He gestured to the north, where the skyline of the city loomed like a distant mountain range, with gleaming marble ramparts and spires of mocking stone.
'Look here,' I asked him. 'Do you mean to say your nearest neighbor is ten miles away?'
'Sure,' he told me. 'The Smiths lived over a couple of miles to the west, but they moved out this spring. Went down to the south. Claimed the hunting was better there.'
He shook his head sadly. 'Maybe hunting is all right. I do a lot of it. But I like to do a little farming, too, And it's mighty hard to break new ground. I had a right handsome bunch of squashes and carrots this year. 'Taters did well, too.'
'But at one time a lot of people lived here.' I insisted. 'Thousands and thousands of people. Probably millions of them.'
'I heard tell of that,' agreed the old man, 'but I can't rightfully say there's any truth in it. Must've been a long time ago. Somebody must have built all them buildings –although what for I just can't figure out.'
The
There had been some changes, but it was still a newspaper office. All it needed was the blur of voices, the murmur of the speeding presses to bring it to life again.
The desks still were there, and chairs ringed the copy table.
Our feet left trails across the dust that lay upon the floor and raised a cloud that set us both to sneezing.
I made a beeline for one dark corner of the room; there I knew I would find what I was looking for.
Old bound files of the paper. Their pages crackled when I opened them, and the paper was so yellowed with age that in spots it was hard to read.
I carried one of the files to a window and glanced at the date. September 14, 2143. Over three hundred years ago!
A banner screamed: 'Relief Riots in Washington.' Hurriedly we leafed through the pages. And there, on the front pages of those papers that had seen the light more than three centuries before, we read the explanation for the silent city that lay beyond the shattered, grime-streaked windows.
'Stocks Crash to Lowest Point in Ten Years!' shrieked one banner. Another said: 'Congress Votes Record Relief Funds.' Still another: 'Taxpayers Refuse to Pay.' After that they came faster and faster. 'Debt Moratorium Declared'; 'Bank Holiday Enforced': 'Thousands Starving in Cleveland'; Jobless March on Washington'; 'Troops Fight Starving Mobs': 'Congress Gives Up, Goes Home': 'Epidemic Sweeping East'; 'President Declares National Emergency':
'British Government Abdicates'; 'Howling Mob Sweeping Over France'; 'U.S. Government Bankrupt.'
In the market and financial pages, under smaller heads, we read footnotes to those front-page lines. Story after story of business houses closing their doors, of corporations crashing, reports on declining trade; increasing unemployment, idle factories.
Civilization, three hundred years before, had crashed to ruin under the very weight of its own superstructure. The yellowed files did not tell the entire story, but it was easy to imagine.
'The world went nuts,' said Herb, 'Yeah,' I said. 'Like that guy who took the dive.'
I could see it all as plain as day. Declining business, increasing unemployment, heavier taxation to help the unemployed and buy back prosperity, property owners unable to pay those taxes. A vicious circle.
Herb was rummaging around back in the dimness by the filing cabinet. Presently he came out into the light again, all covered with dust.
'They're only twenty or thirty years of files,' he said, 'and we got the newest one. But I found something else. Back behind the cabinet. Guess it must have fallen back there and nobody ever bothered to clean it out.'
He handed it to me – an old and crumpled paper, so brittle with age I was afraid it might crumble to dust in my very hands.
'There was quite a bit of rubble back of the cabinet,' said Herb. 'Some other papers. Old, too, but this one was the oldest.'
I looked at the date. April 16, 1985.
That yellowed paper was almost five hundred years old! It had come off the press less than thirty-five years after Herb and I had taken off with the time machine!
Lying behind the filing cabinet all those years. The cabinet was large and heavy to move, and janitors in newspaper offices aren't noted for outstanding tidiness.
But there was something bothering me. A little whisper way back in my head, somewhere down at the base of my brain, that kept telling me there was something I should remember.
I tossed the old paper on a desk and walked to a window. Most of the glass was broken out, and what wasn't broken out was coated so thick with grime you couldn't see through it. I looked out through the place where there wasn't any glass.
There the city lay – almost as I remembered it. There was Jackson's tower, the tallest in the city back in 1950, but now dwarfed by three or four others. The spire of the old cathedral was gone, and I missed that, for it had been a pretty thing. I used to sit and watch it from this very window through the mist of early-spring rain or through the ghostly white of the winter's first snowfall. I missed the spire, but Jackson's tower was there, and so were a lot of other buildings I could place.
And every one of them looked lonely. Lonely and not quite understanding – like a dog that's been kicked out of a chair he thinks of as his own. Their windows gaping like dead eyes. No cheerful glow of light within them. Their colors dulled by the wash of seasons that had rolled over them.
This was worse, I told myself, than if we'd found the place all smashed to hell by bombs. Because, brutal as it is, one can understand a bombed city. And one can't understand, or feel comfortable in a city that's just been left behind to die.
And the people!
Thinking about them gave me the jitters. Were all the people like old Daniel Boone? We had seen how he and his family lived, and it wasn't pretty. People who had backed down the scale of progress. People who had forgotten the printed word, had twisted the old truths and the old history into screwy legends.
It was easy enough to understand how it had happened. Pull the economic props from under a civilization and there's hell to pay. First you have mad savagery and even madder destruction as class hatred flames unchecked. And when that hatred dies down after an orgy of destruction there is bewilderment, and then some more savagery and hatred born of bewilderment.
But, sink as low as he may, man always will climb again. It's the nature of the beast. He's an ornery cuss.
But man, apparently, hadn't climbed again. Civilization, as Herb and I knew it, had crashed all of three hundred years before – and man still was content to live in the shadow of his former greatness, not questioning the mute evidences of his mighty past, uninspired by the soaring blocks of stone that reared mountainous above him.
There was something wrong. Something devilish wrong.
Dust rose and tickled my nose, and suddenly I realized my throat was hot and dry. I wanted a beer, if I could only step down the street to the Dutchman's– Then it smacked me straight between the eyes, the thing that had been whispering around in the back of my head all day.
I remembered Billy Larson's face and the way his ears wiggled when he got excited and how hopped up he had been about a sunspot story.
'By Heaven, Herb, I got it,' I yelled, turning from the window.
Herb's mouth sagged, and I knew he thought that I was nuts.
'I know what happened now,' I said. 'We have to get a telescope.'
'Look here, Mike,' said Herb, 'if you feel-'
But I didn't let him finish.
'It's the sunspots,' I yelled at him.
'Sunspots?' he squeaked.
'Sure,' I said. 'There aren't any.'
My hunch bad been right.
