Science fiction; Short stories; Time travel -- Fiction
Redskins! Boston tealeggers! Jeep men! Time
traveler Devin Orth clutched his temples,
battling insanity. Some "genius" had waved
a wand over Terran history and produced a--
Scrambled World
By BASIL WELLS
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Planet Stories Spring 1947.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
The sun was dying. About its sullen shadow-streaked red globe thousands
of miniature artificial worlds clustered like a swarm of night-chilled
midges. So thickly did they hug the great globe of dulling flame that
it seemed Sol had acquired an outer husk of interlocked asteroids and
moonlets.
Of all the planets and their satellites only Earth remained--a shrunken
and changed planet. And Earth too had shifted its orbit until it now
swung but a few million miles from its molten primary.
In the huge ovoid of metal that was the _Time Bubble_ the three men
making up its crew had by now grown accustomed to the changes that
three million years had brought to the solar system. They had expected
great changes--and found them. This was to be their first stop in their
time quest for an efficient shield against the deadly radiations of
atomic disintegration's side effects.
Devin Orth, the lean, dark-haired young scientist sharing the
control blister with his employer and friend, Norris Horn, studied
the expanding green wilderness of what had once been northern Ohio.
He turned to the big bald man in whose brain the plans for the time
spanner had been born.
"The continents are there," he said unbelieving, "almost exactly as we
left them. And yet Earth is smaller. Its diameter has dwindled more
than a thousand miles!"
Horn's broad thick body quivered as he loosed a volcanic chuckle.
"I know," he said. "And the oceans, big though they are, are probably
very shallow. A thousand feet at the most. Water will be growing
precious."
"But," puzzled Orth, "why are there no cities and why have the
continents changed so little? Surely three million years...."
"I'd say the inhabitants of those small globes near the sun," suggested
Horn, "are descendants of Earthmen. They have used their superb command
of science to make of Earth a beautiful park or preserve as it was in
our own primitive age.
"Surely, if they have such knowledge, they can give us the secret
of atomic control that will overcome the sterility threatening
mankind. We cannot return now to the limited culture afforded by
the lesser power-sources of coal or gas without great damage to
civilization--perhaps its utter downfall."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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