The Great Fog (6 page)

So the few ranges and plateaus which rose above the six-thousand-foot level stood gaunt as the ribs of a skeleton carcass under the untwinkling stars and the white glaring sun. After a very few exploratory expeditions out into that open, men realized that they must content themselves with a subsurface life, a new kind of fish existence, nosing about on the floor of a pool which henceforth was to be their whole world. It might be a poor, confined way of living, but above that surface was death. A few explorers returned, but, though fish taken out of water may recover if put back soon enough, every above-the-Fog explorer succumbed from the effect. After a few days the lesions and sores of bad X-ray burning appeared. If, after that, the nervous system did not collapse, the wretched man literally began to fall to pieces.

Underneath the Fog-blanket men painfully, fumblingly worked out a new answer to living. Of course, it had to be done without preparation, so the cost was colossal. All who were liable to rheumatic damage and phthisis died off. Only a hardy few remained. Man had been clever enough to pull down the atmosphere-roof which had hung so loftily over his head, but he never learned again how to raise a cover as high, spacious, and pleasant as the sky's blue dome. The dividing out of the air was a final precipitation, a nonreversible change-down toward the final entropy. Man might stay on, but only at the price of being for the rest of his term on earth confined under a thick film of precipitated air. Maybe, even if he had been free and had had the power to move fast and see far, it would have been too great a task for him to have attempted to “raise the air.” As he now found himself, pinned under the collapse he had caused, he had not a chance of even beginning to plan such a vast reconstruction.

His job, then, was just to work at making lurking livable. And, within the limits imposed, it was not absolutely impossible. True, all his passion for speed and travel and seeing far and quick, all that had to go. He who had just begun to feel that it was natural to fly, now was confined not even to the pace of a brisk walk but to a crawl. It was a life on the lowest gear. Of course, great numbers died just in the first confusion, when the dark came on, before the permanent change in humidity and light swept off the other many millions who could not adapt themselves. But, after a while, not only men's health but their eyes became adapted to the perpetual dusk. They began to see that the gloom was not pitch-dark. Gradually, increasing numbers learned to be able to go about without lamps. Indeed, they found that they saw better if they cultivated this “nightsight,” this ancient part of the eye so long neglected by man when he thought he was master of things. They were greatly helped also by a type of faint phosphorescence, a “cold-light,” which (itself probably another mold-mutation) appeared on most surfaces if they were left untouched, and so outlined objects with faint, ghostly highlights.

So, as decentralized life worked itself out, men found that they had enough. War was gone, so that huge social hemorrhage stopped. Money went out of gear, and so that odd strangle hold on goods-exchange was loosed. Men just couldn't waste what they had, so they found they had much more than they thought. For one reason, it wasn't worth hoarding anything, holding back goods, real, edible, and wearable goods, for a rise in price. They rotted. The old medieval epitaph proved itself true in this new dark age: “What I spent I had: what I saved I lost.” Altogether, life became more immediate and, what people had never suspected, more real because less diffused. It was no use having a number of things which had been thought to be necessities. Cars? You could not see to travel at more than four miles an hour, and not often at that. Radios? They just struck; either insulation against the damp was never adequate or the electric conditions, the radio-resonant layers of the upper atmosphere, had been completely altered. A wailing static was the only answer to any attempt to re-establish wireless communication.

It was a low-built, small-housed, pedestrian world. Even horses were too dashing; and they were blinder in the Fog than were men. As for your house, you could seldom see more than its front door. Metal was little used. Smelting it was troublesome (the fumes could hardly get away and nearly suffocated everyone within miles of a furnace), and when you got your iron and steel it began rusting at once. Glass knives were used instead. They were very sharp. Men learned again, after tens of thousands of years of neglect, how to flake flints, crystal, and all the silica rocks to make all manner of neat, sharp tools.

Man's one primary need, which had made for nearly all his hoarding, the animal craving to accumulate food stocks, that fear which, since the dawn of civilization, has made his granaries as vast as his fortresses, this need, this enemy, was wiped out by another freak botanical by-product of the Fog. The curious sub-fog climate made an edible fungus grow. It was a sort of manna. It rotted if you stored it. But it grew copiously everywhere, of itself. Indeed, it replaced grass: wherever grass had grown the fungus grew. Eaten raw, it was palatable and highly nutritious—more tasty and more wholesome than when cooked (which was a blessing in itself, since all fires burnt ill and any smoke was offensive in the dense air). Man, like the fishes, lived in a dim but fruitful element.

The mean temperature under the Fog stayed precisely at 67 degrees Fahrenheit, owing, evidently, to some basic balance, like that which keeps the sea below a certain depth always at 36 degrees, four degrees above freezing. Men, then, were never cold.

They stayed mainly at home, around their small settlements. What was the use of going about? All you needed and could use was at your door. There was nothing to see—your view was always limited to four feet. There was no use in trying to seize someone else's territory. You all had the same: you all had enough.

Art, too, changed. The art of objects was gone. So a purer, less collectible art took its place. Books would not last; and so memory increased enormously, and men carried their libraries in their heads—a cheaper way and much more convenient. As a result, academic accuracy, the continual quoting of authorities, disappeared. A new epic age resulted. Men in the dusk composed, extemporized, jointly developed great epics, sagas, and choruses, which grew like vast trees, generation after generation, flowering, bearing fruit, putting out new limbs. And, as pristine, bardic poetry returned, it united again with its nursery foster-brother, music. Wood winds and strings were ruined by the damp. But stone instruments, like those used by the dawn cultures, returned—giving beautiful pure notes. An orchestra of jade and marble flutes, lucid gongs, crystal-clear xylophones grew up. Just as the Arabs, nomads out on the ocean of sand, had had no plastic art, but, instead, a wonderful aural art of chant and singing verse, so the creative power of the men of the Umbral Epoch swung over from eye to ear. Indeed, the thick air which baffled the eye made fresh avenues and extensions for the ear. Men could hear for miles: their ears grew as keen as a dog's. And with this keenness went subtlety. They appreciated intervals of sound which to the old men of the open air would have been imperceptible. Men lived largely for music and felt they had made a good exchange when they peered at the last moldering shreds of pictorial art.

“Yes,” said Sersen's great-grandson, when the shock of the change was over and mankind had accustomed itself to its new conditions, “yes, I suspect we were not fit for the big views, the vast world into which the old men tumbled up. It was all right to give animal men the open. But, once they had got power without vision, then either they had to be shut up or they would have shot and bombed everything off the earth's surface. Why, they were already living in tunnels when the Fog came. And out in the open, men, powerful as never before, nevertheless died by millions, died the way insects used to die in a frost, but died by one another's hands. The plane drove men off the fields. That was the thing, I believe, that made Mind decide we were not fit any longer to be at large. We were going too fast and too high to see what we were actually doing. So, then, Mind let man fancy that all he had to do was to make food apart from the fields. That was the Edible Mold, and that led straight, as my great-grandfather saw, to the atmospheric upset, the meteorological revolution. It really was a catalyst, making the well-mixed air, which we had always taken for granted as the only possible atmosphere, divide out into two layers as distinct as water and air. We're safer as we are. Mind knew that, and already we are better for our Fog cure, though it had to be drastic.

“Perhaps, one day, when we have learned enough, the Fog will lift, the old high ceiling will be given back to us. Once more Mind may say: ‘Try again. The Second Flood is over. Go forth and replenish the earth, and this time remember that you are all one.' Meanwhile I'm thankful that we are as we are.”

WINGLESS VICTORY

I was looking for copy—“Moby Dick” stuff. I'm a “descriptive journalist.” Now that whaling is about to join Purchas'
Pilgrims
and El Dorado hunting, I thought the time had come to “meet the last whalers.” I've landed something, but whether it's a whale of a story or simply a snark, I can't make up my mind. As a yarn it's straight stuff, simple narrative. But the narrator …?

There's a small public house near Wapping Stairs where old “masters” will drop in if they're on the Thames. That was the place where I used to go angling for whale stories. I own I'd found pretty well nothing. Even before it ceased to pay well, whaling was really large-scale knacking, butchery. That evening no one who'd actually ever smelled blubber had come in, and the few clients had all gone except one man. I'd come to the conclusion that my search was no good and that I'd better think up some other subject for a write-up. Certainly the last hanger-on in that doleful little bar looked a very unlikely source for a story. It was clear he wasn't a “master” of anything. Then something made me look at him twice. He was a lightly built fellow, pretty obviously down and out. But in some odd way, in spite of the air of wastrel and flotsam which his clothes and carriage pretty clearly bespoke, there was one little oddity that didn't fall in with the commonplace formula of failure, and, though it was a small thing, it caught my attention. It was a small thing but it was odd in such a make-up. It was his complexion.

Shabby and shambling as he was, he ought to have been withered and ill-colored. He wasn't. Out of his sordid suit emerged a skin which had about it a wholly inconsistent freshness. He saw me looking at him. I offered him a drink and he shifted over on the bench beside me. There was no doubt about it, his skin was like a boy's, and now that he was within a couple of feet of me, I could see another odd little thing: it was not only smooth and tanned like well-cared-for leather but it was covered with a peculiar down. I found myself wondering whether he could ever have shaved. But he interrupted my rather personal inventory. Perhaps he felt self-conscious at my look; perhaps he felt he ought to do some-thing in exchange for the drink.

“You're interested in voyages?” he asked rather tentatively.

“I want to get the last of the whaling stories,” I told him.

“Afraid I can't help you there. But,” he hesitated, “you wouldn't be interested in polar exploration?”

I remarked that whaling led in that direction. He seemed to wish to talk—gave me the impression I'd be doing him a service by listening.

“You haven't done that?” I asked half-encouragingly.

Again he replied with a question. “Do you remember an expedition when one man had to drop out to give the others a chance to get through?”

“That's a common predicament,” I was saying when a particular incident suddenly flashed through my mind.

“You're not …?”

“Perhaps not; perhaps not.” He was suddenly evasive. “But when I've told you what I've been through, you won't care who I am and perhaps you'll even understand why I don't, either.”

Suddenly he seemed to become alive. He glanced at me almost humorously.

“The Ancient Mariner only wanted to talk about his Albatross—well, I want to talk about a bird, but polar, physically, to an albatross.”

To hurry him on I tried to pin him down. “Polar?” I asked.

“But not North,” he answered.

“No, I guessed …”

Then he was off. “Antarctica—the only, the last, unexplored continent! The North got men first, and what did it give? Not a continent; simply more sea. Haven't we enough? Three-fifths of the earth's covered with sea.”

“Well, Antarctica isn't any better!”

“It's land.”

“Frozen land's no better than frozen sea?”

“True enough; that's the point. Still, I don't know if it was true. Perhaps it was a delirium. But if so, how'm I here? Well, that's your problem now. That's for you to answer. Here it is straight. You know, I just walked out. There was a blizzard on. It's good, of course, as deaths go. You just plug ahead; don't have to bother where you're going, and when you feel numb you settle down and Nature, subzero Nature, the master anesthetist, does the rest. Well, I bumbled and stumbled, crawled a bit and sank. I woke gradually. It wasn't painful, so I knew I was dead. Another thing made me sure. I was moving, heaving, with a queer pulsing jerk. That, I thought, that's the way you feel your last heartbeats, as though they were something outside you, because you're already more'n half out of your body. But, if so, those jerks ought to have gotten weaker. Instead, they grew stronger. I was being pulled along, with big, swinging jerks. I must be on a sled, I thought. It was then that I began to give up the death idea.

“There was only one alternative: Rescue. I tried to shift, but found myself fast. Finally, I worked a goggle so I could see through a slit in the wrappings, sideways. The blizzard had stopped. The stars were dazzlingly clear. You remember, it was just at the end of the season when we were lost; we got late on our schedule. I lay awhile, peering out, watching a large star hanging clearly above the edge of the plain over which we'd tramped all those days, and now I was pulsing along. I was just turning over and over in my mind: what the dickens could be the team that could pull the way I was being pulled? when suddenly I stopped dead from wondering about that and switched to asking Where? For that bright star had crept down, down toward the horizon.