by Earl
SIX hours later, Riker, still in his pajamas, stroked the long fur of Pete, who reposed in his lap. Rita Caldwell sat near him. They had been talking of many things, but now she suddenly laughed. “Those glasses! They look so comical! You haven’t explained yet, how they work. Can you see perfectly?”
“I can see as well as you, through these polaroid lenses,” Riker nodded. “Almost, anyway. By polarized light. Pete, here, who also has delayed vision, caught a mouse in the moonlight last night. That was the clue—moonlight is polarized light. I don’t know why, really, but polarized images are transmitted through our trick eyes without more than a second’s delay. Maybe it forms a different kind of nerve-impulse that can jump those wide synapses.”
The phone rang, and Paul Gregory, calling from the radio station, said: “Gregg’s party has been sighted, Riker. A plane just radioed that they’re landing beside the wreck. Two more ships are heading there, to pick up all the men. They’ll be back in civilization in a few hours, safe and sound, thanks to you. By the way, how much do you want for the patent on your radio? We’re prepared to go as high as—” Riker whistled and half staggered from the phone, though not from delayed vision. He sat down again and put Pete in his lap while telling the girl.
Then he leaned forward a little. “It won’t be so bad, wearing polaroid glasses all my life,” he said. “They won’t look any different on a man than ordinary spectacles. Don’t you think so, Rita?”
[*] The rays, in Riker’s case, striking the sensitive nerve-cells, seared them and caused them to shrink. That made the synapses—the spaces between the cells—wider. So when his eyes received light impulses, the impulses had to jump over these wider gaps, and therefore limp to the occipital lobe, taking almost three minutes instead of the normal 1/30 of a second.—Ed.
LORDS OF CREATION
For three thousand years he slept, his life preserved by the Twentieth Century’s most elaborate science, so that he could awake, an emissary to Tomorrow. He was young, skillful, intelligent—and of course he was brave. But if he could have dreamed what he would find when his eyes beheld the Fiftieth Century World, he would never have ventured beyond the borders of Today. Beginning a powerful novel of fantasy and adventure
CHAPTER I
AFTER AN AGE
To be Opened in the Year 5000 A.D. All You Who Pause before these Stones Prior to that Day and Age Take Heed that it Is Not for Your Eyes to See. We of the Past Place this Trust in You of the Future. 5000 A.D.—Open this Record-Crypt of 1940 A.D.
THESE words had been deeply chiseled into a smooth marble block that filled the arch over the outline of the doorway of cemented bricks. Three thousand years of wind and storm had not obliterated the graven letters, though the inscription was thickly encrusted with fungi.
The crypt was perhaps thirty feet long and half as wide, a solid structure fashioned out of time-defying limestone. Low and squat., it was without windows or openings of any kind, save for the sealed door. Though battered and worn through the long, harsh centuries, it stood there, stolid, grim, and stubborn—victorious over the elements.
And over Time, the great leveler . . .
Hundreds of people had come; watching the stone masons chip away at the door, but none could read or understand the ancient message. Only old Sem Onger, the learned scholar, who had made a study of dead languages, could interpret it. His lips mumbled in the accents of a past age.
Beside him stood the leader of the people, Jon Darm—tall commanding, but kindly of eye, with faint traces of gray streaking his temples. With him were his three chieftains, and all of them were as nervous as he.
“The relics of more than three thousand years ago!” said one of the chieftains in low-voiced awe.
“Perhaps all has turned to dust!” suggested a second, pessimistically.
“How much longer will those fellows take?”
Old Sem Onger grin led, showing almost senile, toothless gums.
“Impatient, Mai Radnor?” he cackled. “Think of all the thousands upon thousands in the intervening centuries who stood before these stones and could not enter! Truly, it must have taken great restraint not to rifle this crypt. We can——”
In his mind’s eye he could see it—the procession of the ages, reverting at last to—what?
thank many whose bones lie buried who might have robbed us of this moment.” Chief Jon Darm spoke. “But are you sure, Sem Onger, that we are not committing a sacrilege? This is the time? What does 5000 A.D. mean?”
The learned man nodded firmly. “There is no doubt. By the ancient reckoning, that term means five thousand years after the death of one of their deities, called The Saver. Our reckoning, of course, dates from the rise of Antarka, eleven centuries ago. That was the year 3905 A.D., by their calendar. I have checked closely. This is their year of 5000.”
AT LAST the final brick had been removed and the dark hole of the crypt’s entrance lay revealed. The masons saluted the chief and retreated to join the crowd. The five men looked at one another for a moment, as though to gather courage.
Jon Darm’s voice was strangely husky as he said, “Let us go in. Light the candles.”
Slowly they strode forward. In back of them the throng remained in blank, awed silence. It was a supreme moment—the future meeting the past. An age striding an age. Man groping out for man, past all the boundaries of time. The five could not have described their feelings.
In earlier times, explorers had so felt when entering the pyramids, relics of a more distant past.
Chief Jon Darm had to stoop to enter through the low doorway. The others followed him closely. Their candles drove back the gloom and gleamed from dust.
For a moment they stood just within the doorway, turning and staring. The air was close and dank, and made them shiver. But they shivered as much from a Sensation of the hoary antiquity.
The interior had been solidly braced with wide stone pillars, to withstand the exigencies of time. Then they saw the contents, lined up in neat rows. Shelves of outjutting brick held various objects. Part of one shelf had crumbled away, spilling its contents to the floor.
It was the only sign that Time had not stood still here.
Jon Darm’s footsteps sounded like the scrape of two mountains as he moved toward the nearest shelf. He bent, blew with his lips. A cloud of dust billowed around his head, blinding him. When he had rubbed his eyes clear, he looked at what lay revealed. It was a uniform glass cylinder; within it reposed a queerly intricate little object, with tiny wheels and shiny surfaces.
Though he did not know it, it was an exact model of a streamlined automobile of 1940.
The others crowded up, peering over his shoulder eagerly. Jon Darm blew dust from another glass container. This held a book on whose front cover were words undecipherable to them. The book’s leather covering showed only a slight crumbling at the edges.
The 20th century people had done well to seal these things in glass that enclosed a sterile atmosphere of helium.
From object to object Jon Darm and his companions went, finding little whose purpose or meaning they could guess. They began to realize what a vast gulf lay between that past age and this. Having glanced at most of the things on the shelves, they noticed now that the containers on the floor were much larger and were not of glass.
They were of a smooth, hard material whose name—bakelite—would have meant nothing to them.
The sliding cover of the first, after the wax that sealed it had been scraped away, came off to reveal dozens of books.
“Look, Sem Onger!” cried Jon Darm. “Writings for you to translate. The history of those times, perhaps, in a detail long lost to our knowledge!”
But Sem Onger, with the independence of the old, was shuttling around by himself, sticking his lighted taper before anything that intrigued his eyes.
The others had worked down one wall and now turned to the rear of the rectangular space. Their flickering lights here revealed something much larger and more complex th
an anything before. They blew dust from it and then stared wonderingly.
“What is it?” demanded Jon Darm, as though his chieftains must know. They looked at the object in silent mystification.
IT STOOD four feet high, set solidly on metal legs. Its many mechanical parts made no recognizable picture to them. From the forepart projected a cylindrical tube, with glass in its end. Toward the back were several large, curved plates. Jon Darm’s fingers trembled as he moved them across the object’s metallic surfaces.
“Do you suppose,” he whispered, “that it is a—machine!”
They all started.
Then Mai Radnor stepped close and boldly grasped a large handle that protruded from the side. He pulled toward him but it would not move. When he pushed the other way, however, a clicking sound arose and slowly the large crank turned. At the same time, some of the other parts moved, and a soft whirring noise purred from the interior.
The others stepped back, half in alarm. Mai Radnor, eyes glowing proudly at his own daring, continued pressing the handle around. At the end of the first revolution, a loud click sounded. As though this were a signal, the whole machine seemed to come to life.
“Look!” choked one of the chieftains, pointing a trembling finger at the wall toward which the tube pointed.
Amazingly, a picture had grown there, dim and strange!
At the same time a dry, crackling noise vibrated into the still air. Mai Radnor, though trembling excitedly at what he had brought into being, continued rotating the handle in a half frenzy.
The others stared at the picture cast on the wall.
“It moves!” spluttered one. “The picture moves!”
“A man!” cried another. “It is a man moving!”
“And what we hear,” said Jon Darm in sudden, stunning realization, “is his voice!”
It was unmistakably so.
The picture on the wall, though dim and shot through with yellow lines and spots, was obviously that of a man. Watching closely, they saw that as his lips moved, the sounds varied accordingly. The man of the 20th century seemed to be speaking directly to them. He smiled as his eyes stared straight out at them, and the inflection of his voice was friendly.
And they sensed, Trough the speech meant nothing to them that he was greeting them.
Mai Radnor, puffed out with justifiable pride at this sensational find, continued turning the big handle.
He did not know that this muscular effort, besides moving the reels, shutters and cogs, also motivated a simple magneto which supplied current to the sound-track of the film.
Nor did he suspect that if he polished clean the platinum surfaces of the concave mirrors beside him, the dim picture would brighten. The mirrors were so adjusted as to catch light from the opened doorway, concentrate it, and send it as a fairly strong beam through the lenses.
It was a setup calculated to operate, no matter what length of time had passed, whenever human muscles were applied. Batteries or any other form of power would long since have deteriorated.
They watched the smiling man of the past age gesticulate and move his lips. His motions were somewhat jerky. Mai Radnor was not turning the handle at its required speed. Also the voice that they heard was no more than a croak because the film was not moving at its normal rate. But to them it seemed a miraculous reproduction of human action and speech.
Suddenly the scene changed.
It became a distance-view that showed many geometrical figures reposing beneath the sky. In the foreground was water, on which danced little boats. Overhead soared a queer mechanical bee. In the middle of the water stood a tiny statuette, holding aloft a stone torch. The voice went on, as though describing what these were. To the watchers, it seemed a collection of toys.
But when the scene moved sideward, giving sudden perspective, they all gasped.
In one terrifying moment it flashed on them that the scene represented a hugeness that was unbelievable. The sensation was so real that they clutched at one another as though falling through immense depths.
The pictures had been filmed—if they had known it—from an airplane.
In a moment the picture changed back again to the man speaking. In his face was an expression of mixed pride and apologetic inquiry. If his croaking voice had been understood, they would have heard him say:
“This, people of 5000 A.D., is our greatest modern metropolis, New York City. But perhaps in your eyes it is insignificant beside your own magnificent cities!”
OLD Sem Onger had sidled up beside Jon Darm, staring at the pictures with the eyes of one whose knowledge is not to be challenged.
“It is what they called ‘jumping-pictures,’ ” he announced calmly. “A favorite pastime of theirs. But leave that turning stick be, Mai Radnor.”
A trace of excitement came into his cracked tones. “Come with me, all of you. I will show you something that is perhaps still more amazing.”
Mai Radnor stopped turning the heavy handle and mopped his brow in relief. As they followed Sem Onger, the machine’s whirring trickled to silence. The picture on the wall dimmed and vanished, and the sepulchral voice faded with it.
Sem Onger led them before the fourth wall, which held no shelves. Holding his taper high at the middle section, the wavering beams revealed lines in the stone forming an upright rectangle.
“Another doorway,” said Sem Onger, “leading to the small space that adjoins this chamber to make up the full length of the crypt.”
He held his candle higher, highlighting a message cut above the doorway.
“ ‘In this Room,’ ” he translated hesitantly, “ ‘lies one Who—Sleeps. Turn the Handle and Enter, You of 5000 A.D.!’ ”
“One who sleeps!” whispered Jon Darm. “What does it mean?”
Sem Onger was already tugging at the large metal handle. Mai Radnor sprang to his aid as his old man’s strength was not enough, and Mai Radnor slowly moved the handle down in its long, vertical slot.
A deep rumble of moving counterweights sounded from beneath the floor. Slowly and ponderously, the great stone block of the door pivoted.
The space beyond was dark, mysterious. In his eagerness, old Sem Onger shuffled in first, committing the grave breach of preceding the chief without permission. Jon Darm took no notice, nor did the others. The spell of the place shoved matters of contemporary etiquette and tradition out of their minds.
The full flood of their candlelight bared a small space ten feet wide and as long. This chamber, more than the other, had been braced elaborately with thick stone columns. There was scarecly room to file between them.
And though they were invisibly buried, solid beams of molybdenum-steel interlaced the walls and ceiling. A falling mountain would not have sufficed to grind the chamber flat.
The intruders into this age-old crypt somehow sensed that these precautions had been taken. What could be so precious in the builders’ eyes that must be protected against the elemental forces of nature?
Dust, the heritage of Time, lay thickly over an oblong box in the center of the small chamber.
For a moment hey all stared, wondering what lay within. Then, while the others began blowing the dust away, Sem Onger held his candle close to the nearest stone pillar, on which had been chiseled another message in the ancient tongue.
Something like a moan arose from the lips of Jon Darm and his chieftains as the object within its glass container lay exposed.
It was the figure of a young man, who seemed to be asleep—or dead—and who was entirely naked.
CHAPTER II
OH, FANTASTIC WORLD!
“THE one who sleeps!” murmured Jon Darm, shaking his head sadly. “But look, he does not sleep. He is dead! He does not breathe. They have put his body here, miraculously preserved, so that we of this time might look upon the face of a human being of their time. Three thousand years ago, this man lived and moved in his world. Truly, it is a strange thought.”
They all stared down at the body, marveling at its
semblance to life.
It seemed like a man instantaneously frozen in an attitude of sleep. His chest was poised to rise in a breath. His eyelids were ready to flutter open at the light thrown on them. His muscles were flexed to turn his body from its hard glass couch. The lips might at any moment part to give out a sigh or yawn.
So it seemed.
“The sleeper!” murmured Jon Darm again. “Having slept for three thousand years in his glass coffin, he is now ready to pass the night of eternity!”
Old Sem Onger’s voice rose quaveringly in the hushed awe that pervaded the room.
“He is now ready to awaken,” he announced.
“What!” exclaimed Jon Darm. “From death?”
“From sleep.”
The aged seer pointed to the inscription on the pillar.
“It says—‘This Man, if He Survives at all, is not Dead. He is in a’ ”—Sem Onger paused and went on doubtfully—‘hanging-Life. Pull the Lever at the Side of the Glass Cage He is in People of 5000 A.D.’ ”
Their eyes swung to the glass case.
In their interest over the body, they had not noticed the complicated mechanism fitted into one side of the coffin. Strange parts were both inside and outside its confines.
At a signal from the chief, Mai Radnor stepped close and grasped the long, conspicuous handle of glass with a core of metal. It slid over in squeaky protest.
Then, a succession of things happened. All of them distinctly terrifying.
The parts moved as if by magic. But it was not magic. It was simply the application of the laws of levers, falling weights, and gravity.
The moving of the handle had pushed a weight off its support. Falling, the weight jerked up a small pivoted hammer which broke open the ends of two sealed vials holding colorless liquids. The two liquids ran together, frothed, and turned blood-red. This crimson fluid trickled along the tiny trough into a small glass tube.