Collected Fiction, page 216
THE city was a complete unit, an organism sufficient unto itself, protected and isolated from the outer world. To the dwellers in Center, it was as though anything outside did not exist. They were not curious about it. They knew what it held, and it did not interest them. They concentrated on making Center a unit of perfection.
Plastics were much used, for they had a tensile strength beyond that of steel. Everything in the city seemed to move like a well oiled machine, yet it was significant that there was no machinery in sight. It was hidden by molded plastic, murals, mosaics.
There were great roof parks, amusement areas devoted to pleasure. Nor was anyone excluded by poverty, for there was no money in Center. There were mediums of titillating every sense, and even machines for inducing dreams by audio-suggestion. Work was done only when it was a pleasure, otherwise practically everything was left to the labor-saving machines. Necessary labor was reduced to a minimum.
The people seemed happy, though, Woodley thought, slightly decadent. They were already on the downgrade. But this was so subtle a point that he could not really decide.
He tried to think of a word that would describe Center. At last he remembered it. It was a city of hedonists, following the doctrine that pleasure was the chief good. Everything else was subordinated to that cult.
He could find no flaw. It was a selfish, feline civilization, sufficient to itself, and in itself perfect. Nothing could intrude upon its perfection. Weather was artificially controlled. Diseases were non-existent. Work was done by those who thoroughly enjoyed it.
Woodley saw not an unhappy face among those who dwelt in Center. There were not many, a few thousand men, women and children. Unlike the savages outside the moat, they grew older and procreated the race. No tinge of immortality was evident in them.
Hedonism and pleasure might be static, perhaps—but so was a jewel.
Sated at last with so much beauty and strangeness, Woodley requested an audience with the Senate. There was little delay. Sham took him immediately, via tube-car, to a great room that looked strangely informal. Fountains tinkled amid shrubbery and bright-colored flowers. The walls were a mosaic phantasmagoria. The Senate, a dozen men and women, were lounging in comfortable seats, sipping drinks, smoking and talking idly.
Standing beside Sham, Woodley let his gaze rove over the group. None of the members was young. All wore assorted garments, not one alike, but all becoming to the particular individual. There was a bearded, gray man in a toga. A blond woman wore a gown spun of gray cobwebby stuff that revealed the gentle curves of her body. Another man had a square, blocky face and iron-gray hair that bristled up stiffly.
The Senate watched Woodley with interest as Sham led him forward to a seat.
“We’ve been in session considering your case,” said the bearded man. “It was astonishing to find intelligence outside the moat. We had thought only savages existed out there.”
Woodley hesitated. “Savages may become civilized.”
“Not these. For more than a hundred years—much more—those outside Center have remained the same. They can’t learn. Something has stultified their minds while it prolonged their life-span.”
“I see . . . You know my story, of course.”
The gray man nodded. “Presently, if you wish, we’ll try to help you regain your memory completely. You may remain with us if you desired. There’s nothing for you in the outside world.”
Woodley shifted uneasily in his chair. “Does anyone know what destroyed civilization?” he asked.
“No. There were no records found. More than a hundred years ago, our grandparents and a few of our parents found themselves in a ruined world.
They were adults, but with blank minds. They remembered nothing, yet they had within them the seeds of great intelligence. They experimented and learned day by day. At first they were merely a savage tribe, but presently they outstripped their neighbors in wisdom.
“They found old books and deciphered them. They discovered that there was once a great civilization on Earth, which had been destroyed. No one knew how. The books stopped. July tenth, Nineteen-forty-two was the last recorded date. Newspapers still on their presses bore that date.”
Woodley frowned at a new thought. “How could you keep track of time then? When you found yourselves in a wrecked civilization, how much time had passed since Nineteen-forty-two?”
“That was not difficult. We did not know at first, of course. But we found records, magazines and so forth. We discovered calendars that predicted eclipses and their paths. When an eclipse occurred, we checked it against the old records and learned the date. It is a hundred and thirty years since Nineteen-forty-two—”
“Judgment Day,” Woodley said under his breath.
The graybeard nodded. “True. Some unknown judgment descended upon Earth then, making men into savages, wrecking their minds. But we survived and learned. We mastered the science that had existed before we came and surpassed it. Eventually we sequestered ourselves from the rest of the world, building this city and surrounding it with an impassable moat to keep out the savages.”
“How did you make the moat?”
“Pressure strong enough to fuse rocks into lava.”
“The savages—what’s wrong with their minds?”
“We do not know that,” said the gray-haired man with the square face.
“Wait.” The bearded Senator lifted a hand. “Some of our research scientists have only lately discovered a little. An unknown power affected the minds and bodies of the primitives, destroying intelligence and wiping out memory, but changing their basal metabolism and cellular structure. Men grow old for one reason—loss of energy. The atomic make-up of the savages has been changed, so that little energy is lost.
“Quanta is not released in quantity. The savages live far longer than we. They may be almost immortal. We have never heard of any natural deaths among them. They kill each other, of course. They prolonged their life-span at the cost of intelligence. It is nature’s check-and-balance system.”
THE bearded Senator’s explanation was the one that had been at the edge of Woodley’s consciousness, seeking only the proper words.
“Can the condition be cured?” Woodley asked.
“Yes, at the cost of semi-immortality. If we wished, in the light of recent knowledge, we could change the savages back into normal human beings.” Woodley’s pulses beat faster. He felt unexpected triumph. Before he could speak, the graybeard went on.
“Your case is an unusual one. While you slept, we probed your subconscious mind with a psychological device, hypnotic in nature. By means of association and suggestion, we found out a good deal about you that you do not know. There was a possibility that through your memories we could learn the nature of the cataclysm that wrecked Earth.”
“And?” Woodley blurted hopefully.
“Well, we failed in that. But we learned why you suddenly woke, a hundred and thirty years after Nineteen-forty-two. Your thought-images were caught, their vibrations altered to show a pictorial view. You may see them now, if you like.”
His throat dry, Woodley could only nod.
“Lie back, then. Watch the ceiling.”
CHAPTER VIII
Night on Earth
HE obeyed. At first the smooth white plastic was blank. Gradually a confused melee of color began to shift across it, came into sharp focus. Woodley’s memories, seen through his eyes so long ago! Flashing, confused, blurred . . . in no chronological sequence, but arousing poignant chords of remembrance . . .
A farmhouse where he had lived as a child . . . the roaring confusion of Chicago’s Loop . . . palm trees against a yellow beach . . . faces in which certain features were improbably dominant, warped by Woodley’s own memory. A school-teacher he had once known. The girl who had been his first date. A flood of ticker-tape fluttering down into a crowded street . . .
Slowly he remembered them all. The visions of a past long buried came to life. And through them all, like a motif, floated the dear face of a girl, framed by auburn curls, her blue eyes sometimes sparkling with laughter, sometimes grave with thought, sometimes tender. Janet!
Woodley forgot his surroundings.
He lived again in a world he had once known. It was like stepping through a doorway into the past. All this had lain dormant in his mind, sleeping but unforgotten.
Then came a scene of the interior of what seemed to be a museum. Glass cases were visible. In a large one was a jagged boulder of pitted metal, a meteorite. Janet’s face showed on the screen. Then a confused blur moved too fast for Woodley’s eye to follow. A voice shocked him.
“We have reconstructed,” the graybeard explained. “On July tenth, Nineteen-forty-two, you were in a museum, examining a meteorite in its case. When the catastrophe came, you fell, breaking the glass and collapsing partly under the meteorite. Its bulk shielded you from whatever affected the rest of humanity. Certain ores and compounds in that bit of rock acted as a screen, protecting you. Thus you recovered from the plague of immortality after a hundred and thirty years.”
“Perhaps the others will recover, then?” Woodley asked.
“That is most doubtful.”
“You said you can cure them.”
“We can.”
“Will you?”
For a long moment it was utterly silent in the gardened room, save for the tinkling plash of the fountains. The vision on the ceiling had gone.
“This is our world,” the gray man said quietly. “In it we are perfect. Why should we create discord? We have no concern with the savages, nor with anything outside Center. Here we shall remain isolated forever, finding complete happiness. The outer Earth no longer exists for us. We shall not interfere with it. The savages must remain savages.”
Argument proved useless. The Senate was adamant. Woodley gave up at last as his hosts began to wander out one by one. He let Sham draw him away. In the girl’s eyes was sympathetic understanding.
“We’ll dine together,” she said. “Let’s go out on the terrace.”
The sunset turned the towers of Center into black silhouettes against the western sky. But twilight had come to Earth long ago, Woodley thought as he relaxed in the roof garden, and it was still a mystery. What had caused the catastrophe?
RESTLESS, chafing, he ate food that seemed tasteless. Sham watched him with concern.
“That girl,” she said anxiously. “What happened to her?”
Woodley told the dread story. He was sick with hopelessness.
“If you’d seen her!” he finished. “A mindless savage—and your people could cure her if they would. But they won’t!”
“We are hedonists,” Sharn said. “We seek only pleasure. I can understand the Senate’s decision. But it must be hard indeed for you, Kent Woodley.”
“Hard?” His voice died away into bitterness. “You haven’t my memories, Sharn. A whole world, my own life, crashing down in ruin more than a century ago. If Janet had remained the same, I might have stood it better.”
“I know—a little.” Sharn rose and went to the parapet. Leaning out over the abyss, she plucked petals from a red flower and let them drift down like drops of blood. “We learned to read the old books. We copied many into our microprint libraries. I remember a poem by a man named Chesterton.”
For the end of the world was long ago—And all we dwell today As children of some second birth Like a strange people left on Earth After a judgment day . . .
“I, too, have thought of the past,” she said, after a pause. “From what I have read in the old books, I imagine it was a very lovely world. There was much pain in it and much sorrow, but a great deal of pleasure, too. Here we have only pleasure, and that cloys. Till you came, Kent Woodley, I had not quite known the meaning of the sated dullness I felt sometimes. But now—”
She turned back, her face pale in the twilight, her hair like an aureole.
“There comes a point when beyond pleasure there is no more pleasure. Only a sickness and a groping for something that may not exist. Yet we are afraid. How can we give up what we know in a foolish search for something that may not even exist at all?”
A sudden bond of sympathy sprang into existence between them, a melancholy sadness, one springing from too little pain, the other from too much. It was a cry of sheer agony that rose from Woodley’s heart as he gripped the girl’s hands.
“Can you help me, Sham? Can you?”
“Can you help me?” she pleaded. “I do not know. Even if I wished to—” She made a queer, groping gesture. “You have changed my life. You have made me realize a lack, a hunger. I have seen Center through your eyes, and there is wonder in them. I have never seen the world outside, and perhaps I, too, might find wonder there.”
“There’s a lot I can’t remember,” Woodley said. “But I think I know what’s wrong with Center, Sham. It’s too civilized. It’s a matriarchy.”
“You’re wrong. We have complete equality.”
“But your life is a feminist one, without hardship. I recall a parallel. Let’s see.” He pondered. “The old Chinese Empire.”
“I’ve read of that.”
“Opportunities were thought dead. Men were convinced that was true. It was a feminist culture, based on convenience and luxury, soft and sheltered and weak. It was decadence. There are patriarchs only among pioneers.”
SHARN bit her lip. “The others in Center do not feel as I do yet. They haven’t seen through your eyes, as I have. What is it you want?”
“Your people can cure the rest of mankind, make them intelligent again, give them back their memories.”
“That would mean the end of our isolation.”
“It would mean hardship for awhile, perhaps for a long time. But eventually mankind could be raised to your own level of culture and intelligence. The whole world would be a step further on the road of progress. It would be the end of hedonism, I think. There’d be pioneers again. Everything but the pursuit of pleasure has been lost in Center.”
“Not lost,” she corrected. “Forgotten. The outsiders were luckier than we, perhaps.”
“They’re savages. Your people are blind and selfish. They don’t realize that they’re going down to decadence and destruction.”
“Is that wrong for a hedonist?” Sharn asked. “We live for ourselves, not for our children. The race may die, but we shall be dead long before that. We have been content to drift. We worked for awhile to reach perfection. Now we are resting.”
“Drifting toward a waterfall,” Woodley said. “Don’t you understand what it means to live for others?”
She looked at him oddly.
“If the Senate could be convinced, it would be easy for them to cure mankind of mindless immortality. I might be able to help.” She paused. “You were in love with that girl, weren’t you?”
“Janet? Yes.”
Sharn turned away abruptly.
“I’ll see what can be done. It may take days. I must see certain leaders of Center, do some research in the old books, consult the psychologists and administrators. Perhaps we can bring pressure to bear on the Senate.”
Woodley was on his feet.
“You mean that there really is a chance?”
“Not a very good one. You wouldn’t be satisfied with Center—as it is, I mean—would you?” Her gesture took in the white brilliance of the great towers, and all that lay within them. “But you would not, I know. Well, I’ll see what happens. I may not be free for days. I’ll arrange to have a guide sent tomorrow.”
“I can’t thank you,” he said quietly. “You’ve given me too much hope for mere thanks.”
Sham’s smile was curiously bitter as she murmured a farewell and slipped away through the garden. Woodley stood staring after her. Then he settled back in his chair, looked up at the night sky and lighted another cigarette.
An incongruous thought came to him. How had he remembered how to smoke? It had been a hundred and thirty years since he had last held a cigarette between his fingers. Habit, conditioned reflex, of course.
The Milky Way was a winding, nebulous cloud of light far above. Mars was red on the horizon. The blur of Cassiopeia was familiar, and Orion’s belt was bright. He could remember these without difficulty. But there were so many dark, starless places in his memory!
THAT ultra-scientific miracle he had seen on the ceiling of the Senate chamber had dredged up vague flashes from the past. What he had seen there he recalled distinctly. But their edges were blurred. They faded into nothingness in past and future, like lights on a bridge by night. The lights were bright. Between them was darkness.
Closing his eyes, Woodley visualized what he had seen. In that last vision in the museum, Janet had been there. And he had been quoting a fragment of verse that was poignantly familiar.
In the nation that is not Nothing stands that stood before . . .
Judgment Day, he thought, one more terrible than any that had been visualized by scientists or prophets in the unremembered past. It had been no clean, fiery ending, wiping out all the world. Ruins had been left, standing untenanted and desolate in the deep night, more than a century after the cataclysm.
Somehow a few people had been given another chance, every opportunity to build again, and they had failed. They had reared a magic city of science, in which they slept.
Night had fallen on all the Earth.
So many mysteries, Woodley thought. If only he possessed the key to them! Yet there was a hope, now that Sharn had offered to help. What she could accomplish he did not know, but at least it was better than nothing. He might save Janet.
It was not merely Janet, though. The thought of mankind degraded into bestiality was horrible. Men had dreamed and thought and written, produced great music and created great beauty. Knowing himself how much he missed the small, tender lovelinesses of old days, the easy familiarity, the struggles, the triumphs, Woodley felt deep sympathy for all those other millions who had been robbed.
