The Day the Earth Stood Still: Selected Stories of Harry Bates

by Harry Bates

  "I would ask her what standard she judged our civilization against; but whenever I did that she'd always go obscure, and say she guessed we were too primitive to appreciate the higher values. She consistently refused to describe the sort of civilization she had come from; though, toward the end, she began promising me that if I were a good guide, and answered all her questions, she might–only might–take me there to see it. You can imagine I was a good guide!

  "But meanwhile, I got nothing but my own inferences; and what an extraordinary set I acquired from her questions and reactions! You make your own set as I go along!

  "I showed her New York. She'd say, 'But why do the people hurry so? Is it really necessary for all those automobiles to keep going and coming? Do the people like to live in layers? If the United States is as big as you say it is, why do you build such high buildings? What is your reason for having so few people rich, so many people poor?' It was like that. And endless.

  "I took her to restaurants. 'Why does everybody take a whole hour just to eat?' I told her that people enjoyed eating; it seemed not to have occurred to her. 'But if they spent only a few minutes at it they'd have that much more time for meditation!' I couldn't but agree.

  "I took her to a night club. 'Why do all those men do all the carrying, and those others all the eating?' I explained that the first were waiters, the latter guests. 'Will the guests have a turn at carrying?' I told her I thought so, some day.

  " 'Is that man a singing waiter?'

  " 'No, only a crooner.'

  " 'Why do those men with the things make such an awful noise?'

  " 'Because dance bands get paid for making it.'

  " 'It must be awfully hard on them' I told her I hoped so. 'Are those people doing what you call dancing?'

  " 'Yes.'

  " 'Do you like to do it?'

  " 'Yes.'

  " 'The old ones, too?'

  " 'I doubt it.'

  " 'Then why do they do it?' I didn't know. At the end she asked me almost poignantly, 'Don't they ever spend any time in meditation?' and I had to express my doubts.

  "In our little jaunts it became increasingly clear to her that there was very little meditation being done in New York. It was the biggest surprise that our civilization gave her.

  "However, she continued to indulge her peculiar habit of going off into meditation when something profound, or interesting, or puzzling came to her attention; and the most extraordinary thing about it was that she had to sit down at it, no matter where she was. If there was a chair handy, all right, but if not, she would plunk right down on the floor, or, outside, even in the street! This was not so bad when we were alone, but once it happened under Murphy's flagpole in Union Square as we stood observing the bellowings of a soap-box orator, and once again in Macy's, where we lingered a moment listening to a demonstrator with the last word possible in beauty preparations. It was quite embarrassing! Toward the end I grew adept in detecting signs of the coming descent and was fairly successful in holding her up!

  "In all the six days I spent showing Pearl New York, not once did she show any emotion other than that of intellectual curiosity; not once did she smile; not once did she so much as alter the dry expression on her face. And this, my friends, was the creature who became a student and an exponent of love!

  "It bears on my main theme, so I will tell you in some detail about her experiences with love, or what she thought was love.

  "During the first three days she did not mention the word; and from what I know of her now, I can say with surety that she was holding herself back. During those three days she had seen one performance of 'Romeo and Juliet,' had read two romantic novels containing overwhelming love themes, had observed everywhere the instinct for young people to seek each other out, had seen two couples kiss while dancing, had seen the fleet come in and the sailors make for Riverside Drive, and had heard I don't know how many hours of crooning on radio broadcasts.

  "After all this, one day in my drawing-room, she suddenly asked me, 'What is this love that everyone is always talking about?'

  "Never dreaming of the part love was to play between us, I answered simply that it was nature's device to make mature humans attractive to each other and insure the arrival of offspring and the maintenance of the race. That, it seems, is what she thought it was, but what she couldn't understand was why everybody made such a to-do about it. Take kissing, for instance. That was when a mate and female pushed each other on the lips. Did they like that? I assured her they did. Was it, since they held it so long, a kind of meditation? Well, no, not exactly. Would I try it with her?

  "Don't smile yet, you two–that's nothing! Wait! Anyway, you wouldn't want me to spoil my chances of being taken for a visit to her own time, would you?

  "Well, we kissed. She stood on tiptoe, her dry face looking up at mine, her arms stiffly at her sides, while I bent down, my sober face looking down at hers, and my arms stiffly at my sides. We both pushed; our lips met; and we stayed that way a little. Then, almost maintaining contact, Pearl asked me, 'Is it supposed to sort of scrape?' I assured her it was–something like a scrape. After a moment she said, 'Then there's a great mystery here, somewhere–' And damned if she didn't squat right down on the floor and go off into a think! I couldn't keep a straight face, so I bounced out of the room; and when I returned several minutes later there she was still meditating on her kiss. O tempora!

  "That kiss happened on the third day, and she stayed six, and for the remainder of her visit in our time she said not one thing more about this thing called love–which told me it was a mystery always on her mind, for she asked questions by the score about every other conceivable thing.

  "But I also knew from another thing. For the three days following that kiss she went innumerable times to my radio and tuned in dance and vocal programs whose songs would, of course, inevitably be about love. She fairly saturated herself with love's and above's, star's and are's, blue's and you's, June's and moon's. What a horrible flock of mangy cliché's must have come to flap around in her mental–all too mental–mind! What peculiar notions about love they must have given her!

  "But enough of that phase. You have an idea. You have seen Pearl in New York, tasting of love. Six nights to the very hour after she first appeared to me I stood again on the round base of the time traveler, and this time I accompanied her forward to her time. I do not know how far in the future that was, but I estimate it to be around three million years."

  CHAPTER V

  Frick paused, rose, and, without asking us if we wanted any, served some cold tea from the thermos bottle by his chair. This time we were glad to have it.

  By then I was as close to fully believing as was, I think, Miles. We wasted little time over the tea, but, considerably refreshed and extremely eager with anticipations of what would follow, leaned forward and were again lost in Frick's extraordinary story.

  "The trip forward took what seemed to be only half a minute, and I believe it might have been instantaneous but for the time needed to bring the machine to a stop on exactly the right day. As before, the passage was a period of ineffable silence; but I was aware that all the time Pearl fingered the controls. Very suddenly I saw we were in a dimly-lighted room; with equal suddenness the golden screen vanished and normal daylight took its place. We had arrived.

  "I stepped off the traveler and looked curiously about. We were in a small place, the walls of which were partitions which projected perhaps ten feet up toward a very high ceiling. Everything I could see was made of an ugly, mud-yellow metallic substance, and everything seemed to be built on the square. Light entered from large windows on all sides. The section of the great room in which we had arrived was bare of everything but our traveler. I saw that this time it rested firmly on the floor–a very dirty floor.

  "I suppose it would be superfluous to paint the tremendous state of excitement and curiosity I was in. To be the only man of our time to have voyaged forward! To be the only one allowed to see the human race in m
arvelous maturity! What honor, glory, luck, that such an unmerited distinction should fall upon me! Every atom of my body was living and tingling at that moment. I was going to drink in and remember everything that crossed my senses.

  "I was full of questions at once, but Pearl had warned me not to talk. She had told me that there were several caretakers from whose sight I was to remain hidden; and now the first thing she did was to put her finger to her lips and peer down the corridor outside. She listened a moment, then stepped out and beckoned me to follow.

  "I did–and all but exclaimed out loud to see that the corridor was carpeted with fine dust fully an inch deep!

  "How could this be in an important building of so advanced an age? For surely that building was important, to house, as it did, so marvelous a device as the traveler!

  "But I had no time for wonderment, for Pearl led me rapidly toward the, far side of the great room. At our every step clouds of dust billowed out on each side, so that a hasty glance behind showed such diffusion of it that all there was hidden. The corridor was quite wide, and ran lengthwise of the building on one side of the center. At varying distances we passed doorways, all of them closed, and at the end we turned to the left, to come quickly to a high, wide door. It was open, and golden sunlight was shining through. For a second Pearl held me back while she peered around the edge, then, taking me by the hand, she led me out into our world of the future.

  "What would you have expected to see, Charles? You, Miles? Towering buildings, perhaps, transversed on their higher levels by aerial traffic ways? And crowds of people strangely mannered and curiously dressed? And mysteriously powered aerial carriers? And parks? And flowers? And much use of metal and synthetic marble? Well, of these there was nothing. My eyes looked out over a common, ordinary, flat, 1963 field. In the distance were some patches of trees; near by were some wild grass, low bushes, and millions of daisies; and that was all!

  "My first thought was that Pearl had made some mistake in our time of destination, and when I sought her face, and saw that this was only what she expected, I grew alarmed. She misread my thoughts, though, and saying 'Don't be afraid,' led me along a wide walk to a corner of the building, where she peeped around the edge, and, apparently satisfied with what she found, stepped forth and motioned me to follow. Then she spoke, 'Here we are,' she said.

  "Before me stretched the same sort of landscape as on the other quarter, except that here the immediate field was tenanted with a square block of large metallic boxes, six on a side, and each separated by about ten yards from its neighbors.

  "I suppose I stood there and gaped. I didn't understand, and I told Pearl as much. Her tone in replying came as near surprise as I ever heard it.

  " 'Not understand?' she asked. 'What do you mean? Isn't this just what you expected?'

  "Eventually I found words. 'But where is your city?' I asked.

  " 'There,' she answered with a gesture of her arm toward the boxes.

  " 'But the people!' I exclaimed.

  " 'They are inside.'

  " 'But I–I–there's something wrong!' I stammered. 'Those things are no city, and they couldn't hold ten people apiece!'

  " 'They hold only one apiece,' she informed me with dignity.

  "I was completely flabbergasted. 'Then–then your total population is–'

  " 'Just thirty-six, out here; or, rather, thirty-five, for one of us has just died.'

  "I thought I saw the catch. 'But how many have you that aren't out here?'

  " 'Just us younger ones–four, including myself,' she answered simply. She added, 'And, of course, the two who are not yet born.'

  "All before this had turned my head; her last statement came near turning my stomach. Clutching at straws, I blurted out:

  " 'But this is just a small community; the chief centers of your population lie elsewhere?'

  " 'No,' she corrected levelly, 'this is the only center of our civilization. All human beings are gathered here.' She fixed me with her dry gaze. 'How primitive you are!' she said, as a zoologist might, looking at a threadworm. 'I see that you expected numbers, mere numbers. But I suppose that a comparative savage like you might be expected to prefer quantity of life to quality of life.

  " 'We have here quality,' she went on with noble utterance, '–the finest of the finest, for ten thousand generations. Nature has need of quantity in her lower orders, but in allowing the perfection of such towering supermen as are my friends out here she has indulged in the final luxury of quality.

  " 'Nor is that all. With quality we have at last achieved simplicity; and in the apotheosis of humanity these two things are the ultimates.'

  "All I could do was mumble that simplicity was too weak a word.'

  Frick stopped here, laughed, and rose. "She had my mind down and its shoulders touching! And from that moment–I assure you, my friends–the whole thing began to amuse me."

  He took a few steps about the room, laughing silently; then, leaning with one shoulder against the wall, he went on, "Pearl was on an awfully high horse, there, for a moment, but she soon dismounted and considered what she might offer for my entertainment. She expressed polite regret that her civilization contained so little for me to see with my eyes. She implied that the vast quantities of intellectual activity going on would be far past my understanding.

  "I asked, then, if there was any way I might have a peep at their quality group in action; and to this she replied that her countrymen never came together in groups, and neither did they indulge in actions, but that it would be easy to show me one or two of the leading citizens.

  "I, of course, told her I did not want her to run a risk of getting in trouble, but she assured me there was no danger of that. The guardians of the place–they were the three other 'younger ones' she had just mentioned–were quiet somewhere, and as for the adults, 'They,' she said, 'will be able neither to see nor hear you.'

  "Well, she showed me two. And merciful heavens!"

  Frick laughed so that for a moment he could not go on. Miles by now was reflecting Frick's every mood, and would smile in anticipation when he laughed. I suppose I was doing the same. We were both completely under Frick's spell.

  "She escorted me openly across the field to the nearest box, and I remember that on the way I got a burr in my ankle which I stopped to remove. I found from close up that the boxes were about ten feet square and made of the same ugly yellow metal used in the big building. The upper part of each side had a double row of narrow horizontal slits, and in the middle of each front side there was a closely-fitted door. I was remembering Pearl's promise that they would be able neither to see nor hear me, so I was alarmed when without ceremony she opened the door and half pushed me in.

  "What I saw! I was so shocked that, as Pearl told me later, I gasped out an involuntary 'Oh!' and fairly jumped backward. Had she not been right behind me and held me, I might have run. As it was I remained, hypnotized by the sight before my eyes, trembling, and I think gagging.

  I saw a man, or some kind of a man. He sat right in front of me, nude from the waist up, and covered as the floor was covered from the waist down. How shall I adequately describe him!

  "He was in some ways like an unwrapped mummy, except that a fallen-in mummy presents a fairly respectable appearance. And then he was something like a spider–a spider with only three legs. And again, looking quickly, he was all one gigantic head, or at least a great mass on whose parchment surface appeared a little round two-holed knoll where the nose customarily is, lidded caverns where the eyes belong, small craters where the ears commonly are, and, on the under side, a horrible, wrinkled, half-inch slit, below which more parchment backed almost horizontally to a three-inch striated and, in places, bumpy pipe.

  "By not the slightest movement of any kind did the monster show he knew I was there. He sat on a high dais; his arms were only bones converging downward; his body, only half the usual thickness, showed every rib and even, I think, the front side of some of his vertebrae; and his pipe of a n
eck, unable alone to support his head, gave most of that job to two curved metal pieces that came out of the wall.

  "He had a musty smell.

  "And, final horror, the stuff that covered him to the waist was dust; and there were two inches of dust on the top of his head and lesser piles of it on every little upper surface!

  CHAPTER VI

  "It was horrible; but I swear that as I stood there goggling at him he began to strike me funny. It grew on me, until I think I should have laughed in the old gent's face had I not been restrained by a slight fear that he might in some way be dangerous.

  "Goodness knows what all I thought of as I stood there. I know I eventually asked Pearl, for caution's sake, "'You're sure he can't see or hear me?'

  "She told me he could not.

  "I was not surprised; he looked too old for such strenuous activities. I scrutinized him, inch by inch. After a little I announced with conviction, " 'He's dead! I'm sure of it!'

  "She assured me he was not.

  " 'But look at the dust! He can't have moved for years!'

  " 'Why should he move?' she asked.

  "That stopped me for a little.

  " 'But–but,' I stammered eventually, 'he's as good as dead! He's not doing anything!'

  " 'He certainly is doing something,' was her dignified correction. 'He's meditating.'

  "All I could think to say was 'Goodnight!'

  "At that, Pearl turned on me reproachfully. 'Your attitude is bestial,' she said. 'I have done you the honor of bringing you to witness the highest flowering of the human race, and you act like a pig. Life can hold nothing more beautiful than this man you see here; he is the ultimate in human progress, one who is in truth perfection, whose every taint of animal desire has been cleaned away, who is the very limit in the simplicity of his life and the purity of his thoughts and intentions.'