Page:Avon Fantasy Reader 10.djvu/126

 "I'll be over at once," I fairly shouted, and slammed the receiver down upon its hook. As I scrambled into my clothes, I glanced at the clock. Two fifteen. In half an hour I could reach the laboratory. What would I find waiting for me?

Mortimer was in the lead room with Williams when I arrived.

"Claybridge," he said, "l need someone else's opinion in this case. Look at him, and tell me what you think."

Williams still occupied the chair in the middle of the room. His eyes were wide open, but it was plain that he saw neither Mortimer nor me. Even when I bent over him and touched him, he gave no sign of being conscious of my presence.

"He looks as if he were suffering from some sort of catalepsy," I said, "yet his temperature and pulse are almost normal. I should say that he is still partially in a state of hypnosis."

"Then it is self-hypnosis," said Mortimer, "for I have entirely withdrawn my influence."

"Perhaps," I suggested lightly, "you have transported him irretrievably into the future."

"That," Mortimer replied, "is precisely what I fear has happened."

I stared a him dumbly.

"The only way out," he went on, "is to rehypnotize him, and finish the experiment. At its conclusion, he may return to his natural state."

I could not help thinking that there were certain things which it was forbidden man to know; and that Mortimer, having wantonly blundered into them, was now being made to pay the penalty. I watched him as he worked over poor Williams, straining all his energies to induce a state of hypnotic sleep. At last the glassy eyes before him closed, and his subject slept. With hands that trembled visibly, he adjusted the earphones, and we went back to the laboratory.

"Williams," Mortimer called into his transmitter, "do you hear me?"

"I hear you," replied the odiously familiar voice.

"You are now living in the fourth day. What do you see?"

"I see reptiles; great lizards that walk upon their hind legs, and birds with tiny heads and bats' wings, that build nests in the ruins of the deserted cities.

"Dinosaurs and pterodactyls!" I gasped involuntarily. "A second age of reptiles!"

"The Polar caps have retreated until there is but a small area of ice about each of the poles," continued the voice. "There are no longer any seasons; only a continuous reign of heat. The torrid zone has become uninhabitable even by the reptiles. The sea there boils. Great monsters writhe in their death agonies upon its surface. Even the northern waters are becoming heated.

"All the land is covered with rank vegetation upon which the reptiles feed. The air is fetid with it."