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Ebook has 91 lines and 7846 words, and 2 pages

CONSERVATION READER

HOW OUR FIRST ANCESTORS LIVED

Before these fields were shorn and tilled Full to the brim our rivers flowed; The melody of waters filled The fresh and boundless woods; And torrents dashed, and rivulets play'd, The fountains spouted in the shade.

The earth is our home. It is a great treasure house filled with the most wonderful things. Although people have lived on the earth for many thousands of years, they have been very slow in learning the secrets of their treasure house. This is because early men were much like the lower animals. During all these years their minds have been slowly growing. Now we can learn and understand many things which our ancestors of long ago could not.

In habits and appearance the first men that roamed the earth were little different from the other animals except that they walked upright. When they had enough to eat and a home safe from enemies, they seemed perfectly happy and contented.

These early men lived in the same wonderful treasure house as we do, but they did not know how to make use of its riches. In truth, their wants were so few that they would have had no use for the things that now seem so necessary to us. The rich fields about them lay untilled. The gold, silver, copper, and iron in the earth remained undiscovered; and the animals and birds that we now use in so many ways then served them mainly for food.

Since they had no furry coats to keep them warm as do the animals of the cold regions, and had not learned to make clothing, their homes must have been in the warm parts of the earth. While they were without weapons to defend themselves against the lion and tiger, yet they were sharp witted and very quick in their movements and thus were usually able to escape their more powerful enemies.

Although these early ancestors of ours seemed so much like the other animals, they were in reality very different. They had the same keen senses of sight, hearing, and smell, but they were more intelligent.

When the dog and cat have had enough to eat, they lie down perfectly happy and contented. But when early men had had enough to eat, they were often not satisfied. They had other longings which finally led them to make discoveries about the uses of things around them and how to make their lives more comfortable.

The little bear cub, for example, as it grows up learns from its mother just what it should do on all occasions. It learns what its mother knows and that is all. But among the early people of whom we are speaking the children not only learned all that their parents knew, but a little more. In this way each generation of children came to know more about the world.

Thus after many years had passed people came to understand something of the wonderful world in which they lived. They were no longer at the mercy of wild animals, storms, heat, cold, hunger, and disease.

The first people, like the other animals, used only their hands and teeth in hunting and in fighting their enemies. Finally some of the brighter ones discovered that a stick or club served better than the bare hands.

We have discovered the sites of many of the villages as well as the caves in which the ancient inhabitants of the earth lived. The implements of bone and stone which we have dug up in such places enable us to learn a great deal about their lives.

They began, by and by, to build rude shelters,--huts and wigwams, low houses of dried mud, and dugouts in the hillside. They learned to weave simple coverings out of the fibers of certain plants, or hair or wool, to protect their bodies against the cold and the wet. They learned, somehow, to tan the skins of animals, so that they would not first stretch and grow slippery. They learned to hold things together by sewing, using sharp bones for needles and the sinews of animals or fibers of plants for thread.

How did men discover that they could travel on the water? Some one may at first have made use of a log to cross a river and, afterwards, have tied several logs together, making a raft. When they had learned how to make a canoe out of a log, by burning or hewing it out with rude axes, they could then take long journeys on the water to new lands. Since paddling was very tiresome, some one, brighter than the rest, probably thought of making a sail of bark or skins and so letting the wind push the canoe along.

It is easy to see how, once these new ways of using the earth were found, men could move into other regions than the belt where it was always warm. They could store up food for the winter, they could build warm shelters and get warm clothing, and they could sit by a fire.

Sometimes when the first people were out hunting, insteae corner of his mouth.

Mac Brogarth, nuclear physicist, came waltzing grotesquely across the garden and toppled backward into the pool under the fountain and lay there too weak even to raise his head out of the water. He would have drowned if Lewis hadn't lifted it out for him.

The old man in Lewis' arms looked up at Lewis with a passing light of tragic sobriety.

"Sam Lewis," he said. "That's you, isn't it, Sam? I had a cabin up near Lake Michigan and I was going up there to finish important work. I'll never get back there, Sam. I know now that I never will. I never will."

Lewis stood up. Without seeing or hearing anyone, he walked out into the dry coolness of the starlit desert night.

He walked between the barracks, past the messhall toward the labs, turned down the length of that ominous looking hulk which concealed The Pit, and the Monster with which Lewis had worked until there was no use working any more. Beyond that, he saw the electric fence, and the white helmeted Guards standing at rigid attention.

He walked over there, his shoes crunching on sand and gravel, and looked into the Guard's face. It was a mask, expressionless, and rigid. Its eyes were hardly human, Lewis thought. It had many of the characteristics of Cardoza's robotic barkeep.

Lewis knew that the security Guards had been worked over in the Wards until there was no possibility of their being security risks. Any classified thought, even if it penetrated one side of their heads, quickly drained through the sieved brain and out the other side.

"Carry on, soldier," Lewis said. The Guard didn't seem to hear.

Lewis walked back toward the lab building covering The Pit.

The conflict was like a knife slicing him apart inside. What if he made a grandstand gesture now? It would be much worse perhaps than merely being sent into the Wards for a little mental working over. He would be found guilty of sabotage, tried by the Commander's kangaroo court martial, found guilty of being a traitor to his country, a foreign agent probably. He would be placed inside a gas chamber on a stool and a little gas pellet would be dropped on his lap.

And anyway, aside from his own punishment, would it be morally right? Maybe I'm the one who is crazy, he thought. Maybe it's hell out there, reduced to God knew what kind of social chaos. Maybe we're about to win. Maybe we're about to lose. Maybe as bad as it is, it's the best one could expect during the greatest crisis.

He went inside, and took the elevator down one floor into the lead-lined Pit.

He walked up to the control panel and looked through the thick layers of shielding transparent teflo-nite into the Pit, watching the Monster indirectly through the big lenticular screen disc above the control panel.

The Monster stood in the lead-lined Pit, inactive, as it had been inactive for months. And even before that, during the months when Lewis was learning to control the Monster until it seemed an extension of his own nervous system, its work had become useless, due to unobtainable documents and personnel, not to mention lack of communication with other research centers.

The Monster was part of a general plan to compensate for the out-lawing of A- and H-bombs. The most deadly conceivable compromise. The Pit was a deadly sea of radioactivity in which only a mechanical robot monster could work. Outside the Pit, Lewis directed the Monster whose duty was the construction of drone planes. A few had been built, but they weren't quite effective, and now it was impossible to go on with the experimentation. The parts were all there. Everything was there except certain vital classified documents that could not be cleared into this particular Project.

Thousands of drone planes were to have been built, and perhaps were being built in some other Project, but not in this one. Thousands of drone planes with raw, un-shielded atomic engines, light and inordinately powerful with an indefinite cruising range, remote controlled, free of fallible human agency, loaded with bacteriological bombs, the terrible gas known as the G-agent, and in addition, loaded 'spray' tanks that would spew deadly gamma rays and neutrons over limitless areas of atmosphere.

Lewis moved his hands over the sensitive controls, and through the lenticular disc, watched The Monster respond with the delicate gestures of a gigantic violinist. The Monster was a robot, ten times bigger than Cardoza's barkeep, and when Lewis moved his hands, the Monster moved its own huge mandibles as its electro-magnum, colloid brain, picked up Lewis' mental directions.

The Monster was immune to radiation, and bacteriological horrors. It swam in death as unconcerned as a lovely lady wallowed in a pink bubble-bath.

Lewis sat in the twilight of the Pit making the monster move about in its futile rounds. Lewis loved the Monster and felt the wasteful tragedy of its magnificent potential. A wonder of the world, a reaffirmation of man's imagination and his powers of reason, the Monster was built for what might seem horribly destructive ends, but its potential was for limitless achievement of the best and most far-reaching in man. Yet here it was, doing nothing at all. Standing in a sea of radioactive poison, a gigantic symbol of man's stupidity to man.

Could a man know the truth and continue to deny it, and still remain sane? You could go on living that way. You could take happy pills, sleeping pills, dream-pills and stay lushed-up on government liquor. But sooner or later you would have to face the horrible empty waste. After that loomed the face of madness.

And yet, Lewis thought, how do I know that I know the truth? I'm cut off. No info, no communication. For all I know we're the only people left in the world. An oasis of secrecy surrounded by desert.

Lewis walked back up to the first floor, and out into the night, heading for Betty Seton's apartment. Maybe she was sober enough now to talk this thing over. The hell with security regulations. Just the same, he walked along in the shadow next to the building to avoid any eye-witness of his proposed rendezvous.

Science, he thought, was really another name for freedom. It couldn't function without freedom of thought, freedom of inquiry. You couldn't mix it up with security and cut off communication, because communication is the essence of science. An idea is universal, and how can you go on thinking when you're no longer a part of the world?

Whatever the decision arrived at in Lewis' own heart might otherwise have been, he was never to know. His decision was made for him by an hysterical laugh, the sound of scuffling on boards, and another laugh. He came around the corner of the barracks and saw the Guard manhandling Betty Seton down the steps of her apartment building.

The guard was big, built like a wedge, with a flat bulldog face bunched up under his white helmet. The Guard's brain had been carefully honed down to an efficient, completely unintelligent but precise fighting machine level. He neither knew nor cared why he did anything. But he was handicapped by having Betty Seton in one hand. He was whirling, raising his stungun with the other hand, when Lewis hit him.

Lewis drove in with his weight behind first a solid long blow that broke a rigid wall of muscle in the Guard's belly, turned it to soft clay. Betty fell free and lay laughing on the gravel. Her face was a white smear in the starlight.

Lewis brought his knee up into the Guard's face as he bent over, sank another one into the soft belly, kicked the Guard in the crotch, stamped on his booted foot, came back and ran forward again, driving his shoulder again into the Guard's belly. The Guard's feet hit the bottom step, he smashed into the boards, and his helmet flew off as his head thudded on the stanchion.

The Guard just shook his shaven head, started to get up heavily, reaching again for his stungun, his face expressionless. Lewis heard footsteps pounding around the corner, slashing on gravel.

More Guards. Dehumanized and insensitive, they were almost as invulnerable as so many robots--

He turned, ran past Betty Seton, stilly lying there with only a thin housecoat around her, not laughing now, but looking suddenly sober and horrified.

"Betty!"

She stared up at him. A block away he could hear the Guards coming and he kept on running. He yelled back.

"Get a jeep. Get Brogarth, Cardoza, Nemerov, anybody. We're breaking out of here."

"Where?" he heard her yelling after him as he went around the corner.

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