Page:Avon Fantasy Reader 10.djvu/75

 "Morrow sank into a chair. His face was thin, haggard looking. We all showed signs of fatigue and hunger.

"'Food,' he said, 'it's giving out. I shudder to think what the future holds in store for us.'

"'Is there no solution?' I asked.

"He looked at us slowly. 'I don't know. Perhaps...."

"Years before Morrow had been an engineer; he was nearing seventy now—he was Marna's uncle. His had been one of the voices raised in warning. Yet he had not been like Denson; he had wanted to stand between; and seemingly there had been no standing between.

"'A charnel-house,' he said; 'the city will become that; all the cities: millions must die.' Marna shook uncontrollably. 'All,' he said, 'save those who can reach food and live.'

"Reach food and live! It had come to that, our boasted civilization! 'The Mentanicals,' he said, 'are ignoring man; they will not harm those who blend in with the machine. Don't you understand?' he said at length. 'Yes,' I replied, thinking intently, 'yes, I think I do. You mean that the automatic processes of making food still continue, and will indefinitely, that we must make our way to those places.'

"'We must—or perish.'

"It seems scarcely credible, I know, but we of the leisure—the cultured—class, were ignorant of just where our food was raised and manufactured. Human labor had been reduced in our cities to a minimum, had been sequestered, shut away for fear of rebellion. Those who might have been able to lead us aright, act as our guides, were prisoners—prisoners in the power of Mentanicals!

"'So began that ghastly hunt for food; people pouring through the artificial canyons of great cities, collapsing in thousands on their streets, dying daily by the hundreds, the tens of hundreds.

"How much of this agony and suffering the Mentanicals understood will never be known. They came and went, seemingly indifferent to the fate of man whose service they had deserted. In the privacy of their own homes, or in certain public places, men and women smashed machinery, automatic devices. Nothing sought to stay them. It was only when they strove to attack sources of power, of public utility, that their actions were arrested. There was that devoted band of scientists that sought to paralyze the energy-stations and was wiped out to a man. Doubtless many such bands perished throughout the civilized world. But soon all organized efforts were swept away by famine ... by the growing need for sustenance.

"That hunt for food! How can it be described. Stripped of the veneering of civilization, man ran amuck. Hundreds of thousands fled the cities. But the huge farms and orchards, run solely by automatic devices under the superintendency of Mentanicals, were surrounded by sheer walls too high to scale. Nor in many cases did men know what lay behind those walls. They ate the coarse grass and thistles of open places, the barks and leaves of trees,