Before The Golden Age - A SF Anthology of the 1930s

by Edited By Isaac Asimov

  It came away heavily with a hiss of air, for it had enclosed a near-vacuum, and Winters pulled out clothes neatly folded. He was relieved to find a leather jacket still strong and perfect. It had been well oiled and was as supple as new. Some woolen things had not fared so well, but stout corduroy breeches of linen fibre seemed well preserved and he put these on. A tightly covered crock of glass filled with oil yielded up a pistol designed to shoot lead bullets under compressed air and a neat roll of simple tools: a small saw, a file, a knife and a hand-axe. These he thrust into the waist-band of his breeches, which had been slit around the belt to accommodate them.

  Now with a last look around, Norman Winters started up the steps, guided only by the light from the chamber behind. He stumbled over fallen stones and drifted earth as he climbed and at the top came to a mat of tree-roots sealing him in. And now the axe was wielded delicately by those enfeebled arms and many minutes passed in severing one small piece at a time. The cap-stone which had originally covered the tunnel had been split and pressed to one side by the force of the growing tree and after the third large root had been severed a small cascade of earth and pebbles let down on him a blazing flood of sunlight.

  He paused and forced himself to return to his chamber; filled a glass bottle with water and slung it to his belt; put a handful of concentrated food in his pocket, and left the chamber for good, closing the door behind him and turning off the light.

  It took a few minutes only to squeeze his head and shoulders through the opening between the roots and he looked about him with pounding heart.

  But what was this? He was in the middle of a forest!

  * * * *

  Upon all sides stretched the trees—great sky-thrusting boles with here and there a clump of lesser growth, but set so evenly and spaced so regularly as to betray human oversight. The ground was softly deep in dead leaves and over them trailed a motley of vine-like plants. Winters recognized a cranberry vine and the bright wintergreen berries among many others he did not know. A pleasant sort of forest, he decided, and he set off rather hesitantly through the trees to see what he could find, his mind full of speculations as to how long it must have taken these trees to grow. To judge from the warmth it must be about noon of a midsummer’s day but what year? Certainly many of the trees were over 100 years old!

  He had not progressed more than a hundred yards before he came upon a clearing ahead and, passing beyond a fringe of shrubs he came into full view of a great highway. North and south it stretched and he stamped his feet upon the strange hard surface of green glass-like material. It was smooth in texture and extraordinarily straight and level. For miles he could look in both directions but, gaze as he might, no slightest sign of buildings could he detect.

  Here was a poser indeed, where had the suburbs of New York gone? Had even New York itself joined the lost legion in limbo? Winters stood in indecision and finally started tramping northward along the road. About a mile further along had once been the town of White Plains. It was nearby and, even if no longer in existence, would make as good a starting point as any. His pace was slow, but the fresh air and bright sunshine set the blood coursing through his veins and he went faster as he felt his strength returning with each step. He had gone half an hour and seen no sign of human habitation when a man came out upon the glass roadway a hundred yards ahead of him. He was dressed in red and russet and held one hand over his eyes, peering at Winters, who hesitated and then continued to approach with a wild thrill surging through his veins.

  The man seemed in some vague way different. His skin was dark and tanned; features full and rounded; and eyes (Winters observed as he got nearer) a soft brown. The supple body seemed alert and exuded the very breath of health, yet it was indefinably sensuous and indolent—graceful in movement. He could not for the life of him decide even what race this man of the future represented; perhaps he was a mixture of many. Then the man made a curious gesture with his left hand—a sort of circle waved in the air. Winters was puzzled, but believing it was meant for greeting imitated it awkwardly.

  “Wassum! You have chosen a slow way to travel!”

  “I am in no hurry,” replied Winters, determined to learn all he could before saying anything himself. He had to repress his natural emotions of excitement and joy. He felt an urge to shout aloud and hug this stranger in his arms.

  “Have you come far?”

  “I have been travelling for years.”

  “Come with me and I will take you to our orig. No doubt you will want food and drink and walling.” The words were drawled and his walk was slow: so much so that Winters felt a slight impatience. He was to feel this constantly among these people of the future.

  The surprising thing, when he came to think about it, was that the man’s speech was plain English, for which he was thankful. There were new words, of course, and the accent was strange in his ears—a tang of European broad As and positively continental Rs. He was wondering if radio and recorded speech had been the causes of this persistence of the old tongue when they came to a pleasant clearing lined with two-story houses of shiny brown. The walls were smooth as if welded whole from some composition plastic. But when he entered a house behind his guide he perceived that the entire wall admitted light translucently from outside and tiny windows were placed here and there purely for observation and air. He had little time to look around, for a huge dark man was eyeing him beneath bushy gray eyebrows.

  “A stranger who came on foot,” said his guide and (to Winters) “Our chief Forester.” Then he turned abruptly and left them together, without the slightest indication of curiosity.

  “Wassum, stranger! Where is your orig?” asked the Forester.

  “My orig? I don’t understand.”

  “Why, your village of course!”

  “I have none.”

  “What! A trogling?”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “A wild man—a herman—don’t you understand human speech?”

  “Where I come from there were several forms of human speech, sir.”

  “What is this? Since the dawn of civilization two thousand years ago there has been one common speech throughout the world!”

  Winters made an excited mental note of the date. Two thousand years then, at the least, had elapsed since he entered his sleeping chamber!

  “I have come to learn, sir. I should like to spend several days in your village observing your life in ... er ... an elementary sort of way. For instance, how do you obtain your food here in the middle of a forest. I saw no farms or fields nearby.”

  “You are wassum to the walling, but farms—what are they? And fields! You will travel many a mile before you find a field near here, thanks to our ancestors! We are well planted in fine forests.”

  “But your food?”

  The Forester raised his eyebrows. “Food—I have just said we have fine forests, a hundred square kilos of them—food and to spare! Did you walk with your eyes shut?”

  “Where I come from we were not used to finding food in forests, exactly. What sort of food do you get from them—remember I said I wanted elementary information, sir.”

  “Elementary indeed! Our chestnut flour for baking, naturally, our dessert nuts and our vegetables, like the locust bean, the Keawe, the Catalpea and a dozen others—all the food a man could desire. Then the felled logs bear their crops of mushrooms—we have a famous strain of beefsteak mushroom in this orig. And of course the mast-fattened swine for bacon and winter-fats and the pitch pines for engine oils—the usual forest crops. How can it be that you are ignorant of the everyday things which even schoolboys know?”

  “Mine is a strange story, sir,” replied Winters. “Tell me what I ask and I will tell you later anything you want to know about myself. Tell me things as though I were—oh, from another planet, or from the distant past,” and Winters forced a laugh.

  “This is a strange request!”

  “And my story, when I tell it to you, will be stranger still—depen
d upon it!”

  “Ha! Ha! It should prove amusing—this game! Well then, this afternoon I will spend showing you about and answering questions. After our meal tonight you shall tell me your story—but I warn you! Make it a good one —good enough to repay me for my time!”

  * * * *

  They went out into the sunlight together. The village proved to be a gathering of about fifty large houses stretching for half a mile around a long narrow clearing. The background consisted of the huge trunks, gnarled branches and dark green of the forest. The Forester himself was a rather brisk old fellow, but the villagers seemed to strike again that vague chord of strangeness—of indolence—which he had noticed in his first acquaintance. Groups lay gracefully stretched out here and there under trees and such occasional figures as were in motion seemed to move with dragging feet, to Winters’ business-like mind. It came upon him that these people were downright lazy—and this he afterwards observed to be almost invariably true. They accomplished the work of the village in an hour or two a day—and this time was actually begrudged and every effort was being made to reduce it. The chief effort of world-wide science was devoted to this end, in fact.

  The people were dressed in bright colors and the green grass and the rich brown of the buildings made a background to the colorful picture. Everywhere he saw the same racial characteristics of dark, swarthy faces and soft, liquid, brown eyes. There was something strange about the eyes —almost as if they were not set straight in the face, but a trifle aslant. Very little attention was paid Winters, except for occasional glances of idle curiosity aroused by his unusual attire. He thought the women unusually attractive, but the men seemed somehow effeminate and too soft; not but that they were fine specimens of humanity physically speaking, but that their faces were too smooth and their bodies too graceful to suit his twentieth-century ideas of what vigorous manhood should look like. Their bodies suggested the feline—cat-like grace and lethargy combined with supple strength.

  Winters was told that a thousand people usually formed an “orig.” Just now there were several hundred extra inhabitants and a “colorig” had been prepared fifty miles to the north and trees had been growing for half a century there, making ready for the new colony.

  “But why should you not simply make your village large enough to keep the extra people right here?”

  “The forest supports just so many in comfort—we are having trouble now as it is.”

  “But are there no larger villages where manufacturing is done?”

  “Of course. There are factory origs near the Great Falls in the north. Our airwheel goes there twice a week—a two-hours’ flight. But there are only a few people there; just enough to tend the machines.”

  The people of the village seemed happy and very much contented with life, but most of the younger men and women seemed to Winters too serious. Their dark faces hardly ever showed a smile. He entered several of the houses: among others that of the guild of cloth-makers. He was greatly interested, as if seeing an old friend, to observe wood-pulp fed through a pipe into the thread-making tubes to be hardened in an acid bath. He recognized, of course, the rayon process—new in his youth, but here considered ancient beyond history.

  “How many hours a day do you work here?” he asked of the elderly attendant.

  “I have worked three hours every day for the past week getting cloth ready for the new colonists,” he replied grumblingly. “Perhaps we shall have some peace in this orig when the youngsters are gone! At least there will be plenty of everything to go around once again!”

  As he spoke, a young man, evidently his son, entered the thread room and stared at his father and the Forester with cold, supercilious eyes. “Wassum!” said the attendant, but the youth merely scowled in reply. He examined Winters silently and with distrust and went out again without speaking.

  “Your son is a solemn chap!”

  “Yes. So is his generation—they take life too seriously.”

  “But do they never enjoy themselves?”

  “Oh yes! There is the hunting moon in fall. The young men track the deer on foot and race him—sometimes for days on end—then throw him with their bare hands. My son is a famous deer-chaser. He practises all year long for the Autumn season.”

  “But are there no . . . er . . . lighter pastimes?”

  “There are the festivals. The next one is the festival of autumn leaves. At the time of the equinox the young people dress in russets and reds and gold and dance in a clearing in the woods which has been chosen for its outstanding autumn beauty of color. The young women compete in designing costumes.”

  “But the younger ones—the children?”

  “They are at school until they are twenty years of age. School is the time of hard work and study. They are not permitted games or pastimes except such exercise as is needed to keep them in health. When they finish school, then they enter upon the rights and pleasures of their generation —a prospect which makes them work the harder to finish their schooling as soon as may be.”

  * * * *

  As they went out into the sunlight once more Winters observed a small airship settling down in the village campus. It was the airwheel, the Forester said, and would not leave again until dusk.

  “I have never been in one,” said Winters.

  “You are a trogling,” exclaimed the Forester. “Suppose we go up for a short flight, then?” and Winters eagerly agreed. They walked over to the machine which Winters examined curiously. Here, at least, three thousand years of improvements were amply noticeable. The enclosed cabin would seat about twenty persons. There were no wings at all, but three horizontal wheels (two in front and one in the rear) above the level of the cabin. A propeller projected from the nose and this was still idling when they arrived. The Forester explained his wishes to the pilot who asked which direction they should prefer to take.

  “South to the water and back!” put in Winters, with visions of the thriving New York metropolitan area of his day running through his memory. They took their places and the airwheel rose gently and with only a faintly audible hum—it was practically silent flight and made at enormous speed.

  In ten minutes the sea was in sight and Winters gazed breathless through the crystal windows upon several islands of varying sizes— clothed in the green blanket of dense forest. Slowly he pieced out the puzzle: there was Long Island, evidently, and over there showed Staten Island. Beneath him then lay the narrow strip of Manhattan and the forest towered over everything alike.

  “There are ruins beneath the trees,” said the Forester, noting his interest. “I have been there several times. Our historians believe the people of ancient times who lived here must have been afraid of the open air, for they either lived beneath the ground or raised stone buildings which could be entered without going out-of-doors: There are tunnels, which they used for roadways, running all beneath the ground in every direction.”

  * * * *

  CHAPTER III

  “He Has an Appendix!”

  And now the airship turned about and as it did so Winters caught sight of one gray pile of masonry—a tower-tip—showing above the forest. Surely it must have taken thousands of years to accomplish this oblivion of New York! And yet, he thought to himself, even one century makes buildings old.

  He scarcely looked out of the window on the way back, but sat engrossed in sad thoughts and mournful memories. They landed once more in the village clearing and he continued his tour under the Forester’s guidance, but a recounting of this would be tedious. When the afternoon was over he had gathered a confusing mass of general information about life in the new age. Metals were carefully conserved and when a new colony was started its supply of metal utensils and tools was the final great gift of the parent villages. Farming was entirely unknown, and grain— which the Forester did not know except as “plant-seed”—was not used for food, although primitive races had once so used it, he said. Everything came from trees now, food, houses, clothing—even the fuel for th
eir airships, which was wood alcohol.

  The life of a villager was leisurely and pleasant, Winters decided. Hours of labor were short and the greater part of the day was devoted to social pleasures and scientific or artistic hobbies. There were artists in the village, mostly of some new faddist school whose work Winters could not in the least understand. (They painted trees and attempted to express emotions thereby.) But many beautiful pieces of sculpture were set about in some of the houses. Electric power was received through the air from the Great Falls, where it was generated, and each socket received its current without wiring of any sort. The village produced its own food and made its own clothes and building materials, paper, wood alcohol, turpentine and oils. And as this village lived, so apparently, did the rest of the world.

  As Winters pictured this civilization, it consisted of a great number of isolated villages, each practically self-sufficient, except for metals. By taking the airwheel from one village to the next and there changing for another ship, a man could make a quick trip across the continents and oceans of the globe. But science and art were pursued by isolated individuals, the exchange of ideas being rendered easy by the marvellously realistic television and radio instruments.