fluff. They worked with instinct and prayer, and fortunately they found a diet acceptable to the infant bird before it perished of indigestion.

For the next several weeks the world and Souvan observed the most wonderful thing they had ever experienced, the growth of a little chick into a beautiful yellow songbird. It moved from incubator into a cage and then into a larger cage, and then one day it spread its wings and made its first attempt at flight. Almost half a billion people cheered it, but of this the bird knew nothing. It sang, tentatively at first, and then more and more strongly. It sang its trilling little song, and the world listened with more excitement and interest than it gave to any one of the many great symphony orchestras.

They built a larger cage, a cage thirty feet high and fifty feet long and fifty feet wide, and they set the cage in the midst of a park; and the bird flew and sang and circled the cage like a darting ball of sunlight. By the millions, people came to the park to see the bird with their own eyes. They came across continents, across the broad seas—from the farthest reaches of the world, they came to see the bird.

And perhaps the lives of some of them were changed, even as Souvan's life had been changed. He lived now with dreams and memories of a world that once had been, of a world where these airy, dancing feathered things were a commonplace, where the sky was filled with their darting, swooping, dancing forms. What an unending joy it must have been to live with them! What ecstasy to look at them from one's front door, to watch them, to hear their trilling songs from morning to nightfall! He often went to the park—so often that it interfered with his work—to push his way slowly through the enormous crowds until he was near enough to see the tiny dancing bit of sunlight that had returned to the world from aeons past. And one day, standing there, he looked up at the broad blue reaches of the sky, and then he knew what he must do.

He was a world figure by now, so it was not too difficult for him to get an audience with the council. He stood before the august body of one hundred men and women who managed the business of life on earth, and the chairman, a venerable, white-bearded old man of more than ninety years, said to him:

“We will hear you, Souvan.”

He was nervous, uneasy—as who would not be to stand before the council—but he knew what he must say and he forced himself to say it.

“The bird must be set free,” Souvan said.

There was silence—minutes of silence—before a woman rose and asked, not unkindly, “Why do you say that, Souvan?”

“Perhaps—perhaps because, without being egotistical, I can claim a special relationship to the bird. In any case, it has entered into my life and my being, and it has given me something I never had before.”

“Possibly so with all of us, Souvan.”

“Possibly, and then you will know what I feel. The bird has been with us for more than a year now. The naturalists I have discussed this with believe that so small a creature cannot live very long. We live by a rule of love and brotherhood. We give for what we receive. The bird has given us one of the most precious of gifts, a new sense of the wonder of life. All we can give it in return is the blue sky—the place it was meant for. That is why I suggest that the bird should be set free.”