Айзек Азимов - Before The Golden Age

Kleon turned slowly. “You have done best for yourselves, no doubt,” he said evenly. “You are slaves, Egyptians. You will mingle with these dwellers beyond the flood and find no demeanment in it. You will teach them what you know of the arts and be content. But I am a Greek and these are barbarians. I will not waste my life among such as these—and you. Life is a precious depository for the noumena, the metaphysical thought, or it is nothing. On the farther side of the world mighty Alexander marches to new triumphs, and the Grecian culture marches with him. Here is stagnation, minds that know not science or noble philosophy. What have I, a Greek, to do with these—or with you, for that matter, O Hotep?”

The Egyptian bowed humbly. He was not offended. In the elder days his race had been mighty, but the world had gone topsy-turvy, and the old gods had yielded to new. That was why he and his comrades were content to remain in this new land the balance of their days.

“What do you wish from us, great Kleon?” he asked.

The Greek stared at him speculatively, turned his gaze from the ocean, from the charred husk of the trireme, slid past the trembling crew, past the copper-colored natives, flung inland over the impenetrable jungle to the blue rise of ground that marked the backbone of the interior. Smoke curled lazily from a cone-shaped top. His blue eyes glinted; a strange luster crept into their being. When he spoke he seemed to commune with himself rather than hold conversation with Hotep.

“When Alexander left Persepolis and marched for dreadful months through strange Asian lands and stranger peoples to the Indus, we passed over the very top of the world. There we came upon a race of learned holy men, so old, so wasted with time’s attritions, that verily they seemed in sooth what they maintained—survivors from an elder day, when earth was clad in ice and Zeus himself had not been born.

“I spent some time with them, O Hotep, and they opened their minds to me, a curious seeker after knowledge. They told me of the days before the ice came, when the world was young and the bleak hills were covered with strange verdure and mighty cities; they spoke with the air of participants in great civilizations long since buried. In full sooth their knowledge was beyond that of Aristotle himself. They averred that when the frozen waters pressed inexorably southward from the northern pole their civilization died, but such was the secret science of their priests that some few were able to immure themselves in caverns, there to repose for long centuries in immortal inanition, to awake at a predetermined time when their science taught them the ice would have ebbed back again to the frozen Boreal regions.

“I was skeptical, as the Sophists had taught me to be, but they took me to sealed caverns, into which I was able to peer through a strange instrument that made transparent the solid rock, and behold, I saw some of their sleepers still. These, they averred, had set their awakening for a later era than the rest, desiring to taste the farther future. A thousand more years must elapse before these would stir and breathe again.”

“It is incredible,” murmured Hotep politely.

The face of Kleon was a contemplative mask. “They taught me the secret,” he mused. “The sight of yon mountain, where the Titans rumble underground and the Cyclopes forge their thunderbolts, reminded me of the tale.”

He squared his shoulders suddenly. His voice lashed out as it was wont to do when he had led a phalanx into battle. “Hotep, slaves, listen to me!”

They jumped at his clarion tones, forgetful that he was but one and they were an even hundred. “Yes, gracious lord,” they chorused.

“You have done a foul deed. You are cattle, and this idle land and idler folk will satisfy your limited desires. But I am a Greek, and must blaze always with a bright, clean flame, or life is valueless. I do not intend to rust away my remaining days among barbarians. Therefore, if you seek my forgiveness, you must follow my will in the exactest degree.”

Hotep moved stealthily back to the mass of his comrades, firmed his grip on his spear. Did the Greek, perchance, have some mad notion of building a new trireme from the heavy forest trees, and blunder toward the west? Rather would he-

Kleon did not seem to see the hostile gestures of his men. “I too, shall brave the future,” he declared. “The present is an empty amphora for my spirit; I wish to fill myself with the bright wine of days that are yet unborn. I shall immure myself in a cavern, even as those priests who inhabited the Roof of the World, and do thus and so as they had taught me. I shall set a time for my awakening—let me see—yea, ten thousand years. Who knows what strange and marvelous visions will greet my eye in that tremendous span of years!”

Spears dropped with dull thuds from nerveless fingers; black beards gaped in ludicrous astonishment, confused voices called on Horus and Ammon-Ra. The copper folk, all unwitting, knowing not the meaning of the god, Quetzal, nevertheless, prostrated themselves in fear before his flashing eye, the sound of his speech that surged like the many billowed sea.

Hotep burst out in gasping words. “Lord, have you in sooth gone mad? These tales of magic have addled your brain! They but mocked you. It is impossible-”

“It is enough,” Kleon broke in sharply, “that I command it.” He fingered his sword significantly.

A wave of hasty assent rose like incense from the crew. Why should they not do the mad Greek’s bidding? Even so, would they be freed from ever-present dread of their treachery and meditated vengeance. They would live their lives among these gentle folk, take their women for wives, and loll in ease and security after much bufferings. Let the Greek be immured, if he wished, in the bowels of the earth, let him wait for that fantastic future he described.

It took almost a year to perform the task. But Kleon drove his crew and these pliable folk, who called themselves Mayas, relentlessly. Now that the die was cast, now that he had pondered on it nights and days, he was eager for that future which the gymnosophists of the Roof of the World had promised him; indeed, he was very eager.

He required a volcano; for the gases generated in the smithies of the Cyclopes were necessary for his entombment. He found the blue cone from which the smoke eternally wisped some fifty stadia inland. He caused its base to be cleared, and there the Egyptians built for him a small pyramid, patterned according to the one of Cheops, on which the copper-colored Mayas toiled willingly like submissive beasts of burden. Underneath the tapering stone they inclosed a chamber, rough-hewn, built against the millenniums, air-sealed against all outer contamination. From the chamber they led vents of stone to the bowels of the fire-breathing mountain, so that, by ingenious tappets, the swirling gases of brimstone and sulphurous pungency might be inducted in due proportions.

Then they withdrew and Kleon busied himself in secret. From his leather jerkin underneath the armor he drew a leaden globule. This had been given him by the gymnosophists with appropriate instructions. Within its hollow shell was a lustrous, ever-burning substance—a substance that burned, yet consumed itself only after thousands and thousands of years.

Kleon handled the pellet gingerly, prepared its mechanism so that, at a pressure, tiny openings would appear, so regulated as to emit the radiations of the interior element in specified amounts, and cease completely after ten thousand years. He, a Greek, of course, did not know that he held in his hand an ounce of pure, elemental radium, the secret of whose isolation from its salts had been known to that preglacial civilization, and had been since lost to the new-born world.