Time Travel Omnibus, page 134
“My daughter,” said Rodgers, in his voice only pride and not a trace of resentment, “my daughter Anne.”
STORRS met Anne herself at dinner.
Her dress, blue like her eyes, was a clinging silken wisp, sleeveless, and falling but a little below her hips like a Grecian tunic. Her bare feet were in soft, jewelled sandals, and there were diamonds in the silver net over her hair. “Synthetic,” she explained to him later, and the jewels were as cheap as glass, but they had all the sparkle and beauty of natural gems.
“Mr. Storrs, who has got to us somehow from the year 1933,” Rodgers introduced him to his daughter. Her handclasp was firm, like a boy’s. The old man seemed relieved at the presence of a third person, and transferred to Anne the none too easy task of finding subjects of conversation with the strange visitor. Before the meal was over, he excused himself: “Terribly sorry—have to unload a new shipment at the Museum—my daughter—home on her vacation—take care of you.”
Except at meals, and on a few necessary occasions, Ted never saw Rodgers again during his stay in Anno 2189.
“Dad’s an old dear,” Anne explained, “but he’s simply too absorbed in his Early Twenty-First Century. If you had arrived here from a hundred years later, he would have monopolized you utterly.” She laughed.
CHAPTER II
A Visitor from Venus
THEY sat across the table from each other, finishing an ice whose refreshing flavor was strange to Ted, coming apparently from some new fruit. The meal, served from the common kitchen of the building, had been full of such new vegetable compounds, completely replacing meat. As the sky turned grey through the casement windows, Anne leaned over and switched on the light: three tubes overhead, arranged in a triangle, that glowed like molten silver and gave out a pure white, soft radiance. Storrs thinks, now we bring it to his mind, that this universal source of illumination was almost wholly without heat, but he did not notice particularly, and cannot be sure. And then suddenly, as they were about to rise, a blinding purple beam flashed in the window. It was gone in an instant, but only after another did Ted’s eyes recover from the brilliance.
“I thought so,” declared Anne, springing to her feet. “The Venus Accommodation is overdue again. Let’s find out what’s the matter.” Without waiting for a reply she dashed out into the hall, snatching a cloak about her. Ted followed, a little dazed.
It was hard to keep up with her as she hurried ahead, running along the narrow bridges hung over darkness. Then an imposing gateway, where she showed a pass to gain admittance, an elevator shooting up at breakneck speed, and they came out upon a vast landing field in the midst of the city. It was blocks square, resting upon the tops of buildings. From a tower at its center flashed the great purple searchlights beams. A dozen ships hovered and wheeled above it, maneuvering for a landing, and more were rising.
Anne left Storrs in the crowd at the edge, behind a railing barring the field proper. It was his first chance to examine the interplanetary and air vessels at anything like close quarters. The latter were torpedoshaped, and except for small stabilizing and steering fins at the sides bore no trace of wings. Instead, while propellers at their noses provided forward power, lift was obtained directly from big helicopter screws along the top. The blades were larger than those of the propellers, spiralling in row upon row around their shafts. They seemed more than a little flexible, and made a flapping noise at low speed. They could float a vessel at any chosen height, and three sets of them lifted bodily into the air a ship as big as a Pullman car.
Smaller, speedier machines, with their steering fins at wide angles and their helicopters slanted forward, put up their noses and used their propellers to gain height more quickly. In the purple light, darting here and there or hovering almost motionless, they seemed to Storrs the most incredible things that he had ever seen.
When Anne returned, she had the explanation of delay. “Number Three ship again. The other two got through the squall on coming into the atmosphere but the man let it come down too abruptly and twisted a wing, which threw him off his course. He even lost the radio beam, and had to limp back to it on his batteries. And then, hoping to speed up later and hide his fault, he didn’t radio that things were all right. This makes the second time; no more interplanetary flying for him. He’ll be in any minute now.”
It was true. The searchlights had been turned horizontally to the west. Their purple beams sheared straight through the growing mountain of fog. In another instant, there became visible in the heart of the cloud the approaching flyer and the dots of its escorts. Even far in the distance it gave the impression of size, and as it hurtled toward them its apparent dimensions increased.
In an incredibly short time it was bulking overhead, large as a good-sized steamboat. Its shape was that of two torpedoes lashed together sideways, giving it a big, blunt front. Its rocket tubes were silent now as it glided in—the great wings supporting it. Almost directly above Ted, so that he had to crane his neck to see it, the ship came to a dead stop with the drag of a small braking screw in the tail. Immense, solid, five hundred feet up, it seemed about to fall and crush everything in a great cataclysm. Ted took a step backward.
INSTEAD, it seemed to descend slowly, almost imperceptibly, to the stretch of field cleared for it. Its passengers—Ted could see them easily through the windows; yellow-faced Venusians and returning Americans—were undisturbedly pulling on their coats. In their faces he could see a little annoyance, but no trace of fright, at the experience of their voyage. The ship had scarcely alighted (on row after row of big rollers, projecting but an inch or two from its bottom) when they were swarming down the companionways dropped from its side. In fifteen minutes the vessel was empty, and with a gang of overalled workmen steering it along, its brake propeller towed it backward into a shed.
And then, more to make conversation than from any of the scientific curiosity that should have been gripping him, Storrs asked the one intelligent leading question of his stay in the future: “I gathered from what you said that aside from rockets these ships have electric power. Just how do they manage it?”
Anne’s reply, made with all the sketchiness of one so familiar with her subject that she cannot appreciate her hearer’s ignorance, heard and remembered as sketchily by a casual and unscientific mind, is yet—and perhaps, a little, just because of its vagueness—one of the most fascinating parts of Ted’s story. I give it here, all he told us at first and all he has managed to remember in response to questioning, the hopelessly brief and tantalizingly suggestive outline of the foundations of a new world:
Practically all the power of 2189 was—or should I say will be—electrical, and in origin sub-atomic. Common earth, mined in quantities so small, relatively, as to give no effect of eating up the ground beneath one’s feet, was so treated that its mass was transformed almost wholly into energy, and gave up that energy in electrical form. The process was not so touch secret as so complex and delicately involved as to be incomprehensible to anyone but a small group of super-trained minds—of whom Anne frankly admitted she was not one. Power so generated was incredibly cheap. Ted did not dream of getting figures, and without knowledge of currency basis and price levels they might be worthless. But suffice it that the use of labor-saving devices was limited only by the proficiency, and not the efficiency, of their design.
Moreover, this power was supplied to all freely moving vehicles—airships, seagoing vessels, automobiles as well as interplanetary flyers—and to substations in places too small for generators, by a system of radio transmission. The method made use of an involved combination of inductance and capacity effects, of electrostatic and electromagnetic principles, to fill the ether, not with waves eternally broadcast, but with lines of force tapped only when, and for as much power as needed. A network of transmitters kept up a concentration over all civilized lands and great beams were laid along the coasts and the transportation routes over ocean or waste.
For journeys to Mars or Venus—the flyer was transmitted over a gigantically powerful beam—rockets being used as auxiliary power. But that is so distressing in that Ted gave us just about enough information to meet our curiosity without explaining how things worked.
All this Storrs had explained to him on that huge, eerily purple-lit landing stage. It does not seem to have impressed him as much as it should. It was only when they were walking home, in the cool night, over the airy bridges, and Anne, systematically bringing her discussion back to its starting point, was explaining the aircraft safety devices—higher possible speed for the motors of uninjured screws; separate power supply circuits for each helicopter and propeller; emergency storage batteries of radioactive gold which could keep the heaviest vessel running for hours—that he even realized the perhaps unusual extent of her knowledge.
“Miss Rodgers, have you studied up on these things?” he asked.
“Studied up?” she laughed. “Well, once. I work as pilot on the Polar Special to Moscow.”
As I have said, Storrs had less trouble believing his situation than would have some of the rest of us. His mind simply refused to grasp the incredibility—I had almost said the impossibility—of it all. Besides, when one has actually experienced a thing, the evidence of the senses is highly conclusive. Still even Ted, when he wakened the next morning, was much inclined to count the whole thing a dream. He lay in bed, he says, for fully fifteen minutes, burrowing under the covers to escape the sunlight, fully satisfied than when he chose to look around he would find himself in his own room.
Sport in 2189
IT was a voice that called him out of somnolence, and brought him back to the reality of his trip to the future. “Good morning, Mister 1933. Like to play some tennis?” Anne’s head peered around his half-opened door.
“Betcher life,” Ted replied, realizing as soon as he had spoken that the slang would be as antique as “ods bodikins” today.
“I don’t know what that is but here are some things. Catch.”
The “things” landed squarely in Ted’s face. They proved rather less than the equivalent of a modern track suit, and he donned them with a little hesitation, thinking that something had perhaps been omitted. At breakfast, however, Anne was wearing very much the same costume: abbreviated “shorts”, and a mannish shirt with brief sleeves and throat open in a deep V, both of silky white. Mr. Rodgers was just finishing his meal as Ted entered. Beyond a perfunctory greeting, and a good-bye kiss to his daughter as he departed for the Museum, he paid no attention to either of them.
When they arrived at the tennis court, out on one of the broad setback areas of the building, there were half a dozen other young people playing and waiting. “Mr. Ted Storrs, one of our ancestors,” Anne introduced him to them. They were greatly entertained by his account, which half of them doubtlessly believed to be humorously fictitious, of his marvelous leap to their era.
The court, a pleasant, creamy brown, was constructed of a springy composition very easy on the feet. The dimensions seemed the same as those of today—although Ted who would never think of pacing them off.
reports that the service line looked a little farther back. The rackets likewise had a normal appearance, although cast in one piece out of some sort of condensation product with a marked “whip”. Strings were opaque. The balls, while keeping the traditional white, had no covers. Their surface, instead, possessed an inherent roughness that never wore off—the result, it was explained to Ted, of the constant breaking open of bubbles in the rubber sponge—and that gave such friction as to permit the cutting of all but the hardest balls played. The rules and scoring had not been modified by two hundred and fifty years, except for the abolition of the second chance at service.
But if the external character of the game was not greatly changed, the play itself had been marvellously improved. Speed, hairbreadth accuracy of placement, service that broke like baseball pitching, all testified to centuries of scientific study. And these, as Anne confessed, were far from championship players. Yet one girl, especially—her name was Margaret, and she wore what would pass for a modern bathing suit with dark blue trunks and white top, while a ribbon of flexible copper held back her auburn hair—had a game that not only outclassed all the men present, but would even, Ted insists, make serious trouble for Tilden Or LaCoste.
Before the morning’s play was half over, seemingly bothered at its restriction, she had yanked off the shirt of her suit. Her bronzed torso, as she swung into dazzling service or drives, made Ted think of a boxer’s, though without any masculine suggestion.
A clock somewhere had just struck nine (10:48, it would be, in our time) when Anne suggested a swim. The crowd followed her to a man as she ran off along a path through potted shrubbery. Putting all his force into it, Ted was glad to find that in this exercise of pure strength he could catch up to her, could have passed her. They reached the pool together. The water was smooth and clear, with a marble rim and a strip of grass around it. It was shut off from the sun by the mass of the building. Anne raced straight for the edge. Lagging behind a little, Ted watched her as she pulled the garments from her sweat-gleaming body, stood poised white and naked. Overhead, between the spans of two bridges, a silvery airship hung glittering in the sky.
Then she had plunged into the blue-green, limpid water. The others hurried up, shouting noisily, some having thrown off half their clothes as they ran. One girl, stooping too near the edge to untie her shoes was shoved in fully dressed. Those already swimming splashed up at the others. “Come on in, the water’s fine.” That banal conjuration, Ted reflected, must have now all the connotations of quaint antiquity.
CHAPTER III
A Perilous Age
THE water was cool as Ted stripped and plunged in, the rush of it along the skin refreshing to his hot body. He swam until he was tired—the easy, almost mechanical stroke of the others carried them at racing speed without apparent drain on their energy—then stretched himself out on the grass to dry. From there, he could see that much of the new effortless speed came from a strange twisting thrash of the legs, together with a careful exactitude of arm movements that looked the result of mathematical study.
But what most engrossed Ted’s attention was the picture before him, the flashing bodies of various shades of brown—some of the women’s were a light, creamy tan in spite of all their exposure—and their greenish glimmer beneath the water; the white background of the building, with its great mass towering overhead. His fingers itched, he says, for a brush. It came over him too, a little,’ lying there, that besides the material spotlessness he had noticed in the new San Francisco, there must be a spiritual cleanness about this civilization to permit of such glorious nakedness.
That afternoon, Anne took him to see the sights. Her car, occupying an exceedingly small space in the apartment garage on a level with one of the vehicular causeways, was a snug fit for the two of them. The machine ran from radio power with a silent electric motor, and although steering was done as at present, a small panel of pushbuttons along the inside of the wheel controlled speed, transmission, and ordinary braking. Traffic in the streets and on the higher levels was fairly easy, facilitated both by the small size of the vehicles and, as Anne explained, by a housing system which so far as possible incorporated a factory, the apartment residences of its employees, and a complement of retail stores, in a single great building.
Riding mostly in the streets proper, although at times climbing long inclines to the upper causeways, they visited the great manufactories of the city; the foundries where out of common earth was extracted the aluminum used in the alloys, incredibly light and strong, that had taken almost completely the place of steel; the textile mills where automatic machinery spun its own synthetic threads and wove them into the finished product almost without human intervention, where a huge loom furnished a single canvas for an artist-workman to vary constantly the colors and patterns as they came forth; the generating plants where, looking guardedly through solid feet of filter glass, they could see matter, as it disappeared in a seething flame, giving up the energy that ran the wheels of this new civilization. They went to a number of public buildings, auditoriums, libraries, museums—Ted noticed, in passing, a 1933 airplane among the exhibitions—buildings beautiful in their long straight lines and great, light-filled spaces. It was late afternoon when they came to the Cathedral.
The marble pile, cruciform at its base, rose by scarcely perceptible set-backs in a single spire that towered almost twice as high as the other buildings. Within, its architecture was such a glorification of the girder, as had been Gothic, of that equally mechanical device of the pointed arch: an airy tracery that yet carried the suggestion of the mass it supported. The lines of the place carried the eye upward, up to the great cross-beams where people walked, dwarfed almost to nothingness before the majesty of the House of God; up to where windows that were solid jewels made of the slanting sunlight a rainbow mist; up and up to a luminous infinity that the eye could touch at but could not grasp.
For a minute, Ted stood looking at it. Then Anne drew him off to one side, in a corner of the transept where they could be undisturbed. Her voice was low, befitting the silence of the holy place, when she spoke:
“I brought you here, for the last place to show you and tell you a great truth. We could not have you stay here, or go back to your own time, thinking that our material achievements are the heart and height of our civilization. That was the world’s ideal once and by that it nearly called down its own ruin.
“IT had been a rich world, that early A twenty-first century whose garish relics Dad collects so carefully, until in its love and fear of war, its use and misuse of science, it had built up huge populations that threatened the very food supply and made food sources a cause of conflict. It was an ugly world, so full of blind toil and hectic amusement that man almost desired the relief of strife. It was a cruel world, with God and good forgotten in materialism, with exploitation and crime rampant in every land, and with the two great confederations of the East and West eyeing each other across the Pacific and the Russian border with mingled greed and hatred and fear. Then, in the year 2031, came the cataclysm.
