Flight Through Tomorrow Read online

  Produced by Greg Weeks, Stephen Blundell and the OnlineDistributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net

  _Super warfare has destroyed the old race of man, but elsewhere a new civilization is dawning...._

  FLIGHT THROUGH TOMORROW

  BY STANTON A. COBLENTZ

  I

  Nothing was further from my mind, when I discovered the "Release Drug"Relin, than the realization that it would lead me through as strange andghastly and revealing a series of adventures as any man has everexperienced. I encountered it, in a way, as a mere by-product of myexperiments; I am a chemist by profession, and as one of the staff ofthe Morganstern Foundation have access to some of the best equippedlaboratories in America. The startling new invention--I must call itthat, though I did not create it deliberately--came to me in the courseof my investigations into the obscure depths of the human personality.

  It has long been my theory that there is in man a psychic entity whichcan exist for at least brief periods apart from the body, and haveperceptions which are not those of the physical senses. In accordancewith these views, I had been developing various drugs, compounded ofmorphine and adrenalin, whose object was to shock the psychic entityloose for limited periods and so to widen the range and powers of thepersonality. I shall not go into the details of my researches, nor tellby what accident I succeeded better than I had hoped; the all-importantfact--a fact so overwhelming that I shudder and gasp and marvel even asI tell of it--is that I did obtain a minute quantity of a drug which, byputting the body virtually in a state of suspended animation, couldrelease the mind to travel almost at will across time and space.

  Yes, across time and space!--for the drag of the physical having beenstricken off, I could enter literally into infinity and eternity. Butlet me tell precisely what happened that night when at precisely 10:08in the solitude of my apartment room, I swallowed half an ounce of Relinand stretched myself out on the bed, well knowing that I was takingincalculable risks, and that insanity and even death were by no meansremote possibilities of the road ahead. But let that be as it may! In myopinion, there is no coward more despicable than he who will not facedanger for the sake of knowledge.

  My head reeled, and something seemed to buzz inside it as soon as thebitter half ounce of fluid slipped down my throat. I was barely able toreach the bed and throw myself upon it when there came a snapping as ofsomething inside my brain ... then, for a period, blankness ... then agradual awakening with that feeling of exhilaration one experiences onlyafter the most blissful sleep. I opened my eyes, feeling strong andlight of limb and charged with a marvelous vital energy--but, as Ipeered about me, my lips drew far apart in astonishment, and I am surethat I gaped like one who has seen a ghost.

  Where were the familiar walls of my two-by-four room, the bureau, thebook-rack, the ancient portrait of Pasteur that hung in its glass framejust above the foot of the bed? Gone! vanished as utterly as though theyhad never been! I was standing on a wide and windy plain, with the galebeating in my ears, and with rapid sunset-colored clouds scuddingacross the blood-stained west. Mingled with the wailing of the blast,there was a deep sobbing sound that struck me in successive waves, likethe ululations of great multitudes of far-off mourners. And while I waswondering what this might mean and felt a prickling of horror along myspine, the first of the portents swept across the sky. I say "portents,"for I do not know by what other term to describe the apparitions; highin the heavens, certainly at an altitude of many miles, the flamingthing swept across my view, comet-shaped and stretching over at leastten degrees of arc, swift as a meteor, brilliantly flesh-red, sputteringsparks like an anvil, and leaving behind it a long ruddy trail that onlyslowly faded out amid the darkening skies.

  It must have been a full minute after its disappearance before thehissing of its flight came to my ears--a hissing so sharp, so nastilyinsistent that it reached me even above the noise of the wind. And morethan another minute had passed before the earth beneath me was wrenchedand jarred as if by an earthquake and the most thunderous detonations Ihad ever heard burst over me in a prolonged series.

  Let me emphasize that none of this had the quality of a dream; it wasclear-cut, as vivid as anything I had ever experienced; my mind workedwith an unusual precision and clarity, and not even a fleeting doubtcame to me of the reality of my observations. "This is some sort ofbombing attack," I remember reflecting, "some assault of super-monstersof the skies, perfected by a super science." And I did not have to betold the fact; I knew, as by an all-illuminating inner knowledge, that Ihad voyaged into the future.

  Even as this realization came to me, I made another flight--and one thatwas in space more than in time. It did not surprise me, but I took it asthe most natural thing in the world when I seemed to rise and gofloating away through the air. It was still sunset-time, but I could seeclearly enough as I went drifting at a height of several hundred yardsabove a vast desolated space near the junction of two rivers. Perhaps,however, "desolated" is not the word I should use; I should say, rather,"shattered, pulverized, obliterated," for a scene of more utter andhopeless ruin I have never seen nor imagined. Over an area of manysquare miles, there was nothing but heaps and mounds of broken stone,charred and crumbling brick, fire-scarred timbers, and huge contortedmasses of rusting steel like the decaying bones of superhuman monsters.From the great height and extent of the piles of debris, and from theoccasional sight of the splintered cornice of a roof or of some batteredwindow-frame or door, I knew that this had once been a city, one of theworld's greatest; but no other recognizable feature remained amid thegray masses of ruins, and the very streets and avenues had been erased.But here and there a tremendous crater, three hundred feet across and ahundred to a hundred and fifty feet deep, indicated the source of thedestruction.

  As if to reinforce the dread idea that had taken possession of mybrain, one of the comet-like red prodigies went streaking across the skyeven as I gazed down at the dead city; and I knew--as clearly as if Ihad seen the whole spectacle with my own eyes--that the missile hadsprung from a source hundreds or thousands of miles away, possiblyacross the ocean; and that, laden with scores of tons of explosives, ithad been hurled with unerring mechanical accuracy upon its mission ofannihilation.

  Then I seemed to float over vast distances of that sunset-tinted land,and saw great craters in the fields, and villages shot to ribbons, andfarms abandoned; and the wild dogs fought for the wild cattle; andthistles grew deep on acres where wheat had been planted, and weedssprouted thickly in the orchards, and blight and mildew competed for thecrops. But though here and there I could see a dugout, with traces offire and abandoned tools flung about at random, nowhere in all thatdismal world did I observe a living man.

  After a time I returned to a place near the ruined city by the tworivers; and in the rocky palisades above one of the streams, I made outsome small circular holes barely large enough to admit a man. And, borneonward by some impulse of curiosity and despair, I entered one of theseholes, and went downward, far downward into the dim recesses. And nowfor the first time, at a depth of hundreds of yards, I did at lastencounter living men. My first thought was that I had gone back to theday of the cave-man, for a cave-like hollow had been scooped out in thesolid rock. It was true that the few hundreds of people huddled togetherthere had the dress and looks of moderns; it was true, also, that thegloom was lighted for them by electric bulbs, and that electricradiators kept them warm; yet Dante himself, in painting the ninthcircle of his Inferno, could not have imagined a drearier and moredespondent group than these that slouched and drooped and muttered inthat cavernous recess, seated with their heads fallen low upon theirknees, or moodily pacing back and forth like captives who can hope forno escape. "Here at least we will be saf
e from the sky marauders," Iheard one of them muttering. Yet I could not help wondering what themere safety of the body could mean when all the glories of man'scivilization were annihilated.

  II

  There came a whirring in my head, and another blank interval; and when Iregained my senses I knew that another period of time had passed,possibly months or even years. I stood on the palisade above the river,near the entrance of the caves; and the sun was bright above me; butthere was no brightness in the men and women that trailed out of a smallcircular hole in the ground. Drab as dock-rats, and pasty pale ofcountenance as hospital inmates, and with bent backs and dirty, tatteredclothes and a mouse-like nosing manner, they emerged with the warinessof hunted refugees; and they flung up their hands with low cries toshield them from the brilliance of the sun, to which they were evidentlyunaccustomed. From the packs on their backs and the bundles in theirhands, I knew that they were emerging from their