by Fritz Leiber
This was far less dramatic, more in keeping with the age that had turned him and the others out, but it was, he told himself, right in the tradition. Most poets were a pretty poor lot at managing their lives, but they usually seemed to get in a good piece of arranging at the finish.
Finish? But this wasn’t. It was dark and silent and there was no feeling of ground beneath his feet. But this wasn’t the finish—not yet, anyway.
Out of confusion of decades, the continuing lines broke through:
“Be kind to our darkness,
O Fashioner, dwelling in light,
And feeding the lamps of the sky—”
His memory petered out at the same instant that he realized the darkness had lifted slightly and he was standing on solid ground again. It was still dark, but it was the darkness of night, not the absolute darkness of—wherever it was they had been.
He was conscious of several dark shapes standing by him. For a moment, they were hushed. He counted them. There were five. So they had all arrived. And he realized that this was why they had been silent. They had been counting, too.
Now they spoke and somebody fumbled for a torch. The light went gaping around the knot of old men, showing the fallen cheeks, the bald and the white heads, the bleary, surprised eyes.
“Well, we got here.”
“But it’s dark.”
“All I could think of while I was out there was that I’d left my false teeth behind.”
“Hah, that’s a good one.”
“Jeez, but it’s cold.”
The last statement brought realization to them all. They were chilled not only by fear and uncertainty.
“Where’s the guy with the stove?”
Hawkins, the poet and the leader, looked down. Yes, the pack was at his feet, just as it had been when the switch had closed. He bent down and unzipped it. He lit the stove with hands that trembled from cold and tension. The men huddled around it, crouching, rubbing their hands, white plumes of their breath disappearing upwards over the heat it gave forth.
“Mm-mm. Good piece of equipment.” That was Bell, the old colonel. His voice still had the clipped quality of the professional officer. “Almost as good as the Mark Nine.”
“I don’t think I’ve ever been as cold as this,” said Green, the carpenter.
“Perhaps there’s been another Ice Age,” Hawkins suggested.
“Not in seven hundred and fifty years.” Who was that? Oh, Lindsay, the professorial-looking little man. Hawkins realized that he didn’t know anything about him. There was no reason, of course, why he should. But he did know something about the others. They had chatted during the few minutes before they had been gathered into the chamber. Bell, Green, Hasse, an electrician. And Ez, whose surname hadn’t been known even to the clerk. He’d survived one appeal, he had told Hawkins, and then, because there were no records, they had assessed him at retiring age, seventy.
In fact, as he had confided with a wink while the attendant reached for the switch, he was nearly eighty-three.
“How can you say it’s seven hundred and fifty years?” That was Bell again, his voice peremptory and querulous. Hawkins smiled to himself. Must have been a blow to the poor chap, a leader of men, not to be leader now on this pathetic and unretraceable excursion. Instead, he was under the command of a damned longhair. That’s probably what he calls me, Hawkins thought, a damned longhair.
In the light of the stove, Lindsay’s lips made a downward self-deprecatory gesture before he replied. “I heard—on fairly reliable authority—that it was seven hundred and fifty years.”
“Nobody’s supposed to know,” said Bell, “nobody at all”—in a tone which implied the added words, “not even me.”
“It’s somewhere between two hundred and a thousand years, but the exact time’s supposed to be strictly secret.” Strictly Secret, thought Hawkins, Top Secret, To Be Read and Destroyed Immediately. That must have been the circle, the delight of Bell’s rigidly military life. It was all over, but he still clung to it.
“Does it really matter?” Hawkins asked mildly. “Now?”
Bell’s eyes glared in the light. “Of course it matters. There have to be rules. Even in this business, everything should be above-board.”
“Who cares about rules?” Hasse broke in. “I’m amazed that we’ve arrived, whatever century it is. I thought it was all a hoax, a handy kind of gas-chamber for getting rid of us dodderers.”
Bell snorted.
“It’s funny,” Hasse went on, as if talking to himself. “All my life, I thought that everything any of the high-ups told us was a lie. Whenever a politician opened his mouth, or a scientist, or a general, I always took what he said with a grain of salt. A whole sack of salt. And now…” He shrugged, not entirely without humour. “I had to wait till now to find out that it wasn’t all hokum. Not this time, anyway. Unless—unless this is—” He stopped short at the thought.
“Death?” whispered Green.
Ez tittered. “That ain’t so. Don’t know about you folks, but it wouldn’t be as cold as this where I’d be goin’.”
But nobody else laughed.
“It’s all wrong,” Green insisted. “It’s heathen and unnatural.” He was a quiet man who didn’t look old the way the others did. He looked middle-aged, but as if he’d looked middle-aged all his adult life. “God didn’t mean anything like this. He meant that men should live their lives out in a natural way, in the time and place He appointed for them This way is plain un-Christian.”
“From any viewpoint,” said Bell firmly, “it’s unethical. I never did agree with it. In the past few years, I’ve done a lot of lobbying against it. It’s just not ethical for one community to shift its burdens on to the shoulders of another.”
“Oh, I don’t know, Colonel,” Hawkins couldn’t help saying. “It’s only a kind of invasion. And this kind is peaceable, at least.”
“Pah!” spat Bell. “War is a matter of dire necessity and it’s the same for both sides. But the future never made war on us.”
Lindsay looked even more professorial as he leaned forward slightly into the light of the stove. “This was necessary. If it hadn’t been done in our day and age, there probably wouldn’t have been a future, anyway. And the future will know it. This future now knows about us. We’re a part of history to them. That’s why our time only chose up to a thousand years, with the time carefully spaced out. Don’t forget, little groups like us have been arriving for several centuries now.”
Bell stirred again at the easy confidence of the period of their projection. “You seem to be well acquainted with all this.”
Lindsay coughed self-effacingly. “Well, I am. You see I’m—I was, that is—a geriatrician.”
To men of a previous generation, the word wouldn’t have been so familiar. But even old Ez knew what it meant.
“One of the enemy, eh?” he wheezed.
Lindsay smiled uneasily. “Would you have preferred the Eskimo way, being turned out into the snow?”
“Wouldn’t have been much different,” said Hasse.
“This way,” Lindsay retorted, “we have a chance to live out the rest of our lives. We’re prejudiced because we’re the ones it happened to. It was bad enough before the Global War. Afterwards, with so much soil poisoned, so many mouths to feed, something drastic had to be done.”
“They should have had compulsory sterilization,” declared Bell. “That was the practical solution.”
“But that would have been unethical, an infringement of fundamental human rights. Anyway, it wasn’t the number of people that mattered. It was the number of unproductive people. We were the problem.”
“I was still working as well as ever,” said Green quietly.
“As quickly?” Lindsay asked just as quietly.
“I was a
craftsman.”
“And I was a scholar. But there had to be one time for everybody. I was thinking in the last few years that I was really beginning to know my subject at last. And now…” His voice faltered. “This, in a way, solves all the problems I ever grappled with. Funny how the human race always seems to turn up with an answer to its problems just in time. Come to think of it, being able to send people on a one-way trip into the future wasn’t good for much else, was it?”
“The future!” Green repeated, his slow voice unexpectedly vehement. “I don’t want to be in the future. The present was bad enough. Everything speeded up—quicker and quicker every year.”
Hasse had been craning his neck, surveying the darkness. “I’m beginning to think there’s something phony about this, after all. If the future had been expecting us, like Lindsay says, wouldn’t they have got this area all fixed up? But I can’t see sign of anything. No lights—nothing.”
A sudden thought came to Hawkins. Perhaps the future had resented the influx of tottering immigrants from the past. Perhaps they’d developed the time-projecting principle, found a way of diverting them into some limbo that was neither past, present nor future.
“Jeez!” said Ez. “I’ve slept in the open more nights than not, but it was never as cold as this. If only I was tired and cold, instead of just cold, I might at least be able to get some shut-eye.”
Yes, that was a problem for them all, thought Hawkins. It seemed to symbolize their situation. They had been sent on their way one sunny morning at nine o’clock, straight into a dark and bitter future night. He remembered an item of their communal pack, fumbled in its depths, among the first-aid equipment and emergency rations. He found what he was looking for and brought it out.
He smiled at the grotesque legality of it. The label read: Supplied Duty-Free for Departers. For Medicinal Purposes Only. He screwed out the cork and saw old Ez’s rheumy eyes look up and glow at the familiar sound.
“Well,” said Hawkins, “since it’s obviously impossible to make a move before dawn, we might as well have something to warm us up.” He handed the bottle around.
Only Green, when his turn came, hesitated. “I—I don’t, that is, I never—”
“Medicinal,” Hawkins interrupted reassuringly.
Green nodded gratefully and took a swig.
How we cling, thought Hawkins, to our little canons of respectability—even now! He took a gulp himself, recorked the bottle and stowed it back in the bag. Ez smacked his lips expressively and looked beseechingly at him. Hawkins rezipped the bag, feeling a childish pleasure in the meager power his office gave him. There was something in being a leader of men. Perhaps he’d missed his vocation and the little tin gods at the departure centre had seen his true worth, his latent qualities. He smiled. “Hawkins,” he told himself, “you never did have a head for liquor.”
But his thoughts ran on. What a stupid game it was, a stupid game for stupid old men. He could picture the serious reasoning that had gone into it all—the endless reports from sub-committees, the graphs, the charts. The doctrine of social workers: “We must ensure that the Departers have a proper sense of purpose. They mustn’t feel—unwanted. They must have a spirit of unity.” That was what they had said to him and the others. But wasn’t it the occupational disease of old people to feel unwanted? And weren’t they unwanted?
He himself had been living for thirty years on a reputation, included in every anthology of living poets—simply because he had still been living. He thought of the little party of admirers who had met at his place the night before departure, of how they had made half-hearted jokes about his being the first poet actually to meet posterity.
Someone had slipped a copy of his first book in his pocket and winked and said, “First edition. Be worth a fortune in the future.” He felt it in his pocket, thought of being a poet, thought of posterity, and found that he didn’t care two hoots.
Ez had started on a mouth organ, playing plaintive old hobo songs that had been hoary even in 1990. The wiry, wily old bird played them with gusto—and very badly. The others stirred angrily and told him to lay off, but he stopped only to wheeze that he wasn’t keeping anyone awake, was he, and went right on playing. The defiant strains of Hallelujah, I’m a Bum and The Big Rock Candy Mountain went fading into the black emptiness around them.
No one could play quite as badly as that by accident, thought Hawkins. Its badness was a work of art in itself.
Hawkins gave a sigh of capitulation and reached in the bag again. Ez lowered the mouth-organ and, as the bottle came around again, he put the instrument away with a grin of triumph.
Hawkins put the empty bottle back in the bag. Protected now against the coldness of the night and the chill of their thoughts, the little group huddled closer to the stove and settled down to await the dawn. One by one, they fell asleep. Only Hawkins remained awake, not because he was leader, but because he was used to brooding through the long, dark hours of the night.
But even so, dawn was a long time in coming. At the first grey relief from darkness, the others were all awake. Stretching, grumbling, they tottered to their feet. The greyness began taking on undertones of pink.
The sight made Hawkins feel even colder.
“Jeez,” cried Ez.
In the wan light, the landscape was desolate. Back in 1990, it had been a pleasant enough spot, open green country that had escaped the ravages of war. But this was worse than the rubble of war. For here, as far as the eye could see in the half-light, was no sign of human habitation, no sign of anything. It was a bare, ashen desert.
“Not even a blade of grass,” said Hasse in an awed voice.
Green began to sway and moan, his eyes rolling back. His lips moved. “And there shall come great desolation upon the Earth.”
“God!” muttered Lindsay.
Hasse wheeled on him, his face twitching. “It was a hoax. I should have known better than to believe you damned experts. Why didn’t you just kill us?” He stumbled towards the mild-featured Lindsay. His bony fingers clawed at Lindsay’s coat collar, his throat.
“Stop that!” shouted Hawkins, surprising himself by the note of authority in his voice. It surprised him even more that Hasse took his hands away. But his face was still filled with bitterness and loathing.
“He didn’t do it,” said Hawkins. “It’s not his fault.” He could see from Lindsay’s face that this—this desolation had come as much a shock to him as to the rest of them.
“What do you make of it?” he asked the geriatrist. Lindsay rubbed the heel of a hand across his brow. “I don’t know. I really don’t know. This is out of my department.”
“Well, there’s no use moaning about it,” said Bell stiffly. “If things have gone wrong, we shall have to make our plans accordingly.” In his voice was the immemorial fatalism of the military man, stoically carrying on despite the incompetence of armourers. Hawkins was grateful for the sobering effect of it.
“The city,” Bell continued, “used to lie over there beyond the hills.” But his pointing arm traversed a whole circle before it paused uncertainly and dropped. “There—there aren’t even hills any more.”
It was Ez who offered the only realistic suggestion. “Well, there’s no help standing here in the cold. I’m for walking, now it’s light.”
“Sure,” agreed Hawkins. “Somewhere there’ll be a town and people.” The only question was—where? No direction looked any less forbidding than the rest. “We’ll travel east,” he said firmly. At least they’d have the Sun in their faces—what there was of it.
Nobody objected. Silently, they turned their faces to the Sun. Hawkins stopped only to turn the stove off and swing it in the cold air till it was cool. Then he stowed it in his bag and slung it over his shoulder. The others slung on their smaller ration bags. And then they were walking.
Hawkins knew why they were walking, knew the thought that was in the minds of all of them, because it was in his mind, too. They would go on and on, trudging through this wilderness until they became too tired to notice the cold and the desolation, until they dropped in exhaustion, and that would be the end. It would be release.
And so they tottered forth towards the red wintry Sun while it slowly rose.
Hawkins understood two things as they stumbled along. The first brought a smile to his lips. He knew now, as the communal bag weighed heavily on his shoulders, just why they had chosen him as leader. Not because he was a born leader—but simply and brutally because he was the strongest. The second explained why they had passed Bell over. For he walked with a limp. He did his best to conceal it, Hawkins saw, and did his best to conceal that he was concealing it, but it was too apparent.
After they had gone a short way, he stumbled on a rough piece of ground, spun and fell. His game leg stuck out helplessly, as if it weren’t a part of him. It wasn’t, Hawkins realized, as he stooped to help him up. His eyes and Bell’s met for an instant. And for an instant, the barricade of military self-control dropped and the man looked out. A man who admitted his disability and smiled briefly in gratitude at being helped. And then he was on his feet and dusting himself off.
“Thank you,” he said stiffly. “That won’t happen again.” The barricade was up again. But Hawkins felt better and sensed that Bell did, too.
The Sun cleared the horizon finally and seemed to hang there like a great bladder of blood. A wind rose now and picked up the dust, sending it in dismal eddies across the landscape. They went on, their pace gradually slowing. Hawkins began to feel the approach of ultimate exhaustion.
They had been going up a slight incline and Hawkins had not noticed it. And they had passed through a cleft in the bare rock. And below them…
“Look, a real city!”
“Hallelujah!”
It stood in the shallow valley below them, less than a mile away.
