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- Herausgeber: Musaicum Books
- Kategorie: Fantasy und Science-Fiction
- Sprache: Englisch
Stanley G. Weinbaum's 'The Black Flame' is a gripping dystopian novel set in a future society where individuality is suppressed and conformity is paramount. The protagonist navigates through a world controlled by a totalitarian government, shedding light on the consequences of a society ruled by fear. Weinbaum's writing is both thought-provoking and engaging, presenting a bleak vision of the future that raises important philosophical questions about the nature of freedom and identity. The novel's vivid descriptions and intricate world-building immerse the reader in a fully realized dystopia, making it a compelling read for fans of the genre. Stanley G. Weinbaum, a pioneer in the science fiction genre, drew inspiration from contemporary political events and societal trends to create 'The Black Flame'. His keen observations of human behavior and society's trajectory are evident throughout the novel, showcasing his deep understanding of the human condition. Weinbaum's unique perspective and bold storytelling make 'The Black Flame' a standout work in the dystopian genre. I highly recommend 'The Black Flame' to readers who enjoy dystopian fiction that challenges societal norms and offers a thought-provoking commentary on the potential consequences of unchecked authority. Weinbaum's novel is a timeless exploration of power, control, and the resilience of the human spirit that will captivate and provoke readers long after they finish the final page. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A comprehensive Introduction outlines these selected works' unifying features, themes, or stylistic evolutions. - A Historical Context section situates the works in their broader era—social currents, cultural trends, and key events that underpin their creation. - A concise Synopsis (Selection) offers an accessible overview of the included texts, helping readers navigate plotlines and main ideas without revealing critical twists. - A unified Analysis examines recurring motifs and stylistic hallmarks across the collection, tying the stories together while spotlighting the different work's strengths. - Reflection questions inspire deeper contemplation of the author's overarching message, inviting readers to draw connections among different texts and relate them to modern contexts. - Lastly, our hand‐picked Memorable Quotes distill pivotal lines and turning points, serving as touchstones for the collection's central themes.
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The Black Flame
(Dystopian Novel)
Published by
Books
Table of Contents
Introduction
This collection presents Stanley G. Weinbaum’s dystopian novel The Black Flame in full, arranged according to its internal sequence of books from Penalty — and Aftermath through The Master Sits in Judgment. Rather than a miscellany of disparate pieces, it offers a single, continuous narrative whose architecture emphasizes progression and return, crisis and reckoning. The purpose is to restore the experience of the novel as Weinbaum structured it: a future history unfolding in linked movements that accumulate thematic force. Readers encounter a complete imaginative design—neither excerpted nor reconfigured—organized to foreground the novel’s ideas, moods, and shifting centers of power.
Weinbaum’s brief career in the 1930s reshaped early science fiction with disciplined speculation and vivid storytelling. Though his life ended prematurely, his posthumous reputation endured, and several texts were developed or presented after his death. The Black Flame has a complex history, reflecting material that originated in shorter forms and was subsequently extended to novel length. This edition acknowledges that lineage while treating the work as a unified whole. It situates the novel among the author’s most ambitious undertakings, demonstrating how his lucid prose and careful extrapolation survive the transition from episodic conception to sustained, book-length design.
The text is a novel of speculative fiction, not a compilation of essays, poems, or letters. Its internal books function like movements in a symphony—self-contained yet inseparable—encompassing adventure, political drama, survival narrative, and scientific romance. Scenes of wilderness traversal, clandestine negotiation, and laboratory inquiry alternate with debates over social order and destiny. While the structure suggests serial vigor, the throughline is novelistic: characters tested by a transformed world, institutions under strain, and ideas embodied in concrete action. The result is an integrated fiction that preserves the immediacy of episodes without sacrificing the momentum of a continuous plot.
At its core, The Black Flame is a tale of a remade world—scarred by catastrophe, stratified by authority, and haunted by the promise and peril of longevity. The figure known as the Black Flame presides as an enigmatic constant, a symbol of allure, memory, and control. The city-state of Urbs concentrates knowledge and discipline; beyond its reach, altered environments and contested territories challenge the human claim to mastery. Throughout, Weinbaum tests the terms of loyalty and rebellion, the ethics of rule and resistance, and the fragile bargain between stability and freedom in a society unsure of its future.
Weinbaum’s signature lies in clarity of method and precision of image. He anchors bold conjectures in plausible detail, sketches institutions with economical strokes, and lets motives emerge through action rather than assertion. The prose is swift without haste, turning on clean descriptions, crisp dialogue, and scenes that reveal the cost of every choice. Within these books—Forest Meeting, The Way to Urbs, Two Women—he moves deftly between frontier urgency and civic deliberation. Scientific ideas enter as pressures on behavior, not lectures, producing a narrative in which intellectual tension and emotional stakes reinforce one another.
The novel’s questions remain contemporary: What forms of power survive disaster? Who is entitled to command, and to what end? The sequence engages technologies and their burdens, from the uneasy promise of transformation hinted by The Metamorphs and The Amphimorphs in the Pool to the specter named in The Atomic Bomb. Across Revolution, Declaration, and judgment thereafter, Weinbaum interrogates legitimacy and the uses of force. His inquiry predates later dystopian conventions yet participates in their central concerns, offering a bridge between early speculative romance and the more systematic social critique that would define mid-century science fiction.
For orientation, the internal books mark evolving phases of ordeal, encounter, and reckoning. Penalty — and Aftermath establishes the price of survival; The Way to Urbs and The Messenger draw the protagonist’s orbit toward authority; The Conspirators and Declaration tighten the knot of conflict; The Master Sits in Judgment closes the circuit with consequence rather than mere spectacle. Along the way—through Panate Blood, In Time of Peace, and Death Flight?—the narrative widens from personal crisis to civic fate. New readers will find a complete arc; longtime admirers will recognize Weinbaum’s unmistakable balance of wonder, rigor, and moral poise.
Historical Context
Stanley G. Weinbaum (1902–1935) wrote during the late-Depression, pulp-magazine boom that made speculative fiction a laboratory for social thought. His premature death left fragments and cycles that editors later organized as The Black Flame. The stories were conceived amid industrial volatility, mass unemployment, and accelerating research in physics and biology. American readers encountered them first in the context of magazines like Wonder Stories, which prized extrapolation from current science and social currents. This milieu encouraged plausible futures: decayed metropolises, charismatic leaders, and improvised polities. The collection draws repeatedly on interwar tensions between technological promise and the fragility of democratic institutions.
Post-apocalyptic settings across the cycle reflect the epoch’s memory of collapse. The mechanized slaughter of 1914–1918 and the 1918–1920 influenza pandemic supplied a credible template for sudden depopulation and social amnesia. Earlier cautionary works, notably Jack London’s The Scarlet Plague (1912) and H. G. Wells’s disaster narratives, circulated widely and set expectations that catastrophe could birth new orders. Weinbaum’s retrospections on “ancient history” and arduous returns through ruin echo contemporary fears that modernity’s networks—electricity, transport, public health—could unravel quickly. By dramatizing survivors’ oral histories and contested legends, these stories mirror the interwar preoccupation with how civilizations remember, mythologize, and rebuild after systemic shock.
Visions of cities and hinterlands in the collection engage debates about planning and technocracy that animated the 1930s United States. The New Deal’s vast infrastructures, the Technocracy movement (circa 1932–1933), and display spectacles like the 1939 New York World’s Fair promoted rationalized, centralized “worlds of tomorrow.” Simultaneously, critics and back-to-the-land advocates valorized small communities. Weinbaum’s processions toward fortress-cities, market-villages, and forest encampments dramatize this argument: whether salvation lies in disciplined urban machines or resilient rural networks. International architectural currents—Le Corbusier’s Radiant City and the 1932 “International Style” exhibition—fed a broader discourse that the stories translate into contested roads toward the fabled Urbs.
Recurring confrontations with oligarchs, secret councils, and messianic figures reflect the global drift toward authoritarianism in Weinbaum’s era. Mussolini’s seizure of power (1922), Hitler’s rise (1933), Stalinist consolidations, and polarized street politics made “strong men” and orchestration from above feel historically plausible. Uprisings and counterplots in episodes of revolution and declaration draw on contemporary fears that modern mass media and paramilitary organization could rapidly reshape society. The Spanish Civil War (1936–1939) and American demagogues like Huey Long and Father Coughlin underscored the volatility of plebiscitary movements. Against this backdrop, the cycle interrogates whether order after collapse must default to coercion or can emerge from consent.
The collection’s scientific imagination also tracks the evolution of atomic discourse. Before Weinbaum’s death, research milestones—Rutherford’s 1919 transmutation and Fermi’s 1934 neutron work—fueled popular speculation, epitomized by H. G. Wells’s The World Set Free (1914). The discovery of nuclear fission in 1938 and the atomic bombings of 1945 then recontextualized earlier tales for postwar readers. Chapters invoking inferno or atomic weaponry read as foresight, even when composed before Hiroshima, because pulp writers had already linked radioactivity with geopolitics. By 1948, anxieties over radiological ruin and centralized control of energy sharpened reception, making the book’s technocratic regimes and cataclysmic memories resonate with lived history.
Equally influential were interwar debates in biology and medicine. Alexis Carrel’s widely publicized “immortal” tissue cultures (1912 onward), Serge Voronoff’s 1920s rejuvenation grafts, and new endocrinology stoked hopes for life extension alongside eugenic schemes then mainstream in the United States and Europe. Popular expositions by J. B. S. Haldane and Julian Huxley spread genetic thinking to lay readers. Within this climate, Weinbaum’s immortals, metamorphs, and puzzling bloodlines explore the allure and peril of engineered destiny: who deserves longevity, and at what social price. The stories convert lab-bench promises and anxieties into dramas of caste, mutation, and biologically rationalized hierarchy after the fall.
The prominence of commanding women in the cycle aligns with shifting gender politics. American women’s suffrage (1920), the “New Woman,” and interwar work and leisure cultures normalized female autonomy even as media recycled vamp and sorceress archetypes. Pulp fiction experimented with forceful heroines whose authority unsettled patriarchal orders. Weinbaum’s enigmatic leaders and rivalrous protagonists participate in this trend, negotiating charisma, sexuality, and statecraft. Contemporary readers recognized both the novelty and ambiguity of such figures: emancipatory in competence, yet entangled in power mythologies common to the age. The collection thus stages gender as a battleground for legitimacy in rebuilding societies.
The text’s transmission history shaped its meaning. After Weinbaum’s 1935 death, editors reconstructed related manuscripts, with Fantasy Press under Lloyd Arthur Eshbach issuing The Black Flame in 1948 for a small but influential fandom and collectors’ market. Mid-century critics, including historian-anthologist Sam Moskowitz, helped canonize Weinbaum as a bridge between early pulp exuberance and later rigor. Early Cold War tensions—the Truman Doctrine (1947), the Berlin crisis (1948–1949), and airpower’s ascendancy—colored readings of its flights, conspiracies, and city-states. Emerging alongside Campbell-era “hard” SF, the volume was received as both elegy and warning: a synthesis of interwar lessons and postwar foreboding.
Synopsis (Selection)
Prologue and Settlement (Penalty — and Aftermath; Evanie the Sorceress; Forest Meeting; A Bit of Ancient History; The Village)
In a ruined future, a wary survivor threads through scattered communities and encounters an enigmatic woman whose presence suggests buried power and old allegiances.
The tone is somber and investigative, establishing motifs of memory, magnetism, and the ethics of rebuilding a social order from ashes.
Mutants and Bloodlines (The Metamorphs; Panate Blood; The Amphimorphs in the Pool)
Encounters with altered beings and perilous inheritances turn survival into scientific mystery, blurring lines between human and other.
Weinbaum’s rational, detail-minded style treats monstrosity as ecology, probing prejudice, adaptation, and kinship through tense, close-quarters episodes.
Approaching the City (In Time of Peace; The Way to Urbs)
A fragile calm frames the approach to Urbs, a stronghold whose order promises safety with hidden obligations.
The focus narrows to urban intrigue and negotiation, weighing security against freedom and the allure of centralized authority.
Whispers of Rebellion (Revolution; The Messenger; Declaration)
Rumors harden into manifestos and covert signals as factions test the city’s grip and the populace’s patience.
The narrative pivots toward political thriller, revisiting motifs of charisma, propaganda, and the peril of righteous certainty.
Escape and Return (Flight; The Trail Back; The Sky-Rat; Death Flight?)
High-stakes chases over wasteland and sky punctuate cycles of pursuit and homecoming, where trust proves as fragile as fuel.
Kinetic, pulpy action alternates with rueful reflection, underscoring the costs of mobility, loyalty, and technological daring.
Courts and Conspiracies (The Master; Two Women; The Conspirators; The Dinner at the Sleeper's)
Power crystallizes around a commanding figure and rival intimacies, while private gatherings become stages for public betrayal.
Weinbaum balances intimate drama with systemic critique, amplifying motifs of personal magnetism, divided allegiance, and governance as spectacle.
Immortality and Destiny (Immortality; The Destiny of Man)
The story contemplates life extended beyond natural spans, asking what leadership, love, and purpose mean when time no longer binds.
Philosophical in tone, these parts distill the central anxiety—progress without compassion—and the hope of renewal through deliberate choice.
Cataclysm and Judgment (The Atomic Bomb; Inferno; The Master Sits in Judgment)
Unleashed power reshapes the landscape and the moral calculus, forcing leaders and followers to confront irreversible acts.
The finale is stark and interrogative, returning to the recurring question of who may decide for the many and at what human cost.
The Black Flame (Dystopian Novel)
Penalty — and Aftermath
Thomas Marshall Connor was about to die. The droning voice of the prison chaplain gradually dulled his perception instead of stimulating his mind. Everything was hazy and indistinct to the condemned man. He was going to the electric chair in just ten minutes to pay the supreme penalty because he had accidentally killed a man with his bare fists.
Connor, vibrantly alive, vigorous and healthy, only twenty–six, a brilliant young engineer, was going to die. And, knowing, he did not care. But there was nothing at all nebulous about the gray stone and cold iron bars of the death cell. There was nothing uncertain about the split down his trouser leg and the shaven spot on his head.
The condemned man was acutely aware of the solidarity of material things about him. The world he was leaving was concrete and substantial. The approaching footsteps of the death guard sounded heavily in the distance.
The cell door opened, and the chaplain ceased his murmuring. Passively Thomas Marshall Connor accepted his blessings, and calmly took his position between his guards for his last voluntary walk.
He remained in his state of detachment as they seated him in the chair, strapped his body and fastened the electrodes. He heard the faint rustling of the witnesses and the nervous, rapid scratching of reporters' pencils. He could imagine their adjectives—"Calloused murderer"…"Brazenly indifferent to his fate."
But it was as if the matter concerned a third party.
He simply relaxed and waited. To die so quickly and painlessly was more a relief than anything. He was not even aware when the warden gave his signal. There was a sudden silent flash of blue light. And then—nothing at all.
* * * * *
So this was death[1q]. The slow and majestic drifting through the Stygian void, borne on the ageless tides of eternity.
Peace, at last—peace, and quiet, and rest.
But what was this sensation like the glimpse of a faint, faraway light which winked on and off like a star? After an interminable period the light became fixed and steady, a thing of annoyance. Thomas Marshall Connor, slowly became aware of the fact of his existence as an entity, in some unknown state. The senses and memories that were his personality struggled weakly to reassemble themselves into a thinking unity of being—and he became conscious of pain and physical torture.
There was a sound of shrill voices, and a stir of fresh air. He became aware of his body again. He lay quiet, inert, exhausted. But not as lifeless as he had lain for—how long?
When the shrill voices sounded again, Connor opened unseeing eyes and stared at the blackness just above him. After a space he began to see, but not to comprehend. The blackness became a jagged, pebbled roof no more than twelve inches from his eyes—rough and unfinished like the under side of a concrete walk.
The light became a glimmer of daylight from a point near his right shoulder.
Another sensation crept into his awareness. He was horribly, bitterly cold. Not with the chill of winter air, but with the terrible frigidity of inter–galactic space. Yet he was on—no, in, earth of some sort. It was as if icy water flowed in his veins instead of blood. Yet he felt completely dehydrated. His body was as inert as though detached from his brain, but he was cruelly imprisoned within it. He became conscious of a growing resentment of this fact.
Then, stimulated by the shrilling, piping voices and the patter of tiny feet out there somewhere to the right, he made a tremendous effort to move. There was a dry, withered crackling sound—like the crumpling of old parchment—but indubitably his right arm had lifted!
The exertion left him weak and nauseated. For a time he lay as in a stupor. Then a second effort proved easier. After another timeless interval of struggling torment his legs yielded reluctant obedience to his brain. Again he lay quietly, exhausted, but gathering strength for the supreme effort of bursting from his crypt.
For he knew now where he was. He lay in what remained of his grave. How or why, he did not know. That was to be determined.
With all his weak strength he thrust against the left side of his queer tomb, moving his body against the crevice at his right. Only a thin veil of loose gravel and rubble blocked the way to the open. As his shoulder struck the pile, it gave and slid away, outward and downward, in a miniature avalanche.
Blinding daylight smote Connor like an agony. The shrill voices screamed.
"'S moom!" a child's voice cried tremulously. "'S moom again!"
Connor panted from exertion, and struggled to emerge from his hole, each movement producing another noise like rattling paper. And suddenly he was free! The last of the gravel tinkled away and he rolled abruptly down a small declivity to rest limply at the bottom of the little hillside.
He saw now that erosion had cut through this burial ground—wherever it was—and had opened a way for him through the side of his grave. His sight was strangely dim, but he became aware of half a dozen little figures in a frightened semicircle beyond him.
Children! Children in strange modernistic garb of bright colors, but nevertheless human children who stared at him with wide–open mouths and popping eyes. Their curiously cherubic faces were set in masks of horrified terror.
Suddenly recalling the terrors he had sometimes known in his own childhood, Connor was surprised they did not flee. He stretched forth an imploring hand and made a desperate effort to speak. This was his first attempt to use his voice, and he found that he could not.
The spell of dread that held the children frozen was instantly broken. One of them gave a dismayed cry: "A–a–a–h! 'S a specker!"
In panic, shrieking that cry, the entire group turned and fled. They disappeared around the shoulder of the eroded hill, and Connor was left, horribly alone. He groaned from the depths of his despair and was conscious of a faint rasping noise through his cracked and parched lips.
He realized suddenly that he was quite naked—his shroud had long since moldered to dust. At the same moment that full comprehension of what this meant came to him, he was gazing in horror at his body. Bones! Nothing but bones, covered with a dirty, parchment–like skin!
So tightly did his skin cover his skeletal framework that the very structure of the bones showed through. He could see the articulation at knuckles, knees, and toes. And the parchment skin was cracked like an ancient Chinese vase, checked like aged varnish. He was a horror from the tomb, and he nearly fainted at the realization.
After a swooning space, he endeavored to arise. Finding that he could not, he began crawling painfully and laboriously toward a puddle of water from the last rain. Reaching it, he leaned over to place his lips against its surface, reckless of its potability, and sucked in the liquid until a vast roaring filled his ears.
The moment of dizziness passed. He felt somewhat better, and his breathing rasped a bit less painfully in his moistened throat. His eyesight was slowly clearing and as he leaned above the little pool, he glimpsed the specter reflected there. It looked like a skull—a face with lips shrunken away from the teeth, so fleshless that it might have been a death's head.
"Oh, God!" he called out aloud, and his voice croaked like that of a sick raven. "What and where am I!"
In the back of his mind all through this weird experience, there had been a sense of something strange aside from his emergence from a tomb in the form of a living scarecrow. He stared up at the sky.
The vault of heaven was blue and fleecy with thewhitest of clouds. The sun was shining as he had never thought to see it shine again. The grass was green. The ground was normally earthy. Everything was as it should be—but there was a strangeness about it that frightened him. Instinctively he knew that something was direfully amiss.
It was not the fact that he failed to recognize his surroundings. He had not had the strength to explore; neither did he know where he had been buried. It was that indefinable homing instinct possessed in varying degree by all animate things. That instinct was out of gear. His time sense had stopped with the throwing of that electric switch—how long ago? Somehow, lying there under the warming rays of the sun, he felt like an alien presence in a strange country.
"Lost!" he whimpered like a child.
After a long space in which he remained in a sort of stupor, he became aware of the sound of footsteps. Dully he looked up. A group of men, led by one of the children, was advancing slowly toward him. They wore brightly colored shirts—red, blue, violet—and queer baggy trousers gathered at the ankles in an exotic style.
With a desperate burst of energy, Connor gained his knees. He extended a pleading skeletonlike claw.
"Help me!" he croaked in his hoarse whisper.
The beardless, queerly effeminate–looking men halted and stared at him in horror.
"'Assim!" shrilled the child's voice. "'S a specker. 'S dead."
One of the men stepped forward, looking from Connor to the gaping hole in the hillside.
"Wassup?" he questioned.
Connor could only repeat his croaking plea for aid.
"'Esick," spoke another man gravely. "Sleeper, eh?"
There was a murmur of consultation among the men with the bright clothes and oddly soft, womanlike voices.
"T' Evanie!" decided one. "T' Evanie, the Sorc'ess."
They closed quickly around the half reclining Connor and lifted him gently. He was conscious of being borne along the curving cut to a yellow country road, and then black oblivion descended once more to claim him.
When he regained consciousness the next time, he found that he was within walls, reclining on a soft bed of some kind. He had a vague dreamy impression of a girlish face with bronze hair and features like Raphael's angels bending over him. Something warm and sweetish, like glycerin, trickled down his throat.
Then, to the whispered accompaniment of that queerly slurred English speech, he sank into the blissful repose of deep sleep.
Evanie the Sorceress
There were successive intervals of dream and oblivion, of racking pain and terrible nauseating weakness; of voices murmuring queer, unintelligible words that yet were elusively familiar.
Then one day he awoke to the consciousness of a summer morning. Birds twittered; in the distance children shouted. Clear of mind at last, he lay on a cushioned couch puzzling over his whereabouts, even his identity, for nothing within his vision indicated where or who he was.
The first thing that caught his attention was his own right hand. Paper– thin, incredibly bony, it lay like the hand of death on the rosy coverlet, so transparent that the very color shone through. He could not raise it; only a twitching of the horrible fingers attested its union with his body.
The room itself was utterly unfamiliar in its almost magnificently simple furnishings. There were neither pictures nor ornaments. Only several chairs of aluminum–like metal, a gleaming silvery table holding a few ragged old volumes, a massive cabinet against the opposite wall, and a chandelier pendant by a chain from the ceiling. He tried to call out. A faint croak issued.
The response was startlingly immediate. A soft voice said, "Hahya?" in his ear and he turned his head pain–fully to face the girl of the bronze hair, seated at his side. She smiled gently.
She was dressed in curious green baggy trousers gathered at the ankle, and a brilliant green shirt. She had rolled the full sleeves to her shoulders. Hers was like the costume of the men who had brought him here.
"Whahya?" she said softly.
He understood.
"Oh! I'm—uh—Thomas Connor, of course."
"F'm 'ere?"
"From St. Louis."
"Selui? 'S far off."
Far off? Then where was he? Suddenly a fragment of memory returned. The trial—Ruth—that catastrophic episode of the grim chair. Ruth! The yellow–haired girl he had once adored, who was to have been his wife—the girl who had coldly sworn his life away because he had killed the man she loved.
Dimly memory came back of how he had found her in that other man's arms on the very eve of their wedding; of his bitter realization that the man he had called friend had stolen Ruth from him. His outraged passions had flamed, the fire had blinded him, and when the ensuing battle had ended, the man had been crumpled on the green sward of the terrace, with a broken neck.
He had been electrocuted for that. He had been strapped in that chair!
Then—then the niche on the hill. But how—how? Had he by some miracle survived the burning current? He must have—and he still had the penalty to pay!
He tried desperately to rise.
"Must leave here!" he muttered. "Get away—must get away." A new thought. "No! I'm legally dead. They can't touch me now; no double jeopardy in this country. I'm safe!"
Voices sounded in the next room, discussing him.
"F'm Selui, he say," said a man's voice. "Longo, too." "Eah," said another. " 'S lucky to live—lucky! 'L be rich."
That meant nothing to him. He raised his hand with a great effort; it glistened in the light with an oil of some sort. It was no longer cracked, and the ghost of a layer of tissue softened the bones. His flesh was growing back.
His throat felt dry. He drew a breath that ended in a tickling cough.
"Could I have some water?" he asked the girl.
"N–n–n!" She shook her head. "N' water. S'm licket?" "Licket?" Must be liquid, he reflected. He nodded, and drank the mug of thick fluid she held to his lips.
He grinned his thanks, and she sat beside him. He wondered what sort of colony was this into which he had fallen—with their exotic dress and queer, clipped English.
His eyes wandered appreciatively over his companion; even if she were some sort of foreigner, she was gloriously beautiful, with her bronze hair gleaming above the emerald costume.
"C'n talk," she said finally as if in permission.
He accepted. "What's your name?"
"'M Evanie Sair. Evanie the Sorc'ess."
"Evanie the Sorceress!" he echoed. "Pretty name—Evanie. Why the Sorceress, though? Do you tell fortunes?" The question puzzled her.
"N'onstan," she murmured.
"I mean—what do you do?"
"Sorc'y." At his mystified look, she amplified it. "To give strength—to make well." She touched his fleshless arm.
"But that's medicine—a science. Not sorcery."
"Bah. Science—sorc'y. 'S all one. My father, Evan Sair
the Wizard, taught me." Her face shadowed. "'S dead now." Then abruptly: "Whe's your money?" she asked. He stared. "Why—in St. Louis. In a bank."
"Oh!" she exclaimed. "N–n–n! Selui! N'safe!"
"Why not?" He started. "Has there been another flood of bank–bustings?"
The girl looked puzzled.
"N'safe," she reiterated. "Urbs is better. For very long, Urbs is better." She paused. "When'd you sleep?"
"Why, last night."
"N–n–n. The long sleep[2q]."
The long sleep! It struck him with stunning force that his last memories before that terrible awakening had been of a September world—and this was mid–summer! A horror gripped him. How long—how long—had he lain in his—grave? Weeks? No—months, at least.
He shuddered as the girl repeated gently, "When?"
"In September," he muttered.
"What year?"
Surprise strengthened him. "Year? Nineteen thirty–eight, of course!"
She rose suddenly. "'S no Nineteen thirty–eight. 'S only Eight forty–six now!"
Then she was gone, nor on her return would she permit him to talk. The day vanished; he slept, and another day dawned and passed. Still Evanie Sair refused to allow him to talk again, and the succeeding days found him fuming and puzzled. Little by little, however, her strange clipped English became familiar.
So he lay thinking of his situation, his remarkable escape, the miracle that had somehow softened the discharge of Missouri's generators. And he strengthened. A day came when Evanie again permitted speech, while he watched her preparing his food.
"Y'onger, Tom?" she asked gently. "'L bea soon." He understood; she was saying, "Are you hungry, Tom? I'll be there soon."
He answered with her own affirmative "Eah," and watched her place the meal in a miraculous cook stove that could be trusted to prepare it without burning.
"Evanie," he began, "how long have I been here?"
"Three months," said Evanie. "You were very sick."
"But how long was I asleep?"
"You ought to know," retorted Evanie. "I told you this was Eight forty– six."
He frowned.
"The year Eight forty–six of what?"
"Just Eight forty–six," Evanie said matter of factly. "Of the Enlightenment, of, course. What year did you sleep?"
"I told you—Nineteen thirty–eight," insisted Connor, perplexed. "Nineteen thirty–eight, A.D."
"Oh," said Evanie, as if humoring a child.
Then, "A.D.?" she repeated. "Anno Domini, that means. Year of the Master. But the Master is nowhere near nineteen hundred years old."
Connor was nonplussed. He and Evanie seemed to be talking at cross– purposes. He calmly started again.
"Listen to me," he said grimly. "Suppose you tell me exactly what you think I am—all about it, just as if I were a—oh, a Martian. In simple words."
"I know what you are," said Evanie. "You're a Sleeper. Often they wake with muddled minds."
"And what," he pursued doggedly, "is a Sleeper?"
Surprisingly Evanie answered that, in a clear, understandable—but most astonishing—way. Almost as astonished herself that Connor should not know the answer to his question.
