Lords of Creation

by Eando Binder

  Jon Darm was there, and Sharina, with Mal Radnor standing close by her side, their faces lit by wavering candlelight. Four people—of the Second Stone Age. That phrase drummed steadily in Ellory’s mind.

  “Just how much of the past do you know?” asked Ellory curiously, addressing Sem Onger. “About my time, for instance?”

  “I know much of the past,” boasted the old scholar. “I have read all the existing records. Of your 20th century, which is a small part of the past 3000 years, little detail is known, save that it was a very queer time.”

  “Queer?” smiled Ellory.

  “We know of the most popular game of your time, called Captilnlabr, in which those who could sit down the longest won. It was probably derived from a much earlier time, for you had a group called the picts in it.”

  “Capital and labor!” murmured Ellory, when he had caught on. “A game—I see! What else, Sem Onger? What name from our times has lived the longest?”

  “Suprim,” cracked the old seer promptly. “He was a marvelous man who could fly through the air and lift a house by himself. It is said he performed many feats back in your time that saved countless lives and almost reduced crime to zero. I have figured out that his amazing powers were a product of your great science and that he really lived. I can determine what is myth and what is truth.”

  “I guess you can,” agreed Ellory. “But what about such names as Kennedy, Edison, Einstein—haven’t they been remembered?” —

  Sem Onger mumbled the names to himself several times blankly.

  Then his watery old eyes lighted.

  “Oh, yes—Einstein. He was a philosopher in the Land of Fsiks, who formulated the doctrine that things which move do not move at times. I have myself proved that he was wrong. He and his people were quite mad.”

  Ellory turned and stared out of the doorway.

  Three thousand years, and his times were lost in the night of the past! This simple Second Stone Age knew little or nothing of his civilization. They were as separate as night and day. The intervening centuries had fallen like a stage curtain between.

  Sharina touched his arm.

  “We are waiting to hear, Humrelly, about the building of this crypt, and your preservation in it.”

  Ellory faced them. “It is a simple enough story,” he began, speaking more or less fluently in their tongue. “A so-called ‘eccentric millionaire’ of my time decided to have this crypt built to preserve relics of our age for a future age to see. This was a unique institution of our time. He got his cue from the various Time Capsules that had been buried notably at the New York World Fairs of 1939 and 1964.

  “True, some previous structures and records—particularly the pyramids—had inadvertently survived into a far future, but my, crypt was expressly designed for that purpose.

  “The year 5000 A.D. was chosen for the opening. A previous high point in civilization existed approximately 3000 years before—the Grecian Era. So a time 3000 years later was picked, after an equal era, to pass our relics on to a still higher point—”

  He broke off, hiding a grimace, and waved at the shelves. ‘The builder had models made of the most noteworthy machines and implements of our time, and had them sealed in glass against corrosion, as you have seen.

  “Of books he picked only the most representative and general—scientific, cultural and some classical fiction. Also historical, in the event that this future age had lost many valuable records we had of our past.

  “Illustrated magazines, printed on lasting parchment, are in one of the Bakelite cases, giving a pictorial view of our times. Some newspapers are included, though they are not good reading, to show the spot-news mania so prevalent.”

  Ellory turned and placed his hand on the machine that had so mystified and intrigued Jon Darm and his men upon first seeing it.

  “This is what we called a motion-picture projector. In one of those large cases are hundreds of reels of specially long-lasting film, most of them prepared to depict the life of our day.

  “They show world events such as war, famine, parades and scenic panoramas. The film in the machine now, which you saw, was that of the millionaire’s son greeting the future of 5000 A.D. In brief, it extends the 20th century’s heartiest wishes to the 50th.”

  The future people looked at one another, as though still amazed at the thought.

  Ellory smiled a little as he turned the switch of the small compact phonograph he had previously rescued from its sealed container. A deep voice rose above the scratching of the needle, filling the vault.

  Only Ellory understood the words, but the others listened in astonishment at the clear reproduction of a human voice.

  “Hello, 50th century! This is the day of July 4th, 1970, the 174th year of the existence of the United States of America. Only destiny itself can say whether such a nation exists in your year of 5000 A.D. But whether it does or not, I speak to the people who have inherited the same lands and waters, and in that kinship I, the president, extend to you my and my country’s heartfelt greetings!”

  The voice stopped and Ellory switched off the record.

  “That was the president, or chief, of my land,” he said, finding his voice a little husky. ‘There are several hundred other records here, of personages, speeches and music of my time.”

  He gave an involuntary sigh, thinking of how completely all that it had stood for had vanished. His times, and all the things thereof, were no more than a breath of wind in the hall of history.

  “But now about myself. I was the assistant of a famous man who studied natural things—a scientist, we called such a man. Briefly, he had at this time perfected a method of suspending life, by an electroleptic process. When he heard of the crypt being built, he arranged to have added a small chamber in which would be interred a human being to awaken in the future. I had already volunteered for the project. And so it was done.”

  Ellory did not attempt to explain, why he had done it. He had frankly been given only one chance in ten of awakening. The electrical suspension might drop the slender thread of life through the long age.

  He had left behind a secure place in a world he knew, to face an unknown future. It had taken courage. But he had thought of the adventure of it, and the thrill of living in a future age so far advanced from his time—

  “Your time was a time of magic!” Jon Darm was saying in awed tones, staring at the phonograph. “What strange sorcery makes that machine talk with the voice of a man dead for 3000 years?”

  “Not magic—science,” said Ellory. “With suitable metals I could build many machines for you.

  “You have no science—no metals!” he exclaimed. “This is a second Stone Age. How could history turn that trick, in the past 3000 years?”

  “Metals?” Old Sem Onger turned from his scrutiny of the phonograph. “No, we have no metals.”

  “But they can be mined, smelted, and then fashioned into machines,” continued Ellory half impatiently. He lapsed into his own idiom. “I’ll show you people things that will make your hair curl!”

  “But there are no metals to be found,” croaked Sem Onger. “There are no—no—”

  He failed to find a word he wanted.

  “Of course not,” agreed Ellory, captivated suddenly with the idea of what he would do. “Metals don’t just lie around to be picked up. You have to extract them from ores and—”

  “Ores!” cried the old seer. “That’s the word. There are no ores, Humrelly. They have been used up.”

  “Used up!” Ellory felt his heart sink.

  Sem Onger went on, blinking owlishly.

  “I have read much of the Age of Metals, which begins properly before your time and extends a thousand years beyond. I would be able to extract metals, too, if I had good ores. But none are left.”

  The ag
ed man fumbled in his coat and withdrew several sheets of fibrous bark inscribed with his own writing.

  “This is a translation of the writings of an unknown man two thousand years ago, and one thousand years after your time.”

  He moved near to a candle and read.

  “Mankind has lived too extravagantly. He has raped Earth of its once-generous products. There was a limit he did not foresee in time.

  “In this year of 3000 A.D., the last shreds of coal are being brought up from deep mines. Oil has been unknown for centuries. Of metals, many have become unavailable starting with the practical extinction of tin five hundred years ago.

  “Iron and aluminum are plentifully distributed through the ground we walk upon, but in forms that our best science cannot break down save at prohibitive cost and labor.”

  Ellory shuddered as though ghosts were beside him. The ghosts of men who even in his time had predicted the failure of natural supplies, in the not-so-distant future.

  But the optimists had boasted that science would always find a way out. What of transmutation, whose signposts even the 20th century had followed?

  As if in answer, Sem Onger read from his translations.

  “Experiments in transmutation failed to succeed commercially. Some processes required too much power for operation, making the end-product more expensive than gold. Other processes released energy with an explosive violence that scattered machine, inventor and product over half of Earth.

  “And thus civilization, as we know it, crumbles in the face of metal-and-power starvation.

  “Constant warfare has been the prime thief, and has made a shambles of human affairs on this ill-fated globe. The Era of Dictators, beginning in the 20th century, had thrown all civilization finally into a frightful war whose hatreds are still not spent. The glorious promise of the past has become a mocking skull. An airplane sailed over the city today, dropping a bomb. It is perhaps one of the last aircraft there are, fueled by vegetable alcohol.

  “But this present war will go on. If there are no guns, men will fly at one another’s throats with clawing fingers.

  “I will keep my secret. It might have saved this civilization a thousand years ago, but today it would only add fuel to the fires of war. This is the twilight of civilization as we have known it for one thousand years. I look ahead and see night. A night of darkness and misery for mankind.”

  Ellory stood like a statue.

  The future people watched him, hardly aware of what soul-shaking thoughts were his.

  “And it was truly a hideous night for humanity,” mumbled Sem Onger in comment. “Not long after, from what records I have, the general collapse came. Hordes of what were practical savages swept over the world.

  “The running-down of that civilization so dependent on power and metals, threw millions upon millions of people on their own resources. There wasn’t room for all in those simpler circumstances. The population dwindled, by famine and struggle. For nine hundred years after, mankind lived in barbarism. The great cities fell to ruin. Your age, Humrelly, passed into the forgotten.”

  “History repeating itself,” Ellory murmured. “The higher they rise, the lower they fall!” He stirred. “But what are the general conditions over Earth today?”

  “We have risen out of savagery,” Sem Onger said sagely. “There has come a sort of balance. Mankind is divided into what you would call ‘tribal states.’ Jon Darm is chief of a land extending to the north and south and west as far as a horse can run in three days. Five other chiefs rule in lands bordering ours, called Norak. Beyond are more chiefs, more tribal states. Our sailing vessels have plied at times to all the lands of Earth across the great oceans. Everywhere it is the same. Sometimes we have border disputes, fighting. For the rest, our life is purely agricultural.”

  For a long moment there was silence in the crypt. Sharina caught Ellory’s eye. “Are you dissatisfied in this life, Humrelly?” she asked softly.

  “No, angel,” Ellory replied, realizing he must have been frowning. “I’m just wondering what place I can find in it. The only scientist in an era without metals, machines—without a laboratory!”

  Again that phrase came to his lips—“The Second Stone Age!”

  A sound droned into the open doorway of the stone crypt. Ellory’s jaw dropped as he looked up into the sunny sky. While his brain was still repeating, like a dirge, “The Second Stone Age”, his eyes saw something in the sky that played havoc in his mind.

  He saw—an airplane!

  Chapter 6

  MEN OF ANTARKA

  The craft was strange, like no airplane Ellory had ever seen. Two wide, triangular wings supported a torpedo-shaped cabin, all of shiny white metal. There were no engines apparent, or propeller, but little orange spurts of flame came from the back wing-edges. It was unmistakably a rocket-type aircraft, product of advanced science.

  Somewhere on Earth lay civilization! Ellory felt like yelling for joy. So it wasn’t entirely Second Stone Age after all!

  He watched until the craft had vanished in the western sky, its pace steady and swift. Then he whirled on his companions. Their faces were queerly crest-fallen, as if they had been reminded of something they disliked.

  “What people have such craft, Sem Onger?” demanded Ellory. “Were you trying to hide it from me? You told me all Earth was metal-less and machine-less!”

  “I was about to tell you of them,” replied the old man calmly. “Yes, there is a type of your Twentieth Century civilization, in a cold land of snow and ice, surrounded entirely by water. Lords of Antarka, they are named.”

  “Antarka?” echoed Ellory, struck by a familiar ring to the word. “Is it south from here—far, far south?”

  Sem Onger nodded.

  “Antarctica! Lords of Antarctica!” Ellory grasped the old man’s bony shoulder. “Tell me about them!”

  Sem Onger shook his head.

  “Little is known of them, save that they have the flying machines, and live in that cold land. They are an isolated people, and have little to do with the rest of Earth.”

  Ellory’s awakening into a second Stone Age had struck him queerly enough. But this was still more bizarre. A people, knowing science and metal, hoarding it for themselves and letting the rest of the world go on in stone-age backwardness!

  It made Ellory angry. But he knew he must not condemn them this quickly. Antarctica had been known to have coal and metal ores, even in the Twentieth Century. But certainly not enough to supply the rest of the ravaged world.

  Ellory resolved to seek out the so-called Lords of Antarka, in the near future. His pulse leaped at the mere thought of once again seeing civilization similar to his own. But in the meantime, he felt a tie with these people who had disinterred him.

  Perhaps something might be done for them, within the limits of present-day conditions.

  In the next month, Ellory spent much of his time with Sem Onger. The old seer was in a frenzy of delight over the relics of the crypt. Ellory talked himself hoarse, explaining everything to his insatiable curiosity. Sharina came in often to listen, eyes wide at the wonders of the Twentieth Century.

  They seemed most intrigued by the motion pictures. Ellory found himself twisting the heavily-geared crank long hours while they watched.

  “Oh, for one little half-horsepower motor!” he often said, smiling helplessly at the impossible wish. Yet down in Antarctica—it was a curious thought—they had machines, metals, civilization. Bleak wilderness in 1950, home of civilization today. And America, Europe, Asia, in the reverse role, in a stone age. Queer trick of fate.

  Sharina and Sem Onger sat dumbly through most of the reels, watching trains, autos, aircraft without comment. But when a common two-wheeled bicycle appeared in one scene, they broke out in excited words. It was something they could almost understand. Its mo
tion to them seemed swift and miraculous.

  Sharina always stared with pathetic yearning at the women’s clothing shown in the pictures. It was a pitiful manifestation of the eternal feminine, and it summed up in itself the aching absence of the things of civilization.

  Old Sem Onger kept shaking his head at what he saw, as though denying the evidence of his eyes. He jumped back half frightened as a city scene showed an elevated train rounding a curve.

  “It will fall!” he cried.

  “Don’t worry,” admonished Ellory chuckling. “If it didn’t then, it won’t now.”

  He caught his breath. He tried to realize that all this had happened 3000 years ago. That these were nothing but mocking images, ghosts of things that were, caught on a film. That it was all vanished into limbo.

  “Ah, there were so many great things in the past!” old Sem Onger sighed. “So many secrets that we can never know, of that time and later. What was the secret, for instance, of that man of 3000 A.D. who wrote at the close of the scientific age?”

  Ellory suddenly stopped turning the handle and let the film come to a stop.

  “Yes!” he said, realizing that this had been in his subconscious mind all along. What was the secret? “Sem Onger, where did you find his original writing?”

  “In the ruins of ancient Norak. What did you call it—Noo Yoruk? I have often wandered there, trying to imagine what that great city was like before its fall in 3090 A.D., in some terrible war. The papers seemed to be carefully preserved, in an envelope of gold leaf, among the debris of a stone vault.”

  In Ellory’s mind rose a vision of a tiled laboratory. A scientist of the Thirtieth Century had toiled there, had discovered some great thing and then had died with it; but he had left an enigmatic record. It might mean something. It might not.

  “Can you find the stone vault again?” Ellory asked.

  “Perhaps.”

  “Then we’ll make a trip to Norak,” Ellory stated. “I want to see the ruins of New York anyway.”