Wasteland.
Total, glaring, absolute.
Stark, terrible.
Nothing growing.
Nothing moving.
Ageless, perpetual silence. Eternal solitude. Only the piercing whine of the dry nameless wind blowing in from a distantly heard sea.
Desolation. A universe of nakedness and nil.
Utter, supreme. Everlasting.
Nothing of Life. Only the unrelenting deathly stillness. The infinity of zero, emptiness, nothingness.
This is the planet where Man has lost his supreme position in the scheme of things. Listen to the Wind.
If it could speak, it would tell you of Taylor. The man, the scientist, the space-explorer. The scorching, chilling breath of the wind’s passage would carry the terrible tale to the walls of Infinity, down the endless corridors of that vast timelessness which seems to be the core of the land itself…
Listen, the Wind…
“This is the truth eternal: whatever thinks, can speak. And whatever speaks can murder.
“But what is there to murder in this dead place?”
There is no answer for the Wind.
“When the astronaut, Taylor, came first among us from a voyage in outermost space, he perceived that his ship had passed through a fold in the Fourth Dimension, which is Time. And Taylor knew that he was older than when his journey had begun… by two thousand years and ten.”
The Wind whines higher and louder, scoring eerily over a dead landscape. Weird lambent lights suffuse the terrain. There is a vast unearthly brilliance invested in a panorama of Nothingness.
“But in the first days he did not know the name of the planet on which he had set foot—where Apes, risen to great estate, had acquired the power of tongues, while Man, fallen from his zenith to become a beast of the earth, had lost the means of speech, and was dumb…”
The dead sands remained unmoving, the wind prowled over the monolithic expanse of desert-like desolation. And isolation. The unknown lights bathed the wasteland with a dull, inflexible glow.
“Now Taylor hated war. And since Man had made war upon himself—murdered himself—over and over again, ever since the first town was built and burned and bloodied—Taylor believed that the race of Man was hopeless.”
A Dead Sea. Dead like the Dead Land.
The wind stole quietly over the still, stagnant, murky waters.
“Yet the great Apes were hardly better. They put Taylor in a cage as they had once been caged. When he and his woman escaped from the City of the Apes into the wilderness called the Forbidden Zone… he found a desert land of rock and stone. Barren, unfruitful, devoid of life and eternally laid waste by Man’s vilest war in Man’s history. And in this wilderness, Taylor set eyes upon the Statue…”
A statue with spikes.
A stone lady, gazing out over the limitless endless acres of sand. Oblivious to the mean waves lapping at her copper-lined bosom. A Colossus, with upstretched arm, bearing aloft a torch that had lost all its meaning. All its truth. All its light.
A long-dead lady of stone eyes, stone ears and stone senses—whose only companion for an eon had been—
—the Wind.
“…and Taylor knew he was back on Earth… an Earth defiled and destroyed by the hand of Man. Set this down: whatever speaks, can murder.”
And Taylor, sliding down from the back of his horse, with the savage woman Nova also dismounting, staggered toward the gigantic spikes upthrusting from the cruel sand and blurted his cry of agony to the unheeding skies all around them: “Goddamn you all to hell!”
Falling to his torn knees, he buried his head in his hands. Sobs racked his tall, magnificent figure. Nova watched and listened in dumb incomprehension. The dead landscape remained mute.
The Statue of Liberty could not hear Taylor weeping.
Stone has no heart.
Or soul.
It does not even hear the wind.