Van Deventer was eying Arthur Chamberlain keenly.
"It isn't a question of your wanting pay in exchange for your
services in putting us back, is it?" he asked coolly.
Arthur turned and faced him. His face began to flush slowly. Van
Deventer put up one hand.
"I beg your pardon. I see."
"We aren't settling the things we came here for," Estelle
interrupted.
She had noted the threat of friction and hastened to put in a
diversion. Arthur relaxed.
"I think that as a beginning," he suggested, "we'd better get
sleeping arrangements completed. We can get everybody together
somewhere, I dare say, and then secure volunteers for the work."
"Right." Van Deventer was anxious to make amends for his blunder
of a moment before. "Shall I send the bank watchmen to go on each
floor in turn and ask everybody to come down-stairs?"
"You might start them," Arthur said. "It will take a long time
for every one to assemble."
Van Deventer spoke into the telephone on his desk. In a moment he
hung up the receiver.
"They're on their way," he said.
Arthur was frowning to himself and scribbling in a note-book.
"Of course," he announced abstractedly, "the pressing problem
is food. We've quite a number of fishermen, and a few hunters.
We've got to have a lot of food at once, and everything considered,
I think we'd better count on the fishermen. At sunrise we'd better
have some people begin to dig bait and wake our anglers. They'd
better make their tackle to-night, don't you think?"
There was a general nod.
"We'll announce that, then. The fishermen will go to the river under
guard of the men we have who can shoot. I think what Indians there
are will be much too frightened to try to ambush any of us, but we'd
better be on the safe side. They'll keep together and fish at nearly
the same spot, with our hunters patrolling the woods behind them,
taking pot-shots at game, if they see any. The fishermen should make
more or less of a success, I think. The Indians weren't extensive
fishers that I ever heard of, and the river ought fairly to swarm
with fish."
He closed his note-book.
"How many weapons can we count on altogether?" Arthur asked Van
Deventer.
"In the bank, about a dozen riot-guns and half a dozen repeating
rifles. Elsewhere I don't know. Forty or fifty men said they had
revolvers, though."
"We'll give revolvers to the men who go with the fishermen. The
Indians haven't heard firearms and will run at the report, even if
they dare attack our men."
"We can send out the gun-armed men as hunters," some one suggested,
"and send gardeners with them to look for vegetables and such
things."
"We'll have to take a sort of census, really," Arthur suggested,
"finding what every one can do and getting him to do it."
"I never planned anything like this before," Van Deventer remarked,
"and I never thought I should, but this is much more fun than
running a bank."
Arthur smiled.
"Let's go and have our meeting," he said cheerfully.
But the meeting was a gloomy and despairing affair. Nearly every
one had watched the sun set upon a strange, wild landscape. Hardly
an individual among the whole two thousand of them had ever been
out of sight of a house before in his or her life. To look out
at a vast, untouched wilderness where hitherto they had seen the
most highly civilized city on the globe would have been startling
and depressing enough in itself, but to know that they were alone
in a whole continent of savages and that there was not, indeed,
in all the world a single community of people they could greet as
brothers was terrifying.
Few of them thought so far, but there was actually--if Arthur's
estimate of several thousand years' drop back through time was
correct--there was actually no other group of English-speaking people
in the world. The English language was yet to be invented. Even
Rome, the synonym for antiquity of culture, might still be an
obscure village inhabited by a band of tatterdemalions under the
leadership of an upstart Romulus.
Soft in body as these people were, city-bred and unaccustomed to
face other than the most conventionalized emergencies of life, they
were terrified. Hardly one of them had even gone without a meal in
all his life. To have the prospect of having to earn their food,
not by the manipulation of figures in a book, or by expert juggling
of profits and prices, but by literal wresting of that food from its
source in the earth or stream was a really terrifying thing for them.
In addition, every one of them was bound to the life of modern
times by a hundred ties. Many of them had families, a thousand years
away. All had interests, engrossing interests, in modern New York.
One young man felt an anxiety that was really ludicrous because
he had promised to take his sweetheart to the theater that night,
and if he did not come she would be very angry. Another was to have
been married in a week. Some of the people were, like Van Deventer
and Arthur, so situated that they could view the episode as an
adventure, or, like Estelle, who had no immediate fear because
all her family was provided for without her help and lived far
from New York, so they would not learn of the catastrophe for
some time. Many, however, felt instant and pressing fear for the
families whose expenses ran always so close to their incomes that
the disappearance of the breadwinner for a week would mean actual
want or debt. There are very many such families in New York.
The people, therefore, that gathered hopelessly at the call of Van
Deventer's watchmen were dazed and spiritless. Their excitement
after Arthur's first attempt to explain the situation to them had
evaporated. They were no longer keyed up to a high pitch by the
startling thing that had happened to them.
Nevertheless, although only half comprehending what had actually
occurred, they began to realize what that occurrence meant.
No matter where they might go over the whole face of the globe,
they would always be aliens and strangers. If they had been carried
away to some unknown shore, some wilderness far from their own
land, they might have thought of building ships to return to their
homes. They had seen New York vanish before their eyes, however.
They had seen their civilization disappear while they watched.
They were in a barbarous world. There was not, for example,
a single sulfur match on the whole earth except those in the
runaway skyscraper.