These Savage Futurians by High Philip E

Author:High, Philip E. [High, Philip E.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Science Fiction
ISBN: 158715238X
Google: Uls0AgAAQBAJ
Amazon: 158715238X
Goodreads: 1575007
Publisher: Brownstone Books
Published: 1967-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

8

When Ventnor opened his eyes, Stein was a little shocked to see tears in them.

“You must be very sensitive.”

“Really?” Ventnor sounded a little choked. “I don’t know, maybe I read deeper—is it wrong to react?”

“If you mean do I disapprove—the answer is no. Most definitely no! Although as a psych I shouldn’t, I despise the indifferent. I’ve had young girls through this thing and some of them haven’t batted an eyelid.” He sighed. “Candidly, I distrust lack of feeling, so you have gone up in my estimation, although, I must add here, it will make you very vulnerable.”

He paused and began to remove the terminals. “Lansom was fifty-eight when he died, heart attack as you probably guessed.”

Ventnor looked up at him. “And all he fought for, all he cared for was his wife and children. He fought, killed the Indoes, hated, because it eased the aching sense of loss inside him.”

Stein nodded. “Very touching. Not many get to the actual motivation of the man.” He changed the subject “Not a pretty story, those final days.”

“And now we rebuild?”

“Where it is possible without the Island finding out—rebuild and, more important, profit by past mistakes.”

He laughed briefly and bitterly. “Some of us have a ‘thing’ about the Island. They’re so God-awful blind and so smug with it. They conduct this grandiose experiment on the commandments of a deceased paranoic. Megellon, as I have told you, had a bug about Gadgeteers. He also had a bug about religion—hence the Padres. Here is the perfect example of a man who thought he was God trying to create a race of sheep in his own image. His kind of sheep, once the work is complete, won’t survive two generations alone. Meanwhile, the world itself is sliding to pieces. Soil erosion has already turned Africa into one huge Sahara and dust bowls are spreading in the United States, Australia and many parts of Europe.

“While the Island conducts itself like an Olympus creating their alleged stable society, vital work goes unnoticed. The world needs not these pathetic culture trays, but vast engineering projects, the rebuilding of cities and the foundation of a new society educated to the mistakes of the past.”

Stein paused and smiled grimly. “You are probably unaware that the ‘primitives’ outside the culture trays, are permitted to continue their existence only for ‘comparison purposes.’ What they do not know is that, but for our forebears, there would be no primitives.

“People like Hubel, and thousands of such tribes all over the world, owe their existence to those who stayed behind in survival cells. This base for example, began with forty men and women working in an artificial cavern under a hill near Lenham.

“With strictly limited equipment, awful conditions and working like dogs, they virtually saved this area. The same tales of heroism can be applied to every resistance cell in the world. In England, the United States of America, Europe, in fact almost every part of the world, these tiny groups of dedicated experts worked until they dropped, staggered to their feet and worked until they dropped again.

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