Tempus Fugitive
Harker Lee walks along the edge of a shifting, almost formless plain of sand and sandy soil. The sun rises and sets at intervals which seem to be composed of only a few fleeting moments. The scene flickers eerily, as day and night alternate with furious frequency. The ground beneath his feet is hazy and indistinct, and the sky is vaporous and ill-defined. He walks on in substance, his pale eyes roaming the horizon. He is beginning his own odyssey, but this is not really his world. He had little or no part in the making of it. For him, it can hardly be any less a confinement than Canaan itself. And yet he is an instrument in the judgment. He is at home here. He can live here.
There are no misfits in your Creation.
Some distance away he sees the sharply defined outline of a city rising from the gently curving ground, and he begins walking toward it. It appears to be small — he judges that it is no more than a mile from one edge to the other — but as he watches he sees that it is growing slowly. New silhouettes appear all along the black line of buildings, strange square silhouettes, taller than those in the center.
His mind attunes itself, focuses like a pair of binoculars, so that the gaze of his eyes compensates for the stroboscopic effect of night and day, and imparts a three-dimensional quality to the fluid city. He sees the rectangles at the edges of the city spring straight from the ground to soar erect into the air. Even without the persistent flashing, he receives an impression of jerky, sporadic growth as though there are lapses of time in between images. This he attributes to the changes in the pace at which the buildings are constructed: the differences are too small to be seen individually, but have a collective effect of unevenness. The whole of the border of the city is in constant and violent movement. The center changes, too, gradually. Its symmetry is never quite given over to the regimentation of the suburbs, but it grows, and its lines are somewhat smoothed.
All at once, clumps of buildings begin to appear a few miles removed from the city. Harker is witnessing the birth and development of a megalopolis, something which the universe he had previously known had made him no stranger to, save for the fact that the megalopoli had run into one another and fused, never being left alone, surrounded by wilderness, closed communities, city-shelters, city-coffins, city-wombs.
The buildings no longer huddle but lie ranged like the jagged outline of a row of broken teeth along the horizon. It is sprouting darkly outlined shapes along the whole of its still increasing length. More buildings vanish and more grow up in the space they vacate. The pace of enlargement increases. The whole skyline is wavering and oscillating.
A road suddenly extends across his field of vision, traveling from horizon to horizon in what is, to him, scant minutes. There are no people or vehicles visible — their presence is too ephemeral for him to detect. Only by the hectic life of the silhouetted city is life on a smaller scale manifest. He is seeing humanity in the whole — alive, growing, and building like a lunatic of stone and metal.
And then, all in one instant, while he is yet many miles from its outskirts, it falls. In one moment the city is standing straight and mighty, presenting a proud face to the sun and stars, and in the next it collapses into ruin. In one moment it is complete, a dynamic system of growth. Then a sudden flash of intense glare transcends the chain of night and day, and in the next moment there is a transient thin swirl of black smoke and half of it cascades as though vaporized into a thin smear of rubble. There is only the merest glimpse of a halo of flame, and then it is gone, swept into the skies by the surge of time, and only ruin is left.
Harker Lee never felt the shock wave of the bomb, nor felt its heat. He stops while the pantomime goes on — sporadic, feeble growth for a short while, which slows and then ceases. The wavering stops, gently and quietly. There is no rebirth.
There is none of the violent thrashing of the wounded beast, only a tranquil passivity. Slowly the city falls into disrepair. The helter-skelter passages of night and day have not altered, yet the scene slows, as though the city is consumed with tiredness.
The city is dying.
It slowly surrenders its hold on the chaotic life it once possessed. The blunt, square-ended figures abandon their claw-handed reach for the stars and slide to the ground. The road is washed gently into oblivion by the loving caress of the tidal sands, their waves sweeping lethargically across the plain. The lone towers which had carried power lines fall, make stony mounds for a little while, and then they, too, are swept into smoothness by the marching plain.
The horizon lapses deeper and deeper toward its former flatness and again curls away evenly to disappear in the haze. The shifting colors of cultivation pale. The sand shifts and stirs. The skyline is dead, the city buried without a monument to signal its passing. It is lost and forgotten. Peace has come. Peace and emptiness, hand in hand.
But even the peace has small durations. Order, like chaos, proves to be only temporary. Far, far away in the shimmering distance a tiny black dot appears. Then, after a while, another, and another, and . . .
Harker Lee is laughing. He has been laughing for a million years.
Was it a bomb or a thunderbolt from the hand of God which destroyed the first city? Was it the reward of civilization, or the price of building roads across the wilderness?
Ask Harker. He knows all about the megalopolis, all about the wilderness.
He knows.
While I walk by the banks of a river which girdles the world, I stop to rest where a boatman waits to ferry passengers across the river.
“A coin,” cry the beggars, scampering around my feet, dragging their maimed children and rolling over and over in the dirt to display the full complement of their injuries and their agonies.
“A coin, a coin, a coin, a coin!” they chant, in endless harmony, for the one strength they have left to them is the strength of their voices.
“I have no coin,” I tell them.
But there is another man passing by, and the beggars rush to him to surround him, the better to assault his pity and his kindness with the arrows of their need and the spears of their despair. The man has one coin, and he gives it to the most despicable of the beggars, who thereupon abandons her broken-limbed child to leap into the waiting boat. Steadily and unhurriedly, the boatman stirs the quiet water with his spatulate oars.
“A coin?” he asks, with a voice like idle thunder. The beggar gives the boatman the coin she has been given, and the boat swings out onto the river, transporting the delirious beggar to her reward.
The generous man turns to me. “How long?” he asks.
I stare at him coldly, and then look down at the beggars, who are settling to wait by the roadside.
“A thousand years,” murmur the beggars sleepily. “Perhaps forever.”
They know the value of pity and conscience.
My dreams are haunting me and taunting me with beggars. I know what the beggars mean. How many times have I accused civilized men of maiming and crippling their children as the beggars of Calcutta used to do — still do in some strange other world? All the better to beg, all the better to fit the mold that the social slot machine has destined the child for. Everywhere it is the same story, the same mythology. I know why you have made beggars to haunt madmen. Do they cluster around the feet of poor Judas as well? And all the others, too?
I wish you joy of them. Judas will laugh at them; Sam Mastervine will kick them to death; Luis Dalquier will gamble with them and take from. them everything that they have or will earn. Cain Urquhart will try to convert them. Who do you think will find pity for them? Bedbug? Perhaps.
Is that what you want? Do you want us to scorn the whole human race for beggars? You want us to cheat them? You want us to turn our backs on the whole human race? It won’t work. Not with beggars. Whatever makes you think that they have that much consequence? Whatever makes you think that we have repulsion left in our hearts to spare for your meager hauntings?
Show us glory, God, show us pride and ambition, if you want to win us. Give us the pride and the power. Don’t ask us to find our own. We can’t.