We clambered to our feet. "There," he pointed to the box I had nearly sat upon, "there lies the key to the ages." And he took up a crowbar and jimmied the top off the crate.
I lifted out carefully the most miscellaneous collection of junk ever seen outside a museum of modern art. "What, for example," I asked, gingerly dangling a canvas affair at arms' length, "does this thing do?"
"One wears it as a belt," he said. I put the thing on and found that it resolved itself into a normal Sam Browne belt with all sorts of oddments of things dangling from it. "Now," he said, "I have but to plug this into a wall socket, and then, providing you get on the time wheel, out you go like a light — pouf!"
"Don't be silly," I said. "I'm practically out now in the first place, in the second place I don't care whether I go out pouf or splash – though the latter is more customary – and in the third place I don't believe your silly old machine works anyway. I dare you to make me go pouf – I just dare you!"
"All right," he said mildly. "Over there is the time wheel. Get on it."
The time wheel reminded me of a small hand-turned merry-go-round. I got on it with a good will, and he made it turn. Then he plugged in the lead to a wall socket, and I went out like a light – pouf!
There are few things more sobering than time-travel. On going pouf I closed my eyes, as was natural. Possibly I screamed a little, too. All I know is when I opened my eyes they were bleary and aching, and certainly nowhere very near the old house past the dog-pound on Court Street. The locale appeared to be something like Rockefeller Center, only without fountains.
I was standing on polished stones – beautifully polished stones which seemed to set the keynote of the surroundings. Everything was beautiful and everything was polished. Before me was a tall, tall building. It was a dark night, and there seemed to be a great lack of illumination in this World of Tomorrow.
I followed my nose into the building. The revolving door revolved without much complaint, and did me the favor of turning on the lights of the lobby.
There were no people there; there were no people anywhere in sight. I tried to shout, and the ghastly echo from the still darkened sections made me tremble to my boots. I didn't try again, but very mousily looked about for an elevator or something. The something turned out to be a button in a vast column, labeled in plain English, "Slavies' ring."
I rang, assuring myself that doing so was no confession of inferiority, but merely the seizing of an offered opportunity.
All the lobby lights went out, then, but the column was glowing like mother-of-pearl before a candle. A sort of door opened, and I walked through. "Why not?" I asked myself grimly.
I seemed to be standing on a revolving staircase – but one that actually revolved! It carried me up like a gigantic corkscrew at a speed that was difficult to determine. It stopped after a few minutes, and another door opened. I stepped through and said "Thank you" nicely to the goblins of the staircase, and shuddered again as the door slammed murderously fast and hard.
Lights go again at my landing place – I was getting a bit more familiar with this ridiculous civilization. Was everybody away at Bermuda for the summer? I wondered. Then I chattered my teeth.
Corpses! Hundreds of them! I had had the bad taste, I decided, to land in the necropolis of the World of Tomorrow.
On slabs of stone they lay in double rows, great lines of them stretching into the distance of the huge chamber into which I had blundered. Morbid curiosity moved me closer to the nearest stiff. I had taken a course in embalming to get my C.E., and I pondered on the advances of that art.
Something hideously like a bed-lamp clicked on as I bent over the mummified creature. Go above! With a rustling like the pages of an ancient book it moved – flung its arm over its eyes!
I'm afraid I may have screamed. But almost immediately I realized that the terror had been of my own postulation. Corpses do not move. This thing had moved – therefore it was not a corpse, and I had better get hold of myself unless I was determined to go batty.
It was revolting but necessary that I examine the thing. From its fingers thin, fine silver wires led into holes in the slab. I rolled it over, not heeding its terrible groans, and saw that a larger strand penetrated the neck, apparently in contact with its medulla oblongata. Presumably it was sick – this was a hospital. I rambled about cheerfully, scanning cryptic dials on the walls, wondering what would happen next, if anything.
There was a chair facing the wall; I turned it around and sat down.
"Greetings, unknown friend," said an effeminate voice.
"Greetings right back at you," said I.
"You have seated yourself in a chair; please be advised that you have set into motion a sound track that may be of interest to you."
The voice came from a panel in the wall that had lit up with opalescent effects.
"My name," said the panel, "is unimportant. You will probably wish to know first, assuming that this record is ever played, that there are duplicates artfully scattered throughout this city, so that whoever visits us will hear our story."
"Clever, aren't you?" I said sourly. "Suppose you stop fussing around and tell me what's going on around here."
"I am speaking," said the panel, "from the Fifth Century of Bickerstaff."
"Whatever that means," I said.
"Or, by primitive reckoning, 2700 A.D."
"Thanks."
To explain, we must begin at the beginning. You may know that Bickerstaff was a poor Scottish engineer who went and discovered atomic power. I shall pass over his early struggles for recognition, merely stating that the process he invented was economical and efficient beyond anything similar in history.
"With the genius of Bickerstaff as a prod, humanity blossomed forth into its fullest greatness. Poetry and music, architecture and sculpture, letters and graphics became the principal occupations of mankind."
The panel coughed. "I myself," it said, modestly struggling with pride, "was a composer of no little renown in this city.
"However, there was one thing wrong with the Bickerstaff Power Process. That is, as Bickerstaff was to mankind, so the element yttrium was to his process. It was what is known as a catalyst, a substance introduced into a reaction for the purpose of increasing the speed of the reaction."
I, a Chemical Engineer, listening to that elementary rot! I didn't walk away. Perhaps he was going to say something of importance.
"In normal reactions the catalyst is not changed either in quantity or in quality, since it takes no real part in the process. However, the Bickerstaff process subjected all matter involved to extraordinary heat, pressure, and bombardment, and so the supply of yttrium has steadily vanished.
"Possibly we should have earlier heeded the warnings of nature. It may be the fault of no one but ourselves that we have allowed our race to become soft and degenerate in the long era of plenty. Power, light, heat – for the asking. And then we faced twin terrors: shortage of yttrium – and the Martians."
Abruptly I sat straight. Martians! I didn't see any of them around.
"Our planetary neighbors," said the panel, "are hardly agreeable. It came as a distinct shock to us when their ships landed this year – my year, that is – as the bearers of a message.
"Flatly we were ordered: Get out or be crushed. We could have resisted, we could have built war-machines, but what was to power them? Our brain-men did what they could, but it was little enough.
"They warned us, did the Martians. They said that we were worthless, absolutely useless, and they deserved the planet more than we. They had been watching our planet for many years, they said, and we were unfit to own it.