CHAPTER II

REVIVAL

YEARS and years passed over Zulerich, sitting in his glass case entirely unable to move, even to raise an eyebrow or lift a finger. He grew no older. However, with the years there came a change in the manners and moods of the human beings who passed him every day as they wandered curiously about the museum.

Sentiment warmed and grew so that it had a great influence over the minds and actions of the people. They became more and more easily swayed by soft gush of unthinking folk. They became wrought up over old Zulerich and demanded that he be buried. Some of them sobbed a bit over what they called the desecration of an old man's dead body.

The scientists who controlled the museum protested the maudlin sentiment. They almost guessed that Zulerich was still alive, needed but some secret potion to revive him, though they had no idea what that potion might be.

Zulerich heard the whispers and speeches and discovered that a movement was under way to have him buried. Naturally in his condition he became terrified for he could not speak. He could not move. He could make no protesting outcry at all. He could only stare straight before him and feel very much afraid. As months passed the movement gained support. Zulerich thought day and night, trying to think of some way to beg the leaders of the new movement to let him alone. But he could think of no way at all. He stared at the cleaners as they washed down his case with great dousing swabs of alkali water from their sloshing pails. A few drops of that liquid would release him. Yet there was no way to hint that he wanted a drink of the suds.

Terrifying hours he spent. He listened fearfully to every footstep which came down the narrow aisle. He watched every solemn face. He feared every approach. Every man in black seemed to him to be the undertaker who would remove him from the brightly lighted museum and take him to the darkness of an eternal grave.

Finally the hour came. Two men entered the room brisky. Zulerich did not guess their mission until they opened his case and took him out. The keeper of the museum watched wistfully and turned his back upon them as they took him down. He felt their warm hands upon him and they chilled him with terror. After he had been put in the ambulance and driven away to the morgue he was placed in a cheap steel casket and rumbled out to the cemetery. Fright grew in his kindly old soul as he felt them remove his box and sink it into the grave. Then he heard the sullen fall of spaded earth. Every nerve was taut and strained, trying to command his voice to cry out, yet not a whisper left his lips. He tried to rise, to pound a hand against the lid, but he could not make the slightest move. The thudding became fainter and fainter until black silence crept in to keep him company. Silence rang in his ears. Darkness spread like a great void all about.

SO HE lay, day on day, night on night, and both were the same in the black grave. And he grew used to the darkness and the silence and his thoughts quieted and ripened like old wine in a dark place. He became very wise in meditating upon things he had observed while on the earth. His thoughts were of bright sunshine upon bright flowers, of the warm moist earth at springtime when buried seeds burst their prison to send up their shoots. Seeds that were so like him, seemingly dead but with eternal life prisoned in them.

He recalled poems and scanned them line by line to dwell upon their beauty and mull upon their thought. He reasoned out theories. He pondered facts. He dreamed dreams.

Then, when he could think of nothing new at all, he would begin all over and retrace his thought again. Over and over his fancy circled the unending memory of old days and wove into them new imaginings. Still black silent night held reign.

Eternity is a long time and much can happen in it.

Even the steel box in which old Zulerich lay rusted and grew weak and thin. There came the rains of the great wet years. Water trickled into the sod and found the mouldy cavity where rusted the steel box. A tiny leak came through a rusted hole in the casket lid and water dripped upon his forehead all night. All night or all day, he could not tell which, for day was as night in that grave. On and on the drip continued. Tap, tap, tap, tap, like the tick of a clock almost run down. It broke in a new place and dripped upon his chest, his limbs and finally into his upturned mouth. His nerves were tortured with the constant drip of it. He tried to move just a little. He wanted to let the splatter of it fall in a new place. He tried to move though he knew from experience that he could not. But he did move! After more than a hundred years of stiff hypnosis he moved! He stretched his legs. He closed his muddy wide open eyes and then he fought furiously to get out. The drip through the gypsum clay had carried in it the small amount of alkali he needed to get back the use of his muscles!

Squirming about against the steel lid ripped it loose and a strip of it broke off in his hand. With that as a spade it did not take long for him to work his way out and poke his grizzled half-bald head into the gray light of a rainy day. He crawled naked into the fresh sweet rain for his clothes were as ash and had fallen from him while he worked his way out.

Out on top of the earth again! He had not dared dream of it as he lay paralyzed with earth spaded upon him. Such a miracle had not occurred to him at all!

He smelled the moist clean freshness of a rain-washed earth. The fragrance of new blossoming flowers, the sweet meadows which spread green and luscious all about him.

The pain and misery of his long dark wait below was behind him. It was forgotten in his joy at being above the earth again, able to move again. He was in a new century and the scientist in him was alert as he hurried down from the top of the little hill where he had been buried. He wondered what he would find in the old town. Had mankind advanced? Had they continued the unparalleled progress he had witnessed during the twentieth century or had that been merely a mushroom growth already decayed? He hurried down to see.

IF POPULATION were any answer man had certainly progressed. The old home town had swelled out beyond the forested hills and it seemed to have been remade. It glowed with a white beauty undulled even by the dreary day.

Light glowed from every wall and tower, soft and radiant like the glow of a firefly. The whole city seemed painted with some luminous enamel which glowed more brightly with the passing of dark clouds and dimmed with the rifting of them.

There were no streets as he knew them in the old days. Instead there were crescents and stars and circles landscaped off for the setting of stately buildings. Many people were about but they were high in the air, traveling here and there very rapidly in small planes which were of a peculiar butterfly pattern. They were tinted and exquisitely lighted.

Zulerich dared not enter the city for he was naked. Still, those above seemed not to notice him at all as he crouched behind a statue of white marble.

Finally a plane dropped vertically from the sky. He drew away, expecting to see it dashed upon the base of the statue near which he crouched. But as it dived toward the earth the beautiful butterfly wings began to revolve around and around and it came down as lightly as a bird upon a twig. A man crawled from the plane and stared at Zulerich in astonishment. "What are you doing out here naked, old man?" he asked.

Zulerich was staring a bit himself, studying every feature of man and plane. So this was a product of the twenty-third or twenty-fourth century. Zulerich's interest was alert as to what changes had taken place in man and mechanics since his time on earth.

The man seemed rather more feminine than men used to be. He had soft delicate features, slim, perfectly-cared-for hands, a low well-controlled voice. The plane was seemingly made to please the eye as well as to be of service.

"Where did you come from?" the man asked, piqued by Zulerich's close observation.

"I dug myself from my grave," Zulerich answered, knowing the surprise he must awake. "My box rusted from me and I dug through the wet clay."

The man frowned. Zulerich shook a little in the drizzle of chill rain. The man's tone changed when he spoke again. It became indulgent. "Sure, sure," he said consolingly, "but who are your people, old man?"

"There must be none alive," Zulerich answered with nostalgia in his tone. "There will be no one, I am sure, none who know me, for I have been buried for so long a time. I had no way to number the years but I must have lain there in the grave for centuries.

"Still you may have a written remembrance of me, for I was a great marvel in my day. I found the compound which would perpetuate body cells, the pale green drops of eternal life!"

"Sure, sure," the man said indulgently, "but where is your home? With whom do you stay? I will take you there. Can't you remember where you live?"

"I am not insane, sir," Zulerich said, looking the man straight in the eye. "The story I tell is strange but I can prove the most marvelous part of what I saw. I still remember my formula and I can give any man who drinks of it eternal life."

"You don't expect me to believe that?"

"Yes."

"Old man, you're crazy as a bolo. You'd better let me take you home or else go there yourself. Get on some clothes. You must know it's been a hundred years since people were allowed naked in the streets!

The new rule won't stand for naked men, you ought to know that!"

"I know nothing of your rule, son. I have just come out of the grave. I have not seen the good light of day since the year of Our Lord two thousand and thirty-nine."

"You act well," the man admitted. "You have taken on the old form of speech, you dare walk naked in the street and you hint that you reckon time by the old Julian calendar, which has been in disuse for more than a hundred years. You act too well to be entirely insane." The man stared straight into old Zulerich's clear eyes. His face lighted as he seemed to arrive at a conclusion.

"Prove that you can give eternal life! By all the truth of science it will open a place for us both in the chamber of the Rulers."

"Give me some clothes," Zulerich demanded, "take me where we can talk. Allow me yet a little time so that I may see that man is ready for them and I will give to every one that wishes the pale green drops which will cause him to never die!"

TURNING, the man opened the tinseled door of the little plane.

"Come," he decided. "I'll give you clothes. I'd do that much for anyone. Not that I believe a thing you say, not a bit of it."

"I will prove what I say," Zulerich affirmed. "I will give my secret freely to you and all the people. I have always loved them, felt a deep pity for them all, sorrowed at the waste death laid upon their lives, regretted that when man was just learning how to live it was ordained as time he should die.

"The earth is already filled with a new race. They seem to have the secret of perfect health and luxurious life. I will add the last and greatest gift. They shall have time to work into their years the pattern of their dreams! They shall never know again the fear of death!"

Into the man's face crept a glowing avidity. Zulerich knew it was a hunger of eternal life, a desire to outwit eternal death!

"Lord!" the man whispered, "If you were only not crazy after all?" He stared in dumb silence as though the possibilities of such a dream were too much for speech. There came a measured, rumbling tread from somewhere below the earth. The man drew rigidly erect and stared about. He grabbed Zulerich by the arm.

"Get in," he urged, "the telecops must not sense you. They would have you before the Rulers!" Zulerich slid his naked body into the seat and sank into soft satin cushions against the far door. There were many strange switches and lights and knobs he did not understand. Certainly in this age mechanics seemed perfected.

The man slid in beside him. The butterfly wings began to whirl around and around over the cab and sucked the plane straight into the sky. Far above the city the wings ceased whirling and the propeller ahead began to spin. The wings spread rigidly from either side of the fuselage and they sped away much as planes had when Zulerich lived before upon the earth.

It would take volumes to recount half of the mechanical marvels Zulerich saw in that one city. It seemed to him the world had become an Aladdin's lamp where the slightest touch yielded satisfaction to the greatest desires.

There was one thing he remarked more than all the others and that was this—though all work that man desired was done through power broadcast by radio over the whole city, not one smoking chimney told of a power house, not one river was harnessed and not one gasoline engine sputtered in plane or factory. Zulerich asked his companion about this and was told that man had long ago learned to use energy from the great source itself. The sun furnished all power through a series of intensifiers which caught the sunlight and brought it into one startling blaze of incandescent heat. This beam was shot downward like a searchlight to the engines, which ran all day and stored power for the night. On occasions power could be transmitted by radio from stations with a surplus to those that needed it. Power could even be drawn from the other side of the earth should it be required.