FOR a minute no one spoke. The story, Omega’s feats, in fact everything which had happened since Mark’s appearance on Nona’s horizon, seemed like a fantastic dream or a fairy tale. Things really didn’t happen that way. The last real thing which had happened to her had been the reception she had been given by the savage tribes-people. She remembered that with a shudder.
But more disconcerting than any of the other weird happenings was the man, Mark.
There were no men like him in her experience. He was like the heroes in the ancient stories. She remembered, with a delighted shiver, the way he had grinned when Omega introduced them.
The men in the city didn’t grin. There was nothing to grin about. Even in their leisure moments, the men she knew thought of nothing but of how to do their work more efficiently, in order to please the overseers. That, of course, was the fault of the eugenics system. Subservience was bred into her people. It was not their fault. But it didn’t alter the fact that they were very dull company.
“Then I suppose,” Mark commented with labored irony, “that when you have tired of watching the amusing, but far from intellectual, pursuits of lesser people, you indulge yourself in communion with these great brains?”
“Far from it,” denied Omega. “Neither is a character I should dare to cultivate. When they were mere men, they were ambitious and ruthless. And they remain the same. Both are greedy for knowledge, which is commendable in itself, but they have no decency in acquiring it.
“Several times they destroyed capable leaders of different communities just to see how well the people could make out without them. Malicious curiosity, and nothing more. Later they amused themselves by pitting one community against another in conflict. Actually enjoying the resultant suffering.
“No, my friend, I don’t desire any communion with such as they. On other planets, in other galaxies, there are minds whom I admire and with whom I sometimes communicate. But these two earthborn monsters don’t even know I exist. Lately they have left the people of this planet to their own devices, to acquire knowledge of other worlds. And everywhere they go their infernal experiments wreak havoc.”
“But haven’t you done anything about it?” inquired Mark. “Surely with your vast power, you could destroy them. They certainly deserve it.”
Omega shook his head sadly. “I’ll grant you they are still too young to cope with me individually, but combined I’m afraid they would be too much for me. I’ve never dared to take the chance. As it is, by keeping them in ignorance of my existence, I have frequently circumvented them when their insatiable appetite for creating trouble has threatened to ruin some promising civilization.” Omega’s mockery and irresponsibility had vanished; his tone had become that of a beset father, trying to protect his children.
“Well, something should be done,” Mark insisted. “Suppose they come back and decide to give the Earth another going over? They do come back, don’t they?”
“If you mean do they return periodically and inhabit their brains, as I used to do, the answer is yes, they do. It’s a matter of psychology, I suppose. I know I should never have gotten the idea of destroying my brain if you hadn’t suggested it. And naturally they have never thought of it either, and probably never will. So of course they will come back, just when, there is no way of knowing. Possibly not for centuries. It’s nothing for you to worry about.”
“No,” Mark admitted, glancing at Nona. “I suppose not. It just occurred to me that as long as those two are in existence nobody could ever be sure of a quiet, decent life.”
“What’s the difference?” countered Omega, with a glance toward Nona. “You can’t expect to live quietly and decently anyhow. Someone always pops up to gum the works.” He beamed. “I remembered that phrase,” he said proudly.
Mark didn’t seem to hear him.
“Well, be that as it may,” he said, “the idea enters my mind that it will be dark soon and we are totally unprepared to spend the night in these woods. We’d better rig up some sort of shelter. Unless of course, you’d like to transform yourself into a six-room bungalow.”
Omega cocked a weather eye toward the sky which was already becoming slightly gray with approaching twilight. “It won’t rain,” he stated. “And it won’t be cold. You don’t need a shelter. I would advise that you travel in a general southerly direction. There is still an hour or more of light and the further away from our late friends the better.”
“You speak as if you were leaving us.”
“Don’t feel too sad. I’ll be back again when you least expect me.”
Mark laughed. “I’ll just bet you will.”
“So long, Mark.” The sly smile on the withered face died out and the eyelids dropped. Mark hesitated for a moment, then placed one finger on the bony chest and gave a light push. The stooped figure teetered and then fell with a thud. Nona stepped forward, alarmed, but he reassured her.
“He’s just absent-minded. Forgot his body.”
Chapter 7: Nocturne for Tomorrow
THE going was a bit rough in the new direction, but that fact didn’t bother Mark in the least. Helping Nona over obstructions was just as pleasant a way of putting in his time as he could wish for. Her grateful smiles of thanks were ample payment for the scratches he got separating thorny undergrowth for her.
“Have you any idea at all where we are going?” he inquired.
Nona hesitated before answering. “I’m not sure, but I think the nearest place in this direction is New Haven. It is not directly south, but more to the west. We must not go there, though.”
“Why not?”
“Because the city is friendly with mine and would keep me prisoner until they could return me to the council.”
“We don’t want that,” Mark declared. “You said this city was New Haven. Then we should be somewhere south of Hartford. Was that the city in which your ancestors settled?” He remembered New Haven on crisp fall afternoons. Feathered hats. Chrysanthemums. Programs for a quarter.
“Yes,” she replied. “New Haven is our closest neighbor and we often send caravans to exchange goods. But I’ve never been there. Women are not allowed to travel. Only armed men make up the caravans.”
The sky was growing darker and the little light which penetrated through the trees was scarcely sufficient to enable them to pick their way through the dense forest. Mark spotted a clear space, devoid of vegetation, beneath a giant evergreen. This, he decided, would make an ideal place to spend the night.
“It just occurred to me that it has been quite a time since I’ve done any tramping through a New England woods. So far today I’ve seen no dangerous wild life, except for those unpleasant cannibals. But of course that doesn’t prove anything. How about it?”
Nona’s eyes widened, he frowned. “Oh gracious, I thought you knew! There are wildcats — thousands of them! Nobody ever goes near the forest after nightfall. Even the armed caravans will travel miles out of their way to get away from them. But you can kill them, can’t you? You’re so wonderful. They won’t come near us when you use your magic, will they?”
“Magic?”
“Yes, the magic that you used against the savages. You pointed your finger and they fell dead. Even Omega wasn’t that smart. He had to use a club.”
Mark winced realizing that the girl thought him some kind of wizard with all sorts of weird powers. He was flattered, of course, but sporadic caution caused him to try to get things on a reasonable plane. “That wasn’t magic. All it was was this needle gun. It’s so small you thought it was my finger. It shoots needles, tipped with poison that stuns the victim for several hours. Simple, see?
“But I’m afraid it might not work against wildcats. Maybe the needles couldn’t penetrate their fur. Maybe I’d better build a fire.”
AS HE talked, he had been fumbling in his pockets, although he knew that he would find no matches. That was one thing the old doctor had not thought of. Or maybe he had. There might have been a means of making fire in one of the
cabinets, an old-fashioned tinder box or some such contrivance, for ordinary matches would have crumbled to dust with the years. He hadn’t searched as carefully as he might have. His fingers encountered a spare clip to fit the automatic he had lost. A sudden train of thought snapped him into action. Tinder box — gunpowder...
An eerie scream rose in the still air, sending a shiver down his backbone, and confirming Nona’s story. Removing a cartridge from the clip, he used the point of a clasp-knife to pry the bullet loose. Then he carefully selected some dried leaves, crumpled them, and mixed in the powder from the brass cartridge. Some small, dried twigs completed the tinder. Then in the fast fading light he managed to find a hard rock, about the size of his hand.
“Hold your breath,” he requested, and struck the blunt end of the steel axe a sharp blow. Nothing happened. “I should have joined the Boy Scouts,” he mourned, striking another futile blow. The third, however, produced a shower of sparks, although none of them landed on the tinder. On about the tenth try the tinder flared with a sudden greenish flame and continued burning merrily while Mark piled on heavier twigs until he had a sizable blaze. He was surprised, naturally, but took care not to show it.
“That should do the trick,” he said, satisfied. “We’d better fix up a place to sleep before it gets too dark. We can make a couple of soft mattresses if we collect enough of these leaves.”
“I’ll do that,” Nona answered. “You hack off some branches with the axe and I’ll strip off the leaves. Then we can use the wood for the fire.”
“Clever girl. Except that the wood, being green, would make more smoke than flame.”
“I’m still clever,” she retorted. “The smoke will discourage the mosquitoes. And there is enough dry wood within reach to keep the fire blazing.”
“Oh-oh. Mosquitoes! I’d forgotten them. It’s six thousand years since I’ve been bitten by one of the pesky critters.”
With both of them working energetically it took very little time to collect enough dry wood, leaves and green wood. Fortunately there was but the lightest of breezes and the leaves were in no danger of blowing away. Nona busied herself with arranging them to form a thick matting while Mark chopped the wood into convenient lengths.
Finishing his task he surveyed the result of Nona’s efforts with a quizzical eye. She had undoubtedly fashioned a comfortable bed. Not two beds — one bed. The leaves were spread out over a wide area, to a depth of about four inches.
Mark saw immediately that certain implications were staring him right in the eye, but for the life of him he couldn’t come to any definite conclusion regarding them. Of course he realized that customs were bound to be changed.
But Nona had seemed to be such a nice girl... He was just about to blurt out a leading question when he saw that she was standing beside her handiwork, smiling brightly, evidently expecting some sort of praise.
“Nice job,” he said lamely, and turned to sit down near the fire. Look here, he addressed himself sternly, if I’m just going to sit around burdened with a flock of Twentieth Century ethics — but it was no good. He was, heaven help him, unsuspectedly puritanical.
Nona stood looking at Mark’s back for a long minute before making up her mind what to do. Then she went over and sat beside him, following his gaze into the fire. The dancing flames seemed to conjure up a picture of a rugged young face just breaking into a smile. Startled, she stole a glance at its living counterpart, wondering if this were more magic or if her own thoughts of him caused her to see the image. But Mark was still staring gloomily into the fire.
“Dearest Mark,” she whispered and ran her fingers through his hair. Mark jerked away. Had the creature no shame?
She hesitantly placed her hand on his arm. “Did I... Is there anything wrong?” she asked timidly.
Mark smiled. He put a finger under her chin, tilted her head back, and looked searchingly into her eyes. “No,” he declared. “Nothing. Not after the way you said that.”
Nona smiled. “I’m glad. When you were sad, I was sad,” she said, naively. “But something was wrong. Will you tell me?”
MARK turned again to stare at the fire before venturing to speak. There it was again. If one were to accept the girl’s actions and words at their face value and judge them according to standards dead these thousands of years, one might reach a wrong conclusion. Mark’s sense of values needed a hasty reconditioning — but he couldn’t seem to get on with it.
With all the things that had happened since he had met her it seemed that he had known her for years. And then there were times that he didn’t know her at all.
“I’ll tell you some other time,” he promised, tossing a dry stick in the fire. He licked his lips and sought a reasonably safe topic of conversation. “Now suppose you tell me something of how people live in your city.”
Nona shuddered. “They don’t. They just exist. I don’t mean there is any hardship,” she explained. “It’s just that life in the city is so monotonous. The people have no initiative. Even their pleasures are directed. And although the hours of work are not long, it always seems that there is no time to do things you want to do. There is always some meeting that you must attend, where stuffy people discuss ways to co-operate more efficiently so that more work may be accomplished in a shorter time. The reason given for this endless quest for efficiency, is to get more time for leisure. But there’s not much sense to that if the people are allowed no leisure anyway.
“The Recreation Council insists that you relax according to directions. There are games, contests and all sorts of ways you may spend your own time. But you must decide just what you wish to do on any certain day, and then sign up for it. You can’t change your mind at the last minute and do something else. You must appear at the designated recreation place and answer to your name and number. Otherwise you will be punished with extra work hours. I was punished often.
“There was only one recreation that I liked. We were given permission to read the reproductions of any of the ancient books we liked, and that is how I spent most of my time. You would think that when people read of the freedom enjoyed by their ancestors they would have been discontented with their lot. That was the effect it had on me. But just the opposite was true of the rest. They seldom read of the ancients, because it made them mad that their ancestors could have been so frivolous and selfish; so concerned with their individual welfare. So you see my people are really satisfied with the way they live. I was the only one who rebelled at having my every move plotted out for me.”
“The little rebel, eh? And you didn’t care for the husband they picked for you either.”
THE eerie wail of a nearby wildcat mingled with Nona’s chuckle. “You should have seen him. They picked him because they thought he was stolid enough to counteract the wayward streak in me. There was no other man in the city so submissive and willing to obey. He was never so proud as when he was permitted to take part in some volunteer extra work. I remember the day the man from the Eugenics Council brought him to my father’s house. We were introduced and I was told that this was the man the council had chosen for my mate. Then we were left alone. You see, it is the regular procedure when the council chooses two people to be mated to introduce them and then leave them alone for two hours to get acquainted. They then separate and the mating date is set for a day one week later.
“During this week either of the two may decide not to take the other for a mate. Then he or she is introduced to another who has the required gene-determinants. Each person is allowed five choices although seldom does anyone ask for a second choice. It’s foolish to do so, for if one person has the same gene-determinants as another, he would differ from the other in only the most superficial characteristics. So there really isn’t any choice at all.”
“I suppose that after generations of such artificial selection your people would be pretty nearly alike anyway,” Mark guessed.
“Oh yes,” Nona said. “The art of photography has been almost abandoned. A picture of
one man would do for all the men in the city.” She chuckled again, and spread her hands. “That’s an exaggeration, of course, for there are differences physically, but not nearly so much as I’ve noted in the pictures in the ancient books. No two people looked alike in those days, did they?”
“Very few,” Mark admitted. “But what sort of a ceremony is held when two people are mated?”
“Ceremony?” Nona looked puzzled for a moment. “Oh, I know what you mean. I’ve read about it. We don’t have anything like that. On the appointed day the couple are assigned a house and they occupy it. That is all.”
Mark felt this was too direct to be any fun. He forgot, momentarily, that one reason he’d shunned marriage was his dread of a big church wedding.
“Like heck it is, but that’s just what I suspected. Tell me some more.” He threw another branch on the fire at the sound of a raucous screech. “Do these couples live happily together?”
“Happily? Oh yes, I suppose so. It seemed rather dreary to me. You see, they don’t live together in the sense that the ancients did. Neither sees the other except when the day’s work and recreation is over. And that amounts to only about ten hours, which includes the sleeping period.”
Mark thought this one over a minute. “Pretty clever,” he decided. “They don’t see enough of each other to quarrel. Not a bad stunt at that. The men are segregated from the women at all other times, I suppose?”
“Yes, of course, Since I was a little girl the only men I have spoken to have been my father, the man from the Eugenics Council and the rabbitlike little slug I was introduced to. I only saw the last two for a few minutes.”
Mark grinned. “And Omega and me,” he supplemented. “Although Omega is not a man. He’s a perambulating thought wave. And what happened to your would-be mate?” Not that he cared — or did he?
The Best of Argosy #2 - Minions on the Moon Page 5
