He did not know what had happened, or how, or when. He only knew he was falling. Instinctively he began counting. Somewhere above him the ship was falling, too. Down below, still a long way off, he could see a bed of search lights, its rays probing the clouds — looking for him, no doubt.
At the count of six he pulled the cord. Then he felt the jerk on his harness as the 'chute bellied out. His head ached fearfully and he realized for the first time he was wounded. He did not know when he struck the earth or how far he was dragged across the fields.
The hospital ward was not so bad a place, considering it was in a prison camp. Only there was never food enough. It was later, though, that he felt the pinch of real hunger. That was after he had been pronounced fit for duty and sent out daily with the other war prisoners, to repair the holes made nightly by Britain's bombers along the main railway line.
The hospital ward was not so bad a place, considering it was in a prison camp. Only there was never food enough. It was later, though, that he felt the pinch of real hunger. That was after he had been pronounced fit for duty and sent out daily with the other war prisoners, to repair the holes made nightly by Britain's bombers along the main railway line.
"Serves me right, I guess," Allan Winchester muttered to himself as he shouldered his pick and shovel and stumbled along after the rest. "I had no business mixing in another fellow's war."
But the guttural curse of a burly guard and the threat of the ever-ready gunbutt made him change his mind. He ducked the blow and hastened his stride, but red rage surged within him.
"No," he added, in an inaudible growl, "it is my war! It is everybody's war who hates cruelty and oppression. I'll see it through. Ruthless tyrants shall not rule the earth!"
For a moment Winchester's thoughts had gone back to the good job and cozy home he had given up in the States to fight these dictators. He had been a consulting engineer. Moreover, his bachelor bungalow in the suburbs had been the gathering place for others like him who shared his devoted hobby.
In Winchester's rare garden a few amateur enthusiasts carried on the work begun by Burbank — the creation of new and interesting plant hybrids. All that the American engineer had surrendered in a glow of indignation over the treatment of the helpless little countries of Europe. One day he had flown to Canada and joined her air force.
"And here I am," he muttered again, ruefully, "shot down in my very first big show."
"Ssh-h-h, Yank!" came a cautious hiss from the man next to him. They had been detailed to fill in a new-made bomb crater. The guard had gone on forty yards beyond.
"D'ya want to join the gang?" whispered his mate. "We've tunneled under the barbed-wire fence. Tonight's the night. Ten are going, but they say there's a hiding place outside for one or two more. Friends, you know. Working undercover."
"Count me in," answered Winchester in a low voice. He sank his pick into the soft shoulder of the crater. The guard had wheeled and was looking their way.
"I'll tell you more at mess-time," said the other man softly, as he flung a shovelful of damp earth down the slope.
Allan Winchester, the American, was the last man through the hole. Wriggling along like an earthworm, he thought the tunnel interminable, especially since the passage of the others had caused several cave-ins, which had to be dug out with the hands and pushed backward with the feet. By the time he emerged into the dark night outside the barricades, the others had gone. Winchester brushed the loose dirt from him and groped his way forward. They had told him what to do if they became separated.
It was then that the hoarse-voiced whistle on the prisoners' steam-laundry building broke the night air with its raucous blast. A flare burst overhead and floodlights came on. Rifle shots rang out. Off to the left a machine gun began to chatter. Winchester heard men shouting in the fields ahead of him, and the sudden scream of a stricken man. He dropped panting into a little ditch and crawled into some shrubbery.
For hours he lay there in a cold sweat. Heavily booted men crashed through the brush repeatedly, prodding with bayonets.
"Zehn," one said. "Ten we got, already. The Kommandant says there should be one more."
Dawn came, but they did not find the American. He stayed there all day without moving, though his thirst became painful. For far and near sounds told him the search was still on. Somehow the news must have leaked out. The prison break had turned into failure. What was to have been escape ended in a death trap.
Winchester lay still another night and day, except for chewing some lush grass for the moisture that was in it. Then on the third night he stole forth and crossed the pasture beyond. It was at Munich, those prisoners from Dunquerque had told him, that he would find friends and shelter — if he could only get to it. The address he had long since memorized.
It took Winchester four nights, walking always in the fields and skirting villages and highways. He drank occasionally from brooks and once succeeded in stealing a hatful of vegetables from a farm garden. But in time he reached the outskirts of Munich and knew that for once he was in luck. A vigorous British air raid was going on.
He made his way to the heart of the town unchallenged. Troopers and firemen were everywhere, but they had their hands full snatching at dazzling fire-bombs or dodging crashing masonry. Winchester hurried on, searching for the small alley three blocks west of the Schutzenplatz. He had little trouble finding his way, despite the pandemonium of flame and destruction going on about him, for Munich was a city fairly familiar to him. He had lived there for months when he was a student before the war.
It was during a lull in the aerial attack that Winchester reached the neighborhood. The street was perfectly dark, except for the dull red glare of reflected fires. The blackness in the alley was as pitch. The American stole into it, feeling with a cautious toe for stumbling-blocks among the cobbles.
He had hardly gone four steps when he froze motionless against a wall. Overhead a brilliant magnesium flare suddenly blazed, lighting the place up like noon. Winchester waited, tense, while it burned out and slowly drifted away. Then, as the dark returned, he took a step forward.
"No!" A soft hand clutched his sleeve. "This way. Say nothing, but — oh, please — hurry!"
The voice was low and vibrant, the voice of a woman. Winchester could barely make out her outline in the darkness, but he judged her to be young. Her hand found his and tugged. He followed her blindly. She had spoken to him in English!
She must be one of the friends his fellow prisoners had told him of. But to his surprise, instead of taking him deeper into the alley, she darted out into the broad street from which he had just come.
"Where to?" he asked huskily.
"Anywhere," she answered in an agonized voice. "Anywhere but there! I have just learned we were betrayed. Two of our members are Gestapo men and they are waiting there for us now. Come!"
They ran blindly in the dark, down one street and up another. Bombs were bursting steadily to the westward, and the barking of the ack-acks was almost continuous. A sudden flare lit the street up once more. Dead ahead of them were two gendarmes. One raised his arm and shouted a challenge, then charged forward. The girl jerked Winchester into a doorway.
"Try this door," she moaned. Her voice was urgent.
The door was locked, but Winchester drew back a yard and launched himself bodily against it. There was a rending of splintering wood and the portal crashed open, hurling the American twice his length into a dark hall. He picked himself up dazedly, only to find the girl was once more at his side. Heavy footfalls were heard running by the door. The police paused, hesitated and turned back.
"Here is a stairway going down," the girl whispered in the dark.
They tumbled down it. It was a spiral staircase and of stone. They had reached the first stage below when they heard the upper door burst open and the yells of their pursuers. Almost in the same instant there was a deafening crash and a blinding flash of light. They were flung into a far corner, and cowered there while they heard the building above them come crashing down. A bomb from the sky had miraculously covered their retreat.
Winchester lay quietly, holding the trembling form of his rescuer in his arms, until the last of the reverberations died away and until the dust which filled the air settled a little. If the policemen above had died, they had died instantly, for they made no sound. At length, assured of comparative safety, Winchester moved the girl a little way and fished out his box of treasured matches. He struck one.
They were in what appeared to be a medieval vault, of heavy stone construction. The stairs down which they had come were choked with fallen debris from above. There was the smell of smoke in the air. Beyond the circle of the flickering light the stairs curved on down into blackness.
"We had better go lower," Winchester said, lifting the girl. "The sub-cellar is the best place until this raid is over."
He did not say so, but what he feared now was fire. It was obvious they had escaped one fate only to be trapped to await another.
Before a huge nail-studded oaken door the stairs ended. The American lifted the heavy wrought-iron latch and swung it open. Inside were rows of glistening white tables, and in brackets on the walls Winchester was delighted to see wax candles. He lit one and closed the door behind.
"How incongruous!" the girl murmured, looking about. She still trembled a little, but her air was as unafraid as though she were at a party. "Look, a modern diet kitchen located in this gruesome old dungeon."
"The guy that did it knew a good air-raid shelter when he saw one," explained Winchester, casting an appraising eye over the groined stone arches overhead. "They can blast the whole town down and we'll still be all right."
But something more than the security of the chamber had taken his eye. At one end of the room was an immense electric refrigerator. The girl already had its door open, looking over its contents. People in blockaded countries soon learn to scout for food at every opportunity. Winchester himself was famished.
Now that there was light, he could see the pinch of hunger in the girl's pale face. He wondered how beautiful she would really be, with color in her cheeks and the sunken spots rounded out once more. For despite his preoccupation with food and safety, the American could not miss observing that she was the kind of girl a man meets but once in a lifetime.
"Smells all right — smells good," she pronounced, dragging out a glass bowl filled with an amber-colored gelatine. She poked a finger into the quivering stuff and tasted it. "It is good!"
They both laughed. The girl set the bowl on the shelf while she crossed the vault to the tables on the other side, where plates and cutlery were stacked. Meanwhile Winchester studied the room, trying to figure out what the layout meant.
One side was lined with shelves on which stood rows of jars containing vari-colored pellets. The label on one read: "Vitamin B Concentrate." The contents of the others were similar, though Winchester had never dreamed before there could be so many vitamins. "L2 & P1, P5 Complex" said the ticket on another jar. Another table had standard foods, such as dried beans, sugar and other staples.
"Everything but meat," commented Winchester, thinking how nice it would be to sink his teeth into a juicy porterhouse once more.
"There's meat, too," the girl told him, handing him a plate of clear amber jelly, "but I imagine this is better for you on an empty stomach. You poor fellow, you must be nearly starved."
"You don't look overfed yourself," Winchester smiled back.
Then he looked at the cupboard she had indicated when she said there was meat. She had thrown the doors open to reveal a row of small cages containing cats, dogs and rabbits — all sound asleep.
To Winchester's notion, only the rabbits were legitimate meat. He wondered, though, why they slept so soundly. The crash overhead should have wakened anything but the dead. Yet he could see their ribs rise and fall slowly as they breathed. Perhaps they had been doped for some dietetic experiment.
"Another helping?" the girl asked, reaching for the American's empty plate. Unconsciously they had eaten ravenously.
"Yeah," he yawned, lazily stretching his arms, "think I will."
She brought more food. Drowsily they ate it. Neither one knew when the candle burned out.
Winchester opened his eyes to the darkness and raised his hand to his face. To his absolute and utter astonishment, he found it entangled in a heavy growth of hair. His hand trembled as he verified a discovery that bordered on the incredible. He was bearded like a patriarch, and the hair of his head overflowed his shoulders.
He sat up gasping, struck a match and staggered to his feet. The candle of last night was no more than a blackened stump of wick. He lit another and another. The light brought fresh astonishment.
The room looked incredibly old and moldy, and stalactites the American had not noticed the night before hung dripping from the arched stones above. The stones, he observed now, were covered with heavy green moss and ferns. And, to pile surprise on surprise, so was the floor!
Winchester rubbed his forehead dazedly. He glanced at the cages of animals. Where sleek, well-fed sleeping cats and dogs had been, there were now only skeletons, or emaciated, half-mummified carcasses. Mushrooms grew on one of the tables beside the ranks of stoppered glass jars. This cavern had the look of immeasurable antiquity, and the air had the smell of cave-trapped gases that had never known the warming rays of the sun.
The American knelt beside the girl. She sprawled where she had fallen, and under her outflung arm lay the empty plate from which she had been eating the gelatine of the night before. She was alive. There was no doubt about that, but her garments had the flimsy, rotten look of wrappings from an Egyptian ancient tomb.
Nor was that all.
The oak door that gave onto the staircase was gone, except for a few soggy boards that still clung to the ancient wrought-iron hardware. Hard-packed rubble blocked the stairs. Small wonder their place of hiding had begun to look like a tomb — their burial was complete!
Only a narrow flue brought down fresh air. Winchester could make out a glimmer of green-tinged light at the top of it, but the flue was too small to admit his body.
He went back into the room and prowled among the food containers. He started to make breakfast on the gelatine stuff. But as he was about to taste it, he noticed for the first time a withered and yellowish ticket on the bowl.
Winchester took the card to the nearest light and read the dim scribble. "Lot 3133, ledger page 104." He turned the card over. On the back of it was the single word "Nein!" and a crude skull-and-crossbones. The American frowned. That was what they had eaten!
He pocketed the card and hunted for the ledger. He handled the gossamer pages gently, for fear they would fall apart under his fingers. To his delight the notes had been kept in English. On Page 104 he came upon this:
Eureka! The perfect food concentrate at last! But, alas, it is too perfect. A single grain will furnish subsistence for a large cat or a medium-sized dog for many weeks, but unfortunately the animal devotes its whole efforts to digestion. It lies stupefied as if drugged until the food has been absorbed. I must think of some way to dilute it. I have calculated that half a pound of it will sustain an adult human many centuries — perhaps five, perhaps more. What a food!
Winchester shuddered. He looked down at the girl and a fresh horror smote him. He himself was awake now — whether after months or years or centuries, he could not tell. Had they eaten the same amount? Was their rate of metabolism similar? Might the girl not sleep on for years and years to come, or whatever term it was?
He threw himself down beside her and tried to bring her to. But though he chafed and shook and even slapped her, she only stirred lightly and smiled dreamily, like a child in its cradle. At length he desisted.
He had better shave, he thought. The beard made him feel unclean. He found a pair of shears, an oft-whetted butcher knife and the scoured bottom of an aluminum pan. It was tedious and painful, but he accomplished the shave.
Digging his way up to air was a slower job. It took weeks, during which Winchester had to work mostly in the dark to conserve the few remaining candles. It was more than twenty days when finally he broke through the surface into a bright starlit night.
He hauled himself out onto the turf and drew his first breath of outside air. If the interior of the vault had been amazing, the world outside was no less so. Instead of emerging into an air-besieged German city, the American had emerged into virgin woods. It was a country of little hills, heavily grassed, and tall trees stood all about.
Winchester made a short tour of exploration close by, but saw no lights or sign of human habitation whatever. When he returned to the cavern, he sat for a long time looking at the sky.
Until the Moon rose, it looked much as it had always done. But when the Moon emerged from behind a towering oak-top, Winchester had to gasp in unstinted admiration. Whereas the Moon he had always known had been a pallid disk, featured only by craters in monochrome, this Moon was a thing of scintillating color.
It was as if it had been studded with jewels.
One crater gave off a many-faceted ruby light, another purest emerald green. Another was of the color of a prime sapphire, while over the whole surface of the globe were patches of a vague iridescence, such as is seen in fire-opals and choice moonstones. Winchester gazed and marveled.
At length he tired, and decided to go below. Tomorrow he must get up early and explore the country about him.
It was clear that the war had destroyed Munich and that it had ceased to exist as a city, but surely somewhere nearby the Germans had rebuilt its successor.
But by a happy coincidence, when Winchester went below the girl stirred slightly of her own accord and opened a lazy eye. He stood above her, holding the stump of their last candle.
She sat up, blinking.
"I think I must have fallen asleep," she said apologetically.
"I think you must have," he said. It had been three weeks since he himself had awakened.
All that time the girl had slept without moving.
"Did you rest well?" he asked.
"Oh, quite," she said, stifling a small yawn. "Do you think the raid is over?"
"Yes," Allan Winchester said, very soberly. "The raid is over."
For some reason he found it very hard to tell the girl what had happened.
Or rather, what he thought had happened. For he was not too sure that it was not all part of a not altogether unpleasant dream. Yet despite her merry peals of incredulous laughter, as if he was trying to amuse her, the aspects of the room and, above all, the gaunt carcasses of the trapped animals at last convinced her.
"So we're years and years in the future — is that it?" she asked cheerfully. "Like Wells and the others used to write about?"
"Sort of," Winchester admitted. "Only what you've read is no help. It's all woods outside, and no people that I can see. Maybe the war washed the whole world up and we're all that's left."
"Another Adam and Eve, you mean?" she asked archly.
The American blushed.
"W-well, no," he stammered. "That's not what I meant, exactly." He ruffled his hair and stared at the floor.
He felt a little out of his depth. He groped for an appropriate come-back, since she seemed to be in a light mood despite the momentous news he had given her.
"I do think, though," he managed, with a gulp, "that it is about time I knew your name. Since it is a decade or so — or maybe a century — that we've been living in this cave."
"Nonsense!" the girl retorted. "Do you call this living? But since you want to know, my name is Cynthia Schnachelbauer. My father was German. German-American."
"Oh," Winchester said, repeating the name slowly. "Sounds rather cumbersome, the last half."
"Do you want to make something of it?" Cynthia challenged, planting her hands on her hips and jutting a small jaw at him.
"I may, at that," he said thoughtfully.
Cynthia made clothes for them. The ones they had were falling apart from rot. She worked from a roll of chamois skins she found in the kitchen-laboratory. In the meantime, Winchester gathered together a pack of selected provisions. When the two of them were quite ready for their expedition, they crawled up the steps to the outside vent and stepped into the woods above. After Winchester had sealed their cave with a flat stone, they started on their journey.
Of Munich there was nothing left, or hardly a trace. The frosts of unnumbered winters and the encroachment of vegetation had thrown apart what bits of masonry were left intact after the bombers had gone. Now it was virgin forest. But beyond, where once there had been fields, the adventurers came upon an endless lawn, on which tame deer grazed and peacocks strutted.
It was mid-afternoon before they encountered any evidence of the existence of man. Rounding the spur of a low hill, they came upon a valley where the grass had every appearance of just having been mowed. Winchester stooped to examine it, for his bewilderment had been growing at seeing so many thousand acres of carefully tended lawn. As he did, his eye caught a moving object.
The thing resembled a huge tortoise, and was racing down the valley at a great clip. It had a metallic, reddish sheen, as if plated with burnished copper. It approached rapidly, and as it came, Winchester noted that the color of the grass in its wake was not quite the same as that to its right. It was a mowing machine!
It halted abruptly some fifty feet away. A gaunt fellow, clad in a simple gray blouse and kilts of a coarse and cheap-looking material, popped out of a hatch that opened at its top. He leaped to the ground and at once prostrated himself, oriental style. In the same movement, he snatched open the back of his blouse, revealing his naked shoulders and the upper half of his back.
Since the fellow persisted in remaining in the position into which he had thrown himself, kneeling and with his face buried in the grass, Winchester and Cynthia approached him slowly. As they neared, they saw that there were symbols and numbers branded or tattooed on his back.
Winchester stared at them with a frown. What troubled him was that the figures were placed so as to be read upside down! The creature was identifying himself, and to do so he had to perform the kow-tow!
"Get up, man!" called Winchester sharply, seeing the fellow continued to grovel. "Tell us where is the nearest town."
"Ay, milord, whip me if you will, but do not mock me by calling me a 'man'," whined the operator of the mowing machine. "I am but your miserable slave. They did not tell me you were abroad today, or I would not have been so bold — "
"Nonsense!" snorted Winchester, stooping and shaking the fellow by the shoulder. "Stand up and talk face to face."
He stepped back, astonished that what he supposed to be a German peasant should speak English so instinctively. Not that it was English exactly, but a peculiar Anglo-Saxon dialect.
The man stood up, and the visitors saw he was trembling. But the moment he looked into Winchester's face, his attitude changed with startling abruptness. He dropped his whining, abject servility. In its place he registered a curious blend of rage and fright. With a bound he sprang back into his machine, screaming at the same time.
"Away! Masterless slaves, away! I have not seen you — I have not spoken to you — I do not know you!" His utterances trailed off into a wail. "Ah, why did they have to come here? Now they will punish us all!"
He slammed the hatch cover down. The machine darted forward and in a moment was no more than a dwindling speck on the distant lawn.
"That's the payoff," said Winchester softly.
Cynthia looked at him, puzzled.
"Here's a plain laborer of Middle Europe, who speaks English as a matter of course, indicating that at some time in the past the English-speaking peoples dominated this country. Yet he has the psychology of a whipped slave."
"I still don't understand," Cynthia said.
"Because we were walking boldly across what I take to be forbidden grounds, our slave at once assumed that we were of the existing master class. So he behaved accordingly."
"They must be nice people," observed Cynthia sarcastically.
"Quite," Winchester agreed grimly. "But when he stood up at my command and looked at us, he knew at once we were phonies. We are untamed slaves of his own race, not of his masters. They must be of another type altogether."
"I wonder what has happened to the world," Cynthia mused. And this time, apprehension was in her voice.
Their education was soon to begin. Unnoticed while they had been talking with the slave, a dark object had been circling in the sky above. Now it swooped, to descend at a steep angle and in a tight spiral. It was a plane of sorts, painted brilliant scarlet, but it was noiseless and apparently propelled by some invisible internal force. It made a jarless landing a dozen yards away.
Two men sprang out. They were obviously police, for they wore trim blue uniforms glittering with gold lace and buttons. Queerly shaped weapons hung from hooks on their belts, and each wore a round leather loop dangling from shoulder to shoulder. Winchester took these to be aigulettes of some description, but he was as instantly disabused.
As the men strode toward them, they unslipped the small ends of the tapered leather straps from one shoulder, and jerked the thick ends from sockets at the other. The straps were whips!
"Down, slaves!" one yelled harshly, swinging the whip above his head.
The other already had his unlimbered, and took a vicious slash at Cynthia. The singing tip missed her face by a scant inch.
"Take it easy, you!" snarled Winchester, lunging forward.
In his sudden white rage the American cared nothing for the mysterious gadgets dangling from these men's belts. His fist caught the second trooper squarely on the jaw and the fellow flopped backward, out cold.
But the crack of knuckles against jawbone was accompanied by a soft spat! While still unbalanced from the delivery of the blow. Winchester plunged forward onto the grass, frozen into his attitude of the moment. All his muscles and bones were filled with excruciating pain, yet he was so paralyzed by the unseen, swift force unleashed by the trooper that he could not make the slightest twitch.