They continued to work, one a type of man who had lived a hundred thousand years or more before Christ, the other the refined end of human evolution, a product of the highest civilization (technologically speaking) of Earth, and, indeed, one of the last men on Earth—if he was to be believed.
Suddenly, Frigate howled, jumped up, and hopped around holding his left thumb. One of his strokes had missed its target. Kazz grinned, exposing huge teeth like tombstones. He got up, too, and walked into the grass with his curious rolling gait. He returned a few minutes later with six bamboo sticks with sharpened ends and several with straight ends. He sat down and worked on one stick until he had split the end and inserted the triangular chipped-down point of an axe head into the split end. This he bound with some long grasses.
Within half an hour, the group was armed with hand axes, axes with bamboo hafts, daggers, and spears with wooden points and with stone tips.
By then Frigate’s hand had quit hurting so much and the bleeding had stopped. Burton asked him how he happened to be so proficient in stone-working.
“I was an amateur anthropologist,” he said. “A lot of people—a lot relatively speaking—learned how to make tools and weapons from stone as a hobby. Some of us got pretty good at it, though I don’t think any modern ever got as skillful and as swift as a Neolithic specialist. Those guys did it all their lives, you know.
“Also, I just happen to know a lot about working bamboo, too, so I can be of some value to you.”
They began walking back to the river. They paused a moment on top of a tall hill. The sun was almost directly overhead. They could see for many miles along the river and also across the river. Although they were too far away to make out any figures on the other side of the mile-wide stream, they could see the mushroom-shaped structures there. The terrain on the other side was the same as that on theirs. A mile-wide plain, perhaps two and a half miles of foothills covered with trees. Beyond, the straight-up face of an insurmountable black and bluish-green mountain.
North and south, the valley ran straight for about ten miles. Then it curved, and the river was lost to sight.
“Sunrise must come late and sunset early,” Burton said. “Well, we must make the most of the bright hours.”
At that moment, everybody jumped and many cried out. A blue flame arose from the top of each stone structure, soared up at least twenty feet, then disappeared. A few seconds later, a sound of distant thunder passed them. The boom struck the mountain behind them and echoed.
Burton scooped up the little girl in his arms and began to trot down the hill. Though they maintained a good pace, they were forced to walk from time to time to regain their breaths. Nevertheless, Burton felt wonderful. It had been so many years since he could use his muscles so profligately that he did not want to stop enjoying the sensation. He could scarcely believe that, only a short time ago, his right foot had been swollen with gout, and his heart had beaten wildly if he climbed a few steps.
They came to the plain and continued trotting, for they could see that there was much excitement around one of the structures. Burton swore at those in his way and pushed them aside. He got black looks but no one tried to push back. Abruptly, he was in the space cleared around the base. And he saw what had attracted them. He also smelled it.
Frigate, behind him, said, “Oh, my God!” and tried to retch on his empty stomach.
Burton had seen too much in his lifetime to be easily affected by grisly sights. Moreover, he could take himself to one remove from reality when things became too grim or too painful. Sometimes he made the move, the sidestepping of things-as-they-were, with an effort of will. Usually, it occurred automatically. In this case, the displacement was done automatically.
The corpse lay on its side and half under the edge of the mushroom top. Its skin was completely burned off, and the naked muscles were charred. The nose and ears, fingers, toes, and the genitals had been burned away or were only shapeless stubs.
Near it, on her knees, was a woman mumbling a prayer in Italian. She had huge black eyes which would have been beautiful if they had not been reddened and puffy with tears. She had a magnificent figure which would have caught all his attention under different circumstances.
“What happened?” he said.
The woman stopped praying and looked at him. She got to her feet and whispered, “Father Giuseppe was leaning against the rock; he said he was hungry. He said he didn’t see much sense in being brought back to life only to starve to death. I said that we wouldn’t die, how could we? We’d been raised from the dead, and we’d be provided for. He said maybe we were in hell. We’d go hungry and naked forever. I told him not to blaspheme, of all people he should be the last to blaspheme. But he said that this was not what he’d been telling everybody for forty years would happen and then…and then….”
Burton waited a few seconds, and then said, “And then?”
“Father Giuseppe said that at least there wasn’t any hellfire, but that that would be better than starving for eternity. And then the flames reached out and wrapped him inside them, and there was a noise like a bomb exploding, and then he was dead, burned to death. It was horrible, horrible.”
Burton moved north of the corpse to get the wind behind him, but even here the stench was sickening. It was not the odor as much as the idea of death that upset him. The first day of the Resurrection was only half over and a man was dead. Did this mean that the resurrected were just as vulnerable to death as in Earthlife? If so, what sense was there to it?
Frigate had quit trying to heave on an empty stomach. Pale and shaking, he got to his feet and approached Burton. He kept his back turned to the dead man.
“Hadn’t we better get rid of that?” he said, jerking his thumb over his shoulder.
“I suppose so,” Burton said coolly. “It’s too bad his skin is ruined, though.”
He grinned at the American. Frigate looked even more shocked.
“Here,” Burton said. “Grab hold of his feet, I’ll take the other end. We’ll toss him into the river.”
“The river?” Frigate said.
“Yaas. Unless you want to carry him into the hills and chop out a hole for him there.”
“I can’t,” Frigate said, and walked away. Burton looked disgustedly after him and then signaled to the subhuman. Kazz grunted and shuffled forward to the body with that peculiar walking-on-the-side-of-his-feet gait. He stooped over and, before Burton could get hold of the blackened stumps of the feet, Kazz had lifted the body above his head, walked a few steps to the edge of the river, and tossed the corpse into the water. It sank immediately and was moved by the current along the shore. Kazz decided that this was not good enough. He waded out after it up to his waist and stooped down, submerging himself for a minute. Evidently he was shoving the body out into the deeper part.
Alice Hargreaves had watched with horror. Now she said, “But that’s the water we’ll be drinking!”
“The river looks big enough to purify itself,” Burton said. “At any rate, we have more things to worry about than proper sanitation procedures.”
Burton turned when Monat touched his shoulder and said, “Look at that!” The water was boiling about where the body should be. Abruptly, a silvery white-finned back broke the surface.
“It looks as if your worry about the water being contaminated is in vain,” Burton said to Alice Hargreaves. “The river has scavengers. I wonder…I wonder if it’s safe to swim.”
At least, the subhuman had gotten out without being attacked. He was standing before Burton, brushing the water off his hairless body, and grinning with those huge teeth. He was frighteningly ugly. But he had the knowledge of a primitive man, knowledge which had already been handy in a world of primitive conditions. And he would be a damned good man to have at your back in a fight. Short though he was, he was immensely powerful. Those heavy bones afforded a broad base for heavy muscles. It was evident that he had, for some reason, become attached to Burton. Burton liked to thin
k the savage, with a savage’s instincts, “knew” that Burton was the man to follow if he would survive. Moreover, a subhuman or prehuman, being closer to the animals, would also be more psychic. So he would detect Burton’s own well-developed psychic powers and would feel an affinity to Burton, even though he was Homo sapiens.
Then Burton reminded himself that his reputation for psychism had been built up by himself and that he was half-charlatan. He had talked about his powers so much, and had listened to his wife so much, that he had come to believe in them himself. But there were moments when he remembered that his “powers” were at least half-fake.
Nevertheless, he was a capable hypnotist, and he did believe that his eyes radiated a peculiar extrasensory power, when he wished them to do so. It may have been this that attracted the half-man.
“The rock discharged a tremendous energy,” Lev Ruach said. “It must have been electrical. But why? I can’t believe that the discharge was purposeless.”
Burton looked across the mushroom shape of the rock. The gray cylinder in the center depression seemed to be undamaged by the discharge. He touched the stone. It was no warmer than might have been expected from its exposure to the sun.
Lev Ruach said, “Don’t touch it! There might be another….” and he stopped when he saw his warning was too late.
“Another discharge?” Burton said. “I don’t think so. Not for some time yet, anyway. That cylinder was left here so we could learn something from it.”
He put his hands on the top of the mushroom structure and jumped forward. He came up and onto the top with an ease that gladdened him. It had been so many years since he had felt so young and so powerful. Or so hungry.
A few in the crowd cried out to him to get down off the rock before the blue flames came again. Others looked as if they hoped that another discharge would occur. The majority were content to let him take the risks.
Nothing happened, although he had not been too sure he would not be incinerated. The stone felt only pleasantly warm on his bare feet.
He walked over the depressions to the cylinder and put his fingers under the rim of the cover. It rose easily. His heart beating with excitement, he looked inside it. He had expected the miracle, and there it was. The racks within held six containers, each of which was full.
He signaled to his group to come up. Kazz vaulted up easily. Frigate, who had recovered from his sickness, got onto the top with an athlete’s ease. If the fellow did not have such a queasy stomach, he might be an asset, Burton thought. Frigate turned and pulled up Alice, who came over the edge at the ends of his hands.
When they crowded around him, their heads bent over the interior of the cylinder, Burton said, “It’s a veritable grail! Look! Steak, a thick juicy steak! Bread and butter! Jam! Salad! And what’s that? A package of cigarettes? Yaas! And a cigar! And a cup of bourbon, very good stuff by its odor! Something…what is it?”
“Looks like sticks of gum,” Frigate said. “Unwrapped. And that must be a…what? A lighter for the smokes?”
“Food!” a man shouted. He was a large man, not a member of what Burton thought of as “his group.” He had followed them, and others were scrambling up on the rock. Burton reached down past the containers into the cylinder and gripped the small silvery rectangular object on the bottom. Frigate had said this might be a lighter. Burton did not know what a “lighter” was, but he suspected that it provided flame for the cigarettes. He kept the object in the palm of his hand and with the other he closed the lid. His mouth was watering, and his belly was rumbling. The others were just as eager as he; their expressions showed that they could not understand why he was not removing the food.
The large man said, in a loud blustery Triestan Italian, “I’m hungry, and I’ll kill anybody who tries to stop me! Open that!”
The others said nothing, but it was evident that they expected Burton to take the lead in the defense. Instead, he said, “Open it yourself,” and turned away. The others hesitated. They had seen and smelled the food. Kazz was drooling. But Burton said, “Look at that mob. There’ll be a fight here in a minute. I say, let them fight over their morsels. Not that I’m avoiding a battle, you understand,” he added, looking fiercely at them. “But I’m certain that we’ll all have our own cylinders full of food by supper time. These cylinders, call them grails, if you please, just need to be left on the rock to be filled. That is obvious, that’s why this grail was placed here.”
He walked to the edge of the stone near the water and got off. By then the top was jammed with people and more were trying to get on. The large man had seized a steak and bitten into it, but someone had tried to snatch it away from him. He yelled with fury and, suddenly, rammed through those between him and the river. He went over the edge and into the water, emerging a moment later. In the meantime, men and women were screaming and striking each other over the rest of the food and goods in the cylinder.
The man who had jumped into the river floated off on his back while he ate the rest of the steak. Burton watched him closely, half-expecting him to be seized by fish. But he drifted on down the stream, undisturbed.
The rocks to the north and south, on both sides of the river, were crowded with struggling humans.
Burton walked until he was free of the crowd and sat down. His group squatted by him or stood up and watched the writhing and noisy mass. The grailstone looked like a toadstool engulfed in pale maggots. Very noisy maggots. Some of them were now also red, because blood had been spilled.
The most depressing aspect of the scene was the reaction of the children. The young ones had stayed back from the rock, but they knew that there was food in the grail. They were crying from hunger and from terror caused by the screaming and fighting of the adults on the stone. The little girl with Burton was dry-eyed, but she was shaking. She stood by Burton and put her arms around his neck. He patted her on the back and murmured encouraging words which she could not understand but the tone of which helped to quiet her.
The sun was on its descent. Within about two hours it would be hidden by the towering western mountain, though a genuine dusk presumably would not happen for many hours. There was no way to determine how long the day was here. The temperature had gone up, but sitting in the sun was not by any means unbearable, and the steady breeze helped cool them off.
Kazz made signs indicating that he would like a fire and also pointed at the tip of a bamboo spear. No doubt he wanted to fire-harden the tip.
Burton had inspected the metal object taken from the grail. It was of a hard silvery metal, rectangular, flat, about two inches long and three-tenths across. It had a small hole in one end and a slide on the other. Burton put his thumbnail against the projection at the end of the slide and pushed. The slide moved downward about two-sixteenths of an inch, and a wire about one-tenth of an inch in diameter and a half-inch long slid out of the hole in the end. Even in the bright sunlight, it glowed whitely. He touched the tip of the wire to a blade of grass; the blade shriveled up at once. Applied to the tip of the bamboo spear, it burned a tiny hole. Burton pushed the slide back into its original position, and the wire withdrew, like the hot head of a brazen turtle, into the silvery shell.
Both Frigate and Ruach wondered aloud at the power contained in the tiny pack. To make the wire that hot required much voltage. How many charges would the battery or the radioactive pile that must be in it give? How could the lighter’s power pack be renewed?
There were many questions that could not be immediately answered or, perhaps, never. The greatest was how they could have been brought back to life in rejuvenated bodies. Whoever had done it possessed a science that was godlike. But speculation about it, though it would give them something to talk about, would solve nothing.
After a while, the crowd dispersed. The cylinder was left on its side on top of the grailstone. Several bodies were sprawled there, and a number of men and women who got off the rock were hurt. Burton went through the crowd. One woman’s face had been clawed, especially arou
nd her right eye. She was sobbing with no one to pay attention to her. Another man was sitting on the ground and holding his groin, which had been raked with sharp fingernails.
Of the four lying on top of the stone, three were unconscious. These recovered with water dashed into their faces from the grail. The fourth, a short slender man, was dead. Someone had twisted his head until his neck had broken.
Burton looked up at the sun again and said, “I don’t know exactly when supper time will occur. I suggest we return not too long after the sun goes down behind the mountain. We will set our grails, or glory buckets, or lunch pails, or whatever you wish to call them, in these depressions. And then we’ll wait. In the meantime….”
He could have tossed this body into the river, too, but he had now thought of a use, perhaps uses, for it. He told the others what he wanted, and they got the corpse down off the stone and started to carry it across the plain. Frigate and Galeazzi, a former importer of Trieste, took the first turn. Frigate had evidently not cared for the job, but when Burton asked him if he would, he nodded. He picked up the man’s feet and led with Galeazzi holding the dead man under the armpits. Alice walked behind Burton with the child’s hand in hers. Some in the crowd looked curiously or called out comments or questions, but Burton ignored them. After half a mile, Kazz and Monat took over the corpse. The child did not seem to be disturbed by the dead man. She had been curious about the first corpse, instead of being horrified by its burned appearance.
“If she really is an ancient Gaul,” Frigate said, “she may be used to seeing charred bodies. If I remember correctly, the Gauls burned sacrifices alive in big wicker baskets at religious ceremonies. I don’t remember what god or goddess the ceremonies were in honor of. I wish I had a library to refer to. Do you think we’ll ever have one here? I think I would go nuts if I didn’t have books to read.”
To Your Scattered Bodies Go/The Fabulous Riverboat Page 4
