Arthur led the way to the flat-topped desk in the middle of the room.
“Let’s settle a few of the more important matters,” he said in a businesslike tone. “None of us has any authority to act for the rest of the people in the tower, but so many of us are in a state of blue funk that those who are here must have charge for a while. Anybody any suggestions?”
“Housing,” answered Van Deventer promptly. “I suggest that we draft a gang of men to haul all the upholstered settees and rugs that are to be found to one floor, for the women to sleep on.”
“M—m. Yes. That’s a good idea. Anybody a better plan?”
No one spoke. They all still looked much too homesick to take any great interest in anything, but they began to listen more or less half-heartedly.
“I’ve been thinking about coal,” said Arthur. “There’s undoubtedly a supply in the basement, but I wonder if it wouldn’t be well to cut the lights off most of the floors, only lighting up the ones we’re using.”
“That might be a good idea later,” Estelle said quietly, “but light is cheering, somehow, and every one feels so blue that I wouldn’t do it to-night. To-morrow they’ll begin to get up their resolution again, and you can ask them to do things.”
“If we’re going to starve to death,” one of the other men said gloomily, “we might as well have plenty of light to do it by.”
“We aren’t going to starve to death,” retorted Arthur sharply. “Just before I came down I saw a great cloud of birds, greater than I had ever seen before. When we get at those birds—”
“When,” echoed the gloomy one.
“They were pigeons,” Estelle explained. “They shouldn’t be hard to snare or trap.”
“I usually have my dinner before now,” the gloomy one protested, “and I’m told I won’t get anything to-night.”
The other men began to straighten their shoulders. The peevishness of one of their number seemed to bring out their latent courage.
“Well, we’ve got to stand it for the present,” one of them said almost philosophically. “What I’m most anxious about is getting back. Have we any chance?”
Arthur nodded emphatically.
“I think so. I have a sort of idea as to the cause of our sinking into the Fourth Dimension, and when that is verified, a corrective can be looked for and applied.”
“How long will that take?”
“Can’t say,” Arthur replied frankly. “I don’t know what tools, what materials, or what workmen we have, and what’s rather more to the point, I don’t even know what work will have to be done. The pressing problem is food.”
“Oh, bother the food,” some one protested impatiently. “I don’t care about myself. I can go hungry to-night. I want to get back to my family.”
“That’s all that really matters,” a chorus of voices echoed.
“We’d better not bother about anything else unless we find we can’t get back. Concentrate on getting back,” one man stated more explicitly.
“Look here,” said Arthur incisively. “You’ve a family, and so have a great many of the others in the tower, but your family and everybody else’s family has got to wait. As an inside limit, we can hope to begin to work on the problem of getting back when we’re sure there’s nothing else going to happen. I tell you quite honestly that I think I know what is the direct cause of this catastrophe. And I’ll tell you even more honestly that I think I’m the only man among us who can put this tower back where it started from. And I’ll tell you most honestly of all that any attempt to meddle at this present time with the forces that let us down here will result in a catastrophe considerably greater than the one that happened to-day.”
“Well, if you’re sure—” some one began reluctantly.
“I am so sure that I’m going to keep to myself the knowledge of what will start those forces to work again,” Arthur said quietly. “I don’t want any impatient meddling. If we start them too soon God only knows what will happen.”
VIII.
Van Deventer was eying Arthur Chamberlain keenly.
“It isn’t a question of your wanting pay in exchange for your services in putting us back, is it?” he asked coolly.
Arthur turned and faced him. His face began to flush slowly. Van Deventer put up one hand.
“I beg your pardon. I see.”
“We aren’t settling the things we came here for,” Estelle interrupted.
She had noted the threat of friction and hastened to put in a diversion. Arthur relaxed.
“I think that as a beginning,” he suggested, “we’d better get sleeping arrangements completed. We can get everybody together somewhere, I dare say, and then secure volunteers for the work.”
“Right.” Van Deventer was anxious to make amends for his blunder of a moment before. “Shall I send the bank watchmen to go on each floor in turn and ask everybody to come down-stairs?”
“You might start them,” Arthur said. “It will take a long time for every one to assemble.”
Van Deventer spoke into the telephone on his desk. In a moment he hung up the receiver.
“They’re on their way,” he said.
Arthur was frowning to himself and scribbling in a note-book.
“Of course,” he announced abstractedly, “the pressing problem is food. We’ve quite a number of fishermen, and a few hunters. We’ve got to have a lot of food at once, and everything considered, I think we’d better count on the fishermen. At sunrise we’d better have some people begin to dig bait and wake our anglers. They’d better make their tackle to-night, don’t you think?”
There was a general nod.
“We’ll announce that, then. The fishermen will go to the river under guard of the men we have who can shoot. I think what Indians there are will be much too frightened to try to ambush any of us, but we’d better be on the safe side. They’ll keep together and fish at nearly the same spot, with our hunters patrolling the woods behind them, taking pot-shots at game, if they see any. The fishermen should make more or less of a success, I think. The Indians weren’t extensive fishers that I ever heard of, and the river ought fairly to swarm with fish.”
He closed his note-book.
“How many weapons can we count on altogether?” Arthur asked Van Deventer.
“In the bank, about a dozen riot-guns and half a dozen repeating rifles. Elsewhere I don’t know. Forty or fifty men said they had revolvers, though.”
“We’ll give revolvers to the men who go with the fishermen. The Indians haven’t heard firearms and will run at the report, even if they dare attack our men.”
“We can send out the gun-armed men as hunters,” some one suggested, “and send gardeners with them to look for vegetables and such things.”
“We’ll have to take a sort of census, really,” Arthur suggested, “finding what every one can do and getting him to do it.”
“I never planned anything like this before,” Van Deventer remarked, “and I never thought I should, but this is much more fun than running a bank.”
Arthur smiled.
“Let’s go and have our meeting,” he said cheerfully.
But the meeting was a gloomy and despairing affair. Nearly every one had watched the sun set upon a strange, wild landscape. Hardly an individual among the whole two thousand of them had ever been out of sight of a house before in his or her life. To look out at a vast, untouched wilderness where hitherto they had seen the most highly civilized city on the globe would have been startling and depressing enough in itself, but to know that they were alone in a whole continent of savages and that there was not, indeed, in all the world a single community of people they could greet as brothers was terrifying.
Few of them thought so far, but there was actually—if Arthur’s estimate of several thousand years’ drop back through time was correct—there was actually no other group of English-speaking people in the world. The English language was yet to be invented. Even Rome, the synonym for antiquity of culture, might s
till be an obscure village inhabited by a band of tatterdemalions under the leadership of an upstart Romulus.
Soft in body as these people were, city-bred and unaccustomed to face other than the most conventionalized emergencies of life, they were terrified. Hardly one of them had even gone without a meal in all his life. To have the prospect of having to earn their food, not by the manipulation of figures in a book, or by expert juggling of profits and prices, but by literal wresting of that food from its source in the earth or stream was a really terrifying thing for them.
In addition, every one of them was bound to the life of modern times by a hundred ties. Many of them had families, a thousand years away. All had interests, engrossing interests, in modern New York.
One young man felt an anxiety that was really ludicrous because he had promised to take his sweetheart to the theater that night, and if he did not come she would be very angry. Another was to have been married in a week. Some of the people were, like Van Deventer and Arthur, so situated that they could view the episode as an adventure, or, like Estelle, who had no immediate fear because all her family was provided for without her help and lived far from New York, so they would not learn of the catastrophe for some time. Many, however, felt instant and pressing fear for the families whose expenses ran always so close to their incomes that the disappearance of the breadwinner for a week would mean actual want or debt. There are very many such families in New York.
The people, therefore, that gathered hopelessly at the call of Van Deventer’s watchmen were dazed and spiritless. Their excitement after Arthur’s first attempt to explain the situation to them had evaporated. They were no longer keyed up to a high pitch by the startling thing that had happened to them.
Nevertheless, although only half comprehending what had actually occurred, they began to realize what that occurrence meant. No matter where they might go over the whole face of the globe, they would always be aliens and strangers. If they had been carried away to some unknown shore, some wilderness far from their own land, they might have thought of building ships to return to their homes. They had seen New York vanish before their eyes, however. They had seen their civilization disappear while they watched.
They were in a barbarous world. There was not, for example, a single sulfur match on the whole earth except those in the runaway skyscraper.
IX.
Arthur and Van Deventer, in turn with the others of the cooler heads, thundered at the apathetic people, trying to waken them to the necessity for work. They showered promises of inevitable return to modern times, they pledged their honor to the belief that a way would ultimately be found by which they would all yet find themselves safely back home again.
The people, however, had seen New York disintegrate, and Arthur’s explanation sounded like some wild dream of an imaginative novelist. Not one person in all the gathering could actually realize that his home might yet be waiting for him, though at the same time he felt a pathetic anxiety for the welfare of its inmates.
Every one was in a turmoil of contradictory beliefs. On the one hand they knew that all of New York could not be actually destroyed and replaced by a splendid forest in the space of a few hours, so the accident or catastrophe must have occurred to those in the tower, and on the other hand, they had seen all of New York vanish by bits and fragments, to be replaced by a smaller and dingier town, had beheld that replaced in turn, and at last had landed in the midst of this forest.
Every one, too, began to feel am unusual and uncomfortable sensation of hunger. It was a mild discomfort as yet, but few of them had experienced it before without an immediate prospect of assuaging the craving, and the knowledge that there was no food to be had somehow increased the desire for it. They were really in a pitiful state.
Van Deventer spoke encouragingly, and then asked for volunteers for immediate work. There was hardly any response. Every one seemed sunk in despondency. Arthur then began to talk straight from the shoulder and succeeded in rousing them a little, but every one was still rather too frightened to realize that work could help at all.
In desperation the dozen or so men who had gathered in Van Deventer’s office went about among the gathering and simply selected men at random, ordering them to follow and begin work. This began to awaken the crowd, but they wakened to fear rather than resolution. They were city-bred, and unaccustomed to face the unusual or the alarming.
Arthur noted the new restlessness, but attributed it to growing uneasiness rather than selfish panic. He was rather pleased that they were outgrowing their apathy. When the meeting had come to an end he felt satisfied that by morning the latent resolution among the people would have crystallized and they would be ready to work earnestly and intelligently on whatever tasks they were directed to undertake.
He returned to the ground floor of the building feeling much more hopeful than before. Two thousand people all earnestly working for one end are hard to down even when faced with such a task as confronted the inhabitants of the runaway skyscraper. Even if they were never able to return to modern times they would still be able to form a community that might do much to hasten the development of civilization in other parts of the world.
His hope received a rude shock when he reached the great hallway on the lower floor. There was a fruit and confectionery stand here, and as Arthur arrived at the spot, he saw a surging mass of men about it. The keeper of the stand looked frightened, but was selling off his stock as fast as he could make change. Arthur forced his way to the counter.
“Here,” he said sharply to the keeper of the stand, “stop selling this stuff. It’s got to be held until we can dole it out where it’s needed.”
“I—I can’t help myself,” the keeper said. “They’re takin’ it anyway.”
“Get back there,” Arthur cried to the crowd. “Do you call this decent, trying to get more than your share of this stuff? You’ll get your portion to-morrow. It is going to be divided up.”
“Go to hell!” some one panted. “You c’n starve if you want to, but I’m goin’ to look out f’r myself.”
The men were not really starving, but had been put into a panic by the plain speeches of Arthur and his helpers, and were seizing what edibles they could lay hands upon in preparation for the hunger they had been warned to expect.
Arthur pushed against the mob, trying to thrust them away from the counter, but his very effort intensified their panic. There was a quick surge and a crash. The glass front of the showcase broke in.
In a flash of rage Arthur struck out viciously. The crowd paid not the slightest attention to him, however. Every man was too panic-stricken, and too intent on getting some of this food before it was all gone to bother with him.
Arthur was simply crushed back by the bodies of the forty or fifty men. In a moment he found himself alone amid the wreckage of the stand, with the keeper wringing his hands over the remnants of his goods.
Van Deventer ran down the stairs.
“What’s the matter?” he demanded as he saw Arthur nursing a bleeding hand cut on the broken glass of the showcase.
“Bolsheviki!” answered Arthur with a grim smile. “We woke up some of the crowd too successfully. They got panic-stricken and started to buy out this stuff here. I tried to stop them, and you see what happened. We’d better look to the restaurant, though I doubt if they’ll try anything else just now.”
He followed Van Deventer up to the restaurant floor. There were picked men before the door, but just as Arthur and the bank president appeared two or three white-faced men went up to the guards and started low-voiced conversations.
Arthur reached the spot in time to forestall bribery.
Arthur collared one man, Van Deventer another, and in a moment the two were sent reeling down the hallway.
“Some fools have got panic-stricken!” Van Deventer explained to the men before the doors in a casual voice, though he was breathing heavily from the unaccustomed exertion. “They’ve smashed up the fruit-stand on the ground floor
and stolen the contents. It’s nothing but blue funk! Only, if any of them start to gather around here, hit them first and talk it over afterward. You’ll do that?”
“We will!” the men said heartily.
“Shall we use our guns?” asked another hopefully.
Van Deventer grinned.
“No,” he replied, “we haven’t any excuse for that yet. But you might shoot at the ceiling, if they get excited. They’re just frightened!”
He took Arthur’s arm, and the two walked toward the stairway again.
“Chamberlain,” he said happily, “tell me why I’ve never had as much fun as this before!”
Arthur smiled a bit wearily.
“I’m glad you’re enjoying yourself!” he said. “I’m not. I’m going outside and walk around. I want to see if any cracks have appeared in the earth anywhere. It’s dark, and I’ll borrow a lantern down in the fire-room, but I want to find out if there are any more developments in the condition of the building.”
X.
Despite his preoccupation with his errand, which was to find if there were other signs of the continued activity of the strange forces that had lowered the tower through the Fourth Dimension into the dim and unrecorded years of aboriginal America, Arthur could not escape the fascination of the sight that met his eyes. A bright moon shone overhead and silvered the white sides of the tower, while the brightly-lighted windows of the offices within glittered like jewels set into the shining shaft.
From his position on the ground he looked into the dimness of the forest on all sides. Black obscurity had gathered beneath the dark masses of moonlit foliage. The tiny birch-bark teepees of the now deserted Indian village glowed palely. Above, the stars looked calmly down at the accusing finger of the tower pointing upward, as if in reproach at their indifference to the savagery that reigned over the whole earth.
Like a fairy tower of jewels the building rose. Alone among a wilderness of trees and streams it towered in a strange beauty: moonlit to silver, lighted from within to a mass of brilliant gems, it stood serenely still.
The Murray Leinster Megapack Page 4
