“I think that’s the right thing,” said Kit with conviction.
“You and your father will get word to Earth that there’s almost certainly a matter-transmitter on Khem IV, and that what’s happened to Procus and Sardin and Luxor and so on—you’ll get the word back?”
“No,” said Kit.
“What’s that?” he demanded sharply.
He glanced out the bow-ports. The planet they neared was green and pleasing. It looked as if it would be a kindly world.
There was at least one city. The passengers of the Delilah would want to land there and most likely stay there.
“Anyhow,” said Kit, “my father says you’ll be trying to find Earth to take the news yourself. He’s going to come along with you. There ought to be at least three or four men on a ship this size.” Then she added irrelevantly, “Besides, my father likes you. Very much.”
Brent swallowed.
Kit looked intently at her fingernails.
“It might be nice,” she said slowly. “And—my father said— in case I should think of anything so foolish or so drastic-he’s a Commerce Commissioner and so automatically a magistrate. He said if we wanted him to, he’d—he’d marry us.”
The green globe ahead was a world that humans lived on all their lives. It was a nice world. It was an admirable world. It grew slowly larger as the Delilah drew nearer to it.
It was fortunate, though, that for some little while Brent didn’t have to pay exclusive attention to the controls.
THE MILLIONTH YEAR
By Martin Pearson
I
RALPH STRIKER’S mind was too confused and bewildered to appreciate the full danger of his position. He knew he was tottering on the brink of precipice; he could see water far below. But his thoughts were numb from the shock of sudden transference from the world he knew and understood, to completely alien surroundings.
In what had seemed the veriest fraction of a second, he had been hurled a million years into the future, whisked from a laboratory where everything was comprehensible to—what?
Instinctively, he tried to throw himself backward to safety, even as his brain sought to grasp the newness of the scene before him. His body was not responding properly yet: the shock had thrown him off balance; he was falling …
He could feel the terrible fear of it deep in his stomach, the same feeling that he received from the big roller-coaster at Coney Island. Then his brain began to work. He must remember to breathe while he was falling, must let himself fall limp. The water was looming beneath him now—
Splash! He was in. The coldness of the water bit into him; yet, as he struggled upward, some measure of security returned. This was still danger, but it was danger he could understand and cope with.
Carefully, now, he swam up to the surface, looked around quickly for sharks, or their equivalent in this world of the future.
Not too far away he could see land, a lowlying bank with the suggestion of docks and cranes. Good. Calmer now, he struck out for shore, swimming heavily from the equipment that dragged at his shoulders. Striker wished he could drop his rifle and bandolier at least, but he didn’t dare. No telling what might be waiting on that shore—
A steam whistle sounded behind him and he looked around to see a small launch pulling alongside. Hands clutched at him, hauled him over the rim of the craft, and Striker looked into faces as human as his own. They were chattering amiably at him, obviously asking questions, but he couldn’t understand a word of the language.
His rescuers were three; suddenly they fell silent as they realized what a strange fish they had pulled out. Striker stared blankly and saw that they were certainly human. It was he, then, who did not give the impression of a reasoning being. His wet, matted hair—the rifle, hand-gun, cooking kit, rucksack crammed with tins, all insanely slung from his waist in a clattering mass—he must be a sight! He grinned feebly at the three rescuers. They were smaller than he; dark-skinned, with a prognathous cast to their features. Their costumes were much less radical than Striker’s for they knew where they were going.
“Thanks, friends,” said Striker gratefully. Whoever or whatever they were, they had helped him out.
Then the shock of his sudden transition into the future, his thirty-foot drop into icy waters, the strain until his rescue, took their toll. Striker went down and out.
He woke in a sort of hospital ward, flopping like a fish out of water. For a moment of orientation he was bewildered. Then he sat up violently when he recalled where—and when— he was. His was but one of a long row of beds. They were only a foot off the ground, and a bit too short and skimpy for his big body. Down the length of the room were other litter-like beds, occupied by representatives of the future race in various stages of disrepair. Some were lying still; others were chattering cheerfully.
“Hey!” Striker querulously called out. Abruptly the noise of the room shut off like water from a faucet; all turnable heads were turned his way. From a great deal of furtive whispering Striker guessed that he was as great an enigma to them as they were to him.
One of them loped up to his bed with a supervisory air and shot sounds at the man.
“Sorry,” said Striker. “I can’t understand a word you’re saying.” By way of explanation, he pointed -at his mouth, tapped Iris temple and violently shook his head. The attendant grinned amicably and held up two fingers as he bustled away.
Striker had barely time to wonder what was up when the creature was back, and with another of his kind. This one must be older, Striker thought, for his face was covered by a network of dark wrinkles, and his jaw protruded very far to the front of his brow. It came to Striker like a blow that it was almost a muzzle. Had man, let alone not progressed, but actually fallen back along the evolutionary scale in the million years since his time?
The older man turned on a light above Striker’s bed and held out his hand. Striker soberly shook it as the oldster grinned delightedly and turned to the attendant, uncoiling several yards of incomprehensible chatter. With a brisk smile the attendant rambled off.
The old man held up a finger, as if to demand silence and cooperation. Striker watched very carefully as his mentor indicated the bedclothes, fingered them carefully, and in a voice heavy with significance uttered the word: “bamafa.”
This, thought Striker, would be the inevitable language-lesson. Obediently he fingered the fabric and approximated the word.
Being an intense, brilliant man, capable of turning on bursts of concentration like arc-fights, also because he had no opportunity to speak anything else. Striker found himself in a few weeks able to get along in the language of these people. Written speech he mastered easily, fascinated by the curious mathematical relations of the dot-patterns that formed their alphabet.
To his surprise, as soon as he had assimilated enough of the knowledge of this world to form a conclusion, he found quite definitely that he was in no Utopia. The sneering accusations of the yellow press regarding his authenticity, the savage attacks by disgruntled anthropologists into whose custody he had been given, were very human indeed. But among his friends, quickly found, he discovered that Earthly virtues as well had not yet died.
Baffled, he explained: “I thought that if man were still in existence he would be advanced enough to send me back to my own time.” He shrugged. “I gambled and lost.”
His first friend, the old man, Prash-maun, who had taught him the language, grinned, his face falling naturally into the lines of mirth that characterized him. “Lost, Striker? You expected to find yourself in either a wilderness on the heels of which would come swift death, or in a perfect world in which man had subdued his surroundings. Neither of these is so, but you are alive, though living on the bounty of friends.”
Striker winced. Though it seemed to have no shameful connection among these people, he did not like the idea of charity. His life had been valuable in his own time. “I know,” he said. “But tonight we were going exploring. Shall we start?”
“If you wish,” said Maun. “But from what you have told me of your day, you’ll find little changed.”
Striker did not believe the old man just then. Later, having wandered by foot and conveyance through the metropolis into whose harbor he had fallen, he understood.
First they had seen the slums—a word existing in the language meaning exactly that—and were properly horrified. Rickety tenements fronting narrow, twisted streets, the air filled with the smell of refuse and decay; everything was there just as Striker had seen in the warrens under Brooklyn Bridge and the East End of London.
Elsewhere they saw the homes of the wealthy, reminiscent of Millionaires’ Row on Fifth Avenue, long since crumbled into dust. There were shops catering to the rich and well-to-do, having windows and displays such as he had seen in his own time.
And then they visited a factory—new ground to Striker, who had been born into a comfortable family and, though realizing well that there was a need of reform of some sort, had never seen how a worker lived. He was appalled at the filthy hovels of the factory hands. “Why do they live here?” he gasped to his guide.
“Company owned,” said Maun, depressed by the sight. “If they want to live elsewhere they find themselves another job. And there are no other jobs to be had. Was it so in your world?”
“I don’t know,” said Striker shakily. “I’ve signed petitions-protests—but I never saw anything like this. I don’t think we had anything the equal of your place here. Many years ago in my world, certainly, but reforms were going on in my time.”
“I wish I could say the same,” sighed Maun. And they followed the crowd on the guided tour of the factory, the man from the past wincing at the thought of the soul-crushing monotony of the work. It was a production plant of steam motor-vehicles involving the stamping out with heavy dies and presses of simple but huge parts. The workers who serviced the presses looked to the man from the past like little grimy apes moving with mechanical precision, machine-like and yet terribly weary.
Striker remembered talk he had heard from some of his younger assistants—strange words like “Speedup” and “industrial decrepitude.” And now, ironically, he was only beginning to understand them.
“Let’s get away from this,” he spat to his companion. “I can’t stand it!”
Later, when they were smoking cigars of a sort in Maun’s modest apartment, the man from the past unburdened his soul.
“Maun,” he cried, “one million! And what has it meant to man? To my eyes there has not been one upward step since the day when I left my own time and advanced into this. What can it mean?”
The old man shrugged. “Who can say? I can see that there is in operation a rising tide of internationalism. I thought once that I might see political and national boundaries swept away before I died. Now it seems that it will take a little longer than that. Shall I tell you how far back history goes for us?”
“Half a million years?” guessed Striker.
“No,” said the old man. “Not much more than twelve thousand. And what traces we have of that early day are obscured. Man was then only a little above the beasts. First recorded civilization is Loayan, flourishing nine thousand years ago. And they were a crude people without industries or trade.”
“And since then,” said Striker, “the climb to your present status has been slow and irregular?”
“Exactly. Do you recognize the pattern?”
“Very well indeed. And so I find myself in a world almost a duplicate of my own, yet unable to use my talents and knowledge. There was a song in my time—” He hummed a bar of the smash hit, Put Me in My Place. Abruptly Maim sat up. “Do that again,” he said excitedly. Striker whistled the tune and went on to the end with fancy runs and trills.
Maun watched him closely, his features rapt. When the man from the past was quite finished, he raptly breathed: “Beautiful! The most beautiful thing I’ve ever heard!”
Striker stared dumbly. “You’re crazy,” he said. “That’s just a piece of trash that had every moron on Earth drooling with joy.”
“Do you know many more of those?” asked Maun.
“Lots,” said Striker. “And I have a memory full to the brim ‘ with real music: Sibelius, Rachmaninoff, Shostakovitch. Plus Gershwin. Say!” Dawn was breaking. “Maybe I can make some money on this sort of thing?”
II
FOR the next month Striker struggled feebly against the incredible notoriety that had engulfed him. After that he surrendered to the fate that was his. From his memory, well stocked with the syncopations and classics of his day, there flowed tune after tune, to which Maun would scamp up some sort of lyrics. His greatest popular success was an insignificant little swing number whose name he did not remember.
And more seriously, he was able to piece together some sort of orchestration, for the vaguely familiar instruments of this new world, to Tchaikovsky’s Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth Symphonies. This, together with numberless Bach preludes, fugues and chorales—the old music-master had been his delight and relaxation in his own time—assured him a reputation as a bizarre and masterly composer of precision, endless pains and melancholy genius.
He lived with Maun now, not in the old scholar’s humble apartment near the university, but in that Millionaires’ Row he had seen in his tour of the city. Striker grew swiftly accustomed to the social usages of this far day and easily slid into a routine of work. Indeed, it was almost forgotten that he had emerged not from this world but from the misty depths of time long past.
The particular joy he took in revealing to these strange people something of the glory of his own day, he thought, was sufficient compensation for the old-time scientific zeal with which he had torn into problems as widely scattered as engineering, chemistry and archeology. Striker had been an all-around man, and was not surprised to find himself at last a musician.
The well of melody had not run dry, it seemed, for he was furiously at work on the notation of a Schumann piano concerto in the great gilded study of his house. Maun was quietly reading over the score as he dashed it down. Striker grimaced furiously and crumpled his pencil in his great fist. He swore furiously and steadily in English.
Maun looked up mildly. “I don’t understand,” he said.
“Letting off steam,” said the man from the past. “Something’s wrong—I don’t know what. I feel like this sometimes. Whenever it came over me in the old days I’d pack up and see Tibet, or work on something solid.”
“Ah.” said the old man. “I have been waiting for this.”
“You could tell?”
“I could expect it from anyone—especially you, Striker.”
The young man rose furiously and paced the length of the room. “What can I do?” he exploded. “I don’t know your world—I haven’t got my labs—my notes are heaven knows where!”
“What was the last problem you were working on before your time-travel machine?” asked Maun calmly.
Striker thought for a moment, knitting his brows. “We had a man,” he said at last “Charles Fort was his name—” Another long pause.
“What did he do?” prodded the old man calmly.
“Tore down the structure of science,” said Striker with a grin. “He made it his job to attack every fact established by research and investigation.”
“How could he do that?” demanded Maun, fascinated.
“By the most grueling kind of counter-research. And by wanton insults hurled on the heads of men who had given their lives in a search for the truth. And by proclaiming the anarchy of science. That was his life-work.”
“Fascinating!” breathed the old man. “But what were his conclusions?”
“He formulated none. Fort died—died young, some might think. But his work leads so inevitably to certain conclusions that it only remains to check them.”
“It may be so,” said Maun tolerantly. “Go on.”
“What do you know about ball lightning?”
“Nonsense! A fable.”
“I thought you’d speak that little piece,” laughed Striker. “I’ve heard it before. But ball lightning exists nonetheless. Countless observers have seen it with eyes as sound as mine. How about lights in the sky?”
“Scores of reasons. Gegenschein, cloud effects, meteorites, radiant gas escaping from some natural well, distant cities, aircraft—take your choice.”
“You’ve taken yours already, eh? I shan’t argue. You can never argue on the premise that the other man is wrong, which is what you’re doing.” Striker paced the floor, softly fuming. “I’ll see,” he murmured at last. “Balls of fire … lights in the sky … strange visitors … unknown languages … poltergeisten, fairies and demons!”
“One of our newspapers.” said Maun, “has a jeering column. They collect stories from papers all over the country and poke fun at them for their provincialism, sincere religious conviction, or whatever other crude manifestation of emotion they may display. Surely they should have a jest or two at the expense of some backwoods editor reporting lights in the sky.”
“Thanks, Maun,” said Striker. “And the day that one appears I’m going—wherever it is.”
“I was going to say,” continued Maun tonelessly, realizing that his best and only friend was about to slip two thousand miles away from him, “that they carried just such an item. Lights were seen in Bolama, to the North, by some trappers.”
“Bolama,” echoed Striker. He had seen literary allusions to the frozen peninsula before; it was the equivalent of Ultima Thule.
III
STRIKER shifted the heavy-laden pack on his shoulders. It had been the rucksack that he had taken with him into this world of the future, and with it he carried the rifle and air-gun that had been also part of his equipment. He didn’t trust the tricky little steamguns of the people who had befriended and enriched him.
Adventures in the Far Future Page 13
