Айзек Азимов - Before The Golden Age

He shook his head violently to clear his addled brain. Ten thousand years ahead! That meant eight thousand years for him. Good Lord! Had he slept that long? Were these others representatives of that far-distant future? He opened his mouth to speak, fumbling for the dimly remembered Greek.

But Tomson had decided that enough time had been wasted. He had understood the tongue of the man in the coarse-fibered clothes, but not this other in shining metal.

“Enough,” he interrupted peremptorily. “These are matters for Gano, the head of the Olgarchs, to settle. You will come with me.”

Sam was slowly regaining his poise. His pulses even leaped at the incredible adventure that was opening its doors to him. “O. K.,” he said. “Lead on to this Gano.”

But Kleon did not move. He had not followed Tomson’s words, but the gesture was unmistakable. He took no orders from a slave.

Sam read his mind and grinned. “It’s all right, friend Kleon, alias Quetzal,” he translated haltingly into Greek. “These men are from that future you told me about. They are not my slaves. I am from another time myself, some two thousand years after you. Sam Ward is my name, and my country America. It did not exist in your day. I stumbled into your pyramid, and slept along with you. I don’t think they mean us any harm.”

Kleon’s face lighted with gladness and a certain astonishment. “You speak Greek, Sam Ward, yet you speak it as a barbarian would. The accents are false and the quantities wrong.” Sam grimaced wryly at that. His professors at college had been most careful in inculcating those accents and quantities. They represented the true Attic Greek in all its purity, they had averred.

“As for fear of harm”—Kleon straightened himself proudly, gestured significantly with sword and javelin—”these, my good weapons, are sufficient protection against such puny things as these men of the future.”

Sam knew better. He had a hunch that even his own six-chambered revolver, with its fleet spew of death, might not be able to cope with the unimaginable weapons available to the year 10,000 A. D. Brawn, cold steel, meant little in such a case. But, of course, Kleon knew of nothing beyond the sword, the spear and bow.

Nevertheless, they followed the pair. Tomson and Harri, in spite of appearance, radiated a certain power, a certain feeling that it would be wise not to resist. They came to the great conveyor tube. Sam looked up its circular orifice, stretching almost five thousand feet aloft, and wondered. Were they expected to climb those smooth, coldly glowing walls’?

Tomson jerked resistor packs from an emergency kit, strapped them on the two strangers. “Do as I do,” he said, “and do not fear.”

Sam moved the lever over obediently. Kleon understood and followed suit. Sam Ward could not repress a startled cry; Kleon called upon Hermes, the god of swiftness. They were catapulting upward at breath-taking speed.

Sam caught glimpses of a mighty civilization as he fled smoothly up: platforms which led into levels crowded with swarming humanity; huge machines that glowed and blasted and spun and gyrated; endless quarters; glittering miles of strange sights; laboratories; enormous sectors of fiery tumult, tier on tier, until he grew dizzy.

Then, new levels—a different world. Underneath lay teeming life, sprawling vastness, machinery, technique. Here were soft green patches shimmering under dewy artificial luminance; flowers of strange blooms and stranger fragrance; a soft, lapping interior lake, blue as cobalt, warmed and perfumed; multicolored buildings, spaciously set, gracious with curves and melting outlines; noble figures who gazed through transparent sections at their upward rush with incurious eyes and returned to their dalliance.

Then, suddenly, the mighty shaft ended. Tomson gestured and switched the lever to neutral. Sam and Kleon did likewise. Harri had quit them at the level of the lesser Technicians. Only the chief Technicians could converse with the Olgarchs.

They glided to a halt, whipped over to a landing platform. For an awful moment Sam thought he was slipping, would plummet downward the five thousand feet he had journeyed. The solid stance felt grateful to his muscles.

Tomson beckoned them on. A frescoed panel opened. They went in.

A simultaneous exclamation burst from ancient Greek and middle-period American alike. Sam blinked. At first it seemed as if they had come out upon a sky of lambent hue. Above them stretched a vault like that of heaven itself, with glowing stars, a silver moon that swung in slow orbit from side to side. Then he realized what it was. A very cunning and magnificent representation, on a vaulted dome, of an ancient sky, projected by invisible mechanisms, even like the planetariums of the twentieth century. Which meant that this building, or city, or world, whichever it might be, was wholly inclosed from the rest of earth—a cosmos self-contained, unitary.

He had not long to speculate. Tomson beckoned them into a tear-drop conveyance of white metal. They got in. A pressure on an inset and they darted off, rising low in the air, skimming over the level at a speed that Sam estimated at five hundred miles per hour. Yet there was no motor, no gears, no whirling propeller. Nor did the wind whip through them as it should. Sam could only figure that somehow the strange vehicle carried its own shell of air along with it.

Kleon pressed close to him, gripped his sword fiercely. This was magic beyond his knowledge. Sam grinned encouragingly at the Greek. “Something like this was in my time also,” he told him. “It is better than horses or chariots.”

An understanding had arisen between the two. They felt closer akin to each other than to Tomson, who represented the future. And Sam, however lamely, could speak the Grecian tongue.

Sam leaned over the side, breathless. It was paradise over which they were skimming. Everywhere, up to the dim slope of the domed horizon, were white-glowing dwellings, noble parks, artificial lakes, limpid, pellucid; skimming cars like their own, carrying commanding figures, tall as themselves, nobly proportioned, quite unlike the Technician who guided them. Nowhere was there any sign of machinery, of activating power, of the teeming swarms of the lower levels.

“Something tells me,” Sam gritted between his teeth, “I’m not going to like this.”

But there was no time for further observations. The conveyor car dipped, glided to the ground in front of a building gleaming in blue and gold. They were in a great park. Fountains splashed; music played softly; trees festooned with bright orange blossoms waved in an invisible breeze.

They got out quietly. Tomson stepped upon an oblong section of red metal; bowed toward the blank walls of the building with low genuflection. Sam watched him with narrowed eyes.

Kleon nodded with a pleased smile. “I knew he was but a slave,” he said to the strange companion with whom he had been thrust into this future. “Only a slave would bend so humbly. Soon we shall meet his lord. I, a free Greek, am the equal of any one.”

A voice issued from the building. “Enter, Tomson. You have done well.” The wall seemed to roll back on itself. They went in. The wall retracted behind them.

Tomson said nervously, “Forgive this unusual intrusion, head of the Olgarchs. But this is a problem which only you can solve.”

Sam and Kleon stood a little apart, both straight and proudly erect. Of an equal height, the Greek was blond and blue-eyed, chiseled of feature; the American darker-hued, weather-tanned, keen of eye, firm-chinned. Two thousand years of civilization separated them; yet they were both men, in the sense that Tomson, for all his trained knowledge and intellectuality, was not.