Our Children's Children by Clifford D. Simak Page B

will this time, but we can’t ignore them. We have to give them something and it had better be the truth.”
    â€œI would think,” said Williams, “that we should tell them we have information which tends to make us believe these people may be, as they say, from the future, but that we need some time to check. At the moment, we can make no positive announcement. We still are working on it.”
    â€œThey’ll want to know,” said Sandburg, “why they are coming back. Steve has to have some sort of answer. We can’t send him out there naked. And, besides that, they will know, within a short time, that we are placing guns in front of the tunnels.”
    â€œIt would scare hell out of everyone,” said Williams, “if it was known why the guns were being placed. There would be a worldwide clamor for us to use the guns to shut down the tunnels.”
    â€œWhy don’t we just say,” suggested the President, “that the people of the future are facing some great catastrophe and are fleeing for their lives. The guns? I suppose we’ll have to say something about them. We can’t be caught in a downright falsehood. You can say they are no more than routine precaution.”
    â€œBut only if the question should be raised,” said Sandburg.
    â€œOK,” said Wilson, “but that isn’t all of it. There’ll be other questions. Have we consulted with other nations? How about the UN? Will there be a formal statement later?”
    â€œYou could say, perhaps,” said Williams, “that we have contacted other governments. We have—that advisory about the guns.”
    â€œSteve,” said the President, “you’ll have to try to hold them off. We’ve got to get our feet under us. Tell them you’ll be back to them later.”

14
    By Molly Kimball
    Washington (Global News)—The people who are coming from the tunnels are refugees from time.
    This was confirmed late today by Maynard Gale, one of the refugees. He refused to say, however, why they were fleeing from a future which he says lies 500 years ahead of us. The circumstances of their flight, he insisted, could only be revealed to a constituted government. He said he was making efforts to get in contact with an appropriate authority. He explained that he held the position of ombudsman for the Washington community in his future time and had been delegated to communicate with the federal government upon his arrival here.
    He did, however, give a startling picture of the kind of society in which he lives, or rather, did live—a world in which there are no longer any nations and from which the concept of war has disappeared.
    It is a simple society, he said, forced to become simple by the ecological problems that we face today. It is no longer an industrial society. Its manufacturing amounts to no more, perhaps less, than one percent of today’s figure. What it does manufacture is made to last. The philosophy of obsolescense was abandoned only a short distance into our future, he said, in the face of dwindling natural resources, a dwindling about which economists and ecologists have been warning us for years.
    Because its coal and fossil fuels are almost gone, the future world, said Gale, relies entirely for its energy on fusion power. The development of that type of power, he said, is the only thing that holds the delicate economic fabric of his world together.
    The world of 500 years from now is highly computerized, with the greater part of the population living in “high rise” cities. Half a dozen towers, some of them reaching as high as a mile, will constitute a city. Urban sprawl is gone, leaving vast surface areas free for agricultural purposes. The cities are built, in large part, from converted scrap metal which in our day would have been buried in landfills, and are computer-operated, almost entirely automatic.
    There is, Gale said, none of the great spread