Wyndham Smith

by S. Fowler Wright

  “She seems too stupid to move,” Vinetta said. “She had better follow her friends.” With firm hands, though without roughness, she pulled off the woman’s outer cloak. Then Vinetta put on the woman’s cloak and slipped off her own garment from beneath it.

  They drew her into the hot antechamber, where there was now a smell of roasting flesh such as would have been pleasant to twentieth-century nostrils, but was nauseous to theirs, taking her as near to the furnace as their own skins would endure. They withdrew in haste from the scorching heat, and looked back to see that she had not moved.

  “We can’t leave her there. She will only scorch,” Vinetta said doubtfully. Feeling the heat as they did, it was hard to think of others as being immune from the dreadful pain. Certainly, it was not pleasant to think of the woman walking blindly away from the central heat, and waking to further consciousness in a half-roasted condition on the next day.

  There was a rough mercy in what he did when Wyndham, completing a series of actions of the possibility of which Colpeck-4XP would not have thought in his wildest dream, ran forward into the heat, and with a hard kick sent the woman, stumbling and sprawling forward to fall among those who were already roasted flesh at the furnace-mouth.

  As he rejoined Vinetta she turned away. “Come,” she said, “we have lost too much time now.”

  “I don’t want to stay here,” he said. “I hope we may never see such a place again. But why did you want the woman’s robe? We can get all you care to take.”

  He had loaded the aeroplane with such things as seemed likely to be useful to him or them, omitting only such as were specifically feminine, which he had not ventured to take. His plan had been that they should add such articles as she chose in the hours before morning came.

  But she was now in an urgent haste to be gone, thinking that the threat to her own life of which Pilwin-C6P had spoken in such ominous words must be something close around, which they might avoid by a rapid flight. She did not think it could be any trick which would wreck the plane, for it had been clear that it was against her only that it was aimed, and anything of that kind would apparently have been equally fatal to Wyndham, even had she gone the way of obedient death.

  Wyndham did not object to the haste she showed. The value she put on her own life did not price it more highly than he, and they both knew that whatever had seemed certain to the two by whom it had been contrived would not be easily foiled.

  “In any case,” Wyndham said, “the garments are of little account.

  He meant that the only difference between those worn by men and women had been that the woman’s purple was of a darker shade, and he had stored a supply for his own use. The need of that differing shade would not be much from this hour!

  With sufficient moonlight on smooth, white paths, they went to the place—it was no more than half a mile distant—where the aeroplane lay. They went by a quiet desolate road, but with hearts beating with vague fear, and apprehensive eyes searching the gloom. The warning of Pilwin-C6P was potent already to spoil the peace of the new life which, without that, would have had perils and problems enough.

  But nothing happened at all. The night was quiet and vacant around them. They looked back to the community buildings, which were lit up to the extent which was usual during the darker hours So far they had not deviated from their routine through the absence of the human residents by whom they had been designed and controlled. But that collapse would be sure to come.

  The aeroplane was easy to find, having lit itself, as its duty was, when the night had come. It required no pilot, and it was not usual for it to carry living passengers, but its design had been partially governed by the habits of earlier centuries. It was more bird-like in form than the first aeroplanes, having a head which had once been a passenger-cabin de luxe, as it would, retain a level floor even when the body swerved or dived in the wild skies of those early days.

  Its wings also moved in a bird-like manner, spreading more widely for increase of speed, and flapping regularly, for it was with these that it flew, rather than with its tail, which was used for steering only.

  Seen from below its wings appeared to move with no more than a sluggish ease, like those of a heron in lazy flight, but they could propel it at a great speed through the windless skies. Its engines were soundless, which increased the illusion of living wings. Under normal conditions of flight it was of an absolute safety. There was no record of accident to any aeroplane which had been sent aloft since the skies were tamed. How it would behave if tempests should sweep again through the upper air was less easy to judge, which was another reason why Wyndham was content to agree to an instant start.

  But literally instantly, they found that it could not be. The controls in the head-cabin, which were intended to be worked while it was still on the ground, were clearly marked, and their directions were explicit. Its destination must be set as the starting lever was moved. On that lever being turned over, it would occupy itself in taking in fuel and oil, and in testing its vital parts for a period which would not be less than twenty minutes, and might be much longer if it should discover any defect such as might require the substitution of a duplicate part. For it was constructed to test and repair itself or, at the worst, to indicate that it was unfit for flight and must submit to the care of the hospital sheds, where machines of greater competence would operate upon it.

  “I agreed,” Wyndham said, “with Pilwin, that I would go to Mount Ida, which he strongly recommended as a place where, though I might not live, I should take longer to die.”

  “It sounds a good choice,” she replied doubtfully, “and is a long distance from there.”

  “So it may be. But I was not sure then that Pilwin was thinking only of me, and I am more doubtful now.”

  He looked at the direction controls, which showed that there were no less than twenty stations to which the aeroplane could be set to alight. The third was Mount Ida. His eye passed on rapidly. He knew what he looked for, his decision being already made. He raised his hand to the ninth, Taormina, and turned it over before she could protest.

  She looked at it and him with contracted brows. “Well,” she said, “it is done now” She knew that the destination could not be altered when it had once been set. “Of course, it is a place they will never guess. But have you thought of the mists? Could we live through them?”

  She thought his action showed that he would sacrifice everything for her, as he might have done, but in this choice he had thought of more than had yet come to her mind.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  The winds and weather were now controlled to an extent that ensured equable temperature and peaceful skies in all places which had been the regular abodes of men, but the effect of the equinoxes remained, and some differences between winter and summer in the two hemispheres there had still been. The effects of reduced hours of sunlight in the northern winter had been corrected by wind currents, which left the Mediterranean a stagnant area hidden in mist for six months of the year. There was no trouble for that.

  The sea was vacant, since men had ceased the folly of moving vainly about. No one dwelt on its shores. Only, in some parts of Sicily, the cultivation of grapes had been allowed to continue during the summer of sunny days, and of regulated rain during the nights. They had been tended entirely by automata, which could dig and plant, and in due season gather the crop, and load it for transport to the central food-depot in Hungary. Men might not have visited it at all during recent years.

  Wyndham had disregarded the threat of the Mediterranean mists. He had enquired what the climate of Sicily had been in the ancient days. Such he supposed it would be again when the winds were free. He had learned from the librarian that it had been temperate in winter, and that it was sufficiently mountainous to allow them, as he rather crudely dreamed, to mitigate the effect of seasonal changes by climbing up to the heights, or moving down to the shore-levels. It had an active volcano, to which he also attached a theoretical importance which
might be modified by experience.

  Finally, though it was an island, it was no longer detached from the mainland. The old Messina ferry had been replaced by an enormous concrete causeway. The power of Etna in stimulated eruption had been harnessed to this gigantic task about two centuries earlier. The librarian could not say that it had been visited by any of the present generation, but there could be no doubt that it still stood in that windless sea.

  Wyndham’s imagination, inflamed by Avanah’s historical tales, had gone forward to vague dreams of an earth released again to renewed riot of life, swarming with greater beasts, perhaps including some of semi-human character, against which his descendents, multiplying themselves in that spacious island, would erect an impregnable barrier where the causeway joined the land. They would be secure in their island home, and yet free, as the centuries would pass, to sally out to win a wider domain.

  Something of this he said, while they waited in the aeroplane cabin, and heard within its entrails the noises of the preparations it made for the coming flight. They had secured the door by which they had entered. They could do no more to safeguard her life from a danger the nature of which they could not guess, nor from what direction it would arrive; and the spacious dream did something to turn her mind from its present fear.

  It was an hour before dawn when the plane gently and steadily lifted its bird-like head, and began to move forward along the ground. Quickly the pace increased. The wings lifted. Before its course the ground dipped sharply, and as it did so the plane rose, with a rapid flapping of wide-spread wings.

  The dim bulk of the buildings, in which they had passed the whole of their pain-free, negative lives till that hour, showed beside and then beneath them in the level light of the setting moon. That sight, at least, had gone forever from mortal eyes, as had the dull glow of the euthanasia furnace which held the ashes, or was still baking the flesh, of the ninety-eight with whom they had ruled the world to so vain an end. The steady wing-beats bore them onward and up, under the starry vault of a cloudless sky. On the far low horizon to which they flew there was the first faint hint of the coming dawn.

  The main cabin—the upper body, as it were, of the great bird—was plainly meant only for transit of goods, for the safe reception of which it was fitted with large cupboards and shelves, bars and ropes and hanging straps, and fixed grooves along which sliding partitions might be run, as the nature and quantity of its cargo required. Beneath, in a lower compartment, were the engines and all the complicated mechanism of flight. Only the small head—cabin had been adapted for the human occupants for whom it had been originally designed.

  The tools and garments, the stores of food, and other articles which Wyndham had collected for his lonely and desperate quest were in the main cabin. The head-cabin, steady in its level flight, as though borne on a sentient neck, and giving wide views above, around, ahead, through transparent panels and roof, was uncumbered, but still allowing little more than comfortable space for them to stand, or stretch themselves on the pneumatic, silk-soft cushions with which it was furnished.

  For the moment, a least, they were secure in the safe and lonely heights of the placid air. And they were not merely alive in bodies drugged to a condition of dull existence, scarcely sentient either of pleasure or pain. They were exultantly, passionately alive, and aware of each other, in this great moment, so high, so lonely, so hardly won.

  Wyndham cast from him the sword-belt he had ceased to need. He was incredibly careless, for the first time in his ordered life, that he was not free from dirt or the stains of his own and another’s blood.

  He caught Vinetta in eager arms, and kissed her as they stood beneath the dim light of the stars. A week before, Colpeck-4XP would not have thought such ecstasy as theirs was possible to human kind.

  Soon the pale gold of sunrise, which was a familiar monotony of that time of year in the windless skies, broadened and rose wide and high, chasing the stars. But its core was no longer pale. It was an intense crimson, fading upward into a colder gold where the day-star shone. It was such a dawn as she had not seen.

  “It is the dawn,” she said, in the exultation of the moment through which she came, “of a new world. It may have been so when the world began.”

  Wyndham lifted his eyes. In the northern sky he saw the long trail of a windy cloud, that drifted over the last of the falling stars. “So it may be,” he said. “We will call it a good omen for us. But it may be well that we did not delay till a later hour.”

  “So it was,” she agreed, with another meaning than his. “There is no doubt about that.”

  He rose to regard further the strange magnificence of the windy dawn, and to guess the meaning of those wisps of clouds in the wide fields of the northern air. He looked down on a barer landscape than had been in the old, disorderly, fecund days, when trees and weeds of little value were left to breed almost at their own wills, and dogs were allowed to live which were of no value or use at all. Bare of life it might be, random or tamed, but its contours were little changed. Its hills rose. Its rivers twisted, thin, silver ribbon beneath the dawn.

  The sight to him was almost strange, and recalled something that Munzo-D7D had said to himself at least to Colpeck-4XP—a few months before, which had been accepted at the time as an argument difficult to refute.

  He had said that, if the Universe had been the work of a constructive, orderly mind, it would have been more neatly arranged: the stars would have been the same distances apart, and the rivers would have run straight to the sea, with tributaries at right-angles, and at regular intervals. “But everywhere,” he had said, “there is disorder and senseless waste, such as would disgrace the brain of a child.”

  Wyndham recalled this, but a difference of circumstance, or perhaps of ego, caused him to be less friendly to the plausible argument. Certainly it was true that the rivers wandered about, and he had seen before that the stars were strewn as though Blind Chance were their only god. But was it not possible that this was just because they were the work of an Infinite Mind? That it is only the finite brain, capable of no more than a succession of single thoughts, which must have method—and pattern—in its designs, lest they fall—to confusion it cannot rule?

  Munzo’s idea—as he did not know—was not new. An old, forgotten poet had put it aside by no better device than bold assertion of what was not. “Order,” he had written, “is Heaven’s first law,” to which the obvious comment must be that, if it be so, it is a law which it does not keep.

  Wyndham said something of this as he looked down on those twisting rivers, calling Vinetta to share his thought, as it might often become his habit to do, if she should survive the snare by which Munzo-D7D had contrived her death.

  And, as might also be a frequent experience, she looked with different eyes, and replied with more practical words. She had been taught, with some detailed exactness, the physical features of the earth, which her occupation had required her to know, and of which his own knowledge was vague and slight. She asked abruptly, “Do you know where we are?”

  “Not exactly. Does it matter?”

  “But you can see which way we are going! You can see that by the sun.”

  Yes. He could see that, now he looked with observant eyes. They were flying almost due east. Certainly not a straight way to Taormina, though for Mount Ida it would have been well enough.

  That was a fact. But what could they do? If the plane were taking them to another place than that to which it had been set, it was a matter with which they should not venture to interfere. They were faced by the warning not to change the controls after they had been set for flight. The mechanism was not—they could but suppose—intended to be manipulated by a pilot en route. No one would normally be with it upon its flights. If Pilwin-C6P had had it manipulated in some manner which would land them where his trap was set, they dare not attempt an interference which, if it were not futile, might lead to disaster they could not guess. The aeroplane, winging its steady way towards
the great mountains ahead, became to them as a giant eagle bearing them to its own place like a taken prey.

  But what could they do? Nothing, while they remained in those cloudless heights. The aeroplane required no aid from, and might yield no obedience to, them.

  Being so impotent to control the event beyond what they had already done, they became aware of the physical ennui that followed a day and night of tension and strife, and many exhausting moods. If they slept now, would they not be more equal to whatever there might be to face when the moment of landing should come? Soon, the plane flew on towards the mountain range that made a late dawn for the climbing sun, and the two who remained alive in a lonely world were unconscious of what it did.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  “If we be flying east when we wake”, they had said, “we shall know Taormina to be a place we shall never see.” But when they waked they could tell nothing of that. The sun was hidden above, and the earth beneath. The great bird in whose head they flew was beating wings which were obscured by the driving sleet. The wind was a rushing tempest without, with which the wide-stretched wings strove, beating more rapidly than they had done before. The head-cabin, although the plane was designed to keep it steady, swayed and shook its occupants from their feet, if they rose from the pneumatic cushions without the support of a friendly bar.

  To the two who looked, it was a strange and terrible sight, for it was the first time that they had known the forces of wind and rain in insurrection from human control. They had heard of such outbreaks before in most ancient tales, and seen them in pictures that still remained They had no capacity to judge whether the fury they witnessed now were stirred to a dangerous degree, nor knowledge of how far the plane, which had been accustomed to move through a placid air, was adapted to endurance of such conditions.