Page:Avon Fantasy Reader 11 (1949).pdf/55

 The metal-cased human raised itself on one elbow and clutched for support at a small hilly mound a foot away. The hand closed on its top—and pulled away. The rock was rotten, eaten away as was everything else in the world of shadows. With a viscous splash, the figures fell back into the muck. Again the cry.

“The air's going fast. Tom! Where's the Fortress, where's the council, where's the Fortress… The Fortress!” an hysterical laugh, “yes, where. Where's anything? Anything but this muck and mist? Tom! If you don't come back the engines will stop. You were so good at mending them. Tom!” the voice took on a crafty note of supplication, “you wouldn't let the City die. Not Tom Hayward! I might. I'm weak. Amos Bevin's weak, Tom. He's no good to the Fortress, but now, you, you Tom Hayward, you, you…”

The helmeted head slipped forward, buried itself in the green slime.

Rocks, earth, sky. All shifting vapours and unstable. No direction. No up or down. Merely a space between one nothingness and the next. No light but a wavering twilight, like evening seen through storm clouds. The earth a crushed vista of emptiness, without solidity, drowned in acid ooze. Silence, now, complete.

The precise spot occupied by the prostrate body had once been a farm in southern Ohio. Once—two hundred years before—it had borne green grass and laughing plants beneath a great, burning sun. The seasons had come and gone, the balmy Spring, Summer, the crisp Autumn, Winter. The land had remained the land. Sweet-smelling, green, drenched in light and sun and air. Southern Ohio. A mighty plain of waving wheat drinking from the warm, wet earth. Earth, damp with clean rain. Earth smelling of earth.

The wars came and changed this land. The metal monsters of guns and armored tanks swept over it and churned it and buried it. The seasons came and went and presently the land bore a new crop—of bones and rotting flesh and fragments of bombs. The sweet air was filled with the roar of cruelly clawed birds, birds that spat thunder and flame and obscured the sun. The rains came again and washed away the earth and exposed naked rock. And then the gas. The gas rolled in from the ocean and the northern lakes and from far above. It covered the land in thick clouds and buried it forever from the light of day and the light of night. It combined with the soil and the rocks and changed them into hissing slime. The people who used the land vanished. They went into the earth in giant steel fortresses and forgot the land and the smell of it and the sunlight and natural air. Because all this had been taken away. After a time they forgot what they were fighting for and fought blindly, fortress against fortress, with weapons mighty and irresistible. Presently nothing was left but a scarred surface and here and there at indistinguishable points, the fortress cities, immense masses of steel and glass, battered, pitted, buried away from even the gloomy ruins of the earth's surface, filled with complicated machinery that whirred and banged and filled the endless hours with endless 91