Sense of Wonder: A Century of Science Fiction (102 page)

The lead pipe was coated with a few tiny cracks in its surface, and particles of white dust lay in them where the cold water had gathered the moisture of the air by condensation. But this could not have been helped, for the stream of water through this pipe was all that kept the tiny generator turning—that made possible the heated chamber and the final blaze of the specially constructed X-ray lamp that now filled his whole being with its life-restoring radiations.

Winters removed the cover from the power box and examined the motor and generator with great care. The chromium metal parts and the jeweled bearings showed not the slightest sign of wear. Did that mean that only a few years had elapsed? He doubted his clock’s accuracy. He replaced the covering and brushed off his hands, for everything was coated with dusty sediment. Next, Winters examined the heat elements and placed a glass container of water on them to heat. With more of his meat concentrate he made a hot soup and drank it thankfully.

Then he went eagerly to the door in the lead wall and pulled at the locking lever. It resisted and he pulled harder, finally exerting all the strength he had in the effort. It was useless. The door was immovable! He leaned against it a moment, panting, then stooped and scrutinized the doorjamb. With a chill of dread he observed that the leaden chamber wall had become coated at the crack with a fine white dust. It had rusted the door into place! Had he awakened only to die here like a rat in a trap?

In his weakened condition he felt total despair. He again sank back on his couch and stared desperately at the door. It was hours before the simple solution to his difficulties occurred to him. The locking lever—of course! It was of stainless steel and was held to the door only by one bolt. A matter of a dozen turns loosened the nut on this bolt and the lever came away freely in his hands.

With this bar of stout metal as a crowbar he easily pried into the soft lead wall beside the doorjamb and, obtaining a fulcrum, put his frail weight on the end of the lever. The door gave inward an inch! In a few minutes his efforts were rewarded. The door groaned protestingly as it swung open, and Winters looked up the ancient stone steps, half-lit by the room’s illumination. But in the open doorway a chill draft blew on his ragged and tune-tattered garments so he went back to the chamber and commenced unscrewing a circular cover set into the wall.

It came away heavily with a hiss of air, for it had enclosed a near-vacuum, and Winters pulled out clothes neatly folded. He was relieved to find a leather jacket still strong and perfect. It had been well oiled and was as supple as new. Some woolen things had not fared so well; but stout corduroy breeches of linen fiber seemed well preserved, and he put these on. A tightly covered crock of glass filled with oil yielded up a pistol designed to shoot lead bullets under compressed air and a neat roll of simple tools: a small saw, a file, a knife and a hand-axe. These he thrust into the waistband of his breeches, which had been slit around the belt to accommodate them.

Then with a last look around, Norman Winters started up the steps, guided only by the light from the chamber behind. He stumbled over fallen stones and drifted earth as he climbed. At the top he came to a mat of tree roots sealing him in. So the axe was wielded delicately by those enfeebled arms, and many minutes passed in severing one small piece at a time. The capstone which had originally covered the tunnel had been split and pressed to one side by the force of the growing tree and after the third large root had been severed a small cascade of earth and pebbles let down on him a blazing flood of sunlight.

He paused and forced himself to return to his chamber. There he filled a glass bottle with water and slung it to his belt, put a handful of concentrated food in his pocket, and left the chamber for good, closing the door behind him and turning off the light.

It took only a few minutes to squeeze his head and shoulders through the opening between the roots. He looked about him with pounding heart.

But what was this? He was in the middle of a forest!

* * * *

Upon all sides stretched the trees—great sky-thrusting boles with here and there a clump of lesser growth, but set so evenly and spaced so regularly as to betray human oversight. The ground was softly deep ia dead leaves and over them trailed a motley of vinelike plants. Winters recognized a cranberry vine and the bright wintergreen berries among many others he did not know. A pleasant sort of forest, he decided, and he set off rather hesitantly through the trees to see what he could find, his mind full of speculations as to how long it must have taken these trees to grow. To judge from the warmth, it must be about noon of a midsummer’s day—but of what year? Certainly many of the trees were over a hundred years old!

He had not progressed more than a hundred yards before he came upon a clearing. Passing beyond a fringe of shrubs he soon came into full view of a great highway. North and south it stretched and he stamped his feet upon the strange, hard surface of green glass-like material. It was smooth in texture and extraordinarily straight and level. For miles he could look in both directions but, gaze as he might, not the slightest sign of buildings could he detect.

Here was a poser indeed; where had the suburbs of New York gone? Had even New York itself joined the “lost legion” in limbo? Winters stood in indecision, and finally started tramping northward along the road. Once, about a mile further along had been the town of White Plains. It was nearby and, even if no longer in existence, it would make as good a starting point as any. His pace was slow, but the fresh air and bright sunshine set the blood coursing through his veins. He went faster as he felt his strength returning with each step. He had gone half an hour and had seen no sign of human habitation when a man appeared on the glass roadway a hundred yards ahead. He was dressed in red and russet. He held one hand over his eyes, peering at Winters, who hesitated, then continued to approach—a wild thrill surging through his veins.

The man seemed in some vague way different. His skin was dark and tanned—features full and rounded —and his eyes (Winters observed as he got nearer) were a soft brown. The supple body seemed alert and exuded the very breath of health, yet it was indefinably sensuous and indolent—graceful in movement. He could not for the life of him decide even what race this man of the future represented—perhaps he was a mixture of many. Then the man made a curious gesture with his left hand—a sort of circle waved in the air. Winters was puzzled, but believing it was meant for greeting, imitated it awkwardly.

“Wassum! You have chosen a slow way to travel!”

“I am in no hurry,” Winters replied, determined to learn all he could before saying anything himself. He had to repress his natural emotions of excitement and joy. He felt an urge to shout aloud and hug this stranger in his arms.

“Have you come far?”

“I have been traveling for years.”

“Come with me and I will take you to our orig. No doubt you will want food and drink and walling.” The words were drawled and his walk was slow—so much so that Winters felt a slight impatience. He was to feel this constantly among these people of the future.

The surprising thing, when Winters came to think about it, was that the man’s speech was plain English, for which he was thankful. There were new words, of course; and the accent was strange in his ears—a tang of European broad
A
’s and positively continental
R’s.
He was wondering if radio and recorded speech had caused this persistence of the old tongue, when they came to a pleasant clearing lined with two-story houses of shiny brown. The walls were smooth as if welded whole from some composition plastic. But when he entered a house behind his guide he perceived that the entire wall admitted light translucently from outside; tiny windows were placed here and there purely for observation and air. He had little time to look around, for a huge dark man was eyeing him beneath bushy gray eyebrows.

“A stranger who came on foot,” said his guide and nodding to Winters, “Our chief Forester.” Then he turned abruptly and left the two together, without exhibiting the slightest curiosity.

“Wassum, stranger! Where is your orig?” asked the Forester.

“My orig? I don’t understand.”

“Why, your village of course!”

“I have none.”

“What! A trogling?”

“I don’t understand.”

“A wild man—a herman—don’t you understand human speech?”

“Where I come from there were several forms of human speech, sir.”

“What is this? Since the dawn of civilization two thousand years ago there has been one common speech throughout the world!”

Winters made an excited mental note of the date. Two thousand years then, at the least, had elapsed since he entered his sleeping chamber!

“I have come to learn, sir. I should like to spend several days in your village observing your life in…er…an elementary sort of way. For instance, how do you obtain your food here in the middle of a forest? I saw no farms or fields nearby.”

“You are wassum to the walling, but farms—what are they? And fields! You will travel many a mile before you find a field near here, thanks to our ancestors! We are well planted in fine forests.”

“But your food?”

The Forester raised his eyebrows. “Food—I have just said we have fine forests, a hundred square kilos of them—food and to spare! Did you walk with your eyes shut?”

“Where I come from we were not used to finding food in forests, exactly. What sort of food do you get from them—remember I said I wanted elementary information, sir.”

“Elementary indeed! Our chestnut flour for baking, naturally, our dessert nuts and our vegetables, like the locust bean, the Keawe, the Catalpea and a dozen others—all the food a man could desire. Then the felled logs bear their crops of mushrooms—we have a famous strain of beefsteak mushroom in this orig. And of course the mast-fattened swine for bacon and winter-fats, and the pitch pines for engine oils—the usual forest crops. How can it be that you are ignorant of the everyday things which even schoolboys know?”

“Mine is a strange story, sir,” replied Winters. “Tell me what I ask and I will tell you later anything you want to know about myself. Tell me things as though I were—oh, from another planet, or from the distant past,” and Winters forced a laugh.

“This is a strange request!”

“And my story, when I tell it to you, will be stranger still—depend upon it!”

“Ha! Ha! It should prove amusing—this game! Well then, this afternoon I will spend showing you about and answering questions. After our meal tonight you shall tell me your story—but I warn you! Make it a good one—good enough to repay me for my time!”

* * * *

They went out into the sunlight together. The village proved to be a gathering of about fifty large houses stretching for half a mile around a long narrow clearing. The background consisted of the huge trunks, gnarled branches and dark green of the forest. The Forester himself was a rather brisk old fellow, but the villagers seemed to strike again that vague chord of strangeness—of indolence—which he had noticed in his first acquaintance. Groups lay gracefully stretched out here and there under trees, and such occasional figures as were in motion seemed to move with dragging feet to Winters’ businesslike mind. He guessed these people were downright lazy—and this he afterward observed to be invariably true. The natives accomplished the work of the village in an hour or two a day—and this time was actually begrudged and every effort was being made to reduce it. The chief effort of worldwide science was devoted to this end, in fact.

The people were dressed in bright colors, and the green grass and the rich brown of the buildings made a background to the colorful picture. Everywhere Winters saw the same racial characteristics of dark, swarthy faces and soft, liquid brown eyes. He noticed something strange about the eyes—as if they were not set straight in the face, but a trifle aslant. Little attention was paid Winters, except for occasional glances of idle curiosity aroused by his unusual attire. He thought the women unusually attractive, but the men seemed somehow effeminate and too soft; not that they were not fine specimens of humanity physically speaking, but their faces were too smooth and their bodies too graceful to suit his twentieth-century ideas of what vigorous men should look like. Their bodies suggested the feline—catlike grace and lethargy combined with supple strength.

Winters was told that a thousand people usually formed an “orig.” Just now there were several hundred extra inhabitants and a “colorig” had been prepared fifty miles to the north where trees had been growing for half a century, making ready for the new colony.

“But why should you not simply make your village large enough to keep the extra people right here?”

“The forest supports just so many in comfort—we are having trouble now as it is.”

“But are there no larger villages where manufacturing is done?”

“Of course. There are factory origs near the Great Falls in the north. Our airwheel goes there twice a week—a two-hours’ flight. But only a few people live there, just enough to tend the machines.”

The people of the village seemed happy and contented with life, but most of the younger men and women seemed to Winters too serious. Their dark faces hardly ever showed a smile. He enteied several of the houses—among others that of the guild of cloth-makers. He was greatly interested, as if seeing an old friend, to observe wood-pulp fed through a pipe into the threadmaking tubes to be hardened in
an acid bath. He recognized, of course, the rayon process— new in his youth, but here considered ancient beyond history.

“How many hours a day do you work here?” he asked the elderly attendant.

“I have worked three hours every day for the past week getting cloth ready for the new colonists,” he replied grumblingly. “Perhaps we shall have some peace in this orig when the youngsters are gone! At least there will be plenty of everything to go around once again!”