CHAPTER XV
_A Thousand Years into the Future_
1930 to 2930--a thousand years in three hours. It was sufficiently
slow traveling so that Larry could see from the cage window the actual
detailed flow of movement: the changing outline of material objects
around him. There had been the open country of Revolutionary times
when this space was north of the city. It was a grey, ghostly
landscape of trees and the road and the shadowy outlines of the Atwood
house five hundred feet away.
Larry saw the road widen. The fence suddenly was gone. The trees were
suddenly gone. The shapes of houses were constantly appearing; then
melting down again, with others constantly rearing up to take their
places; and always there were more houses, and larger, more enduring
ones. And then the Atwood house suddenly melted: a second or two, and
all evidence of it and the trees about it were gone.
There was no road; it was a city street now; and it had widened so
that the cage was poised near the middle of it. And presently the
houses were set solid along its borders.
At 1910 Larry began to recognize the contour of the buildings: The
antiquated Patton Place. But the flowing changing outlines adjusted
themselves constantly to a more familiar form. The new apartment
house, down the block in which Larry and I lived, rose and assembled
itself like a materializing spectre. A wink or two of Larry's eyelids
and it was there. He recalled the months of its construction.
The cage, with Larry as a passenger, could not have stopped in these
years: he realized it, now. There was a nameless feeling, a repulsion
against stopping; it was indescribable, but he was aware of it. He had
lived these years once, and they were forbidden to him again.
The cage was still in its starting acceleration. They swept through
the year 1935, and then Larry was indefinably aware that the forbidden
area had passed.
* * * * *
They went through those few days of June, 1935, during which Tugh's
Robots had devastated the city, but it was too brief an action to make
a mark that Larry could see. It left a few very transitory marks,
however. Larry noticed that along the uneven line of ghostly
roof-tops, blobs of emptiness had appeared; he saw a short distance
away that several of the houses had melted down into ragged, tumbled
heaps. These were where the bombs had struck, dropped by the
Government planes in an endeavor to wreck the Tugh house from which
the Robots were appearing. But the ragged, broken areas were filled in
a second--almost as soon as Larry realized they were there--and new
and larger buildings than before appeared.
At sight of all this he murmured to Tina, "Something has happened
here. I wonder what?"
He chanced to turn, and saw that Tugh was regarding him very queerly;
but in a moment he forgot it in the wonders of the passage into his
future.
This growing, expanding city! It had seemed a giant to Larry in 1935,
especially after he had compared it to what it was in 1777. But now,
in 1950, and beyond to the turn of the century, he stood amazed at the
enormity of the shadowy structures rearing their spectral towers
around him. For some years Patton Place, a backward section, held its
general form; then abruptly the city engulfed it. Larry saw monstrous
buildings of steel and masonry rising a thousand feet above him. For
an instant, as they were being built he saw their skeleton outlines;
and then they were complete. Yet they were not enduring, for in every
flowing detail they kept changing.
An overhead sidewalk went like a balcony along what had been Patton
Place. Bridges and archways spanned the street. Then there came a
triple bank of overhead roadways. A distance away, a hundred feet
above the ground level, the shadowy form of what seemed a monorail
structure showed for a moment. It endured for what might have been a
hundred years, and then it was gone....
* * * * *
This monstrous city! By 2030 there was a vast network of traffic
levels over what had been a street. It was an arcade, now, open at the
top near the cage; but further away Larry saw where the giant
buildings had flowed and mingled over it, with the viaducts, spider
bridges and pedestrian levels plunging into tunnels to pierce through
them.
And high overhead, where the little sky which was left still showed,
Larry saw the still higher outlines of a structure which quite
evidently was a huge aerial landing stage for airliners.
It was an incredible city! There were spots of enduring light around
Larry now--the city lights which for months and years shone here
unchanged. The cage was no longer outdoors. The street which had
become an open arcade was now wholly closed. A roof was overhead--a
city roof, to shut out the inclement weather. There was artificial
light and air and weather down here, and up on the roof additional
space for the city's teeming activities.
Larry could see only a shadowy narrow vista, here indoors, but his
imagination supplied visions of what the monstrous, incredible city
must be. There was a roof, perhaps, over all Manhattan. Bridges and
viaducts would span to the great steel and stone structures across the
rivers, so that water must seem to be in a canyon far underground.
There would be a cellar to this city, incredibly intricate with
conduits of wires and drainage pipes, and on the roof rain or snow
would fall unnoticed by the millions of workers. Children born here in
poverty might never yet have seen the blue sky and the sunlight, or
know that grass was green and lush and redolent when moist with
morning dew....
Larry fancied this now to be the climax of city building here on
earth; the city was a monster, now, unmanageable, threatening to
destroy the humans who had created it.... He tried to envisage the
world; the great nations; other cities like this one. Freight
transportation would go by rail and underseas, doubtless, and all the
passengers by air....
* * * * *
Tina, with her knowledge of history, could sketch the events. The
Yellow War--the white races against the Orientals--was over by the
year 2000. The three great nations were organized in another
half-century: the white, the yellow and the black.
By the year 2000, the ancient dirigibles had proven impractical, and
great airliners of the plane type were encircling the earth. New
motors, wing-spreads, and a myriad devices made navigation of the
upper altitudes possible. At a hundred thousand feet, upon all the
Great Circle routes, liners were rushing at nearly a thousand miles an
hour. They would halt at intervals, to allow helicopter tenders to
come up to transfer descending passengers.
Then the etheric wave-thrust principle was discovered: by 2500 A.D.
man was voyaging out into space and Interplanetary travel began. This
brought new problems: a rush of new millions of humans to live upon
our Earth; new wars; new commerce in peace times; new ideas; new
scientific knowledge....
By 2500, the city around Larry must have reached its height. It stayed
there a half century; and then it began coming down. Its degeneration
was slow, in the beginning. First, there might have been a hole in the
arcade which was not repaired. Then others would appear, as the
neglect spread. The population left. The great buildings of metal and
stone, so solidly appearing to the brief lifetime of a single
individual, were impermanent over the centuries.
By 2600, the gigantic ghosts had all melted down. They lay in a
shadowy pile, burying the speeding cage. There was no stopping here;
there was no space unoccupied in which they could stop. Larry could
see only the tangled spectres of broken, rusting, rotting metal and
stone.
He wondered what could have done it. A storm of nature? Or had mankind
strangely turned decadent, and rushed back in a hundred years or so to
savagery? It could not have been the latter, because very soon the
ruins were moving away: the people were clearing the city site for
something new. For fifty years it went on.
* * * * *
Tina explained it. The age of steam had started the great city of New
York, and others like it, into its monstrous congestion of human
activity. There was steam for power and steam for slow transportation
by railroads and surface ships. Then the conquest of the air, and the
transportation of power by electricity, gradually changed things. But
man was slow to realize his possibilities. Even in 1930, all the new
elements existed; but the great cities grew monstrous of their own
momentum. Business went to the cities because the people were there;
workers flocked in because the work was there to call them.
But soon the time came when the monster city was too unwieldy. The
traffic, the drainage, the water supply could not cope with
conditions. Still, man struggled on. The workers were mere
automatons--pallid attendants of machinery; people living in a world
of beauty who never had seen it; who knew of nothing but the city
arcades where the sun never shone and where amusements were as
artificial as the light and air.
Then man awakened to his folly. Disease broke out in New York City in
2551, and in a month swept eight million people into death. The cities
were proclaimed impractical, unsafe. And suddenly the people realized
how greatly they hated the city; how strangely beautiful the world
could be in the fashion God created it....
There was, over the next fifty years, an exodus to the rural sections.
Food was produced more cheaply, largely because it was produced more
abundantly. Man found his wants suddenly simplified.
And business found that concentration was unnecessary. The telephone
and television made personal contacts not needed. The aircraft, the
high-speed auto-trucks over modern speedways, the aeroplane-motored
monorails, the rocket-trains--all these shortened distance. And, most
important of all, the transportation of electrical energy from great
central power companies made small industrial units practical even
upon remote farms. The age of electricity came into its own. The
cities were doomed....
* * * * *
Larry saw, through 2600 and 2700 A.D., a new form of civilization
rising around him. At first it seemed a queer combination of the old
fashioned village and a strange modernism. There were, here upon
Manhattan Island, metal houses, widely spaced in gardens, and
electrically powered factories of unfamiliar aspect. Overhead were
skeleton structures, like landing stages; and across the further
distance was the fleeting, transitory wraith of a monorail air-road.
Along the river banks were giant docks for surface vessels and sub-sea
freighters. There was a little concentration here, but not much. Man
had learned his lesson.
This was a new era. Man was striving really to play, as well as work.
But the work had to be done. With the constant development of
mechanical devices, there was always a new machine devised to help the
operation of its fellow. And over it all was the hand of the human,
until suddenly the worker found that he was no more than an attendant
upon an inanimate thing which did everything more skilfully than he
could do it. Thus came the idea of the Robot--something to attend, to
oversee, to operate machines. In Larry's time it had already begun
with a myriad devices of "automatic control." In Tina's Time-world it
reached its ultimate--and diabolical--development....
At 2900, Larry saw, five hundred feet to the east, the walls of a long
low laboratory rising. The other cage--which in 1777 was in Major
Atwood's garden, and in 1935 was in the back yard of the Tugh house on
Beckman Place--was housed now in 2930, in a room of this
laboratory....
At 2905, with the vehicle slowing for its stopping, Tina gestured
toward the walls of her palace, whose shadowy forms were rising close
at hand. Then the palace garden grew and flourished, and Larry saw
that this cage he was in was set within this garden.
"We are almost there, Larry," she said.
"Yes," he answered. An emotion gripped him. "Tina, your world--why
it's so strange! But you are not strange."
"Am I not, Larry?"
He smiled at her; he felt like showing her again that the ancient
custom of kissing was not wholly meaningless, but Tugh was regarding
them.
"I was comparing," said Larry, "that girl Mary Atwood, from the year
1777, and you. You are so different in looks, in dress, but you're
just--girls."
She laughed. "The world changes, Larry, but not human nature."
"Ready?" called Tugh. "We are here, Tina."
"Yes, Tugh. You have the dial set for the proper night and hour?"
"Of course. I make no mistake. Did I not invent these dials?"
The cage slackened through a day of sunlight; plunged into a night;
and slid to its soundless, reeling halt....
Tina drew Larry to the door and opened it upon a fragrant garden,
somnolently drowsing in the moonlight.
"This is my world, Larry," she said. "And here is my home."
* * * * *
Tugh was with them as they left the cage. He said:
"This is the tri-night hour of the very night you left here. Princess
Tina. You see, I calculated correctly."
"Where did you leave Harl and the two visitors?" she demanded.
"Here. Right here."
Across the garden Larry saw three dark forms coming forward. They were
three small Robots of about Tina's stature--domestic servants of the
palace. They crowded up, crying:
"Master Tugh! Princess!"
"What is it?" Tugh asked.
The hollow voices echoed with excitement as one of them said:
"Master Tugh, there has been murder here! We have dared tell no one
but you or the Princess. Harl is murdered!"
Larry chanced to see Tugh's astonished face, and in the horror of the
moment a feeling came to Larry that Tugh was acting unnaturally. He
forgot it at once; but later he was to recall it forcibly, and to
realize that the treacherous Tugh had planned this with these Robots.
"Master Tugh, Harl is murdered! Migul escaped and murdered Harl, and
took the body away with him!"
Larry was stricken dumb. Tugh seized the little Robot by his metal
shoulders. "Liar! What do you mean?"
Tina gasped, "Where are our visitors--the young man and the girl?"
"Migul took them!"
"Where?" Tina demanded.
"We don't know. We think very far down in the caverns of machinery.
Migul said he was going to feed them to the machines!"