In All His lifetime of perhaps twenty years, it had never occurred toBurl to wonder what his grandfather had thought about his surroundings.The grandfather had come to an untimely end in a rather unpleasantfashion which Burl remembered vaguely as a succession of screams comingmore and more faintly to his ears while he was being carried away at thetop speed of which his mother was capable.
Burl had rarely or never thought of the old gentleman since. Surelyhe had never wondered in the abstract of what his great grandfatherthought, and most surely of all, there never entered his headsuch a purely hypothetical question as the one of what hismany-times-great-grandfather—say of the year 1920—would have thoughtof the scene in which Burl found himself.
He was treading cautiously over a brownish carpet of fungus growth,creeping furtively toward the stream which he knew by the generic titleof "water." It was the only water he knew. Towering far above his head,three man-heights high, great toadstools hid the grayish sky from hissight. Clinging to the foot-thick stalks of the toadstools were stillother fungi, parasites upon the growth that had once been parasitesthemselves.
Burl himself was a slender young man wearing a single garment twistedabout his waist, made from the wing-fabric of a great moth the membersof his tribe had slain as it emerged from its cocoon. His skin was fair,without a trace of sunburn. In all his lifetime he had never seen thesun, though the sky was rarely hidden from view save by the giant fungiwhich, with monster cabbages, were the only growing things he knew.Clouds usually spread overhead, and when they did not, the perpetualhaze made the sun but an indefinitely brighter part of the sky, never asharply edged ball of fire. Fantastic mosses, misshapen fungus growths,colossal molds and yeasts, were the essential parts of the landscapethrough which he moved.
Once as he had dodged through the forest of huge toadstools, hisshoulder touched a cream-colored stalk, giving the whole fungus a tinyshock. Instantly, from the umbrella-like mass of pulp overhead, a fineand impalpable powder fell upon him like snow. It was the season whenthe toadstools sent out their spores, or seeds, and they had beendropped upon him at the first sign of disturbance.
Furtive as he was, he paused to brush them from his head and hair. Theywere deadly poison, as he knew well.
Burl would have been a curious sight to a man of the twentieth century.His skin was pink, like that of a child, and there was but little hairupon his body. Even that on top of his head was soft and downy. Hischest was larger than his forefathers' had been, and his ears seemedalmost capable of independent movement, to catch threatening sounds fromany direction. His eyes, large and blue, possessed pupils which coulddilate to extreme size, allowing him to see in almost complete darkness.
He was the result of the thirty thousand years' attempt of the humanrace to adapt itself to the change that had begun in the latter half ofthe twentieth century.
At about that time, civilization had been high, and apparently secure.Mankind had reached a permanent agreement among itself, and all men hadequal opportunities to education and leisure. Machinery did most of thelabor of the world, and men were only required to supervise itsoperation. All men were well-fed, all men were well-educated, and itseemed that until the end of time the earth would be the abode of acommunity of comfortable human beings, pursuing their studies anddiversions, their illusions and their truths. Peace, quietness, privacy,freedom were universal.
Then, just when men were congratulating themselves that the Golden Agehad come again,