Flight From Tomorrow | Page 5

to the west. He made signs indicative of eating, and of sleeping, and of rising, and of
working. At length, he succeeded in conveying his meaning.
There was considerable argument between the man and the woman, but his proposal was
accepted, as he expected that it would. It was easy to see that the work of the farm was
hard for this aging couple; now, for a place to sleep and a little food, they were able to
acquire a strong and intelligent slave.
In the days that followed, he made himself useful to the farm people; he fed the chickens

and the livestock, milked the cow, worked in the fields. He slept in a small room at the
top of the house, under the eaves, and ate with the man and woman in the farmhouse
kitchen.
It was not long before he picked up a few words which he had heard his employers using,
and related them to the things or acts spoken of. And he began to notice that these people,
in spite of the crudities of their own life, enjoyed some of the advantages of a fairly
complex civilization. Their implements were not hand-craft products, but showed
machine workmanship. There were two objects hanging on hooks on the kitchen wall
which he was sure were weapons. Both had wooden shoulder-stocks, and wooden
fore-pieces; they had long tubes extending to the front, and triggers like blasters. One had
double tubes mounted side-by-side, and double triggers; the other had an octagonal tube
mounted over a round tube, and a loop extension on the trigger-guard. Then, there was a
box on the kitchen wall, with a mouthpiece and a cylindrical tube on a cord. Sometimes a
bell would ring out of the box, and the woman would go to this instrument, take down the
tube and hold it to her ear, and talk into the mouthpiece. There was another box from
which voices would issue, of people conversing, or of orators, or of singing, and
sometimes instrumental music. None of these were objects made by savages; these
people probably traded with some fairly high civilization. They were not illiterate; he
found printed matter, indicating the use of some phonetic alphabet, and paper pamphlets
containing printed reproductions of photographs as well as verbal text.
There was also a vehicle on the farm, powered, like the one he had seen on the road, by
an engine in which a hydrocarbon liquid-fuel was exploded. He made it his business to
examine this minutely, and to study its construction and operation until he was
thoroughly familiar with it.
It was not until the third day after his arrival that the chickens began to die. In the
morning, Hradzka found three of them dead when he went to feed them, the rest drooping
unhealthily; he summoned the man and showed him what he had found. The next
morning, they were all dead, and the cow was sick. She gave bloody milk, that evening,
and the next morning she lay in her stall and would not get up.
The man and the woman were also beginning to sicken, though both of them tried to
continue their work. It was the woman who first noticed that the plants around the
farmhouse were withering and turning yellow.
* * * * *
The farmer went to the stable with Hradzka and looked at the cow. Shaking his head, he
limped back to the house, and returned carrying one of the weapons from the kitchen--the
one with the single trigger and the octagonal tube. As he entered the stable, he jerked
down and up on the loop extension of the trigger-guard, then put the weapon to his
shoulder and pointed it at the cow. It made a flash, and roared louder even than a
hand-blaster, and the cow jerked convulsively and was dead. The man then indicated by
signs that Hradzka was to drag the dead cow out of the stable, dig a hole, and bury it.
This Hradzka did, carefully examining the wound in the cow's head--the weapon, he

decided, was not an energy-weapon, but a simple solid-missile projector.
By evening, neither the man nor the woman were able to eat, and both seemed to be
suffering intensely. The man used the communicating-instrument on the wall, probably
calling on his friends for help. Hradzka did what he could to make them comfortable,
cooked his own meal, washed the dishes as he had seen the woman doing, and tidied up
the kitchen.
It was not long before people, men and women whom he had seen on the road or who had
stopped at the farmhouse while he had been there, began arriving, some carrying baskets
of food; and shortly after Hradzka had eaten, a vehicle like the farmer's, but in better