He went on to explain his work, as that of one of those who had undertaken the coordination of human knowledge, his subject being political history. For that purpose, all relevant books, having been already assembled, were submitted in chronological batches for his inspection. Some of these he would entirely preserve. Some he would summarize. From others he would abstract passages of separate value. But always he would retain a clear purpose of reducing the records of the past to a compass which would be within the possible study and comprehension of one man’s brain, within the duration of human life.
Large deliveries of these books were made every four months, when there would be removal of those with which he had dealt. One was now due in two days’ time, and—which had never occurred before—he would not be completely ready for the exchange. He had been working against time, having been weakened by shortage of food, and delayed by searching for it, before he adopted the desperate expedient which had resulted in her capture, and it had now become necessary for him to send a telepathic message to postpone the delivery.
She asked: “Can you do that?”
He looked surprised. “Have you no knowledge of telepathy on your side of the river?”
The question caused her a momentary confusion. She had been talking to him in the personality of Marguerite Cranleigh, her mind cautiously alert to avoid disclosure of how much she knew of, and how directly she was interested in, the period of which he spoke. And now she had another experience of how hard it was to transfer to another personality with the memories belonging to it.
But the awkward silence ended when she replied: “We know what telepathy is, but do not practice it in such ways.”
“By preference or inability?”
“I don’t think we could.”
“We have always considered that you were savages; but I should not have thought you to be so primitive as that must imply.”
“We are not savage at all. We have a gracious and kindly civilization, sufficient for our own contentment.”
“Then you must be easily pleased. Yet you are an intelligent specimen. I will admit that.”
It was a compliment which, in view of the final experience of his previous wife, she was pleased to have, though she had already reached a comfortable conclusion that she was in no immediate danger of a similar fate. She saw also (but must not say) that it might be praise, not of those who were in his thoughts, but of the older civilization which he had condemned in vigorous words.
She revealed another unspoken thought when she replied: “Perhaps if she’d had more brains, she wouldn’t have had such a good liver.”
“It is an interesting speculation. Am I to understand that yours would not be worth frying?”
She felt that the subject might be advantageously changed, and replied lightly: “Yes. Too tough to bite, more likely than not.” (She remembered a friend of her far-off days saying how much she disliked a man looking at her as though she were naked. But how much worse it was to be looked at with eyes that seemed to go a lot deeper than that!) She went on rapidly: “Can you really use telepathy to communicate with anyone as you wish, or does it work along special lines?”
“It depends upon vacant receptivity; or stimulation of any mind not too explicitly concentrated.”
“I see…. So you don’t expect any difficulty?”
“It is most improbable. There would be difficulty if a general referendum were being made.”
“Will you do it now?”
“No. Later. When I shall be better able to estimate what further time I still require. But it must be in time to allow of—” He broke off abruptly. He said, with curt emphasis: “Be silent until I speak.” And then his eyes changed their focus, as though they looked at a distant thing.
CHAPTER VII: A NATION ASSERTS ITS WILL
Now they sat very still, while she thought: “If it takes all this time to say that by telepathy, I call it a slow game.”
But, after that, she found that foreign thoughts were invading her own mind, which was soon protesting against them, though with consciousness of the futility of opposition to the force of a hundred thousand contending wills that gained each moment in volume and intensity. Then gradually they came to a unity of resolve as to what they would undertake, to overcome the famine conditions which threatened universal starvation before another season’s crop of nuts and fruits should be ripe—and which, even then, would be a meagre subsistence unless the epidemic which had already almost destroyed their swine should be arrested while there were still sufficient remaining alive to breed supplies for the coming year.
The resolve which had now been brought to an apparent unanimity was that food should be sought by penetrating, with whatever violence might be necessary, to the resources of other lands. And, that being agreed, there was next a momentous question to be resolved—in what directions, one or more, should they set out?
For those in Lemno’s part of the land, there was the choice of going down the river, below the falls; of going far west, leaving the river at their backs; or of going up the river, and crossing, if they could, above the rapids, to ravage Gleda’s people.
Gleda realized that the first of these propositions was not seriously regarded. It was only slightly considered, so that its rejection might be clearly agreed upon. Below the falls there were great stretches of malarial swamps.
To turn their backs on the river was a very different enterprise, for there, beyond the wide, well-wooded plain on which they dwelt, the land rose, not in sudden hills, but by gradual arid, treeless, and windswept slopes, where there was as little to sustain life as there was life to be sustained. But, beyond that, there were great nations in fertile lands, and there was a difference of opinion as to whether they should proceed by threats of violence or peaceful appeal.
To go up the river was obviously the best course.
Above the rapids, two rivers joined. To continue along the nearer bank would be to go far north through their own land, till they would come at last to the impregnable barrier of the great mountain range in which both rivers rose. There would be no profit in that.
But to cross the two rivers, which were separately less formidable, and gentler in their currents, above the rapids, would mean that they must traverse the intervening peninsula, and come at last to Gleda’s own country, where no swine plague had raged, though the arboreal harvests had failed, and where the people themselves might furnish a cannibal banquet for starving men.
But—to cross even the tip of the peninsula between? Gleda knew the doubtful peril of that, and wondered, till her mind was borne down by surrounding wills, that, in whatever extremity, it should be considered at all.
The great mountain range was more than a hundred miles away. The two rivers rose about forty miles apart. The space between was a wooded triangle of about two thousand square miles, which, for almost a generation, had not been invaded by human feet.
In the reason for this lay the explanation of much in the constitution of the life around her which had been puzzling to Marguerite Cranleigh, however commonplace, by familiarity, it might have become to Gleda’s mind.
There had been, at a quite recent period, a complex civilization, in which the
