Collected Short Fiction, page 356
The Under-men, as they came to call themselves, built up a secret power. The network of their tunnels crossed every continent, and the domed ports of their submarine fleets studded every continental shelf.
In the year 212 of the Oblivion, as the Under-men had learned from the Utopians to count time, Chief Soro Grekko brought his young son, Kran, back to the ruins of New York. Soro Grekko, now the ruler of the Undermen, was the great-great-grandson of Silver Skull. Powerful, dark-haired, he bore a strong resemblance to his ancestor. This likeness was even more striking in the case of his dark-eyed son, who was now fifteen.
MAKING two hundred miles an hour through evacuated tubes, the private rail car of the Chief brought them to a city a mile beneath and fifty miles to seaward of the old metropolis. They took a branch line toward the westward petroleum drillings, and climbed on foot through one of the first tunnels, and at last emerged into one of the ancient subways, and mounted a crumbling stair into the sunlight.
For a moment Kran Grekko was dazzled. And then, staring at the unfamiliar wonders of grass, and green trees, and a silent dappled deer watching them from a little glade, and the blue incredible splendor of the sky above, he voiced a breathless cry of joy.
“Father—it—it’s wonderful!”
The dark face of the Chief grew stern as he nodded.
“It is beautiful,” he said soberly. “Vast as are the tunnels and passages our people have made, the world above is a thousand times more spacious, and its sky is more splendid than all our limestone caverns. But come—you shall see.”
He led the way southward, in the shadow of a thick and ancient forest. The boy followed him, pausing again and again to exclaim at the wonder of a wild flower or a squirrel or a songbird.
“Once,” said the grim-faced Chief, “our fathers lived here. This, so the ancient records tell us, was their greatest city. Ten times more people lived here than in all the spaces of the Under-men.”
He paused, pointed.
“You see that long, low hill, with great trees growing upon it—that was once a row of the buildings of our fathers. Time, and fires, and tremors of the Earth, have leveled them.
“But once our people dwelt here—free to the air and the Sun and the stars.”
“See, Father!” The boy pointed, breathless. “That stone is squared!” He ran to touch it, hurried on. “Why was it, Father, that our people were driven under the ground? Really, I mean. All the history books said about it seemed so strange, so hard to understand.”
The Chief shook his dark head, bitterly.
“It has always been hard for us to understand,” he said. “I’m to tell you what we know. Just wait a few minutes, until you have seen Utopia—that is what the Outsiders call their world.”
The boy stopped again, to point wonderingly at a tall monument of brown, strangely graven stone, that towered alone above the trees.
“Look, Father. There is one building of the old city that stands.”
“But it isn’t of the old city,” the Chief told him. “It is far older. For the ancient books tell us that it was first set up when civilization was young, in a forgotten land above our cavern city of Ohor. It is odd that the oldest thing should remain.
Beyond the obelisk they plunged again into the forest. At last, when they came into another little glade, the boy pointed with an exclamation of wonder into the sky.
“FATHER—what is that?” Above the treetops was a round, shining tower. It looks as far off as the sky!”
“That was the greatest house of the Old World,” said the Chief. “Even the Utopians have built few buildings as large. In the ancient books, it is called the Empire State.”
“We are going to it?” asked the boy.
His father nodded, soberly.
“More than a hundred years age, he said, “our fathers patched the roofs and repaired the elevators and equipped them with power tubes. We have preserved the building, for a watch tower. From the top of it, you can see far into Utopia.”
The boy caught his breath, when at last he looked from the tower. Manhattan Island was a thick green forest, unbroken save by the tiny brown spire of the obelisk. Wild green covered the end of Long Island, and a tip of the northward mainland, and a wide border beyond the empty river.
“This was the prison of our fathers.” The Chief gestured at the green. “Beyond, you can see the white towers of the barrier. And beyond them, far off in the distance, you can see the buildings of Utopia.”
Shading his eyes against the Sun’s unaccustomed glare, Kran Grekko saw the gleam of bright, wide-spaced pylons upon a distant hill. He saw bright, tiny flecks of ships curving above them.
“That is Utopia.” The voice of Chief Soro Grekko was low and grim. “The Utopians rule all the world above—the world that we should justly share—that was denied us, after the Oblivion.”
The boy was following the tiny gay ships, in the crystal distance.
“What was the Oblivion, really. Father? You promised to tell me.”
“We have never understood,” the Chief told him. “There is no record of it, in all the old books—for the Oblivion stopped the writing of books. We know only what our spies have learned from the Utopians—and their ideas seem twisted and strange and filled with curious gaps.
“To them, in fact, it is almost a religion. They believe that something about the Old World was mysteriously evil. And—somehow in consequence of that evil—the Earth was destined to be destroyed by a strange Holocaust of fire.
“But there were four scientist-prophets in the Old World—so the Utopians believe, though the old books say nothing of them—who foresaw this Holocaust. And, to save the Earth from it, they caused the Oblivion.
“What that really was, we have never learned. But it caused men everywhere to forget the Old World. Only the Four remembered. They taught the Utopians, and led them out of the old cities, and gave them a new Law.
“The Law of the Four forbade any men to know the old knowledge, or enter the old places. The penalty was death. Our fathers were those who broke that Law. The Utopians could not come into the old places, to kill them. But they build the barriers to keep us here, and destroy many from their towers.
“The Utopians regard the Four almost as gods—though evidently they never claimed to be anything but human scientists. They were three men, and a beautiful woman. There was a legend that they were immortal, and would return at intervals to assure the Utopians of safety from that Holocaust they had threatened.
“NEARLY two hundred years have passed since they last were seen. But still the Utopians expect them, and prepare an elaborate festival in their honor, every thirty years. The Utopians are strange people.”
“They are very fortunate.” The boy filled his lungs with cool fresh air that was fragrant with the forest beneath, and lifted his face to the Sun. “With all the wonders of this world above, they should be very happy.”
“Perhaps they are, but I doubt it,” said the Chief. “Men seldom value what they have not strived for. Anyhow”—and his face set grimly—“it will not be theirs for long.”
“Why not?” The boy looked at him, wondering. “Is the Holocaust coming, really.”
“I know nothing of the Holocaust,” rang out the voice of Soro Grekko. But we are coming.”
The boy blinked. “We?”
“The Utopians have been our enemies, since the Oblivion,” his father told him urgently. “For a hundred years and more we have planned to burst the barriers they have set around us, and make ourselves a place in the Sun.
“Always they have been too strong for us. They outnumber us, a thousand to one. The Four taught them a science that is not in the old books, and they have built a great new science of their own.
“I had hoped to lead the attack. I now now that I cannot. But you will, my son, after you are Chief of the Under-men. The dark eyes of Soro Grekko shone fiercely. “You will crush the Utopians, and lead your people back into the light.”
“I, Father? But I am so young!”
“You will grow older,” his father told him. “For the task will take you many years. But, from this day onward, you are the conqueror of Utopia. You will live for nothing else. Look at those bright towers, beyond the barrier, and promise me that you will take them for the Under-men.”
The boy’s dark eyes stared for a long time at the far-off shining pylons. At last he turned, with a sober reflection of the Chief’s grimness upon his youthful features, and gripped the older man’s trembling hand.
“Father,” he whispered, “I promise I will take them.”
CHAPTER XV
The Eve of the Holocaust
A SENSE of pressing urgency came to Cartwright as he slept. The hour had come. Some vague insistent alarm was sounding in his brain. He struggled against strange shackles of sleep.
He tried to move, but a queer stiff numbness held his limbs. He tried to breathe. But his lungs were filled with something sweetish, choking. It took him a long time even to open his eyes. Finally, when the glued lids opened, he saw only an utter darkness.
A horrible dread seized him. This overwhelming darkness could be only the darkness of the tomb. It was the closeness of his coffin that made the air so bad. This frightful silence was the silence of the grave.
Had some hideous slip of circumstance buried him alive?
Dimly, through the mists that fogged his brain, he groped for recollection. There was something—if only he could remember—something that would explain—
Unconsciously, with a painful tension of effort, he found himself listening. He was straining desperately to hear something. To hear, he knew suddenly, the ticking of a clock.
The clock had stopped!
That fact, somehow, set off a little start of terror in him. Still, however, he couldn’t think why a clock should have been buried with him—or why it was terrible that the clock had stopped.
There was something about the Moon. Dimly, then, he remembered little Delorme’s rocket, falling in the rain-forest. For a moment he feared that he was still in the rocket, buried under some tropical swamp.
Then he remembered seeing Delorme’s body, with the ants at it. Remembered Captain Drumm—the Pioneer—the Oblivion—the fortress on the Moon. Then he was buried—under a crater on the Moon! And the clock that had stopped was the one that should have waked him in the year Two Thousand and Two.
He fought desperately, as his brain cleared, to move. To breathe. A terrible dry stiffness froze his body. His skin felt as if it were flaking off in scales. Agony filled his lungs. His limbs were dead.
But he made his fingers, dry and withered and lifeless as they were, find the stud on the wall at his head. Desperately, he pressed it. Light blinded his eyes. Fresh air carried away that sickening sweetness.
For a long time he lay still, content merely to breathe the good air. At last he opened his eyes again. He saw a long ragged crack, across the gray walls and ceiling of the cell. It must have been that crack, allowing the sleep-gas to escape, which caused his awakening.
He looked at his hands. They were drawn, yellowish, dessicated. He touched his face. It felt leathery, stiff, dead. A stiff mass of beard curled down over his throat.
How long, he asked himself desperately, had he slept? Fear was cold in him. Hardly an inch of beard, he recalled, had grown before in thirty years of sleep.
With a dogged effort, he sat up on the bunk. Bones ached dully from the movement. His muscles screamed at effort. His dry skin felt as if it were tearing in rotten strips. Every laboring rise and fall of his chest was agony.
HE stared at the clock-face on the massive door. Its hands indicated four minutes and thirteen seconds after midnight, March 18, 1998. But that meant nothing, for the clock had stopped.
He swayed to his feet. His dead fingers managed to open one of the sealed water bottles on the little table. He rinsed his mouth and gulped the reviving fluid and splashed his dry body with it.
Movement and water began to restore his body’s elasticity. He became aware of a gnawing faintness of hunger. Then that was forgotten in an impact of shuddering terror.
Something pretty violent, evidently, had happened to the fortress. What had it done to the others? To Worth and Pat and Captain Drumm? Would the doors and the elevator work? Or were they all buried alive or dead forever?
He stumbled frantically to the door, twisted a key, waited trembling for its motors to respond. The whirring seemed to falter—the door was jammed! No, it moved again! At last it came open, and he staggered out into the narrow corridor before the row of vaults.
Ugly cracks crossed walls and vaulted ceiling. The floor was covered with dust and fragments of shattered concrete. And all the clocks in the doors of the vaults were stopped at that same second, March 18, 1998.
Cartwright staggered along in front of the doors, breaking the little panes of glass and pulling the emergency levers that would start the mechanism to blow out the sleep-gas. He waited, swaying weakly, tense with apprehension.
Presently, one by one, the others came stumbling out to join him. Captain Drumm’s red hair had grown into a flaming mop, and his face was hidden by a fiery beard. Mart Worth’s pointed satanic beard was longer. Pat Wayland’s skin looked dry, but her blond beauty was not greatly changed.
In a voice curiously stiff and rusty, Cartwright told them how he had waked, and ended with the fearful question:
“How long have we been sleeping?”
“Several years, by the look of your beard,” observed Martin Worth. He blinked at the cracks and the debris. “A meteor must have struck the fortress, in 1998, so hard it stopped the clocks.”
“The sleep gas must have leaked out of your cell,” said Pat Wayland. “When the cylinders were empty, the pressure fell. That opened the air-valves, automatically. It must have taken a long time.”
“Let’s get out of here,” gasped Cartwright, “and find out how long.”
“If we can get out,” muttered Worth.
The elevator, however, operated without difficulty—only such delicate instruments as the clocks had been greatly injured. The section of the fortress upon the peak seemed scarcely damaged. Looking for evidences of the meteor, Cartwright could discover only one tiny new craterlet, near the foot of the mile-high peak.
“Well, Mr. Astronomer?” he called to Mart Worth. “How long would you say we’ve been sleeping?”
There was, curiously, no reply from Worth. Cartwright walked toward him, around the curving corridor that followed the wall of the fortress, and found him peering fixedly through one of the small northward ports.
CARTWRIGHT looked out, beside him. The first thing that caught his eye was the half-Earth, huge and brilliant against the stars.
“I wonder what has happened there?” he whispered. “Is our Utopia still—Utopia?” But not yet did Worth answer, and Cartwright felt a little tremor of alarm. “What do you see, Mart?” he demanded. “Can you tell how long—”
“There!” Worth’s yellow hand pointed. “Are you blind?”
And there, low in the north and below the Earth, Cartwright saw a vast unfamiliar cloud of darkness against the stars. It drowned Lyra and Cygnus and Cepheus, and fell beyond the ragged peaks of Arzachel. Dull green streaks and whorls shone ominously within it.
“Is that—” Cartwright’s voice failed him; he clutched Worth’s shoulder. “Is it—”
Worth’s yellow-skinned satanic head nodded faintly.
“It is the nebula. When we went to sleep, it was a faint telescopic object in Perseus. Now it is spread across eighty degrees of the sky. We have awakened on the very eve of the Holocaust.”
“When—” whispered Cartwright. “How long—”
Worth shook his head.
“It is approaching us at seventy miles a second. Within a few weeks we shall meet the outermost fringes.
Probably it will be two months before absorption cuts off the light of the Sun completely.”
“And,” gulped Cartwright, hoarsely, “then—”
“That final night,” said the little astronomer, “will last a month or two, before the light of the meteor-swarms brings the dawn of the last day.” He made an odd little jerk of his dark-bearded head. “I should say that life will be possible on the Earth for—at the outside—four months longer.”
“Then,” boomed the voice of Captain Drumm, behind them, “here is hoping the Utopians have got their plans all laid for the safety of the Earth!”
Worth shook his unkempt head.
“I doubt very much that they have,” he said. “I never knew just what exactly we hoped for them to do—I was never able to see what possible human agency would assure escape from the nebula. But, at this distance, the Earth looks quite unchanged. And it is already in the very maw of the Holocaust!”
“Anyhow,” Cartwright said, “we’ll soon be on Earth to see.”
“Not until we’ve eaten,” said Captain Drumm, “and soaked a little water into our dessicated bones.”
“And,” added Pat Wayland, “until you’ve done something about those awful beards!”
CHAPTER XVI
The Children of Utopia
AS the Pioneer lifted them at last above the grim walls of Arzachel and the Moon’s dead plains, the full dreadful extent of the nebula came into view. Standing rigid at the little ship’s controls, Cartwright scanned its vast green-shot ellipse with an apprehensive awe.
“It is somewhat disk-shaped,” said Martin Worth, “but tilted so that it appears flattened. About sixty billion miles in diameter. The Earth will strike it somewhat toward the galactic pole from the center.”
He tugged wearily at the point of his black beard.
“Call it a net of death,” he whispered, “and men the fishes. It is sweeping upon us, seventy miles a second. What can we possibly do about it?” He shook his head. “Galt hoped that, in two centuries, our Utopians would be able to turn the trick. But I never really believed—”
