Clifford Simak: Our Children's Children

"Like what?" asked Douglas.

"I don't know," said Sandburg.

"How deeply, Reilly, does your objection go?" the President asked the Attorney General.

"Not deeply," said Douglas. "Just a lawyer's reaction against irregularity."

"Then I think," said the President, "that we should see him." He looked at Wilson. "Do you know, has he got a name?"

"Maynard Gale," said Wilson. "He has his daughter with him. Her name is Alice."

The President nodded. "You men have the time to sit in on this?"

They nodded.

"Steve," said the President. "You as well. He's your baby."

The village had known hunger, but now the hunger ended. For, sometime in the night, a miracle had happened. High up in the sky, just beyond the village, a hole had opened up and out of the hole poured a steady stream of wheat. The foolish boy with the crippled leg, who belonged to no one, who had simply wandered into the village, who was crippled in his mind as well as in his body, had been the first to see it. Skulking through the night, skulking as well as he could with one leg that dragged, unable to sleep, looking for the slightest husk that he could steal and chew upon, he had seen the grain plunging from the sky in the bright moonlight. He had been frightened and had turned about to run, but his twisting hunger would not let him run. He had not known what it was to start with, but it was something new and it might be something he could eat and he could not run away. So, frightened still, he had crept upon it and finally, seeing what it was, had rushed upon it and thrown himself upon the pile that had accumulated. He had stuffed his mouth, chewing and gasping, gulping to swallow the half-chewed grain, strangling and coughing, but stuffing his mouth again as soon as he managed to clear his throat. The overloaded stomach, unaccustomed to such quantities of food, revolted, and he rolled down off the pile and lay upon the ground, weakly vomiting.

It was there that others found him later and kicked him out of the way, for with this wondrous thing that had happened and that had been spotted by a man of the village who had happened to go out to relieve himself, they had no time for a foolish, crippled boy who had merely attached himself to the village and did not belong there.

The village was aroused immediately and everyone came with baskets and with jars to carry off the wheat, but there was far more than enough to fill all the receptacles that the village had, so the headmen got together and made plans. Holes were dug in which the grain was dumped, which was no way to treat good wheat, but it must be hidden, if possible, from the sight of others and it was the only thing they could think of to do immediately. With the dryness and the drought upon the land there was no moisture in the ground to spoil the wheat and it could be safely buried until the time when something else could be devised to store it.

But the grain kept pouring from the sky and the ground was baked and hard to dig and they could not dispose of the pile, which kept growing faster than they could dispose of it.

And in the morning soldiers came and, thrusting the villagers to one side, began hauling the wheat away in trucks.

The miracle kept on happening, the wheat pouring from the sky, but now it was a less precious miracle, not for the village alone, but for a lot of other people.

"I would suppose," said Maynard Gale, "that you would like to know exactly who we are and where we're from."

"That," agreed the President, "might be an excellent place to start."

"We are," said Gale, "most ordinary, uncomplicated people from the year 2498, almost five centuries in your future. The span of time between you and us is about the same as the span of time between the American voyages of Christopher Columbus and your present day.

"We are traveling here through what I understand you are calling, in a speculative way, time tunnels, and that name is good enough. We are transporting ourselves through time and I will not even attempt to try to explain how it is done. Actually I couldn't even if I wanted to. I do not understand the principles, other than in a very general way. If, in fact, I understand them at all. The best that I could do would be to give you a very inadequate layman's explanation."

"You say," said the Secretary of State, "that you are transporting yourselves through time back to the present moment. May I ask how many of you intend to make the trip?"

"Under ideal circumstances, Mr. Williams, I would hope all of us."

"You mean your entire population? Your intention is to leave your world of 2498 empty of any human beings?"

"That, sir, is our heartfelt hope."

"And how many of you are there?"

"Give or take a few thousand, two billion of us. Our population, as you will note, is somewhat less than yours at the present moment and later I will explain why this…"

"But why?" asked the Attorney General. "Why did you do this? You must know that the world's economy cannot support both your population and our own. Here in the United States, perhaps in a few of the more favored countries of the world, the situation can be coped with for a limited period of time. We can, as a matter of utmost urgency, shelter you and feed you, although it will strain even our resources. But there are other areas of the Earth that could not do this, even for a week."

"We are well aware of that," said Maynard Gale. "We are trying to make certain provisions to alleviate the situation. In India, in China, in some African and South American areas we are sending back in time not only people, but wheat and other food supplies, in the hope that whatever we can send through may help. We know how inadequate these provisions will be. And we know as well the stress which we place upon all the people of this time. You must believe me when I say we did not arrive at our decision lightly."

"I would hope not," said the President, somewhat tartly.

"I think," said Gale, "that in your time you may have taken note of published speculations about whether or not there are other intelligences in the universe, with the almost unanimous conclusion that there must surely be. Which raises the subsidiary question of why, if this is so, none of these intelligences has sought us out, why we've not been visited. The answer to this, of course, is that space is vast and the distances between stars are great and that our solar system lies far out in one of the galactic arms, far from the greater star density in the galactic core, where intelligence might have risen first. And then there is the speculation concerning what kind of people, if you want to call them that, might come visiting if they should happen to do so, Here I think the overwhelming, although by no means unanimous, body of opinion is that by the time a race had developed star-roving capability they would have arrived at a point of social and ethical development where they would pose no threat."

"And while this may be true enough, there would always be exceptions and we, it seems, up in our own time, have become the victims of one of these exceptions."

"What you are saying," said Sandburg, "is that you have been visited, with what appear to have been unhappy results.

Is that why you sent ahead the warning about the planting of artillery?"

"You haven't done that yet? From the tone of your voice…"

"There has not been the time."

"Sir, I plead with you. We discussed the possibility that some of them might break through the defenses we set up and invade the tunnels. We have strong defenses, of course, and there are strict orders, which will be carried out by devoted men, to destroy any tunnel where this might happen, but there always is the chance that something could go wrong."