The Return Read online

  Produced by Greg Weeks, Sankar Viswanathan, and the OnlineDistributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net

  Transcriber's Note:

  This etext was produced from The Science-Fictional Sherlock Holmes, 1960. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.

  THE RETURN

  by

  H. Beam Piper and John J. McGuire

  * * * * *

  I

  Altamont cast a quick, routine glance at the instrument panelsand then looked down through the transparent nose of thehelicopter at the yellow-brown river five hundred feet below.Next he scraped the last morsel from his plate and ate it.

  "What did you make this out of, Jim?" he asked. "I hope you keptnotes while you were concocting it. It's good."

  "The two smoked pork chops left over from yesterday evening,"Loudons said, "and that bowl of rice that's been taking up spacein the refrigerator the last couple of days, together with alittle egg powder and some milk. I ground the chops up and mixedthem with the rice and other stuff. Then added some bacon, tomake grease to fry it in."

  Altamont chuckled. That was Loudons, all right: he could take afew left-overs, mess them together, pop them in the skillet, andhave a meal that would turn the chef back at the Fort green withenvy. He filled his cup and offered the pot.

  "Caffchoc?" he asked.

  Loudons held his cup out to be filled, blew on it, sipped, andthen hunted on the ledge under the desk for the butt of the cigarhe had half-smoked the evening before.

  "Did you ever drink coffee, Monty?" the socio-psychologist asked,getting the cigar drawing to his taste.

  "Coffee? No. I've read about it, of course. We'll have toorganize an expedition to Brazil, sometime, to get seeds and tryraising some."

  Loudons blew a smoke ring toward the rear of the cabin.

  "A much overrated beverage," he replied. "We found some, once,when I was on that expedition into Idaho, in what must have beenthe stockroom of a hotel. Vacuum-packed in moisture-proofcontainers, and free from radioactivity. It wasn't nearly as goodas caffchoc.

  "But then, I suppose, a pre-bustup coffee drinker couldn'tstomach this stuff we're drinking."

  Loudons looked forward, up the river they were following. "Getanything on the radio?" he asked. "I noticed you took us up toabout ten thousand, while I was shaving."

  Altamont got out his pipe and tobacco pouch, filling the formerslowly and carefully.

  "Not a whisper. I tried Colony Three, in the Ozarks, and I triedto call in that tribe of workers in Louisiana. I couldn't geteither."

  "Maybe if we tried to get a little more power on the set...."

  That was Loudons, too, Altamont thought. There wasn't a betterman at the Fort, when it came to dealing with people. Butconfront him with a problem about things and he was lost.

  That was one of the reasons why he and the stocky, phlegmatic socialscientist made such a good team, he thought. As far as he, himself,was concerned, people were just a mysterious, exasperatinglyunpredictable order of things which were subject to no known naturallaws.

  And Loudons thought the same thing about machines: he couldn'tpsychoanalyze them.

  Altamont gestured with his pipe toward the nuclear-electricconversion unit, between the control-cabin and the livingquarters in the rear of the boxcar-sized helicopter.

  "We have enough power back there to keep this windmill in the airtwenty-four hours a day, three hundred and sixty-five days ayear, for the next fifteen years," he said. "We just don't haveenough radio. If I'd step up the power on this set any more, it'dburn out before I could say, 'Altamont calling Fort Ridgeway.'"

  "How far are we from Pittsburgh now?" Loudons wanted to know.

  Altamont looked across the cabin at the big map of the UnitedStates as they had been, the red and green and blue and yellowpatchwork of vanished political divisions. The colors gleamedthrough the transparent overlay on which this voyage ofre-discovery was plotted.

  The red line of their journey started at Fort Ridgeway, in whathad been Arizona. It angled east by a little north, to ColonyThree, in northern Arkansas ... sharply northeast to St. Louisand its lifeless ruins ... then to Chicago and Gary, where littlebands of Stone Age reversions stalked and fought and ate eachother ... Detroit, where things that had completely forgottenthey were human emerged from their burrows only at night ...Cleveland, where a couple of cobalt bombs must have landed in thelake and drenched everything with radioactivity that stilllingered after two centuries ... Akron, where vegetation was onlybeginning to break through the glassy slag ... Cincinnati, wherethey had last stopped....

  "How's the leg this morning, Jim?" he asked.

  "Little stiff. Doesn't hurt much, though."

  "Why, we're about fifty miles, as we follow that river, andthat's relatively straight." He looked down through thetransparent nose of the copter at a town, now choked with treesthat grew among the tumbled walls. "I think that's Aliquippa."

  Loudons looked and shrugged, then looked again and pointed.

  "There's a bear. Just ducked into that church or movie theater orwhatever. I wonder what he thinks we are."

  Altamont puffed slowly at his pipe. "I wonder if we're going tofind anything at all in Pittsburgh."

  "You mean people, as distinct from those biped beasts we've foundso far? I doubt it," Loudons replied, finishing his caffchoc andwiping his mustache with the back of his hand. "I think the wholeeastern half of the country is nothing but forest like this, andthe highest type of life is just about three cuts below HomoNeanderthalensis, almost impossible to contact, and even moreimpossible to educate."

  "I wasn't thinking about that. I've just about given up hope offinding anybody or even a reasonably high level of barbarism,"Altamont said. "I was thinking about that cache of microfilmedbooks that was buried at the Carnegie Library."

  "If it was buried," Loudons qualified. "All we have is thatarticle in that two-century-old copy of Time about how thepeople at the library had constructed the crypt and werebeginning the microfilming. We don't know if they ever had achance to get it finished, before the rockets started landing."

  They passed over a dam of flotsam that had banked up at awrecked bridge and accumulated enough mass to resist the periodicfloods that had kept the river usually clear. Three human figuresfled across a sand-flat at one end of it and disappeared into thewoods. Two of them carried spears tipped with something thatsparkled in the sunlight, probably shards of glass.

  "You know, Monty, I get nightmares, sometimes, thinking aboutwhat things must be like in Europe," Loudons said.

  Five or six wild cows went crashing through the brush below.Altamont nodded when he saw them.

  "Maybe tomorrow, we'll let down and shoot a cow," he said. "I waslooking in the freeze-locker and the fresh meat's getting alittle low. Or a wild pig, if we find a good stand of oak trees.I could enjoy what you'd do with some acorn-fed pork."

  He looked across the table. "Finished?" he asked Loudons. "Takeover, then. I'll go back and wash the dishes."

  They rose, and Loudons, favoring his left leg, moved over to theseat at the controls.

  Altamont gathered up the two cups, the stainless-steel dishes,and the knives and the forks and spoons, going up the steps overthe shielded converter and ducking his head to avoid the seat inthe forward top machine-gun turret. He washed and dried thedishes, noting with satisfaction that the gauge of the water tankwas still reasonably high, and glanced out one of the windows.Loudons was taking the big helicopter upstairs, for a betterview.

  Now and then, among the trees, there would be a glint of glassyslag, usually in a fairly small
circle. That was to be expected:beside the three or four H-bombs that had fallen on thePittsburgh area, mentioned in the transcripts of the last news toreach the Fort from the outside, the whole district had beenpelted, more or less at random, with fission bombs.

  West of the confluence of the Allegheny and the Monongahela, itwould probably be worse than this.

  "Can you see Pittsburgh yet, Jim?" he called out.

  "Yes, it's a mess! Worse than Gary, worse than Akron even."

  "Monty! Come here! I think I have something!"

  Picking up the pipe he had laid down, Altamont hurried forward,dodging his six-foot length under the gun turret and swingingdown from the walkway over the converter.

  "What is it?" he asked.

  "Smoke. A lot of smoke, twenty or thirty fires at the veryleast."

  Loudons had shifted from Forward to Hover and was peering througha pair of binoculars. "See that island, the long one? Across theriver from it, on the north side, toward this end. Yes, byEinstein! And I can see cleared ground, and what I think arehouses, inside a stockade...."