Page:Weird Tales volume 36 number 02.djvu/66

 Carruthers wiped his forehead. It was entirely possible that he was wrong. After all, he wasn't infallible. He tried to remember errors in calculations he had made in the past. But they were surprisingly few and were errors of haste rather than method. And there was no consolation in them.

Tiredness was upon him. He allowed his body to slump forward until his damp forehead rested in the crook of his arm. But he couldn't thrust the horror of the future from his mind. And while he tried to forget momentarily what he, alone in all the world knew, time kept ticking off its inexorable seconds and minutes. There was no stopping its remorseless march onward.

The year of time was 2007 as reckoned by the earth's new calendar, and was still the same world with its familiar continents and oceans as recorded by the historians of the twentieth century.

There had been wars, pestilence, famines and destruction undreamed of in the red decades following the rise of the dictator nations. Empires had spread their tentacles over most of the earth's surface—enslaving humans with their mephitic, bestial ideologies.

Then the people, as if inspired and guided by some soul-inspiring force outside their enslaved bodies, had risen in rebellion all over the world, thrown off their shackles, and annihilated their masters.

Scientifically and mechanically, the world had never stood still. There seemed to be no end to the inventive genius of mankind. But man, himself, had not changed—only the structures that housed him, and the mechanical marvels that surrounded him. He was still subject to greed, poverty and fear of the unknown.

In the world's largest city, New York, the month of Venus brought intolerable heat that drove people deep underground to ventilated caverns constructed when Venus had been known as the month of July. Those who were not in the caverns, or not working at daily tasks, were garnered before the Continental Television News panels where they watched rather than heard world news. Aside from the seasonal heat, there was nothing to mar the serenity of their daily lives.

Around them, as they stood watching the news flash across the panel from all parts of the globe, towered massive buildings. The tallest of these was the one where Aaron Carruthers' connecting laboratories covered the top floor of a hundred-story structure.

Looking from the quartz glass windows of these laboratories, one could see the steel control towers of New York's majestic transportation system—the four-speed sidewalk bands that extended north, south, east and west.

Subway and elevated trains no longer existed. Taxis and privately owned vehicles had been banished to the great open spaces known as the outlands.

This efficient transportation system, of escalator type, was high above the city streets, and extended north to Peekskill and west across the Hudson River into a teeming industrial center that had once been known as New Jersey.

The first band from the station platform moved quite slowly. The second, somewhat faster. By stepping from the slower to the faster-moving bands, passengers could easily control the speed they wished to travel.

There was little or no noise in this sprawling metropolitan area except the droning reverberations of turbines deep underground—turbines which supplied light, power and heat to all businesses, all families, rich and poor alike.

Even to this lonely, serious-faced young scientist there came moments of reflection when he marveled at the changes that had taken place during his own lifetime. But