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THE ETERNAL WALL
By RAYMOND Z. GALLUN
_A scream of brakes, the splash into icy waters, a long descent into alkaline depths ... it was death. But Ned Vince lived again--a million years later!_
"See you in half an hour, Betty," said Ned Vince over the partytelephone. "We'll be out at the Silver Basket before ten-thirty...."
Ned Vince was eager for the company of the girl he loved. That was whyhe was in a hurry to get to the neighboring town of Hurley, where shelived. His old car rattled and roared as he swung it recklessly aroundPit Bend.
There was where Death tapped him on the shoulder. Another car leapedsuddenly into view, its lights glaring blindingly past a high,up-jutting mass of Jurassic rock at the turn of the road.
Dazzled, and befuddled by his own rash speed, Ned Vince had only swiftyoung reflexes to rely on to avoid a fearful, telescoping collision. Heflicked his wheel smoothly to the right; but the County HighwayCommission hadn't yet tarred the traffic-loosened gravel at the Bend.
An incredible science, millions of years old, lay in theminds of these creatures.]
Ned could scarcely have chosen a worse place to start sliding andspinning. His car hit the white-painted wooden rail sideways, crashedthrough, tumbled down a steep slope, struck a huge boulder, bounced up alittle, and arced outward, falling as gracefully as a swan-diver towardthe inky waters of the Pit, fifty feet beneath....
Ned Vince was still dimly conscious when that black, quiet pool geyseredaround him in a mighty splash. He had only a dazing welt on hisforehead, and a gag of terror in his throat.
Movement was slower now, as he began to sink, trapped inside his wreckedcar. Nothing that he could imagine could mean doom more certainly thanthis. The Pit was a tremendously deep pocket in the ground, spring-fed.The edges of that almost bottomless pool were caked with a rim ofwhite--for the water, on which dead birds so often floated, wassurcharged with alkali. As that heavy, natronous liquid rushed upthrough the openings and cracks beneath his feet, Ned Vince knew thathis friends and his family would never see his body again, lost beyondrecovery in this abyss.
The car was deeply submerged. The light had blinked out on thedash-panel, leaving Ned in absolute darkness. A flood rushed in at theshattered window. He clawed at the door, trying to open it, but it wasjammed in the crash-bent frame, and he couldn't fight against the forceof that incoming water. The welt, left by the blow he had received onhis forehead, put a thickening mist over his brain, so that he could notthink clearly. Presently, when he could no longer hold his breath,bitter liquid was sucked into his lungs.
His last thoughts were those of a drowning man. The machine-shop he andhis dad had had in Harwich. Betty Moore, with the smiling Irisheyes--like in the song. Betty and he had planned to go to the StateUniversity this Fall. They'd planned to be married sometime.... Goodbye,Betty ...
The ripples that had ruffled the surface waters in the Pit, quietedagain to glassy smoothness. The eternal stars shone calmly. The geologicDakota hills, which might have seen the dinosaurs, still bulked alongthe highway. Time, the Brother of Death, and the Father of Change,seemed to wait....
* * * * *
"Kaalleee! Tik!... Tik, tik, tik!... Kaalleee!..."
The excited cry, which no human throat could quite have duplicatedaccurately, arose thinly from the depths of a powder-dry gulch,water-scarred from an inconceivable antiquity. The noon-day Sun was redand huge. The air was tenuous, dehydrated, chill.
"Kaalleee!... Tik, tik, tik!..."
At first there was only one voice uttering those weird, triumphantsounds. Then other vocal organs took up that trilling wail, and thoseshort, sharp chuckles of eagerness. Other questioning, wondering notesmixed with the cadence. Lacking qualities identifiable as human, thedisturbance was still like the babble of a group of workmen who havediscovered something remarkable.
The desolate expanse around the gulch, was all but without motion. Theicy breeze tore tiny puffs of dust from grotesque, angling drifts ofsoil, nearly waterless for eons. Patches of drab lichen grew here andthere on the up-jutting rocks, but in the desert itself, no other lifewas visible. Even the hills had sagged away, flattened by incalculableages of erosion.
* * * * *
At a mile distance, a crumbling heap of rubble arose. Once it had been abuilding. A gigantic, jagged mass of detritus slanted upward from itscrest--red debris that had once been steel. A launching catapult for thelast space ships built by the gods in exodus, perhaps it was--half amillion years ago. Man was gone from the Earth. Glacial ages, war,decadence, disease, and a final scattering of those ultimate superhumansto newer worlds in other solar systems, had done that.
"Kaalleee!... Tik, tik, tik!..." The sounds were not human. They weremore like the chatter and wail of small desert animals.
But there was a seeming paradox here in the depths of that gulch, too.The glint of metal, sharp and burnished. The flat, streamlined bulk of aflying machine, shiny and new. The bell-like muzzle of a strangeexcavator-apparatus, which seemed to depend on a blast of atoms to clearaway rock and soil. Thus the gulch had been cleared of the accumulatedrubbish of antiquity. Man, it seemed, had a successor, as ruler of theEarth.
Loy Chuk had flown his geological expedition out from the far lowlandsto the east, out from the city of Kar-Rah. And he was very happynow--flushed with a vast and unlooked-for success.
He crouched there on his haunches, at the dry bottom of the Pit. Thebreeze rumpled his long, brown fur. He wasn't very different inappearance from his ancestors. A foot tall, perhaps, as he squattedthere in that antique stance of his kind. His tail was short and furred,his undersides creamy. White whiskers spread around his inquisitive,pink-tipped snout.
But his cranium bulged up and forward between shrewd, beady eyes,betraying the slow heritage of time, of survival of the fittest, ofevolution. He could think and dream and invent, and the civilization ofhis kind was already far beyond that of the ancient Twentieth Century.
Loy Chuk and his fellow workers were gathered, tense and gleeful, aroundthe things their digging had exposed to the daylight. There was a gob ofjunk--scarcely more than an irregular formation of flaky rust. Butimbedded in it was a huddled form, brown and hard as old wood. The drymud that had encased it like an airtight coffin, had by now been chippedaway by the tiny investigators; but soiled clothing still clung to it,after perhaps a million years. Metal had gone into decay--yes. But notthis body. The answer to this was simple--alkali. A mineral saturationthat had held time and change in stasis. A perfect preservative fororganic tissue, aided probably during most of those passing eras bydesert dryness. The Dakotas had turned arid very swiftly. This body wasnot a mere fossil. It was a mummy.
* * * * *
"Kaalleee!" Man, that meant. Not the star-conquering demi-gods, but theancestral stock that had built the first machines on Earth, and in theearly Twenty-first Century, the first interplanetary rockets. No wonderLoy Chuk and his co-workers were happy in their paleontologicalenthusiasm! A strange accident, happening in a legendary antiquity, hadaided them in their quest for knowledge.
At last Loy Chuk gave a soft, chirping signal. The chant of triumphended, while instruments flicked in his tiny hands. The final instrumenthe used to test the mummy, looked like a miniature stereoscope, withcomplicated details. He held it over his eyes. On the tiny screenwithin, through the agency of focused X-rays, he saw magnified images ofthe internal organs of this ancient human corpse.
What his probing gaze revealed to him, made his pleasure even greaterthan before. In twittering, chattering sounds,
he communicated hisfurther knowledge to his henchmen. Though devoid of moisture, the mummywas perfectly preserved, even to its brain cells! Medical and biologicalsciences were far advanced among Loy Chuk's kind. Perhaps, by theapplication of principles long known to them, this long-dead body couldbe made to live again! It might move, speak, remember its past! What amarvelous subject for study it would make, back there in the museums ofKar-Rah!
"Tik, tik, tik!..."
But Loy silenced this fresh, eager chattering with a command. Work wasalways more substantial than cheering.
* * * * *
With infinite care--small, sharp hand-tools were used, now--the mummy ofNed Vince was disengaged from the worthless rust of his primitiveautomobile. With infinite care it was crated in a metal case, andhauled into the flying machine.
Flashing flame, the latter arose, bearing the entire hundred members ofthe expedition. The craft shot eastward at bullet-like speed. Thespreading continental plateau of North America seemed to
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