The music took on a more profound mournfulness. One of the green men smiled tragically. He plucked a small flower and burst into tears. Others followed his example.
“We were exploring the solar system when our craft fell to the Earth. It was . . . terrible. Now, we are here.”
Claude brightened. “Mechanical difficulties?” he said.
“Yes. We would like to go on, somehow.”
Claude rubbed his hands together. “Perhaps a little old-fashioned know-how would be in order.”
“It is hopeless, but you are good.”
“Let’s have a look-see.”
Sighing, two of the Martians rose from the grassy hillock. It seemed to Claude that they were nearly transparent. They proceeded to the spaceship.
“Just let me poke around a little,” Claude said, and entered.
Within, it was a maze of coils, tubes, knobs, dials, and antennae. Claude shook his head. Then he noticed something on the lowest level.
Clearly, it was a furnace.
Beside it, stood a huge stack of wood.
“Ah,” he said. It was the most devilishly clever device he had ever seen. The ship was operated on the absurdly simple —and therefore ingenious—principle of outer combustion, or spontaneous ignition!
The solution was at hand.
Claude left the ship, beaming. “I’ve got her fixed, I think,” he said.
Sadly, the Martians went up the ladder. Claude took some ten-dollar credits from his wallet—useless now!—and broke up some kindling. He applied his pipe lighter to the bills. In moments there was a crackling blaze.
The ship quivered.
Claude left in a hurry and decided he had better close the airlock for them. “Impractical fools,” he chuckled.
He found the increasingly female android waiting for him.
He turned back, but the ship was already off the ground.
The voice inside his brain was imperially calm. “Earthling, you have done us a service. Martians do not forget. The android is yours.”
Then, in a shower of sparks and heat, the ship smoked into the sky.
The android’s hand touched his.
He turned and touched her shoulders. They were surprisingly soft.
“I’ll call you Eve,” he said.
The symbolism did not escape him.
~ * ~
In the fullness of time, a child was born.
Torn between Cain and Abel, Claude Adams called the boy Son. The compromise preyed on his precision-hungry mind, but it was the best that he could do.
The first indication they had that Son was somehow different came when the boy was three months old. He killed a rabbit by staring weakly at it with his watery eyes. This caused Claude some discomfiture, but his insatiable curiosity got the upper hand. He began to watch the boy closely.
When Son began to nurse while Eve was yet a good hundred yards away, that was good enough for Claude. Son was different from other children he had known.
“Psi factors,” Claude said, stamping on the grass. “The mysterious chemisms of blood. Post-atomic radiation. Exposure to the time stream. Alteration of the gene chromosomes. The boy’s a mutant!”
And so he was.
Yet they had their Son, and in the main these were happy times. They had the sunlight and the green fields and tie long summer days.
And the nights.
Eve was enough to drive a man mad, when properly oiled.
Still, Claude reflected, there was a price tag on Paradise. You had to pay to play in the Garden of Eden. The halcyon years went by, and no honeymoon lasts forever.
Little things began to come between them.
Eve grew cross and irritable, and took to sleeping late in the mornings and slouching about the fields in unkempt leaves. Claude felt a growing restlessness. He took to polishing up his time machine, and would retire to its cabin for long periods, smoking his pipe and idly twiddling with the dials.
Finally he called Son to his side.
“Running away, Pop?” Son said knowingly, lying at his ease in mid-air. “You ditching Mom?”
“In a nutshell,” Claude admitted, “that’s it. I’m going into the future. Son. Maybe I’ll come back later. Would you like to go with me?”
Son gracefully rolled over in the air and touched his chin with his knees. “You go ahead, Pop, I’ll catch up with you later.”
“But you have no machine, Son.”
Son smiled tolerantly. “I’ll get there,” he said.
“Stout lad.”
Claude made his preparations with care. Exactly twelve years since he had first set foot on the grassy fields, he climbed back into his machine. His heart was somehow heavy within him.
He took the old, long-empty oil tube with him, and there was a suspicion of moisture about his eyes.
He set the dials.
He pressed the red button for the second time.
~ * ~
There was a sort of hiss, followed by grindings. The machine stopped.
Claude moved toward the portal. “Well.” he said, “the twentieth century, if I’m not mistaken!” He glanced at the temporal indicator.
He was mistaken.
The long red arrow trembled slightly at 3042 A.D. Claude frowned. “Damned strange,” he muttered.
The machine could not be set into operation again until it had properly cooled, of course.
Claude activated the door. It wheezed pneumatically inward, colliding with a rather shapeless object in the corner, that Claude knew instantly, had not been there before.
“Eve!”
She rose stiffly from her cramped position.
“I stowed away,” she said. “Was it very wrong of me, dear?”
Claude sighed. “What is wrong? What is right? Anyway, we’re here.”
They stepped out the cabin door.
The day was a riot of sunshine and crisp breezes. Claude sniffed and examined his surroundings.
He was in a city. Tall, lean buildings rose all around him. The buildings were girdled by insect swarms of tiny planes, and crowds of people stood on mobile sidewalks. Claude watched the people. They seemed strangely alike, as if there were only one person, reflected and reflected again, thousandly. They were, without exception, expressionless. They stared at tiny antennaed boxes, which depended from their necks.
“Do you love me?” Eve asked.
“Yes and no,” Claude answered, evasively, and continued at a brisker gait.
Then he stopped. At his feet was a clump of dandelions. He plucked one of the healthier specimens.
Instantly, a plane dropped from the sky and landed at his side.
The door of the plane opened. There was no one inside.
“Name?”
“Claude Adams. And yours?”
“Address?”
“At the moment, I’m afraid that I am not permanently located.”
“You are under arrest. We’re booking you on a 703-A.”
“A 703-A?”
“That’s right. A 703-A. Curiosity.”
Claude was suddenly unable to control his feet. They marched him into the cabin. He sat down. The door closed. The plane lifted.
“I’ll get you out!” Eve called from far below. “Don’t worry. I’ll talk to someone!”
Her voice faded with distance.
~ * ~
Tamping down a quantity of strong shag tobacco—the last of his supply—Claude stretched out on the fibrous pallet and attempted to think.
Undoubtedly this was a jail, although it did not resemble a jail. There were no bars: only a shallow moat, easily leaped, and a decided ascetic touch in the furnishings suggested the concept of imprisonment.
There was a baffled sob.
Claude turned and saw that he was not alone. A youngish man in a far corner sat disconsolately, twirling the knobs of a blank TV set.
“What’s the difficulty?” Claude asked democratically.
“The TV,” the man groaned. “It does
n’t work. You understand? It does not work!”
At this moment there came a hollow laugh.
From another corner an older man arose. He was bearded. “It’ll never work, either,” he gibbered.
The young man turned on the bearded gentleman angrily and Claude turned away, wondering. After the commotion died down he addressed himself to the bearded man.
“Tell me something about this civilization,” he said. “I seem to have a touch of amnesia.”
“What’s to tell?” the bearded man shrugged. “When the Overmasters arrived fifty years ago, from Mars, they eliminated all war, suffering, crime, disease, and work. It seems that this was in payment for a favor an Earthman once did them. Since then we’ve lived off the fat of the land. The Big Machine runs the show—”
“The Big Machine?”
“A highly Complex Mechanism,” the bearded man said, warming to his topic. “Cybernetics and all that. It has taped the neural indices of every human being on Earth—it can steam your brains out if you step out of line. Not only that, but it serves as the electronic matrix of every structure on the planet. Without the Big Machine, friend, there wouldn’t be a manufactured molecule around here big enough to spit on.”
“Hmmm,” said Claude.
He continued to think.
~ * ~
Eve came to him the following day. He spotted her moving slowly across the smooth green lawn.
“Eve!”
She stopped at the water and did not look up.
Claude rushed to the edge of the moat. “Eve,” he cried. “What news?”
“I got through,” Eve said. “I spoke to it. The Big Machine.”
“Ah I It’s here, in this very city?”
“Yes.”
“Well, then. I am going to be released immediately?”
Eve toed at a daisy. She seemed to blush. “No,” she murmured. “It has extended your sentence to ninety years.”
Claude reeled. “You’re angry,” he groped. “I left you and this is your revenge—”
“No.” Eve raised her head. Of her two prime expressions, she did not use joy. “You must try to understand, Claude. I went to The Big Machine. My intentions were excellent. Then . . . something happened. Chemical affinities, meshing circuits—oh, I don’t know!”
“Meshing circuits?”
Eve smiled, remembering. “I am mechanical,” she said slowly. “The Big Machine is mechanical. It was one of those things. He’s been lonely, Claude.”
“That’s enough. Do not go on.”
Claude leaped the moat. He grasped Eve’s shoulders. “Where is he?” he rasped. “Come on, I know he’s around here somewhere.”
“There. The domed building on the corner. Oh, Claude—”
Claude moved fast. His blood was up now. The Big Machine, since it had the neural indices of every person on Earth, had no need of guards. Claude entered the Central Rotunda without difficulty.
The Big Machine, resembling an immense dynamo, hummed.
“Machine,” Claude murmured, “say your prayers.”
Claude inspected the machine. It was forged of heavy materials. It appeared to be impenetrable. It hummed and banks of lights flickered in its cavernous recesses.
Somewhere, it must have an Achilles’ heel.
Claude applied his scientific know-how to the problem and got nowhere. He kicked The Big Machine with something akin to desperation.
Then he noticed something odd floating directly above his head.
It was Son.
“The plug, Dad,” Son said.
“Beg pardon?”
“The plug. Pull the plug!”
“Of course!”
The Big Machine sent up Sonic Vibrations. It hummed and quivered as Claude approached the socket. It knew Fear.
“Damned clever,” Claude said, and yanked the plug out.
“Umph!” cried Son. “Hang on, Pop!”
The world began to lose its bearings. Things effervesced. Claude swayed and was hit by attacks of nausea.
Buildings crumbled, their electronic matrix destroyed.
People dropped in their tracks, their neural indices triggered.
Claude felt himself falling...,
There was darkness.
~ * ~
He awoke to find himself in the collapsed ruins of the city. A sluggish breeze pushed sand through the piles of junk that had once housed a mighty civilization.
There was silence everywhere.
Son flew over astride a large boulder and ground to a stop at his father’s side. “Mom is here,” he said. “She wants you, Dad.”
Side by side, they walked into a clearing, surrounded by scorched foliage. Eve sat silently on a block of broken masonry. Her face was moist with tears.
Claude took her hand.
“Eve,” he said. “You and I and Son are now civilization. Do you understand what this means?”
“Yes.”
“And are you afraid?”
“A little. It isn’t easy to be the mother of a whole new race.”
“No,” Claude conceded, “not easy. The job is too big for the two of us. We must have a wife for Son. We must have a female child.”
Son smiled.
Claude squared his shoulders.
Together, he and Eve marched into the bushes.
<
~ * ~
SURVIVAL
After we’ve blown ourselves to dust
And all the dooms have come to pass,
The things from space will wonder at
The endless patience of the grass.
CABLYN COFFIN
<
~ * ~
The Best From Fantasy and Science Fiction Fifth Series Page 27