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- Herausgeber: Al-Mashreq eBookstore
- Kategorie: Fantasy und Science-Fiction
- Serie: Tomorrow
- Sprache: Englisch
Tomorrow by Arthur Leo Zagat is a riveting science fiction adventure that explores the thin line between hope and despair. In a world teetering on the brink of collapse, a scientist discovers a way to glimpse the future—a future that promises either salvation or annihilation. As the clock ticks down, he must navigate a treacherous landscape of political intrigue, ethical dilemmas, and personal sacrifice. Will he uncover a path to a brighter tomorrow, or will his revelations doom humanity to an irreversible fate? Immerse yourself in this thought-provoking narrative that blends suspense with speculative brilliance.
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Seitenzahl: 90
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024
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Table of Contents
Tomorrow
CHAPTER I. THE LOST ONES
CHAPTER II. THE NIGHTMARE THAT WAS TRUE
CHAPTER III. AFTER ARMAGEDDON
CHAPTER IV. WE MEET IN THE NIGHT
CHAPTER V. THE OLD ONES
CHAPTER VI. SHADOWS AT SUNRISE
CHAPTER VII. THE FAR GREEN LAND
CHAPTER VIII. IN THE TOMORROW
Landmarks
Table of Contents
Cover
Tomorrow
Cautiously the two young savages circled—
and the Bunch stood breathless, waiting for first blood.
What will they be like—those Lost Children of Tomorrow? How will they live, and who will lead them? Here is a vivid visualization of their fight back to Civilization, an exciting adventure story, and the portrait of fiction's most striking hero since Tarzan, rolled in one...
CHAPTER I. THE LOST ONES
DIKAR was on his knees, his head bowed against the side of his cot, his hands palm to palm. The fragrance of the dried grass with which his mattress was stuffed was in his nostrils, the rabbit fur of his blanket soft and warm against his forehead. Behind him there were two long rows of cots, eleven in each, separated by a wide space. At every cot knelt one of the Bunch, but the only sound was a low drone.
Dikar's own murmur was a part of that drone. "Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep. And should I die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take." Dikar used, as all of them did, the prayer they had learned before the terror had come. They had never been taught another.
Dikar stayed on his knees as behind him there was a rustle of lifting bodies, a chatter of voices. One cried out, loud above the others, "Hey, fellers!" Jimlane it was. "Who took my bow and arrows an' didn't bring 'em back?" His changing voice, deep at first, broke into a high squeal. "If I ketch the guy—"
"They're out by the Fire Stone, foolish." That was Tomball. "I seen you leave 'em there yourself. You'll be leavin' your head somewhere one these days, an' forget where. You're sure the prize dumby of the Bunch."
The other Boys laughed, tauntingly. Dikar heard them, and he didn't quite hear them.
He was watching for a soft hand to stroke his hair, for sweet, low tones to say, "The good Lord bless you, my son, and give you pleasant dreams." He knew they would not come. Hand and voice were vanished in the mists of Long-Ago, curtained from Dikar by the dark Time of Fear before which, as he very dimly recalled, everything had been different from what it was now. But always, when he had said his "now-I-lay-me," he waited for them...
"Quit callin' me a dumby," Jimlane squealed. "You gotta quit it."
"Who's gonna make me, dumby? You?"
Dikar rose to his feet, sighing, the burden of his leadership once more heavy upon him.
From the blaze on the Fire Stone, a wavering light came in through the unglazed, oblong openings in the wall of the long narrow Boys' House. It bathed with red the stalwart, naked bodies; nut-brown skin under which flat muscles moved smoothly.
Tomball was out in the space between the cots, his bulging arms hanging loose at his sides, his adolescent, chunky jaw black-stubbled, his eyes, too closely set, glittering between slitted lids.
Jimlane faced him and was little more than half his size. Puny, his hairless countenance rashed with small pimples, the kid's upper lip trembled but he stood his ground in mid-aisle as the other advanced, slow and threatening.
"Yes, me," Jimlane answered him bravely. "I ain't scared uh you, you big bully."
"You ain't, huh," Tomball grunted, closing the distance between them as Dikar got into motion. "Then I'll teach you to be."
Tomball had hold of Jimlane's wrist and was twisting it, his shadowed lip curling. The smaller lad's face went white with pain. His free hand twisted, batted at his tormentor's hairy belly. Tomball grinned and kept on twisting. His victim bent almost double, agonized, but still there was no whimper from the youngster...
Dikar's fingers closed on Tomball's arm and dug into the hard muscle. "No fair," Dikar said. "Break!"
Tomball loosed Jimlane, jerked free of Dikar's hold and swung around. "Says who?" he growled, a redness in his black, small eyes that was not put there by the light. He was a quarter-head taller than Dikar and broader across the shaggy chest, and his thighs were twice the span of Dikar's. "Oh, it's you!"
"It's me," Dikar said quietly. "And I'm orderin' you to quit pickin' on Jimlane an' on the other little fellows who don't take your guff." Dikar was lean-flanked and lithe-limbed, his hair and his silken beard yellow as the other's was black, his eyes a deep, shining blue.
"There will be no bullyin' here, so long as I'm Boss of the Bunch."
Their code, like their talk, had been preserved unchanged from their young childhood, back before the Days of Fear. Isolated, they had no adult models to copy as they grew to young manhood.
"Yeah?" Tomball said through lips thin and straight beneath their sparse covering of sprouting hairs, and somehow Dikar knew what he was going to say next. It had been coming for a long time and now it was here and Dikar was not altogether sorry.
Tomball said it: "As long as you're Boss." Two gray spots pitted the skin at the corners of his flat nose. "Maybe. But it's time you made room for someone else, Dikar. For me."
By Tomball's increasing unwillingness to obey orders, by his sulking and his endless whisperings with those of the Boys who had to be watched lest they shirk their share of work, Dikar had known the challenge was coming.
He had thought out his answer and was ready with it. "All right," he said, low voiced and very calm. "I'll call a Full Council tomorrow, of the Boys an' the Girls. I'll tell 'em why I think I should keep on being Boss an' you'll tell 'em why you think I should not, an' then the Bunch will decide."
A murmur ran around the ring of Boys that had close-packed about Dikar and Tomball.
"No!" Tomball refused. "It wasn't the Bunch decided you should be Boss in the first place. It was the Old Ones." He paused, and a meaningful grin widened his mouth. "Or so you say."
"Maybe," Dikar smiled, surprised he could smile. "Maybe, Tomball, you'd like to ask the Old Ones if they picked me to be Boss when they brought us here and left us. Maybe you'd like to climb down the Drop an' ask 'em whether you or I should be Boss from now on."
The Boys gasped in the ring around them, and Dikar's own skin crawled at the back of his neck.
DOWN, down as far as the Mountain on which the Bunch lived was high, fell the great Drop that fully circled its base. Straight up and down was the Drop's riven rock, and so barren of foothold that no living thing could hope to scale it.
Below, for a space twice as wide across as the tallest of the trees in the forest that robed the Mountain, were tumbled stones as big as the Boy's House and bigger. White and angry waters fumed beneath the stones, and beneath stones and waters were the Old Ones.
Dikar himself had seen these things, from the topmost branch of a certain tree that gave a view of them, but not even Dikar had ever gone out from the concealing curtain of the forest to the brink of the Drop, for of all the Must-Nots the Old Ones had left behind, this was the most fearful; "You must not go out of the woods. You must not go near the edge of the Drop."
Thinking of all this as he stared into the red hate in Tomball's eyes, Dikar asked, "Do you dare, Tomball, climb down the Drop an' talk to the Old Ones?"
"Smart," Tomball sneered. "You think you're smart, don't you? You want me to go down there an' that way be rid of me. Well, it don't work, see? I'm just as smart as you are."
Dikar spread his hands. "You will not let the Bunch decide between us, an' you will not ask the Old Ones. How, then, do you want this thing settled?"
"How? How have you yourself ordered scraps between the Boys settled? Dikar! I dare you to fight out with me, fists, or sticks or knives even, who's gonna be Boss of the Bunch—you or me."
"No fair," Jimlane cried out at that. "I say it's no fair. Tomball's bigger than Dikar an' heavier."
"No fair," Steveland yelped. Billthomas yelled, "We cry the dare no fair." But others were shouting, "Fight!" Fredalton and Halross and rabbit-faced Carlberger. "They gotta fight it out. It's Dikar's own Rule an' he's gotta stick by it."
Most of the Boys shouted, "Fight!"
"Shut up!" Dikar bellowed. "Shut up, all of you," and at once the yelling stopped. But the ring had shrunk till he could feel their breaths on his back and heard little whimpers in the Boys' throats and read their eyes, shining in the changing light of the Fire. "You dare me fight to decide who'll be Boss," Dikar said to Tomball, taking up the ritual he himself had set. "Do you cry a fight between us two fair?"
A cord in Tomball's short neck twitched. "I cry us equal- matched." (By the Rule, Dikar had a right to appeal to the Bunch from Tomball's lying response.) "If you refuse my dare, Dikar, I will cry you yellow, an' claim the right about which we scrap." Reading the eyes in the ring, Dikar saw that if he appealed and the Bunch said he and Tomball were not equal matched, he might remain Boss in name, but Boss in truth he would be no longer. "That is the Rule you yourself have made." Tomball abandoned the ritual. "And you gotta stick by it."
