He had come out of the old, familiar world into this new, strange world and if the world were entirely empty of human life, then he was on his own.
He sat down and emptied his pockets and made an inventory of what he had. A half a package of cigarettes; three packs of matches, one almost finished, one full, one with just a match or two gone from it; a pocket knife; a handkerchief; a billfold with a few dollars in it; a few cents in change; the key to the Forever car; a keyring with the key to the house and another to the desk and a couple of other keys he couldn't identify; a mechanical pencil; a few half sheets of paper folded together, pocket size, on which he had intended to make notes if he saw anything worth noting — and that was all. Fire and a tool with a cutting edge and a few hunks of worthless metal — that was the sum of what he had.
If this world were empty, he must face it alone. He must feed himself and defend himself and find shelter for himself and, in time to come, contrive some way in which to clothe himself.
He lit a cigarette and tried to think, but all that he could think about was that he must go easy on the cigarettes, for the half pack was all he had and when those were gone, there would be no more.
An alien land — but not entirely alien, for it was Earth again, the old familiar Earth unscarred by the tools of Man. It had the air of Earth and the grass and sky of Earth, and even the wolves and buffalo were the same as old Earth had borne. Perhaps it was Earth. It looked for all the world like the primal Earth might have looked before it lay beneath Man's hand, before Man had caught and tamed it and bound it to his will, before Man had stripped and gutted it and torn all its treasures from it.
It was no alien land — no alien dimension into which the top had flung him, although, of course, it had not been the top at all. The top hadn't had anything to do with it. The top was simply something on which one focused one's attention, simply a hypnotic device to aid the mind in the job which it must do. The top had helped him come into this land, but it had been his mind and that strange otherness that was his which had enabled him to travel from old familiar Earth to this strange, primal place.
There was something he had heard or read…
He went searching for it, digging back into his brain with frantic mental fingers.
A new story, perhaps. Or something he had heard. Or something he had seen on television.
It came to him finally — the story about the man in Boston — a Dr. Aldridge, he seemed to remember, who had said that there might be more worlds than one, that there might be a world a second ahead of ours and one a second behind ours and another a second behind that and still another and another and another, a long string of worlds whirling one behind the other, like men walking in the snow, one man putting his foot into the other's track and the one behind him putting his foot in the same track and so on down the line.
An endless chain of worlds, one behind the other. A ring around the Sun.
He hadn't finished reading the story, he remembered; something had distracted him and he'd laid the paper down. Smoking the cigarette down to its final shred, he wished that he had read it all. For Aldridge might have been right. This might be the next world after the old, familiar Earth, the next link on an endless chain of earths.
He tried to puzzle out the logic of such a ring of worlds, but he gave it up, for he had no idea of why it should be so.
Say, then, that this was Earth No. Two, the next earth behind the original Earth which he had left behind. Say, then, that in topographical features the earths would resemble one another, not exactly like one another perhaps, but very close in their topography, with little differences here and there, each magnified in turn until probably a matter of ten earths back the change would become noticeable. But this was only the second earth and perhaps its features were but little changed, and on old Earth he had been somewhere in Illinois and this, he told himself, was the kind of land the ancient Illinois would have been.
As a boy of eight he had gone into a land where there had been a garden and a house in a grove of trees and maybe this was the very earth he had visited then. If that were so, the house might still be there. And in later years he had walked an enchanted valley and it, too, might have been this earth, and if that were true, then there was another Preston house on this very earth, exactly like the one which stood so proudly in the Earth of his childhood.
There was a chance, he told himself. A slim chance, but the only chance he had…
He'd head for the Preston house, toward the northwest, retracing on foot the many miles he had driven since leaving his boyhood home. He knew there was little reason to believe there'd be any Preston house, little reason to think anything other than that he was trapped in an empty, lonely world. But he shut his mind to reason, for this was the only hope he had.
He checked the sun and saw that it had climbed higher in the sky, and that meant that it was morning and not afternoon and by that he knew which was west, and that was all he needed.
He set off, striding down the hill, heading for the north-west, toward the one hope he had in all the world.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
WELL before dark, he picked a camping site, a grove through which ran a stream.
He took off his shirt and tied it to the stick to form a crude seine, then went down to a small pool in the creek and after some experimenting found how to use the seine to the best advantage. At the end of an hour, he had five good-sized fish.
He cleaned the fish with his pocket knife and lit the fire with a single match and congratulated himself upon his woodsmanship.
He cooked one of the fish and ate it. It was not an easy thing to eat, for he had no salt and the cooking was very far from expert — part of the fish was singed by flame, part of the rest was raw. But he was ravenous and it didn't taste too bad until the edge was off his hunger. After that it was a hard job choking down the rest, but he forced himself to do it, for he knew that he faced hard days ahead and to get through them he must keep his belly filled.
By this time darkness had fallen and he huddled beside the fire. He tried to think, but he was too tired for thinking. He caught himself dozing as he sat.
He slept, awoke to find the fire almost out and the night still dark, built up the fire with cold sweat breaking out on him. The fire was for protection as well as warmth and cooking and on the day's march he had seen not only wolves, but bear as well, and once a tawny shape had run through one of the groves as he passed through, moving too fast for him to make out what it was.
He woke again and dawn was in the sky. He built up the fire and cooked the rest of the fish. He ate one and then part of another, tucked the others, messy as they were, into his pocket. He would need food, he knew, throughout the day, and he did not want to waste the time to stop and make a fire.
He hunted around the grove and found a stout, straight stick, tested it with his weight and knew that it was sound. It would serve him for a walking staff and might be of some use as a club if he were called upon to defend himself. He checked his pockets to see that he was leaving nothing behind. He had his pocket knife and the matches and they were the important things. He wrapped the matches carefully in his handkerchief, then took off his undershirt and added it to the handkerchief. If he were caught in rain or fell in crossing a creek, the wrappings might help to keep the matches dry. And he needed those matches. He doubted very seriously that he could make fire with struck flint or by the Boy Scout bow and arrow method.
He was off before the sun was up, slogging northwestward, but going slower than he had gone the day before, for now he realized that it was not speed, but stamina that counted. To wear himself out in these first few days of hiking would be silly.