"What—what happened?" Vic whispered painfully.
Fran helped Sem to his feet. Blood streamed from a gash in his forehead. He wriggled his shoulders. Nothing. He was rooted to the floor.
"Try your Gravity Cells," he said quickly.
They did. Nothing again. A Tending Machine wabbled crazily in a corner, rolled to a dead stop.
"I think," he said, very slowly and very distinctly, "that something has destroyed the City of the Machines. There is no power."
They stared at each other with dull, drawn faces. No power! That meant no Tending Machines, no Repairs, no food, no locomotion, no means of communication, no civilization. Fran's wild dreams had come to fruition with a vengeance.
"Now, do you see, Sem 15," he asked softly, "why it is imperative to find the Orb?"
The patriarch shook the blood in a spray from his matted locks. He seemed like some Neanderthaler from the days when the earth was young.
"I do not," he declared defiantly. He shook his fist at the heavens. "I am not afraid," he shouted. "Bring on your probabilities; bring on the unpredictable. Ha! ha! I am as incalculable as you all. While I'm alive, while I'm here, I'll seek no favors. I'll wrest what I want from an unwilling world."
Like a prophet of old, like that man immortalized in the long-forgotten song, his head was bloodied, but unbowed. Perhaps he was a little mad just then.
Fran watched him in half admiration, but he saw clearly what had to be done. Instinctively he took command.
"The first thing to do is to determine what happened to the City of Machines; whether there is any possibility of repairs or salvage. Vic, Sem, follow me."
Vic looked bewildered, but went obediently. He was a follower, not a leader. Sem grumbled in his beard, and went along.
V.
OUTSIDE everything was chaos. All landmarks were gone. Strange vistas lurched on their sides, or emerged, half buried, from the ground in which they had materialized. Bottomless pits yawned underfoot; great fissures ran diagonally through earth and vita-crystal. Bodies lay in profusion. Remembered faces, faces never before seen, stared sightlessly up at them. Others resembled nothing at all, mere shapeless lumps that had dropped from tremendous heights.
Fran shuddered and stumbled on. Vic was suddenly sick. But Sem did not seem to see. Death and destruction were inevitable concomitants of the change.
Walking was wearisome to their unaccustomed feet. Even to Fran, who had practiced secretly in the days of his revolt. For one thing the ground was a bumpy, hummocky mass. For another, the rain water swirled around their legs, poured in sheeted waterfalls into the depthless chasms beneath. And the City of the Machines was a good four miles distant.
As they made a long detour to avoid a fissure and climbed over the crumpled remains of a vista, something darted at them. It had been one with the shadows, flattened stealthily against the wall. Now it was a crashing thunderbolt. Straight for Vic it hurled, a long, quavering howl in its throat.
There was a startled cry from the youth. He tried to swerve. But it was too late. The apparition fastened on him with a hideous cry of triumph. A mouth gaped wide, teeth flashed white in the sunlight, dipped eagerly for Vic's throat.
Fran came out of his daze. He leaped forward. His fist swung out, smashed with a satisfying thud into yielding flesh. The apparition howled with pain. He dropped the half-fainting youth, glared fiercely at his attacker, and darted back into the shadows from which he had come.
Fran caught Vic as he swayed. Sem glowered after the vanished man, shouted strange words that sounded like ancient imprecations.
"You all right, Vic?" Fran asked anxiously.
The youth shuddered, smiled faintly. "Quite. But what—what was that?"
"That," said Fran gravely, "was Char 17. Once a civilized man. Now he is a beast of prey, seeking the food the Tending Machines can no longer give him."
"But I—I didn't have any," Vic protested.
"Human flesh," Fran said, "is food. Long, long ago there were men who ate and found it very good."
They continued in silence. Even Sem seemed shaken by that episode. Bars of metal, wrenched from the lever supports of wrecked Machines, were in their hands. They met other prowlers, who fled like ancient wolves at their determined approach, at the primitive but effective weapons they held.
The dead were everywhere, but so were those who were still alive. Some, unhurt, not yet ghouls and cannibals, lay where they were. Unaccustomed to physical movements, unused to decisive processes of thought, they seemed sunk in deathlike stupor. Fran moved toward them with pitying gestures. They needed help. They would starve to death in their helplessness, if the prowlers did not get to them first.
"Let them alone," Sem objected. "They are not good for anything. They are weaklings who will never survive the new conditions. Better they should die now than drag us down with them."
It was pitiful, but Sem was right. This new world of theirs was a hard, cruel one. Only the strong, the determined, could survive. Food, shelter, clothing, would be at a premium. The weaklings would impede them in the struggle.
So, with the stirrings of humanitarian impulses sternly repressed, they went on. But there were other men, men in whom already the new conditions had brought the latent iron to the surface. Men who did not slink or prowl, who did not weep and bemoan their fate, but toiled purposefully at the wreckage, succoring the wounded, seeking the Machines, trying clumsily to make them work.
These the little party hailed. These were the men of whom the new world would be fashioned. They fell in behind, a steadily growing horde, hasty weapons in hand, streaming toward the silent City of the Machines.
SOMETHING sang in Fran's bosom, something exulted. If only the devilish Orb he had invented were smashed, fate might still prove not too unkind.
"Did you notice," he told Sem abruptly, "that there have been no further shifts of probability since that last great crash?"
It was true. All the strange transmigrations had ceased. Matter once more seemed immutably rooted, subject to immutable laws. The First Phase had passed. But Fran did not know it then.
There were almost a hundred men in the band that followed Fran by the time they reached the City. The last chasm had been skirted, the last upheaval laboriously surmounted. As one man they stopped, aghast at what they saw. Whatever hopes they might have cherished were dashed to the ground.
The City of the Machines was an irremediable chaos. A huge hole went down half a hundred miles into the very bowels of the earth. Machines, Tenders, Calculators, Statistical Integrators, had vanished into no one knew what realm of probability along with the hundreds of thousands of tons of soil and underlying rock. Only the Central Power Cylinder remained, flaunting its smooth metallic slenderness on the very edge of the tremendous deep. Nothing else.
The weaker in the party sank hopelessly to the ground. Tear glands sent strange watery fluids trickling down their cheeks. What could they do; where could they turn? The Machines had tended them for thousands of years; now that aid was withdrawn. A new and raw world faced them, a world that cared not whether they lived or died, whether they fed or starved. Even Fran was stunned for the moment. He had not expected quite such a cataclysmic disaster.
But a curious sense of responsibility stirred him to action. These men, and women who were almost like men, were his wards now, even as they had once been wards of the Machines. They looked to him for guidance, for leadership. It would never do to show that he was afraid.
Therefore, he said cheerfully: "We are very fortunate. The Power Cylinder is still intact. We may be able to start it operating again. If we can, there are plenty of Machines lying around in the wreckage that no doubt will work."
Thus, with words of encouragement, with face that was gay and open, he lashed them on to further struggle. Sem thundered and exhorted and was a tower of strength. Finally, somewhat red and shamefaced, the easy despairers tottered to their feet, took their places in the long line that wended over the broken t
errain toward the still-standing Cylinder.
"Keep away from that hole," Fran cried sharply. But it was too late. One man, shambling wearily along, had slipped on loose rubble. Before their horrified eyes he shot over the smooth knife edge, went tumbling and gyrating into the terrific cavity. For long minutes they heard his echoing, frantic screams as he went down, down. Finally there were no more.
The band stared at each other with ashen-white faces, and went on. There was no time now for vain regrets or lengthy mournings. Life faced them. Life must be conquered.
Fran, Sem and Vic inspected the Power Cylinder, the Communications Board that went around it in a spiral platform. They had been Guardians, hence they knew something of the mechanism. The rest huddled like sheep beneath, waiting for the leaders to emerge. On their report rested their chances of survival. Already they were hungry and cold, and these were at once novel and terrifying sensations.
Minutes passed, hours, and still no word. Then suddenly, high up, like three tiny dolls, they appeared. Fran's hand went out in a wide gesture.
"Friends," he shouted, "the Cylinder can be repaired. It will take days of work, but determined men can do it. Also, there is a storage tank of food intact, enough to last a month. After that—"
But the rest of his speech was lost in the great cheer that went up. Confidence surged through them, a feeling of strength and mastery. Shoulders went back, eyes snapped with alertness, power tensed their soft muscles. They laughed and jested as men had not laughed and jested since the advent of the Machine Cities.
It took them a grueling month of work. They were unaccustomed to their tasks; muscles grew slowly hard while blisters yielded plentiful crops. Missing parts had to be searched for among the debris of former Machines. Discipline had to be initiated, responsibilities divided. Guards were set, and a code of signals evolved. For outside humanity—those who had survived the great catastrophe—had reverted to primitive savagery. Normal food had long since given out. There was only one supply left to the half-mad, beast-like creatures—the flesh of living men.
Time and again the little band heard the code alarm, dropped all tasks, snatched up the metals bars that never left their sides, and surged in disciplined ranks to repel the swarms of shrieking, maddened beings who clawed at them with taloned fingers. Always they beat them back, but not without losses. However, there were additions also. Weakened but still civilized humans who managed to elude the roving hordes came to join this last stand of the human race.
BY THE END of the month food was perilously low. The newcomers were an unexpected drain. Yet they were not refused admittance. Sem attempted to argue the matter, but Fran was very firm, and Vic backed him up.
"We live or die together. They have shown their worth and stamina by not succumbing to the frightful conditions outside. They need us, and we need them, and more like them, if we are to conquer our new world."
At last, with the precious ichor, which was their only known supply of food, down to the last thin lining of the Storage Tank, Fran dropped a plate of metal into place, bolted it clumsily to the otherwise smooth round of the Cylinder.
Vic, watching, shouted exultantly. The workers dropped everything, swarmed cheering and laughing and crying into the room. The job was finished.
Fran swayed with weariness. The back of a dirty hand swept salt sweat from a smudgy brow. Callouses and blisters covered his palms. He grinned faintly. "Don't cheer yet, boys. It may not work."
"It must," Sem shouted, capering like a youngster of twenty instead of a patriarch of over a thousand.
Fran walked steadily to the manual control. There was a sense of fate, of doom, in his firm, resilient step. The confused crying ceased.
For an imperceptible second Fran's fingers hesitated. Now he was afraid, deathly afraid. His fingers firmed, he closed his eyes and pulled.
What was that little purring sound? A veritable frenzy overtook the devoted band of humans. They shouted, they sang, they danced insanely. Life before the debacle had never held anything so heady, so thrilling.
The Power Cylinder was operating! The last delivered load of bauxite fed smoothly into the one remaining Atom Smasher, there to be converted in a blast of annihilation into power. The tremendous energy flowed into the huge Cylinder, flashed in blue flares in the faceted ball at the top of the column. Repair Machines they had salvaged and dragged with aching shoulders to the Machine City galvanized into life, floated like worker bees to the great Queen Cell. Patched, clumsy repairs the humans had made were transformed to perfect adjustments. Gravity Cells lifted at the slightest twitch.
The first and most vital function to which they put the resurrected Power was the synthesis of food. Repairing and Building Machines set to work. Within two days a Food Synthesis Machine was completed; within three the first precious drops of the nutrient liquid flowed into the Storage Tanks.
"We've won back to where we were," Fran told his friends with quiet exultation a month later. Already the Machine City was building back to its former proud estate. More and more humans came in, with dreadful tales of unbelievable conditions outside. But within was security, peace, and a growing population. Already, in his mind's eye, Fran envisaged the world recovered with Machine Cities, using their own as a base, and Sectors of vistas rising phoenixlike from the debris of the former civilization.
Sem grunted. He had been oddly morose for over a week.
"What's the matter?" Fran asked in some surprise.
"Matter enough," the patriarch retorted. "Is that what we suffered for, struggled, conquered? To restore the deathlike dullness and inanity of a world that was well lost?"
"But—" Fran started to protest.
"Look at them now," Sem interrupted tensely. He seized his more youthful friend by the arm, dragged him out on a balcony of the new City. Sem had smashed his vanes with a violent gesture the week before. He had discovered his legs, he averred, and he intended to keep on using them.
Fran looked down on the great temporary communal hall. The Sector was still in the process of rebuilding.
THE WHOLE community, some five hundred in all, was congregated in the spacious expanse. They reclined on couches, languidly, inertly, scarcely deigning to lift their heads at the appearance of their leaders. Feeding Machines floated among them, injecting nutriment into their veins; Tending Machines supplied their slightest unuttered want.
"Look at them," Sem thundered with fierce contempt. "A month ago they were alive, vigorous, masters of their fates. Now—bah!—they have slipped back to their old selves, weak, colorless nonentities babied by the Machines. A month ago, when the Cell-Mating Machines no longer existed, men and women drew apart, looked at each other with new eyes, new comradeship. Now they are indifferently one, sexless. We have labored mightily and brought forth a pallid simulacrum of all you revolted against."
Fran knit his brows. He had spent some anxious moments himself over this easy sliding back into old grooves, but— "There's nothing we can do about it, Sem," he submitted.
Sem lowered his voice to a tense whisper. His eyes blazed fanatically. "Yes, there is. Smash the Machines. This time thoroughly, so they can never be rebuilt."
Fran shivered. "Then we'd all die," he protested. "There would be no food, no—"
"Natural food once grew in the bosom of the earth," Sem pointed out.
"There is none now," Fran said. "No, Sem, I'm afraid we must continue."
And for another month they did. The Sector was finished, men reclined on their private couches now as of old. The Machines did all the work. New Machine Cities sprang up in a steadily widening territory, powered as yet from the Great Central Cylinder. Except for certain tremendous chasms in the ground, it was hard to believe that anything had happened. The great disaster faded from minds that held less and less of thought. Why think when the Machines did it so much better?
By this time Fran had almost ceased to think of his vanished Orb of Probability, the Machine which had started it all. He assumed, and
plausibly, that it had destroyed itself in that last tremendous crash. Once again, the world was fixed, immutable; and electrons were held within inconceivably small areas of indeterminacy.
But unknown to him, to anyone, a small crystal sphere swung around the earth in planetary flight, five hundred miles out in space. Cold and lifeless it was during the middle period when the Central Cylinder had blanked out of commission. The power that fed its tubes and filaments and transformers had come from the faceted balls at the top of the tall metal column.
Then the Cylinder was repaired, and started anew. Once more waves surged out into the ether, even into outer space. Once more the rushing energy impinged on the delicate apparatus, sent it into ceaseless motion.
But something had happened. Some small imperceptible change in the character of the waves perhaps, in their lengths and frequency. Therefore, when the Orb of Probability functioned again, it was on an entirely new principle, something that Fran in his experiments had never anticipated, had never believed possible even in his wildest theorizings.
VI.
IT WAS almost two months after that last discussion with Sem that the Second Phase brought new and undreamed-of disaster to a world that had relapsed into its old patterns of life.
Fran noticed it first. He was talking to Sem in Sem's vista. The patriarch was gesticulating, walking back and forth, harping on his old grievance. His long beard swept wildly behind him, his hair in an uncut tangle. Fran rested delicately on a couch, a trifle weary. He who had once been alone in his revolt, now floated in a pleasant enervation of relaxed effort. It was good; it was normal; it was civilized.
"I like it this way," he said a bit defiantly. He had not quite stilled the last qualms of the old stirring. Subconsciously he realized that Sem was right.
When The Future Dies Page 15