The Eternal Wall, Page 2

crawl backward,beneath. A tremendous sand desert, marked with low, washed-downmountains, and the vague, angular, geometric mounds of human cities thatwere gone forever.

  Beyond the eastern rim of the continent, the plain dipped downwardsteeply. The white of dried salt was on the hills, but there was alittle green growth here, too. The dead sea-bottom of the vanishedAtlantic was not as dead as the highlands.

  Far out in a deep valley, Kar-Rah, the city of the rodents, came intoview--a crystalline maze of low, bubble-like structures, glinting in thered sunshine. But this was only its surface aspect. Loy Chuk's peoplehad built their homes mostly underground, since the beginning of theirfoggy evolution. Besides, in this latter day, the nights were very cold,the shelter of subterranean passages and rooms was welcome.

  The mummy was taken to Loy Chuk's laboratory, a short distance below thesurface. Here at once, the scientist began his work. The body of theancient man was put in a large vat. Fluids submerged it, slowly soakingfrom that hardened flesh the alkali that had preserved it for so long.The fluid was changed often, until woody muscles and other tissuesbecame pliable once more.

  Then the more delicate processes began. Still submerged in liquid, thecorpse was submitted to a flow of restorative energy, passing betweencomplicated electrodes. The cells of antique flesh and brain graduallytook on a chemical composition nearer to that of the life that they hadonce known.

  * * * * *

  At last the final liquid was drained away, and the mummy lay there, amummy no more, but a pale, silent figure in its tatters of clothing. LoyChuk put an odd, metal-fabric helmet on its head, and a second, muchsmaller helmet on his own. Connected with this arrangement, was a blackbox of many uses. For hours he worked with his apparatus, studying, andguiding the recording instruments. The time passed swiftly.

  At last, eager and ready for whatever might happen now, Loy Chuk pushedanother switch. With a cold, rosy flare, energy blazed around thatmoveless form.

  For Ned Vince, timeless eternity ended like a gradual fading mist. Whenhe could see clearly again, he experienced that inevitable shock of vastchange around him. Though it had been dehydrated, his brain had beenkept perfectly intact through the ages, and now it was restored. So hismemories were as vivid as yesterday.

  Yet, through that crystalline vat in which he lay, he could see a broad,low room, in which he could barely have stood erect. He saw instrumentsand equipment whose weird shapes suggested alienness, and knowledgebeyond the era he had known! The walls were lavender and phosphorescent.Fossil bone-fragments were mounted in shallow cases. Dinosaur bones,some of them seemed, from their size. But there was a complete skeletonof a dog, too, and the skeleton of a man, and a second man-skeleton thatwas not quite human. Its neck-vertebrae were very thick and solid, itsshoulders were wide, and its skull was gigantic.

  All this weirdness had a violent effect on Ned Vince--a sudden,nostalgic panic. Something was fearfully wrong!

  The nervous terror of the unknown was on him. Feeble and dizzy after hisweird resurrection, which he could not understand, remembering as he didthat moment of sinking to certain death in the pool at Pit Bend, hecaught the edge of the transparent vat, and pulled himself to a sittingposture. There was a muffled murmur around him, as of some vast,un-Earthly metropolis.

  "Take it easy, Ned Vince...."

  The words themselves, and the way they were assembled, were old,familiar friends. But the tone was wrong. It was high, shrill,parrot-like, and mechanical. Ned's gaze searched for the source of thevoice--located the black box just outside of his crystal vat. From thatbox the voice seemed to have originated. Before it crouched a small,brownish animal with a bulging head. The animal's tiny-fingeredpaws--hands they were, really--were touching rows of keys.

  To Ned Vince, it was all utterly insane and incomprehensible. A rodent,looking like a prairie dog, a little; but plainly possessing a highorder of intelligence. And a voice whose soothingly familiar words weremore repugnant somehow, simply because they could never belong in aplace as eerie as this.

  Ned Vince did not know how Loy Chuk had probed his brain, with the aidof a pair of helmets, and the black box apparatus. He did not know thatin the latter, his language, taken from his own revitalized mind, wasrecorded, and that Loy Chuk had only to press certain buttons to makethe instrument express his thoughts in common, long-dead English. Loy,whose vocal organs were not human, would have had great difficultyspeaking English words, anyway.

  Ned's dark hair was wildly awry. His gaunt, young face held befuddledterror. He gasped in the thin atmosphere. "I've gone nuts," hepronounced with a curious calm. "Stark--starin'--nuts...."

  * * * * *

  Loy's box, with its recorded English words and its sonic detectors,could translate for its master, too. As the man spoke, Loy read theilluminated symbols in his own language, flashed on a frosted crystalplate before him. Thus he knew what Ned Vince was saying.

  Loy Chuk pressed more keys, and the box reproduced his answer: "No, Ned,not nuts. Not a bit of it! There are just a lot of things that you'vegot to get used to, that's all. You drowned about a million years ago. Idiscovered your body. I brought you back to life. We have science thatcan do that. I'm Loy Chuk...."

  * * * * *

  It took only a moment for the box to tell the full story in clear, bold,friendly terms. Thus Loy sought, with calm, human logic, to make hischarge feel at home. Probably, though, he was a fool, to suppose that hecould succeed, thus.

  Vince started to mutter, struggling desperately to reason it out. "Aprairie dog," he said. "Speaking to me. One million years. Evolution.The scientists say that people grew up from fishes in the sea. Prairiedogs are smart. So maybe super-prairie-dogs could come from them. A loteasier than men from fish...."

  It was all sound logic. Even Ned Vince knew that. Still, his mind, tunedto ordinary, simple things, couldn't quite realize all the vast thingsthat had happened to himself, and to the world. The scope of it all wastoo staggeringly big. One million years. God!...

  Ned Vince made a last effort to control himself. His knuckles tightenedon the edge of the vat. "I don't know what you've been talking about,"he grated wildly. "But I want to get out of here! I want to go backwhere I came from! Do you understand--whoever, or whatever you are?"

  Loy Chuk pressed more keys. "But you can't go back to the TwentiethCentury," said the box. "Nor is there any better place for you to benow, than Kar-Rah. You are the only man left on Earth. Those men thatexist in other star systems are not really your kind anymore, thoughtheir forefathers originated on this planet. They have gone far beyondyou in evolution. To them you would be only a senseless curiosity. Youare much better off with my people--our minds are much more like yours.We will take care of you, and make you comfortable...."

  But Ned Vince wasn't listening, now. "You are the only man left onEarth." That had been enough for him to hear. He didn't more than halfbelieve it. His mind was too confused for conviction about anything.Everything he saw and felt and heard might be some kind of nightmare.But then it might all be real instead, and that was abysmal horror. Nedwas no coward--death and danger of any ordinary Earthly kind, he couldhave faced bravely. But the loneliness here, and the utter strangeness,were hideous like being stranded alone on another world!

  His heart was pounding heavily, and his eyes were wide. He looked acrossthis eerie room. There was a ramp there at the other side, leadingupward instead of a stairway. Fierce impulse to escape this namelesslair, to try to learn the facts for himself, possessed him. He boundedout of the vat, and with head down, dashed for the ramp.

  * * * * *

  He had to go most of the way on his hands and knees, for the up-slantingpassage was low. Excited animal chucklings around him, and theoccasional touch of a furry body, hurried his feverish scrambling. Buthe emerged at last at the surface.

  He stood there panting in that frigid, rarefied air. It was night. TheMo
on was a gigantic, pock-marked bulk. The constellations wereunrecognizable. The rodent city was a glowing expanse of shallow,crystalline domes, set among odd, scrub trees and bushes. The cragsloomed on all sides, all their jaggedness lost after a million years oferosion under an ocean that was gone. In that ghastly moonlight, theground glistened with dry salt.

  "Well, I guess it's all true, huh?" Ned Vince muttered in a flat tone.

  Behind him he heard an excited, squeaky chattering. Rodents in pursuit.Looking back, he saw the pinpoint gleams of countless little eyes. Yes,he might as well be an exile on another planet--so changed had the Earthbecome.

  A wave of intolerable homesickness came over him as he sensed thedistances of time that had passed--those inconceivable eons, separatinghimself from his friends, from Betty, from almost everything that wasfamiliar. He started to run, away from those glittering rodent eyes.