by Earl
He shuddered and lapsed into silence. Professor Reinhardt took up the trend of thought. “But we are not to think of it as a doom, Andrew. As Monituperal said, this civilization is but the step in a more gigantic, more incomprehensible, plan of cosmic proportions. Compare that with the philosophy of fatalism of our time: that individuals live and die merely to prolong the race to its ultimate goal which was always clothed in veils of mystery. They are similar philosophies, one grander in scope than the other. Life is but a short flicker, on and then off, all preordained, said the fatalists of our time. Civilization is but a flicker, a flash in eternity, one of many other flashes all woven into some stupendous plan, says Monituperal. It seems that all human thought in the direction of the Ultimate runs in similar channels.”
Boswell looked at his companion with a strangely troubled expression.
“All human thought in similar channels,” he repeated slowly. “But that is because we fear the mystery of death and extinction. We hold to such fatalistic doctrines because our view is darkened by the shadow of ever-present death. Isn’t it possible that our human conception is wrong—warped by circumstance, colored by delusion?”
“Why, just what do you mean, Andrew?” asked the professor.
“I hardly know myself,” replied Boswell reflectively. “But I seem to feel that there is something in human life that has been missed, swept aside. I feel that there is as much importance in individual life as there is in the continuation of the race. After all. continuation of the race is one of Nature’s inventions; even the dumb animals had that. But intellect. . . . coming from the outside. . . . why should that need constant reproduction and continuation?”
“Ah, my boy, I see your trouble.” Professor Reinhardt was earnest and not in the least contemptuous, nor was there superiority in his voice. “You are young; you have the fire of youth. Youth sees life spread before him and says, ‘Mine, all mine for the taking,’ but does not stop to think that death will eventually wrest away from it anything it may have taken from life. One drops illusion as one advances in age and experience. About all one can do is pack one’s life as full as is humanly possible before the coming of the sleep which knows no awakening in this world again.”
But Boswell had lost his trend of thought, vague and undefined that it was from the first. He had seated himself in front of the apparatus which Monituperal had mentioned and looked over it curiously. It was nothing more than a circular screen of some unknown material suspended above the floor at the height of his eyes when seated. Below it on the floor reposed a cubicle affair with no apparent connection to the screen above.
“I wonder how we go about this, professor?” queried Boswell puzzled.
“Monituperal said it would respond to our thoughts,” said the biologist, also seating himself.
“Yes, but what particular thoughts—”
A new voice interrupted Boswell. It was Monituperal’s, but Boswell felt a slight chill down his spine when he turned to all corners of an empty room.
“I should have explained it more carefully,” came the voice from nowhere in particular. “There is a button on the box which rests on the floor. Press that; then look directly into the screen and think the name of any planet or heavenly body you wish to see. In response to your thoughts, it will picture that body from any height, motionless or moving over its surface, as you please. If you have any trouble, just call my name. I am in direct connection with you.”
Recovering from shocked surprise, Boswell bent over to press the button. Then he motioned to the elder man to continue with the novel entertainment.
Professor Reinhardt fastened his gaze on the screen which now glowed faintly and gave them the dizzying impression of looking into a hole in a bottomless void. Immediately the room shrouded into absolute darkness and the screen leaped to life. In a panorama of bright stars swam a glowing ball of faint green. It was much drabber and more shadowed than the ancient moon of long ago had appeared from Earth, but of about that size. The picture wavered and faded, then flicked out suddenly.
“Took my breath away,” gasped Professor Reinhardt in explanation, blinking his eyes in the suddenly lighted room again. “But I think I can carry it through if I try again.”
Darkness dropped around them again, and on the screen appeared the same scene. For a moment it wavered, interposed with the gray shapes of other bodies that whirled by with startling suddenness, then cleared to crystalline sharpness, like the focusing of binoculars.
“Got it now,” came in low tones from the professor. On the screen the darkly shining planet began to grow at an amazing rate. Larger and larger it became till it filled the screen and they could see the details of its surface. As if they were in a space-ship, the image swung flat so that they seemed to be paralleling the surface. The scene rolled underneath them evenly for a time, then abruptly stopped. In another moment it swung ponderously sideward, shifted in the opposite direction, increased to blurring speed, and then slowed to an easy pace.
l Boswell heard the professor chuckle in satisfaction and realized that he had been experimenting to get himself familiarized with a magical control of the images. As the scenery rolled downwards leisurely, Boswell involuntarily shivered at the picture of lifeless frigidity. An endless desert of dimly lighted barren reaches, tufted here and there with a whiteness that might be snow, shocked his eyes in drab monotony. A low range of smooth hills dipped into the scene, bare and sending dense black shadows in one direction. Beyond these a monstrous gash in the ground came to view, raw and painful looking as if a titanic sword had slashed from the heavens. Past this shuddery sight the ground sloped gently into a huge depression whose surfaces were gashed with many of the cracks, some large and sharp-edged, some small and smooth-walled. Then more hills loomed into the screen, predominating the landscape for a long stretch. These were replaced again by flat deserts whose sands glinted like broken glass in the dim light that suffused the place. Nowhere were there rivers, lakes, or oceans, nor was there vegetation of any sort. Not a vestige of anything resembling human habitation appeared in that endless expanse of deserts and low hills and mutilated plateau lands.
Boswell had a sudden forewarning. “Is that. . . . can it possibly be. . . . Earth?”
“Yes, Andrew,” assented the professor. “That is the same earth we lived on two billion years ago when it was a young world of immense oceans, growing trees, flowering plants, wild animals, and warring humans. Now it is a gray waste of undisturbed desert and bleak steppes, practically airless and waterless. The mountains we knew, tall and majestic, are leveled to low hills; the forest lands are barren; and all that remains of the oceans are the depressions that were once their muddy beds. Of civilization there is not a sign . . .
They watched the image with an intense fascination only natural to persons who once knew the place as a world of sunshine and life. The feeble rays of the dying sun fell more like the ancient moonlight they knew on the scene, although it was broad daylight in that region.
“Nothing is the same,” remarked the professor softly. “The continents of our time changed their shapes long before the waters evaporated into space. The rivers must have changed their courses, shifting centers of population, and lakes must have dried up and appeared in new places as the ground rose and sank, as the surfaces of a world constantly do throughout the ages. Perhaps the North American Continent settled to become a new ocean-bed as the ages passed, and new lands arose in what we called the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. How many times the world changed its face after we left and before the sun died to a coal we will never know, Andrew. How many times civilization moved or was partially destroyed is also a question never to be answered. Even Monituperal, with all he may know of the dim past, cannot know that. And the cities we can remember—great New York. Chicago, Boston, Berlin, London, San Francisco, Paris—have long since been scattered as the molecules of which they were composed, into the air, ground, and space.”
In sickening monotony, the bleakness
of a dead world rolled across their vision. The deserts were as flat and smooth as a sheet of iron, the hills as uniform and rounded as artificial molehills. And the deep, painful looking gashes which were present almost everywhere seemed like the death wounds of Mother Earth, from which her life’s blood had long ceased to flow.
“It doesn’t seem like earth at all,” whispered Boswell sadly. “It is more like my conception of what Pluto or a transplutonian planet would resemble. Time has been a plunderer. It has killed a world. . . . and soon it will end the activity of a splendid civilization. I just wonder if that was meant to be. . . . if Life is meant to end in Death. . . .”
But Boswell had allowed his voice to trail so low that his companion did not hear the last sentence. The professor had switched the position of the image so that they seemed to be high above the earth. The entire daylight hemisphere appeared in the screen.
“Those deep rents and gullies, Andrew,” said the biologist, “are the signs of Earth’s death-throes, before she gave up the ghost entirely to become a cosmic corpse. It looks as if there must have been a titanic upheaval, probably comparatively recently. I presume civilization by that time had moved elsewhere or it would have been destroyed utterly. Now let’s take a glimpse at the moon.”
Even as he spoke, the image of dark Earth was replaced instantaneously by a smaller, somewhat brighter object that approached them like a huge bomb. As it loomed large in the screen, Boswell exclaimed with pleasure.
“Well at least the moon is still recognizable. There are the craters, mountains, and radiating pole-lines that have always been there. Only its surface too is badly cracked and jumbled up in places.”
“Yes, it’s much the same moon of old,” agreed the professor. “Most of its topographical alteration took place long before man appeared on earth. It has merely given a few last heaves and shudders since then. But there is no one to mourn the moon as we mourn the earth. I doubt that it ever harbored rational life. Its sole purpose, it seems, was to light the night skies of man on earth, and to fill his mind with some of the vague beauties of emotional life. Much that was man’s spiritual life was influenced by the sight of that orb in the sky as it used to be; a bright, majestically moving globe, shedding its soft silvery rays on rippling water, on verdant foliage, or through leafy trees. But distance lends enchantment; from close up it is an ugly scene of sharp-shadowed, ragged detail. No doubt in the ages following the twentieth century, the moon was visited quite often once space-vehicles had been made. But man has left no trace, no sign. . . . if there were any, time has wiped them out.”
As the professor finished speaking, the moon vanished to be replaced immediately by a heavenly body that shone perceptibly brighter than earth had. The image neared rapidly, then swung flat and slowly rolled across their vision.
“Venus,” breathed the professor.
l Although a succession of deserts and low hills greeted them in endless profusion, yet there was something characteristically different about it than the same scene on earth. There was noticeably more of the hilly regions, and the depressions that marked the beds of former oceans were far deeper. The desert lands were less deserts than steppes that had long ceased to bear life for lack of water. But on the other hand, the gashes and cracks in the dried ground were innumerable and stupendously large, sometimes half filled with the remains of a gigantic range of fallen and undermined mountains.
“Venus seems to have passed through a particularly cataclysmic anguish of death,” remarked the biologist, “more so even than earth; due, I presume, to the greater quantity of water on this planet. Most of these topographical upheavals are caused by the unnoticed union of water and the molten inner parts of the planets. The expansive force of steam as we used it in our steam-engines, multiplied a million-fold, caused much of that before our eyes. Then notice that there is still considerable water left here on Venus; in some places there is actually a blanket of light snow. But it has lost its air just as completely as Earth; you can see that by the denseness of the shadows of the hills and their sharp outlines.”
For a while they watched in silence. Then Boswell clicked his teeth.
“Wait a minute, professor. Make it turn back slowly. I thought I saw something . . .
The image obediently swung backwards and finally stopped as Boswell exclaimed, “There it is. See it, professor?”
The ground leaped toward them and they found themselves poised a few hundred feet above a colossal stone figure of a man with arms upflung and a perfect expression of mental agony on his face. In form and physique he was a prototype of Monituperal except that his arms and legs were more muscular. In one hand, resting on the palm, was a delicately carved globe that puzzled them till in a flash Boswell recognized it as Earth. The other hand held a much larger globe that glowed dully in the gloom around the figure. Around the feet of the colossus reared a mixture of richly detailed architecture of a type that was foreign to their eyes.
“A monument to civilization that must once have thrived here on Venus,” voiced the professor in awed tones. “Probably the pre-Mercurian era.”
For long moments they gazed at the figure that stood out clearly against the drab surroundings, their hearts throbbing sympathetically each time they looked at the mute despair and agonized sorrow shown in its face. It told only too clearly of the last farewell to a world that had sheltered civilization for countless ages.
“Let us see Mars,” said the professor softly after a time.
The size of a ruddy orange, Mars replaced the scene of lifeless Venus. It proved to be even more desolate and lonely than Earth in appearance. Never possessed of large bodies of water, it had passed into lifelessness much more quietly than the other two planets. It presented to their eyes an exasperating monotony of smooth desert and rolling plateau, marred only here and there by the scars of surface splitting. Far more numerous were broad lines of a brilliant white stone set flush with the ground.
“There are the so-called ‘canals’ of Mars, Andrew,” commented the biologist. “Maybe they were meant to be canals, or rather pipes; or they may have been constructed for some other purpose of which we can conceive nothing.”
“There is something odd about them. . . . I mean about their being here,” said Boswell thoughtfully. “Monituperal called earth the ‘cradle of civilization. ’ Yet even in our day we saw these ‘canals’ through our telescopes. Who, then, built them?”
“That is a question we must set aside until Monituperal tells us the Story of Mankind,” remarked Professor Reinhardt. “As there doesn’t seem to be anything of particular interest on Mars, I suggest a little excursion out to the major planets.”
“Good!” exclaimed Boswell enthusiastically. “Just the very thought of those distant and little-known planets and their numerous moons has always thrilled me. I often longed to visit them back in our other life, with a wistful and hopeless longing. But now . . .”
Already a new image had replaced Mars. It was Jupiter, but a Jupiter that was as different from the old one as earth had been from its old self. It no longer had a blanket of thick mists, nor the great red eye, nor the belts and bands that had marked it so unmistakably in earthly telescopes. It, too, was cold, surrounded by intense gloom which was only lessened by the diffusion of starlight in the scant atmosphere that it had managed to retain through the ages. But no living thing, neither plant nor animal, survived on its frozen surface. It was a dead world—the Titan of the dead worlds of the dying solar system.
They took a glance at each of its nine moons, out of curiosity, and were surprised to find several isolated ruins on the larger ones. They were mainly the collapsed walls, sometimes metal, sometimes stone, of apparently large structures.
“I think I can explain that,” said the professor. “The reason ruins survived here when they disappeared on Earth and Venus and Mars is because they were never subjected to the wear and tear of the elements. These little moons, like our moon, never had a telling atmosphere so that structur
es would be free of the agelong winds and rains that battered similar buildings on the inhabited planets to dust.”
Saturn offered the biggest surprise, however. His magnificent rings of a bygone age were no longer there. Only a few scattered rocks and tiny planetoids circled him in the plane that used to carry the millions of ring particles. Farther out, his ten moons still plied their endless courses, dead and bearing ruins like those of Jupiter. Uranus, Neptune, Pluto, and three trans-plutonian planets were terribly dark and dreary so that the two explorers took but a hasty glance at them.
Then Professor Reinhardt switched the picture from the last planet to Earth in the wink of an eye, a distance that would take days to travel at the speed of light. The image of Earth seemed to melt right into the screen and then the scene swung in an arc to reveal the starry sky.
“We are now ‘standing,’ so to speak, on Earth in its perpetual night hemisphere in a northern latitude, Andrew,” said the professor as the sky locked into place. “The sky we used to know. . . . is. . . . no. . . . longer.”
True it was. Not a star could they recognize, so astoundingly mixed up were they. The Big Dipper, well-known constellation of other days, was lost forever. All the other constellations were also absent; the stars had completely rearranged themselves.
“This is the first thing that has really brought home the fact that we are actually two billion years removed in time from our former life on Earth,” said Boswell timidly. “When stars leave their places. . . .”
He stopped with a catch in his voice. Measured by that cosmic time-piece, a blinding realization of what a long time had passed since they had left their friends staggered his mind. Professor Reinhardt was also numbed by the thought and hastily switched the scene away from Earth.
Into their vision leisurely floated the sun. Again they looked silently upon its image: a gigantic, barely glowing cinder in the blackness of the void. Only in spots was it anywhere resembling in brightness the sun of yore, seething spots that yet defiantly poured out radiant energy, the last dying gasp of a succumbing sun. The rest of its surface, already a crust of solid matter, radiated a mere dull-red glow. Around the whole globe hung a thick veil of mists and swirling gases.
