That city below us was a dead city! There was no sign of life. Not a single automobile on the street, not a person on the sidewalks.
Herb and I looked at one another, and disbelief must have been written in letters three feet high upon our faces.
“Herb,” I said, “we gotta find out what this is all about.”
Herb’s Adam’s apple jiggled up and down his neck.
“Hell,” he said. “I was figuring on dropping into the Dutchman’s and getting me a pick-up.”
It took almost an hour to find anything that looked like an airport, but finally I found one that looked safe enough. It was overgrown with weeds, but the place where the concrete runways had been was still fairly smooth, although the concrete had been broken here and there, and grass and weeds were growing through the cracks.
I took her down as easy as I could, but even at that we hit a place where a slab of concrete had been heaved and just missed a crackup.
The old fellow with the rifle could have stepped from the pages of a history of early pioneer days except that once in a while the pioneers probably got a haircut.
He came out of the bushes about a mile from the airport, and his rifle hung cradled in his arm. There was something about him that told me he wasn’t one to fool with.
“Howdy, strangers,” he said in a voice that had a whiny twang.
“By Heaven,” said Herb, “it’s Daniel Boone himself.”
“You jay birds must be a right smart step from home,” said the old guy, and he didn’t sound as if he’d trust us very far.
“Not so far,” I said. “We used to live here a long time ago.”
“Danged if I recognize you.” He pushed back his old black felt hat and scratched his head. “And I thought I knew everybody that ever lived around here. You wouldn’t be Jake Smith’s boys, would you?”
“Doesn’t look like many people are living here any more,” said Herb.
“Matter of fact, there ain’t,” said Daniel Boone. “The old woman was just telling me the other day we’d have to move so we’d be nearer neighbors. It gets mighty lonesome for her. Nearest folks is about ten miles up thataway.”
He gestured to the north, where the skyline of the city loomed like a distant mountain range, with gleaming marble ramparts and spires of mocking stone.
“Look here,” I asked him. “Do you mean to say your nearest neighbor is ten miles away?”
“Sure,” he told me. “The Smiths lived over a couple of miles to the west, but they moved out this spring. Went down to the south. Claimed the hunting was better there.”
He shook his head sadly. “Maybe hunting is all right. I do a lot of it. But I like to do a little farming, too, And it’s mighty hard to break new ground. I had a right handsome bunch of squashes and carrots this year. ‘Taters did well, too.”
“But at one time a lot of people lived here.” I insisted. “Thousands and thousands of people. Probably millions of them.”
“I heard tell of that,” agreed the old man, “but I can’t rightfully say there’s any truth in it. Must’ve been a long time ago. Somebody must have built all them buildings—although what for I just can’t figure out.”
The Globe editorial rooms were ghostly. Dust lay everywhere, and a silence that was almost as heavy as the dust.
There had been some changes, but it was still a newspaper office. All it needed was the blur of voices, the murmur of the speeding presses to bring it to life again.
The desks still were there, and chairs ringed the copy table.
Our feet left trails across the dust that lay upon the floor and raised a cloud that set us both to sneezing.
I made a beeline for one dark corner of the room; there I knew I would find what I was looking for.
Old bound files of the paper. Their pages crackled when I opened them, and the paper was so yellowed with age that in spots it was hard to read.
I carried one of the files to a window and glanced at the date. September 14, 2143. Over three hundred years ago!
A banner screamed: “Relief Riots in Washington.”
Hurriedly we leafed through the pages. And there, on the front pages of those papers that had seen the light more than three centuries before, we read the explanation for the silent city that lay beyond the shattered, grime-streaked windows.
“Stocks Crash to Lowest Point in Ten Years!” shrieked one banner. Another said: “Congress Votes Record Relief Funds.” Still another: “Taxpayers Refuse to Pay.” After that they came faster and faster. “Debt Moratorium Declared”; “Bank Holiday Enforced”; “Thousands Starving in Cleveland”; “Jobless March on Washington”; “Troops Fight Starving Mobs”; “Congress Gives Up, Goes Home”; “Epidemic Sweeping East”; “President Declares National Emergency”; “British Government Abdicates”; “Howling Mob Sweeping Over France”; “U.S. Government Bankrupt.”
In the market and financial pages, under smaller heads, we read footnotes to those front-page lines. Story after story of business houses closing their doors, of corporations crashing, reports on declining trade, increasing unemployment, idle factories.
Civilization, three hundred years before, had crashed to ruin under the very weight of its own superstructure. The yellowed files did not tell the entire story, but it was easy to imagine.
“The world went nuts,” said Herb.
“Yeah,” I said. “Like that guy who took the dive.”
I could see it all as plain as day. Declining business, increasing unemployment, heavier taxation to help the unemployed and buy back prosperity, property owners unable to pay those taxes. A vicious circle.
Herb was rummaging around back in the dimness by the filing cabinet. Presently he came out into the light again, all covered with dust.
“There’re only twenty or thirty years of files,” he said, “and we got the newest one. But I found something else. Back behind the cabinet. Guess it must have fallen back there and nobody ever bothered to clean it out.”
He handed it to me—an old and crumpled paper, so brittle with age I was afraid it might crumble to dust in my very hands.
“There was quite a bit of rubble back of the cabinet,” said Herb. “Some other papers. Old, too, but this one was the oldest.”
I looked at the date. April 16, 1985.
That yellowed paper was almost five hundred years old! It had come off the press less than thirty-five years after Herb and I had taken off with the time machine!
Lying behind the filing cabinet all those years. The cabinet was large and heavy to move, and janitors in newspaper offices aren’t noted for outstanding tidiness.
But there was something bothering me. A little whisper way back in my head, somewhere down at the base of my brain, that kept telling me there was something I should remember.
I tossed the old paper on a desk and walked to a window. Most of the glass was broken out, and what wasn’t broken out was coated so thick with grime you couldn’t see through it. I looked out through the place where there wasn’t any glass.
There the city lay—almost as I remembered it. There was Jackson’s tower, the tallest in the city back in 1950, but now dwarfed by three or four others. The spire of the old cathedral was gone, and I missed that, for it had been a pretty thing. I used to sit and watch it from this very window through the mist of early-spring rain or through the ghostly white of the winter’s first snowfall. I missed the spire, but Jackson’s tower was there, and so were a lot of other buildings I could place.
And every one of them looked lonely. Lonely and not quite understanding—like a dog that’s been kicked out of a chair he thinks of as his own. Their windows gaping like dead eyes. No cheerful glow of light within them. Their colors dulled by the wash of seasons that had rolled over them.