There came a whirring in my head, and another blank interval; and when I
regained my senses I knew that another period of time had passed,
possibly months or even years. I stood on the palisade above the river,
near the entrance of the caves; and the sun was bright above me; but
there was no brightness in the men and women that trailed out of a small
circular hole in the ground. Drab as dock-rats, and pasty pale of
countenance as hospital inmates, and with bent backs and dirty, tattered
clothes and a mouse-like nosing manner, they emerged with the wariness
of hunted refugees; and they flung up their hands with low cries to
shield them from the brilliance of the sun, to which they were evidently
unaccustomed. From the packs on their backs and the bundles in their
hands, I knew that they were emerging from their subterranean refuge, to
try to begin a new life in the ravaged world above; and my heart went
out to them, for I saw that, few as they were--not more than fifty in
all--they were the sole survivors of a once-populous region, and would
have a bitter fight to wage in the man-made wilderness that had been a
world metropolis.
But as they roamed above through the waste of ash and rubble, and as
they wandered abroad where the fields had been and saw how every brush
and tree had been seared from the earth or poisoned by chemical brews, I
knew that their fight was not merely a bitter one--it was hopeless. And
I heard them muttering among themselves, "We have not even any tools!",
and again, "We have no fuel left for the great machines!" ... For they
had lived in a highly mechanical world, and the technicians who alone
understood the workings of that world had all been destroyed, and the
sources of power had all been cut off--and power was the food without
which they could not long survive.
Unable to endure their haggard, hangdog looks and grim, despondent eyes,
I went wandering far away, over the length and breadth of many lands.
And nowhere did I see a factory that had not been hammered to dust, nor
a village that had not been unroofed or burnt, nor a farm where the
workers went humming on their merry, toilsome way. Yet here and there I
did observe little knots of survivors. Sometimes they were half-clad
groups, lean and ferocious as famished wolves, who roamed the houseless
countryside with stones and clubs, hunting the wild birds and hares, or
making meager meals from bark and roots. Sometimes three or four men,
with the frenzied eyes and hysterical shrieks and shouts of maniacs,
would emerge from a brush hut by a river flat. Sometimes little bands of
men and women, in a dazed aimless way, would go wandering about a huge
jagged hole in the ground, where their homes and their loved ones lay
buried. I came upon solitary refugees high up on the scarred mountain
slopes, with nothing but a staff to lean upon and a deer-skin to keep
them warm. I saw more than one twisted form lying motionless at the foot
of a precipice. I witnessed a battle between two half-crazed, ravenous
bands, with murder, and cannibalism, and horrors too grisly to report. I
observed brave men resolutely trying to till the soil, whose productive
powers had been ruined by a poison spray from the sky; and I noted some
who, though the fields remained fertile enough, had not the seed to
plant; and others who had not the tools with which to plow and reap. And
some who, with great labor, managed to produce enough for three or four
mouths, had twenty or thirty to feed; and where the three or four might
have lived, the twenty or thirty perished.
Then, with a great sadness, I knew that man, having become civilized,
cannot make himself into a savage again. He has come to depend upon
science for his sustenance, and when he himself has destroyed the means
of employing that science, he is as a babe without milk. And it is not
necessary to destroy all men in order to exterminate mankind; one need
only take from him the prop of his mechanical inventions.