Айзек Азимов - Before The Golden Age

The levels flashed by with clicking signals, tier on tier of them. Each one held its ordered niche in the society of Hispan. He had passed the ten sections of the lesser Technicians, dropped through the storage levels, the incubator tiers, the subsidiary power units; then he fled past the myriad swarming cells of the Workers, down through the factories where the food pellets were synthesized, past the levels of the intricate machines, and the eternal flames of the atom crushers.

There were others rising and descending in the force field of the conveyor tube. All greeted him as he flashed by, some with the decent nods of equals, others with respectful salutations in nice gradations of humbleness according to the level of abode. He returned them with the proper bend of head and twist of hand—and suddenly bent his slight form almost double.

A young man had just stepped out on the platform of the Workers’ eating level, twisted his resistor pack, was rising in the conveyor tube. He was tall and well-formed, not spindly and bulging of forehead as Tomson, nor clumsily heavy as the Workers. He moved with a quick, calm grace, and his tawny hair was almost radiant. His features were aristocratic, high-bred, and were saved from superciliousness only by a frank, careless smile which he flashed on Workers, Technicians and equals alike, much to the scandal of his fellow Olgarchs.

He returned Tomson’s respectful genuflection with the same grin, and was gone, a tawny portent, flashing upward to the highest Olgarchic tier. Tomson straightened out, so startled that he forgot the proper meticulous nod to the next Worker who humbly saluted him.

What was Beltan, an Olgarch, doing in the Worker levels? It was not, of course, the province of a Technician, even a chief, to question the goings and comings of the Olgarchs; but very rarely, and only for serious reasons, did any of the ruling caste deign to leave their parks and palaces. Tomson realized that Beltan was different from his fellows. With the others, like Gano, the dark, saturnine head, he knew his place and was at ease. Not so with Beltan.

The yellow-haired young Olgarch was forever poking his nose into nooks and corners of all the levels, had sought certain technical and scientific information from Tomson about which his fellows had never bothered, had actually, on occasion, spoken to a Worker. This in itself was an unheard-of thing, and Tomson disapproved of it strongly. Let each man order his actions in conformity with custom and station—even an Olgarch.

The bottom of the great shaft shot up to meet the Technician. In his bemusement he had barely time to switch the lever and come to a floating halt. He had reached the end of this three-thousand-foot drop.

He shivered, drew his scanty garment close around his thin shoulders. He coughed slightly. His sensitive skin detected the unforgivable variation of temperature in these depths. Why, it was surely a degree and a half below blood heat, the equable bath in which his body was wholly at ease.

Harri was waiting for him at the bottom of the conveyor tube. His sharp-nosed features betrayed his mingled anxiety and relief at the sight of the chief Technician. Now all responsibility was lifted from his own shoulders. Harri, like all lesser Technicians, was able to sustain only a minimum of such an onerous commodity as independent thought and action. He was of the caste who contacted the Workers directly, engineered their operations, directed their activities. They were the administrative branch, whereas the chief Technicians performed executive duties only; planned, experimented, made scientific discoveries.

“What is the meaning of this?” Tomson asked sharply. “Must a chief be disturbed from his important meditations simply because you are too lazy to think your problem out?”

Harri suffered from a nervous tic. A good many Technicians of both classes were thus afflicted. The neural system was overdeveloped compared to the muscular and vascular supports. His nearsighted eyes blinked rapidly; his arms and legs jerked uncontrollably. “I am sorry, Tomson,” he declared humbly, “for breaking in upon your meditations. But a situation has arisen. You see, you gave instructions for a crew of Workers to blast new areas from the underlying rock. I was placed in charge.”

“I know—I know!” Tomson grumbled impatiently. “We need more fuel for the atom crushers. Get on with your story.”

“It is simply this, Tomson,” Harri hurried. “In accordance with proper procedure, I turned on the penetro ray before I gave the order to blast. It sometimes happens there are materials embedded in the rock stratum we could otherwise use. I declare, my heart almost ceased its necessary functions at what the ray disclosed. I stopped all work, hastened to contact you at once. This represents a problem not in my sphere of action.”

‘What,” demanded Tomson, “did you see that scared you into the loss of all faculties?”

“You shall determine for yourself. Look!”

They were standing below the lowermost level. During the course of thousands of years, as Hispan required more and more power for its purpose, the solid rock that underlay the city had gradually been penetrated to greater and greater depths. The rock was blasted with shattering electro-dissonances, the resulting powder fed into the atom crushers, and there, in shielded furnaces, the electrons burst from the atom shells, flashed into annihilation, and furnished energy for all the mighty machines that powered the city.

Within the still unfinished cavern, blasted from glistening quartzite, stood twoscore Workers. They were powerful, husky men, towering over the intellectualized Technicians, and their bodies were knotted and twisted with muscles. They stood by the boring machines and blasters, immobile, waiting patiently for the end of the conference of their chiefs. If they waited for hours it did not matter. Nothing mattered. It was all routine. They worked their shift, and they returned to the eating level, ate their pellets in silence in long community barracks, shifted to the mating quarters, performed their necessary acts, ascended next to the recreation level, where, for a few precious hours, they talked, quarreled, jested, saw selected audio visions of innocuous comedy at which they roared unthinkingly, and, by signal, shifted to the final sleeping unit, there to be awakened by further signal to continue the endless round.

Harri’s finger jittered toward the control mechanism of the penetro ray, switched it on. The machine hummed with blue light. The solid rock seemed to dissolve in front of it, to become transparent as the clearest glass. Tomson stared, started violently in spite of himself. It was not proper for a chief Technician to show vulgar surprise in front of inferiors.

The vague outlines of a mathematical pyramid glimmered beneath, surrounded by encrusting pressure strata. Within its tapering body a passage showed, clogged with sediment and crumbled stone. At the farther end it opened into a shadowy chamber. He stepped quickly forward, adjusted the depth of the ray to bring its contents into bold relief.

Two bodies lay sprawled—one outstretched within a niche, clad in shining metal, the other twisted on the stony floor as if he had fallen unawares. Neither was a man of Hispan, in lineaments or dress. They seemed strangers from another world—preserved in every detail as if they had just fallen asleep, yet obviously dead. A yellowish gas, slightly iridescent, filled the chamber.

Tomson wrinkled his vestigial nose. The delicate instrument next to the ray apparatus was fluctuating violently. Powerful radiations were filtering through the layers of rock. He permitted himself a most unseemly exclamation of astonishment. Within a corner of the immuring chamber he saw the shadow of a pellet, through whose eyelets thin shafts of radiance were streaming. Metallic radium, its atoms breaking down through countless centuries, emitting ceaseless packets of alpha, beta and gamma rays!