Project Gutenberg's The Return, by H. Beam Piper and John J. McGuire
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Title: The Return
Author: H. Beam Piper and John J. McGuire
Illustrator: Kelly Freas
Release Date: July 17, 2006 [EBook #18855]
Language: English
*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE RETURN ***
Produced by Greg Weeks, Sankar Viswanathan, and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
Transcriber's Note:
This etext was produced from Astounding Science Fiction,
January, 1954. Extensive research did not uncover any
evidence that the copyright on this publication was renewed.
THE RETURN
BY H. BEAM PIPER
AND
JOHN J. McGUIRE
[Illustration: ]
* * * * *
_The isolated little group they found were doing fine--
but their religion was most strange--and yet quite logical!_
Illustrated by Kelly Freas
Altamont cast a quick, routine, glance at the instrument panels and
then looked down through the transparent nose of the helicopter at the
yellow-brown river five hundred feet below. Next he scraped the last
morsel from his plate and ate it.
"What did you make this out of, Jim?" he asked. "I hope you kept
notes, while you were concocting it. It's good."
"The two smoked pork chops left over from yesterday evening," Loudons
said, "and that bowl of rice that's been taking up space in the
refrigerator the last couple of days together with a little egg
powder, and some milk. I ground the chops up and mixed them with the
rice and the other stuff. Then added some bacon, to make grease to fry
it in."
Altamont chuckled. That was Loudons, all right; he could take a few
left-overs, mess them together, pop them in the skillet, and have a
meal that would turn the chef back at the Fort green with envy. He
filled his cup and offered the pot.
"Caffchoc?" he asked.
Loudons held his cup out to be filled, blew on it, sipped, and then
hunted on the ledge under the desk for the butt of the cigar he had
half-smoked the evening before.
"Did you ever drink coffee, Monty?" the socio-psychologist asked,
getting the cigar drawing to his taste.
"Coffee? No. I've read about it, of course. We'll have to organize an
expedition to Brazil, some time, to get seeds, and try raising some."
Loudons blew a smoke ring toward the rear of the cabin.
"A much overrated beverage," he replied. "We found some, once, when I
was on that expedition into Idaho, in what must have been the
stockroom of a hotel. Vacuum-packed in moisture-proof containers, and
free from radioactivity. It wasn't nearly as good as caffchoc. But
then, I suppose, a pre-bustup coffee drinker couldn't stomach this
stuff we're drinking." He looked forward, up the river they were
following. "Get anything on the radio?" he asked. "I noticed you took
us up to about ten thousand, while I was shaving."
Altamont got out his pipe and tobacco pouch, filling the former slowly
and carefully.
"Not a whisper. I tried Colony Three, in the Ozarks, and I tried to
call in that tribe of workers in Louisiana; I couldn't get either."
"Maybe if we tried to get a little more power on the set--"
That was Loudons, too, Altamont thought. There wasn't a better man at
the Fort, when it came to dealing with people, but confront him with a
problem about things, and he was lost. That was one of the reasons why
he and the stocky, phlegmatic social scientist made such a good team,
he thought. As far as he, himself, was concerned, people were just a
mysterious, exasperatingly unpredictable, order of things which were
subject to no known natural laws. That was about the way Loudons
thought of things; he couldn't psychoanalyze them.
He gestured with his pipe toward the nuclear-electric conversion unit,
between the control-cabin and the living quarters in the rear of the
box-car-sized helicopter.
"We have enough power back there to keep this windmill in the air
twenty-four hours a day, three hundred and sixty-five days a year, for
the next fifteen years," he said. "We just don't have enough radio. If
I'd step up the power on this set any more, it'd burn out before I
could say, 'Altamont calling Fort Ridgeway.'"
"How far are we from Pittsburgh, now?" Loudons wanted to know.
Altamont looked across the cabin at the big map of the United States,
with its red and green and blue and yellow patchwork of vanished
political divisions, and the transparent overlay on which they had
plotted their course. The red line started at Fort Ridgeway, in what
had once been Arizona It angled east by a little north, to Colony
Three, in northern Arkansas; then sharply northeast to St. Louis and
its lifeless ruins; then Chicago and Gary, where little bands of Stone
Age reversions stalked and fought and ate each other; Detroit, where
things that had completely forgotten that they were human emerged from
their burrows only at night; Cleveland, where a couple of cobalt bombs
must have landed in the lake and drenched everything with
radioactivity that still lingered after two centuries; Akron, where
vegetation was only beginning to break through the glassy slag;
Cincinnati, where they had last stopped--
* * * * *
"How's the leg, this morning, Jim?" he asked.
"Little stiff. Doesn't hurt much, though."
"Why, we're about fifty miles, as we follow the river, and that's
relatively straight." He looked down through the transparent nose of
the 'copter at a town, now choked with trees that grew among tumbled
walls. "I think that's Aliquippa."
Loudons looked and shrugged, then looked again and pointed.
"There's a bear. Just ducked into that church or movie theater or
whatever. I wonder what he thinks we are."
Altamont puffed slowly at his pipe, "I wonder if we're going to find
anything at all in Pittsburgh."
"You mean people, as distinct from those biped beasts we've found so
far? I doubt it," Loudons replied, finishing his caffchoc and wiping
his mustache on the back of his hand. "I think the whole eastern half
of the country is nothing but forest like this, and the highest type
of life is just about three cuts below _Homo Neanderthalensis_, almost
impossible to contact, and even more impossible to educate."
"I wasn't thinking about that; I've just about given up hope of
finding anybody or even a reasonably high level of barbarism,"
Altamont said. "I was thinking about that cache of microfilmed books
that was buried at the Carnegie Library."
"If it was buried," Loudons qualified. "All we have is that article in
that two-century-old copy of _Time_ about how the people at the
library had constructed the crypt and were beginning the microfilming.
We don't know if they ever had a chance to get it finished, before the
rockets started landing."
They passed over a dam of flotsam that had banked up at a wrecked
bridge and accumulated enough mass to resist the periodic floods that
had kept the river usually clear. Three human figures fled across a
sand-flat at one end of it and disappeared into the woods; two of them
carried spears tipped with something that sparkled in the sunlight,
probably shards of glass.
"You know, Monty, I get nightmares, sometimes, about what things must
be like in Europe," Loudons said.
Five or six wild cows went crashing through the brush below. Altamont
nodded when he saw them.
"Maybe tomorrow, we'll let down and shoot a cow," he said. "I was
looking in the freezer-locker; the fresh meat's getting a little low.
Or a wild pig, if we find a good stand of oak trees. I could enjoy
what you'd do with some acorn-fed pork. Finished?" he asked Loudons.
"Take over, then; I'll go back and wash the dishes."
They rose, and Loudons, favoring his left leg, moved over to the seat
at the controls. Altamont gathered up the two cups, the
stainless-steel dishes, and the knives and forks and spoons, going up
the steps over the shielded converter and ducking his head to avoid
the seat in the forward top machine-gun turret. He washed and dried
the dishes, noting with satisfaction that the gauge of the water tank
was still reasonably high, and glanced out one of the windows. Loudons
was taking the big helicopter upstairs, for a better view.
Now and then, among the trees, there would be a glint of glassy slag,
usually in a fairly small circle. That was to be expected; beside the
three or four H-bombs that had fallen on the Pittsburgh area,
mentioned in the transcripts of the last news to reach the Fort from
outside, the whole district had been pelted, more or less at random,
with fission bombs. West of the confluence of the Allegheny and
Monongahela, it would probably be worse than this.
"Can you see Pittsburgh yet, Jim?" he called out.
"Yes; it's a mess! Worse than Gary; worse than Akron, even. _Monty_!
Come here! I think I have something!"
Picking up the pipe he had laid down, Altamont hurried forward,
dodging his six-foot length under the gun turret and swinging down
from the walkway over the converter.
"What is it?" he asked.
"Smoke. A lot of smoke, twenty or thirty fires, at the very least."
Loudons had shifted from _Forward_ to _Hover_, and was peering through
a pair of binoculars. "See that island, the long one? Across the river
from it, on the north side, toward this end. Yes, by Einstein! And I
can see cleared ground, and what I think are houses, inside a
stockade--"
* * * * *
Murray Hughes walked around the corner of the cabin, into the morning
sunlight, lacing his trousers, with his hunting shirt thrown over his
bare shoulders, and found, without much surprise, that his father had
also slept late. Verner Hughes was just beginning to shave. Inside the
kitchen, his mother and the girls were clattering pots and skillets;
his younger brother, Hector, was noisily chopping wood. Going through
the door, he filled another of the light-metal basins with hot water,
found his razor, and went outside again, setting the basin on the
bench.
Most of the ware in the Hughes cabin was of light-metal; Murray and
his father had mined it in the dead city up the river, from a place
where it had floated to the top of a puddle of slag, back when the
city had been blasted, at the end of the Old Times. It had been hard
work, but the stuff had been easy to carry down to where they had
hidden their boat, and, for once, they'd had no trouble with the
Scowrers. Too bad they couldn't say as much for yesterday's hunting
trip!
As he rubbed lather into the stubble on his face, he cursed with
irritation. That had been a bad-luck hunt, all around. They'd gone out
before dawn, hunting into the hills to the north, they'd spent all day
at it, and shot one small wild pig. Lucky it was small, at that.
They'd have had to abandon a full-grown one, after the Scowrers began
hunting them. Six of them, as big a band as he'd ever seen together at
one time, and they'd gotten between them and the stockade and forced
them to circle miles out of their way. His father had shot one, and
he'd had to leave his hatchet sticking in the skull of another, when
his rifle had misfired.
That meant a trip to the gunsmith's, for a new hatchet and to have the
mainspring of the rifle replaced. Nobody could afford to have a rifle
that couldn't be trusted, least of all a hunter and prospector. And
he'd had words with Alex Barrett, the gunsmith, just the other day.
Not that Barrett wouldn't be more than glad to do business with him,
once he saw that hard tool-steel he'd dug out of that place down the
river. Hardest steel he'd ever found, and hadn't been atom-spoiled,
either.
He cleaned, wiped and stropped his razor and put it back in the case;
he threw out the wash-water on the compost-pile, and went into the
cabin, putting on his shirt and his belt, and passed on through to the
front porch, where his father was already eating at the table. The
people of the Toon liked to eat in the open; it was something they'd
always done, just as they'd always liked to eat together in the
evenings.
He sweetened his mug of chicory with a lump of maple sugar and began
to sip it before he sat down, standing with one foot on the bench and
looking down across the parade ground, past the Aitch-Cue House,
toward the river and the wall.
"If you're coming around to Alex's way of thinking--and mine--it won't
hurt you to admit it, son," his father said.
He turned, looking at his father with the beginning of anger, and then
grinned. The elders were constantly keeping the young men alert with
these tests. He checked back over his actions since he had come out
onto the porch.
To the table, sugar in his chicory, one foot on the bench, which had
reminded him again of the absence of the hatchet from his belt and
brought an automatic frown. Then the glance toward the gunsmith's
shop, and across the parade ground, at the houses into which so much
labor had gone; the wall that had been built from rubble and topped
with pointed stakes; the white slabs of marble from the ruined
building that marked the graves of the First Tenant and the men of the
Old Toon. He _had_ thought, in that moment, that maybe his father and
Alex Barrett and Reader Rawson and Tenant Mycroft Jones and the others
were right--there were too many things here that could not be moved
along with them, if they decided to move.
It would be false modesty, refusal to see things as they were, not to
admit that he was the leader of the younger men, and the boys of the
Irregulars. And last winter, the usual theological arguments about the
proper chronological order of the Sacred Books and the true nature of
the Risen One had been replaced by a violent controversy when Sholto
Jiminez and Birdy Edwards had reopened the old question of the
advisability of moving the Toon and settling elsewhere. He'd been in
favor of the idea himself, but, for the last month or so, he had begun
to doubt the wisdom of it. It was probably reluctance to admit this to
himself that had brought on the strained feelings between himself and
his old friend the gunsmith.
"I'll have to drill the Irregulars, today," he said. "Birdy Edwards
has been drilling them, while we've been hunting. But I'll go up and
see Alex about a new hatchet and fixing my rifle. I'll have a talk
with him."
He stepped forward to the edge of the porch, still munching on a
honey-dipped piece of corn bread, and glanced up at the sky. That was
a queer bird; he'd never seen a bird with a wing action like that.
Then he realized that the object was not a bird at all.
His father was staring at it, too.
"Murray! That's ... that's like the old stories from the time of the
wars!"
But Murray was already racing across the parade ground toward the
Aitch-Cue House, where the big iron ring hung by its chain from a
gallows-like post, with the hammer beside it.
* * * * *
The stockaded village grew larger, details became plainer, as the
helicopter came slanting down and began spiraling around it. It was a
fairly big place, some forty or fifty acres in a rough parallelogram,
surrounded by a wall of varicolored stone and brick and concrete
rubble from old ruins, topped with a palisade of pointed poles. There
was a small jetty projecting out into the river, to which six or eight
boats of different sorts were tied; a gate opened onto this from the
wall. Inside the stockade, there were close to a hundred buildings,
ranging from small cabins to a structure with a belfry, which seemed
to have been a church, partly ruined in the war of two centuries ago
and later rebuilt. A stream came down from the woods, across the
cultivated land around the fortified village; there was a rough flume
which carried the water from a dam close to the edge of the forest and
provided a fall to turn a mill wheel.
"Look; strip-farming," Loudons pointed. "See the alternate strips of
grass and plowed ground. Those people understand soil conservation.
They have horses, too."
As he spoke, three riders left the village at a gallop, through a gate
on the far side. They separated, and the people in the fields, who had
all started for the village, turned and began hurrying toward the
woods. Two of the riders headed for a pasture in which cattle had been
grazing, and started herding them, also, into the woods. For a while,
there was a scurrying of little figures in the village below, and then
not a moving thing was in sight.
"There's good organization," Loudons said. "Everybody seems to know
what to do, and how to get it done promptly. And look how neat the
whole place is. Policed up. I'll bet anything we'll find that they
have a military organization, or a military tradition at least. We'll
have to find out; you can't understand a people till you understand
their background and their social organization."
"Humph. Let me have a look at their artifacts; that'll tell what kind
of people they are," Altamont said, swinging his glasses back and
forth over the enclosure. "Water-power mill, water-power
sawmill--building on the left side of the water wheel; see the pile of
fresh lumber beside it. Blacksmith shop, and from that chimney I'd say
a small foundry, too. Wonder what that little building out on the tip
of the island is; it has a water wheel. Undershot wheel, and it looks
as though it could be raised or lowered. But the building's too small
for a grist mill. Now, I wonder--"
[Illustration: ]
"Monty, I think we ought to land right in the middle of the enclosure,
on that open plaza thing, in front of that building that looks like a
reconditioned church. That's probably the Royal Palace, or the
Pentagon, or the Kremlin, or whatever."
Altamont started to object, paused, and then nodded. "I think you're
right, Jim. From the way they scattered, and got their livestock into
the woods, they probably expect us to bomb them. We have to get
inside; that's the quickest way to do it." He thought for a moment.
"We'd better be armed, when we go out. Pistols, auto-carbines, and a
few of those concussion-grenades in case we have to break up a
concerted attack. I'll get them."
The plaza and the houses and cabins around it, and the
two-hundred-year-old church, were silent and, apparently, lifeless as
they set the helicopter down. Once Loudons caught a movement inside
the door of a house, and saw a metallic glint. Altamont pointed up at
the belfry.
"There's a gun up there," he said. "Looks like about a four-pounder.
Brass. I knew that smith-shop was also a foundry. See that little curl
of smoke? That's the gunner's slow-match. I'd thought maybe that thing
on the island was a powder mill. That would be where they'd put it.
Probably extract their niter from the dung of their horses and cows.
Sulfur probably from coal-mine drainage. Jim, this is really
something!"
"I hope they don't cut loose on us with that thing," Loudons said,
looking apprehensively at the brass-rimmed black muzzle that was
covering them from the belfry. "I wonder if we ought to--Oh-oh, here
they come!"
* * * * *
Three or four young men stepped out of the wide door of the old
church. They wore fringed buckskin trousers and buckskin shirts and
odd caps of deerskin with visors to shade their eyes and similar beaks
behind to protect the neck. They had powder horns and bullet pouches
slung over their shoulders, and long rifles in their hands. They
stepped aside as soon as they were out; carefully avoiding any gesture
of menace, they stood watching the helicopter which had landed among
them.
Three other men followed them out; they, too, wore buckskins, and the
odd double-visored caps. One had a close-cropped white beard, and on
the shoulders of his buckskin shirt he wore the single silver bars of
a first lieutenant of the vanished United States Army. He had a pistol
on his belt; it had the saw-handle grip of an automatic, but it was a
flintlock, as were the rifles of the young men who stood watchfully on
either side of the two middle-aged men who accompanied him. The whole
party advanced toward the helicopter.
"All right; come on, Monty." Loudons opened the door and let down the
steps. Picking up an auto-carbine, he slung it and stepped out of the
helicopter, Altamont behind him. They advanced to meet the party from
the old church, halting when they were about twenty feet apart.
"I must apologize, lieutenant, for dropping in on you so
unceremoniously." He stopped, wondering if the man with the white
beard understood a word of what he was saying.
"The natural way to come in, when you travel in the air," the old man
replied. "At least, you came in openly. I can promise you a better
reception than you got at that city to the west of us a couple of days
ago."
"Now how did you know we'd had trouble at Cincinnati
day-before-yesterday?" Loudons demanded.
The old man's eyes sparkled with childlike pleasure. "That surprises
you, my dear sir? In a moment, I daresay you'll be amazed at the
simplicity of it. You have a nasty rip in the left leg of your
trousers, and the cloth around it is stained with blood. Through the
rip, I perceive a bandage. Obviously, you have suffered a recent
wound. I further observe that the side of your flying machine bears
recent scratches, as though from the spears or throwing-hatchets of
the Scowrers. Evidently they attacked you as you were leaving it; it
is fortunate that these cannibal devils are too stupid and too anxious
for human flesh to exercise patience."
"Well, that explains how you knew we'd been recently attacked,"
Loudons told him. "But how did you guess that it had been to the west
of here, in a ruined city?"
"I never guess," the oldster with the silver bar and the
keystone-shaped red patch on his left shoulder replied. "It is a
shocking habit--destructive to the logical faculty. What seems strange
to you is only so because you do not follow my train of thought. For
example, the wheels and their framework under your flying machine are
splashed with mud which seems to be predominantly brick-dust, mixed
with plaster. Obviously, you landed recently in a dead city, either
during or after a rain. There was a rain here yesterday evening, the
wind being from the west. Obviously, you followed behind the rain as
it came up the river. And now that I look at your boots, I see traces
of the same sort of mud, around the soles and in front of the heels.
But this is heartless of us, keeping you standing here on a wounded
leg, sir. Come in, and let our medic look at it."
"Well, thank you, lieutenant," Loudons replied. "But don't bother your
medic; I've attended to the wound myself, and it wasn't serious to
begin with."
"You are a doctor?" the white-bearded man asked.
"Of sorts. A sort of general scientist. My name is Loudons. My friend,
Mr. Altamont, here, is a scientist, also."
There was an immediate reaction; all three of the elders of the
village, and the young riflemen who had accompanied them, exchanged
glances of surprise. Loudons dropped his hand to the grip of his slung
auto-carbine, and Altamont sidled unobtrusively away from him, his
hand moving as by accident toward the butt of his pistol. The same
thought was in both men's minds, that these people might feel, as a
heritage of the war of two centuries ago, a hostility to science and
scientists. There was no hostility, however, in their manner as the
old man advanced and held out his hand.
"I am Tenant Mycroft Jones, the Toon Leader here," he said. "This is
Stamford Rawson, our Reader, and Verner Hughes, our Toon Sarge. This
is his son, Murray Hughes, the Toon Sarge of the Irregulars. But come
into the Aitch-Cue House, gentlemen. We have much to talk about."
* * * * *
By this time, the villagers had begun to emerge from the log cabins
and rubble-walled houses around the plaza and the old church. Some of
them, mostly young men, were carrying rifles, but the majority of them
were unarmed. About half of them were women, in short deerskin or
homespun dresses; there were a number of children, the younger ones
almost completely naked.
"Sarge," the old man told one of the youths, "post a guard over this
flying machine; don't let anybody meddle with it. And have all the
noncoms and techs report here, on the double." He turned and shouted
up at the truncated steeple: "Atherton, sound 'All Clear!'"
A horn, up in the belfry, began blowing, to advise the people who had
run from the fields into the woods that there was no danger.
They went through the open doorway of the old stone church, and
entered the big room inside. The building had evidently been gutted by
fire, two centuries before, and portions of the wall had been
restored. Now there was a rough plank floor, and a plank ceiling at
about twelve feet; the room was apparently used as a community center.
There were a number of benches and chairs, all very neatly made, and
along one wall, out of the way, ten or fifteen long tables had been
stacked, the tops in a pile and the trestles on them. The walls were
decorated with trophies of weapons--a number of old M-12 rifles and
M-16 submachine guns, all in good clean condition, a light machine
rifle, two bazookas. Among them were stone and metal-tipped spears and
crude hatchets and knives and clubs, the work of the wild men of the
woods. A stairway led to the second floor, and it was up this that the
man who bore the title of Toon Leader conducted them, to a small room
furnished with a long table, a number of chairs, and several big
wooden chests bound with iron.
"Sit down, gentlemen," the Toon Leader invited, going to a cupboard
and producing a large bottle stopped with a corncob and a number of
small cups. "It's a little early in the day," he said, "but this is a
very special occasion. You smoke a pipe, I take it?" he asked
Altamont. "Then try some of this; of our own growth and curing." He
extended a doeskin moccasin, which seemed to be the tobacco-container.
Altamont looked at the thing dubiously, then filled his pipe from it.
The oldster drew his pistol, pushed a little wooden plug into the
vent, added some tow to the priming, and, aiming at the wall, snapped
it. Evidently, at times the formality of plugging the vent had been
overlooked; there were a number of holes in the wall there. This time,
however, the pistol didn't go off. He shook out the smoldering tow,
blew it into flame, and lit a candle from it, offering the light to
Altamont. Loudons got out a cigar and lit it from the candle; the
others filled and lighted pipes. The Toon Leader reprimed his pistol,
then holstered it, took off his belt and laid it aside, an example the
others followed.
They drank ceremoniously, and then seated themselves at the table. As
they did, two more men came into the room; they were introduced as
Alexander Barrett, the gunsmith, and Stanley Markovitch, the
distiller.
"You come, then, from the west?" the Toon Leader began by asking.
"Are you from Utah?" the gunsmith interrupted, suspiciously.
"Why, no; we're from Arizona. A place called Fort Ridgeway," Loudons
said.
The others nodded, in the manner of people who wish to conceal
ignorance; it was obvious that none of them had ever heard of Fort
Ridgeway, or Arizona either.
"We've been in what used to be Utah," Altamont said. "There's nobody
there but a few Indians, and a few whites who are even less
civilized."
"You say you come from a fort? Then the wars aren't over, yet?" Sarge
Hughes asked.
"The wars have been over for a long time. You know how terrible they
were. You know how few in all the country were left alive," Loudons
said.
"None that we know of, beside ourselves and the Scowrers until you
came," the Toon Leader said.
"We have found only a few small groups, in the whole country, who have
managed to save anything of the Old Times. Most of them lived in
little villages and cultivated land. A few had horses, or cows. None,
that we have ever found before, made guns and powder for themselves.
But they remembered that they were men, and did not eat one another.
Whenever we find a group of people like this, we try to persuade them
to let us help them."
"Why?" the Toon Leader asked. "Why do you do this for people you've
never met before? What do you want from them--from us--in return for
your help?" He was speaking to Altamont, rather than to Loudons; it
seemed obvious that he believed Altamont to be the leader and Loudons
the subordinate.
* * * * *
"Because we're trying to bring back the best things of the Old Times,"
Altamont told him. "Look; you've had troubles, here. So have we, many
times. Years when the crops failed; years of storms, or floods;
troubles with these beast-men in the woods. And you were alone, as we
were, with no one to help. We want to put all men who are still men in
touch with one another, so that they can help each other in trouble,
and work together. If this isn't done soon, everything which makes men
different from beasts will soon be no more."
"He's right. One of us, alone, is helpless," the Reader said. "It is
only in the Toon that there is strength. He wants to organize a Toon
of all Toons."
"That's about it. We are beginning to make helicopters like the one
Loudons and I came here in. We'll furnish your community with one or
more of them. We can give you a radio, so that you can communicate
with other communities. We can give you rifles and machine guns and
ammunition, to fight the ... the Scowrers, did you call them? And we
can give you atomic engines, so that you can build machines for
yourselves."
"Some of our people--Alex Barrett, here, the gunsmith, and Stan
Markovitch, the distiller, and Harrison Grant, the iron worker--get
their living by making things. How'd they make out, after your
machines came in here?" Verner Hughes asked.
"We've thought of that; we had that problem with other groups we've
helped," Loudons said. "In some communities, everybody owns everything
in common; we don't have much of a problem, there. Is that the way you
do it, here?"
"Well, no. If a man makes a thing, or digs it out of the ruins, or
catches it in the woods, it's his."
"Then we'll work out some way. Give the machines to the people who are
already in a trade, or something like that. We'll have to talk it over
with you and with the people who'd be concerned."
"How is it you took so long finding us," Alex Barrett asked. "It's
been two hundred or so years since the Wars."
"Alex! You see but you do not observe!" The Toon Leader rebuked.
"These people have their flying machines, which are highly complicated
mechanisms. They would have to make tools and machines to make them,
and tools and machines to make those tools and machines. They would
have to find materials, often going far in search of them. The marvel
is not that they took so long, but that they did it so quickly."
"That's right," Altamont said. "Originally, Fort Ridgeway was a
military research and development center. As the country became
disorganized, the Government set this project up, to develop ways of
improvising power and transportation and communication methods and
extracting raw materials. If they'd had a little more time, they might
have saved the country. As it was, they were able to keep themselves
alive and keep something like civilization going at the Fort, while
the whole country was breaking apart around them. Then, when the
rockets stopped falling, they started to rebuild. Fortunately, more
than half the technicians at the Fort were women; there was no
question of them dying out. But it's only been in the last twenty
years that we've been able to make nuclear-electric engines, and this
is the first time any of us have gotten east of the Mississippi."
"How did your group manage to survive?" Loudons said. "You call it the
Toon; I suppose that's what the word platoon has become, with time.
You were, originally, a military platoon?"
"_Pla_-toon!" the white-bearded man said. "Of all the unpardonable
stupidity! Of course that was what it was. And the title, Tenant, was
originally _lieu_-tenant; I know that, though we have all dropped the
first part of the word. That should have led me, if I'd used my wits,
to deduce platoon from toon.
"Yes, sir. We were originally a platoon of soldiers, two hundred years
ago, at the time when the Wars ended. The Old Toon, and the First
Tenant, were guarding pows, whatever they were. The pows were all
killed by a big bomb, and the First Tenant, Lieutenant Gilbert Dunbar,
took his ... his platoon and started to march to Deecee, where the
Government was, but there was no Government, any more. They fought
with the people along the way. When they needed food, or ammunition,
or animals to pull their wagons, they took them, and killed those who
tried to prevent them. Other people joined the Toon, and when they
found women whom they wanted, they took them. They did all sorts of
things that would have been crimes if there had been any law, but
since there was no law any longer, it was obvious that there could be
no crime. The First Ten--Lieutenant--kept his men together, because he
had The Books. Each evening, at the end of each day's march, he read
to his men out of them.
[Illustration: ]
"Finally, they came here. There had been a town here, but it had been
burned and destroyed, and there were people camping in the ruins. Some
of them fought and were killed; others came in and joined the platoon.
At first, they built shelters around this building, and made this
their fort. Then they cleared away the ruins, and built new houses.
When the cartridges for the rifles began to get scarce, they began to
make gunpowder, and new rifles, like these we are using now, to shoot
without cartridges. Lieutenant Dunbar did this out of his own
knowledge, because there is nothing in The Books about making
gunpowder; the guns in The Books are rifles and shotguns and revolvers
and airguns; except for the airguns, which we haven't been able to
make, these all shot cartridges. As with your people, we did not die
out, because we had women. Neither did we increase greatly--too many
died or were killed young. But several times we've had to tear down
the wall and rebuild it, to make room inside it for more houses, and
we've been clearing a little more land for fields each year. We still
read and follow the teachings of The Books; we have made laws for
ourselves out of them."
"And we are waiting here, for the Slain and Risen One," Tenant Jones
added, looking at Altamont intently. "It is impossible that He will
not, sooner or later, deduce the existence of this community. If He
has not done so already."
"Well, sir," the Toon Leader changed the subject abruptly, "enough of
this talk about the past. If I understand rightly, it is the future in
which you gentlemen are interested." He pushed back the cuff of his
hunting shirt and looked at an old and worn wrist watch.
"Eleven-hundred; we'll have lunch shortly. This afternoon, you will
meet the other people of the Toon, and this evening, at
eighteen-hundred, we'll have a mess together outdoors. Then, when we
have everybody together, we can talk over your offer to help us, and
decide what it is that you can give us that we can use."
"You spoke, a while ago, of what you could do for us, in return,"
Altamont said. "There's one thing you can do, no further away than
tomorrow, if you're willing."
"And that is--?"
"In Pittsburgh, somewhere, there is an underground crypt, full of
books. Not bound and printed books; spools of microfilm. You know what
that is?"
The others shook their heads. Altamont continued:
"They are spools on which strips are wound, on which pictures have
been taken of books, page by page. We can make other, larger pictures
from them, big enough to be read--"
"Oh, photographs, which you enlarge. I understand that. You mean, you
can make many copies of them?"
"That's right. And you shall have copies, as soon as we can take the
originals back to Fort Ridgeway, where we have equipment for enlarging
them. But while we have information which will help us to find the
crypt where the books are, we will need help in getting it open."
"Of course! This is wonderful. Copies of The Books!" the Reader
exclaimed. "We thought we had the only one left in the world!"
"Not just The Books, Stamford; other books," the Toon Leader told him.
"The books which are mentioned in The Books. But of course we will
help you. You have a map to show where they are?"
"Not a map; just some information. But we can work out the location of
the crypt."
"A ritual," Stamford Rawson said happily. "Of course."
* * * * *
They lunched together at the house of Toon Sarge Hughes with the Toon
Leader and the Reader and five or six of the leaders of the community.
The food was plentiful, but Altamont found himself wishing that the
first book they found in the Carnegie Library crypt would be a cook
book.
In the afternoon, he and Loudons separated. The latter attached
himself to the Tenant, the Reader, and an old woman, Irene Klein, who
was almost a hundred years old and was the repository and arbiter of
most of the community's oral legends. Altamont, on the other hand,
started, with Alex Barrett, the gunsmith, and Mordecai Ricci, the
miller, to inspect the gunshop and grist mill. Joined by half a dozen
more of the village craftsmen, they visited the forge and foundry, the
sawmill, the wagon shop. Altamont looked at the flume, a rough
structure of logs lined with sheet aluminum, and at the nitriary, a
shed-roofed pit in which potassium nitrate was extracted from the
community's animal refuse. Then, loading his guides into the
helicopter, they took off for a visit to the powder mill on the island
and a trip up the river.
They were a badly scared lot, for the first few minutes, as they
watched the ground receding under them through the transparent plastic
nose. Then, when nothing disastrous seemed to be happening,
exhilaration took the place of fear, and by the time they set down on
the tip of the island, the eight men were confirmed aviation
enthusiasts. The trip up-river was an even bigger success; the high
point came when Altamont set his controls for _Hover_, pointed out a
snarl of driftwood in the stream, and allowed his passengers to fire
one of the machine guns at it. The lead balls of their own
black-powder rifles would have plunked into the waterlogged wood
without visible effect; the copper-jacketed machine-gun bullets ripped
it to splinters. They returned for a final visit to the distillery
awed by what they had seen.
* * * * *
"Monty, I don't know what the devil to make of this crowd," Loudons
said, that evening, after the feast, when they had entered the
helicopter and prepared to retire. "We've run into some weird
communities--that lot down in Old Mexico who live in the church and
claim they have a divine mission to redeem the world by prayer,
fasting and flagellation, or those yogis in Los Angeles--"
"Or the Blackout Boys in Detroit," Altamont added.
"That's understandable," Loudons said, "after what their ancestors
went through in the Last War. But this crowd, here! The descendants of
an old United States Army infantry platoon, with a fully developed
religion centered on a slain and resurrected god--Normally, it would
take thousands of years for a slain-god religion to develop, and then
only from the field-fertility magic of primitive agriculturists. Well,
you saw these people's fields from the air. Some of the members of
that old platoon were men who knew the latest methods of scientific
farming; they didn't need naive fairy tales about the planting and
germination of seed."
"Sure this religion isn't just a variant of Christianity?"
"Absolutely not. In the first place, these Sacred Books can't be the
Bible--you heard Tenant Jones say that they mentioned firearms that
used cartridges. That means that they can't be older than 1860 at the
very earliest. And in the second place, this slain god wasn't
crucified or put to death by any form of execution; he perished,
together with his enemy, in combat, and both god and devil were later
resurrected. The Enemy is supposed to be the master mind back of these
cannibal savages in the woods and also in the ruins."
"Did you get a look at these Sacred Books, or find out what they might
be?"
Loudons shook his head disgustedly. "Every time I brought up the
question, they evaded. The Tenant sent the Reader out to bring in this
old lady, Irene Klein--she was a perfect gold mine of information
about the history and traditions of the Toon, by the way--and then he
sent him out on some other errand, undoubtedly to pass the word not to
talk to us about their religion."
"I don't get that," Altamont said. "They showed me everything they
had--their gunshop, their powder mill, their defenses, everything." He
smoked in silence for a moment. "Say, this slain god couldn't be the
original platoon commander, could he?"
"No. They have the greatest respect for his memory--decorate his grave
regularly, drink toasts to him--but he hasn't been deified. They got
the idea for this deity of theirs out of the Sacred Books." Loudons
gnawed the end of his cigar and frowned. "Monty, this has me worried
like the devil, because I believe that they suspect that you are the
Slain and Risen One."
"Could be, at that. I know the Tenant came up to me, very
respectfully, and said, 'I hope you don't think, sir, that I was
presumptuous in trying to display my humble deductive abilities to
_you_.'"
"What did you say?" Loudons demanded rather sharply.
"Told him certainly not; that he'd used a good quick method of
demonstrating that he and his people weren't like those mindless
subhumans in the woods."
"That was all right. I don't know how we're going to handle this. They
only suspect that you are their deity. As it stands, now, we're on
trial, here. And I get the impression that logic, not faith, seems to
be their supreme religious virtue; that skepticism is a religious
obligation instead of a sin. That's something else that's practically
unheard of. I wish I knew--"
* * * * *
Tenant Mycroft Jones, and Reader Stamford Rawson and Toon Sarge Verner
Hughes, and his son Murray Hughes, sat around the bare-topped table in
the room, on the second floor of the Aitch-Cue House. A lighted candle
flickered in the cool breeze that came in through the open window
throwing their shadows back and forth on the walls.
"Pass the tantalus, Murray," the Tenant said, and the youngest of the
four handed the corncob-corked bottle to the eldest. Tenant Jones
filled his cup, and then sat staring at it, while Verner Hughes thrust
his pipe into the toe of the moccasin and filled it. Finally, he drank
about half of the clear wild-plum brandy.
"Gentlemen, I am baffled," he confessed. "We have three alternate
possibilities here, and we dare not disregard any of them. Either
this man who calls himself Altamont is truly He, or he is merely what
we are asked to believe, one of a community like ours, with more of
the old knowledge than we possess."
"You know my views," Verner Hughes said. "I cannot believe that He was
more than a man, as we are. A great, a good, a wise man, but a man and
mortal."
"Let's not go into that, now." The Reader emptied his cup and took the
bottle, filling it again. "You know my views, too. I hold that He is
no longer upon earth in the flesh, but lives in the spirit and is only
with us in the spirit. There are three possibilities, too, none of
which can be eliminated. But what was your third possibility, Tenant?"
"That they are creatures of the Enemy. Perhaps that one or the other
of them _is_ the Enemy."
Reader Rawson, lifting his cup to his lips, almost strangled. The
Hugheses, father and son, stared at Tenant Jones in horror.
"The Enemy--with such weapons and resources!" Murray Hughes gasped.
Then he emptied his cup and refilled it. "No! I can't believe that;
he'd have struck before this and wiped us all out!"
"Not necessarily, Murray," the Tenant replied. "Until he became
convinced that his agents, the Scowrers, could do nothing against us,
he would bide his time. He sits motionless, like a spider, at the
center of the web; he does little himself; his agents are numerous.
Or, perhaps, he wishes to recruit us into his hellish organization."
"It is a possibility," Reader Rawson admitted. "One which we can
neither accept nor reject safely. And we must learn the truth as soon
as possible. If this man is really He, we must not spurn Him on mere
suspicion. If he is a man, come to help us, we must accept his help;
if he is speaking the truth, the people who sent him could do wonders
for us, and the greatest wonder would be to make us, again, a part of
a civilized community. And if he is the Enemy--"
"If it is really He," Murray said, "I think we are on trial."
"What do you mean, son? Oh, I see. Of course, I don't believe he is,
but that's mere doubt, not negative certainty. But if I'm wrong, if
this man is truly He, we are being tested. He has come among us
incognito; if we are worthy of Him, we will penetrate His disguise."
"A very pretty problem, gentlemen," the Tenant said, smacking his lips
over his brandy. "For all that it may be a deadly serious one for us.
There is, of course, nothing that we can do tonight. But tomorrow, we
have promised to help our visitors, whoever they may be, in searching
for this crypt in the city. Murray, you were to be in charge of the
detail that was to accompany them. Carry on as arranged, and say
nothing of our suspicions, but advise your men to keep a sharp watch
on the strangers, that they may learn all they can from them.
Stamford, you and Verner and I will go along. We should, if we have
any wits at all, observe something."
* * * * *
"Listen to this infernal thing!" Altamont raged. "'_Wielding a
gold-plated spade handled with oak from an original rafter of the
Congressional Library, at three-fifteen one afternoon last week--_'
One afternoon last week!" He cursed luridly. "Why couldn't that
blasted magazine say _what_ afternoon? I've gone over a lot of
twentieth century copies of that magazine; that expression was a
regular cliché with them."
Loudons looked over his shoulder at the photostated magazine page.
"Well, we know it was between June thirteen and nineteen, inclusive,"
he said. "And there's a picture of the university president, complete
with gold-plated spade, breaking ground. Call it Wednesday, the
sixteenth. Over there's the tip of the shadow of the old Cathedral of
Learning, about a hundred yards away. There are so many inexactitudes
that one'll probably cancel out another."
"That's so, and it's also pretty futile getting angry at somebody
who's been dead two hundred years, but why couldn't they say
Wednesday, or Monday, or Saturday, or whatever?" He checked back in
the astronomical handbook, and the photostated pages of the old
almanac, and looked over his calculations. "All right, here's the
angle of the shadow, and the compass-bearing. I had a look, yesterday,
when I was taking the local citizenry on that junket. The old baseball
diamond at Forbes Field is plainly visible, and I located the ruins of
the Cathedral of Learning from that. Here's the above-sea-level
altitude of the top of the tower. After you've landed us, go up to
this altitude--use the barometric altimeter, not the radar--and hold
position."
Loudons leaned forward from the desk to the contraption Altamont had
rigged in the nose of the helicopter--one of the telescope-sighted
hunting rifles clamped in a vise, with a compass and a spirit-level
under it.
"Rifle's pointing downward at the correct angle now?" he asked. "Good.
Then all I have to do is hold the helicopter steady, keep it at the
right altitude, level, and pointed in the right direction, and watch
through the sight while you move the flag around, and direct you by
radio. Why wasn't I born quintuplets?"
"Mr. Altamont! Dr. Loudons!" a voice outside the helicopter called.
"Are you ready for us, now?"
Altamont went to the open door and looked out. The old Toon Leader,
the Reader, Toon Sarge Hughes, his son, and four young men in
buckskins with slung rifles, were standing outside.
"I have decided," the Tenant said, "that Mr. Rawson and Sarge Hughes
and I would be of more help than an equal number of younger men. We
may not be as active, but we know the old ruins better, especially the
paths and hiding places of the Scowrers. These four young men you
probably met last evening; it will do no harm to introduce them again.
Birdy Edwards; Sholto Jiminez; Jefferson Burns; Murdo Olsen."
"Very pleased, Tenant, gentlemen. I met all you young men last
evening; I remember you," Altamont said. "Now, if you'll all crowd in
here, I'll explain what we're going to try to do."
He showed them the old picture. "You see where the shadow of a tall
building falls?" he asked. "We know the location and height of this
building. Dr. Loudons will hold this helicopter at exactly the
position of the top of the building, and aim through the sights of the
rifle, there. One of you will have this flag in his hand, and will
move it back and forth; Dr. Loudons will tell us when the flag is in
the sight of the rifle."
"He'll need a good pair of lungs to do that," Verner Hughes commented.
"We'll use radio. A portable set on the ground, and the helicopter's
radio set." He was met, to his surprise, with looks of incomprehension.
He had not supposed that these people would have lost all memory of
radio communication.
"Why, that's wonderful!" the Reader exclaimed, when he explained. "You
can talk directly; how much better than just sending a telegram!"
"But, finding the crypt by the shadow; that's exactly like the--"
Murray Hughes began, then stopped short. Immediately, he began talking
loudly about the rifle that was to be used as a surveying transit,
comparing it with the ones in the big first-floor room at the
Aitch-Cue House.
* * * * *
Locating the point on which the shadow of the old Cathedral of
Learning had fallen proved easier than either Altamont or Loudons had
expected. The towering building was now a tumbled mass of slagged
rubble, but it was quite possible to determine its original center,
and with the old data from the excellent reference library at Fort
Ridgeway, its height above sea level was known. After a little
jockeying, the helicopter came to a hovering stop, and the slanting
barrel of the rifle in the vise pointed downward along the line of the
shadow that had been cast on that afternoon in June, 1993, the cross
hairs of the scope-sight centered almost exactly on the spot Altamont
had estimated on the map. While he peered through the sight, Loudons
brought the helicopter slanting down to land on the sheet of fused
glass that had once been a grassy campus.
"Well, this is probably it," Altamont said. "We didn't have to bother
fussing around with that flag, after all. That hump, over there, looks
as though it had been a small building, and there's nothing
corresponding to it on the city map. That may be the bunker over the
stair-head to the crypt."
[Illustration: ]
They began unloading equipment--a small portable nuclear-electric
conversion unit, a powerful solenoid-hammer, crowbars and intrenching
tools, tins of blasting-plastic. They took out the two hunting rifles,
and the auto-carbines, and Altamont showed the young men of Murray
Hughes' detail how to use them.
"If you'll pardon me, sir," the Tenant said to Altamont, "I think it
would be a good idea if your companion went up in the flying machine
and circled around over us, to keep watch for Scowrers. There are
quite a few of them, particularly farther up the rivers, to the east,
where the damage was not so great and they can find cellars and
shelters and buildings to live in."
"Good idea; that way, we won't have to put out guards," Altamont said.
"From the looks of this, we'll need everybody to help dig into that
thing. Hand out one of the portable radios, Jim, and go up to about a
thousand feet. If you see anything suspicious, give us a yell, and
then spray it with bullets, and find out what it is afterward."
They waited until the helicopter had climbed to position and was
circling above, and then turned their attention to the place where the
sheet of fused earth and stone bulged upward. It must have been almost
ground-zero of one of the hydrogen-bombs; the wreckage of the
Cathedral of Learning had fallen predominantly to the north, and the
Carnegie Library was tumbled to the east.
"I think the entrance would be on this side, toward the Library,"
Altamont said. "Let's try it, to begin with."
He used the solenoid-hammer, slowly pounding a hole into the glaze,
and placed a small charge of the plastic explosive. Chunks of the
lavalike stuff pelted down between the little mound and the huge one
of the old library, blowing a hole six feet in diameter and two and a
half deep, revealing concrete bonded with crushed steel-mill slag.
"We missed the door," he said. "That means we'll have to tunnel in
through who knows how much concrete. Well--"
* * * * *
He used a second and larger charge, after digging a hole a foot deep.
When he and his helpers came up to look, they found a large mass of
concrete blown out, and solid steel behind it. Altamont cut two more
holes sidewise, one on either side of the blown-out place, and fired a
charge in each of them, bringing down more concrete. He found that he
hadn't missed the door, after all. It had merely been concreted over.
A few more shots cleared it, and after some work, they got it open.
There was a room inside, concrete-floored and entirely empty. With the
others crowding behind him, Altamont stood in the doorway and
inspected the interior with his flashlight; he heard somebody back of
him say something about a most peculiar sort of a dark-lantern. Across
the small room, on the opposite wall, was a bronze plaque.
It carried quite a lengthy inscription, including the names of all the
persons and institutions participating in the microfilm project. The
History Department at the Fort would be most interested in that, but
the only thing that interested Altamont was the statement that the
floor had been laid over the trapdoor leading to the vaults where the
microfilms were stored. He went outside to the radio.
"Hello, Jim. We're inside, but the films are stored in an underground
vault, and we have to tear up a concrete floor," he said. "Go back to
the village and gather up all the men you can carry, and tools.
Hammers and picks and short steel bars. I don't want to use explosives
inside. The interior of the crypt oughtn't to be damaged, and I don't
know what a blast in here might do to the film, and I don't want to
take chances."
"No, of course not. How thick do you think this floor is?"
"Haven't the least idea. Plenty thick, I'd say. Those films would have
to be well buried, to shield them from radioactivity. We can expect
that it'll take some time."
"All right. I'll be back as soon as I can."
The helicopter turned and went windmilling away, over what had been
the Golden Triangle, down the Ohio.
Altamont went back to the little concrete bunker and sat down,
lighting his pipe. Murray Hughes and his four riflemen spread out, one
circling around the glazed butte that had been the Cathedral of
Learning, another climbing to the top of the old library, and the
others taking positions to the south and east.
Altamont sat in silence, smoking his pipe and trying to form some
conception of the wealth under that concrete floor. It was no use.
Jim Loudons probably understood a little more nearly what those books
would mean to the world of today, and what they could do toward
shaping the world of the future. There was a library at Fort Ridgeway,
and it was an excellent one--for its purpose. In 1996, when the
rockets had come crashing down, it had contained the cream of the
world's technological knowledge--and very little else. There was a
little fiction, a few books of ideas, just enough to give the
survivors a tantalizing glimpse of the world of their fathers. But
now--
* * * * *
A rifle banged to the south and east, and banged again. Either Murray
Hughes or Birdy Edwards--it was one of the two hunting rifles from the
helicopter. On the heels of the reports, they heard a voice shouting:
"Scowrers! A lot of them, coming from up the river!" A moment later,
there was a light whip-crack of one of the long muzzle-loaders, from
the top of the old Carnegie Library, and Altamont could see a wisp of
gray-white smoke drifting away from where it had been fired. He jumped
to his feet and raced for the radio, picking it up and bringing it to
the bunker.
Tenant Jones, old Reader Rawson, and Verner Hughes had caught up their
rifles. The Tenant was shouting, "Come on in! Everybody, come in!" The
boy on top of the library began scrambling down. Another came running
from the direction of the half-demolished Cathedral of Learning, a
third from the baseball field that had served as Altamont's point of
reference the afternoon before. The fourth, Murray Hughes, was running
in from the ruins of the old Carnegie Tech buildings, and Birdy
Edwards sped up the main road from Shenley Park. Once or twice, as he
ran, Murray Hughes paused, turned, and fired behind him.
Then his pursuers came into sight. They ran erect, and they wore a few
rags of skin garments, and they carried spears and hatchets and clubs,
so they were probably classifiable as men. Their hair was long and
unkempt; their bodies were almost black with dirt and from the sun. A
few of them were yelling; most of them ran silently. They ran more
swiftly than the boy they were pursuing; the distance between them
narrowed every moment. There were at least fifty of them.
Verner Hughes' rifle barked; one of them dropped. As coolly as though
he were shooting squirrels instead of his son's pursuers, he dropped
the butt of his rifle to the ground, poured a charge of powder,
patched a ball and rammed it home, replaced the ramrod. Tenant Jones
fired then, and then Birdy Edwards joined them and began shooting with
the telescope-sighted hunting rifle. The young man who had been north
of the Cathedral of Learning had one of the auto-carbines; Altamont
had providently set the fire-control for semi-auto before giving it
to him. He dropped to one knee and began to empty the clip, shooting
slowly and deliberately, picking off the runners who were in the lead.
The boy who had started to climb down off the library halted, fired
his flintlock, and began reloading it. And Altamont, sitting down and
propping his elbows on his knees, took both hands to the automatic
which was his only weapon, emptying the magazine and replacing it. The
last three of the savages he shot in the back; they had had enough and
were running for their lives.
So far, everybody was safe. The boy in the library came down through a
place where the wall had fallen. Murray Hughes stopped running and
came slowly toward the bunker, putting a fresh clip into his rifle.
The others came drifting in.
* * * * *
"Altamont, calling Loudons," the scientist from Fort Ridgeway was
saying into the radio. "Monty to Jim; can you hear me, Jim?"
Silence.
"We'd better get ready for another attack," Birdy Edwards said.
"There's another gang coming from down that way. I never saw so many
Scowrers!"
"Maybe there's a reason, Birdy," Tenant Jones said. "The Enemy is
after big game, this time."
"Jim! Where the devil are you?" Altamont fairly yelled into the radio,
and as he did, he knew the answer. Loudons was in the village, away
from the helicopter, gathering tools and workers. Nothing to do but
keep on trying.
"Here they come!" Reader Rawson warned.
"How far can these rifles be depended on?" Birdy Edwards wanted to
know.
Altamont straightened, saw the second band of savages approaching,
about four hundred yards away.
"Start shooting now," he said. "Aim for the upper part of their
bodies."
The two auto-loading rifles began to crack. After a few shots, the
savages took cover. Evidently they understood the capabilities and
limitations of the villagers' flintlocks; this was a terrifying
surprise to them.
"Jim!" Altamont was almost praying into the radio. "Come in, Jim!"
"What is it, Monty? I was outside."
Altamont told him.
"Those fellows you had up with you yesterday; think they could be
trusted to handle the guns? A couple of them are here with me,"
Loudons inquired.
"Take a chance on it; it won't cost you anything but my life, and
that's not worth much at present."
"All right; hold on. We'll be along in a few minutes."
"Loudons is bringing the helicopter," he told the others. "All we have
to do is hold on, here, till he comes."
A naked savage raised his head from behind what might, two hundred
years ago, have been a cement park-bench, a hundred yards away.
Reader Stamford Rawson promptly killed him and began reloading.
"I think you're right, Tenant," he said. "The Scowrers have never
attacked in bands like this before. They must have had a powerful
reason, and I can think of only one."
"That's what I'm beginning to think, too," Verner Hughes agreed. "At
least, we have eliminated the third of your possibilities, Tenant. And
I think probably the second, as well."
Altamont wondered what they were double-talking about. There wasn't
any particular mystery about the mass attack of the wild men to him.
Debased as they were, they still possessed speech and the ability to
transmit experiences. No matter how beclouded in superstition, they
still remembered that aircraft dropped bombs, and bombs killed people,
and where people had been killed, they would find fresh meat. They had
seen the helicopter circling about, and had heard the blasting; every
one in the area had been drawn to the scene as soon as Loudons had
gone down the river.
Maybe they had forgotten that aircraft also carried guns. At least,
when they sprang to their feet and started to run at the return of the
helicopter, many did not run far.
* * * * *
Altamont and Loudons shook hands many times in front of the Aitch-Cue
House, and listened to many good wishes, and repeated their promise to
return. Most of the microfilmed books were still stored in the old
church; they were taking away with them only the catalogue and a few
of the more important works. Finally, they entered the helicopter. The
crowd shouted farewell, as they rose.
Altamont, at the controls, waited until they had gained five thousand
feet, then turned on a compass-course for Colony Three.
"I can't wait till we're in radio-range of the Fort, to report this,
Jim," he said. "Of all the wonderful luck! And I don't yet know which
is more important; finding those books, or finding those people. In a
few years, when we can get them supplied with modern equipment and
instructed in its use--"
"I'm not very happy about it, Monty," Loudons confessed. "I keep
thinking about what's going to happen to them."
"Why, nothing's going to happen to them. They're going to be given the
means of producing more food, keeping more of them alive, having more
leisure to develop themselves in--"
"Monty; I saw the Sacred Books."
"The deuce! What were they?"
"It. One volume; a collection of works. We have it at the Fort; I've
read it. How I ever missed all the clues--You see Monty, what I'm
worried about is what's going to happen to those people when they find
out that we're not really Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson."
THE END
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