The Future Is Ours
Page 2
“It’s not that. It’s rather…well, why have these writers always assumed that travel to the past or future was possible, anyway? We know now that we can—in this machine—increase or decrease the age of an animal, in much the same manner that the age of a traveler through space would change as he approached the speed of light.”
“Of course, Professor. We’ve done it with rocks and plants, and even mice…”
Fordley smiled. “In other words, everything that goes into the machine is affected. But what no one ever realized before that only the material in the time machine can grow older or younger. What you step out, you will be older, but the world will be unchanged.”
“You mean the only way we could advance to the year 2000 would be to build a time machine large enough for the entire earth?” John Comptoss asked incredulously.
“Exactly,” Fordley replied. “And of course that is impossible. Therefore, time travel as portrayed in fiction will never come to pass.”
“So you’re going to stick me inside this crazy machine and make me older? Just that and nothing more?”
“Isn’t that enough, John? You’re twenty-eight years old now—and in a moment you’ll be thirty-five years older. You’ll be sixty-three…”
“Can you bring me back all right? Back to twenty-eight?”
Fordley chuckled. “Of course, my boy. But you must remember everything that happens to you. Everything. There’s always a possibility my movie cameras will miss something.”
The young man sighed. “Let’s get it over with. The whole thing’s sort of a letdown now that I’m not going to end up in 2000.”
“Step inside,” Fordley said quietly, “and…good luck.”
“Thanks.” The heavy door clanged shut behind him, and immediately the condensing water vapor began misting over the glass dome.
* * * *
Professor Fordley stepped to his control dial and checked the setting. Yes, thirty-five years into the future…. Not the future of the world, but only the future of John Comptoss….
The big machine vibrated a bit, as if sighing at the overload of a human occupant. It took nearly ten minutes before the indicator came level with the thirty-five year mark, and then Fordley flipped the reverse switch.
While he waited for the time traveler to return, he checked the cameras and the dials and the hundreds of auxiliary instruments that had been so necessary to it all. Yes, they were all functioning.
He had done it; he had done it with a human being.…
The green light above the board flashed on, and he stepped to the heavy steel door. This was the moment, the moment of supreme triumph.
The door opened, slowly, and the blurred figure of John Comptoss stepped out through the smoke.
“John! John, my boy! You’re all right!”
“No, Professor,” the voice from the steam answered him, sounding somehow strange. “You picked the wrong man for your test. The wrong man….”
“What’s happened to you, John? Let me see your face!”
“Professor, I died at the age of sixty…. And there’s one place from which even your machine couldn’t return me. One place where there is no time….”
* * * *
And then the smoke cleared a bit, and Professor Fordley looked into his face…
And screamed….
ABOUT “THE WOLFRAM HUNTERS”
Here is a beautiful story that brings together several diverse themes and motifs found throughout Hoch’s work. It is a post-apocalyptic adventure, a coming-of-age story, and a murder mystery, all told with the insights of an anthropologist. A young Apache in a post-technological society ponders questions of faith, tradition, and truth amidst the search for a missing tribesman.
First Publication—The Saint Mystery Magazine, March 1964.
THE WOLFRAM HUNTERS
Now in the ninth decade after the Bomb, when the war which had ravaged the earth was almost forgotten, there lived in the upper valley of the Rio Grande a tribe of Indians that had once—in more glorious days—been Apaches. It was not a large tribe, and in the little village called Del Norte there were perhaps no more than two hundred souls.
One of these was the child Running who passed his days playing and climbing among the foothills much as children everywhere had done in the old days. If there was any difference between Running and these children of the past, it was only that he was alive. Very early in life, certainly before he was seven, Running learned of the old man who lived up on the mountains, a cave-dwelling ogre who easily became the subject of parental threat and childhood legend. “I’ll send you to the man on the mountain,” parents would say when trying to scare obedience into their offspring. “Be good or the man on the mountain will get you!”
But after he’d passed a certain threshold of age—was it seven or eight or nine?—he realized in a burst of enlightenment that there was nothing to fear from this cave-dwelling creature. The older boys initiated him into the terrors of the cave one stormy night in summer, by the simple expedient of dragging him to its mouth and hurling him inside. The cave in which Running found himself was low and narrow at its entrance, but it soon broadened out into a sort of room where a boy or even a man could stand and walk upright without discomfort.
And the man he found there was far from the horrible bearded ancient he’d come to imagine in his dreams. He was rather a tall and not unhandsome Indian of perhaps forty years, a man who came to greet Running with a smile and an outstretched hand. “You are brave to come here on such a stormy night,” he said, and when Running took an uncertain step backward, he added quickly, “Don’t be afraid. I am only a man like the others in the valley.”
Running summoned all his courage and asked “Who are you? Why do you live here alone?”
“My name is Legion,” he said quietly. “Father Legion. I am a priest, and that is the reason why I must live here, away from other men.”
“A priest?” He had heard them mentioned vaguely, as something that had vanished with the cities and the airplanes and the sea and the rest of it, vanished with the bursting of the Bombs. “I didn’t know there were any left,” he told the man.
“I believe I am the only one. At least I am the only one at Del Norte, little friend. But tell me, what is your name?”
“Running.”
“Running? I like that name. It is a good name, swift and powerful. What do you know of the far world, little Running? What do you know of the past?”
“Only what they tell me in the councils,” Running said, a bit uncertainly. “I am still too young to be initiated into all the mysteries.”
The priest smiled at Running as a father would and said, “Let me tell you about our people, and about the great war that killed so many. Let me tell you why we alone have survived, and how the unfortunate ignorance of a few is perhaps dooming us all to eventual oblivion.”
The words, some of them, were strange to the ears of Running, accustomed as he was only to the half-grunted monosyllables of the tribe. But the voice of the priest was gentle and there was meaning to what he said. Running did not learn it all on the first visit, or the second, but during the months that followed he came again and again to the cave in the hills, and gradually the story of their civilization took shape in his ear and mind and memory.
“Nearly a hundred years ago,” Father Legion told him, “men lived in big cities, and flew planes through the air and even ventured as far as the moon you see in the heavens. There were good men and bad men and sometimes it was difficult to tell which was which. Anyway, presently there came a great war, and rockets fell from the skies all over the World. These rockets, and their Bombs, released something called radiation. It killed people, all people, sometimes at once and sometimes weeks or months later. And here in America everyone died…everyone but the Indians.”
“But why did we alone live?” Running asked. Why, the eternal question.
“We don’t exactly know that answer,” Father Legion explained, “but of course it must have had something to do with the pigment in our skin. It acted as a natural barrier to the radiation that killed the white man. The other races of the world—the Negro, the Oriental—were not so fortunate. They died too, and only the brown men—that odd mixture of all the races—remained. I suppose in a way it was destined by some greater Power, for now the country which had been our God-given homeland was returned to us.”
“But why don’t we go to live in the cities?” Running asked one day during their conversation.
“Because, little one, the cities are mostly in ruins. And where buildings remain, the radiation may still be too high even for the Indian to survive. We do not have the intricate measuring devices necessary to be certain of safety. We know only that we have been safe for three generations here at Del Norte and so we remain here.”
“But what about you? Why do you live up here?”
“After the Bomb a great many people gave up any consolation that religion might have offered them. In those final days of blind fury, churches were burned and priests were slaughtered in the streets, and truly it seemed to the survivors as if the end of the world had finally come to pass. But as I said the Indians survived. Rather than being thankful to God for the survival, they reflected the sins of the white man. The few Indian priests were not killed, but they were driven into the hills.” He paused a moment, as if seeing it all once more on some giant screen before his eyes. “And so we have lived out our years in places like this, worshipping God and searching out others—boys like yourself—to take our place when the time comes.”
“I don’t want to,” Running said quickly, suddenly feeling a bolt of fear through his young body. “I don’t want to be like you and live in this cave all my life!”
“Come, come. I’m not asking you to, am I? A boy like you was born to run and play and enjoy life too much to be coming up here. I am only telling you a story, because this is what all of you should know.”
“Why don’t you come down and tell the others, then?” Running asked, playing absently with a stone that was smooth and cool to his touch.
“Because they will not have me. They let me live probably because their superstitious natures kept them from killing me—or those who came before me. They let me live, if only to serve as a frightening example to bad children. And instead of rebuilding a lost civilization, they spend their days in search of wolfram.”
Running knew of the quest for the precious metal, a quest which was carried out only by the warriors of the tribe. Each day they went off into the hills, never wandering too far from the valley, but searching, ever searching for the dark stones of their strange destiny. “Why do they search?” Running asked.
“Because wolfram is the source of the metal tungsten, and at their half-memories of the world as it was, they connect it with electricity and electric lights.”
“Electric lights?”
Father Legion nodded. “Once whole cities glowed with light, my son, and it was the light of a million candles. But the light had to be generated. There is no magic in the metal wolfram that will bring it back.” And he shook his head sadly, adding half to himself, “Such a long way to fall in only ninety years.”
* * * *
Finally the annual feast of Easter drew near, and Running was as busy as the others with the preparations for it. The tribal leader, Volyon, was everywhere at once, instructing, ordering, planning. The year’s precious gathering of wolfram had to be collected and treated for the ceremonies. And most important of all, the prisoners must be anointed and prepared for execution. It was this last part of the annual ceremonies which drew from Father Legion the greatest condemnation, and Running had never seen him as angry as the afternoon they talked of it.
“A blasphemous, profane thing!” the priest told him. “To crucify these men in the manner of Christ!”
“They are criminals,” Running argued because he could see nothing wrong in the annual custom, which never failed to provide a few days’ excitement.
“Some of them are murderers,” Father Legion admitted. “But more are simply poor men who drank too much or had the wrong friends. To keep them penned up during the whole year and then to put them to death at Easter time—and such a death!”
“Our leader Volyon says it is a religion death,” Running replied, but for the first time he wondered if a doubt had crossed his mind. For the few years he could remember, the annual observance had been the high point of the year. But he had to admit cruelty in the proceedings. Any member of the village of two-hundred-odd who committed a crime during the year was arrested, tried by a council of elders, and imprisoned. Thus a man might spend up to a year in jail before the fatal day of his execution arrived. And the horrible penalty of crucifixion was meted out for a variety of offences ranging from murder and rape to the stealing of wolfram and sleeping on guard duty.
“It is a perversion of religion,” Father Legion insisted, and he told Running the story of the Christ, as it had been told by so many through the centuries.
And when he’d finished, Running asked, “You learned all this from the priest ahead of you?”
“And the priest ahead of him,” Father Legion said with a little nod. And then, almost to himself, he added “I suppose I am a bishop really, or perhaps even the Pope, if I am truly the last one left.” Then, louder, “How old are you, my son?”
“Nearly ten, I think.”
“And you have been coming here since last summer, listening to me talk. Surely a boy your age would rather run and play with the others.”
“No, no,” Running said, barely believing the words himself. “I would rather be here with you.”
And so that evening again Running returned to the settlement in the valley by the shores of the river and as before he spoke to no one about his meeting with the priest in the cave, or about the strange and wonderful things he was learning there. His mother and sisters were busy with the Easter preparations, and his father was up in the hills with the wolfram hunters.
On the following day, Running saw that the terrible rite about which Father Legion had spoken was beginning its annual re-enactment on the hill before his eyes. The prisoners—there were nine of them—were brought before the tribal leader, Volyon. Very carefully he read the sentences, which all of them knew so well already. One man, Crow, was a murderer, and he accepted the death sentence with eyes downcast at the dusty earth. Another, Raincloud, who had stolen another man’s allotment of wolfram, cried out to his brothers and relatives as he was led to one of the nine wooden crosses. His mother tried to break through the line of guards, but they held her back.
The rest was a nightmare, clouding the mind of Running, terrifying him as it never had before. Towards the end when the last of the nine was being lashed to his cross, Running looked away, back toward the little line of frame houses. But even in this vista there was no escaping the sight or sound of it. He saw that final cross reflected in a broken windowpane, saw it distorted by the cracked glass into a shattered image of life, and death. He closed his eyes tightly as the last of the nine screamed out his fright in the face of death, then stopped suddenly in mid-scream as the ceremonial arrows found his naked chest.
Afterward, when the nine condemned men had become simply nine punctured corpses hanging from their crosses on the hilltop, Volyon left the warrior Samely on guard and led the others back down to the village. Still the relatives of the executed men cried and screamed, for the idea of death is difficult to accept, even with many months to prepare for it. These families knew now that their loved ones were dead, with bodies fated to hang up there for many days until the sun and the buzzards had done their work, until the lesson had been well learned by those who remained.
In the morning the village woke slowly to the cares of a new day. There were more ceremonies, including the offering of the wolfram to Volyon, and his own symbolic offering in turn to heaven, but for Running there was still the memory of the men on the hill. He ran up early to see them, praying perhaps that they would be still alive, or at least finally buried. But the nine crosses still stood in the morning sun and when he came too close Samely chased him away with a wave of his spear.
Running remembered stories of guns that fired bullets, and for many years after the Bomb the Indians had continued to use such weapons. Now, though, the bullets were gone, used up, and the tribe had reverted to the bow and arrow and the spear. Running had seen a rifle once, dust-covered in his uncle’s house, but he had been afraid to touch it.
He played on the hill for a time with the other boys, and they wrestled around, showing off for the guards who took time from their duties to watch. No one even remembered now what the valley was guarded against, whether the unknown enemy of long ago had been dying white men, or other Indians, or even Mexicans up from the south. The enemy had never come, whoever he was, though someone like Father Legion would have claimed he was already there.