THE AWAKENING
BY JACK SHARKEY
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Galaxy Magazine February 1964.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
They awoke after ages of hiding—to emerge into
a world richer than they had dared to dream of!
Rik's first impressions were an uncomfortable chill creeping along hisbare flesh, and a bright milky swirling of light that encompassed hisentire vision. He shivered and blinked his eyes a few times, and thenthe swirling settled down and became the vault. The chill, he realized,was due to the body warmth being methodically sucked away by the coldslab on which he lay. Another shiver brought a gasp of breath into hislungs, and then he was wide awake.
When he sat up and swung his legs over the side, the interior of thevault began swirling again. He had to grip the edge of the slab to keepfrom falling. The air was humid, much too humid, and he could taste theprickly presence of carbon dioxide when he breathed. "The pump," hemumbled, dropping to the floor on feet that he could barely control."Something's happened to the pump."
He pushed himself determinedly erect, then stumbled down the longcorridor between the other slabs, hardly glancing at their silenttenants, until he got to Zina's. She lay still as death, not flickingso much as an eyelid, and her flesh was like frozen wax beneath hisexploring fingers.
There was nothing he could do for her until he got the pump workingagain....
Rik pushed away from the slab on which Zina lay, and went through thearchway into the next chamber. Here another fifty of the group lay ontheir slabs, not so much as a muscle twitch betraying the fact thatthey were all quite alive. It seemed only a few hours since he had laindown on his slab in the other room and gotten his injection, but hecould not, for a dizzy moment, recall in which direction the pump lay.His mind seemed to be plumbing dust-covered depths to dredge out hismemories, one by one.
He suddenly remembered the War. The war that had driven the group tobuild this place, to try and safeguard a handful from the holocaustthat would set fire to the surface of the world and turn the seas tosteam. Was it possible the war had passed? Or had it ever come!
There was no way to know without going outside—Wait! There was!Rik thought hard, trying to get his sense of direction back. Theatom-powered clock that marked off months instead of minutes was in thecentral vault, where the elders slept. The other nine vaults ringedthat one, he recalled, veering at right angles to his first direction,which would have taken him on a circular tour of the nine vaults andback to his starting place again.
The archway to the vault of the elders was unaccountably blocked,and Rik realized suddenly that part of the ceiling there had fallen,carried by some fault in the granite of the mountain itself. But thatwas impossible! The elders had selected this site on the basis of therigidity of the rocky strata that made it up. A fault could not haveoccurred for more years than Rik's own lifetime—
Or had that many years passed already?
There was no way of knowing; not until he had examined the clock. Rikmoved away from the blockade and made his way into the next vault, andthe next, finally finding an archway in the sixth vault from his ownwhere the rock had not completely sealed the way into the elders' vault.
Here he had expected to find the air