Astounding Stories of Super-Science, March 1930Various
Science
Astounding Stories of Super-Science, March 1930
Various
Science fiction -- Periodicals; Science fiction, American -- Periodicals
The scene was the interior of one of the coral houses. There were
persons there, seated on stone or coral chairs, padded with marine
growths. One of the occupants of the room was a very old man; his face
was wrinkled, and his hair was silvery. With him were a man and a woman,
and a little girl. Somehow I seemed to recognize the child as the girl
in the pool.
The three of them were watching the old man. While his lips did not
move, I could see his throat muscles twitching as the girl's had done
when she made the murmuring sound I had guessed was her form of speech.
The scene faded. For perhaps thirty seconds I was aware of nothing more
than a dim gray mist that seemed to swirl in stately circles. Then,
gradually, it cleared somewhat. I sensed the fact that what I saw now
was what the old man was telling, and that the majestic, swirling mist
was the turning back of time.
Here was no ocean bottom, but land, rich tropical jungle. Strange exotic
trees and dense growths of rank undergrowth choked the earth. The trees
were oddly like undersea growths, which puzzled me for an instant. Then
I recalled that the girl could interpret the old man's words only in
terms of that which she had seen and understood. This was the way she
visualized the scene.
* * * * *
There was a gray haze of mist everywhere. The leaves were glistening
with condensed moisture; swift drops fell incessantly to the soaking
ground below.
Into the scene roamed a pitiful band of people. Men with massive frames,
sunken in with starvation, women tottering with weakness. The men
carried great clubs, some tipped with rudely shaped stone heads, and
both men and women clothed only in short kittles of skin.
They searched ceaselessly for something, and I guessed that something
was food. Now and then one or the other of the little band tore up a
root and bit at it, and those that did so soon doubled into a twitching
knot of suffering and dropped behind.
At last they came to the edge of the sea. A few yards away the water was
lost in the dense steaming miasma that hemmed them in on all sides.
With glad expressions on their faces, the party ran down to the edge of
the water and gathered up great masses of clams and crabs. At first they
ate the food raw, tearing the flesh from the shells. Then they made what
I understood was a fire, although the girl was able to visualize it only
as a bright red spot that flickered.
The scene faded, and there was only the slowly swirling mist that I
understood indicated the passing of centuries. Then the scene cleared
again.
* * * * *
I saw that same shore line, but the people had vanished. There was only
the thick, steamy mist, the tropic jungle crowding down to the shore,
and the waves rolling in monotonously from the waste of gray ocean
beyond the curtain of fog.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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