Science fiction; Short stories; Time travel -- Fiction
"Then another scene, land appearing from the ship. A great statue,
upholding a torch, and we on the ship seemed passing beneath it. They
said that the ship was approaching a city, the city of New York, but
mists hid all before us. Then suddenly the mists before the ship cleared
and there before me seemed the city.
* * * * *
"Mother of God, what a city! Climbing range on range of great
mountain-like buildings that aspired up as though to scale heaven
itself! Far beneath narrow streets pierced through them and in
the picture we seemed to land from the ship, to go through those
streets of the city. It was an incredible city of madness! The
streets and ways were mere chasms between the sky-toppling buildings!
People--people--people--millions on millions of them rushed through the
endless streets. Countless ground-vehicles rushed to and fro also, and
other different ones that roared above the streets and still others
below them!
"Winged flying-cars and great airships were sailing to and fro over the
titanic city, and in the waters around it great ships of the sea and
smaller ships were coming as man never dreamed of surely, that reached
out from the mighty city on all sides. And with the coming of darkness,
the city blazed with living light!
"The pictures changed, showed other mighty cities, though none so
terrible as that one. It showed great mechanisms that appalled me. Giant
metal things that scooped in an instant from the earth as much as a man
might dig in days. Vast things that poured molten metal from them like
water. Others that lifted loads that hundreds of men and oxen could not
have stirred.
"They showed men of knowledge like Rastin and Thicourt beside me. Some
were healers, working miraculous cures in a way that I could not
understand. Others were gazing through giant tubes at the stars, and the
pictures showed what they saw, showed that all of the stars were great
suns like our sun, and that our sun was greater than earth, that earth
moved around it instead of the reverse! How could such things be, I
wondered. Yet they said that it was so, that earth was round like an
apple, and that with other earths like it, the planets, moved round the
sun. I heard, but could scarce understand.
"At last Rastin and Thicourt led me out of that place of living pictures
and to their ground-vehicle. We went again through the streets to their
building, where first I had found myself. As we went I saw that none
challenged my right to go, nor asked who was my lord. And Rastin said
that none now had lords, but that all were lord, king and priest and
noble, having no more power than any in the land. Each man was his own
master! It was what I had hardly dared to hope for, in my own time, and
this, I thought, was greatest of all the marvels they had shown me!
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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