World in Eclipse

by William Dexter

  We found no fewer than six pairs of doors in the short space of twenty yards, and then the shelter opened out into a large enclosure, where supplies of fodder hung in hoppers. Here, obviously, the cattle had lived in bad weather. The arrangements for feeding them and watering them were complete in every detail. A runnel of water flowed from an open tap in the wall, running through a trough, out at an overflow, and down a drain. The hoppers were of the type that only delivered certain quantities of feeding stuff — worked by clockwork, we thought, but later we discovered an ingenious mechanism operated by water-power.

  A door in a side wall next came in for investigation, and on passing through it we learnt the secret of the beasts' survival.

  Hanging from a chain on one wall was a canvas case, coloured white to catch the eye. We opened it, and took out a batch of typescript, which told the story.

  It was a short story, and told of the effort to provide safety for animals in the event of atomic war.

  Appended at the bottom of the document were the words:

  "The Director, believing that the results of the premature explosion of the Vogel bomb may be akin to those of atomic explosion, has instructed that animals and birds selected for experiment, and for which accommodation is prepared, shall be sequestered in the shelters provided. A map of these shelters is enclosed herewith, the sections devoted to dangerous animals being marked in red. If anyone survives the Vogel catastrophe, and finds these words, he is to understand that the animals concerned have been selected previously for orthodox experiment in defence. It is feared that few of them will be of any use to surviving humanity, save those marked on the map with a cross. Time has been too short to allow of a more judicious selection at this stage. September 5th, 1973."

  Then followed a pencilled note, apparently inserted by the official depositing the document in its case on the wall:

  "Shelters were designed for a maximum of six months' occupation — not anticipated that they will provide sustenance for occupants after that period."

  Here was a blow to the sudden hopes we had built. A further blow came when we explored the other shelters marked on the map.

  Inside the first we found the bodies of eight chimpanzees and six men. They were well preserved, and might have lived for a month or so after the catastrophe. We took away the bodies of the men, and buried them out in the open. Over their grave we placed a pencilled notice, to be replaced later with a permanent memorial, to the effect that here lay the last men to breathe on Earth before the Return.

  In other shelters we had equally bad luck — except in one, where we found a dozen poor gamefowls all but prostrate. I am sure that if another day had passed the birds would have died.

  However, we looked on our finds philosophically, and were deeply thankful to find the birds alive.

  Their food hoppers had jammed, and they had been on the point of starving when we arrived. They were too weak to peck at the grain we held before them, but within an hour Karinga Varga, a Virian, had persuaded them to eat.

  Eight of the birds survived, I am glad to say, and within a week were as healthy as they had ever been.

  Our three cattle, Honey, the bull, and Ginger and Snowey, the two cows, had forced their way out of the shelter by main strength, we saw. The doors of their enclosure had been installed later than those of other shelters, and had been designed to be opened from within.

  We were at first encouraged to believe that if animals and birds could survive the catastrophe, we might yet find men who had outlived it, but our discovery of the six human bodies in the chimpanzees' shelter had robbed us of that hope.

  However, we never lost the feeling that some day, somewhere, we might meet with one of our kind, although we realised the vanity of the ambition.

  We made the conducting of our three cattle and eight birds to Primswood a major ceremony. The birds were taken in large cages found at the Zoo, and we drove slowly down so that the three beasts, carefully coaxed into padded lorries — one to each lorry in case of accident — should not be hurt.

  At Primswood they were installed in the most carefully tended luxury any animal ever enjoyed. A couple of Virians elected themselves their keepers, and these two promised us calves in at least — how long is the gestation period of Highland cattle? Nobody knew, but anyway, the calves should be there on time, they promised.

  Now, of course, the cattle are firmly established and the care devoted to them has become a privileged task for experts. The birds, too, have accommodated themselves better than we ever hoped, and are the best substitute for the old domestic fowl that is likely to be found, although they are a little small and wiry as table birds, and their eggs are something smaller than the old type. However, finding them was the most important incident in our lives since the Return, and we were more than satisfied with our luck.

  After our find, much time was spent in research at my information bureau, and we listed every useful animal, bird, reptile and insect, and black-listed the others. Useful, I say, using the word as applied to our standards at the time. We did not set ourselves up as contradicting the original Decree — if such there had been — that had first ordered life on this world. We simply sought out information to guide us as to the helpful and the dangerous creatures.

  Then we returned to the Zoo and conducted a minute search. The results were many, but of little apparent value to mankind. We found many insects. The poisonous ones we destroyed quickly, and the others — including a swarm of bees — we preserved. These, however, came to nothing and died off before we had any honey. The queen was lacking, I believe.

  There were several reptiles, but with the exception of frogs and lizards we had to destroy them. We did not intend to loose upon the world even a handful of the smallest poisonous snakes, who would no doubt thrive in a world offering them no combat.

  However, we had our lists, and these were kept permanently, in the faint hope of some day finding more living creatures.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Placing events in sequence, and allotting them their individual measure of importance, has meant a difficult choice for me. So far, the chapters dealing with our resumed life on Earth have given a sketchy picture of our activities, I fear, and many phases of our life which I regard now as being of prime importance may in after years lose much of their significance. But I write with incidents fresh in mind, and if I have failed to produce the perspective adopted by those who come after me, I ask to be forgiven.

  There is no doubt in my mind, though, that later generations will want to know more about the enduring factors of our work in these first few years of the Return.

  How were we all so busily occupied each day? — as I have intimated that we were busily occupied.

  What did we do? And to what end?

  Life was not all pleasure outings and picnics, finds and thrills. There was long and arduous work to be done in those first months.

  It was Arabin's design that we should first find for ourselves a pleasant place in which to live. I have described something of the finding of that place and of the farm, too. After we had settled ourselves in, Arabin planned to spend the rest of the year in contemplation — active, not idle — of our prospects for the future. Each person was allotted his part, and some of us received a number of tasks to do. By the following summer, it was our hope that we should have gathered enough information about our condition and our hopes to enable us to plan a way of life for the coming years.

  One of the heaviest tasks was the centralising of essential stores — not only for our own use, but possibly for the use of many future generations. This was done on a really big scale. While there might be less than a hundred people on Earth as we worked, we had to provide for thousands in the years to come. We had no doubt now that there would be following generations, and neither had we any doubt that for many, many years those following generations would be unable to build civilisation up to its previous state.

  Therefore it was our immediate aim to store away
safely everything — everything — that we thought might be of use to us and our descendants.

  It was a colossal work. Not only food and clothing, but vehicles, tools, equipment, such raw materials as we could transport, and metals, fabrics and the like had to be sorted and stored.

  We explored London for three weeks before finding the ideal centre for our store. After inspecting vast warehouses in the City, manufacturing plants on the by-pass roads, and hangars on the rural fringe of London, we abandoned each in turn. The warehouses were disqualified because most of them already housed enormous stocks, which would have to be moved. The factories and workshops were little better, because they were designed for working in, rather than for storage, and what storage space they had was already overloaded, in most instances. There was plenty of space in the hangars and aircraft depots, but these could not be sealed against atmospheric action.

  Then we came across the great empty dumps and sheds built by the Government at the time of the threatened war with Russia. They spread across many acres of downland in Surrey, and the nearer ones were less than fifteen miles outside London. When they were built, the threat of the hydrogen bomb had hung heavy over Britain, and these great go-downs had been constructed partly underground. It was possible for two men to seal each building almost hermetically within two hours, and it had been the Government's boast that non-perishable goods would keep for five hundred years there.

  They were empty, as they always had been, when we found them, but the equipment necessary for maintaining them was all neatly laid in place, with full printed instructions.

  Arabin and Jesse Armitage surveyed them and returned with detailed maps of the buildings we

  proposed to use. Armitage, who had been the power behind the throne in Cosmopolis Stores, was especially suitable for having charge of the installations. He was also able to save us many months of fruitless exploration by putting us on to the warehouses where we could find the things we sought.

  There was a sound reason for siting our stores outside London. Although we lived in Town comfortably enough then, we knew well enough that we could not remain there for long. It might be months, or it might even be ten years, but the time would come when we should have to move to a more compact home. Corruption would in time overtake the great sprawling city of London with only a handful of people to keep going a few of the necessary works of maintenance and preservation. I have already told of our complete inability to keep even the streets in our own neighbourhood clean. In time, dust and corrosion would overwhelm the city.

  As it was, the absence of mankind from the Earth for a few short months had wrought ruinous consequences. Windows were broken by debris blown along the streets, rain and wind had destroyed woodwork, sunshine and weather had already conspired to peel off paint nearly everywhere.

  When we first went on our foraging expeditions, we had not scrupled to break into any building that was locked against us. Then, after a few days of this reckless destruction, we made it a rule never to break in anywhere unless we could secure the premises again when we had left. It was a truly sad sight to see the smashed plate-glass windows and swinging, broken doors along the streets that had once been great thriving shopping thoroughfares, but it was beyond our powers to patch up the damage. We accordingly resolved to do as little further damage as we could.

  At one time we had been terrified by a great fire that broke out, and which destroyed half of Regent Street. Our terror was caused because at first we did not know what had caused the blaze, and by the thought that it might spread until we ourselves were burned out of our home. However, the fire burned for three days and then died as quickly as it had started, after having gutted a block of property running from the east side of Regent Street to Wardour Street.

  To settle our own fears, an investigation was set afoot to establish the cause of the fire, and we concluded that it had been originated by the sun shining through a lens in an optician's window. We knew the shop, for we had taken Thomas Ludlam there and tried to fit him with spectacles for his failing sight.

  So we determined to place our stores at a distance from the city.

  We were detailed by teams for the work of moving the vast quantities of goods we planned to make safe. First of all came the long convoys of vehicles that we moved. David Cohen had scouted round London to find them for us, and we took what was best. The temptation to drive away in some

  handsome sleek car found at the roadside was always great, and we often did it, but the vehicles we were going to keep for the future were in every case new.

  One whole warehouse was set aside for these, and a team of Virians set about the task of protecting each vehicle against corrosion and decay. For weeks on end they were kept busy, and each vehicle was laid safely aside in its proper bay, coated with the air-tight "cobweb" protection the Navy had found so useful in days gone by.

  The Virians were at first highly amused at our mechanical principles, and not least so at our internal combustion engines, which they regarded as complex nonsense. But we had no Nagani to devise simpler, more efficient devices, as they had on Vulcan.

  Food was our next object. We moved thousands of tons of canned food, carefully selecting according to a calorific schedule worked out by Dr. Axel. The tins were packed into two-piece crates of Adamantine plastic — a one-piece body, with a flush-fitting lid — and these too were sealed in cobweb skin. Week by week, well into the winter, we worked on this until we saw another great warehouse filling up. The stocks of food we laid up will, Langer has estimated, last us and our descendants for at least ten years, even assuming that no more are added to them. But of course, there has been a steady stream of additions daily since we started the work, and this will continue until natural sources of supply are again regularly available.

  The question of clothing was another that exercised our minds. There were some who were for learning the old crafts of spinning and weaving all over again, but they were over-ruled by the others who foresaw that the time for that would come in the future. Now, they reasoned, we had ample sources of clothes and fabrics to last for many years. But we must first preserve them against perishing. So we laid up great stocks of fabrics as well as clothing of every description.

  Timber, too, we stored, although we wondered at the time whether it might not be better to establish our own supplies and encourage the crafts of working by hand. That again we agreed to do — later — and in the meantime accumulated many hundred cubic feet of raw timber and thousands of superficial yards of the tough plexiboard, which had been new in my day, but which, we found, had come into wide use since.

  One warehouse was allotted to machinery — such as we could transport with our small resources — and tools. Lathes, stamping presses, cutting tools and every variety that was portable were stocked away there, and cobwebbed for the future.

  Even aircraft were salted away, although we were, of course, only able to store a few of the smaller, more manageable planes and helicopters. The trend had been, in mankind's last days, to build bigger and bigger aircraft. Arabin declared that the changes wrought in flying since he was taken to Vulcan were even greater than the changes between the crazy kites of the early 1900's and the jet-propelled craft of his own time. He personally set greater store by the simpler petrol-driven aircraft than by the mammoth turbine planes of later years.

  One man, he used to say, could, at a pinch, service and maintain a small helicopter, but it would need a whole squadron to tend the newer giants, and that without taking into consideration the elaborate plant needed for their upkeep.

  It may be wondered why we made no use of the eight Discs that had landed in Primswood Place. The simple answer is that the Virians refused most flatly to operate them. Once inside them again, they feared, they would fall under the Vulcanids' influence.

  Arabin, most foolishly, determined to convey the Discs himself to our stores, for one warehouse had a great wide entrance that would admit them.

  He succeeded in flying
six of the Discs over from Primswood, and then nearly struck tragedy with the seventh. We were watching his progress from the ground, when we saw the Disc suddenly shoot

  upwards. The Virians standing by rushed straight into the underground hangar where we had stowed the first six, and manned the Discs. We expected them to emerge from the wide ramp of the hangar, but none came out. They had another idea. As we watched the sky, where a tiny bright spot was fast disappearing, we saw the results of their work.

  First the spot seemed to stagger, then it stood still, and in a few moments it came hurtling down.

  Krill Hvensor stood beside me watching Arabin's Disc, and his lips moved in a whisper all the time. He was using his own tongue, so I had no idea of his motives.

  He was, in actual fact, talking Arabin down. The crews of the Discs in the hangar, by the use of their Nagani radio equipment, were able to pick up Krill Hvensor's voice — although he used no microphone — and were operating their crafts' selective attractors. By sheer combined force of these instruments they were literally able to pull Arabin's Disc back to us.