by Eando Binder
“They just slipped a century or so and dated me in the stagecoach days of the middle 19th century! So to keep me from being shocked out of my aboriginal wits by a sudden sight of their super-civilization, they’re introducing me to it gradually and carefully. That, Homer, is a sign of a tremendously superior intelligence. And of considerable tact.”
The journey promised to last for hours. Ellory enjoyed it. The air was warm, fresh, and sweet with the odor of growing things. It had also been considerate of them to open the crypt in spring, instead of promptly on January First, in bitter weather.
Ellory found himself looking back often at the girl Sharina in the following wagon. Her hair was a golden blaze in the sunlight. Her eyes strayed toward him at times. Or perhaps, Ellory reflected, curbing his romantic impulse, toward Mal Radnor beside him. Evidently Mal had reversed the guess—he was scowling slightly.
Ellory grinned. 20th century or 50th, it made little difference in the oldest of human relationships. There still were love and jealousy and man’s instinct wholly to possess the mind and body and heart of his chosen mate.
Chapter 4
MEN WITHOUT METAL
When Homer Ellory awoke the next morning, he was distinctly puzzled. For a fleeting moment he was back in the 20th century again, preparing to start a day’s activity on the crypt which would soon be ready for sealing.
Then he remembered and a silent, hollow wonder filled him.
The crypt had been sealed, and unsealed, and this was the 50th century. The year 5000 A.D. Three thousand years and more since he had been born.
Ellory had to assimilate that fact slowly, like sipping a strong, heady drink. It gave him a kind of mental hangover, and he dug his fists into his steel blue eyes to make sure he was not still enthralled by a dream that had lingered after waking.
How had he gotten here, on a couch covered with blankets, and in a room? What had happened? The last he could remember was riding in the wagon with the future men and then—all had faded away.
He had either fallen asleep or fainted. Probably the latter, for he had felt a strange weakness stealing through him. That might easily have been an after effect of the powerful compounds that woke life in his body after its 3000 years of suspended animation.
Shelving the matter as relatively unimportant, Ellory stared around. He was not alone. Sem Onger sat in a chair at the foot of the bed, gazing at him with quiet awe. His monkey-face grinned and he bobbed his white-haired head, murmuring some greeting.
“Good morning, Mr. Zip-Zip,” Ellory muttered foolishly.
Something caught Ellory’s eye—a window.
He jumped up, finding himself clothed in a short white robe like a nightshirt, and stumbled toward it. They had evidently taken him to their city. What would he see when he looked out? A vertiginous view of their supermetropolis from some 200-storied eyrie?
Ellory still thought of himself as some jungle native suddenly transported to an incredible civilization.
He looked out eagerly.
He was no more than a hundred feet from the ground. Beyond the tips of surrounding trees he saw a collection of small houses of wood and stone, with wide green lawns. The unpaved streets between were bordered with a myriad of bright flowers. It was a scene so reminiscent of 20th century sleepy rural towns that Ellory’s sight blurred for a moment.
What did it mean?
“The chief’s country villa, of course,” he murmured, conscious of a deep prick of disappointment. “They’ll keep me here for a while and tell me about their great civilization before overwhelming me with it at first hand. Very considerate of them but—”
A hand touched his arm. Ellory turned and took the large piece of bark Sem Onger proffered.
“I wish,” Ellory said half in annoyance, “you people wouldn’t treat me like this. Bark for paper and charcoal writing! I’m not that backward. I suppose you think that if you showed me paper and a fountain-pen, I’d sit down and play with them like a delighted child.”
He read the message in shapeless letters and indifferent spelling.
“Yastdaiy yoou swoouned in wagun. We tak yoou heer, give yoou stroong drunke. Yoou sleep eesfally all neitte. Yoou must reast todaiy. Any questzins?”
“Thanks. I feel fine now,” Ellory wrote back. “Let us go on to Chief Jon Daroa’s Royal House, to which he invited me.”
Sem Onger, after reading this, carefully rolled the bark now filled with scrawled lettering, slipped it into his coat pouch, and took out a clean sheet.
“This is Rooyal Hause. Yoou hunngry inside?”
“Yes, I am very hungry inside,” wrote back Ellory. “I have a suggestion. Why not teach me your language? I am sure it is just a modified form of mine. I think in a few days I would be able to understand your spoken words.”
After reading this, old Sem Onger nodded smilingly and left. ‘
Alone, Ellory sat down on the couch, frowning. “This is the Royal House, he says. But I still insist it’s just a sort of country estate, or hunting lodge perhaps. As chief, king, president or whatever his title, Jon Darm must have something a little more pretentious than this—I hope.”
He stared around the room, at the simple wooden furniture, almost crude, except that carved designs had been nicely worked into the grain. Small pictures of bark in wooden frames depicting sylvan scenes hung on the walls. But there was no indication of electric lights, or heating equipment of any kind.
On a small stand stood several candles and a glazed bowl whose blackened inner surface tagged it as an oil lamp. Primitive, Ellory decided.
Had they rifled a museum just to surround him with things they believed would make him feel at ease?
He paced the room thoughtfully. There was something strange about all this.
The opening door cut off further rumination. Ellory gave a startled cry and leaped for the blankets. The girl Sharina entered, followed by a man carrying a large tray of steaming bowls of food.
Sharina smiled a greeting and then smiled more at Ellory’s discomfiture over his awkward attire. At a few low words from her, the man set the tray down on a small table before the bed, then left.
Sharina, still smiling, handed Ellory a piece of bark.
“Trrust yoou aenjoy our fooud,” he read in Sem Onger’s weird lettering. “Chief Jon Darm excusis, he is bussy withe afairsz of statte. I must goa to cryipt, examine moore of contaents. Sharina saiys she will taeckh our langwag yoou. Yoou liake? Yes.”
Ellory grinned. “Sem Onger, you’re an old fox. You’re all right.”
A savory odor brought a sigh from his lips.
“Sit down, Sharina”—he motioned—“while I have my first meal in 3000 years, and satiate a corresponding appetite. Sharina”—he continued between mouthfuls—“as I said before, you’re a lovely girl. Won’t you join me?”
She shook her head at his gestured invitation, and stepped to the window, looking out.
Ellory got down to serious eating. The implements he ate with were wooden. Jon Darm seemed to have an aversion to metals in his house, but that detracted nothing from his enjoyment of what was remarkably similar to plain 20th century beef-stew, boiled potatoes, bread and butter, vegetable salad, and a rich cake. Ellory was delighted to find his beverage was coffee, with cream and sugar.
“Wonderful!” he sighed, when he had swallowed the last crumb. “I never did take much stock in those 20th century predictions that future people would eat tasteless compressed tablets. But I wouldn’t doubt these foods are all vitamin-rich and carefully balanced in dietary values. They probably have it all down to an exact science.”
He smiled up at the girl as she came over, moved the tray aside, and sat down.
“And now,” Ellory said, “for language lessons from this earthly angel. Hope it takes a year.” He considered playing
dumb and taking a long time to learn. “They wouldn’t suspect since they apparently class me only about three jumps ahead of Neanderthal Man.”
Sharina began by naming the various objects around them. Ellory repeated the words after her carefully, finding their vowels subtly overtoned with dovetailed syllables. She could say words in half the time his untrained tongue could perform them. Ellory recalled his German lessons, where a word like Geschlechtichkeit had seemed to him insurmountable while his teacher had rolled it off in a second without missing a syllable.
It was a matter of tongue work.
His previous impression that their language was a modified form of English grew. Elision through the centuries had resulted in contractions. Also there had been a progression of the consonants toward the lips, as in all evolution of language. As the guttural Chaucerian English sounded to him, so his speech must sound to these people.
“Probably most of my words register to them as archaic grunts,” Ellory thought.
They made rapid progress, as the day wore on.
Later, they were interrupted. Mal Radnor, the young chieftain, stepped in, and instantly, the air became uncomfortable. He greeted Ellory with a smile that was somewhat wan. He stayed a while, listening quietly, but Ellory could not feel at ease. Sharina’s obvious interest in her task was not to the young chieftain’s liking.
When he left, he shot Ellory a glowering look. Ellory felt a little guilty, in his third party role. Mal Radnor might never be his friend. Human nature was one thing that 3000 years, or 30,000 years, could never change.
In the next few days, Sharina extended the range of her lessons by taking her pupil out for daily walks, thought it was a trial at first for Ellory to be the object of all the passers’ frankly curious glances.
Yet he did not feel too conspicuous. The people did not go out of their way to ogle him. He could not quite understand it. He thought of being a Roman loose in the 20th century, with photographers, reporters, civic groups and whatnots plaguing him ceaselessly. Scientists pawing him. Movie agents, sob sisters, pedants, ad-men buzzing around like gadflies.
Here, there seemed no such public greed for the sensational. Not one photographer or reporter.
Ellory was both relieved and disappointed. And mystified.
The town proved to be quite a large one, sprawling neatly along the Hudson for several miles, but its atmosphere was strictly rural. There were no streetcars or public conveyances of any sort. The Maln avenue was paved with wooden blocks, and over these rattled a procession of horse-drawn carts and wagons. Most of the people walked. They were all dressed in the same baggy, unstyled clothes that Ellory wore.
Had they isolated him in their most hidden and backward region? Surely none of this could be typical of their 50th century civilization. Ellory could hardly wait to know enough of the language to ask questions—millions of them. They jostled and fumed in his mind in a confused heap as he learned a little here and a little there, and could not fit it all together in any rational scheme.
Nowhere was there a sign of radio, or steam power, or electricity, or engines, trucks, or aircraft. It seemed to be a machineless community. Had he by rare chance awakened in some backwoods of a country, comparable to the inner China of his age?
But all such theories that Ellory formulated struck him as off the right track. The explanation was still more bizarre whatever it was.
There was something about it all that lurked just beyond Ellory’s reach. He strained and strained to pin it down…
Hearing the sounds of activity one day from a long, low building that might be a factory, Ellory had Sharina conduct him there. Inside, he gasped. Hundreds of workers sat at their benches, turning out various implements of bone, hide and wood. Ellory watched a man smooth down the curve of a plow.
The plow was of hard wood. The man’s tool was of fire-chipped flint.
“Why does he not use an—an iron tool?” asked Ellory, concentrating all his recently acquired knowledge of the language.
“Iron?” echoed Sharina. “What is that ‘iron?’ ”
“Iron—metal!” Ellory said, but again he used a word Sharina had taught him no synonym for in her tongue.
He glanced around for a bit of metal to illustrate what he meant. His eyes grew wide as they swept over the shop, over everything.
There was not one scrap of metal visible anywhere!
And swiftly reviewing the past few days, Ellory could not recall seeing any since he had left the crypt. “Good Lord!” he gasped.
In one blinding flash it all became clear to him. Ever since he had stepped out into this new world, he had been subconsciously trying to pin down that one thing. Because of its complete absence he had overlooked it, as a person on another planet might not notice the complete lack of the color red until he objectively looked for it.
Metals were unknown to Jon Darm and his people!
“You seem disturbed, Humrelly,” Sharina said. “What is this iron-metal you seek?—Oh wait! I know. Come with me.”
She led the way out of the shop and down the avenue to a large open building which proved to be a museum of sorts. One corner of the exhibit displayed a queer assortment of objects. Ellory stared at a coil, green with verdigris, labeled: Product known as Copper Wire. Date unknown. Use unknown, but probably in a Machine. Found in ruins of ancient Norak.
Further on were other metallic objects, most of them unnamed and undated, but all of them attributed to the ubiquitous Machine. Sharina pointed to a rusted blade sticking up from a block of age hardened clay. “That is what you seek!” she said proudly.
The label read: This was known as Iron-Metal. Origin and use unknown.
It was a bayonet…
Ellory turned staring eyes from the pathetic relics to the girl.
“Is it the same all over Earth, as it is here?” he asked breathlessly, almost afraid to hear the answer.
Sharina stared back, as if the question were absurd. “All over Earth,” she said finally.
She seemed about to say more, touching his arm, but Ellory had turned dazedly away.
On their return to the Royal House, Ellory almost ignored her presence, his brain whirling. This meant that all metalcraft, and therefore all civilization as he had known it, was extinct! That not one machine labored for man! That the world was in a stage comparable to the early Egyptian dynasties, at least in its lack of mechanical things. But even the earliest Egyptians and Sumerians had had metals.
These 50th century people had none. This was a return to the Stone Age!
That realization burst into his brain like a bombshell. He found himself laughing crazily. “No metals, no machines—nothing but stone, flint, bone and wood, as in prehistoric days, when Ab the Caveman roamed through primeval forests!”
Again emotion shook him, as when he had first awakened.
“The Stone Age, that’s what you’re in. Do you hear, Sharina? The Second Stone Age!”
Chapter 5
TURN BACK THE CLOCK
Another week passed. The chief Jon Darm and the old scholar Sem Onger seemed in no hurry to question him, or conversely, to satisfy his curiosity.
Ellory realized, however, that the first step in his new life must be to learn their language properly. He might have fretted more save that Sharina’s tutorship was such a pleasant way to pass the time. He became reasonably proficient in their tongue. His older English became more and more stilted by comparison, even in his thoughts.
There came the time, at last, when Sharina announced that on the following day Jon Darm and Sem Onger would speak at length with him and exchange information about their two separate times.
“You now know our language well enough for that purpose,” said the girl, smiling. “You have been a good pupil.”
“Thanks, angel,” Ellory re
turned. He hadn’t explained to her the innuendo behind angel and she had taken its frequent use as a title. At times he wondered how she would react to: “Gorgeous.”
“I’ve enjoyed our—lessons,” he went on softly. “Have you, Sharina?” He gave her a sidelong glance, knowing that he had grown much fonder of her than he had dreamed. The girl dropped her eyes before his. A rosy tint stole over her face, guiltily.
“I’m sorry, Humrelly. I should have told you before. Mal Radnor and I are betrothed!”
She glanced at him once, helplessly, then left without another word.
Alone, Ellory regarded his fingernails with a bleak feeling.
“Well, that’s that!” he sighed finally. “It’s happened to the best of us since Adam!”
He didn’t know quite what he meant himself. He wasn’t sure if he was deeply sorry or not. He wasn’t sure of anything—except that he had thought of Sharina often.
“Well, that’s that,” he said again, shrugging.
He shoved the matter out of his mind and forced his thoughts ahead—to what? To a life in the Second Stone Age!
And suddenly, for the first time, Ellory felt the hollow emptiness of this awakening in what might be the wane of all civilization. Crushed, dismayed, his spirit bowed its head. He dreamed that night that he stood before a mirror and saw the reflection of a wizened, wrinkled, senile old wretch whose scrawny shoulders bore the weight of 3000 years of life. Himself!
The next day, in the crypt, Ellory looked around. Much of the contents, infinitely precious in old Sem Onger’s eyes, had been removed to his quarters in the Royal House for leisurely examination. Ellory could remember so clearly—it seemed like yesterday—when the relics had been meticulously sealed and brought in for their long interment.
Yesterday? Three thousand years ago! That bare thought could still make him tremble.