The black and snaky arms covered an area acres in extent. Upon that immense body it seemed that regiments of men might find a footing. And that eye stared unwinkingly at the vessels, every one within the reach of its long arms. Yards across, the single eye was daunting in its very immensity. It stared horribly, terrifyingly, hypnotically at the men who looked upon it. Its long tentacles swept the water in seeming purposelessness, while the occupants of the submarines stood petrified with their amazement and their fear. Presently, quite leisurely, one of the monstrous tentacles coiled gently about one of the fighting submarines. One could almost hear the gasp of horror that was breathed in every one of the air-tight vessels at the sight. Panic-stricken, the submarine that had been seized fired a torpedo blindly at the monster. It did not reach its mark, but one of the serpentine, coiling arms came in the way of the flying missile. A blast of sound, a spurt of spume and spray, and then a mighty thrashing in the water.
The pain-maddened monster released its hold and beat upon the waves with its remaining arms, while from some unknown orifice within its body it emitted a huge volume of dense black liquid that turned all the waters into ink. Then anger seemed to take hold upon it. One of the fish-like craft of the Esthonians was seized by the giant cephalopod. Huge though the submarine might be, it was a toy to the fabled Kraken, which raised it high in the air for an instant, and then swept it beneath the surface. The sea became a foaming turmoil. The fighting submarines lost all their thoughts of vengeance upon the fugitives. Torpedoes streaked their way through the inky ocean, almost at random. They exploded against the sea-bottom, they ran their course harmlessly and sank—one flashed into flame against the steel side of a fellow and lifted it clear from the water, its gaping side an invitation for the sea to enter. The maddened sea-monster swept upon these presumptuous fish who would harm him. Two of them were crashed together, and their shell caved in beneath the impact. A third was flung three hundred yards through the air…
The clumsy crawling submarines of the fugitives sank to the bottom of the ocean, unnoticed either by the raging giant octopus from the unknown depths, or by their late pursuers, now fighting for their lives against this incredible enemy. Slowly, yet at the topmost speed of which their awkward craft were capable, the survivors of the earthquake fled from the scene. Behind them they could hear the mighty thrashings of the battle. Explosion after explosion told of the desperate efforts of the other submarines to destroy their antagonist. The sea-slugs crawled and bumped along the ocean floor, making the best of their way to the shore-line.
The strange battle was still in progress when Andrews’ followers beached their craft and leaped from them. Explosions but little deadened by the distance still came to their ears as they faced the sea-slugs about and started the motors once more. They heard crash after crash and then a weird, unearthly gasp, as the unknown sea-monster gave up the fight and lay floating lifelessly in a sea of ink and blood.
The fugitives hastened inland, and when the fighting submarines were again masters of themselves, the crawling submarines were creeping, crewless and blind, toward the unsounded depths of mid-ocean.
X.
While Andrews with two other men went on to reach his hidden dirigible, the fugitives secreted themselves among the rocks and wreckage along the seashore. There was not one of them who in the time between the catastrophe and his discovery by the Esthonians had not learned to forage for his food. They would suffer little from hunger while Andrews went for help for them. He looked forward to an awkward time while transferring them to a safe place well-hidden from Esthonian fliers, but was confident that in time all of his plans would materialize.
It took a night and day of steady traveling for the three of them to reach the valley of the boiling springs. The crawling submarines had been slow, and had traveled in a course that was far from straight. Despite the steadiness of their efforts, they were barely more than fifty miles from the city of the Junkers, and came cautiously up to the smoking area hidden from the city by a mountain. Still covered by a protecting pall of steam, the shining dirigible was quite intact, and rose with its three passengers to bring aid to the escaped prisoners. Andrews, three-quarters dead from lack of rest, forced himself to keep awake until he reached the huddled village of survivors which had raised in him such hopes.
He soared down from the heights and hung motionless above the shacks. They were deserted. No sign of life, no smoke, no people, not even one of the three or four dogs that had been about the place. Esther’s small brother had disappeared.
Then, on a hillside a half-mile away, they saw a man signaling violently. The shimmering airship went cautiously in his direction, fearful that it might be an Esthonian trap. When Andrews saw the messenger clearly, however, he was relieved. He had seen the man on his previous visit to the village. The man had good news. One of the villagers had made a find three days before. Beside a ruined stretch of railroad track, an upturned train had been discovered. Breaking into the cars, he found no less than three of them packed with cases containing boxed motors, wings and chassis of pleasure-type aircraft, on their way to New York buyers. The whole village had slipped away and was working like mad upon the discovery.
(Editor’s note: We summarize again the remainder of the account. It simply recounts in detail events with which most of us are familiar. The author evidently had the African cities in mind compiling his narrative. As both the Lake Tchad Town and Nyassarobia libraries are well-supplied with books on the reconstruction of society, detail is unnecessary.)
Within a week, and while the Esthonian submarines were still scouring the seas and beaches for traces of the fugitives, the entire carload of planes had been assembled and tested. With the automatic landing devices and controls, their management presented no problems, and in a single flight of the whole squadron more than one-fifth of the escaped prisoners were rescued and carried to a semi-concealed valley previously selected. Four more flights completed the transfer, and Andrews found himself by common consent the head of a community of between eight hundred and eight hundred and fifty people. Caves were dug in the steep hillsides of the retreat. Wells were dug. Foraging and exploring parties went secretly to investigate the ruins of nearby towns and extricate what tools, provisions and arms could be found.
In the armory of a state militia regiment no less than seven machine-guns were found, with several hundred rifles and ammunition. Three motor-cars were found so nearly undamaged that they were actually run to the hidden city (now Cosmopolis) under their own power. A number of technical treatises were rescued from a library and formed the foundation of our first library, and several caches of provisions were uncovered. In addition, more than twenty additional survivors were found who had not been located by the Esthonians, and were brought to the hidden valley.
With such an abundance of labor and material, Andrews found himself at the head of a force whose resistance to oppression might be formidable. He was able to construct three large dirigibles of considerable capacity, and two very swift craft in which machine-guns were mounted. Two of the larger dirigibles were at once sent on exploring missions to the west to find what proportion of the continent had escaped destruction, while the rest of the survivors continued their labor of making themselves as formidable opponents as possible. They were, fortunately, spared the necessity of fighting. Some four months after the beginning of Cosmopolis as a city of refuge from the Esthonians, a fresh outbreak of volcanic activity seemed to pass over the whole earth. Three new fissures opened on the North American continent and the activities of the numberless boiling springs and geysers were redoubled. There were volcanic eruptions of extreme severity in the Catskills, and numerous earthquakes which would have been alarming if the Catastrophe had not once for all made other earth-tremors seem trivial. In Cosmopolis an explosion was heard which seemed to come from the east and indicate a cataclysm of importance.
Shortly afterwards, it was noticed that the rare flights of Esthonian fliers had seemed to cease,
and ten aeroplanes with the two fighting dirigibles at the disposal of the survivors were sent to investigate. Appearing first at a very great height—to avoid observation by the enemy—they found the area of boiling springs seemed to have doubled. Then, daring to investigate, they found at once the solution of the Esthonian fliers’ non-appearance and the new volume of steam.
On the one side was the valley of the steaming waters. In the middle was the mountain up which Andrews had climbed, and from which he surveyed the Esthonian city. But on the other side, where the capital of the proposed Empire of the world had been, there was—nothing. A vast chasm yawned where the Esthonians had built their city. From its depths a glow as of molten lava could be seen, and a continual roar heard. The river that had flowed by the city poured down into the opening, but issued forth again instantly, as steam. It dropped down to the white-hot rocks, and rose again as a column of white vapor which can still be seen for many miles. Toward the sea the lava had built itself a barrier of rock, against which the ocean hissed and babbled. The river-bed along which the sea-slugs crawled is forever closed, and the city of the Esthonians is gone.
As the exploring party alighted to make sure of the end of all their enemies, they found just six men left of all the Junkers. Six men, in the gold-braided uniforms of the aristocrats, gazed down into the hole in which all their hopes were sunk. And one of them was His Majesty Adalbert von Hohenstaufen, King of Esthonia. Still arrogant, still claiming deference from his five fellows on the ground of royal birth, he stood apart from them and stared down where the charred remnants of his race’s last ambitious scheme were hidden by the rolling clouds of vapor.
Offered food, the Esthonians refused haughtily. Smilingly offered citizenship in the Universal Republic already planned by Andrews, they turned away angrily. The searchers had other business at hand, and returned to report at Cosmopolis.
The details of the reconstruction period can better be followed in one of the official bulletins, or any one of a number of excellent accounts of the work. For over fifteen years the work of searching for survivors was the most important business of the government established at Cosmopolis. An amazing tendency seems to have displayed itself among the survivors. Having escaped the storm, each individual apparently believed himself or herself the only member of the human race left alive, and hardly made any great effort to look for others. Where the earth was not overwhelmed with lava or ashes, the survivors found sustenance an easy task, and extremely few suffered from starvation. When the government found them, however, everyone joined eagerly in the work at hand, and nearly eighty thousand people, first and last, were gathered together to reconstitute civilization. As soon as twenty or more people had been located by the searching parties from Cosmopolis, they were provided with supplies and aircraft to carry on the work themselves. In England, no less than five thousand people were found after the original three hundred had been given food and means of carrying on their search. The new town of London is the largest at present in the world, containing nearly four thousand people.
It must not be assumed that all this was done at once. Cosmopolis was for a long time the only real town on the earth. Now, it is sufficient to mention that there are no less than sixteen towns with a population of two thousand people or more—and all in daily and hourly communication by wireless—some twenty villages of from two hundred to two thousand, and a number of searching-posts and individual families which make up a total population of a hundred and twenty thousand people for the whole earth. It is estimated that there are perhaps twenty to thirty thousand people in addition who are either survivors of still-savage tribes, or have not yet been located by our dirigibles. Most of them are believed to be in the interior of Africa and the Indian jungles.
Our civilization must be considered better than that before the Catastrophe. With the whole world to divide for our farms, with all the mechanical knowledge of the previous civilization at our disposal, and above all with the caste and wealth distinctions of the previous era abolished, we would be foolish not to be happy. There is land enough for all, so whoever cultivates land owns the produce. There is metal enough for all, so whoever mines metal owns it. Our machines are at least as good as those before the Catastrophe, and our flying machines probably better. We are in hourly communication all over the earth, we have practically no need of police and none at all of soldiers, and since the Great Catastrophe was fated to occur, we may congratulate ourselves upon the better world remaining, though there are so few of us left. We are increasing, however, and in time the world will probably be as thickly populated as ever before. We may hope that that time is still a long way off.
Those of us who are particularly interested in the first president, John Andrews, may find a further verbatim quotation from the original account of value. The incident it describes took place just a year after the Great Catastrophe.
Andrews came smiling down the hillside to where Esther was milking the same two cows that had carried their burdens during their journeying together. Bobby stood gravely watching the process. He grinned at Andrews when he approached and sidled near him, to slip his small hand into Andrews’ big one.
“Esther,” said Andrews solemnly, watching her as she rose and reached for the pail of milk, “something is weighing on my mind.”
Esther smiled frankly at him.
“What is it? Did you get that engine fixed?”
“I did,” said Andrews, “It was most undignified. Here these people have gone and elected me President of a republic consisting of themselves, and yet when they have an engine that won’t work they ask me to help them.”
“But you are good at fixing engines,” said Esther practically.
“Yes,” admitted Andrews. “I am good at fixing engines. I am fixing a constitution for the republic just now, and I hope it will be as good as the engine I finished with. But look at me!”
For the executive of a republic he surely did not look imposing. His clothes were worn and greasy, his hands were grimy, and a splotch of engine-oil went across his forehead. He smiled at Esther, and suddenly she pinked a little.
“There is something on my mind,” Andrews repeated gravely. “I fixed that engine hours ago and I was working on the constitution until something arose that must be settled at once. It’s a state secret.”
“Do republics have state secrets?” asked Esther, smiling.
“This one is going to have,” Andrews assured her. “It is a very secretive secret. I have been wanting to tell it to someone for a long time, but there were things to prevent it. Now that I am writing a constitution, though, it must be told.”
“But it won’t be a secret…”
“Being the President, I appoint you official keeper of state secrets.” Andrews laughed lightheartedly and drew Esther to a seat beside him on a log. Bobby looked on, owl-eyed. “Bobby, I’m going to tell Esther a secret. Will you go and tell Limpy one?”
Bobby obediently turned away. Andrews laughed again.
“There was a wireless today from England. Our search-party has gathered together nearly six hundred people and they’re making a town just outside of London. There are more than two hundred at Marseilles, and a hundred and fifty…”
His voice trailed into silence. He was watching the sun trailing through the branches of a little grove of up-rooted trees they had propped up again and tended until they revived.
“I don’t care whether school keeps or not!” he announced suddenly. “Come on, Esther. All those people have joined the republic. I’m the President, and I don’t seem to care a bit. Let’s go for a walk where people can’t find me to fix engines.”
Esther smiled a little.
“And state secrets?”
“I’ll tell you…”
Andrews led her into the little grove, where no-one could see them. He turned and looked down at her. Esther’s mouth was curved in a mischievous smile.
“Well?”
“The secret,” said Andrews, drawing a long
breath, “is…”
He whispered three words. Esther pinked again, and smiled. The President of the Universal Republic—then consisting of some fifteen hundred citizens—did a very illogical thing. He put his arms deliberately around Esther and held her so she could not escape.
“Well?” he enquired in turn.
Esther dimpled.
“Poof,” she said in a superior fashion. “I knew that long ago. And—and—I do too. You, I mean.”
The President of the Universal Republic kissed her very accurately and satisfactorily. They sat down upon a log and told each other foolish things for a long time, and at intervals the President repeated his illogical performance. They were annoyed when Bobby found them.
“Vere’s a man,” he announced, “’at says vey want you to fix something.”
He gazed curiously at Andrews’ arm about his sister’s waist. Andrews considered.
“Bobby,” he said at last, looking at Esther with a smile, “tell him that the President is telling state secrets, and will come and fix something when the state secrets are all told.”
And despite the call of his democracy, the President of the Universal Republic continued to tell state secrets.
TO ALL FAT POLICEMEN
Nancy watched as old Mrs. Korvac approached the street-crossing. The fat, red-faced policeman raised a hamlike hand. “I love him!” said Nancy fervently in the stillness of the Rummage Shop. “I love all the policemen in America! I adore fat ones with red faces! May God bless him and keep him…”
First Contacts: The Essential Murray Leinster Page 68
