The Golden Age of Pulp Fiction Megapack 01

by George Allan England

  “Just a sheer streak of luck,” Stern remarked, as he stood looking at this huge piece of fortune with the girl. “Just a kindly freak of fate, that Van Amburg should have bought one of Edison’s first sets of nickel-sheet books.

  “Except for the few sets of these in existence, here and there, not a book remains on the surface of this entire earth. The finest hand-made linen paper has disintegrated ages ago. And parchment has probably crinkled and molded past all recognition. Besides, up-to-date scientific books, such as we need, weren’t done on parchment. We’re playing into gorgeous luck with these cyclopedias, for everything I need and can’t remember is in them. But it certainly was one job to sort those scattered sheets out of the rubbish-pile in the library and rearrange them.”

  “Yes, that was hard work, but it’s done now. Come on out into the garden, Allan, and see if our crops have grown any during the night!”

  The grounds about the bungalow were a delight to them. Like two children they worked, day by day, to enlarge and beautify their holdings, their lands won back from nature’s greed.

  Though wild fruits—some new, others familiar—and fish and the plentiful game all about them offered abundant food, to be had for the mere seeking, they both agreed on the necessity of reestablishing agriculture. For they disliked the thought of being driven southward, with the return of each successive winter. They wanted, if advisable, to be able to winter in the bungalow. And this meant some provision for the unproductive season.

  “It won’t always be summer here, you know,” Stern told her. “This Eden will sometime lie wet and dreary under the winter rains that I expect now take the place of snow. And the eternal curse of Adam—toil—is not yet lifted even from us two survivors of the fifteen hundred million that once ruled the earth. We, and those who shall come after, must have the old-time foods again. And that means work!”

  They had cleared a patch of black, virgin soil, in a sunny hollow. Here Stern had transplanted all the wild descendants of the vegetables and grains of other time which in his still limited explorations he had come across.

  The work of clearing away the thorns and bushes, the tangled lianas and tall trees, was severe; but it strengthened him and hardened his whipcord muscles till they ridged his skin like iron. He burned and pulled the stumps, spaded and harrowed and hoed all by hand, and made ready the earth for the reception of its first crop in a thousand years.

  He recalled enough of his anthropology and botany from university days to recognize the reverted, twisted and stringy little degenerate wild-potato root which had once served the Aztecs and Pueblo Indians for food, and could again, with proper cultivation, be brought back to full perfection. Likewise with the maize, the squash, the wild turnip, and many other vegetable forms.

  “Three years of cultivation,” he declared, “and I can win them back to edibility. Five, and they’ll be almost where they were before the great catastrophe. As for the fruits, the apple, cherry, and pear, all they need is care and scientific grafting.

  “I predict that ten years from to-day, orchards and cornfields and gardens shall surround this bungalow, and the heritage of man shall be brought back to this old world!”

  “Always giving due credit to the encyclopedia,” added Beatrice.

  “And to you!” he laughed happily. “This is all on your account, anyhow. If I were alone in the world, you bet there’d be no gardens made!”

  “No, I don’t believe there would,” she agreed, a serious look on her face. “But, then,” she concluded, smiling again, “you aren’t alone, Allan. You’ve got me!”

  He tried to catch her in his arms, but she evaded him and ran back toward the bungalow.

  “No, no, you’ve got to work,” she called to him from the porch. “And so have I. Good-by!” And with a wave of the hand, a strong, brown hand now, slim and very beautiful, she vanished.

  Stern stood in thought a moment, then shook his head, and, with a singular expression, picked up his hoe, and once more fell to cultivating his precious little garden-patch, on which so infinitely much depended. But something lay upon his mind; he paused, reflecting; then picked up a stone and weighed it in his hand, tried another, and a third.

  “I’m damned,” he remarked, “if these feel right to met I’ve been wondering about it for a week now—there’s got to be some answer to it. A stone of this size in the old days would certainly have weighed more. And that big boulder I rooted out from the middle of the field—in the other days I couldn’t have more than stirred it.

  “Am I so very much stronger? So much as all that? Or have things grown lighter? Is that why I can leap farther, walk better, run faster? What’s it all about, anyhow?”

  He could not work, but sat down on a rock to ponder. Numerous phenomena occurred to him, as they had while he had lain wounded under the tree by the river during their first few days at the bungalow.

  “My observations certainly show a day only twenty-two hours and fifty-seven minutes long; that’s certain,” he mused. “So the earth is undoubtedly smaller. But what’s that got to do with the mass of the earth? With weight? Hanged if I can make it out at all!

  “Even though the earth has shrunk, it ought to have the same power of gravitation. If all the molecules and atoms really were pressed together, with no space between, probably the earth wouldn’t be much bigger than a football, but it would weigh just that much, and a body would fall toward it from space just as fast as now. Quite a hefty football, eh? For the life of me I can’t see why the earth’s having shrunk has affected the weight of everything!”

  Perplexed, he went back to his work again. And though he tried to banish the puzzle from his mind it still continued to haunt and to annoy him.

  Each day brought new and interesting activities. Now they made an expedition to gather a certain kind of reeds which Beatrice could plat into cordage and basketry; now they peeled quantities of birch-bark, which on rainy days they occupied themselves in splitting into thin sheets for paper. Stern manufactured a very excellent ink in his improvised laboratory on the second floor, and the split and pointed quills of a wild goose served them for pens in taking notes and recording their experiences.

  “Paper will come later, when we’ve got things a little more settled,” he told her. “But for now this will have to do.”

  “I guess if you can get along with skin clothing for a while, I can do with birch-bark for my correspondence,” she replied laughing. “Why not catch some of those wild sheep that seem so plentiful on the hills to westward? If we could domesticate them, that would mean wool and yarn and cloth—and milk, too, wouldn’t it? And if milk, why not butter?”

  “Not so fast!” he interposed. “Just wait a while—we’ll have cattle, goats, and sheep, and the whole business in due time; but how much can one pair of human beings undertake? For the present we’ll have to be content with what mutton-chops and steaks and hams I can get with a gun—and we’re mighty lucky to have those!”

  Singularly enough, and contrary to all beliefs, they felt no need of salt. Evidently the natural salts in their meat and in the fruits they ate supplied their wants. And this was fortunate, because the quest of salt might have been difficult; they might even had had to boil seawater to obtain it.

  They felt no craving for sweets, either; but when one day they came upon a bee-tree about three-quarters of a mile back in the woods to westward of the river, and when Stern smoked out the bees and gathered five pounds of honey in the closely platted rush basket lined with leaves, which they always carried for miscellaneous treasure-trove, they found the flavor delicious. They decided to add honey to their menu, and thereafter always kept it in a big pottery jar in their kitchen.

  Stern’s hunting, fishing and gardening did not occupy his whole time. Every day he made it a rule to work at least an hour, two if possible, on the thirty-foot yawl that had already begun to take satisfactory shape on the timber ways which now stood on the river bank.

  All through July and part of August he
labored on this boat, building it stanch and true, calking it thoroughly, fitting a cabin, stepping a fir mast, and making all ready for the great migration which he felt must inevitably be forced upon them by the arrival of cool weather.

  He doubted very much, in view of the semitropic character of some of the foliage, whether even in January the temperature would now go below freezing; but in any event he foresaw that there would be no fruits available, and he objected to a winter on flesh foods. In preparation for the trip he had built a little “smoke-house” near the beach, and here he smoked considerable quantities of meat—deer-meat, beef from a wild steer which he was so fortunate as to shoot during the third week of their stay at the bungalow, and a good score of hams from the wild pigs which rooted now and then among the beech growth half a mile downstream.

  Often the girl and he discussed this coming trip, of an evening, sitting together by the river to watch the stars and moon and that strange black wandering blotch that now and then obscured a portion of the night sky—or perchance leaning back in their huge, rustic easy chairs lined with furs on the broad piazza; or again, if the night were cool or rainy, in front of their blazing fire of pine knots and driftwood, which burned with gorgeous blues and greens and crimsons in the vast throat of Hope Lodge fireplace.

  Other matters, too, they talked of—strange speculations, impossible to solve, yet filling them with vague uneasiness, with wonder and a kind of mighty awe in face of the vast, unknowable mysteries surrounding them; the forces and phenomena which might, though friendly in their outward aspect, at any time precipitate catastrophe, ruin and death upon them and extinguish in their persons all hopes of a world reborn.

  The haunting thought was never very far away: “Should either one of us be killed—what then?”

  One day Stern voiced his fear.

  “Beatrice,” he said, “if anything should ever happen to me, and you be left alone in a world which, without me, would become instantly hostile and impossible, remember that the most scientific way out is a bullet. That’s my way if anything happens to you! Understand?”

  She nodded, and for a long time that day the silence of a great pact weighed upon their souls.

  CHAPTER IX

  PLANNING THE GREAT MIGRATION

  Stern rigged a tripod for the powerful field-glasses he had rescued from the Metropolitan Building, and by an ingenious addition of a wooden tube and another lens carefully ground out of rock crystal, succeeded in producing (on the right-hand barrel of the binoculars) a telescope of reasonably high power. With this, of an evening, he often made long observations, after which he would spend hours figuring all over many sheets of the birch bark, which he then carefully saved and bound up with leather strings for future reference.

  In Van’s set of encyclopedias he found a fairly large celestial map and thorough astronomic data. The results of his computations were of vital interest to him.

  He said to Beatrice one evening:

  “Do you know, that wandering black patch in the sky moves in a regular orbit of its own? It’s a solid body, dark, irregular in outline, and certainly not over five hundred miles above the surface of the earth.”

  “What can it be, dear?”

  “I don’t know yet. It puzzles me tremendously. Now, if it would only appear in the daytime once in a while, we might be able to get some information or knowledge about it; but, coming only at night, all it records itself as is just a black, moving thing. I’m working on the size of it now, making some careful studies. In a while I shall probably know its area and mass and density. But what it is I cannot say—not yet.”

  They both pondered a while, absorbed in wonder. At last the engineer spoke again.

  “Beta,” said he, “there’s another curious fact to note. The axis of the earth itself has shifted more than six degrees, thirty minutes!”

  “It has? Well—what about it?” And she went on with her platting of reed cordage.

  “You don’t seem much concerned about it!”

  “I’m not. Not in the least. It can shift all it wants to, for all of me. What hurt does it do? Doesn’t it run just as well that way?”

  Stern looked at her a moment, then laughed.

  “Oh, yes; it runs all right,” he answered. “Only I thought the announcement that the pole-star had thrown up its job might startle you a bit. But I see it doesn’t. So far as practical results go, it accounts for the warmer climate and the decreased inclination to the plane of the ecliptic; or, rather, the decreased—”

  “Please, please, don’t!” she begged. “There’s nothing really wrong, is there?”

  “Well, that depends on how you define it. Probably an astronomer might think there was something very much wrong. I make it that the orbit of the earth has altered its relative length and width by—”

  “No figures, Allan, there’s a dear. You know I’m awfully bad at arithmetic. Tell me what it means, won’t you?”

  “Well, it means, for one thing, that we’ve maybe spent a far longer time on this earth since the cataclysm than we even dare suspect. It may be that what we’ve been calculating as about a thousand years, is twice that, or even five times that—no telling. For another thing, I’m convinced by all these changes, and by the diminution of gravity and by the accelerated rate of revolution of the earth—”

  “Allan dear, please hand me those scissors, won’t you?”

  Stern laughed again.

  “Here!” said he. “I guess I’m not much good as a lecturer. But I tell you one thing I’m going to do, and that’s a one best bet. I’m going to have a try at some really big telescope before a year’s out, and know the truth of this thing!”

  “A big telescope! Build one, you mean?”

  “Not necessarily. All I need is a chance to make some accurate observations, and I can find out all I need to know. Even though I have been out of college for—let’s see—”

  “Fifteen hundred years, at a guess,” she suggested.

  “Yes, all of that. Even so, I remember a good bit of astronomy. And I’ve got my mind set on peeking through a first-class tube. If the earth has broken in two, or anything like that, and our part is skyhooting away toward the unknown regions of outer space beyond the great ring of the Milky Way and is getting into an unchartered place in the universe—as it seems to be—why, we ought to have a good look at things. We ought to know what’s what, eh?

  “Then there’s the moon I want to investigate, too. No living man except myself has even seen the side that’s now turned toward the earth. No telling what a good glass mightn’t show.”

  “That’s so, dear,” she answered. “But where can you find the sort of telescope you need?”

  “In Boston—in Cambridge, rather. The Harvard observatory has the biggest one within striking distance. What do you say to our making our trial trip in the boat, up the Sound and around Cape Cod, to Boston? We can spend a week there, then slant away for wherever we may decide to pass the winter. How does that suit you, Beta?”

  She put away her work, and for a moment sat looking in at the flames that went leaping up the huge boulder chimney. The room glowed with warmth and light that drove away the cheerlessness of a foggy, late August drizzle.

  “Do you really think we’re wise to—to leave our home, with winter coming on?” she asked at length, pensively, the firelight casting its glow across her cheek and glinting in her eyes.

  “Wise? Yes. We can’t stay here, that’s certain. And what is there to fear out in the world? With our firearms and our knowledge of fire itself, our science and our human intelligence, we’re far more than a match for all enemies, whether of the beast-world or of that race of the Horde. I hate, in a way, to revisit the ruins of New York, for more ammunition and canned stuffs. The place is to o ghastly, too hideous, now, after the big fight.

  “Boston will be a clean ground for us, with infinite resources. And as I said before, there’s the Cambridge observatory. It’s only two or three miles back in the forest, from the co
ast; maybe not more than half a mile from some part of the Charles River. We can sail up, camp on Soldiers’ Field, and visit it easily. Why not?”

  He sat down on the tiger-rug before the fire, near the girl. She drew his head down into her lap; then, when he was lying comfortably, began playing with his thick hair, as he loved so well to have her do.

  “If you think it’s all right, Allan,” said she, “we’ll go. I want what you want.”

  “That’s my good girl!” exclaimed the engineer. “We’ll be ready to start in a few days now. The boat’s next thing to finished. What with the breadfruit, smoked steer and buffalo meat, hams and canned goods now on our shelves, we’ve certainly got enough supplies to stock her a two months’ trip.

  “Even with less, we’d be safe in starting. You see, the world’s lain untouched by mankind for so many centuries that all the blighting effect of man’s folly and greed and general piracy has vanished.

  “The soil’s got back to its natural state, animal life abounds, and so long as I still have a good supply of cartridges, we can live almost anywhere. Anthropoids? I don’t think there’s much danger. Oh, yes, I remember the line of blue smoke we saw yesterday over the hills to westward; but what does that prove? Lightning may have started a fire—there’s no telling. And we can’t always stay here, Beta, just because there may be dangers out yonder!”

  He flung one arm toward the vast night, beyond the panes where the mist and storm were beating cheerlessly.

  “No, we can’t camp down here indefinitely. Now’s the time to start. As I say, we’ve got all of sixty days’ of downright civilized food on hand, for a good cruise in the Adventure. The chance of finding other people somewhere is too precious not to make any risk worth while.”

  Silence fell between them for a few minutes. Each saw visions in the flames. The man’s thoughts dwelt, in particular, on this main factor of a possible rediscovery of other human beings somewhere.

  More than the girl, he realized the prime importance of this possibility. Though he and she loved each other very dearly, though they were all in all each to the other, yet he comprehended the loneliness she felt rather than analyzed—the infinite need of man for man, of woman for woman—the old social, group-instinct of the race beginning to reassert itself even in their Eden.