by Anthology
“Consider the situation, Airthman,” came the savage, shouted answer, “ ’Tis night, Martian night. The temperature’s down past zero and plummeting every minute. We haven’t any time t’ look;—we’ve got t’ go straight there. If we’re not there in half an hour, we’re not going t’ get there at all.”
Allen knew that well, and mention of the cold increased his consciousness of it. He spoke through chattering teeth as he drew his heavy, fur-lined coat closer about him.
“We might build a fire!” The suggestion was a half-hearted one, muttered indistinctly, and fallen upon immediately by the other.
“With what?” George was beside himself with sheer disappointment and frustration. “We’ve pulled through this far, and now we’ll prob’ly freeze t’ death within a mile o’ the city. C’mon, keep running. It’s a hundred-t’-one chance.”
But Allen pulled him back. There was a feverish glint in the Earthman’s eye, “Bonfires!” he said irrelevantly. “It’s a possibility. Want to take a chance that might do the trick?”
“Nothin else t’ do,” growled the other. “But hurry. Every minute I—”
“Then run with the wind—and keep going.”
“Why?”
“Never mind why. Do what I say—run with the wind!”
There was no false optimism in Allen as he bounded through the dark, stumbling over loose stones, sliding down declivities,—always with the wind at his back. George ran at his side, a vague, formless blotch in the night.
The cold was growing more bitter, but it was not quite as bitter as the freezing pang of apprehension gnawing at the Earthman’s vitals.
Death is unpleasant!
And then they topped the rise, and from George’s throat came a loud “B’ Jupe ‘n domn!” of triumph.
The ground before them, as far as the eye could see, was dotted by bon-fires. Shattered Aresopolis lay ahead, its homeless inhabitants making the night bearable by the simple agency of burning wood.
And on the hilly slopes, two weary figures slapped each other on the backs, laughed wildly, and pressed half-frozen, stubbly cheeks together for sheer, unadulterated joy.
They were there at last!
The Aresopolis lab, on the very outskirts of the city, was one of the few structures still standing. Within, by makeshift light, haggard chemists were distilling the last drops of extract. Without, the city’s police-force remnants were clearing desperate way for the precious flasks and vials as they were distributed to the various emergency medical centers set up in various regions of the bon-fire-pocked ruins that were once the Martian metropolis.
Old Hal Vincent supervised the process and his faded eyes ever and again peered anxiously into the hills beyond, watching hopefully but doubtfully for the promised cargo of blooms.
And then two figures reeled out of the darkness and collapsed to a halt before him.
Chill anxiety clamped down upon him, “The blooms! Where are they? Have you got them?”
“At Twin Peaks,” gasped Allen. “A ton of them and better in a sand-truck. Send for them.”
A group of police ground-cars set off before he had finished, and Vincent exclaimed bewilderedly, “A sand-truck? Why didn’t you send it in a ship? What’s wrong with you out there, anyway? Earthquake—”
He received no direct answer. George had stumbled towards the nearest bonfire with a beatific expression on his worn face.
“Ahhh, ‘tis warm!” Slowly, he folded and dropped, asleep before he hit the ground.
Allen coughed gaspingly, “Huh! The Gannie tenderfoot! Couldn’t—ulp—take it!”
And the ground came up and hit him in the face.
Allen woke with the evening sun in his eyes and the odor of frying bacon in his nostrils. George shoved the frying pan towards him and said between gigantic, wolfing mouthfuls, “Help yourself.”
He pointed to the empty sand-truck outside the labs, “They got the stuff all right.”
Allen fell to, quietly. George wiped his lips with the back of his hand and said, “Say, All’n, how’d y’ find the city? I’ve been sitting here trying t’ figure it all out.”
“It was the bonfires,” came the muffled answer. “It was the only way they could get heat, and fires over square miles of land create a whole section of heated air, which rises, causing the cold surrounding air of the hills to sweep in.” He suited his words with appropriate gestures. “The wind in the hills was heading for the city to replace warm air and we followed the wind.—Sort of a natural compass, pointing to where we wanted to go.”
George was silent, kicking with embarrassed vigor at the ashes of the bonfire of the night before.
“Lis’n, All’n, I’ve had y a’wrong. Y’ were an Airthman tanderfoot t’ me till—” He paused, drew a deep breath and exploded with, “Well, by Jupe V domn, y’r my twin brother and I’m proud o’ it. All Airth c’dn’t drown out the Carter blood in y’.”
The Earthman opened his mouth to reply but his brother clamped one palm over it, “Y’ keep quiet, till I’m finished. After we get back, y can fix up that mechanical picker or anything else y want. I drop my veto. If Airth and machines c’n tairn out y’r kind o’ man, they’re all right. But just the same,” there was a trace of wistfulness in his voice, “y got t’ admit that everytime the machines broke down—from irrigation-trucks and rocket-ships to ventilators and sand-trucks—’twas men who had t’ pull through in spite o’ all that Mars could do.”
Allen wrenched his face from out behind the restraining palm. “The machines do their best,” he said, but not too vehemently. “Sure, but that’s all they can do. When the emairgency comes, a mans got t’ do a damn lot better than his best or he’s a goner.” The other paused, nodded, and gripped the others hand with sudden fierceness, “Oh, were not so different. Earth and Ganymede are plastered thinly over the outside of us, but inside—”
He caught himself.
“Come on, let’s give out with that old Gannie quaver.”
And from the two fraternal throats tore forth a shrieking eldritch yell such as the thin, cold Martian air had seldom before carried.
HERITAGE
Robert Abernathy
There are two ways of considering heritage—the heritage of physical kinship, of blood and racial descent, and the heritage of an intellectual, spiritual sort . . . And which is the more important?
If everyone will please keep his seat and refrain from mobbing the platform, I will make a very confidential admission. I am closely acquainted with the great time traveler, Nicholas Doody.
Now, I am not trying to add to the multitudes of pseudo-Doo-dyesque anecdotes which are perpetually being decanted into unoffending ears in Pullmans, clubs, cafés, and private drawing rooms, and which have undoubtedly driven countless persons into mental declines and padded cells. Neither am I endeavoring to verify either of the two prevailing opinions respecting the inventor of the time machine—one, that he is a halfcracked young genius whose invention’s usefulness is rendered null and void by the immutable laws of time; the other, that he is an insanely selfish, misanthropic, antisocial wretch who is deliberately withholding from the human race a gift of incalculable value.
In sober reality, Nick Doody is a tall, dark-skinned, dark-haired young man of twenty-seven, who looks like a cross between a tennis champion and a naval officer. He is likable, friendly, and not at all standoffish, even regarding his remarkable invention—which he freely admits to be the result of sheer accident rather than of calculated research on his part. Almost anyone in twentieth-century America, he says, might have done it in the same way; the materials are within the grasp of practically everyone. The machine itself has all the simplicity of the first crude beginning of any new science; its very lack of complexity is what makes it such an enigma to your average Einsteinian physicist. But if it were taken apart or put together before you, your wife, or the man across the street, you would wonder why you didn’t think of it yourselves.
As for the popular opini
ons of Doody—the first is hokum and the second is hogwash. The inventor labors under no mystical ideas about the immutability of the past or the inevitable predestination of the future; his machine affords just as much opportunity for control of the fourth dimension of time as ordinary tools offer for managing the usual three. However, neither is Doody subject to any illusions about his sacred duty to humanity being to reveal the secret of the time machine; he believes that humanity has made a quite adequate mess of its world in three spatial dimensions, and that to add a fourth would only complicate modern life to a point where nervous breakdowns would become as common as shiny seats on blue serge trousers.
Being a normal young fellow with a taste for adventure, he uses the time machine solely for minor exploring junkets into past or future ages, with no purpose save sheer amusement. In the process of these trips, as you might expect, he has seen and done many things which for sheer improbability outdo the wildest imaginings of the science-fiction writers.
It is possible that by making public the substance of a conversation which I had with Doody a few days, ago—to be exact, on the evening of November 20, 1976—I may succeed in silencing a few of the macawvoiced critics who have been loudly and raucously insisting that he turn the principle of time travel over to the American government.
“Johnny,” remarked Doody, tete-a-tete with me over an excellent dinner served by the ménage of Elbert’s Exquisite Eatery—or is the adjective Elegant? Perhaps you know the place—it’s on Broadway, one of the most dignifiedly popular cafés of old New York, dating back to 1953. “Johnny, did you ever have any difficulty in proving that you are a man?”
“Not even when I went into the army,” said I, leaning my elbows on the tablecloth and wondering at him frankly. “Why?”
Doody grinned, flashing two thirds of a perfect set of even white teeth. “I did, Johnny; once upon a time that hasn’t happened yet. I stood trial on the question of whether I was or was not human, with my life as well as my reputation dangling in the balance. I conducted my own defense, such as it was—and I lost my case.”
“Well!” I exclaimed, hoisting an eyebrow. “What did they prove you were—a throwback to the chimp?”
“No, not quite,” replied Doody, smiling comfortably, though reflectively—in that curious manner which is his alone, of looking past a companion into far, dim vistas of time. “You know, I’m not sure that I lost that case, after all. Things were getting pretty hot, and I didn’t delay my fade-out long enough to see. Maybe my final argument settled the prosecution’s hash, although the jury had already brought in a verdict of guilty—guilty of impersonating a human being, a crime punishable in that far-off day by death. I’d like to go back to that era and find out; but my little gadget has practically no selectivity at such extreme ranges. I couldn’t even be sure of hitting the right millennium. It would take a much more delicate and complex instrument, with a power source superior to my two dry cells, and a lot of other stuff I haven’t bothered to work out and never will work out. Well, that’s all beside the point, which is that this little experience of mine set me wondering.”
“You wondering—along what line?” I wanted to know, understanding perfectly that I would get the story in Doody’s own good time.
“Ah, that’s a secret,” he evaded amusedly. “Seriously, though, Johnny, I’ll tell you the tale, and we’ll see whether it doesn’t evoke some speculation on your part—not overly pleasant, some of it. Push the signal for a waiter and order more champagne, Johnny, so they won’t be considering giving us the respectfully firm send-off; and I’ll give you the straight of it.”
It seems that Doody, on his last safari into the dark hinterlands of the unexplored aeons, had decided to try a longer jump across time than he ever had made before. It happened that on a previous excursion into one of the odd nooks and corners of chronology, he had had an intriguing little chat with a savant of the time, by name, I believe, Rudnuu Something-or-Other—the surname being placed first—who belonged to a period which Doody estimated in the neighborhood of 13,000 A.D. (They had no system of dates reconcilable with ours, and their records of the elder civilizations of the Indo-European and Neo-European cycles were incomplete and unreliable.) This fellow, who was something of a philosopher and historical student as well as an important member of the technocratic government of his era, was frankly worried about the future of the human race.
In Rudnuu’s day, eleven thousand years from our own, the civilization of the machine had advanced so far on Earth that there was no longer need for men to labor, with muscle or with mind. Briefly, the worldwide society of abundance had come at last into being; and, as the result of every culture which eliminates natural selection by permitting the survival of all, humanity was swiftly going to pot.
Of course, that was nothing new; it has never been new. It is the old, old cycle of man—hardship, ingenuity, civilization, ease, degeneracy, hardship again.
But in the fourteenth millennium the mechanical refinement of life had risen to such a high that the unescapable collapse must be more than catastrophic. The scientist-leader believed that it would be final; that mankind would follow many another dominant breed into the long oblivion of extinction. Unchecked, morbid mutation, without selection, was precipitating the race into a bottomless slough of physical and mental decay.
Scientist Rudnuu had enough curiosity—a quality well-nigh unheard of in his day—to wonder, with a touch of wistfulness, what reasoning race would inherit the Earth when man was gone. Whatever that future breed might be, it must develop from one of two definite groups: either from among the few surviving wild species, which by tenacity and cunning had held their own on the outskirts of human civilization, or from among the tamed animals which man had continued to rear through all these ages for pets or servants, such as dogs and cats and some of the apes.
Even now the members of those groups were far better fitted to rule than decadent humanity. Fierce and quick and clever the wild things had grown, driven by the life struggle of existence in unnoticed crevices and hiding places of a world monopolized by man; strong and sharp-sighted and intelligent the beasts of man had become, bred through the hundreds of centuries for physical and mental perfection. Strong new races, lacking only the skillful hands and the tools of fire and metal to push man off the Earth and claim it for their own.
“So, then,” said Rudnuu, with a shrug of defeat accepted sadly yet without bitterness, “the end is drawing near.”
The upshot of the scientist’s aeration of his views was that Nick Doody, in a hotel room in Brooklyn on a gray evening of 1976, set the simple adjustment of his absurd little instrument and closed its single switch. At once his three-dimensional being in space no longer existed; its four-dimensional counterpart, tenuous, fantastic, and unreal by human standards, was swept away along the world line of the Earth, rushing faster and yet faster, like a fleeting phantom, past the rise of empires and the fall of peoples, past the births and deaths of four hundred generations, to come to a final stop at a point twenty thousand years in our future—nine thousand years beyond the day of Doody’s gloomily prophetic friend.
Though one is unconscious of the flight through time, the sensation, as the synthetic extension through the fourth dimension collapses once more into normal space, is one of inexpressible relief. Doody, gasping and dizzy, sank down upon a heavy carpet of moss and rested for a time, his breathing becoming more even and his eyes refocusing on this unknown future world.
What had been a blurred gold-and-green haze before then became the sunlit summer verdure of a great forest, a forest that was the work of ages. Giant trees, with spreading limbs and twisted roots that clutched the earth protectively, rose on all sides to support the green, leafy ceiling overhead, shutting out vision; the hard, solid surface which supported his back, but which now was becoming painful to his spine and shoulder blades, was the rough bark of a massive trunk with the gnarled branches of an aged oak.
Somewhat giddily, Doody scr
ambled to his feet once more and stared around him. In all directions nothing was apparent but the primeval forest, hardly an insect song stirring the still, sultry air of the midsummer noonday. It had been autumn when he closed the switch; but that signified nothing. Nevertheless—unless the world lines had become unthinkably tangled—he should still be on Long Island. But if this was Long Island, real-estate values had evidently suffered a sharp decline since the late twentieth century—to say nothing of Rudnuu’s nearer day, when from the Catskills to the Susquehanna had stretched the great world city.
“Well!” remarked Doody under his breath. “So the old boy was right, after all, and the human race has handed in its checks.” It was easy to believe that, there in the virgin woodland, seeing no trace of human life and knowing what Doody knew. He shook his head to dispel disgust; he had preferred to think that mankind was made of sterner stuff.
Quickly and efficiently, he made certain that the equipment he always carried on such expeditions—a camera, flashlight, camp ax, and automatic pistol—was still with him and ready for use. Also, with a trace of gingerness, he felt the special inside pocket where, just in case of emergencies, he generally packed a pineapple—not the Hawaiian kind.
On consideration, he unfastened the little, sharp-edged ax, for use in blazing a trail as he explored these woods farther. If he could not find his initial location again for the return to his own time, he might find himself in any one of a number of awkward spots—under the wheels of a motor car, or in someone’s boudoir.
Doody strolled away down the gentle, tree-covered slope, with the vague idea of eventually reaching the ocean shore which could not be far away. Dead leaves crackled, shockingly loud, beneath his feet at intervals, and birds twittered in fright and fluttered confusedly away from the branches where they had been drowsing in the shady heat; yet as he proceeded, perhaps because he himself was the child of a highly advanced civilization, he could not shake off the illusion that this whole pleasant woodland was merely an extensive municipal park, or could he suppress a guilty feeling whenever he knocked a gleaming chip or two out of a tree trunk as he passed by. Objectively, he noted that the forest was entirely devoid of such common but galling annoyances as tangled and unlovely undergrowth, poison oak and ivy, and thorny trees and bushes; tall, graceful ferns and leafy shrubbery gave it an almost cared-for appearance. Of course, the whole Earth had been purified of such useless and troublesome flora many thousands of years ago, the planet turned by science into an Eden for the pleasure of a declining, luxurious race that—apparently—was gone.