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The Eternal Wall · Astounding Sci-Fi Story Collection

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Speaker 1: The Eternal Wall by Raymond Z. Galoon. This is a
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Speaker 1: LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain.
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Speaker 1: For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox dot org.
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Speaker 1: Reading by Greg Marguerite. The Eternal Wall by Raymond Z. Galoon.
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Speaker 1: A scream of brakes, the splash into icy wooters, along
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Speaker 1: descent into alkaline depths. It was death, but ned Vince
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Speaker 1: lived again a million years later. See you in half
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Speaker 1: an hour, Betty, said ned Vince over the party telephone.
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Speaker 1: We'll be out at the Silver Basket before ten thirty.
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Speaker 1: Ned Vince was eager for the company of the girl
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Speaker 1: he loved. That was why he was in a hurry
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Speaker 1: to get to the neighboring town of Hurley, where she lived.
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Speaker 1: His old car rattled and roared as he swung it
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Speaker 1: recklessly around pitt Bend. There was where death tapped him
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Speaker 1: on the shoulder. Another car leaped suddenly into view, its
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Speaker 1: lights glaring blindingly past a high upjutting mass of Jurassic
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Speaker 1: rock at the turn of the road. Dazzled and befuddled
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Speaker 1: by his own rash speed, ned Vince had only swift,
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Speaker 1: young reflexes to rely on to avoid a fearful telescoping collision.
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Speaker 1: He flicked his wheel smoothly to the right, but the
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Speaker 1: County Highway Commission hadn't yet tarred the traffic loosened gravel
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Speaker 1: at the bend. Ned could scarcely have chosen a worse
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Speaker 1: place to start sliding and spinning. His car hit the
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Speaker 1: white painted wooden rail sideways, crashed through, tumbled down a
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Speaker 1: steep slope, struck a huge boulder, bounced up a little,
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Speaker 1: and arked outward, falling as gracefully as a swan diver
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Speaker 1: toward the inky waters of the pit fifty feet beneath.
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Speaker 1: Ned Vince was still dimly conscious when that black, quiet
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Speaker 1: pool geised around him in a mighty splash. He had
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Speaker 1: only a dazzling welt on his forehead and a gag
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Speaker 1: of terror in his throat. Movement was slower now as
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Speaker 1: he began to sink trapped inside his wrecked car. Nothing
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Speaker 1: that he could imagine could mean doom more certainly than this.
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Speaker 1: The pit was a tremendously deep pocket in the ground
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Speaker 1: spring fed. The edges of that almost bottomless pool were
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Speaker 1: caked with a rim of white for the water on
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Speaker 1: which dead birds so often floated was surcharged with alkali
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Speaker 1: as that heavy, netronious liquid rushed up through the openings
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Speaker 1: and cracks beneath his feet. Ned Vince knew that his
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Speaker 1: friends and family would never see his body again, lost
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Speaker 1: beyond recovery in this abyss, the car was deeply submerged.
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Speaker 1: The light had blinked out on the dash panel, leaving
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Speaker 1: Ned in absolute darkness. A flood rushed in at the
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Speaker 1: shattered window. He clawed at the door, trying to open it,
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Speaker 1: but it was jammed in the crash bent frame, and
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Speaker 1: he couldn't fight against the force of that incoming water.
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Speaker 1: The welt left by the blow he had received on
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Speaker 1: his forehead put a thickening mist over his brain, so
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Speaker 1: that he could not think clearly. Presently, When he could
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Speaker 1: no longer hold his breath, bitter liqu it was sucked
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Speaker 1: into his lungs. His last thoughts were those of a
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Speaker 1: drowning man. The machine shop he and his dad had
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Speaker 1: had in Harwich. Betty Moore with the smiling irish eyes
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Speaker 1: like in the song. Betty and he had planned to
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Speaker 1: go to the State University this fall. They'd planned to
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Speaker 1: be married sometime. Good Bye Betty. The ripples that had
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Speaker 1: ruffled the surface. Wooters in the pit quieted again to
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Speaker 1: glassy smoothness. The eternal stars shone calmly. The geologic Dakota hills,
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Speaker 1: which might have seen the dinosaurs, still bulked along the highway. Time.
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Speaker 1: The brother of death and the father of change seemed
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Speaker 1: to wait. Khali di Khali. The excited cry, which no
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Speaker 1: human throat could quite have duplicated accurately, arose thinly from
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Speaker 1: the depths of a powdered, dry gulch wooter scarred from
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Speaker 1: an inconceivable antiquity. The noonday sun was red and huge.
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Speaker 1: The air was tenuous, dehydrated chill Khali. At first there
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Speaker 1: was only one voice, uttering those weird, triumphant sounds. Then
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Speaker 1: other vocal organs took up that trilling wail, in those short,
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Speaker 1: sharp chuckles of eagerness, Other questioning, wondering notes mixed with
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Speaker 1: the cadence, lacking qualities identifiable as human. The disturbance was
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Speaker 1: still like the babble of a group of workmen who
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Speaker 1: have discovered something remarkable. The desolate expanse around the gulch
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Speaker 1: was all but without motion. The icy breeze tore tiny
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Speaker 1: puffs of dust from grotesque angling drifts of soil, nearly
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Speaker 1: waterless for eons. Patches of drab lichen grew here and
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Speaker 1: there on the upjutting rocks, but in the desert itself,
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Speaker 1: no other life was visible. Even the hills had sagged away,
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Speaker 1: flattened by incalculable ages of erosion. At a mile distance,
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Speaker 1: a crumbling heap of rubble arose once it had been
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Speaker 1: a building, A gigantic, jagged mass of detrius slanted upward
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Speaker 1: from its crest red debris that had once been steel,
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Speaker 1: a launching catapult for the last space ships built by
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Speaker 1: the gods in Exodus. Perhaps it was half a million
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Speaker 1: years ago. Man was gone from the Earth. Glacial ages, war, decadence, disease,
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Speaker 1: and a final scattering of those ultimate superhumans to newer
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Speaker 1: worlds in other Solar systems had done that. Khalil. The
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Speaker 1: sounds were not human. They were more like the chatter
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Speaker 1: and whale of small desert animals. But there was a
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Speaker 1: seeming paradox here in the depths of the gulch too,
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Speaker 1: the glint of metal sharp and burnished, the flat, streamlined
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Speaker 1: bulk of a flying machine shiny and new, the bell
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Speaker 1: like muzzle of a strange excavator apparatus which seemed to
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Speaker 1: depend on a blast of atoms to clear away rock
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Speaker 1: and soil. Thus the gulch had been cleared of the
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Speaker 1: accumulated rubbish of antiquity. Man, it seemed, had a successor
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Speaker 1: as ruler of the earth. Lloyd Chuck had flown his
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Speaker 1: geological expedition out from the far Lowlands to the east,
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Speaker 1: out from the city of kar Rah, and he was
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Speaker 1: very happy. Now flushed with a vast and unlooked for success,
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Speaker 1: He crouched there on his haunches at the dry bottom
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Speaker 1: of the pit. The breeze rumpled his long brown fur.
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Speaker 1: He wasn't very different in appearance from his ancestors, afoot tall,
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Speaker 1: perhaps as he squatted there in that antique stance of
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Speaker 1: his His tail was short and furred, his under sides
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Speaker 1: creamy white whiskers spread around his inquisitive, pink tipped snout.
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Speaker 1: But his cranium bulged up and forward between shrewd, beady eyes,
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Speaker 1: betraying the slow heritage of time, of survival, of the
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Speaker 1: fittest of evolution. He could think and dream and invent
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Speaker 1: in the civilization of his kind was already far beyond
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Speaker 1: that of the ancient twentieth century. Lloyd Chuck and his
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Speaker 1: fellow workers were gathered, tense and gleeful around the things
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Speaker 1: their digging had exposed to the daylight. There was a
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Speaker 1: gob of junk, scarcely more than an irregular formation of
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Speaker 1: flaky rust. But embedded in it was a huddled form,
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Speaker 1: brown and hard as old wood. The dry mush that
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Speaker 1: had encased it like an air tight coffin, had by
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Speaker 1: now been chipped away by the tiny investigators, but soiled
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Speaker 1: clothing still hung to it. After perhaps a million years,
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Speaker 1: metal had gone into decay. Yes, but not this body.
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Speaker 1: The answer to this was simple alkali, a mineral saturation
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Speaker 1: that had held time and change in stasis, a perfect
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Speaker 1: preservative for organic tissue, aided probably during most of these
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Speaker 1: passing eras by desert dryness. The Dakotas had turned arid
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Speaker 1: very swiftly. This body was not a mere fossil. It
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Speaker 1: was a mummy khali man. That meant not the star
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Speaker 1: conquering demigods, but the ancestral stock that had built the
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Speaker 1: first machines on Earth, and, in the early twenty first century,
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Speaker 1: the first interplanetary rockets. No wonder, Lloyd Chuck and his
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Speaker 1: co workers were happy in their palaeontological enthusiasm. A strange
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Speaker 1: accident happening in a legendary antiquity had aided them in
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Speaker 1: their quest for knowledge. At last, Lloyd Chuck gave a
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Speaker 1: soft chirping signal. The chant of triumph ended, while instruments
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Speaker 1: flicked in his tiny hands. The final instrument he used
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Speaker 1: to test the mummy looked like a miniature stereoscope with
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Speaker 1: complicated details. He held it over his eyes on the
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Speaker 1: tiny screen within. Through the agency of focused X rays,
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Speaker 1: he saw magnified images of the internal organs of this
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Speaker 1: ancient human corpse. What his probing gaze revealed to him
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Speaker 1: made his pleasure even greater than before. In twittering chattering sounds,
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Speaker 1: he communicated his further knowledge to his henchmen. Though devoid
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Speaker 1: of moisture, the mummy was perfectly preserved, even to its
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Speaker 1: brain cells. Medical and biological sciences were far advanced among
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Speaker 1: Lloyd Chuck's kind. Perhaps by the application of principles long
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Speaker 1: known to them, this long dead body could be made
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Speaker 1: to live again. It might move, speak, remember its past.
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Speaker 1: What a marvelous subject for study it would make back
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Speaker 1: there in the museums of Karah, but lois silenced. This fresh,
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Speaker 1: eager chattering with a command work was always more substantial
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Speaker 1: than cheering with infinite care. Small sharp hand tools were
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Speaker 1: used now. The mummy of ned Vince was disengaged from
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Speaker 1: the worthless rust of his primitive automobile. With infinite care.
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Speaker 1: It was craded in a metal case and hauled into
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Speaker 1: the flying machine, flashing flame. The latter arose bearing the
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Speaker 1: entire hundred members of the expedition. The craft shot eastward
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Speaker 1: at bullet like speed. The spreading continental plateau of North
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Speaker 1: America seemed to crawl backward beneath a tremendous sand desert
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Speaker 1: marked with low, washed down mountains and the vague angular
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Speaker 1: geometric mounds of human cities that were gone forever. Beyond
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Speaker 1: the eastern rim of the continent, the plain dipped downward steeply.
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Speaker 1: The white of dried salt was on the hills, but
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Speaker 1: there was a little green growth here too. The dead
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Speaker 1: sea bottom of the vanished Atlantic was not as dead
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Speaker 1: as the highlands. Far out in a deep valley kar Ra,
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Speaker 1: the city of the Road came into view, a crystalline
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Speaker 1: maze of low, bubble like structures glinting in the red sunshine.
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Speaker 1: But this was only its surface aspect. Lloyd Chuck's people
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Speaker 1: had built their homes mostly underground since the beginning of
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Speaker 1: their foggy evolution. Besides, in this latter day, the nights
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Speaker 1: were very cold, the shelter of subterranean passages and rooms
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Speaker 1: was welcome. The mummy was taken to Lloyd Chuck's laboratory,
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Speaker 1: a short distance below the surface. Here at once the
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Speaker 1: scientist began his work. The body of the ancient man
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Speaker 1: was put in a large vat fluids submerged it, slowly,
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Speaker 1: soaking from that hardened flesh the alkali that had preserved
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Speaker 1: it for so long. The fluid was changed often until
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Speaker 1: woody muscles and other tissues became pliable once more. Then
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Speaker 1: the more delicate process began. Still submerged in liquid, the
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Speaker 1: corpse was submitted to a flow of restorative energy passing
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Speaker 1: between complicated electrodes. The cells of antique flesh and brain
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Speaker 1: gradually took on a chemical composition nearer to that of
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Speaker 1: the life that they had once known. At last, the
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Speaker 1: final liquid was drained away, and the mummy lay there
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Speaker 1: a mummy no more but a pale, silent figure in
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Speaker 1: its tatters of clothing. Lloyd Chuck put an odd metal
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Speaker 1: fabric helmet on its head, and a second, much smaller
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Speaker 1: helmet on his own. Connected with this arrangement was a
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Speaker 1: black box of many uses. For hours he worked with
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Speaker 1: his apparatus, studying and guiding the recording instruments. The time
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Speaker 1: passed swiftly. At last, eager and ready for whatever might happen. Now,
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Speaker 1: Lloyd Chuck pushed another switch with a cold, rosy flare,
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Speaker 1: energy blazed around that moveless form. For ned Vince, timeless
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Speaker 1: eternity ended like a gradual fading mist. When he could
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Speaker 1: see clearly again, he experienced that inevitable shock of vast
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Speaker 1: change around him. Though it had been dehydrated, his brain
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Speaker 1: had been kept perfectly intact through the ages, and now
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Speaker 1: it was restored, so his memories were as vivid as yesterday.
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Speaker 1: Yet through that chris line vat in which he lay,
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Speaker 1: he could see a broad, low room in which he
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Speaker 1: could barely have stood erect. He saw instruments and equipment
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Speaker 1: whose weird shapes suggested alienness and knowledge beyond the era
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Speaker 1: he had known. The walls were lavender and phosphorescent fossil
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Speaker 1: bone fragments were mounted in shallow cases dinosaur bones, some
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Speaker 1: of them seemed from their size, but there was a
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Speaker 1: complete skeleton of a dog too, and the skeleton of
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Speaker 1: a man, and a second man skeleton that was not
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Speaker 1: quite human. Its neck vertebrae were very thick and solid,
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Speaker 1: its shoulders were wide, and its skull was gigantic. All
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Speaker 1: this weirdness had a violent effect on ned Vince, a
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Speaker 1: sudden nostalgic panic. Something was fearfully wrong. The nervous terror
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Speaker 1: of the unknown was on him, feeble and dizzy. After
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Speaker 1: his weird resurrection, which he could not understand, remembering as
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Speaker 1: he did, that moment of sinking to certain death in
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Speaker 1: the pool at pitt Bend, he caught the edge of
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Speaker 1: the transparent vat and pulled himself to a sitting posture.
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Speaker 1: There was a muffled murmur around him, as of some vast,
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Speaker 1: unearthly metropolis. Take it easy, ned Vince. The words themselves
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Speaker 1: and the way they were assembled were old, familiar friends,
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Speaker 1: but the tone was wrong. It was high, shrill, parrot like,
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Speaker 1: and mechanical. Ned's gaze searched for the source of the voice,
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Speaker 1: located the black box just outside of his crystal vat
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Speaker 1: from that box, the voice seemed to have originated before
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Speaker 1: it crouched a small, brownish animal with a bulging head.
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Speaker 1: The animal's tiny fingered paws, hands they were really were
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Speaker 1: touching rows of keys. To ned Vince, it was all
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Speaker 1: utterly insane and incomprehensible. A rodent looking like a prairie dog,
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Speaker 1: a little but plainly possessing a high order of intelligence,
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Speaker 1: and a voice whose soothingly familiar words were more repugnant somehow,
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Speaker 1: simply because they could never belong in a place as
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Speaker 1: eerie as this. Ned vinced he did not know how
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Speaker 1: Lloyd Chuck had probed his brain with the aid of
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Speaker 1: a pair of helmets and the black box apparatus. He
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Speaker 1: did not know that in the latter his language, taken
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Speaker 1: from his own revitalized mind, was recorded, and that Lloyd
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Speaker 1: Chuck had only to press certain buttons to make the
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Speaker 1: instrument express his thoughts in common. Long dead English loy
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Speaker 1: whose vocal organs were not human would have had great
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Speaker 1: difficulty speaking English words anyway. Ned's dark hair was wildly awry,
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Speaker 1: his gaunt young face held befuddled terror. He gasped in
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Speaker 1: the thin atmosphere I've gone nuts, he pronounced, with a
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Speaker 1: curious calm, stark staring nuts. Lloy's box, with its recorded
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Speaker 1: English words and its sonic detectors, could translate for its
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Speaker 1: master too. As the man spoke, Loy read the illuminated
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Speaker 1: symbols in his own language flashed on a frosted crystal
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Speaker 1: plate before him. Thus he knew what Ned Vince was saying.
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Speaker 1: Lloyd Chuck pressed more keys and the reproduced his answer. No, Ned,
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Speaker 1: not nuts, not a bit of it. There are just
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Speaker 1: a lot of things that you've got to get used to.
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Speaker 1: That's all. You drowned about a million years ago. I
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Speaker 1: discovered your body. I brought you back to life. We
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Speaker 1: have science that can do that. I'm Lloyd Chuck. It
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Speaker 1: took only a moment for the box to tell the
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Speaker 1: full story in clear, bold, friendly terms. Thus Loy sought,
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Speaker 1: with calm, human logic to make his charge feel at home,
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Speaker 1: probably though he was a fool to suppose that he
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Speaker 1: could succeed. Thus, Vince started to mutter, struggling desperately to
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Speaker 1: reason it out. A prairie dog, he said, speaking to me.
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Speaker 1: One million years evolution. The scientists say that people grew
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Speaker 1: up from fishes in the sea. Prairie dogs are smart,
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Speaker 1: so maybe super prairie dogs could come from them a
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Speaker 1: lot easier than men from fish. It was all sound logic.
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Speaker 1: Even ned Vince knew that still, his mind tuned to
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Speaker 1: ordinary simple things, couldn't quite realize all the vast things
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Speaker 1: that had happened to himself and to the world. The
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Speaker 1: scope of it all was too staggeringly big. One million
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Speaker 1: years God ned Vince made a last effort to control himself,
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Speaker 1: his knuckles tightened on the edge of the vat. I
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Speaker 1: don't know what you've been talking about, he grated wildly.
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Speaker 1: But I want to get out of here. I want
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Speaker 1: to go back where I came from. Do you understand
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Speaker 1: whoever or whatever you are? Lloyd Chuck pressed more keys.
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Speaker 1: But you can't go back to the twentieth century, said
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Speaker 1: the box, Nor is there any better place for you
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Speaker 1: to be now than kar Rah. You are the only
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Speaker 1: man left on Earth. Those men that exist in other
16:51
Speaker 1: star systems are not really your kind anymore. Though their
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Speaker 1: forefathers originated on this planet, they have gone far beyond
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Speaker 1: you in evolution. To them, you would be only a
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Speaker 1: senseless curiosity. You are much better off with my people,
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Speaker 1: our minds are much more like yours. We will take
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Speaker 1: care of you and make you comfortable. But ned Vince
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Speaker 1: wasn't listening. Now you are the only man left on earth.
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Speaker 1: That had been enough for him to hear. He didn't
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Speaker 1: more than half believe it. His mind was too confused
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Speaker 1: for conviction about anything. Everything he saw and felt and
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Speaker 1: heard might be some kind of nightmare. But then it
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Speaker 1: might all be real instead, and that was abysmal horror.
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Speaker 1: Ned was no coward. Death and danger of any ordinary
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Speaker 1: earthly kind he could have faced bravely, But the loneliness
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Speaker 1: here and the utter strangeness were hideous, like being stranded
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Speaker 1: alone on another world. His heart was pounding heavily, and
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Speaker 1: his eyes were wide. He looked across this eerie room.
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Speaker 1: There was a ramp there at the other side, leading
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Speaker 1: upward instead of a stairway. Fierce impulse to a escaped
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Speaker 1: this nameless lair to try to learn the facts for
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Speaker 1: himself possessed him. He bounded out of the vat and,
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Speaker 1: with head down dashed for the ramp. He had to
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Speaker 1: go most of the way on his hands and knees
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Speaker 1: for the upslanting passage was low, excited, animal chucklings around him,
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Speaker 1: and the occasional touch of a fairy body hurried his
18:19
Speaker 1: feverish scrambling, but he emerged at last at the surface.
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Speaker 1: He stood there, panting in that frigid, rarefied air. It
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Speaker 1: was night. The moon was a gigantic, pock marked bulk.
18:31
Speaker 1: The constellations were unrecognizable. The rodent city was a glowing
18:35
Speaker 1: expanse of shallow crystalline domes set among odd scrub trees
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Speaker 1: and bushes. The crags loomed on all sides, all their
18:43
Speaker 1: jaggedness lost after a million years of erosion under an
18:46
Speaker 1: ocean that was gone. In that ghastly moonlight, the ground
18:50
Speaker 1: glistened with dry salt. Well, I guess it saw true, huh, ned,
18:57
Speaker 1: Vince muttered in a flat tone. Behind him, he heard
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Speaker 1: an excited, squeaky chattering rodents in pursuit. Looking back, he
19:05
Speaker 1: saw the pinpoint gleams of countless little eyes. Yes, he
19:09
Speaker 1: might as well be in exile on another planet, so
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Speaker 1: changed had the Earth become a wave of intolerable homesickness
19:16
Speaker 1: came over him as he sensed the distances of time
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Speaker 1: that had passed, those inconceivable eons, separating himself from his friends,
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Speaker 1: from Betty, from almost everything that was familiar. He started
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Speaker 1: to run away from those glittering, rodent eyes. He sensed
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Speaker 1: death in that cold sea bottom. But what of it?
19:34
Speaker 1: What reason did he have left to live? He'd be
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Speaker 1: only a museum piece here, a thing to be caged
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Speaker 1: and studied. Prison or a madhouse would be far better.
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Speaker 1: He'd tried to get hold of his courage, but what
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Speaker 1: was there to inspire it? Nothing? He laughed harshly as
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Speaker 1: he ran, welcoming that bitter, killing cold. Nostalgia had him
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Speaker 1: in its clutch, and there was no answer in this
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Speaker 1: hell world, lost beyond the barrier of the years. Lloyd
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Speaker 1: Chuck and his followers presently came upon ned Vince's unconscious
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Speaker 1: form a mile from the city of khar Rah in
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Speaker 1: a flying machine. They took him back and applied stimulants.
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Speaker 1: He came to in the same laboratory room as before,
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Speaker 1: but he was firmly strapped to a low platform this
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Speaker 1: time so that he could not escape again. There he
20:18
Speaker 1: lay helpless until presently an idea occurred to him. It
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Speaker 1: gave him a few crumbs of hope. Hey, somebody, he called,
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Speaker 1: you'd better get some rest. Ned Vince, came the answer
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Speaker 1: from the black box. It was Lloyd Chuck speaking again,
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Speaker 1: but listen, ned protested, you know a lot more than
20:38
Speaker 1: we did in the twentieth century. And well, they're that
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Speaker 1: thing called time travel that I used to read about.
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Speaker 1: Maybe you know how to make it work. Maybe you
20:46
Speaker 1: could send me back to my own time. After all,
20:50
Speaker 1: little Lloyd Chuck was in a black, discouraged mood himself.
20:54
Speaker 1: He could understand the utter sick dejection of this giant
20:57
Speaker 1: from the past, lost from his own kind, probably insanity
21:00
Speaker 1: looming in far less extreme circumstances than this death from
21:04
Speaker 1: homesickness had come. Lloyd Chuck was a scientist, in common
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Speaker 1: with all real scientists, regardless of the species from which
21:12
Speaker 1: they spring. He loved the subjects of his researches. He
21:16
Speaker 1: wanted this ancient man to live and to be happy,
21:19
Speaker 1: or this creature would be of scant value for study.
21:22
Speaker 1: So Loy considered carefully what ned Vince had suggested. Time
21:26
Speaker 1: travel almost a legend, an assault upon an intangible wall
21:31
Speaker 1: that had baffled far keener wits than Loys. But he
21:34
Speaker 1: was bent now on the well being of this anachronism.
21:38
Speaker 1: He had so miraculously resurrected this human, this Khalis. Lloy
21:43
Speaker 1: jabbed buttons on the black box. Yes, ned Vince said
21:47
Speaker 1: the sonic apparatus time travel. Perhaps that is the only
21:51
Speaker 1: thing to do to send you back to your own
21:52
Speaker 1: period of history. For I see that you will never
21:55
Speaker 1: be yourself here. It will be hard to accomplish, but
21:58
Speaker 1: will try. Now. I shall put you under an anesthetic.
22:02
Speaker 1: Ned felt better immediately, for there was real hope now
22:06
Speaker 1: where there had been none before. Maybe he'd be back
22:09
Speaker 1: in his hometown of Harwich again. Maybe he'd see the
22:12
Speaker 1: old machine shop there in the trees greening out in spring.
22:15
Speaker 1: Maybe he'd be seeing Betty Moore in Hurley. Soon Ned
22:20
Speaker 1: relaxed as a tiny hypoeedle bit into his arm. As
22:24
Speaker 1: soon as ned Vince passed into unconsciousness, Lloyd Chuck went
22:27
Speaker 1: to work once more, using that pair of brain helmets,
22:30
Speaker 1: again exploring carefully the man's mind. After hours of research,
22:34
Speaker 1: he proceeded to prepare his plans. The government of khar
22:38
Speaker 1: Rah was a scientific oligarchy, of which Loy was a
22:41
Speaker 1: prime member. It would be easy to get the help
22:43
Speaker 1: he needed. A horde of small, gray furred beings and
22:48
Speaker 1: their machines toiled for many days. Ned Vince's mind swam
22:53
Speaker 1: gradually out of the blur that had enveloped it. He
22:56
Speaker 1: was wandering aimlessly in a familiar room. The girt of
23:00
Speaker 1: the roof above were of red painted steel. His tool
23:03
Speaker 1: benches were there, greasy and littered with metal filings, just
23:06
Speaker 1: as they had always been. He had a tractor to
23:09
Speaker 1: repair and a seed drill. Outside of the machine chop,
23:12
Speaker 1: the old, familiar yellow sun was shining. Across the street
23:16
Speaker 1: was the small brown house where he lived. With a
23:19
Speaker 1: sudden startlement, he saw Betty Moore in the doorway. She
23:22
Speaker 1: wore a blue dress and a mischievous smile curved her
23:25
Speaker 1: lips as though she had succeeded in creeping up on
23:28
Speaker 1: him for a surprise. Why, Ned, she chuckled. You look
23:31
Speaker 1: as though you've been dreaming and just woke up, he
23:34
Speaker 1: grimaced ruefully. As she approached. With a kind of fierce gratitude,
23:38
Speaker 1: he took her in his arms. Yes, she was just
23:41
Speaker 1: like always. I guess I was dreaming, Betty, he whispered,
23:45
Speaker 1: feeling that mighty sense of relief. I must have fallen
23:49
Speaker 1: asleep at the bench here and had a nightmare. I
23:51
Speaker 1: thought I had an accident, a pitted ben and that
23:54
Speaker 1: a lot of worse things happened. But it wasn't true,
23:58
Speaker 1: ned Vince's mind, over which there was still an elusive
24:01
Speaker 1: fog that he did not try to shake off. Accepted
24:04
Speaker 1: apparent facts. Simply, he did not know anything about the
24:07
Speaker 1: invisible radiations beating down upon him, soothing and dimming his
24:11
Speaker 1: brain so that it would never question or doubt, or
24:14
Speaker 1: observe too closely the incongruous circumstances that must often appear,
24:20
Speaker 1: the lack of traffic in the street without, for instance,
24:23
Speaker 1: and the lack of people besides himself and Betty. He
24:26
Speaker 1: didn't know that this machine shop was built from his
24:29
Speaker 1: own memories of the original. He didn't know that this
24:32
Speaker 1: Betty was of the same origin, a miraculous fabrication of
24:36
Speaker 1: metal and energy units and soft plastic. The trees outside
24:39
Speaker 1: were only lantern slide illusions. It was all built inside
24:43
Speaker 1: a great opaque dome. But there were hidden television systems too.
24:48
Speaker 1: Thus Lloyd Chuck's kind could study this ancient man, this Khalie.
24:53
Speaker 1: Thus their motives were mostly selfish. Lloyd, though, was not observing.
24:58
Speaker 1: Now he had wandered far out into the cold, sad
25:01
Speaker 1: sea bottom to ponder. He squeaked and chattered to himself,
25:05
Speaker 1: Contemplating the magnificent, inexorable march of the Ages. He remembered
25:09
Speaker 1: the ancient ruins left by the final Superman, The Khalis
25:13
Speaker 1: believes himself home. Lloy was thinking he will survive and
25:17
Speaker 1: be happy, but there was no other way. Time is
25:21
Speaker 1: an eternal wall. Our archaeological researches among the cities of
25:25
Speaker 1: the Superman show the truth. Even they who once ruled
25:28
Speaker 1: the earth never escaped from the present by so much
25:32
Speaker 1: as an instant end of the Eternal Wall. By Raymond Z.
25:42
Speaker 1: Galoon