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Title: Past, Present and Future
Author: Schachner, Nat [Nathan] (1895-1955)
Date of first publication: September 1937
Date first posted: 2 November 2016
Date last updated: 2 November 2016
Project Gutenberg Canada ebook #1371

This ebook was produced by Al Haines


PUBLISHER'S NOTE

Italics in the original printed edition are indicated _thus_.

As part of the conversion of the book to its new digital
format, we have made certain minor adjustments in its layout.






PAST, PRESENT AND FUTURE

by Nat Schachner



Kleon stood on the edge of the jungle, stared out at the bright-blue
bay.  The great trireme, with its steeply pitched banks of oars, burned
furiously.  Fire and smoke crackled up to the tropic sun, licked like
running tongues around the poop, swirled with final fury over the god
Poseidon, whose wooden beard and pointing trident adorned the
high-beaked prow.

As the god tottered and fell, charred beyond recognition, into the
briny waters, Kleon bowed his head, uttered the classic prayer of
Homer.  It was an omen, a sign to him that never again would he see his
native vines and twisted olive trees, that never again would he
discourse with the philosophers or hear the godlike Alexander shout the
Macedonian charge against the Persian hosts.

Slowly the embers died, slowly the sound of the crackling timbers
ceased.  Behind him, framed against a tangle of festooned trees and
outlandish blooms, cowered his crew.  They were not of his race; they
were swart Egyptian sailors from Thebes, impressed by the mighty
Alexander for his fleet against Arabia and the Indian potentates.

They held their spears uneasily, bracing themselves against the
terrible wrath of their young commander, knowing that they had been
guilty of foulest treachery, yet not sorry withal for what they had
done.  Their eyes feasted hungrily on the women by their sides--whom
they had found inhabiting this incredible land where strange stars
glowed overhead and the earth teemed with food and shelter and
sustenance for the taking.  These women were tall and light and
straight, with copper-colored skins and laughing eyes that were a
delight to sailors who had seen not even a mermaid for many moons.

Why should they leave these newfound delights, this gentle race of
friendly people who called themselves Mayas in their own liquid tongue,
to embark once more on restless Oceanus and steer back toward the
setting sun?  That was tempting the gods too much.  This time, they
were sure, their bones would molder in the sunless caverns of the
fathomless seas, or their ship sweep over the rim of the world into the
maw of old Chaos.

No, they had had enough of tempting the spirits of the waters.  Only
Isis and Osiris had saved them thus far, since the great wind had
sprung up in the Indian Ocean and separated them from the fleet of
Nearchus, admiral of Alexander, as it skirted the hostile coasts.  They
would stay here, with the people who thought them and their blond young
commander, forsooth, gods from across the sea.  Had they not kneeled
and worshiped Kleon when the trireme had sailed into the fantastic bay?
Had they not cried on him and called him by some outlandish name, as
though he had been long expected?  Quetzal--that was it.

Yet Kleon, in his Greek obstinacy, had ordered them, after a month of
soft surrender to the balmy airs, after replenishment of food and water
casks, to the oars again, to brave once more the perils they had so
miraculously escaped.  His mouth had set in a grim, hard way to all
their protestations.

So they had burned the ship!  It would be impossible for Kleon, for all
his Greek learning, for all the magic arts he had learned among the
wizards of the Persians, the Hindus, and the one-eyed Anthropophagi who
lurked in caves on the Roof of the World, to force them to breast the
waves again.

Yet, because he was their commander and they were but Egyptian slaves,
because he wore bright armor and knew how to wield with slashing
strokes the Macedonian short sword at his side, they cowered and were
uneasy--though they outnumbered him an even hundred to one.

And still the Greek, terrible in his armor like the young sun god, made
no move.  The trireme was a dead-black hulk on the silent waters.  The
Mayas, black-haired, tall, stared at the stranger they had hailed as
Quetzal, with fixed adoration.  Even the raucous birds of many hues,
who seemed to mock them from the trees with human cries, were still.



Hotep, the steersman, approached him timidly.  "You are not angry with
us, noble Kleon," he pleaded.  "We have done only that which seemed
best.  Here, among these people, we are as gods.  Why breast the floods
to suffer hunger and thirst and hideous monsters, and perchance, the
outraged edges of the world, to return once more to--slavery and
backbending toil and the hewing of fierce weapons?"

Kleon turned slowly.  "You have done best for yourselves, no doubt."
he said evenly.  "You are slaves, Egyptians.  You will mingle with
these dwellers beyond the flood and find no demeanment in it.  You will
teach them what you know of the arts and be content.  But I am a Greek
and these are barbarians.  I will not waste my life among such as
these--and you.  Life is a precious depository for the _noumena_, the
metaphysical thought, or it is nothing.  On the farther side of the
world mighty Alexander marches to new triumphs, and the Grecian culture
marches with him.  Here is stagnation, minds that know not science or
noble philosophy.  What have I, a Greek, to do with these--or with you,
for that matter, O Hotep?"

The Egyptian bowed humbly.  He was not offended.  In the elder days his
race had been mighty, but the world had gone topsy-turvy, and the old
gods had yielded to new.  That was why he and his comrades were content
to remain in this new land the balance of their days.

"What do you wish from us, great Kleon?" he asked.

The Greek stared at him speculatively, turned his gaze from the ocean,
from the charred husk of the trireme, slid past the trembling crew,
past the copper-colored natives, flung inland over the impenetrable
jungle to the blue rise of ground that marked the backbone of the
interior.  Smoke curled lazily from a cone-shaped top.  His blue eyes
glinted; a strange luster crept into their being.  When he spoke he
seemed to commune with himself rather than hold conversation with Hotep.

"When Alexander left Persepolis and marched for dreadful months through
strange Asian lands and stranger peoples to the Indus, we passed over
the very top of the world.  There we came upon a race of learned holy
men, so old, so wasted with time's attritions, that verily they seemed
in sooth what they maintained--survivors from an elder day, when earth
was clad in ice and Zeus himself had not been born.

"I spent some time with them, O Hotep, and they opened their minds to
me, a curious seeker after knowledge.  They told me of the days before
the ice came, when the world was young and the bleak hills were covered
with strange verdure and mighty cities; they spoke with the air of
participants in great civilizations long since buried.  In full sooth
their knowledge was beyond that of Aristotle himself.  They averred
that when the frozen waters pressed inexorably southward from the
northern pole their civilization died, but such was the secret science
of their priests that some few were able to immure themselves in
caverns, there to repose for long centuries in immortal inanition, to
awake at a predetermined time when their science taught them the ice
would have ebbed back again to the frozen Boreal regions.

"I was skeptical, as the Sophists had taught me to be, but they took to
me sealed caverns, into which I was able to peer through a strange
instrument that made transparent the solid rock, and behold, I saw some
of their sleepers still.  These, they averred, had set their awakening
for a later era than the rest, desiring to taste the farther future.  A
thousand more years must elapse before these would stir and breathe
again."

"It is incredible," murmured Hotep politely.



The face of Kleon was a contemplative mask.  "They taught me the
secret," he mused.  "The sight of yon mountain, where the Titans rumble
underground and the Cyclopes forge thunderbolts, reminded me of the
tale."

He squared his shoulders suddenly.  His voice lashed out as it was wont
to do when he had led a phalanx into battle.  "Hotep, slaves, listen to
me!"

They jumped at his clarion tones, forgetful that he was but one and
they were an even hundred.  "Yes, gracious lord," they chorused.

"You have done a foul deed.  You are cattle, and this idle land and
idler folk will satisfy your limited desires.  But I am a Greek, and
must blaze always with a bright, clean flame, or life is valueless.  I
do not intend to rust away my remaining days among barbarians.
Therefore, if you seek my forgiveness, you must follow my will in the
exactest degree."

Hotep moved stealthily back to the mass of his comrades, firmed his
grip on his spear.  Did the Greek, perchance, have some mad notion of
building a new trireme from the heavy forest trees, and blunder toward
the west? Rather would he----

Kleon did not seem to see the hostile gestures of his men.  "I, too,
shall brave the future," he declared.  "The present is an empty amphora
for my spirit; I wish to fill myself with the bright wine of days that
are yet unborn.  I shall immure myself in a cavern, even as those
priests who inhabited the Roof of the World, and do thus and so as they
had taught me.  I shall set a time for my awakening--let me see--yea,
ten thousand years.  Who knows what strange and marvelous visions will
greet my eye in that tremendous span of years!"

Spears dropped with dull thuds from nerveless fingers; black beards
gaped in ludicrous astonishment, confused voices called on Horus and
Ammon-Ra.  The copper folk, all unwitting, knowing not the meaning of
the god, Quetzal, nevertheless, prostrated themselves in fear before
his flashing eye, the sound of his speech that surged like the many
billowed sea.

Hotep burst out in gasping words.  "Lord, have you in sooth gone mad?
These tales of magic have addled your brain! They but mocked you.  It
is impossible----"

"It is enough," Kleon broke in sharply, "that I command it."  He
fingered his sword significantly.

A wave of hasty assent rose like incense from the crew.  Why should
they not do the mad Greek's bidding? Even so, would they be freed from
ever-present dread of their treachery and meditated vengeance.  They
would live their lives among these gentle folk, take their women for
wives, and loll in ease and security after much buffetings.  Let the
Greek be immured, if he wished, in the bowels of the earth, let him
wait for that fantastic future he described.

It took almost a year to perform the task.  But Kleon drove his crew
and these pliable folk, who called themselves Mayas, relentlessly.  Now
that the die was cast, now that he had pondered on it nights and days,
he was eager for that future which the gymnosophists of the Roof of the
World had promised him; indeed, he was very eager.

He required a volcano; for the gases generated in the smithies of the
Cyclopes were necessary for his entombment.  He found the blue cone
from which the smoke eternally wisped some fifty stadia inland.  He
caused its base to be cleared, and there the Egyptians built for him a
small pyramid, patterned according to the one of Cheops, on which the
copper-colored Mayas toiled willingly like submissive beasts of burden.
Underneath the tapering stone they inclosed a chamber, rough-hewn,
built against the millenniums, air-sealed against all outer
contamination.  From the chamber they led vents of stone to the bowels
of the fire-breathing mountain, so that, by ingenious tappets, the
swirling gases of brimstone and sulphurous pungency might be inducted
in due proportions.

Then they withdrew and Kleon busied himself in secret.  From his
leather jerkin underneath the armor he drew a leaden globule.  This had
been given him by the gymnosophists with appropriate instructions.
Within its hollow shell was a lustrous, ever-burning substance--a
substance that burned, yet consumed itself only after thousands and
thousands of years.

Kleon handled the pellet gingerly, prepared its mechanism so that, at a
pressure, tiny openings would appear, so regulated as to emit the
radiations of the interior element in specified amounts, and cease
completely after ten thousand years.  He, a Greek, of course, did not
know that he held in his hand an ounce of pure, elemental radium, the
secret of whose isolation from its salts had been known to that
preglacial civilization, and had been since lost to the new-born world.

Then, as he had been taught, he arranged a comfortable niche in which
to spread himself, saw to it that certain hinged stones devised by
Hotep fell swiftly and smoothly into place on swinging pivots to cut
off all entrance and exit, placed over a secret spring that controlled
the pivots a tiny disk of laminated, fluorescent substance, likewise
furnished by the ancients from the Roof of the World.  On this was
trained the perforations from the pellet of radium.

The potent radiations from the sacred element, they told him, would
disintegrate each lamination of the disk in exactly one thousand years.
Therefore, Kleon peeled off the excess layers and left but ten to
withstand the steady buffets of the radium.  As the bombardment finally
pierced the last fluorescent layer, the unobstructed rays would then
impinge on the naked spring that actuated the mechanism of the pivoting
stones.  They would turn smoothly in their sockets; air would rush in
from outer vents, whiff away the preservative gases, and he, Kleon,
would then awake as though from a short, dreamless nap, ten thousand
years into the future.

They had tried to explain to him the exact interaction of pure,
elemental radium with the special mixture of sulphurous oxides,
hydrochloric acid, sulphocyanides and hydrocarbons of which volcanic
gases are compounded, but chemistry was not a science of which the
Greeks had any knowledge.  It was sufficient for Kleon that the
products of the interaction had certain effects on body tissues and
organs.  They acted as an arrester of vital processes, a bath in which
all life remained suspended indefinitely with blood uncongealed and
flesh both fresh and firm.



At last the day arrived.  Kleon felt his heart beat unduly fast.
Suppose the gymnosophists had been but playing on his Greek credulity,
suppose they were magicians whose feats were illusions; suppose,
instead, he would die within this tomb and never emerge.  He laughed,
and the sound of his laughter was hollow in his ears.  He did not fear
death, yet----

They were within the pyramid, within the sacred chamber--only Hotep and
he.  Outside, guarding the entrance, was his crew, spears uplifted in
reverence in accordance with his strict instructions.  Beyond, covering
the cleared space around the pyramid, flat on their faces in adoration,
lay the Mayas.  Quetzal, the blond white god, it had been announced to
them, intended to sleep.  He was weary of the wickedness of the world.
But some day, refreshed, mighty, he would arise and bring to his
children, the Mayas, eternal life, peace and unexampled prosperity.

"I think," Kleon told Hotep with a grim smile, "that will be sufficient
to protect me from harm."  He looked shrewdly at the Egyptian.  "I
think also," he continued, "that you will find it profitable to
perpetuate the legend."

Hotep grinned slyly in his beard.  "You have an all-penetrating eye,
noble Kleon.  I shall make myself high priest of Quetzal, and my
children after me."

"I didn't doubt it," Kleon commented dryly.  Then his face became an
expressionless mask.  He tested the vents, the ensealing stone.  "It is
time, O Hotep.  Do you retire and swing the stone into place behind
you.  Then, as you value your life and the honor of your approaching
priesthood, seek no more entrance to my abode."

The Egyptian struggled for utterance in his black beard, bowed
suddenly, and retired.  The huge, rough-hewn stone clicked softly into
place.  The chamber was sealed.

Kleon, as one already dead, went about his preparations.  A smoky torch
was all his illumination.  The laminated disk swung into position over
the spring.  The lead pellet fitted snugly into its niche.  A touch of
the mechanism and infinitesimal holes in the lead trained on the disk.
A curious stream of radiance leaped out into the chamber.  The
fluorescent material of the ten-laminated disk glowed with a fiery
bombardment.  Kleon felt a strange tingling of his skin, as though
innumerable atoms were popping into oblivion.  He had been warned
against the deadly effects of the unobstructed radium.

Half aghast at what he was about to do, he completed his preparations.
Very carefully he laid himself down on his prepared pallet, hewn out of
the solid wall, stretched himself out.  By his side he laid his sword,
and a keen-edged javelin.  He was a fighting man, a leader of a
phalanx.  Who knew what manner of men he might meet in that remote,
unimaginable future.  In a corner of the chamber were sealed potteries,
filled with dried food and water against his hunger and thirst on
awakening.

He grimaced.  Would he indeed awaken?  His sinewy fingers held on the
tiny metal lever at his side.  A downward pressure and the
smooth-shaped stones that sealed the vents from the volcano would open.
After that----

The torch flickered smokily.  Soon it would go out.  The air in the
inclosure was being fast used up.  Breathing was becoming laborious.
The stream of fiery radiance across the gloom seemed timeless; the disk
pricked out in pin points of flame.  The dry tingling of his skin
increased.  He gritted his teeth, swung down on the lever.

Three great stones moved noiselessly on their sockets; three smooth
holes appeared suddenly in the wall.  There was a faint rumble, a
sucking sound.  Gas billowed in, thick, yellow.

It swarmed through the underground chamber with clammy, twining
tentacles.  It beat around his head with acrid, suffocating vapors.
The torch flickered, plunged into darkness.  His body twitched; his
lungs labored for air.  The gas sucked in, stung and smarted.

But already a faint luminescence glimmered through the yellow, clogging
surge.  It spread.  Fireflies glittered and danced.  There was a
crackling sound, new pungent odors.  Chemical transformations beyond
his knowledge were taking place.

Kleon felt a sudden release from the burning sensations.  He tried to
breathe, couldn't.  He tried to move his limbs.  They refused all
action.  The pounding of his heart slowed, died.  A vast drowsiness
assailed him.  He was slipping.  Time slipped with him.

This, then, was death.  The chamber revolved slowly around him.  His
thoughts drifted through soft obstructions.  Never again would he see
his native vines, his gnarled olives--Athens--Alexander--comrades----

The chamber underneath the pyramid was very still.  The vents to the
volcano had closed automatically.  The transformed gases laved the
motionless body in their bath of inanition.  The radium poured forth
its ceaseless glow.  The laminated disk glittered under the impact.
All was silence.  Time had ceased----




II.

Sam Ward wiped the sweat from the palms of his hands along the rough
khaki of his trousers, and stared.  He was tired, perspiring, bitten by
stinging insects, broiled by the hot Guatemalan sun, and more than a
bit disappointed.  He had been led to expect more.

"There eet ees," the half-breed Indian pointed his grimy finger with
half-triumphant, half-fearful gesture.  "Juan nevaire lies.  Now seor
will pay heem the fifty dollars Mex he promise.  Juan do not weesh to
stay.  There ees dangaire."

Sam did not answer.  He took in the scene with practiced eyes.  It was
a find, all right, but there were innumerable higher and more elaborate
ruins within the Yucatan Peninsula.  There would be nothing here of
startling importance.

Sam had done many things in the few years since he had left college.
China and the war lords, diggings in the Mesopotamia coupled with
certain unheralded brushes with the Bedouins, an unregulated,
unauthorized stay with the Harvard excavations at Chichen-Itza in
Yucatan.  Then, finally, this comparatively tame, but well-paid
assignment to investigate the inner jungles of Guatemala for
possibilities of banana plantations on behalf of a New York syndicate.

At San Felipe, off the Pacific Coast, he had met Juan.  A dirtier,
frowsier, more drink-sodden half-breed did not exist.  But Sam found
him almost his sole source of information.

The whites were courteous, but vague.  They shrugged expressive
shoulders.  The steamy jungles that rolled interminably inland up to
the gaunt ramparts of the Sierra Madre were places most assuredly not
to be visited.  They were impenetrable, malarial, full of ticks and
yellow fever, quaking with bottomless bogs, inhabited only by poisonous
snakes and fierce animals, and, said his informants expressively, the
Indians would not like it.

Sam Ward grinned at this latter bit of news.  He felt perfectly
competent to take care of himself.  He was tall, broad-shouldered, with
lean, hard muscles that rippled smoothly as he walked.  He had been in
jungles before, and he had faced men wilder than any beast or snake.  A
holster flapped carelessly at his side, and it housed a six-chambered
revolver.  It was fully loaded and Sam had used it with effect and
deadly accuracy on certain necessary occasions.  There were more
bullets in his cartridge belt.  No, Sam Ward did not much worry about
the dislike of the Indians.  He had a job to do for which his employers
had paid liberally, and it would be done.

"But why," he asked carefully, "would the Indians not like it?"

His informant shrugged again.  He was the mayor of San Felipe, short,
stout, and a trifle asthmatic.  "They do not tell, seor," he
acknowledged.  "They are Mayas, descendants of a stiff-necked race.
Those jungles are sacred to them.  There have been men gone in there,
seor, but they never come out.  So----"

Sam tried the Indians.  They were tall and straight and handsome in a
copper-colored way.  No seor!  They would not guide him into the
jungle, not even for twenty dollars Mex.  Why?  The god Quetzal would
not like it; he was asleep, biding his time.



It was then he found Juan, outcast from white and red alike, vainly
trying to cadge another drink of the fiery _tequila_ from a
flinty-hearted tavern keeper.  Sam set him up, promised more, _mucho_
more, for guidance into the forbidden territory.  Juan babbled
confusedly in terror, but yielded after a few more drinks skillfully
applied.

Then came hours of hacking through thorny jungles, hours of slogging
through bogs and fighting ticks and mosquitoes.  It was a hell hole.
Yet there were certain areas where the trees might be planted, if only
the natives could be cajoled into work.  A gamble any way you looked at
it, Sam thought.  He was ready to turn back.

Juan saw his gesture of disappointment.  He thought fast.  He knew how
these fool Americans paid generously to be shown bits of stone in the
jungle.  His drink-colored brain had lost all fear.

"Maybe I show the gracious seor where Quetzal he sleep?  Maybe eet ees
worth fifty dollars Mex, huh, seor?" he said hopefully.

Sam pricked up his ears.  "Quetzal?  Nonsense!  Every guttersnipe in
Central America will show you where that fabulous god sleeps, for a
consideration.  I've seen enough unnecessary stones in Yucatan to last
me a lifetime.  Besides, the old Mayas built no cities on the Pacific
side."

"Thees ees different," Juan persisted.  He had noted joyfully that
there had been no objection to the fifty dollars, and in his greed he
lost all sense of superstitious fear.  "Thees--what you call it--real
theeng.  I listen once to priests making talk in time of full moon."

Sam considered.  The Sierra Madre loomed jagged and high a bare half
dozen miles farther east.  A smooth, symmetrical cone plumed lazy smoke
into the air, tiredly, as though it had been doing so for incredible
ages.

"Done!" Sam decided suddenly.  Bananas had not worked out very well.
Perhaps archaeology might.  Another Chichen-Itza?  "But remember--no
Quetzal, no money."

And now he stood, disappointed, staring at the smooth flanks of the
volcano, and at the half overgrown, very low, plain pyramid that was
almost lost in its shade.  Mayan ruins, no doubt, and in a virgin
territory.  But he had seen hundreds of similar ruins which had yielded
nothing of particular importance.

"Quetzal in there," Juan insisted.  "Please, seor, geeve me the fifty
dollars Mex and let Juan go queekly.  Quetzal maybe get angry."

Sam shook his head.  "No sale," he grunted.  "Show me Quetzal and I'll
double it."

But he was talking to thin air.  For the half-breed had swung suddenly
on his bare heel, let out a startled yell, and dived headlong into the
tangled jungles that inclosed them.

"Here, what the devil!" Sam cried and jerked at his gun.

Then he stopped, and his mouth set in a grim gash.  He had seen certain
gliding forms slip noiselessly through the thorn bushes and vanish.
Mayas!  They had been on his trail for hours, dogging his crashing
progress through the jungle.  Juan, he decided, would never get back to
San Felipe.  The odds were against Sam Ward's return, either, he
thought quietly.

Slowly, he backed up to the overgrown pyramid, gun trained for the
slightest movement in the encompassing jungle.  There was none.  If he
could climb the ruin's crumbling, vegetation-covered slopes, he might
be able to orient himself, find a way through the trackless forests.

His foot caught in a depression; he stumbled.  He jerked around, nerves
tense.  There, at the base of the slope, practically screened from view
by a mat of creepers, was a black hole.  His foot had crashed through
the tough lianas, burst them asunder.



Still wary, expecting every moment to hear the whistle of a blowpipe
dart through the air, he bent to examine it.  Luckily, he had a
flashlight.  He sprayed it down.  The questing light illumined a
passage, steeply slanting, straight, stretching fathomlessly.

Feverishly, Sam clawed away the remaining creepers.  He forgot even the
lurking Mayas, waiting to slay this invader of their ancient secrets.
Maybe the drunken half-breed had been right, after all.  For this
passage was squared by human hands, and in a fashion different from
those of the Yucatan pyramids.  Vague familiarity rugged at his brain,
exploded into sudden knowledge.  He had seen passages just like this in
Egypt, at the Great Pyramid of Cheops.

He knelt, sniffed at the air.  It was cold and dank with the must of
the underground, but it was breathable.  He took a swift glance
backward.  There was not a rustle in the jungle, not even a bird cry.
He smiled grimly.  The Mayas were waiting patiently.  Time was of no
particular value to them.  Well, let them wait.  He also had plenty of
time to die.

Meanwhile, the pyramid tugged at him, flooded him with eagerness.  Its
very shape, overgrown as it was, showed Egyptian influences.  If he
could prove that thesis, then the whole problem of the Mayas might be
solved.  If!  He laughed harshly.  He had no illusions.  The chances of
his breaking through to San Felipe were mighty slim.  Then he shrugged,
even as the mayor had shrugged, even as a certain Kleon had shrugged
over two millenniums before.  His life was in the lap of the gods.  In
the meantime----

He ducked quietly into the passageway.  Rocks and loose dirt slithered
in after him.  The echoes were like muffled thunder.  Carefully, he
picked his way along, always down, spraying the flash before him.  The
walls were rough-hewn, but neatly jointed, bare of all carving.  It was
cold and the air somewhat foul.  Which meant that there was no other
exit to the tunnel to create a ventilating draft.

Down, down he went, cautiously, watchful.  Behind him were the Mayas,
resentful of his desecration of their secrets; before him was--what?

He found out fast enough.  He was staring blankly at a solid, barring
wall.  The tunnel had ended abruptly.  He flashed his light carefully
over its surface, and his heart leaped.  Very faintly, almost smudged
by obliterating time, he noted thin, straight cracks.  A final capping
stone had been heaved into position, incredible ages before.  That
meant there was a chamber within, sealed by long-forgotten men.

Juan had talked of Quetzal.  So had the frowning Mayas.  That, of
course, was ridiculous.  Quetzal was a myth, like--like--Zeus and
Poseidon and all the Greek Pantheon.

Nevertheless, he must get in, even if he never lived to disclose to the
world what he had found.  But how?  The great stone must weigh over a
ton, and there was no way even to get a fingerhold in that thin line of
division.  It would require patient drilling with high-powered drills.
He laughed at that.  He might as well as ask for the moon.

Then his eyes narrowed.  There had been tales, in Egypt, of cunning
artifices, of secret springs that moved stones smoothly.  He had never
seen one, nor had any one else with whom he had talked.  Always it was
some vague other, third or fourth removed from the narrator, who had
vouched for such finds.

Nevertheless, his sensitive fingers strayed and tapped and probed.
With a lilt of exultation he edged a forefinger into a tiny, shallow
concavity, discernible only to pressure, not to sight.  He jabbed.



The wall seemed to disappear smoothly in front of him.  He had not even
seen the great stone turn on its pivoting axis.  Light glowed beyond.

He jerked through the opening, swung his flash eagerly around.  A short
exclamation throttled his throat, died queerly on his lips.  He was in
a rough-hewn chamber, walled with blocks of solid stone.  A strange
radiance streamed from a tiny niche in the opposite wall, danced past
him in a direct beam toward the way he had entered.  This was in itself
exciting enough.  But in the farther corner, dimly illuminated by the
queer, crackling luminance, ensconced in a recess carved out of the
solid rock, a figure stretched motionless.

Dead, of course, but queerly lifelike, queerly fresh and untouched by
the countless years of immurement.  He seemed as if he were merely
asleep, awaiting some last trump.

Sam pressed forward.  His limbs were strangely sluggish, his breathing
heavy.  There was a curious yellow smoke within the chamber, glowing
with an inner light, that stirred clammily about him.  Sam paid no
attention, attributing his thudding heart to the excitement of his find.

For the man on that bed of rock was blond of hair and white of skin.
His features, composed in the embalmment of death, were regular,
classical, as if chiseled on a medallion.  Armor encased his limbs,
still untarnished, still bright.

Unbidden, wild theories flashed through Sam.  This was no swarthy Maya
chieftain.  This was--Quetzal?  The legend of that bright, blond god
who had come out of the Pacific, blue-eyed, bringing civilization to
the Mayas.  Could it possibly be----

Then, and then only, did Sam Ward feel the choking sensation in his
throat, the nightmare clogging of his limbs, the electric prickling of
his skin.  The gas!  An embalming gas, whose secret had been lost in
the mists of time, whose preservative influence was doubtless
responsible for the incredible condition of the blond-haired mummy.  He
must get out quickly--give it a chance to dissipate----

The cry that welled from his lips was strangely thin.  The pivoted
stone through which he had come had disappeared.  In its place was a
solid, blank-seeming wall.  He had not heard it close behind him.  Yet
he could have sworn there had been a guttural chuckle, the stealthy pad
of naked feet.  The Mayas had crawled soundlessly after him, had
immured him for all eternity!

He stared at the fluorescent disk that glowed uncannily on the stone.
His thought processes were becoming curiously fogged.  He tried to
laugh.  The sound was dull, far-off.  Irony!  He had made the greatest
find of modern times, and he could not shout it from the housetops.
Quetzal had taken his revenge.  Perhaps, in some future rime, remote
archaeologists would break into this chamber, find an incredible sight.
A fair-haired god in bright armor--and another mummy, dressed in rough
khaki, obviously of the twentieth century.  He could envisage their
bewilderment, their learned explanations.

The flash dropped from his paralyzed fingers; his limbs swayed
pendulously.  He tried to breathe, couldn't.  His heart no longer
pounded.  He was floating on a huge, yellow sea.  His brain fought on a
moment, failed.  He fell, sprawled out on his back.

The flash sent its aimless beam along the stone floor, died out
eventually.  But the glow from the leaden pellet persisted, as it had
for more than two thousand years before.  Time ticked on wearily in the
outside world.  Civilizations rose and fell; wars decimated the earth;
incredible events took place.

But within the chamber silence reigned and the radium clock burned on
with ceaseless energy.  Two figures lay, side by side, motionless,
untouched.  Outside, storm and sun and air-carried seeds built up over
the low pyramid layer on layer of soil.  The Mayas were forgotten.  The
last priest, descendant of one Hotep, prayed for the last time with
bleared, hopeless eyes.  Juan rotted into mother earth, a tiny poisoned
dart between his shoulder blades.  Sam Ward, too, was forgotten.  For a
few weeks there had been a flurry in San Felipe.  But the search was
halfhearted, and there was no way to determine where he had been lost
in the jungle.

Kleon--a Greek--and Sam Ward--an American--heirs of different ages,
united eternally in subterranean death, while the world wagged on to a
fantastic future!




III.

Tomson was curiously near to the vulgar emotion of anger as he stepped
into the conveyor tube that would drop him to the lowest subterranean
level of Hispan.  He did not like to leave his cubicle on the middle
level.  There was home, his laboratory, his equipment, his calculation
chamber.  The atmospheric pressure was carefully attuned to his
delicate body; the temperature did not vary by a hundredth of a degree
from the warmth that was best adapted to the efficient working of his
mind.  In all the fifty years of his life he had not stirred more than
half a dozen times from his level, and never this far down to the
lowermost diggings of the Worker caste.

Why should he?  He held his ordered niche in the system of Hispan.  It
had been fixed from birth, was comfortable, unalterable.  Any other
mode of existence was inconceivable.  There had always been Olgarchs,
there would always be the need for his class, the Technicians; and as
for the Workers--well, no one paid much attention to them.  They worked
out their lives in the bowels of the earth, tended the mighty machines
that made Hispan possible, dug and bred and died in humble anonymity.

Tomson dropped steadily down the conveyor tube that ran the vertical
length of Hispan.  A field of force hummed always in the tube.
Travelers regulated the speed of ascent or descent by resistor packs
attached to their belts.  A slight shift to the right or left of the
rheostat lever and positive or negative resistance to the field of
force built up quickly in the required degree, and determined the speed
and direction of flight.

Tomson passed the secondary levels of the lesser Technicians and his
bald, bulging forehead wrinkled.  It had been Harri who had
respectfully but insistently begged his presence in the subterranean
diggings.  Damn the fellow, with his twitching face and excitable
gesticulations of hands and legs.  Why couldn't he have handled this
alleged new situation himself and not have disturbed Tomson's
intellectual concentrations?  Didn't he know how highly organized and
easily disrupted the delicate body and brain case of a chief Technician
was?  Down here in the Worker levels were crude pressures, fit only for
hulking creatures, and temperatures that fluctuated by as much as a
whole degree either way.

He shivered as he dropped, was tempted to return to his quarters and
let Harri struggle with the problem himself.  But Harri was obviously
floundering, frightened even; and if anything went wrong the Olgarchs
would hold him, Tomson, responsible.  He sighed, and sped up the tempo
of his fall.

The levels flashed by with clicking signals, tier on tier of them.
Each one held its ordered niche in the society of Hispan.  He had
passed the ten sections of the lesser Technicians, dropped through the
storage levels, the incubator tiers, the subsidiary power units; then
he fled past the myriad swarming cells of the Workers, down through the
factories where the food pellets were synthesized, past the levels of
the intricate machines, and the eternal flames of the atom crushers.

There were others rising and descending in the force field of the
conveyor tube.  All greeted him as he flashed by, some with the decent
nods of equals, others with respectful salutations in nice gradations
of humbleness according to the level of abode.  He returned them with
the proper bend of head and twist of hand--and suddenly bent his slight
form almost double.



A young man had just stepped out on the platform of the Workers' eating
level, twisted his resistor pack, was rising in the conveyor tube.  He
was tall and well-formed, not spindly and bulging of forehead as
Tomson, nor clumsily heavy as the Workers.  He moved with a quick, calm
grace, and his tawny hair was almost radiant.  His features were
aristocratic, high-bred, and were saved from superciliousness only by a
frank, careless smile which he flashed on Workers, Technicians and
equals alike, much to the scandal of his fellow Olgarchs.

He returned Tomson's respectful genuflection with the same grin, and
was gone, a tawny portent, flashing upward to the highest Olgarchic
tier.  Tomson straightened out, so startled that he forgot the proper
meticulous nod to the next Worker who humbly saluted him.

What was Beltan, an Olgarch, doing in the Worker levels?  It was not,
of course, the province of a Technician, even a chief, to question the
goings and comings of the Olgarchs; but very rarely, and only for
serious reasons, did any of the ruling caste deign to leave their parks
and palaces.  Tomson realized that Beltan was different from his
fellows.  With the others, like Gano, the dark, saturnine head, he knew
his place and was at ease.  Not so with Beltan.

The yellow-haired young Olgarch was forever poking his nose into nooks
and corners of all the levels, had sought certain technical and
scientific information from Tomson about which his fellows had never
bothered, had actually, on occasion, spoken to a Worker.  This in
itself was an unheard-of-thing, and Tomson disapproved of it strongly.
Let each man order his actions in conformity with custom and
station--even an Olgarch.

The bottom of the great shaft shot up to meet the Technician.  In his
bemusement he had barely time to switch the lever and come to a
floating halt.  He had reached the end of his three-thousand-foot drop.

He shivered, drew his scanty garment close around his thin shoulders.
He coughed slightly.  His sensitive skin detected the unforgivable
variation of temperature in these depths.  Why, it was surely a degree
and a half below blood heat, the equable bath in which his body was
wholly at ease.

Harri was waiting for him at the bottom of the conveyor tube.  His
sharp-nosed features betrayed his mingled anxiety and relief at the
sight of the chief Technician.  Now all responsibility was lifted from
his own shoulders.  Harri, like all lesser Technicians, was able to
sustain only a minimum of such an onerous commodity as independent
thought and action.  He was of the caste who contacted the Workers
directly, engineered their operations, directed their activities.  They
were the administrative branch, whereas the chief Technicians performed
executive duties only; planned, experimented, made scientific
discoveries.

"What is the meaning of this?" Tomson asked sharply.  "Must a chief be
disturbed from his important meditations simply because you are too
lazy to think your problem out?"



Harri suffered from a nervous tic.  A good many Technicians of both
classes were thus afflicted.  The neural system was overdeveloped
compared to the muscular and vascular supports.  His nearsighted eyes
blinked rapidly; his arms and legs jerked uncontrollably.  "I am sorry,
Tomson," he declared humbly, "for breaking in upon your meditations.
But a situation has arisen.  You see, you gave instructions for a crew
of Workers to blast new areas from the underlying rock.  I was placed
in charge."

"I know--I know!" Tomson grumbled impatiently.  "We need more fuel for
the atom crushers.  Get on with your story."

"It is simply this, Tomson," Harri hurried.  "In accordance with proper
procedure, I turned on the penetro ray before I gave the order to
blast.  It sometimes happens there are materials embedded in the rock
stratum we could otherwise use.  I declare, my heart almost ceased its
necessary functions at what the ray disclosed.  I stopped all work,
hastened to contact you at once.  This represents a problem not in my
sphere of action."

"What," demanded Tomson, "did you see that scared you into the loss of
all faculties?"

"You shall determine for yourself.  Look!"

They were standing below the lowermost level.  During the course of
thousands of years, as Hispan required more and more power for its
purpose, the solid rock that underlay the city had gradually been
penetrated to greater and greater depths.  The rock was blasted with
shattering electro-dissonances, the resulting powder fed into the atom
crushers, and there, in shielded furnaces, the electrons burst from the
atom shells, flashed into annihilation, and furnished energy for all
the mighty machines that powered the city.

Within the still unfinished cavern, blasted from glistening quartzite,
stood twoscore Workers.  They were powerful, husky men, towering over
the intellectualized Technicians, and their bodies were knotted and
twisted with muscles.  They stood by the boring machines and blasters,
immobile, waiting patiently for the end of the conference of their
chiefs.  If they waited for hours it did not matter.  Nothing mattered.
It was all routine.  They worked their shift, and they returned to the
eating level, ate their pellets in silence in long community barracks,
shifted to the mating quarters, performed their necessary acts,
ascended next to the recreation level, where, for a few precious hours,
they talked, quarreled, jested, saw selected audio visions of innocuous
comedy at which they roared unthinkingly, and by signal, shifted to the
final sleeping unit, there to be awakened by further signal to continue
the endless round.

Harri's finger jittered toward the control mechanism of the penetro
ray, switched it on.  The machine hummed with blue light.  The solid
rock seemed to dissolve in front of it, to become transparent as the
clearest glass.  Tomson stared, started violently in spite of himself.
It was not proper for a chief Technician to show vulgar surprise in
front of inferiors.

The vague outlines of a mathematical pyramid glimmered beneath,
surrounded by encrusting pressure strata.  Within its tapering body a
passage showed, clogged with sediment and crumbled stone.  At the
farther end it opened into a shadowy chamber.  He stepped quickly
forward, adjusted the depth of the ray to bring its contents into bold
relief.



Two bodies lay sprawled--one outstretched within a niche, clad in
shining metal, the other twisted on the stony floor as if he had fallen
unawares.  Neither was a man of Hispan, in lineaments or dress.  They
seemed strangers from another world--preserved in every detail as if
they had just fallen asleep, yet obviously dead.  A yellowish gas,
slightly iridescent, filled the chamber.

Tomson wrinkled his vestigial nose.  The delicate instrument next to
the ray apparatus was fluctuating violently.  Powerful radiations were
filtering through the layers of rock.  He permitted himself a most
unseemly exclamation of astonishment.  Within a corner of the immuring
chamber he saw the shadow of a pellet, through whose eyelets thin
shafts of radiance were streaming.  Metallic radium, its atoms breaking
down through countless centuries, emitting ceaseless packets of alpha,
beta and gamma rays!

"What shall we do?" Harri asked worriedly.

For the moment Tomson's shoulders sagged.  He would have wished not to
have the responsibility of a decision.  Should he call on Gano, head of
the Olgarchs, for his orders in this emergency?  Then he straightened
his frail body.  No!  This was his province; he must handle it himself.

He tried to keep his voice from quavering as he issued what he thought
were crisp commands.  "Blast away the outside layers of rock, Harri,
then the inner wall of the chamber.  But be careful not to harm
anything within.  We must examine the bodies of these strange beings
who have been buried, for who knows how long, under the very
foundations of Hispan."

Harri gave orders.  The Workers obediently moved into action.  The
borers hummed and bit through the hard stone like so much melted
butter; the blasters whiffed the surrounding layers into impalpable
dust, which was instantly sucked into vacuum conveyors and whirled
aloft to the atom crushers for conversion into power.

"That's enough."  Harri gestured.

The borers stopped, the blasters died, and the last thin layer was
gone.  The chamber lay exposed to their view.

The thin yellow gas swirled out, dispersed into scattering particles.
The air rushed in, laved the silent figures.  At a word, a Worker
lumbered over to the radium pellet, thrust it into a leaden receptacle,
sealed the top.  It did not matter if his hand were burned by the
deadly radiations in the process.

Harri gulped.  His eyes almost bulged out of his head; the skin
twitched over his face with rapid jerks.  "Look, Tomson," he gasped
feebly.  "They're alive!"

Tomson felt the perspiration start out on his bald brow, in spite of
the fact that the temperature was more than a degree below his
accustomed normal.  The Workers looked uneasy.  Alarm gaped on their
lowering faces.  The chief Technician had sufficient presence of mind
to order them sharply to their quarters, though their shift had still
some time to go.  It was unprecedented, but so was the situation in
which he found himself.

The Workers went hastily, shuffled into the conveyor tube, lifted
swiftly to empty eating quarters, chattering at what they had seen.

Tomson and Harri were left alone to face those risen from the dead.




IV.

Sam Ward was the first to return to the interrupted processes of life.
He had been under the retardant influences a lesser period than Kleon.
As the preservative gases fled, and fresh, clean air took their place,
he opened his eyes.  He yawned; he stretched unwittingly.  He did not
know what had happened.  It seemed, for the first few seconds, that he
had merely aroused from a particularly deep and healthful sleep.

Then he blinked.  Was he dreaming?  What the devil was this place?  Who
were those curious creatures who stared at him as if he were a new
species of insect?  His eye fell on the outstretched figure of the man
in armor.  The figure was moving, was sitting up!

With an exclamation, awareness flooded Sam.  San Felipe, Juan, the
jungle, the pyramid, the Mayas, the stumbling into this cave, the
entrapment, then--blankness----

He jerked to his feet swiftly.  The gun whipped out of its holster,
leveled.  "All right," he said harshly.  "What is this masquerade
about?"  His question was directed to the two outlandish figures before
him.  This jungle was spewing forth more and more strange things.  They
were not Mayas, but neither were they members of any human race he had
ever come across.  And those intricate machines that filled the
background of the cavern.  He was sufficient of a physicist and
engineer to realize that they were far in advance of the year 1937.

Tomson shook his head sagely.  This was indeed a matter for Gano.  His
brain clicked keenly.  After all, he was a chief Technician.  He knew
something of the history of the world in the dim days before it died,
and Hispan was isolated in a protective film.  These were primitives of
those earlier eras, somehow immured in this underground chamber,
overlaid with the rocky accretions of centuries.  The radium pellet,
the gas that had dissipated, had kept life intact, through static.

It did not surprise him either that the stranger spoke an archaic
variant of the tongue of Hispan.  There had been a universal language
on earth before it died.  As for the curiously fashioned bit of metal
in his hand, that was obviously a weapon.  Doubtless solid pellets
issued from its orifice.  He was not afraid.  Fear had been bred out of
the Technician class.  Besides, one touch of the blaster inset at his
side, and stranger, weapon and all, would go to feed the energy units
of the atom crushers.

"Masquerade?" he repeated slowly.  "That is a word I do not know.  But
you require much explanation--you, your comrade, and this place in
which you have laid as one dead.  The questioning I shall leave to
Gano."

Sam Ward lowered his gun.  Surprise at the clipped, curious syllables
of this little man with the high, bald forehead and single belted
garment of lustrous material gaped his jaw.  It was English, in a
sense, and understandable, but----

At this instant Kleon rose lithely to his feet, caught up his short
Macedonian sword.  He seemed like a god among mortals--his fair blond
hair, his calm blue eyes that took them all in with one sweeping
glance.  This, then, was the future, ten thousand years ahead.  The
gymnosophists from the Roof of the World had not lied.  He was
disappointed, a bit contemptuous.  Were these the beings of the future?
Could a Greek of Alexander's day, steeped in Aristotle and Aeschylos,
find meet companionship with these spindly, feeble creatures who stood
before him?

Then his eyes met those of Sam Ward.  Ah, this was a different manner
of man.  He took in, approvingly, the tall, well-shouldered body, the
evidence of power and muscular development, the steady gray of eyes,
the level brow.  Here was a man who could fight as at a frolic--and
judge wisely--a healthy mind in a healthy body.

Sam was bewildered.  Quetzal had come to life.  These others----  It
was getting damned confusing, nightmarish even.

He whirled on Kleon.  "And who the devil are you--Quetzal, Maya, or
what?"

Kleon stared quietly.  This was a language strange to him, a bit
barbarous, if the truth must be told, with its harsh consonants and
lack of mellifluous vowels.  Yet there were two words--Quetzal, Maya.
He understood them.  Those copper-colored Cimmerians on whose far shore
his trireme had been driven had called themselves Mayas, and they had
termed him Quetzal, and bowed down in worship.

"Your tongue is unknown to me, my friend of a future that is now," he
said calmly.  "But I recognize the words Quetzal and Maya.  The
barbarians called me Quetzal; why, I do not know.  But I am Kleon of
Athens, who had journeyed far with mighty Alexander, and whose ship had
been driven to a strange coast.  There was no return; Hotep and the
Egyptian slaves burned the ship.  It was not meet for a Greek to rust
out his life with barbarians.  I therefore availed myself of a certain
magic taught me by the gymnosophists and slept into the future, hoping
then to meet beings fitter to converse with an Athenian.  Ten thousand
years should have elapsed.  I confess I am taken with your presence,
stranger, but these two others are beneath my notice.  Are they
perchance your slaves?"

Sam Ward did not even know he had slid his gun back into its holster.
This was becoming entirely too incredible.  First two weakling
creatures who spoke a distorted English, yet were obviously of an
advanced civilization.  Now the god in shining armor, risen from the
dead, speaking in ancient Greek, avowing matters beyond all
possibility.  For Sam had studied Greek at college and recognized the
long surges, the mighty flow of that noblest of all languages.

He shook his head violently to clear his addled brain.  Ten thousand
years ahead!  That meant eight thousand years for him.  Good Lord!  Had
he slept that long?  Were these others representatives of that
far-distant future?  He opened his mouth to speak, fumbling for the
dimly remembered Greek.

But Tomson had decided that enough time had been wasted.  He had
understood the tongue of the man in the coarse-fibered clothes, but not
this other in shining metal.

"Enough," he interrupted peremptorily.  "These are matters for Gano,
the head of the Olgarchs, to settle.  You will come with me."

Sam was slowly regaining his poise.  His pulses even leaped at the
incredible adventure that was opening its doors to him.  "O.K.," he
said.  "Lead on to this Gano."

But Kleon did not move.  He had not followed Tomson's words, but the
gesture was unmistakable.  He took no orders from a slave.

Sam read his mind and grinned.  "It's all right, friend Kleon, alias
Quetzal," he translated haltingly into Greek.  "These men are from that
future you told me about.  They are not my slaves.  I am from another
time myself, some two thousand years after you.  Sam Ward is my name,
and my country America.  It did not exist in your day.  I stumbled into
your pyramid, and slept along with you.  I don't think they mean us any
harm."

Kleon's face lighted with gladness and a certain astonishment.  "You
speak Greek, Sam Ward, yet you speak it as a barbarian would.  The
accents are false and the quantities wrong."  Sam grimaced wryly at
that.  His professors at college had been most careful in calculating
those accents and ties.  They represented the true Attic Greek in all
its purity, they had averred.

"As for fear of harm"--Kleon straightened himself proudly, gestured
significantly with sword and javelin--"these, my good weapons, are
sufficient protection against such puny things as these men of the
future."

Sam knew better.  He had a hunch that even his own six-chambered
revolver, with its fleet spew of death, might not be able to cope with
the unimaginable weapons available to the year 10,000 A.D.  Brawn, cold
steel, meant little in such a case.  But, of course, Kleon knew of
nothing beyond the sword, the spear and bow.



Nevertheless, they followed the pair.  Tomson and Harri, in spite of
appearance, radiated a certain power, a certain feeling that it would
be wise not to resist.  They came to the great conveyor tube.  Sam
looked up its circular orifice, stretching almost five thousand feet
aloft, and wondered.  Were they expected to climb those smooth, coldly
glowing walls?

Tomson jerked resistor packs from an emergency kit, strapped them on
the two strangers.  "Do as I do," he said, "and do not fear."

Sam moved the lever over obediently.  Kleon understood and followed
suit.  Sam Ward could not repress a startled cry; Kleon called upon
Hermes, the god of swiftness.  They were catapulting upward at
breath-taking speed.

Sam caught glimpses of a mighty civilization as he fled smoothly up:
platforms which led into levels crowded with swarming humanity; huge
machines that glowed and blasted and spun and gyrated; endless
quarters; glittering miles of strange sights; laboratories; enormous
sectors of fiery tumult, tier on tier, until he grew dizzy.

Then, new levels--a different world.  Underneath lay teeming life,
sprawling vastness, machinery, technique.  Here were soft green patches
shimmering under dewy artificial luminance; flowers of strange blooms
and stranger fragrance; a soft, lapping interior lake, blue as cobalt,
warmed and perfumed; multicolored buildings, spaciously set, gracious
with curves and melting outlines; noble figures who gazed through
transparent sections at their upward rush with incurious eyes and
returned to their dalliance.

Then, suddenly, the mighty shaft ended.  Tomson gestured and switched
the lever to neutral.  Sam and Kleon did likewise.  Harri had quit them
at the level of the lesser Technicians.  Only the chief Technicians
could converse with the Olgarchs.

They glided to a halt, whipped over to a landing platform.  For an
awful moment Sam thought he was slipping, would plummet downward the
five thousand feet he had journeyed.  The solid stance felt grateful to
his muscles.

Tomson beckoned them on.  A frescoed panel opened.  They went in.

A simultaneous exclamation burst from ancient Greek and middle-period
American alike.  Sam blinked.  At first it seemed as if they had come
out upon a sky of lambent hue.  Above them stretched a vault like that
of heaven itself, with glowing stars, a silver moon that swung in slow
orbit from side to side.  Then he realized what it was.  A very cunning
and magnificent representation, on a vaulted dome, of an ancient sky,
projected by invisible mechanisms, even like the planetariums of the
twentieth century.  Which meant that this building, or city, or world,
whichever it might be, was wholly inclosed from the rest of earth--a
cosmos self-contained, unitary.



He had not long to speculate.  Tomson beckoned them into a tear-drop
conveyance of white metal.  They got in.  A pressure on an inset and
they darted off, rising low in the air, skimming over the level at a
speed that Sam estimated at five hundred miles per hour.  Yet there was
no motor, no gears, no whirling propeller.  Nor did the wind whip
through them as it should.  Sam could only figure that somehow the
strange vehicle carried its own shell of air along with it.

Kleon pressed close to him, gripped his sword fiercely.  This was magic
beyond his knowledge.  Sam grinned encouragingly at the Greek.
"Something like this was in my time also," he told him.  "It is better
than horses or chariots."

An understanding had arisen between the two.  They felt closer akin to
each other than to Tomson, who represented the future.  And Sam,
however lamely, could speak the Grecian tongue.

Sam leaned over the side, breathless.  It was paradise over which they
were skimming.  Everywhere, up to the dim slope of the domed horizon,
were white-glowing dwellings, noble parks, artificial lakes, limpid,
pellucid; skimming cars like their own, carrying commanding figures,
tall as themselves, nobly proportioned, quite unlike the Technician who
guided them.  Nowhere was there any sign of machinery, of activating
power, of the teeming swarms of the lower levels.

"Something tells me," Sam gritted between his teeth, "I'm not going to
like this."

But there was no time for further observations.  The conveyor car
dipped, glided to the ground in front of a building gleaming in blue
and gold.  They were in a great park.  Fountains splashed; music played
softly; trees festooned with bright orange blossoms waved in an
invisible breeze.

They got out quietly.  Tomson stepped upon an oblong section of red
metal; bowed toward the blank walls of the building with low
genuflection.  Sam watched him with narrowed eyes.

Kleon nodded with a pleased smile.  "I knew he was but a slave," he
said to the strange companion with whom he had been thrust into this
future.  "Only a slave would bend so humbly.  Soon we shall meet his
lord.  I, a free Greek, am the equal of any one."

A voice issued from the building.  "Enter, Tomson.  You have done
well."  The wall seemed to roll back on itself.  They went in.  The
wall retracted behind them.




V.

Tomson said nervously, "Forgive this unusual intrusion, head of the
Olgarchs.  But this is a problem which only you can solve."

Sam and Kleon stood a little apart, both straight and proudly erect.
Of an equal height, the Greek was blond and blue-eyed, chiseled of
feature; the American darker-hued, weather-tanned, keen of eye,
firm-chinned.  Two thousand years of civilization separated them; yet
they were both men, in the sense that Tomson, for all his trained
knowledge and intellectuality, was not.

Blue eyes and gray gazed steadily at Gano, head of the Olgarchs, apex
of the city of Hispan.  Gano did not resemble much the other Olgarchs
of whom they had caught fleeting glimpses.  He was thickset, sturdy of
body and limb, with a massive head and craggy features.  His hair was
midnight black and his nose boldly jutting.  But his eyes were
decisive, penetrating, yet unpenetrable themselves.  He sat on a low
divan, his long, thin fingers idling over a desk panel before him on
which colored squares glowed and darkened in irregular succession.  A
signal board, Sam rightly decided.

Gano nodded.  "I know, Tomson," he said brusquely, as one too busy to
waste precious moments.  "I have received visor-signals of your find
and of your coming."  He turned, surveyed the two men of an older day
keenly from under shaggy brows, said, "One speaks the language of
Hispan, in a fashion.  The other does not.  We must remedy that."  He
raised his voice slightly.  "Beltan, take these creatures whom the
foundations of our city have yielded and teach them the proper speech,
so that we may converse at ease."

From a corner of the long, simply furnished room a figure arose.  Sam
had not noticed him before.  He came toward them casually.  He smiled
and his whole face lighted with the brightness of his smile.  Sam
warmed to him at once.  "This chap is more like it," he told himself.

Beltan was an Olgarch, one of the ruling class, but he did not seem to
take his position seriously.  He even grinned at Tomson.  It made the
Technician uneasy.  It was not proper.  He knew his place in the scheme
of things, and Beltan should likewise.  But Kleon relaxed his grip on
his sword.  He, too, recognized a man in this Olgarch of the future, a
man after his own heart.

"Strange," thought Sam, watching the pair, "how alike they are!  Proud
poise of head, bright, tawny hair, clean-cut, classical features, a
certain arrogance of those who never knew superiors.  They'll hit it
off pretty well--even if ten thousand years separate them.  As for
me"--he shrugged his shoulders--"this Beltan looks all right.  But
Gano, the others, the whole set-up, I'm afraid that----"

Beltan said with a certain light mockery.  "Come with me, you two who
have survived from some remote past.  Let me teach you the nice
intricacies of our proper tongue.  Then you may judge if it were wise
for you to leave your own time for the noble hierarchy that is Hispan."

"At times," Gano cut in sharply, "your nonsense bores me, Beltan."

The young Olgarch bowed.  There was a twinkle in his eye.  "At times it
bores me, too, noble Gano.  That is one of the penalties of having been
born an Olgarch."

Gano frowned, turned abruptly to the Technician.  "Return to your
duties, Tomson."



The chief Technician muttered submissive words, fled from the room.
There was a shocked expression on his face.  Sam grinned.  Tomson, he
felt, had a good bit of a Mid-Victorian Philistine in his make-up.

Kleon muttered aside to the American.  "What do they say?"

"They say," Sam told him, "they will teach us their tongue.  I know
something of it already.  But for you it may be hard."

Beltan took them out of the council chamber, into a side room on whose
walls abstract figures were stamped in gold.

"How," inquired Sam, "do you expect to make much headway with my very
recent friend, Kleon?  He is a Greek before my time, and knows nothing
of English."

"English?" repeated Beltan with raised eyebrows.  "Ah, you mean
Hispana.  He will learn as fast as you who have a smattering.  Perhaps
you are not familiar with the Inducto-learner."  He waved toward a
metal helmet suspended at the end of a long, transparent tube, whose
other end entered the ceiling and disappeared.

Sam shook his head.  "Never heard of it," he confessed.  "In my day we
spent half our life learning things and the other half in forgetting
them."

Beltan laughed.  "We Olgarchs waste no time in achieving knowledge.  It
comes to us ready-made.  The Technicians toil and we garner the fruits.
It is simple enough.  An Olgarch on birth, or you, for that matter,
place your head within the reception chamber.  Short waves, oscillating
at high speeds, and automatically attuned to the wave length of your
particular brain, pulse through the tube.  The latter leads to the
cubicles of the chief Technicians.  At the signal, the proper
Technician adjusts his own sending unit.  He concentrates on the
subject of which knowledge is desired.  His thoughts, converted into
current, are transmitted inside your skull, make the necessary impress
on your neurone paths.  Behold, you have learned, well and painlessly."

Sam was impressed.  "And the Technicians, do they learn the same way?"

Beltan looked surprised.  "Of course not.  This is for the Olgarchs
only.  But do you enter, Sam Ward."

Sam hesitated, grinned and placed his head boldly within the helmet.
Beltan made the necessary adjustment.  Then he pressed buttons on an
instrument board.

At first Sam felt only a gentle tingling, a slight massage of his
skull.  Then words began to flow into his consciousness, thoughts which
he had not originated.  His mind was no longer his own; alien speech
beat upon him--words that were the same as those to which he had been
accustomed, yet strangely distorted, clipped, shorn of unnecessary
syllables.  Subtly, the feeling grew that this was right and proper,
the older speech an anachronism, not fit for present use.

When Beltan gestured for the removal of the helmet Sam was speaking
Hispana, the English of the ninety-eighth century.  "There, you see,"
remarked the Olgarch approvingly.  "It is all very simple.  And now,
Kleon, who have been called the Greek, do you likewise."

Kleon was a very brave man, otherwise he would not have thrust his head
without hesitation into the inclosure.  This was powerful magic, he was
certain, more powerful even than the incantations of the gymnosophists.
Aristotle, Zeno, would never have approved of these barbarous
practices.  But he went----




VI.

Back in the council chamber the four men sat again--Gano, Beltan, Sam
Ward and Kleon.  They understood each other now, spoke the same tongue.
But their thought processes were wholly different.  Nor could this be
helped.  Heredity, environment, custom, the training of a lifetime,
slow evolutionary molding could not be changed in a moment, not even by
the marvelous science of Hispan.

Gano was courteous, if condescending.  He listened patiently, first to
the story of the Greek, then to the supplemental tale of the American.
To him they were primitive savages of an elder day, interesting because
of that, but wholly inferior to the Olgarchs and Technicians of Hispan.
But Beltan listened with quiet eagerness to their respective pictures
of earlier civilizations, of the glory of Greece and the march of
Alexander into Asia, of the literature and drama of that ancient
conglomerate of city states.  It is true that he smiled at the naive
scientific conceptions that Kleon brought forth, but the concepts of
the Grecian philosophers struck him forcibly.

To Sam's story of the world of the twentieth century he listened more
skeptically and with a certain fastidious distaste.  The particular
glory of that era--the march of science--he dismissed as mere halting
steps toward the future.  But the story of war and greed and human
conflict, of waste and incredible futility, of shorn forests and
mineral resources, of the World War and the League of Nations, of
concentration camps and the Spanish madness, brought grimaces to his
lips.

"No wonder," he said slowly, "the whole world died not long after your
time.  Your twentieth century represented a retrogression, a relapse
into futile barbarism from the rather noble era of Kleon."

Sam bristled at that.  No man likes to hear his own century impugned,
and another cried up in its place, especially by the member of a third
epoch.  "Perhaps," he said heatedly, "I have been a bit more honest in
my descriptions than Kleon.  For example, he told you nothing of the
slavery that existed in his day, the very fundamental upon which his
civilization was based."

"I see nothing wrong in that," Kleon declared with dignity.  "It is
only right that those whose brains are dull and whose backs are strong
should support in leisure those who can bring forth large thoughts and
meditations.  Has not this Hispan likewise its slaves--its Technicians
and Workers--to bring the flower of Olgarchs like Gano and Beltan into
being?"

Gano relaxed not a muscle of his face, but Beltan threw back his head
and laughed.  "By the hundred levels of Hispan, even in that early age
the Greeks had learned the art of flattery.  You are not quite right,
friend Kleon.  These are no slaves; these are but fixed castes of
society, each with its duties firmly ordered.  Hispan could not long
exist without such strict, efficient subdivisions.  Neither Workers nor
Technicians are other than content with their lot."  He smiled
bitterly.  "That is left only as the last privilege of the Olgarchs."

"Rather," Gano interposed calmly, "it is your peculiar privilege,
Beltan.  No one else of our class feels the necessity for such a
primitive emotion.  Sometimes I think you are a sport, a mutant, not a
true Olgarch."



Sam turned to the head of the Olgarchs.  "What," he asked with a
certain irony, "is the true function of the Olgarchs in this society of
Hispan?  The Technicians, I understand, supervise and create the
scientific mechanism by which the city lives; the Workers lend their
brawn and muscle to its functioning; but the Olgarchs?"

Gano frowned.  "We live," he answered sharply.  "We are the reason for
the creations of the Technicians, the labors of the Workers.  We are
the flower to which they are the roots and stems and leaves.  They
work, so that we may enjoy."

Kleon nodded approvingly.  "Hispan is not far apart from Athens," he
said.  "There is much good in your system."

Sam set his teeth.  "That," he declared, "has always been the
rationalized justification for slavery, even to this future time.  Has
it ever occurred to you that the slaves--call them Technicians,
Workers, Helots, what you will--would also like to live?"

"They are content, happy," Gano answered softly.  "Ask Tomson, if you
will, whether this is not the best of all possible worlds."

Beltan leaned forward.  "Have you already forgotten, Sam Ward," he
mocked, "what you have told us of conditions in your own world?  What
were the Workers then if not slaves?  Slaves who worked at the beck of
others, who toiled far longer hours than the Workers of Hispan, who
starved in times of depression and starved only more slowly while
employed, who went to war to fight and kill for the benefit of others.
Did you not have also your Technician class who toiled in laboratories
and created new inventions for the benefit of your wealthy, your
Olgarchs?"

"Yes, I suppose so," Sam admitted unwillingly.  "But at least they were
free to work or not to work."

"To starve, you mean."  Then, suddenly, the irony was gone from
Beltan's voice, and a certain fierce sincerity took its place.  "It
isn't the plight of the Workers and Technicians that matters.  They are
well taken care of in Hispan; they do their work and are happy and
content.  No, it is the plight of the Olgarchs, the lords of Hispan,
that matters most profoundly.

"Gano, here, at least has the illusion that he is performing a
necessary function.  The chief Technicians listen respectfully to his
orders, obey them.  But the city would flourish just the same if Gano
never gave an order.  As for the rest of us, we haven't even that poor
illusion.  We sit and dawdle and wrap ourselves in fine garments,
listen to fine music, eat delicate fare, strut and stroll and discuss
in noble-sounding, empty phrases.  We are parasites, aimless,
unnecessary.  We are excrescences on the body politic.  The city could
see us vanish and continue its course without a single jar."

Gano was on his feet, his black brow clouded.  "Beltan," he said
sharply, "even an Olgarch may go too far."

Beltan's nostrils quivered.  There was defiance in his gaze.  Then he
subsided with a quizzical smile.  "You are right, Gano," he murmured.
"Even an Olgarch may go too far."

Kleon was puzzled.  He was mightily taken with Beltan, but he did not
understand his dissatisfaction.  "If the uses of philosophy fail," he
interposed, "as they sometimes do, there is always the heady pursuit of
war against the barbarian, the stranger."

The young Olgarch said sadly: "There are no barbarians or strangers,
unless it be you two.  The city of Hispan is all that remains of the
world."

Sam gasped.  "Do you mean that New York, London, Paris, the great
countries, have been wiped out?  How?  Why?"

Beltan did not seem to see Gano's frown, or seeing, paid no heed.



"The story," he replied, "is not often told, and then only to Olgarchs.
But since you already know about the once external world, there is no
harm in telling it to you.  Not long after your time, Sam Ward, in
about the twenty-seventh century, the nations then existing had
withdrawn more and more into their own boundaries.  It was the logical,
if mad development of tendencies in your own era.  Nationalism,
self-sufficiency, I believe, were the watchwords.

"The process accelerated, so our records report," Beltan continued.
"Soon even the national borders grew too large.  The nationalistic
tendencies, the patriotisms, grew fiercer, more local.  Each nation,
cut off from intercourse with other nations, bounded by impregnably
fortified frontiers, dependent only on itself for its economy, found
quarrels arising within its own confines.  The fires of localism, of
hatred for aliens, of patriotic fervor, finding nothing outside to feed
upon, gnawed at their own vitals.  Men of one community, a subdivision,
a State, a city, decried the men of other communities, boasted of their
superiority.  They began to fight in internecine warfare.

"New nationalisms sprang up--nationalisms and hates based on smaller
units.  The countrysides became deserted, as the undefended farms and
villages were devastated by the armies of opposing cities.  The people
collected in the towns, where there was a measure of protection.  Soon
the cry arose: New York for New Yorkers; London for the men of London;
Paris for the Parisians!"

It was now Kleon's turn to nod.  Evolution, he reflected, was but an
eternal recurrence.  For what was this Olgarch of the future describing
but Greece in the time of Pericles and the Peloponnesian War?

"Soon," Beltan went on, "earth was broken up into a vast number of
self-contained, heavily fortified cities.  The old national boundaries
were gone; newer and smaller ones took their place.  Science advanced.
Food was synthesized from inorganic elements; the secret of atomic
power was discovered.  The units grew smaller and smaller, drew away
from each other.  They fought, but the defenses were impregnable.  The
unfortified countryside became wholly deserted, unnecessary.  It grew
in the course of years into a tangle of wild forests, of desert
stretches.  All intercourse ceased.  The cities rose vertically instead
of horizontally along the earth, inclosed themselves in impassable
barriers.

"Generation on generation added to these barriers, improved them with
new methods of science.  Such a one incloses Hispan, once a colony of
your United States, now the sole survivor of all the teeming cities
that once populated earth.  A shield of neutron metal, impassable by
any means known even to our science, was built up, layer on layer,
around our city.  No one knows how unimaginably thick it may be.  No
one has ever tried to penetrate its width."



Sam was appalled.  He tried to grasp the story entire.  It was logical,
he admitted, up to a certain point.  The forces involved were already
at work in his own time.  But to think that all the world had died,
except for this enshrouded city of Hispan!  "What happened to the
others?" he insisted.

He saw the quick, warning glance that Gano flashed.  He noted Beltan's
hesitation.  "On that," the latter admitted reluctantly, "the records
are somewhat garbled.  It seems there was a cataclysm some time in the
forty-first century.  A celestial body from outer space, traveling at
high speed, smashed into the earth, destroyed a goodly part, laid waste
all the cities but Hispan."

"Why Hispan alone?"

"Because our city was the only one inclosed with neutron walls.  Not
even the impact of millions of tons could penetrate its solidity."

"And no attempt was ever made to explore outside, to investigate
conditions?"

Gano rose suddenly.  "There is no way out," he said smoothly, "and
there have been questions enough.  We have been patient with your
rather primitive ignorance, but it is time to call a halt.  And
remember," he finished meaningly, "these tales which Beltan, who should
have known better, has told you must go no further.  Only the Olgarchs
know of these, and Tomson, the chief Technician, the Workers, the other
Technicians even, have no faintest idea that there is a world, a
universe beyond this city of Hispan.  To them there never was a sun or
moon or stars, or earth or other cities and peoples.  This is the round
entire, the circumscription of their destinies.  See to it that they
hear no other."

"I see," Sam answered grimly.  He was beginning to understand.  It was
only by a tremendous effort that he held back the rising wrath within
him.  But Kleon, child of an earlier, franker era, held no inhibitions.
"I am a Greek," he declared proudly, "and bow to no man.  My speech is
my own, and subject to no restrictions."

Sam nudged him sharply.  The brave fool was making trouble for them
both.

Gano surveyed them thoughtfully, then nodded to Beltan as though he had
not heard.  "We shall decide on our course later," he said evenly,
"when the council meets.  In the meantime let these two be held in your
quarters.  You will take care of them."

Kleon's hand strayed to his sword.  Sam's mouth set in a straight line.
Very casually, his fingers touched the butt of his revolver.  He knew
what Gano meant.  They were prisoners.  The Greek, by his defiance, had
brought this upon them.  Yet he liked the headstrong warrior all the
more for his folly.  He was a man!

Beltan said with peculiar intonation, "Please come without delay."

Sam relaxed.  He sensed the warning against resistance in the Olgarch's
voice.  Gano's delicately veined forefinger rested on a green square on
the signal board.  Intuitively, Sam felt that the slightest pressure
would release blasting death against them.

"O.K.," he said laconically, in the elder speech.  "Let's go, Kleon."




VII.

In silence the three entered a waiting car; in silence they sped over
the noble park lands to a small, blank-walled building near the center
of the level.  In silence Beltan escorted them inside, the slide panel
clicking smoothly behind them.

Sam cast a swift glance around.  The walls were bare and smooth, the
furnishings simple.  There were no windows or doors other than the way
they had entered.  "We are prisoners, are we not?" he demanded.

Beltan looked at them with a certain pity.  "I am afraid worse than
that," he admitted.  "Your presence in Hispan will give rise to talk,
to questionings.  You must eventually come in contact with the other
castes.  You know things of which they have no knowledge.  Discontent
may arise, dissatisfaction.  The ordered peace and security of Hispan
may be broken.  You especially, Sam Ward, have subversive ideas.  You
do not like our distribution of functions?"

"I do not," Sam answered emphatically.

Beltan sighed.  "I thought as much.  As for you, Kleon, you are more
sympathetic.  But you spoiled it with your defiance of Gano.  Still,"
he meditated, "if you would but admit your hastiness of speech, perhaps
an exception might be made in your favor."

Kleon gazed at him with candid blue eyes.  "Would that mean I must
desert Sam Ward?"

"I'm afraid so."

The Greek stood poised like a young god.  "Then I remain with him."

"Even if it means death?"

"Even so."

Beltan turned swiftly to the American.  "And you," he inquired, "would
you be willing to give an oath that your tongue would always remain
submissive to the Olgarchs?  Remember," he added hastily, "an answer to
the contrary will mean a quiet dissolution.  I am but one against many.
In any event I shall plead your cause in the council, but my fellow
Olgarchs will feel as Gano does."

Sam swallowed hard, but there was no tremor in his voice.  "Kleon was
right," he answered steadily.  "We are not slaves.  We can give no such
promises."

Beltan sighed again.  There was regretful admiration in that sigh.
"You are both brave men," he said.  "It seems that elder, more
primitive day bred sturdier frames than now.  Yet you must die.  I see
no way out."

Sam fingered his gun.  He glanced significantly at Kleon.  "At least,"
he remarked evenly, "we'll go out fighting."

Kleon rattled his sword.  "By Zeus and Ares," he swore, "you speak
sooth, friend Sam.  We'll take a goodly number of these Olgarchs to the
lower realms along with us."

"You won't have the chance," Beltan assured them.  "Gano controls your
fates literally at his finger tips.  A pressure on the proper square
before him and lethal rays sweep through this structure."

Somehow Sam's gun was in his hand, its cold muzzle pressed against the
Olgarch's ribs.  "I'm sorry to have to do this," he said crisply, "but
we don't give up very easily.  You, Beltan, will show us a means of
escape, or you die along with us."



The Olgarch looked at the two desperate men.  Kleon's sword was out,
its keen point pressed against his other side.  He shook his head
slowly.  "I am not afraid to die," he answered with simple dignity.  "I
am weary of this aimless dalliance to which I am bound.  Slay, if you
will."

Sam stepped back, sheathed his gun.  Kleon raised his sword in salute.
"You, too, are a man," the American approved.  "We three, I think,
given the chance, could conquer the universe."

A slow, unaccustomed red spread over the Olgarch's aristocratic
features.  "Believe me," he spoke earnestly, "I am your friend."  Then
he made a despairing gesture.  "But there is no escape.  I cannot help
you.  No nook or cranny of Hispan is remote from the search screens of
the Olgarch council."

"I wouldn't stay here if I could," Sam declared harshly.  "Your city of
Hispan is a stench in my nostrils, with its brutal caste system, its
limited round.  Me--I prefer freedom and space and a bit of anarchy
even, where men are human beings and not mere soulless cogs in a
hierarchic society, no matter how efficient.  There must be a way to
get out."

"There isn't," Beltan replied somberly.  "The neutron walls are
impassable.  And outside, besides wild desolation in which no man may
live, there are lethal gases: Cyanogen, carbon monoxide, phosgene,
products of the collision.  The atmosphere has been destroyed.  We do
not even know what, if anything, remains of earth, of the sun itself."

"That," Sam retorted with a grin, "is mere propaganda.  Your Olgarchic
ancestors must have been singularly adept at that sort of thing.
Something tells me they foisted that tale even on themselves, in order
to keep their position intact.  If ever Workers or Technicians or even
mutant Olgarchs like yourself came in contact with other forms of
civilization, with other methods, there might be comparisons not at all
favorable to Hispan."

Beltan's tone was sharp, quick.  "Have you any proof of that?"

"None whatever," Sam admitted.  "Call it intuition if you like, or
merely the memory of somewhat similar propaganda methods in my own
twentieth century."

The flame that lifted in Beltan's eyes died.  "In any event," he said
dully, "there is no way of ever finding out.  The neutron walls cannot
be pierced."



Kleon had been singularly silent.  His fair brow was furrowed; he
seemed plunged in profound thought.  Now he raised his head suddenly.
"Is there," he demanded, "a mountain, within the confines of Hispan
where the Titans are wont to groan uneasily?"

Beltan stared.  "I do not understand."

"He means," explained Sam, "a volcano."

"No; there is not."

"Then," shouted Kleon, "by the one-eyed Cyclopes, there is a way of
escape."

"What the devil----" Sam cried.

"Listen to me," the Greek said fiercely.  "The pyramid Hotep built for
me to sleep into this stupid future lay close to the flanks of such a
volcano."

"That's true," Sam averred.  "I remember it.  But what of it?"

"This!  According to the formula of the gymnosophists I required the
gases from the smoking mountain for my chambered sleep.  I drew them in
by cunning vents which pierced the central fires.  These opened to the
day at the top of the mountain.  Stones, nicely pivoted, sealed the
vents after the gases poured into the chamber.  Only I know the secret
of their presence, of the springs by which they may pivot once more.
The pyramid is within the city; the burning mountain is without.  We
shall escape by means of those passages which lead far underground from
one to the other."

Sam pounded the Greek's shoulder.  "Kleon, you are a genius."  Then a
thought struck him, clouded his joy.  "Out of the frying pan into the
fire."  He grimaced.  "Your passages lead to the central fires, you
say.  That means to the inner crater.  We'd suffocate or frizzle to
death."

"The mountain may have ceased its complaining long since," Kleon
answered calmly.  "And brave men die but once."

"Right!" Sam chuckled.  "We start at once.  We still have the gadgets
that Tomson gave us.  They'll drop us down the shaft."  He stuck out
his hand to Beltan.  "Good-by," he said.  "Thanks!  You were the one
bright spot in Hispan."

The Olgarch's eyes were inscrutable.  "Warnings of your descent down
the conveyor tube will be signaled back to Gano from every level," he
said.  "You'll never reach your buried pyramid."

"We'll chance it," Sam retorted.

"I won't permit such chances."

Sam looked at him incredulously.  "You mean you're backing down?  I
thought you were our friend."

"I mean," Beltan replied quietly, "I am going with you.  The levels
will respect my presence."

"You're a good egg," Sam said with feeling.  "But it's no go.  You'd
only get into a mess of trouble when you come back."

"I'm not coming back," the Olgarch retorted patiently.

"Huh!  What's that?"

"I mean I'm going out into the strange new world with you."  He smiled
quizzically.  "Didn't you say a little before that we three, given the
chance, could conquer the universe?"

"But--but----" Sam spluttered.  "Why, damn it, you can't do this.  The
chances of our getting through, or of survival even if we do, are a
thousand to one.  Why should you give up everything----"

"Because I am tired of this life; because in rawness and chaos I may
find again that soul you spoke of; because--I am your friend."

The three men, products of three different ages, stared at one another
with level brows.  Sam felt an unaccustomed lump in his throat, spoke
gruffly.  "Then we'd better get started--before Gano gets on our trail."




VIII.

It was easier than they had anticipated.

Under Beltan's guidance they darted in his conveyor car for the tube,
bailed into the great shaft with swiftness and dispatch.  Down five
thousand feet they catapulted, meeting Technicians and Workers on their
way, getting humble salutes because of the Olgarchic presence, curious
glances as they whirled ever downward.

Then the final excavation, the still-yawning chamber which the blasters
had laid bare.  Harri, back on the job, looked up in alarm at this
unprecedented invasion of an Olgarch.  But Beltan took the trouble to
explain.  The sleepers, he said, were going to disclose to him the
method by which they had slept intact these many ages.  In the
meantime, it was unnecessary for Harri and his corps of Workers to
remain.  And they were, he added with authority, to hold their tongues.

In seconds the final level was clear.

"Now"--Sam grinned--"strut your stuff, O Kleon."  He had noted Beltan's
anxious glances at the visor screen implanted in the upper shaft.

It was an even more anxious moment before the Greek found what he was
looking for.  A tiny, almost imperceptible depression in the ancient
wall.  A simultaneous exhalation of withheld breath burst from three
pair of lips as the section of the wall turned on itself, disclosed a
dark hole within.  Sam, remembering his former experience, would have
held back to determine if hot, volcanic gases would belch forth.  But
the Olgarch had cried out sharply.  "Quick, run!  We're discovered!"

They dived headlong into the baleful opening.  Kleon flung around,
thrust his shoulder against the massive stone.  It swung smoothly and
soundlessly back into position.  They crouched, panting, in utter
darkness.

Just in time, too!  For at that moment there was a low, humming sound
that rose swiftly to an unbearable scream.  "Gano has turned on the
blasters," said Beltan with a groan.  "They'll shear through this
thickness of rock in two or three seconds."

But the scream of rushing power gave way to a mightier roar.  There was
a huge crash, a tumbling, grinding noise.  The solid rock swayed
crazily underfoot.  Then there was silence.

"The pyramid has fallen," Kleon told them shakenly.  "There must be a
hundred feet of earth and rock and stone behind.  All return is
blocked."

"Then the answer is _forward_," Sam responded with a cheerfulness he
did not quite feel.  If the volcano was still active, if, in the course
of long centuries, the crater had become clogged with lava----

It was a long, steep, arduous climb in total darkness--silent, except
for grunts and low curses as they bumped blindly into jagged edges.
Up, always up, in fetid, clammy atmosphere----

Then the path widened suddenly and they were at the bottom of a huge
bowl.  Sam looked up fearfully, then let out a great shout that brought
the echoes tumbling about them.  "The stars!  I see the stars!"



High overhead, framed in limited blue, were tiny pin points of light,
peering down incuriously upon them.  There followed a mad scramble, a
clawing and backward slithering in crumbling, weathered lava flows of
an ancient epoch.  The volcano was extinct.  The air was foul but
breathable.

Then they were out, staring with avid eyes upon the enveloping scene.
It was night and the fresh breeze stirred their hair, ruffled their
clothes.  Three men, of different civilizations, clad in different
habits, united only in a common bond of escape, emerged into an
incredible world!

To one side, framed by the heights of the Sierra Madre, reared a vast,
light-quenching surface.  Five thousand feet it sprang, massive,
somber, swinging over the plain to either side as far as the eye could
reach.  The neutron-walled city of Hispan!

To the other side, past the mountains, a great wilderness stretched
interminably without end, without beginning.  There was no sign of
life, of human habitation, of anything but tangled, savage-crowding
trees.  There wasn't a light, an airplane, not even a boat on the
tideless darkness of the ocean beyond.  Even the stars were strange,
the old configurations gone.

Sam shivered.  It was cold, but it was not that which made his flesh
crawl.  Suppose the tale of Hispan had been true?  Suppose there were
no other cities, no other human beings in that shoreless jungle?
Suppose----

He turned to the others, grinned.  "At least one thing is certain," he
said lightly, "the air is good.  If deadly gases once existed, they
have long since been dissipated or made chemically harmless."  He
raised his voice, "Forward, comrades, to whatever destiny awaits us!"

"Forward!" cried Kleon, the Greek.

"Forward!" spoke Beltan, the Olgarch.

The three men turned their faces resolutely toward the East, toward the
home of the rising sun.  Slowly, they descended the mountain.






[End of Past, Present and Future, by Nat Schachner]
