The plane was squatting in a pasture a short distance from Doc’s Laboratories, situated at the edge of the city, and a tough-looking thug carrying a rifle was standing guard over it. The plane had been guarded night and day. It was just too valuable a thing to let anyone get near it.
Doc explained the operation of the time machine to me.
‘It’s simple,’ he said. ‘Simple as falling off a log.’
And what he said was true. All you had to do was set the indicator forward the number of years you wished to travel. When you pressed the activator stud you went into the time spin, or whatever it was that happened to you, and you stayed in it until you reached the proper time. Then the mechanism acted automatically, your time speed was slowed down, and there you were. You just reversed the process to go backward.
Simple. Simple, so Doc said, as falling off a log. But I knew that behind all that simplicity was some of the most wonderful science the world had ever known – science and brains and long years of grueling work and terrible disappointment.
‘It will be like plunging into night.’ Doc told me. ‘You will be traveling in time as a single dimension. There will be no heat, no air, no gravitation, absolutely nothing outside your plane. But the plane is insulated to keep in the heat. In case you do get cold, just snap on those heaters. Air will be supplied if you need it, by the oxygen tanks. But on a short trip like five hundred years you probably won’t need either the heaters or the oxygen. Just a few minutes and you’ll be there.’
J.R. had been sore at me because I had been late. Sore, too, because Herb had one of the most beautiful hangovers I have ever laid eyes on. But he’d forgotten all about that now. He was hopping up and down in his excitement.
‘Just wait,’ he chortled. ‘Just wait until Johnson sees this down at the _Standard_. He’ll probably have a stroke. Serve him right, the stubborn old buzzard.’
The guard, standing just outside the door of the ship, was shuffling his feet. For some reason the fellow seemed nervous.
Doc croaked at him. ‘What’s the matter with you, Benson?’
The guy stammered and shifted his rifle from one hand to another. He tried to speak, but the words just dried up in his mouth. Then J.R. started some more of his gloating and we forgot about the guard.
Herb had his cameras stowed away and everything was ready. J.R. stuck out his fist and shook hands with me and Herb, and the old rascal was pretty close to tears.
Doc and J.R. got out of the ship, and I followed them to the door. Before I closed and sealed it I took one last look at the city skyline. There it shimmered, in all its glory, through the blue haze of an autumn day. Familiar towers, and to the north the smudge of smoke that hung over the industrial district.
I waved my hand at the towers and said to them: ‘So long, big boys. I’ll be seeing you five hundred years from now.’
The skyline looked different up there in the future. I had expected it to look different because in five hundred years some buildings would be torn down and new ones would go up. New architectural ideas, new construction principles over the course of five centuries will change any city skyline.
But it was different in another way than that.
I had expected to see a vaster and a greater and more perfect city down below us when we rolled out of our time spin, and it was vaster and greater, but there was something wrong.
It had a dusty and neglected look.
It had grown in those five hundred years, there was no doubt of that. It had grown in all directions, and must have been at least three times as big as the city Herb and I had just left behind.
Herb leaned forward in his seat.
‘Is that really the old burg down there?’ he asked. ‘Or is it just my hangover?’
‘It’s the same old place,’ I assured him. Then I asked him. ‘Where did you pick up that beauty you’ve got?’
‘I was out with some of the boys,’ he told me. ‘Al and Harry. We met up with some of the _Standard_ boys and had a few drinks with them later in the evening.’
There were no planes in the sky and I had expected that in 2450 the air would fairly swarm with them. They had been getting pretty thick even back in 1950. And now I saw the streets were free of traffic, too.
We cruised around for half an hour, and during that time the truth was driven home to us. A truth that was plenty hard to take.
That city below us was a dead city! There was no sign of life. Not a single automobile on the street, not a person on the sidewalks.
Herb and I looked at one another, and disbelief must have been written in letters three feet high upon our faces.
‘Herb,’ I said, ‘we gotta find out what this is all about.’
Herb’s Adam’s apple jiggled up and down his neck.
‘Hell,’ he said. ‘I was figuring on dropping into the Dutchman’s and getting me a pick-up.’
It took almost an hour to find anything that looked like an airport, but finally I found one that looked safe enough. It was overgrown with weeds, but the place where the concrete runways had been was still fairly smooth, although the concrete had been broken here and there, and grass and weeds were growing through the cracks.
I took her down as easy as I could, but even at that we hit a place where a slab of concrete had been heaved and just missed a crack-up.
The old fellow with the rifle could have stepped from the pages of a history of early pioneer days except that once in a while the pioneers probably got a haircut.
He came out of the bushes about a mile from the airport, and his rifle hung cradled in his arm. There was something about him that told me he wasn’t one to fool with.
‘Howdy, strangers,’ he said in a voice that had a whiny twang.
‘By Heaven,’ said Herb, ‘it’s Daniel Boone himself.’
‘You jay birds must be a right smart step from home,’ said the old guy, and he didn’t sound as if he’d trust us very far.
‘Not so far,’ I said. ‘We used to live here a long time ago.’
‘Danged if I recognize you.’ He pushed back his old black felt hat and scratched his head. ‘And I thought I knew everybody that ever lived around here. You wouldn’t be Jake Smith’s boys, would you?’
‘Doesn’t look like many people are living here any more,’ said Herb.
‘Matter of fact, there ain’t,’ said Daniel Boone. ‘The old woman was just telling me the other day we’d have to move so we’d be nearer neighbors. It gets mighty lonesome for her. Nearest folks is about ten miles up thataway.’
He gestured to the north, where the skyline of the city loomed like a distant mountain range, with gleaming marble ramparts and spires of mocking stone.
‘Look here,’ I asked him. ‘Do you mean to say your nearest neighbor is ten miles away?’
‘Sure,’ he told me. ‘The Smiths lived over a couple of miles to the west, but they moved out this spring. Went down to the south. Claimed the hunting was better there.’
He shook his head sadly. ‘Maybe hunting is all right. I do a lot of it. But I like to do a little farming, too, And it’s mighty hard to break new ground. I had a right handsome bunch of squashes and carrots this year. ‘Taters did well, too.’
‘But at one time a lot of people lived here.’ I insisted. ‘Thousands and thousands of people. Probably millions of them.’
‘I heard tell of that,’ agreed the old man, ‘but I can’t rightfully say there’s any truth in it. Must’ve been a long time ago. Somebody must have built all them buildings -although what for I just can’t figure out.’
The _Globe_ editorial rooms were ghostly. Dust lay everywhere, and a silence that was almost as heavy as the dust.
There had been some changes, but it was still a newspaper office. All it needed was the blur of voices, the murmur of the speeding presses to bring it to life again.
The desks still were there, and chairs ringed the copy table.
Our feet left trails across the dust that lay upon the floor and raised a cloud that set us both to sneezing.
I made a beeline for one dark corner of the room; there I knew I would find what I was looking for.