Earth Unaware

by Mack Reynolds

  They weren’t long in enlightening him.

  Hopkins said, “Mr. Wonder, time is running out on us. We must have some action. It will be necessary to contact this Ezekiel Joshua Tubber.”

  “I think it’s a good idea. Go ahead. Maybe you can appeal to his patriotism, or something. No, come to think of it, patriotism is out. He thinks the country is being run by a bunch of idiots. He’s against the welfare state.”

  “Little Ed,” Hopkins said smoothly, “I am afraid that it is going to have to be you who sees Tubber. I can think of no one else to whom we can entrust the assignment.”

  “Oh, no you don’t. Listen, why not send a few of the F.B.I. boys? Or maybe the C.I.A. They’re used to trouble. I hate it.”

  Hopkins was at his most persuasive. “If Tubber is at the root of our troubles, sending police officers of any description could well prove disastrous. If he is not, then it could only make us look foolish. No, you are the one. He knows you, his daughter is evidently attracted to you.”

  “But you need me to handle my department, Project Tubber,” Ed said desperately.

  “Mr. De Kemp can handle matters until your return.”

  “I’m expendable, huh?” Ed said bitterly.

  “If you must put it in that manner, yes,” Hopkins told him.

  “Well, you’re just going to have to get another patsy. I’m afraid to get within miles of that old kook,” Ed Wonder told them definitely.

  They had given him a highly detailed map of the Catskill area in which was located Elysium. It wasn’t too far from the Ashokan reservoir, nor from the once artist colony of Woodstock.

  Ed passed through that town, on to Bearsville and beyond to a hamlet called Shady. From there a dirt side road led off some miles to the community of Elysium. There were a couple of signs along the way. Ed Wonder had never had the little Volkshover over a dirt road before. However, beyond churning up quite a screen of dust left behind, there seemed no special effect.

  He passed a small cottage, laid back from the road. Perhaps cabin would be the better term. There was an extensive garden of both flowers and vegetables around it. Ed Wonder drove on, passing another, somewhat similar abode, though not an exact duplicate. In the back of his mind he identified the places as summer houses; someone who wanted to get away from it all, get back to nature during the warm months. The idea didn’t exactly appeal to him, although, come to think of it, there were desirable aspects to this sort of…

  Then it came to him as another cottage appeared to the left.

  This was Elysium.

  There were little side roads going off in this direction and that. Obviously, to other habitations.

  His face twisted. People lived here all year around ? Stuck off here away from, well, from civilization?

  It came to him that there were neither TV nor radio antennas. Nor, for that matter, telephone wires. It came to him, as a shock, that there couldn’t under the circumstances be any community distribution center. These people must actually cook their own food.

  He let the Volkshover settle to the ground so that he could consider other aspects. Three of the cottages were in view now. And there wasn’t a hovercar in sight, aside from his own.

  “You’d go batty,” he muttered.

  There were some youngsters in a grove off a way, playing in the trees. They were scampering around the branches like a tribe of monkeys. Ed Wonder’s first response was to wonder why their parents were allowing them to risk their necks so obviously. Say what you wanted to against TV but at least it kept the kids off the streets and out of dangerous play. A kid could get himself in some risky situations if allowed to horse around as these were. Then something else came to him. Perhaps children should be exposed to a certain degree of danger in their play. Perhaps a broken arm or so, while going through the process of growing up, came under the head of education and had value in the way of experience.

  He was going to go over to the youngsters to ask directions, but then, in the distance, saw someone he recognized. He dropped the lift lever and at slow speed proceeded in her direction. It was one of Tubber’s followers. One of the women who had acted as receptionist at the tent entrance there in Kingsburg, the first night Ed and Helen had come afoul of Ezekiel Joshua Tubber.

  Ed pulled up aside her and said, “Ah… loved one…”

  She stopped and frowned, evidently surprised to see a hovercar on the streets—if they could be called streets—of Elysium. She obviously didn’t recognize him. She said hesitantly, “Good afternoon, loved one. Could I be of assistance?”

  Ed climbed out of the beetle and said, “You don’t remember me. I’ve attended a couple of the meetings of, ah, the Speaker of the Word.” He should have planned this out better. The fact of the matter was, he hadn’t a clue to what he was going to find here and was playing it by ear.

  He said, “I thought I’d come and see Elysium.”

  Her face lost stiffness. “You are a pilgrim?”

  “Well, maybe not exactly. I’d just like to know more about it.” He fell in beside her, leaving the car where it was. Parking was no problem in Elysium. “I’m not keeping you from anything, am I?”

  “Oh, no.” She continued to walk along. “I’m only delivering some of my things to the printer.”

  “Printer?”

  “That building there. It’s our print shop.”

  Ed Wonder looked at that building there, which they were approaching. It looked little different from the cottages. “You mean you print…”

  “Just about everything.” She didn’t look quite as grim as he’d remembered her at the tent meeting in Kingsburg. Come to think of it, Ed decided, he had expected her to look grim at the tent meeting. A dedicated Holy Roller, or something, all set to froth at the mouth against dancing, drink, card playing and similar sins.

  He said, even as they approached the door. “You mean books?” Ed Wonder’s conception of the printing of books involved acres of Rube Goldberg printing presses, entirely automated, with huge rolls of paper unwinding at flashing speed at one end and finished volumes flowing out, to be wrapped and boxed, again automatically, at the other. All at the rate of thousands per hour, if not per minute. This whole building couldn’t have been more than thirty by forty feet, at most.

  He followed her through the door.

  “Books, pamphlets, even a little weekly newspaper we send out to pilgrims throughout the nation who are not yet quite ready to join us in Elysium.” She greeted one of the two men who occupied the print shop. “Kelly, I’ve finally got the last two verses.”

  Kelly had been standing before what Ed vaguely recognized to be a primitive type of printing press. With his left leg he was stomping up and down on a treadle, somewhat similar to the powering of the early sewing machine. At the same time he was picking up sheets of paper with his right hand, inserting them deftly into the moving press, removing them just as deftly with his left hand, repeating the process over and over again.

  Kelly said, “Hi, Martha. Good. Norm can set them up.”

  Ed was watching in fascination. If the other got his hand caught between that type and…

  Kelly grinned at him. “Never saw a platen press before?”

  “Well, no,” Ed said.

  Martha said, “Kelly, this is a new pilgrim. He’s been to some of Josh’s meetings.”

  They exchanged banalities. For a time, Ed watched in complete astonishment. He realized he couldn’t have been more surprised if he had come into a room where women were carding wool and then utilizing spinning wheels to make thread. Had he known it, that was going to come later.

  While Martha and Kelly got into some technical discussion about the book they were evidently in the process of producing, Ed wandered over to where the room’s other occupant was working.

  This worthy looked up and grinned a welcome. “Name’s Haer, loved one,” he said. “Norm Haer.”

  “Ed,” Ed told him. “Ed Wonder. What in the devil are you doing?”

 
; Haer grinned again. “Setting body type. This is a California type box. Ten point, Goudy Old Style.”

  “I thought you set type on a machine that looks something like a typewriter.”

  Haer laughed. “That was the old fashioned way. Here in Elysium we set it by hand.” His hand darted, flicked out, flicked back again. The lines of type in his hand-held tray were slowly growing.

  Ed said, a faint exasperation in his voice: “Look, what’s the point? Ben Franklin used to print like this but since then we’ve dreamed up a few improvements.”

  The typesetter’s fingers never stopped their flying. He was evidently the sort who remained in almost perpetual good humor. At least, thus far, his face had never lost its smile.

  “There’s several angles,” he told Ed. “One, there’s a lot of satisfaction in turning out a finished product with your own hands. Preferably a superior product. Something went out of the production of commodities when a shoemaker no longer makes footwear starting out with leather and winding up with a finished pair of shoes, but instead stands before a gigantic machine, which he doesn’t understand, watching a few gauges and periodically throwing a switch, or pushing a button, for four or five hours a day.”

  Ed said, “Oh, great, but that first shoemaker of yours turned out maybe one pair of shoes a day, and the second one ten or twenty thousand.”

  The printer grinned. “That’s right. But the second one has ulcers, hates his wife and is an incipient alcoholic.”

  Ed Wonder said suddenly, “What did you use to do before you got this job setting type for Tubber? You don’t sound like some uneducated, small time…” He let the sentence dribble away. It didn’t sound very diplomatic.

  Norm Haer was laughing. “I’m not setting type for Tubber, but for Elysium. I used to be managing director of World-Wide Printing Corporation. We had offices in Ultra-New York, Neuve Los Angeles, London, Paris and Peking.”

  Ed had experienced the ruggedness of trying to climb the pyramid in the Welfare State. When only a third of the nation’s potential working force was needed in production, the competition could get fierce. He said, in compassion. “Got all the way to the top but then they bounced you, eh?”

  “Not exactly,” Haer grinned. “I was too big a stockholder for that. I happened to read one of Josh Tubber’s pamphlets one day. So the next day I got hold of everything of his I could locate. And the next week I told World-Wide what they could do with their job and came here to Elysium to help set up this shop.”

  The man was obviously halfway around the corner, good humor or not. Ed left that line of thought. “What are you working on now?” he said.

  “A limited edition of Martha Kent’s latest verse.”

  “Martha Kent?” Ed Wonder knew the name. Poetry wasn’t his forte but American Nobel Prize winners weren’t so common that you didn’t hear of them. “You mean she’s given you permission to bring out a book of hers!”

  “That’s not the way I’d put it,” Haer grinned. “It’s more a matter of Martha bringing it out herself.”

  “Martha!” Ed blurted. His eyes went accusingly over to where the woman with whom he had entered the shop was talking with Kelly as he ran his foot-operated platen press. “You mean that’s Martha Kent?”

  “As ever was,” Haer chuckled.

  Ed Wonder muttered some sort of goodbye and rejoined the other two. He said, in accusation, “You’re Martha Kent.”

  “That’s right, loved one,” she smiled.

  “Look,” Ed demanded. “I don’t want to appear dense, but why’re you bringing out a book of your latest poems through a little one horse outfit like this?”

  “Never let Josh Tubber know I said this,” she said, and there was a quick elfin quality in her face, “but to make money.”

  “Make money!” Ed said in disgust.

  Kelly ran out of paper, stopped peddling, wiped his hands on his apron and walked to a nearby pile of books. He took one up and returned with it to the newcomer. He handed it to Ed without speaking.

  Ed turned it over in his hands. It was bound in leather. Somehow it was different. He opened it and fingered through the pages. The paper was heavy and had sort of an antique finish. He had never heard of the author. He had a strange feeling that he was handling a work of art.

  The other two watched him, a disconcerting amusement in their air.

  To say something, Ed said, “I’ve never seen paper like this, where did you get it?”

  “We made it,” Kelly said.

  Ed closed his eyes for a moment. He opened them and said, “What do you need money for? You evidently make everything.” He pointed a finger accusingly at Martha Kent’s dress. “That’s homespun, isn’t it?”

  “Yes. But obviously we can’t do completely without money, even in Elysium. For instance, we need postage to mail our publications. Sometimes we need medicines. We have to buy salt. Oh, you’d be surprised.”

  “Look,” Ed said plaintively. “You, Martha Kent, write a book that’s potentially a bestseller. You bring it in here and put out a limited edition by setting it by hand, printing it yourself by footpower on paper you made yourself. So how many copies do you print. A thousand?”

  “Two hundred,” Martha said.

  “So you sell them for how much apiece? A hundred dollars?”

  “Two dollars,” Martha said.

  Ed closed his eyes again, this time in pure anguish. He said, “Two dollars for a book like this? I’m no biblomaniac, but a first edition, limited edition, hand produced Martha Kent would be all but priceless. But aside from that, if you simply put the manuscript in the hands of any major publisher, you’d realize a small fortune.”

  Kelly said reasonably, “You don’t understand. We don’t need a small fortune. It’s just that right at the present Elysium could use about four hundred dollars, for medicine and…”

  Martha interrupted hurriedly to say, “But don’t let Josh Tubber know our motivation. Josh isn’t always very practical. He’d be indignant if he knew we were so crass as to publish this work for the sake of raising money.”

  Ed had given up. He said bitterly, “What would he do with them? Give them away?”

  Martha and Kelly said in unison, and as though nothing were more reasonable, “Yes.”

  Ed said, “I’m going outside to get some air.”

  He walked back in the direction of the Volkshover, refusing to allow himself to start tearing his hair.

  All right, darn it, give them every benefit of the doubt. This little community set in the hills and woods of the Catskills had its virtues. Good clean air. Tremendous scenery—there in the background was Overlook Mountain. Good place to raise children, possibly. Although, the devil knows where they’d get their schooling. He pulled himself up on that one. If Tubber held an academecian’s degree and Martha Kent was one of his followers, then Ed suspected there were others capable of teaching school, in some sort of little red schoolhouse tradition.

  All right. So it had its qualities, although it might be another thing in the winter. His eyes went around to two or three of the cottages. They all had chimneys. Holy smokes, these people actually burned wood. Logs, evidently, that they cut themselves. Not even oil heat in the winter! How stoneage could you get?

  Come to think of it, though, it was probably beautiful here in the winter. Especially when the snow was newly fallen. Ed Wonder had a custom, when there’d been a heavy new snowfall, of driving out from Kingsburg into the country, just to look at the snow in the early morning, on the tree limbs, on the fields—before man and sun destroyed it. Of course, he never left the main roads. This would be different. It occurred to him that a really heavy snowfall would snow them in here, so that they couldn’t get down to even Woodstock for supplies.

  He drew himself up again. They didn’t have to get down to Woodstock, or anywhere else, for supplies. They grew their own supplies, evidently.

  But how about medical care, in case one of them fell ill while they were snowed in? He didn’t
know, possibly some of them had medical training. They seemed to have everything else.

  All right, given all their qualities. They were still as kooky as a bunch of Alice in Wonderland hatters. Getting themselves off here, living like a bunch of pioneers. No TV, no radio. He wondered how often the kids had been allowed to go into town to the movies. And then decided probably never. Perhaps he didn’t know Ezekiel Joshua Tubber too well, but it was obvious that the prophet didn’t exactly hold with modern films, with their endless violence, crime and what Tubber probably thought were perverted values.

  What in the devil did they do with themselves?

  And that kooky conversation he’d just had with Martha Kent, Kelly the printer, and Haer the typesetter. There must have been months put into that book of hers. What was to be the product of all that work? Four hundred dollars. How did they arrive at that sum? They’d needed that exact amount for something of which the colony was in want. Oh, great. What was wrong with eight hundred dollars, giving them a reserve of half for future colony needs? Hadn’t that even occurred to anyone? Hadn’t Professor McCord told Ed that Tubber had a degree in economics? What did they teach in the Harvard School of Economics these days?

  He restrained himself again on the tearing of hair bit.

  At that point, he spotted somebody else he knew, disappearing into one of the cottages. It was Nefertiti Tubber.

  He called to her, but evidently wasn’t heard.

  Ed Wonder took a deep breath, straightened his spine, ran his index finger around the inside of his collar and performed one of the bravest acts of his life. He marched up to the cottage and knocked on the door.

  Her voice called, “Come in, loved one.”

  He opened the door and stood there a moment. From time to time, in his reading he had come upon the term quaking. Characters would quake. He had never got quite a clear picture of what quaking amounted to. Now he knew. Ed Wonder was quaking.

  However, unless the Speaker of the Word was off in one of the two smaller rooms which the cottage seemed to boast, besides the larger one which opened off the road, Nefertiti was alone. There was nothing in Nefertiti Tubber to quake about. Ed stopped quaking.