The Certainty of a Future Life in Mars: Being the Posthumous Papers of Bradford Torrey DoddGratacap, L. P. (Louis Pope)
Science
The Certainty of a Future Life in Mars: Being the Posthumous Papers of Bradford Torrey Dodd
Gratacap, L. P. (Louis Pope)
Mars (Planet) -- Fiction; Science fiction
The next message came a few days after my interview with Miss Dodan. It
was a rainy day in November--the spring time of that Southern land. The
register was heard by one of my assistants, Jack Jobson, a man who had
unremittingly taken my place when I was absent, and who seemed more than
anyone else dazed and wonder stricken over the experience we had. He
came running to me, a wild terror in his face, exclaiming, "It's going
again, sir. Hurry! It's running slow." I sprang upstairs, and before I
had reached it heard the telltale clicks. It was not altogether a
sheltered position, and as I reached the table I felt the bleak and
chilly air penetrating the crevices of the window, a raw ocean breeze
that in a few instants crept through my bones. But I was again
unconscious of everything; that marvellous ticking obliterated all
thought of earth, its affairs, accidents, dangers, loves, hopes,
despairs, all forgotten, swallowed up in the immeasurable revelation I
was about to receive.
The second message began at about 4 o'clock in the afternoon of November
25, 1893, two months exactly after the first. Its very opening sentences
I failed to get. It lasted late into the morning of the next day. The
strain of taking it was somehow singularly intense upon me. I was taken
from the table the next morning unconscious. I had fainted at the close.
It began, as I received it, a few opening sentences having been lost:
"...was sent to you I was in the City of Light, and now I am in the City
of Scandor.
"The morning of that wonderful night in which I became a flesh and blood
Martian, strong and young and beautiful, dawned fair. My friend came for
me, and we went together to the great 'Commons' of the Patenta, a superb
hall where all the professors, investigators, and students in the great
Academy sit at many tables. This huge dining room is at the center of
the group of buildings which make up the Patenta. Corridors lead into it
from the four sections of the Patenta, and as we entered, from the
different sides there were many men and some women taking the ivory
chairs at the side's of the long tables of marble, on which rose in
beautiful confusion of color crowded vases of fruits.
"Surrounding the room are niches instead of windows, and in each niche
one noble symbolic figure in white or colored marble.
"Light fell in a torrent of glory through the faintly opalescent glass
compartments of the ceiling, from which, at the intersection of the
broad and long rafters of blue metal, hung chandeliers formed in
branching arms with cup-like extremities, and holding spheres of the
omnipresent _phosphori_.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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