The Black Flame (Dystopian Novel). Stanley G. Weinbaum

      The Village

       Table of Contents

      Days slipped imperceptibly by. Connor had almost regained his full strength. Time and again, whenever he could do so unobserved, he slipped away to the woods alone, but never again did he catch sight of the wood nymph who had so deeply fascinated him. Gradually he came to persuade himself that the whole incident had been a dream. Many things as strange had happened to him since his awakening. Only one thing gave it the semblance of reality—the knowledge he had gleaned from the inky–haired girl of mystery, a knowledge later confirmed when he began to enter the peaceful life of the village.

      Aside from Evanie, however, he had but one other close friend. He had taken at once to Jan Orm, engineer and operator of the village of Ormon's single factory on the hill.

      The factory was a perpetual surprise to Connor. The incredibly versatile machines made nearly everything except the heavier mechanisms used in the fields, and these, he learned, could have been made. That was not necessary since the completed machines could as easily be transported as the steel necessary to construct them.

      The atomic power amazed Tom Connor. The motors burned only water, or rather the hydrogen in it, and the energy was the product of synthesis rather than disintegration. Four hydrogen atoms, with their weight of 1.008, combined into one helium atom, with a weight of 4; somewhere had disappeared the difference of .032, and this was the source of that abundant energy—matter being destroyed, weight transformed to energy.

      There was a whole series of atomic furnaces, too. The release of energy was a process of one degree, like radium; once started, neither temperature nor pressure could speed or slow it in the least. But the hydrogen burned steadily into helium at the uniform rate of half its mass in three hundred days.

      Jan Orm was proud of the plant.

      "Neat, isn't it?" he asked Connor. "One of the type called Omnifac; makes anything. There's thousands of 'em about the country; practically make each town independent, self–sustaining. We don't need your ancient cumbersome railroad system to transport coal and ore."

      "How about the metal you use?"

      "Nor metal either," Jan said. "Just as there was a stone age, a bronze age, and an iron age, just as history calls your time the age of steel, we're in the aluminum age. And aluminum's everywhere; it's the base of all clays, almost eight per cent of the Earth's crust."

      "I know it's there," grunted Connor. "It used to cost too much to get it out of clay."

      "Well, power costs nothing now. Water's free." His face darkened moodily. "If we could only control the rate, but power comes out at always the same rate—a half period of three hundred days. If we could build rockets—like the Triangles of Urbs. The natural rate is just too slow to lift its own weight; the power from a pound of water comes out too gradually to raise a one–pound mass. The Urban know how to increase the rate, to make the water deliver half its energy in a hundred days —ten days."

      "And if you could build rockets?"

      "Then," said Jan, growing even moodier, "then we'd—" He paused abruptly. "We can detonate it," he said in a changed voice. "We can get all the energy it one terrific blast, but that's useless for a rocket."

      "Why can't you use a firing chamber and explode say a gram of water at a time?" Connor asked. "A rapid series of little explosions should be just as effective as a continuous blast."

      "My father tried that," Jan Or said grimly. "He's buried at the bend of the river."

      Later, Connor asked Evanie why Ian was so anxious to develop atom–powered rockets. The girl turned suddenly serious eyes on him, but made no direct reply.

      "The Immortals guard the secret of the Triangle," was all she said. "It's a military secret."

      "But what could he do with a rocket?"

      She shook her glistening hair.

      "Nothing, perhaps."

      "Evanie," he said soberly, "I don't like to feel that you won't trust me. I know from what you've said that you're somehow opposed to the government. Well, I'll help you, if I but I can't if you keep me in ignorance."

      The girl was silent.

      "And another thing," he proceeded. "This immortality process. I've heard somebody say that the results of its failures when some tried it, still haunt the world? Why, Evanie?"

      Swiftly a crimson flush spread over the girl's cheeks and throat.

      "Now what the devil have I said?" he cried. "Evanie, I swear I wouldn't hurt you, for the world!"

      "Don't," she only murmured, turning silently away.

      He, too, was hurt, because she was. He knew he owed his life to her for her treatments and hospitality. It disturbed him to think he knew of no way in which to repay her. But he was dubious of his ability to earn much as an engineer in this world of strange devices.

      "I'd have to start right at the bottom," he observed ruefully to Evanie when he spoke of that later.

      "In Urbs," Evanie said, "you'd be worth your weight in radium as a source of ancient knowledge. So much has been lost; so much is gone, perhaps forever. Often we have only the record of a great man's name, and no trace of his work. Of these is a man named Einstein and another named de Sitter acknowledged to be supreme geniuses of science even by the supreme scientists of your age. Their work is lost."

      "I'm afraid it will remain lost, then," he said whimsically. "Both Einstein and de Sitter were contemporaries of mine, but I wasn't up to understanding their theories. All I know is that they dealt with space and time, and a supposed curvature of space—Relativity, the theory was called."

      "But that's exactly the clue they'd want in Urbs!" exclaimed Evanie, her eyes shining. "That's all they need. And think of what you could tell them of ancient literature! We haven't the artists and writers you had—not yet. The plays of a man named Shakespeare are still the most popular of all on the vision broadcasts. I always watch them." She looked up wistfully. "Was he also a contemporary of yours? And did you know a philosopher named Aristotle?"

      Connor laughed.

      "I missed the one by three centuries and the other by twenty–five!" he chuckled.

      "I'm sorry," said the girl, flushing red. "I don't know much of history."

      He smiled warmly.

      "If I thought I could actually earn something—if I could pay you for all the trouble I've been, I'd go to the city of Urbs for awhile—and then come back here. I'd like to pay you."

      "Pay me?" she asked in surprise. "We don't use money here, except for taxes."

      "Taxes?"

      "Yes. The Urban taxes. They come each year to collect, and it must be paid in money." She frowned angrily. "I hate Urbs and all it stands for! I hate it!"

      "Are the taxes so oppressively high?"

      "Oppressive?" she retorted. "Any tax