It didn’t seem right that a body of matter ninety-three million miles away could rule the lives of mankind – but, after all, all life depended on the Sun. Whiff out the Sun and there wouldn’t be any life. Those old savages who had worshiped the Sun had the right idea.
Say, then, that sunspots had gone out of style. What would happen? Exactly what those files back at the _Globe_ office had shown. Depression, ever deepening. Business failures, more and more men out of work, taxes piling higher and higher as a panicky government fought to hold off the day of reckoning.
I heard Herb making some strangling sounds and swung around again. I was getting annoyed with Herb.
But the look on Herb’s face halted the words that were bubbling on my lips. His face was stark. It was white as a sheet and his eyes were frozen wide.
He shoved the paper at me, babbling, a shaking finger pointing at a small item,
I grabbed the sheet and squinted to make out the faded type. Then I read, slowly, but with growing horror:
LANGER DIES
‘James Langer, convicted in 1951 of tampering with the time machine in which Mike Hamilton and Herb Harding, _Globe_ newsmen, set out on a flight into the future the preceding year, died in Rocky Point prison today at the age of sixty-five.
‘Langer, at his trial, confessed he had bribed the guard placed in charge of the machine, to allow him to enter the plane in which it was installed. There, he testified, he removed that portion of the mechanism which made it possible for the machine to move backward in time.
‘Langer, at that time, was an employee of the _Standard_, which went out of business a few years later.
‘National indignation aroused by the incident resulted in the passage by Congress of a law prohibiting further building or experimentation with time machines. Heartbroken, Dr. Ambrose Ackerman, inventor of the machine, died two weeks after the trial.’
I sat numb for a few minutes, my hand tightening in a terrible grip upon the paper, grinding its yellowed pages into flaking shreds.
Then I looked at Herb, and as I looked into his fear-stricken face I remembered something.
‘So.’ I said, and I was so mad that I almost choked.
‘So, you just had a few drinks with the boys that night before we left. You just met up with some _Standard_ boys and had a few.’
I remembered the way Jimmy Langer had laughed in my face as I was leaving the Dutchman’s. I remembered how nervous the guard had been that morning.
‘You didn’t spill your guts, did you?’ I rasped.
‘Look, Mike-‘ said Herb, getting up off the ground.
‘You got drunk, damn you,’ I yelled at him, ‘and your brains ran right out of your mouth. You told that _Standard_ crowd everything you knew. And Old Man Johnson sent Langer out to do the dirty work.’
I was mad, mad clear down to the soles of my boots.
‘Damn you, Mike-‘ said Herb, and right then I let him have it. I gave him a poke that shook him clear down to the ground, but he came right back at me. Maybe he was mad, too.
He clipped me alongside the jaw and I plastered him over the eye, and after that we went at it hammer and tongs.
Herb wasn’t any slouch with his dukes, and he kept me pretty busy. I gave him everything I had, but he always came back for more, and he pasted me a few that set my head to ringing.
But I didn’t mind – all I wanted was to give Herb a licking he’d remember right down to the day he breathed his last.
When we quit it was just because neither one of us could fight another lick. We lay there on the ground, gasping and glaring at one another. One of Herb’s eyes was closed, and I knew I had lost a couple of teeth and my face felt like it bad been run through a meat grinder.
Then Herb grinned at me.
‘If I could have stayed on my feet a bit longer,’ he gasped, ‘I’d have murdered you.’
And I grinned back at him.
Probably we should have stayed back in 2450. We had a chance back there. Old Daniel Boone didn’t know too much, but at least he was civilized in a good many ways. And no doubt there still were books, and we might have been able to find other useful things.
We might have made a stab at rebuilding civilization, although the cards would have been stacked against us. For there’s something funny about that sunspot business. When the sunspots stopped rearing around out on the Sun, something seemed to have run out of men – the old double-fisted, hell-for-leather spirit that had taken them up through the ages.
But we figured that men would make a come-back. We were pretty sure that somewhere up in the future we’d find a race that had started to climb back.
So we went ahead in time. Even if we couldn’t go back, we could still go ahead..
We went five hundred years and found nothing. No trace of Daniel Boone’s descendants. Maybe they’d given up raising squashes and had moved out where the hunting was better. The city still stood, although some of the stones had crumbled and some of the buildings were falling to pieces.
We traveled another five hundred years, and this time a horde of howling savages, men little more advanced than the tribes which roamed over Europe in the old Stone Age., charged out of the ruins at us, screaming and waving clubs and spears.
We just beat them to the plane.
In two thousand years the tribe had disappeared, and in its place we saw skulking figures that slunk among the mounds that once had been a city. Things that looked like men.
And after that we found nothing at all. Nothing, that is, except a skeleton that looked like it might once have been a human being.
Here at last we stop. There’s no use of going farther, and the gas in the tank of our plane is running low.
The city is a heap of earthy mounds, bearing stunted trees. Queer animals shuffle and slink over and among the mounds. Herb says they are mutations – he read about mutations somewhere in a book.
To the west stretch great veldts of waving grass, and across the river the hills are forested with mighty trees.
But Man is gone. He rose, and for a little while he walked the Earth, But now he’s swept away.
Back in 1950, Man thought he was the whole works. But he wasn’t so hot, after all. The sunspots took him to the cleaners. Maybe it was the sunspots in the first place that enabled him to rise up on his hind legs and rule the roost. Billy said that sunspots could do some funny things.
But that doesn’t matter now. Man is just another has-been.
There’s not much left for us to do. Just to sit and think about J.R. rubbing his hands together. And Billy Larson wiggling his ears. And the way Jimmy Langer laughed that night outside the Dutchman’s place.
Right now I’d sell my soul to walk into the Dutchman’s place and say to Louie: ‘It’s a hell of a world, Louie.’
And hear Louie answer back: ‘It sure as hell is, Mike.’