Page:Amazing Stories Volume 16 Number 06.djvu/98

98 "I computed my formulae meticulously. My tabulations were adjusted into intricate equations by advanced calculus. I consulted the stars, in much the way the early Egyptians first solved mathematical problems. I persuaded my father to check and re-check my computations.

"So many common situations tend to back up our theory. Take a movie—"

I glanced at my watch, and whistled.

"I'm going to take a powder if you don't get down to cases," I broke in. "I can't sit here all evening. Susie Ann is jealous already of the boss' secretary. She'll—"

"All right," he snapped. He pulled out a little leather case from his pocket, opened it. It was disappointing. Only two bottles of amber liquid, and a hypo.

"This is it," he said, with a twisted smile. "I call it the Future Elixir, because it seems related to the old Elixirs of the Middle Ages."

"Why two bottles?"

"One is for transporting myself into the future; the other is for getting back again." He evidently had expected me to figure that out myself.

"How was it one hundred years in the future?" I asked, with a slight sneer. "You did get there?"

"No," he replied, surprisingly. "I tried, but didn't get that far. After walking up and down the beach half the night in a murky fog, thinking and thinking, I finally decided to take the Elixir. It was dawn when I pushed the needle in my arm

IRST it seemed as though nothing at all had happened. Everything looked exactly the same as ever. The sky, the sea, the fog. Even my shack looked the same. But when I opened the door and walked in, I saw a fine layer of dust over everything, and I knew that something had occurred.

"I didn't have a car there, so I flagged down a bus into Los Angeles.

"A bushy-bearded man across from me was reading a newspaper. I peered at the head-lines—black two-inch scare-heads. 'WEINSTOCK GIVES THE WORLD TWO DAYS!', and underneath, in smaller print, 'SPACE TERROR LESS THAN MILLION MILES FROM EARTH. SCIENTISTS AND MULTITUDE FRANTIC!'

"I snatched the paper from him, right out of his hands. He muttered curses, eyeing me malevolently.

"I looked at the date first. 'April 12, 1943!' I shouted.

Paper-snatcher!' shrieked the hirsute man. 'You expect today's paper! That is yesterday's. But what does it matter; we'll all be dead tomorrow!'

"He smote his forehead with knotty fists. Then he tried to take the paper back, but I clung to it grimly, scanning the front-page news avidly.

"It was all about the 'terror.' I could quote it to you word for word. It reviewed that seven weeks previous, the observatory astronomers had detected a metallic object hurtling through space, right in the direction of Earth!

"Earth's scientists went into a huddle, with father at the head. His new theories had raised him up to the position of top scientific genius of this day.

"Their careful calculations proved that within exactly six weeks, six days, nineteen hours and forty-nine minutes this menace out of space would strike the earth. Not squarely, but with enough accumulated force to smash it into infinitesimal meteoroids!

"Most amazing of all, certain peculiarities of the terror out of space indicated beyond doubt that it was not any ordinary space-body. In fact, that it was artificially propelled by alien intelligences. The 'terror' was a gargantuan space-ship!