 In 1924, to be precise, on the morning of January 3rd, the City of San Francisco awoke to read in one of its daily papers a curious letter, which had been received by Walter Bassett, and which had evidently been written by some crank. Walter Bassett was the greatest captain of industry west of the Rockies, and was one of the small group that controlled the nation in everything but name. As such, he was the recipient of lucubrations from countless cranks. But this particular lucubration was so different from the average rock of similar letters that, instead of putting it into the wastebasket, he had turned it over to a reporter. It was signed Goliah, and the superscription gave his address as Paul Grave Island. The letter was as follows. Mr. Walter Bassett, Dear Sir, I am inviting you, with nine of your fellow captains of industry, to visit me here on my island for the purpose of considering plans for the reconstruction of society upon a more rational basis. Up to the present, social evolution has been a blind, aimless, blundering thing. The time has come for a change. Man has risen from the vitalized slime of the primeval sea to the mastery of matter. But he has not yet mastered society. Man is today, as much the slave to his collective stupidity, as a hundred thousand generations ago he was a slave to matter. There are two theoretical methods whereby man may become the master of society, and make of society an intelligent and efficacious device for the pursuit and capture of happiness and laughter. The first theory advances the proposition that no government can be wiser or better than the people that compose that government. That reform and development must spring from the individual, that insofar as the individuals become wiser and better, by that much will their government become wiser and better, in short that the majority of the individuals must become wiser and better before their government becomes wiser and better. The mob, the political convention, the abysmal brutality and stupid ignorance of all concourses of people give the lie to this theory. In a mob, the collective intelligence and mercy is that of the least intelligent and most brutal members that compose the mob. On the other hand, a thousand passengers will surrender themselves to the wisdom and discretion of the captain when their ship is in a storm on a sea. In such matter he is the wisest and most experienced among them. The second theory advances the proposition that the majority of the people are not pioneers, that they are weighted down by the inertia of the established, that the government that is representative of them represents only their feebleness and futility and brutishness, that this blind thing called government is not the surf of their wills, but that they are the serfs of it. In short, speaking always of the great mass, that they do not make government, but that government makes them, and that government is and has been a stupid and awful monster, misbegotten of the glimmerings of intelligence that come from the inertia-crushed mass. Personally, I inclined to the second theory. Also, I am impatient. For a hundred thousand generations, from the first social groups of our savage forebears, government has remained a monster. Today the inertia-crushed mass has less laughter in it than ever before. In spite of man's mastery of matter, human suffering and misery and degradation mar the fair world. Wherefore I have decided to step in and become captain of this world-ship for a while. I have the intelligence and the wide vision of the skilled expert. Also, I have the power. I shall be obeyed. The men of all the world shall perform my bidding and make governments so that they shall become laughter-producers. These modelled governments I have in mind shall not make the people happy, wise and noble by decree, but they shall give opportunity for the people to become happy, wise and noble. I have spoken. I have invited you and nine of your fellow-captains to confer with me. On March 3rd the yacht Enerjon will sail from San Francisco. You are requested to be on board the night before. This is serious. The affairs of the world must be handled for a time by a strong hand. Mine is that strong hand. If you fail to obey my summons, you will die. Candidly, I do not expect that you will obey, but your death for failure to obey will cause obedience on the part of those I subsequently summon. You will have served a purpose. And please remember that I have no unscientific sentimentality about the value of human life. I carry always in the background of my consciousness the innumerable billions of lives that are to laugh and be happy in future eons on the earth. Yours for the reconstruction of society. Goliath. The publication of this letter did not cause even local amusement. Men might have smiled to themselves as they read it, but it was so palpably the handiwork of a crank that it did not merit discussion. Interest did not arouse till next morning. An associated press dispatch to the eastern states followed by interviews by eager-nosed reporters had brought out the names of the other nine captains of industry who had received similar letters, but who had not thought the matter of sufficient importance to be made public. But the interest aroused was mild, and it would have died out quickly, had not Gabberton cartooned a chronic presidential aspirant as Goliath. Then came the song that was sung hilariously from sea to sea with the refrain, Goliath will catch you if you don't watch out. The weeks passed and the incident was forgotten. Walter Bassett had forgotten it likewise, but on the evening of February 22 he was called to the telephone by the collector of the port. I just want to tell you, said the latter, that the yacht Energon has arrived and gone to anchor in the stream off Pier 7. What happened that night Walter Bassett has never divulged, but it is known that he rode down in his auto to the waterfront, chartered one of Crowley's launches, and was put aboard the strange yacht. It is further known that when he returned to the shore three hours later, he immediately dispatched a sheaf of telegrams to his nine fellow captains of industry who had received letters from Goliath. These telegrams were similarly worded and read, The Yacht Energon has arrived. There is something in this. I advise you to come. Bassett was laughed at for his pains. It was a huge laugh that went up, for his telegrams had been made public, and the popular song on Goliath revived and became more popular than ever. Goliath and Bassett were cartooned and lampooned unmercifully. The former as the old man of the sea, riding on the latter's neck. The laugh tittered and rippled through clubs and social circles, was restrained merrily in the editorial columns, and broke out in loud guffaws in the comic weeklies. There was a serious side as well, and Bassett's sanity was gravely questioned by many, and especially by his business associates. Bassett had never been a short-tempered man, and after he sent the second sheaf of telegrams to his brother captains and had been laughed at again, he remained silent. In this second sheaf he had said, Come, I implore you, as you value your life, come. He arranged all his business affairs for an absence, and on the night of March 2nd went on board the Energon. The latter, properly cleared, sailed next morning, and next morning the newsboys in every city and town were crying extra. In the slang of the day Goliath had delivered the goods. The nine captains of industry who had failed to accept his invitation were dead. A sort of violent disintegration of the tissues was the report of the various autopsies held on the bodies of the slain millionaires. Yet the surgeons and physicians, the most highly skilled in the land had participated, would not venture the opinion that the men had been slain. Much less would they venture the conclusion at the hands of parties unknown. It was all too mysterious. They were stunned. Their scientific credulity broke down. They had no warrant in the whole domain of science for believing that an anonymous person on Pahlgrave Island had murdered the poor gentlemen. One thing was quickly learned, however, namely that Pahlgrave Island was no myth. It was charted and well known to all navigators, lying on the line of 160 west longitude, right at its intersection by the 10th parallel north latitude, and only a few miles away from Diana Shoal. Like Midway and Fanning, Pahlgrave Island was isolated, volcanic, and coral in formation. Furthermore, it was uninhabited. A survey ship in 1887 had visited the place and reported the existence of several springs and of a good harbor that was very dangerous of approach. And that was all that was known of the tiny speck of land that was soon to have focused on it the odd attention of the world. Goliath remained silent until March 24. On the morning of that day, the newspapers published his second letter, copies of which had been received by the 10 chief politicians of the United States, 10 leading men in the political world who were conventionally known as statesmen. The letter, with the same superscription as before, was as follows. Dear sir, I have spoken in no uncertain tone. I must be obeyed. You may consider this an invitation or a summons, but if you still wish to tread this earth and laugh, you will be aboard the odd Energon in San Francisco Harbor, not later than the evening of April 5. It is my wish and my will that you confer with me here on Pahlgrave Island in the matter of reconstructing society upon some rational basis. Do not misunderstand me when I tell you that I am one with a theory. I want to see that theory work, and therefore I call upon your cooperation. In this theory of mine, lives are but pawns. I deal with quantities of lives. I am after laughter, and those that stand in the way of laughter must perish. The game is big. There are 1500 million human lives today on the planet. What is your single life against them? It is as not in my theory. And remember that mine is the power. Remember that I am a scientist, and that one life or one million lives mean nothing to me as a raid against the countless billions of billions of lives of degenerations to come. It is for their laughter that I seek to reconstruct society now, and against them your own meager little life is a paltry thing indeed. Who so has the power can command his fellows? By virtue of that military device known as the phalanx, Alexander conquered his bit of the world. By virtue of that chemical device gunpowder, Cortez, with his several hundred cutthroats, conquered the empire of the Montezuma's. Now I am in possession of a device that is all my own. In the course of a century, not more than half a dozen fundamental discoveries or inventions are made. I have made such an invention. The possession of it gives me the mastery of the world. I shall use this invention, not for commercial exploitation, but for the good of humanity. For that purpose I want help, willing agents, obedient hands, and I am strong enough to compel the service. I am taking the shortest way, though I am in no hurry. I shall not clutter my speed with haste. The incentive of material gain developed man from the savage to the semi-barbarian he is today. This incentive has been a useful device for the development of the human, but it has now fulfilled its function, and is ready to be cast aside into the scrap-heap of rudimentary vestiges, such as gills in the throat and belief in the divine right of kings. Of course you do not think so, but I do not see that that will prevent you from aiding me to fling the anachronism into the scrap-heap. For I tell you now that the time has come when mere food and shelter and similar sorrid things shall be automatic. As free and easy and involuntary of access as the air, I shall make them automatic. Most of my discovery and the power that discovery gives me, and with food and shelter automatic the incentive of material gain passes away from the world forever. With food and shelter automatic the higher incentives will universally obtain the spiritual, aesthetic, and intellectual incentives that will tend to develop and make beautiful and noble body, mind, and spirit. Then all the world will be dominated by happiness, and laughter, it will be the reign of universal laughter. Yours for that day, Goliath. Still the world would not believe. The ten politicians were at Washington, so that they did not have the opportunity of being convinced that Bassett had had, and not one of them took the trouble to journey to San Francisco to make the opportunity. As for Goliath, he was hailed by the newspapers as another Tom Lawson with a panacea, and there were specialists in mental diseases who, by analysis of Goliath's letters, proved conclusively that he was a lunatic. The yacht, Energon, arrived in the harbor of San Francisco on the afternoon of April 5, and Bassett came ashore. But the Energon did not sail the next day, for not one of the ten summoned politicians had elected to make the journey to Paul Grave Island. The newsboys, however, called extra that day in all the cities. The ten politicians were dead. The yacht, lying peacefully at anchor in the harbor, became the center of excited interest. She was surrounded by a flotilla of launches and rowboats, and many tugs and steamboats ran excursions to her. While the rabble was firmly kept off, the proper authorities and even reporters were permitted to board her. The mayor of San Francisco and the chief of police reported that nothing suspicious was to be seen upon her, and the port authorities announced that her papers were correct and in order in every detail. Many photographs and columns of descriptive matter were run in the newspapers. The crew was reported to be composed principally of Scandinavians, fair-haired blue-eyed Swedes, Norwegians afflicted with the temperamental melancholy of their race, stolid Russian Finns, and a slight sprinkling of Americans in English. It was noted that there was nothing more curial and flyaway about them. They seemed weighty men, oppressed by a sad and stolid bovine sort of integrity. A sober seriousness and enormous certitude characterized all of them. They appeared men without nerves and without fear, as though upheld by some overwhelming power, or carried in the hollow of some superhuman hand. The captain, a sad-eyed strong-featured American, was cartooned in the papers as Gloomy Gus, the pessimistic hero of the comic supplement. Some sea captain recognized the energon as the yacht Skud, once owned by Mary Vale of the New York Yacht Club. With this clue, it was soon ascertained that the Skud had disappeared several years before. The agent who sold her reported the purchaser to be merely another agent, a man he had seen neither before nor since. The yacht had been reconstructed at Duffy's ship yard in New Jersey. The change in her name and registry occurred at that time, and had been legally executed. Then the energon had disappeared in the shroud of mystery. In the meantime, Bassett was going crazy. At least his friends and business associates said so. He kept away from his vast business enterprises and said that he must hold his hands until the other masters of the world could join him in the reconstruction of society. Proof indubitable that Goliath's bee had entered his bonnet. Two reporters he had little to say. He was not at liberty, he said, to relate what he had seen on Paul Grave Island, but he could assure them that the matter was serious, the most serious thing that had ever happened. His final word was that the world was on the verge of a turnover. For good or ill he did not know. But one way or the other, he was absolutely convinced that the turnover was coming. As for business, business could go hang. He had seen things he had, and that was all there was to it. There was a great telegraphing during this period between the local federal officials and the state and war departments at Washington. A secret attempt was made late one afternoon to board the energon and place the captain under arrest. The Attorney General having given the opinion that the captain could be held for the murder of the ten statesmen. The government launch was seen to leave Megsworth and steer for the energon, and that was the last ever scene of the launch and the men on board of it. The government tried to keep the affair hushed up, but the cat was slipped out of the bag by the families of the missing men, and the papers were filled with monstrous versions of the affair. The government now proceeded to extreme measures. The battleship Alaska was ordered to capture the strange yacht, or failing that to sink her. These were secret instructions, but thousands of eyes from the waterfront and from the shipping in the harbor witnessed what happened that afternoon. The battleship got under way and steamed slowly toward the energon. At half a mile distant, the battleship blew up. Simply blew up. That was all. Her shattered frame sinking to the bottom of the bay, a riff-raff of wreckage and a few survivors strewing the surface. Among the survivors was a young lieutenant who had had charge of the wireless on board the Alaska. The reporters got a hold of him first, and he talked. No sooner had the Alaska got under way, he said, than a message was received from the energon. It was in the international code, and it was a warning to the Alaska to come no nearer than half a mile. He had sent the message through the speaking tube immediately to the captain. He did not know anything more, except that the energon twice repeated the message, and that five minutes afterward the explosion occurred. The captain of the Alaska had perished with his ship, and nothing more was to be learned. The energon, however, promptly hoisted anchor and cleared out to sea. A great clamour was raised by the papers. The government was charged with cowardice and vacillation in its dealings with a mere pleasure yacht and a lunatic who called himself Goliah, and immediate and decisive action was demanded. Also, a great cry went up about the loss of life, especially the wanton killing of the ten statesmen. Goliah promptly replied. In fact, so prompt was his reply that the experts in wireless telegraphy announced that, since it was impossible to send wireless messages so great a distance, Goliah was in their very midst and not on Paul Grave Island. Goliah's letter was delivered to the Associated Press by a messenger boy who had been engaged on the street. The letter was as follows. What are a few paltry lives? In your insane wars you destroy millions of lives and think nothing of it. In your fratricidal commercial struggle you kill countless babies, women, and men, and you triumphantly call the shambles individualism. I call it anarchy. I am going to put a stop to your wholesale destruction of human beings. I want laughter, not slaughter. Those of you who stand in the way of laughter will get slaughter. Your government is trying to delude you into believing that the destruction of the Alaska was an accident. Know here and now that it was by my orders that the Alaska was destroyed. In a few short months all battleships on all seas will be destroyed or flung to the scrap heap, and all nations shall disarm. Fortresses shall be dismantled, armies disbanded, and warfare shall cease from the earth. Mine is the power. I am the will of God. The whole world shall be in vacillage to me, but it shall be a vacillage of peace. I am Goliah. Below Paul Grave Island, out of the water, was the headline retort of the newspapers. The government was of the same frame of mind, and the assemblage of fleets began. Walter Bassett broke out in ineffectual protest, but was swiftly silenced by the threat of a lunacy commission. Goliah remained silent. Against Paul Grave Island, five great fleets were hurled. The Asiatic Squadron, the South Pacific Squadron, the North Pacific Squadron, the Caribbean Squadron, and half of the North Atlantic Squadron, the two latter coming through the Panama Canal. I have the honor to report that we cited Paul Grave Island on the evening of April 29th, round the report of Captain Johnson of the battleship North Dakota to the Secretary of the Navy. The Asiatic Squadron was delayed and did not arrive until the morning of April 30. A council of the admirals was held, and it was decided to attack early next morning. The destroyer Swift-7 crept in, unmolested, and reported no war-like preparations on the island. It noted several small merchant steamers in the harbor and the existence of a small village in a hopelessly exposed position that could be swept by our fire. It had been decided that all the vessels should rush in scattered upon the island, opening fire at three miles, and continuing to the edge of the reef, there to retain loose formation and engage. Paul Grave Island repeatedly warned us by wireless in the international code to keep outside the ten-mile limit, but no heed was paid to the warnings. The North Dakota did not take part in the movement of the morning of May 1. This was due to a slight accident of the preceding night that temporarily disabled her steering gear. The morning of May 1 broke clear and calm. There was a slight breeze from the southwest that quickly died away. The North Dakota lay twelve miles off the island. At the signal, the squadrons charged in upon the island from all sides at full speed. Our wireless receiver continued to tick off warnings from the island. The ten mile limit was passed, and nothing happened. I watched through my glasses. At five miles, nothing happened. At four miles, nothing happened. At three miles, the New York, in the lead on our side of the island, opened fire. She fired only one shot. Then she blew up. The rest of the vessels never fired a shot. They began to blow up, everywhere, before our eyes. Several swerved about and started back, but they failed to escape. The destroyer, Dart Thirty, nearly made the ten-mile limit when she blew up. She was the last survivor. No harm came to the North Dakota, and that night, the steering gear being repaired, I gave orders to sail for San Francisco. To say that the United States was stunned is but to expose the inadequacy of language. The whole world was stunned. It confronted that blight of the human brain, the unprecedented. Human endeavor was a jest, a monstrous futility, when a lunatic on a lonely island who owned a yacht and an exposed village could destroy five of the proudest fleets of Christendom. And how had he done it? Nobody knew. The scientists lay down in the dust of the common road and wailed and gibbered. They did not know. Military experts committed suicide by scores. The mighty fabric of warfare they had fashioned was a gossamer veil rent asunder by a miserable lunatic. It was too much for their sanity. Mere human reason could not withstand the shock. As the savages crushed by the sleight of hand of the witch-doctor, so was the world crushed by the magic of Goliath. How did he do it? It was the awful face of the unknown upon which the world gazed, and by which it was frightened out of the memory of its proudest achievements. But all the world was not stunned. There was the invariable exception, the island empire of Japan. Drunken with the wine of success, deep quaffed without superstition and without faith in ought but its own ascendant star, laughing at the wreckage of science and mad with the pride of race. It went forth upon the way of war. America's fleets had been destroyed. From the battlements of heaven the multitudinous ancestral shades of Japan leaned down. The opportunity, God given, had come. The Mikado was in truth a brother to the gods. The war monsters of Japan were loosed in mighty fleets. The Philippines were gathered in as a child gathers a nose-gay. It took longer for the battleships to travel to Hawaii, to Panama, and to the Pacific coast. The United States was panic-stricken, and there arose the powerful party of dishonorable peace. In the midst of the clamor, the Energon arrived in San Francisco Bay, and Goliath spoke once more. There was a little brush as the Energon came in, and a few explosions of magazines occurred along the war-tunneled hills as the coast defenses went to smash. Also the blowing up of the submarine mines in the Golden Gate made a remarkably fine display. Goliath's message to the people of San Francisco, dated as usual from Paul Grave Island, was published in the papers. It ran, Peace, peace be with you. You shall have peace. I have spoken to this purpose before, and give you me peace. Leave my Yad Energon alone. Commit one overt act against her, and not one stone in San Francisco shall stand upon another. Tomorrow, let all good citizens go out upon the hills that slope down to the sea, go with music and laughter and garlands, make festival for the new age that is dawning, be like children upon your hills, and witness the passing of war. Do not miss the opportunity. It is your last chance to behold what henceforth you will be compelled to seek in museums of antiquity. I promise you a merry day. Goliath. The madness of magic was in the air. With the people it was as if all their gods had crashed and the heavens still stood. Order and law had passed away from the universe, but the sun still shone, the wind still blew, the flowers still bloomed. That was the amazing thing about it. That wooder should continue to run downhill was a miracle. All the stabilities of the human mind and human achievement were crumbling. The one stable thing that remained was Goliath, a madman on an island. And so it was that the whole population of San Francisco went forth the next day in colossal frolic upon the hills that overlooked the sea. Brass bands and banners went forth, brewery wagons and Sunday school picnics, all the strange heterogeneous groupings of swarming metropolitan life. On the sea rim rose the smoke from the funnels of a hundred hostile vessels of war, all converging upon the helpless, undefended Golden Gate, and not all undefended. For out through the Golden Gate moved the Energon, a tiny toy of white, rolling like a straw in the stiff sea on the bar where a strong eb tide ran in the teeth of the summer sea breeze. But the Japanese were cautious. Their 30 and 40,000 ton battleships slowed down half a dozen miles off shore and maneuvered into ponderous evolutions, while tiny scalp boats, lean six funneled destroyers ran in, cutting blackly the flashing sea like so many sharks. But compared with the Energon, they were Leviathans. Compared with them, the Energon was as the sword of the Archangel Michael, and they, the forerunners of the hosts of hell. But the flashing of the sword the good people of San Francisco gathered on her hills never saw. Mysterious, invisible, it cleaved the air and smote the mightiest blows of combat the world had ever witnessed. The good people of San Francisco saw little and understood less. They saw only a million and a half tons of brine-cleaving, thunder-flinging fabrics hurled skyward and smashed back in ruin to sink into the sea. It was all over in five minutes. Remained upon the wide expanse of sea, only the Energon, rolling white and toy-like on the bar. Goliath spoke to the Mikado and the elder statesmen. It was only an ordinary cable message dispatched from San Francisco by the captain of the Energon. But it was a sufficient moment to cause the immediate withdrawal of Japan from the Philippines and of her surviving fleets from the sea. Japan, the skeptical, was converted. She had felt the weight of Goliath's arm, and meekly she obeyed when Goliath commanded her to dismantle her war vessels and to turn the metal into useful appliances for the arts of peace. In all the ports, navy yards, machine shops, and foundries of Japan, tens of thousands of brown-skinned artisans converted the war monsters into myriads of useful things, such as plowshares. Goliath insisted on plowshares. Gasoline engines, bridge trusses, telephone and telegraph wires, steel rails, locomotives, and rolling stock for railways. It was a world penance for a world to see, and paltry indeed it may appear that earlier penance barefooted in the snow of an emperor to a pope for daring to squabble over temporal power. Goliath's next summons was to the ten leading scientists of the United States. This time there was no hesitancy in obeying. The savants were ludicrously prompt, some of them waiting in San Francisco for weeks so as not to miss the scheduled sailing date. They departed on the Energon on June 15th, and while they were on the sea, on the way to Paul Grave Island, Goliath performed another spectacular feat. Germany and France were preparing to fly at each other's throats. Goliath commanded peace. They ignored the command, tacitly agreeing to fight it out on land where it seemed safer for the belligerently inclined. Goliath set the date of June 19th for the cessation of hostile preparations. Both countries mobilized their armies on June 18th and hurled them at the common frontier. And on June 19th Goliath struck. All generals, war secretaries, and jingo leaders in the two countries died on that day, and that day two vast armies, undirected, like strayed sheep, walked over each other's frontiers and fraternized. But the great German warlord had escaped. It was learned afterward by hiding in a huge safe where were stored the secret archives of his empire, and when he emerged he was a very pentiant warlord, and like the Mikado of Japan he was set to work beating his sword blades into plowshares and pruning hooks. But in the escape of the German Emperor was discovered a great significance. The scientists of the world plucked up courage, got back their nerve. One thing was conclusively evident. Goliath's power was not magic. Law still reigned in the universe. Goliath's power had limitations. Else had the German Emperor not escaped by secretly hiding in a steel safe. Many learned articles on the subject appeared in the magazines. The ten top scientists arrived back from Paul Grave Island on July 6. Heavy platoons of police protected them from the reporters. No, they had not seen Goliath, they said, in the one official interview that was vouchsafed. But they had talked with him, and they had seen things. They were not permitted to state definitely all that they had seen and heard. But they could say that the world was about to be revolutionized. Goliath was in the possession of a tremendous discovery that placed all the world at his mercy, and it was a good thing for the world that Goliath was merciful. The ten scientists proceeded directly to Washington on a special train, where for days they were closeted with the heads of government while the nation hung breathless on the outcome. But the outcome was a long time in arriving. From Washington the president issued commands to the masters and leading figures of the nation. Everything was secret. Day by day deputations of bankers, railway lords, captains of industry, and Supreme Court justices arrived, and when they arrived, they remained. The weeks dragged on, and then on. August 25 began the famous issuance of proclamations. Congress and the Senate cooperated with the president in this, while the Supreme Court justices gave their sanction, and the money lords and captains of industry agreed. War was declared upon the capitalist masters of the nation. Martial law was declared over the whole United States, and the supreme power was vested in the president. In one day, child labor in the whole country was abolished. It was done by decree, and the United States was prepared with its army to enforce its decree. In the same day, all women factory workers were dismissed to their homes, and all the sweatshops were closed. But we cannot make profits, wailed the petty capitalists. Fools was the retort of Goliath, as if the meaning of life were profits. Give up your businesses and your profit-mongering. But there is nobody to buy our business, they wailed. Buy and sell. Is that all the meaning life has for you, replied Goliath? You have nothing to sell. Turn over your little cutthroating anarchistic businesses to the government so that they may be rationally organized and operated. And the next day, by decree, the government began taking possession of all factories, shops, mines, ships, railroads, and producing lands. The nationalization of the means of production and distribution went on apace. Here and there were skeptical capitalists of the moment. They were made prisoners and hauled to Paul Grave Island, and when they returned they always acquiesced in what the government was doing. A little later the journey to Paul Grave Island became unnecessary. When objection was made, the reply of the officials was, Goliath has spoken, which was another way of saying, he must be obeyed. The captains of industry became heads of departments. It was found that civil engineers, for instance, worked just as well in government employ as before they had worked in private employ. It was found that men of high executive ability could not violate their nature. They could not escape exercising their executive ability any more than a crab could escape crawling, or a bird could escape flying. And so it was that all the splendid force of the men who had previously worked for themselves was now put to work for the good of society. The half-dozen great railway chiefs cooperated in the organizing of a national system of railways that was amazingly efficacious. Never again was there such a thing as a car shortage. These chiefs were not the Wall Street railway magnets, but they were the men who formerly had done the real work while in the employ of the Wall Street magnets. Wall Street was dead. There was no more buying and selling and speculating. Nobody had anything to buy or sell. There was nothing in which to speculate. But the stock gamblers to work, said Goliath, give those that are young and that so desire a chance to learn useful trades. Put the drummers and salesmen and advertising agents and real estate agents to work, said Goliath. And by the hundreds of thousands the erstwhile useless middlemen in parasites went into useful occupations. The four hundred thousand idle gentlemen of the country who had lived upon incomes were likewise put to work. Then there were a lot of helpless men in high places who were cleared out. The remarkable thing about this being that they were cleared out by their own fellows. Of this class were the professional politicians whose wisdom and power consisted of manipulating machine politics and of grafting. There was no longer any graft since there were no private interests to purchase special privileges. No bribes were offered to legislators and legislators for the first time legislated for the people. The result was that men who were efficient not in corruption but in direction found their way into the legislatures. With this rational organization of society amazing results were brought about. The national day's work was eight hours and yet production increased. In spite of the great permanent improvements and of the immense amount of energy consumed in systematizing the competitive chaos of society, production doubled and tripled upon itself. The standard of living increased and still consumption could not keep up with production. The maximum working age was decreased to fifty years, to forty-nine years, and to forty-eight years. The minimum working age went up from sixteen years to eighteen years. The eight-hour day became a seven-hour day, and in a few months the national working day was reduced to five hours. In the meantime, glimmerings were being caught, not of the identity of Goliath, but of how he had worked and prepared for his assuming control of the world. Little things leaked out, clues were followed up, apparently unrelated things were pieced together. Strange stories of blacks stolen from Africa were remembered, of Chinese and Japanese contract coolies who had mysteriously disappeared, of lonely South Sea islands raided and their inhabitants carried away. Stories of yachts and merchant steamers mysteriously purchased that had disappeared and their descriptions of which remotely tallied with the crafts that had carried the orientals and Africans and islanders away. Where had Goliath got the sinews of war was the question, and the surmised answer was, by exploiting these stolen laborers, it was they that lived in the exposed village on Paul Grave Island. It was the product of their toil that had purchased the yachts and merchant steamers and enabled Goliath's agents to permeate society and carry out his will. And what was the product of their toil that had given Goliath the wealth necessary to realize his plans? Commercial radium, the newspapers proclaimed, and radiate, and radiosoul, and argadium, and argite, and the mysterious go-light that had proved so valuable in metallurgy. These were the new compounds discovered in the first decade of the 20th century, the commercial and scientific use of which had become so enormous in the second decade. The line of fruit boats that ran from Hawaii to San Francisco was declared to be the property of Goliath. This was surmise for no other owners could be discovered, and the agents who had handled the shipments of the fruit boats were only agents. Since no one else owned the fruit boats, then Goliath must own them. The point of which is that it leaked out that the major portion of the world's supply in these precious compounds was brought to San Francisco by those very fruit boats. That the whole chain of surmise was correct was proved in later years when Goliath's slaves were liberated and honorably pensioned by the international government of the world. It was at that time that the seal of secrecy was lifted from the lips of his agents in higher emissaries and those that chose revealed much of the mystery of Goliath's organization and methods. His destroying angels, however, remained forever dumb. Who the men were who went forth to the high places and killed at his bidding will be unknown to the end of time, for kill they did, by means of that very subtle and then mysterious force that Goliath had discovered and named Energon. But at that time Energon, the little giant that was destined to do the work of the world, was unknown and undreamed of. Only Goliath knew and he kept his secret well. Even his agents who were armed with it and who, in the case of the yacht, Energon destroyed a mighty fleet of warships by exploding their magazines, knew not what the subtle and potent force was, nor how it was manufactured. They knew only one of its many uses and in that one use they had been instructed by Goliath. It is now well known that radium and radiate and radiosoul and all the other compounds were byproducts of the manufacturer of Energon by Goliath from the sunlight. But at that time nobody knew what Energon was and Goliath continued to awe and rule the world. One of the uses of Energon was in wireless telegraphy. It was by its means that Goliath was able to communicate with his agents all over the world. At that time the apparatus required by an agent was so clumsy that it could not be packed in anything less than a fair-sized steamer trunk. Today, thanks to the improvements of Hensal, the perfected apparatus can be carried in a coat pocket. It was in December 1924 that Goliath sent out his famous Christmas letter, part of the text of which is given here. So far, while I have kept the rest of the nations from each other's throats, I have devoted myself particularly to the United States. Now I have not given to the people of the United States a rational social organization. What I have done has been to compel them to make that organization for themselves. There is more laughter in the United States these days and there is more sense. Food and shelter are no longer obtained by the anarchistic methods of so-called individualism, but are now well nigh automatic. And the beauty of it is that the people of the United States have achieved all this for themselves. I did not achieve it for them. I repeat, they achieved it for themselves. All that I did was to put the fear of death in the hearts of the few that sat in the high places and obstructed the coming of rationality and laughter. The fear of death made those in the high places get out of the way. That was all, and gave the intelligence of man a chance to realize itself socially. In the year that is to come I shall devote myself to the rest of the world. I shall put the fear of death in the hearts of all that sit in the high places in all the nations, and they will do as they have done in the United States, get down out of the high places and give the intelligence of man a chance for social rationality. All the nations shall tread the path the United States is now on. And when all the nations are well along that path, I shall have something else for them, but first they must travel that path for themselves. They must demonstrate that the intelligence of mankind today, with the mechanical energy now at its disposal, is capable of organizing society so that food and shelter be made automatic, labor be reduced to a three-hour day, and joy and laughter be made universal. And when that is accomplished, not by me, but by the intelligence of mankind, then I shall make a present to the world of a new mechanical energy. This is my discovery. This energon is nothing more or less than the cosmic energy that resides in the solar rays. When it is harnessed by mankind, it will do the work of the world. There will be no more multitudes of miners slaving out their lives in the bowels of the earth. No more sooty firemen and greasy engineers. All may dress in white if they so will. The work of life will have become play, and young and old will be the children of joy, and the business of living will become joy, and they will compete with one another in achieving ethical concepts and spiritual heights in fashioning pictures and songs and stories in statecraft and beautycraft. In the sweat and the endeavor of the wrestler and the runner and the player of games, all will compete, not for sorrid coin and base material reward, but for the joy that shall be theirs in the development and vigor of flesh, and in the development and keenness of spirit. All will be joy smiths, and their task shall be to beat out laughter from the ringing anvil of life. And now one word for the immediate future. On New Year's Day, all nations shall disarm, all fortresses and warships shall be dismantled, and all armies shall be disbanded. Goliath. On New Year's Day, all the world disarmed. The millions of soldiers and sailors and workmen in the standing armies, in the natives, and in the countless arsenals, machine shops, and factories for the manufacturer of war machinery were dismissed to their homes. These many millions of men, as well as their costly war machinery, had hitherto been supported on the back of labor. They now went into useful occupations, and the released labor giant heaved a mighty sigh of relief. The policing of the world was left to the peace officers, and was purely social, whereas war had been distinctly anti-social. Ninety percent of the crimes against society had been crimes against private property. With the passing of private property, at least in the means of production and with the organization of industry that gave every man a chance, the crimes against private property practically ceased. The police forces everywhere were reduced repeatedly, and again and again. Nearly all occasional and habitual criminals ceased voluntarily from their depredations. There was no longer any need for them to commit crime. They merely changed with changing conditions. A smaller number of criminals was put into hospitals and cured, and the remnant of the hopelessly criminal and degenerate was segregated. And the courts in all countries were likewise decreased in number again and again. Ninety-five percent of all civil cases had been squabbles over property, conflicts of property rights, lawsuits, contests of wills, breaches of contract, bankruptcies, etc. With the passing of private property, this ninety-five percent of the cases that cluttered the courts also passed. The courts became shadows, attenuated ghosts, rudimentary vestiges of the anarchistic times that had preceded the coming of Goliah. The year nineteen-twenty-five was a lively year in the world's history. Goliah ruled the world with a strong hand. Kings and emperors journeyed to Paul Grave Island, saw the wonders of Energon, and went away with the fear of death in their hearts to abdicate thrones and crowns and hereditary licenses. When Goliah spoke to politicians, so called statesmen, they obeyed or died. He dictated universal reforms, dissolved refractory parliaments, and to the great conspiracy that was formed of munitious money lords and captains of industry, he sent his destroying angels. The time has passed for fooling, he told them. You are anachronisms. You stand in the way of humanity, to the scrap heap with you. To those that protested, and they were many, he said, This is no time for logomarchy. You can argue for centuries. It is what you have done in the past. I have no time for argument. Get out of the way! With the exception of putting a stop to war and of indicating the broad general plan, Goliah did nothing. By putting the fear of death into the hearts of those that sat in the high places in obstructed progress, Goliah made the opportunity for the unshackled intelligence of the best social thinkers of the world to exert itself. Goliah left all the multitudinous details of reconstruction to these social thinkers. He wanted them to prove that they were able to do it, and they proved it. It was due to their initiative that the white plague was stamped out from the world. It was due to them and in spite of a deal of protesting from the sentimentalists, that all the extreme hereditary inefficence were segregated and denied marriage. Goliah had nothing whatever to do with the instituting of the colleges of invention. This idea originated practically simultaneously in the minds of thousands of social thinkers. The time was ripe for the realization of the idea, and everywhere arose the splendid institutions of invention. For the first time, the ingenuity of man was loosed upon the problem of simplifying life instead of upon the making of money-earning devices. The affairs of life such as house cleaning, dish and window washing, dust removing and scrubbing and clothes washing, and all the endless soared and necessary details were simplified by invention until they became automatic. We of today cannot realize the barbarously filthy and slavish lives of those that lived prior to 1925. The international government of the world was another idea that sprang simultaneously into the minds of thousands. The successful realization of this idea was a surprise to many, but as a surprise it was nothing that received by the mildly protestant sociologists and biologists when irrefutable facts exploded the doctrine of Malthus. With leisure and joy in the world, with an immensely higher standard of living, and with the enormous spaciousness of opportunity for recreation, development, and pursuit of beauty and nobility and all the higher attributes, the birth rate fell, and fell astoundingly. People ceased breeding like cattle, and better than that, it was immediately noticeable that a higher average of children was being born. The doctrine of Malthus was knocked into a cocked hat, or flung to the scrap heap, as Goliah would have put it. All that Goliah had predicted that the intelligence of mankind could accomplish with the mechanical energy at its disposal came to pass. Human dissatisfaction practically disappeared. The elderly people were the great grumblers, but when they were honorably penchant by society as they passed the age of limit for work, the great majority ceased grumbling. They found themselves better off in their idle old days under the new regime, enjoying vastly more pleasure and comforts than they had in their busy and toilsome youth under the old regime. The younger generation had easily adapted itself to the changed order, and the very young had never known anything else. The sum of human happiness had increased enormously. The world had become gay and sane. Even the old fogies of professors of sociology who had opposed with might and main the coming of the new regime made no complaint. They were a score of times better remunerated than in old days, and they were not worked nearly so hard. Besides, they were busy revising sociology and writing new textbooks on the subject. Here and there it is true there were adivisms, men who yearned for the flesh-pots and cannibal feasts of the old alleged individualism, creatures long of teeth and savage of claw who wanted to prey upon their fellow men. But they were looked upon as diseased and were treated in hospitals. A small remnant, however, proved incurable and was confined in a silence and denied marriage. Thus there was no progeny to inherit their atavistic tendencies. As the years went by, Goliah dropped out of running the world. There was nothing for him to run. The world was running itself and doing it smoothly and beautifully. In 1937, Goliah made his long-promised present of energon to the world. He himself had devised a thousand ways in which the little giant could do the work of the world, all of which he made public at the same time. But instantly the colleges of invention seized upon energon and utilized it in a hundred thousand additional ways. In fact, as Goliah confessed in his letter of March 1938, the colleges of invention cleared up several puzzling features of energon that had baffled him during the preceding years. With the introduction of the use of energon, the two-hour work day was cut down almost to nothing. As Goliah had predicted, work indeed became play, and so tremendous was man's productive capacity due to energon and the rational social utilization of it, that the humblest citizen enjoyed leisure and time and opportunity for an immensely greater abundance of living than had the most favored under the old anarchistic system. Nobody had ever seen Goliah, and all the peoples began to clamor for their savior to appear. While the world did not minimize his discovery of energon, it was decided that greater than that was his wide social vision. He was a superman, a scientific superman, and the curiosity of the world to see him had become well-nigh unbearable. It was 1941, after much hesitancy on his part, that he finally emerged from Paul Grave Island. He arrived on June 6 in San Francisco, and for the first time since his retirement to Paul Grave Island, the world looked upon his face, and the world was disappointed. Its imagination had been touched, a heroic figure had been made out of Goliah. He was the man or the demigod, rather, who had turned the planet over. The deeds of Alexander, Caesar, Genghis Khan, and Napoleon were as the play of babies alongside his colossal achievements. And ashore in San Francisco and through its streets stepped and rode a little old man, sixty-five years of age, well preserved with a pink and white complexion and a bald spot on his head the size of an apple. He was short-sighted and wore spectacles. But when the spectacles were removed, his were quizzical blue eyes like a child's filled with mild wonder at the world. Also, his eyes had a way of twinkling, accompanied by a screwing up of the face, as if he laughed at the huge joke he had played upon the world, trapping it, in spite of itself, into happiness and laughter. For a scientific superman and a world tyrant, he had remarkable weaknesses. He loved sweets, and he was inordinately fond of salted almonds and salted pecans, especially the latter. He always carried a paper bag of them in his pocket, and he had a way of saying frequently that the chemism of his nature demanded such fare. Perhaps his most astonishing failing was cats. He had an ineradicable aversion to that domestic animal. It will be remembered that he fainted dead away with sudden fright while speaking in Brotherhood Palace, when the janitor's cat walked out upon the stage and brushed against his legs. But no sooner had he revealed himself to the world than he was identified. Old-time friends had no difficulty in recognizing him as Percival Stoltz, the German-American who in 1898 had worked in the Union ironworks, and who for two years at that time had been Secretary of Branch 369 of the International Brotherhood of Machinists. It was in 1901, then twenty-five years of age, that he had taken special scientific courses at the University of California, at the same time supporting himself by soliciting what was then known as Life Insurance. His records as a student are preserved in the University Museum, and they are unenviable. He is remembered by the professors he sat under chiefly for his absent-mindedness. Undoubtedly even then he was catching glimpses of the wide visions that later were to be his. His naming himself Goliah and shrouding himself in mystery was his little joke as he later explained. As Goliah, or any other thing like that, he said, he was able to touch the imagination of the world and turn it over. But as Percival Stoltz, wearing side-whiskers and spectacles and weighing 118 pounds, he would have been unable to turn over a pecan, not even a salted pecan. But the world quickly got over its disappointment in his personal appearance and antecedents. It knew him and revered him as the mastermind of the ages, and it loved him for himself, for his quizzical short-sighted eyes and the inimitable way in which he screwed up his face when he laughed. It loved him for his simplicity in comradeship and warm humanness, and for his fondness for salted pecans and the aversion to cats, and today, in the wonder-city of Asgard, rises in awful beauty that monument to him that dwarfs the pyramids and all the monstrous blood-stained monuments of antiquity. And on that monument, as all know, is inscribed in imperishable bronze, the prophecy, and the fulfillment. All will be joy-smiths, and their task shall be to beat out laughter from the ringing anvil of life. Editorial note. This remarkable production is the work of Harry Beckwith, a student in the Lowell High School of San Francisco, and it is here reproduced chiefly because of the youth of its author. Far be it from our policy to burden our readers with ancient history, and when it is known that Harry Beckwith was only fifteen when the foregoing was written, our motives will be understood. Goliath won the premiere for high school composition in 2254, and last year Harry Beckwith took advantage of the privilege earned by electing to spend six months in Asgard. The wealth of historical detail, the atmosphere of the times, and the mature style of the composition are especially noteworthy in one so young. End of Goliath by Jack London The Man Who Saw the Future by Edmund Hamilton This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Reading by Greg Marguerite The Man Who Saw the Future by Edmund Hamilton Jean de Marseille, inquisitor extraordinary of the king of France, raised his head from the parchment that littered the crude desk at which he sat. His glance shifted along the long stone-walled torch-lit room to the file of male clad soldiers who stood like steel statues by its door. A word from him and two of them sprang forward. You may bring in the prisoner, he said. The two disappeared through the door, and in moments there came a clang of opening bolts and grating of heavy hinges from somewhere in the building. Then the clang of the returning soldiers, and they entered the room with another man between them, whose hands were fettered. He was a straight figure, and was dressed in drab tunic and hose. His dark hair was long and straight, and his face held a dreaming strength altogether different from the battered visages of the soldiers or the changeless mask of the inquisitor. The latter regarded the prisoner for a moment, and then lifted one of the parchment from before him, and read from it in a smooth, clear voice. Henri Lothier, Apocatherie's assistant of Paris, he read, is charged in this year of our Lord one thousand four hundred and forty-four with offending against God and the king by committing the crime of sorcery. The prisoner spoke for the first time, his voice low but steady. I am no sorcerer, sire. Jean de Marseille read calmly on from the parchment. It has been stated by many witnesses that, for long, that part of Paris called Nanly by some, has been troubled by works of the devil. Ever and anon great collapse of thunder have been heard issuing from an open field there without visible cause. They were evidently caused by a sorcerer of power, since even exorcists could not halt them. It is attested by many that the accused, Henri Lothier, did in spite of the known diabolical nature of the thing, spend much time at the field in question. It is also attested that the said Henri Lothier did state that in his opinion the thunderclaps were not of diabolical origin, and that if they were studied their cause might be discovered. It being suspected from this that Henri Lothier was himself the sorcerer causing the thunderclaps, he was watched, and on the third day of June was seen to go in the early morning to the unholy spot with certain instruments. There he was observed going through strange and diabolical conjurations, when there came suddenly another thunderclap, and the said Henri Lothier did vanish entirely from view in that moment. This fact is attested beyond all doubt. The news spreading, many hundreds watched around the field during that day. Upon that night, before midnight, another thunderclap was heard, and the said Henri Lothier was seen by these hundreds to appear at the field center as swiftly and as strangely as he had vanished. The fear-stricken hundreds around the field heard him tell them how by diabolical power he had gone for hundreds of years into the future—a thing surely possible only to the devil and his minions, and heard him tell other blasphemies before they seized him and brought him to the inquisitor of the king, praying that he be burned and his work of sorcery thus halted. Therefore, Henri Lothier, since you were seen to vanish and to reappear as only the servants of the evil one might do, and were heard by many to utter the blasphemies mentioned, I must adjudge you a sorcerer with the penalty of death by fire. If anything there be that you can advance in palliation of your black offence, however, you may now do so before final sentences passed upon you. Jean de Marseille laid down the parchment and raised his eyes to the prisoner. The latter looked round him quickly for a moment, a half-glimpse panic for an instant in his eyes, then seemed to steady. Sire, I cannot change the sentence you will pass upon me, he said quietly. Yet do I wish well to relate once what happened to me and what I saw. Is it permitted me to tell that from first to last? The inquisitor's head bent, and Henri Lothier spoke. His voice gaining in strength and fervor as he continued. Sire, I, Henri Lothier, am no sorcerer but a simple apocrytheres assistant. It was always my nature, from earliest youth to desire to delve into matters unknown to men, the secrets of the earth and sea and sky, the knowledge hidden from us. I knew well that this was wicked, that the church teaches all we need to know, and that heaven frowns when we pry into its mysteries. But so strong was my desire to know that many times I concerned myself with matters forbidden. I had sought to know the nature of the lightning, and the manner of flight of the birds, and the way in which fishes are able to live beneath the waters and the mystery of the stars. So when these thunderclaps began to be heard in the parts of Paris in which I lived, I did not fear them so much as my neighbors. I was eager to learn only what was causing them, for it seemed to me that their cause might be learned. So I began to go to that field from which they issued, to study them. I waited in it, and twice I heard the great thunderclaps myself. I thought they came from near the field's center, and I studied that place, but I could see nothing there that was causing them. I dug in the ground. I looked up for hours into the sky, but there was nothing. And still, at intervals, the thunderclaps sounded. I still kept going to the field, though I knew that many of my neighbors whispered that I was engaged in sorcery. Upon that morning of the third day of June, it had occurred to me to take certain instruments, such as lodestones to the field, to see whether anything might be learned with them. I went, a few superstitious ones following me at a distance. I reached the field's center, and started the examinations I had planned. Then came suddenly another thunderclap, and with it I passed from the sight of those who had followed and were watching, vanished from view. Sire, I cannot well describe what happened in that moment. I heard the thunderclap come as though from all the air around me, stunning my ears with its terrible burst of sound. And at the same moment that I heard it, I was buffeted as though by awful winds and seemed falling downward through terrific depths. Then through the hellish uproar I felt myself bumping upon a hard surface, and the sounds quickly ceased from about me. I had involuntarily closed my eyes at the great thunderclap, but now slowly I opened them. I looked around me, first in stoop of faction, and then in growing amazement, for I was not in that familiar field at all, Sire, that I had been in a moment before. I was in a room lying upon its floor, and it was such a room as I had never seen before. Its walls were smooth and white and gleaming. There were windows in the walls, and they were closed with sheets of glass so smooth and clear that one seemed looking through a clear opening rather than through glass. The floor was of stone, smooth and seamless as though carbon from one great rock, yet seeming not in some way to be stone at all. There was a great circle of smooth metal inset in it, and it was on it that I was lying. All around the room were many great things the like of which I had never seen. Some seemed of black metal, seemed contrivances or machines of some sort, black cords of wire connecting them to each other, and from part of them came a humming sound that did not stop. Others had glass tubes fixed on the front of them, and there were square black plates on which were many shining little handles and buttons. There was a sound of voices, and I turned to find that two men were bending over me. They were men like myself, yet they were at the same time like no men I had ever met. One was white-bearded and the other plump and bare of face. Neither of them wore cloak or tunic or hose. Instead they wore loose and straight-hanging garments of cloth. They were both greatly excited, it seemed, and were talking to each other as they bent over me. I caught a word or two of their speech in a moment, and found it was French they were talking, but it was not the French I knew being so strange and with so many new words as to be almost a different language. I could understand the drift, though, of what they were saying. We have succeeded. The plump one was shouting excitedly. We brought someone through at last. They will never believe it the other replied. They'll say it was faked. Nonsense cried the first. We can do it again, Raston. We can show them before their own eyes. They bent toward me, seeing me staring at them. Where are you from? shouted the plump-faced one. What time, what year, what century? He doesn't understand, Theorcor, muttered the white-bearded one. What year is it now, my friend? he asked me. I found voice to answer. Surely, sirs, whoever you be, you know that this is the year 1444, I said. That set them off again into a babble of excited talk of which I could make out only a word here and there. They lifted me up, seeing how sick and weak I felt, and seated me in a strange, but very comfortable chair. I felt dazed. The two were still talking excitedly, but finally the white-bearded one, Raston, turned to me. He spoke to me very slowly so that I understood him clearly, and he asked me my name, and I told him. Henri Lothierre, he repeated. Well, Henri, you must try to understand. You are not now in the year 1444. You are five hundred years in the future, or what would seem to you the future. This is the year 1944. And Raston and I have jerked you out of your own time across five solid centuries, said the other grinning. I looked from one to the other. Missus, I pleaded, and Raston shook his head. He does not believe, he said to the other, than to me. Where were you just before you found yourself here, Henri, he asked? In a field at the outskirts of Paris, I said. Well, look from that window and see if you still believe yourself in your fifteenth-century Paris. I went to the window and looked out. Mother of God! What a sight before my eyes! The familiar gray little houses, the open fields behind them, the saunters in the dirt streets. All these were gone. It was a new and terrible city that lay about me. Its broad streets were of stone, and great buildings of many levels rose on either side of them. Great numbers of people dressed like the two beside me moved in the streets, and also strange vehicles or carriages, undrawn by horse or ox, that rushed to and fro, and undreamed of speed. I staggered back to the chair. You believe now, Henri, asked the white-beard Raston kindly enough, and I nodded meekly. My brain was whirling. He pointed to the circle of metal on the floor and the machines around the room. Those are what we use to jerk you from your own time to this one, he said. But how, sirs, I asked, for the love of God, how is it that you can take me from one time to another? Have ye become gods or devils? Neither one nor the other, Henri, he answered. We are simply scientists, physicists, men who want to know as much as man can know and who spend our lives in seeking knowledge. I felt my confidence returning. These were men such as I had dreamed might some day be. But what can you do with time, I asked? Is not time a thing unalterable, unchanging? Both shook their heads. No, Henri, it is not. But lately have our men of science found that out. They went on to tell me things that I could not understand. It seemed they were telling me that their men of knowledge had found time to be a mere measurement or dimension, just as length or breadth or thickness. They mentioned names with reverence that I had never heard, Einstein, De Sitter, and Lorenz. I was in a maze at their words. They said that just as men used force to move or rotate matter from one point along the three known measurements to another, so might matter be rotated from one point in time, the fourth measurement, to another if the right force were used. They said that their machines produced that force and applied it to the metal circle from 500 years before to this time of theirs. They had tried it many times, they said, but nothing had been on the spot at that time and they had rotated nothing but the air above it from the one time to the other and the reverse. I told them of the thunderclaps that had been heard at the spot in the field and that had made me curious. They said that they had been caused by the changing of the air above the spot from one time to the other in their trials. I could not understand these things. They said then that I had happened to be on the spot when they had again turned on their force and so had been rotated out of my own time into theirs. They said that they had always hoped to get someone living from a distant time in that way, since such a man would be a proof to all other men of knowledge of what they had been able to do. I could not comprehend and they saw and told me not to fear. I was not fearful but excited at the things that I saw around me. I asked of those things and Raston and Fikour laughed and explained some of them to me as best they could. Much they said that I did not understand, but my eyes saw marvels in that room of which I had never dreamed. They showed me a thing like a small glass bottle with wires inside and then told me to touch a button beneath it. I did so, and the bottle shone with a brilliant light exceeding that of scores of candles. I shrank back, but they laughed, and when Raston touched the button again, the light in the glass thing vanished. I saw that there were many of these things in the ceiling. They showed me also a rounded black object of metal with a wheel at the end. A belt ran around the wheel and around smaller wheels connected to many machines. They touched a lever on this object, and a sound of humming came from it, and the wheel turned very fast, turning all the machines with the belt. It turned faster than any man could ever have turned it, yet when they touched the lever again, its turning ceased. They said that it was the power of the lightning in the skies that they used to make the light and to turn that wheel. My brain reeled at the wonders that they showed. One took an instrument from the table that he held to his face, saying that he would summon the other scientists or men of knowledge to see their experiment that night. He spoke into the instrument as though to different men, and let me hear voices from it answering him. They said that the men who answered were leagues separated from him. I could not believe, and yet somehow I did believe. I was half dazed with wonder and yet excited too. The white-bearded man Raston saw that and encouraged me. Then they brought a small box with an opening and placed a black disc on the box and set it turning in some way. A woman's voice came from the opening of the box, singing. I shuddered when they told me that the woman was one who had died years before. Could the dead speak thus? How can I describe what I saw there? Another box or cabinet there was, with an opening also. I thought it was like that from which I had heard the dead woman singing, but they said it was different. They touched buttons on it, and a voice came from it speaking in a tongue I knew not. They said that the man was speaking thousands of leagues from us in a strange land across the uncrossed western ocean, yet he seemed speaking by my side. They saw how dazed I was by these things and gave me wine. At that I took heart, for wine at least was as it had always been. You will want to see Paris, the Paris of our time, Omri, asked Raston. But it is different and terrible, I said. We'll take you, the court said, but first your clothes. He got a long light coat that they had me put on that covered my tunic and hose, and a hat of grotesque round shape that they put on my head. They led me then out of the building and onto the street. I gazed astoundingly along the street. It had a raised walk at either side on which many hundreds of people moved to and fro, all dressed in as strange a fashion. Many like Raston and Thicor seemed of gentle blood, yet in spite of this they did not wear a sword or even a dagger. There were no knights or squires or priests or peasants. All seemed dressed much the same. Small lads ran to and fro selling what seemed sheets of very thin white parchment, many times folded and covered with lettering. Raston said that these had written in them all the things that had happened through all the world, even but hours before. I said that to write even one of these sheets would take a clerk many days. But they said that the writing was done in some way very quickly by machines. In the broad stone street between the two raised walks were rushing back and forth the strange vehicles I had seen from the window. There was no animal pulling or pushing any one of them, yet they never halted their swift rush and carried many people at unthinkable speed. Sometimes those who walked stepped before the rushing vehicles, and then from them came terrible warning snarls or moans that made the walkers draw back. One of the vehicles stood at the walk's edge before us, and we entered it and sat side by side on a soft leather seat. Fikor sat behind a wheel on a post with levers beside him. He touched these, and a humming sound came from somewhere in the vehicle, and then it too began to rush forward faster and faster along the street it went, yet neither of them seemed afraid. Many thousands of these vehicles were moving swiftly through the streets about us. We passed on between great buildings and along wider streets. My eyes and ears numbed by what I saw about me. Then the buildings grew smaller after we had gone for miles through them, and we were passing through the city's outskirts. I could not believe hardly that it was Paris in which I was. We came to a great flat and open field outside the city, and there Fikor stopped and we got out of the vehicle. There were big buildings at the field's end, and I saw other vehicles rolling out of them across the field, ones different from any I had yet seen with flat wing-like projections on either side. They rolled out over the field very fast, and then I cried out as I saw them rising from the ground into the air. Mother of God, they were flying! The men in them were flying! Raston and Fikor took me forward to the great buildings. They spoke to men there, and one brought forward one of the winged cars. Raston told me to get in, and though I was terribly afraid, there was too terrible a fascination that drew me in. Fikor and Raston entered after me, and we sat in seats with the other man. He had before him levers and buttons, while at the car's front was a great thing like a double oar or paddle. A loud roaring came, and that double blade began to whirl so swiftly that I could not see it. Then the car rolled swiftly forward, bumping on the ground, and then ceased to bump. I looked down, then shuttered. The ground was already far beneath. I, too, was flying in the air. We swept upward at terrible speed that increased steadily. The thunder of the car was terrific, and as the man at the levers changed their position, we curved around and over, downward, and upward as though birds. Raston tried to explain to me how the car flew, but it was all too wonderful, and I could not understand. I only knew that a wild, thrilling excitement held me, and that it were worth life and death to fly thus, if but for once, as I had always dreamed that men might someday do. Higher and higher we went. The earth lay far beneath, and I saw now that Paris was indeed a mighty city, its vast mass of buildings stretching away almost to the horizon below us. A mighty city of the future that had been given my eyes to look on. There were other winged cars darting to and fro in the air about us, and they said that many of these were starting or finishing journeys of hundreds of leagues in the air. Then I cried out as I saw a great shape coming nearer us in the air. It was many rods in length, tapering to a point at both ends, a vast ship sailing in the air. There were great cabins on its lower part, and in them we glimpsed people gazing out, coming and going inside, dancing even. They told me that the vast ships of the air like this sailed to and fro for thousands of leagues with hundreds inside them. The huge vessel of the air passed us, and then our winged car began to descend. It circled smoothly down to the field like a swooping bird, and when we landed there Raston and Thicor led me back to the ground vehicle. It was late afternoon by then, the sun sinking westward, and darkness had descended by the time we rolled back into the great city. But in that city was not darkness. Lights were everywhere in it, flashing brilliant lights that shone from its mighty buildings, and that blinked and burned and ran like water in great symbols upon the buildings above the streets. Their glare was like that of day. We stopped before a great building into which Raston and Thicor led me. It was vast inside, and in it were many people in rows on rows of seats. I thought at a cathedral at first, but saw soon that it was not. The wall at one end of it, toward which all in it were gazing, had on it pictures of people, great in size, and those pictures were moving as though themselves alive. And they were talking to one another too, as though with living voices. I trembled. What magic! With Raston and Thicor in seats beside me, I watched the pictures enthralled. It was like looking through a great window into strange worlds. I saw the sea, seemingly tossing and roaring there before me, and then saw on it a ship, a vast ship of size incredible, without sails or oars holding thousands of people. I seemed on that ship as I watched, seemed moving forward with it. They told me it was sailing over the western ocean that never men had crossed. I feared. 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 these 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 shortly 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 in oxen could not have stirred. They showed men of knowledge like Raston and Thicor 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 around the sun. I heard, but could scarce understand. At last Raston and Thicor 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 Raston 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. We entered again their building, but Raston and Thicor took me first to another room than the one in which I had found myself. They said that their men of knowledge were gathered there to hear of their feet, and to have it proved to them. You would not be afraid to return to your own time, Almry asked Raston, and I shook my head. I want to return, I told them. I want to tell my people there what I have seen, what the future is that they must strive for. But if they should not believe you, Thicor asked. Still, I must go. Must tell them, I said. Raston grasped by hand. You are a man, Almry, he said, then throwing aside the cloak and hat I had worn outside. They went with me down to the big white-walled room where first I had found myself. It was lit brightly now by many of the shining glass things on ceiling and walls, and in it were many men. They all stared strangely at me and at my clothes, and talked excitedly, so fast that I could not understand. Raston began to address them. He seemed explaining how he had brought me from my own time to his. He used many terms and words that I could not understand, incomprehensible references and phrases, and I could understand but little. I heard again the names of Einstein and De Sitter that I had heard before, repeated frequently by these men as they disputed with Raston and Thicor. They seemed disputing about me. One big man was saying, impossible I tell you, Raston, you have faked this fellow. Raston smiled. You don't believe that Thicor and I brought him here from his own time across five centuries? A chorus of excited negatives answered him. He had me stand up and speak to them. They asked me many questions, part of which I could not understand. I told them of my life and of the city of my own time and of king and priest and noble and of the many simple things that they seemed quite ignorant of. Some appeared to believe me, but others did not, and again their dispute broke out. There is a way to settle the argument, gentlemen, said Raston, finally. Now all cried. Thicor and I brought Omri across five centuries by rotating the time dimensions at this spot, he said. Suppose we reverse that rotation and send him back before your eyes. Would that be proof? They all said that it would. Raston turned to me. Stand on the metal circle, Omri, he said. I did so. All were watching very closely. Thicor did something quickly with the levers and buttons of the mechanisms in the room. They began to hum and blue light came from the glass tubes on some. All were quiet, watching me as I stood there on the circle of metal. I met Raston's eyes and something in me made me call goodbye to him. He waved his hand and smiled. Thicor pressed more buttons and the hum of the mechanism grew louder. Then he reached toward another level. All in the room were tense and I was tense. Then I saw Thicor's arm move as he turned one of the many levers. A terrific clap of thunder seemed to break around me, and as I closed my eyes before its shock I felt myself whirling around and falling at the same time as though into a maelstrom just as I had done before. The awful falling sensation ceased in a moment and the sound subsided. I opened my eyes. I was on the ground at the center of the familiar field from which I had vanished hours before upon the morning of that day. It was night now, though for that day I had spent five hundred years in the future. There were many people gathered around the field, fearful, and they screamed and some fled when I appeared in the thunderclap. I went toward those who remained. My mind was full of things I had seen, and I wanted to tell them of these things. I wanted to tell them how they must work ever toward the future time of wonder. But they did not listen. Before I had spoken minutes to them they cried out on me as a sorcerer and a blasphemer and seized me and brought me here to the Inquisitor, to you, Sire. And to you, Sire, I have told the truth in all things. I know that in doing so I have set the seal of my own fate, and that only a sorcerer would tell such a tale. Yet, despite that, I am glad. Glad that I have told one at least of this time of what I saw five centuries in the future. Glad that I saw. Glad that I saw the things that some day, some time, must come to be. It was a week later that they burned Henri Lothierre. Jean de Marseille lifting his gaze from his endless parchment accusation and examines on that afternoon looked out through the window at a thick curl of black smoke going up from the distant square. Strange that one he mused. A sorcerer, of course, but such a one as I had never heard before. I wonder, he half-whispered, was there any truth in that wild tale of his? The future? Who can say what men might do? There was silence in the room as he brooded for a moment, and then he shook himself as one ridding himself of absurd speculations. But, Tush, enough of these crazy fancies. They will have me for a sorcerer if I yield to these wild fancies and visions of the future. And, bending again with his pen to the parchment before him, he went gravely on with his work. End of The Man Who Saw the Future by Edmund Hamilton The Nothing Equation. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org, recording by Jan Morrison. The Nothing Equation by Tom Godwin. The cruiser vanished back into hyperspace, and he was alone in the observation bubble, 10,000 light years beyond the galaxy's outermost sun. He looked out the windows at the gigantic sea of emptiness around him, and wondered again what the danger had been that had so terrified the men before him. Of one thing, he was already certain. He would find that Nothing was waiting outside the bubble to kill him. The first bubble attendant had committed suicide, and the second was a mindless maniac on the earthbound cruiser. But it must have been something inside the bubble that had caused it, or else they had imagined it all. He went across the small room, his magnetized souls loud on the thin metal floor in the bubble silence. He sat down in the single chair, his weight very slight in the feeble artificial gravity, and reviewed the known facts. The bubble was a project of Earth's Galactic Observation Bureau, positioned there to gather data from observations that could not be made from within the galaxy. Since metallic mass affected the hypersensitive instruments, the bubble had been made as small and light as possible. It was for that reason that it could accommodate only one attendant. The Bureau had selected Horn as the bubble's first attendant, and the cruiser had left him there for his six months period of duty. When it made its scheduled return with his replacement, he was found dead from a tremendous overdose of sleeping pills. On the table was his daily report log, and his last entry made three months before. I haven't attended to the instruments for a long time because it hates us and doesn't want us here. It hates me the most of all, and keeps trying to get into the bubble to kill me. I can hear it whenever I stop and listen, and I know it won't be long. I'm afraid of it, and I want to be asleep when it comes. But I'll have to make it soon because I have only 20 sleeping pills left, and if… the sentence was never finished. According to the temperature recording instruments in the bubble, his body ceased radiating heat that same night. The bubble was cleaned, humiliated, and inspected inside and out. No sign of any inimical entity or force could be found. Silverman was Horn's replacement. When the cruiser returned six months later, bringing him, Green, to be Silverman's replacement, Silverman was completely insane. He babbled about something that had been waiting outside the bubble to kill him, but his nearest to a rational statement was to say once, when asked for the hundredth time what he had seen, nothing. You can't really see it, but you feel it watching you, and you hear it trying to get in to kill you. One time I bumped the wall, and for God's sake, take me away from it. Take me back to Earth. Then he had tried to hide under the captain's desk, and the ship's doctor had let him away. The bubble was minutely examined again, and the cruiser employed every detector device it possessed to search surrounding space for light years in all directions. Nothing was found. When it was time for the new replacement to be transferred to the bubble, he reported to Captain McDowell. Everything's ready, Green, McDowell said. You're the next one. His shaggy gray eyebrows met in a scowl. It would be better if they would let me select the replacement. Instead of them, he flushed with a touch of resentment and said, The Bureau found my intelligence and initiative of thought satisfactory. I know the characteristics you don't need. What they ought to have is somebody like one of my engine room roustabouts. Too ignorant to get scared and too dumb to go nuts. Then we could get a sane report six months from now, instead of the ravings of a maniac. I suggest, he said stiffly, that you reserve judgment until that time comes, sir. That was all he knew about the danger, real or imaginary, that had driven two men into insanity. He would have six months in which to find the answer. Six months minus, he looked at the chronometer and saw that 20 minutes had passed since he left the cruiser. Somehow it seemed much longer. He moved to light a cigarette and his metal soles scraped the floor with the same startling loudness he had noticed before. The bubble was as silent as a tomb. It was not much larger than a tomb, a sphere 18 feet in diameter, made of thin sheet steel and criss-crossed outside with narrow reinforcing girders to keep the internal air pressure from rupturing it. The floor under him was six feet long, the floor under him was six feet up from the sphere's bottom, and the space beneath held the air regenerator and waste converter units, the storage batteries, and the food cabinets. The compartment in which he sat contained a chair, table, a narrow cot, banks of dials, a remote control panel for operating the instruments mounted outside the hull, a microfilm projector, and a pair of exerciser springs attached to one wall. That was all. There was no means of communication since a hyperspace communicator would have affected the delicate instruments within its radiations, but there was a small microfilm library to go with the projector so that he should be able to pass away the time pleasantly enough. But it was not the fear of boredom that was behind the apprehension he could already feel touching at his mind. It had not been boredom that had turned horn into a suicide, and silverman into something cracked sharply behind him, like a gunshot in the stillness, and he leaped to his feet, quarreling to face it. It was only a metal reel of data tape that had dropped out of the spectrum analyzer into the storage tray. His heart was thumping fast, and his attempt to laugh at his nervousness sounded hollow and mirthless. Something inside or outside the bubble had driven two men insane with its threat, and now that he was irrevocably exiled in the bubble himself, he could no longer dismiss their fear as products of their imagination. Both of them had been rational, intelligent men, as carefully selected by the Observation Bureau as he had been. He set out to search the bubble, overlooking nothing. When he crawled down into the lower compartment he hesitated, then opened the longest blade of his knife before searching among the dark recesses down there. He found nothing, not even a speck of dust. Back in his chair again he began to doubt his first conviction. Perhaps there really had been some kind of an invisible force or entity outside the bubble. Both Horn and Silverman had said that it had tried to get in to kill them. They had been very definite about that part. There were six windows around the bubble's walls, set there to enable the attendant to see all the outside mounted instruments and dials. He went to them to look out, one by one, and from all of them he saw the same vast emptiness that surrounded him. The galaxy, his galaxy, was so far away that its stars were like dust. In the other directions the empty gulf was so wide that galaxies and clusters of galaxies were feeble, tiny specks of light shining across it. All around him was a void so huge that galaxies were only specks in it. Who could know what forces or dangers might be waiting out there? A light blinked, reminding him it was time to attend to his duties. The job required an hour, and he was nervous and not yet hungry when he had finished. He went to the exercise springs on the wall and performed a workout that left him tired and sweating, but which at least gave him a small appetite. The day passed and the next. He made another search of the bubble's interior with the same results as before. He felt almost sure then that there was nothing in the bubble with him. He established a routine of work, pastime, and sleep that made the first week pass fairly comfortably, but for the gnawing worry in his mind that something invisible was lurking just outside the windows. Then one day he accidentally kicked the wall with his metal shoe tip. It made a sound like that from kicking a tight-stretched section of tin, and it seemed to him it gave a little from the impact as tin would do. He realized for the first time how thin it was, how deadly, dangerously thin. According to the specifications he had read, it was only one-sixteenth of an inch thick. It was as thin as cardboard. He sat down with pencil and paper and began calculating. The bubble had a surface area of 146,500 square inches, and the internal air pressure was 14 pounds to the square inch, which meant that the thin metal skin contained a total pressure of 2,051,000 pounds. Two million pounds. The bubble in which he sat was a bomb, waiting to explode the instant any section of the thin metal weakened. It was supposed to be an ally so extremely strong that it had a high safety factor, but he could not believe that any metal so thin could be so strong. It was alright for him to be so strong that he could not believe that any metal so thin could be so strong. It was alright for engineers, sitting safely on earth, to speak of high safety factors, but his life depended upon the fragile wall not cracking. It made a lot of difference. The next day, he thought he felt the hook to which the exerciser spring was attached cracked loose from where it was welded to the wall. He inspected the base of the hook close to the base of the wall, he inspected the base of the hook closely, and there seemed to be a fine hairline fracture appearing around it. He held his ear to it, listening for any sound of a leak. It was not leaking yet, but it could commence doing so at any time. He looked out the windows at the inimitable void that was waiting to absorb his pitiful little supply of air, and he thought of the days he had hauled and jerked at the springs with all his strength, not realizing the damage he was doing. There was a sick feeling in his stomach for the rest of the day, and he returned again and again to examine the hairline around the hook. The next day, he discovered an even more serious threat. The thin skin of the bubble had been spot welded to the outside reinforcing girders. Such welding often created hard, brittle spots that would soon crystallize from continued movement, and there was a slight temperature difference in the bubble between his working and sleeping hours that would daily produce a contraction and expansion of the skin, especially when he used a little cooking burner. He quit using the burner for any purpose, and began a daily inspection of every square inch of the bubble's walls, marking with white chalk all the welding spots that appeared to be definitely weakened. Each day he found more to mark, and soon the little white circles were scattered across the walls wherever he looked. When he was not working at examining the walls, he could feel the windows watching him, like staring eyes. Out of self-defense, he would have to go to them and stare back at the emptiness. Space was alien, coldly, deadly alien. He was a tiny spark of life in a hostile sea of nothing, and there was no one to help him. The nothing outside was waiting day and night for the most infinitesimal leak or crack in the walls, the nothing that had been waiting out there since time without beginning, and would wait for time without end. Sometimes he would touch his finger to the wall and think, death is out there, only one sixteenth of an inch away. His first fears became a black and terrible conviction. The bubble could not continue to resist the attack for long. It had already lasted longer than it should have. Two million pounds of pressure wanted out, and all the sucking nothing of intergalactic space wanted in. And only a thin skin of metal rotten with brittle welding spots stood between them. It wanted in. The nothing wanted in. He knew, then, that Horn and Silverman had not been insane. It wanted in, and someday it would get in. When it did, it would explode him and jerk out his guts and lungs. Not until that happened, not until the nothing filled the bubble and enclosed his hideous, turned inside out body, would it ever be content. He had long since quit wearing the magnetized shoes. Afraid of the vibration of them would weaken the bubble still more. And he began noticing sections where the bubble did not seem to be perfectly concave, as though the rolling mill had pressed the metal too thin in places, and it was swelling out like an overinflated balloon. He could not remember when he had last attended to the instruments. Nothing was important but the danger that surrounded him. He knew the danger was rapidly increasing, because whenever he pressed his ear to the wall, he could hear the almost inaudible tickings and vibrations as the bubble's skin contracted or expanded, and the nothing tapped and searched with its empty fingers for a flaw or crack that it could tear into a leak. But the windows were far the worst, with the nothing staring in at him day and night. There was no escape from it. He could feel it watching him, malignant and gloating, even when he hid his eyes in his hands. The time came when he could stand it no longer. The cot had a blanket, and he used that together with all his spare clothes to make a tent stretching from the table to the first instrument panel. When he crawled under it, he found that the lower half of one window could still see him. He used the clothes he was wearing to finish the job, and it was much better then, biting there in the concealing darkness where the nothing could not see him. He did not mind going naked. The temperature regulators in the bubble never let it get too cold. He had no conception of time from then on. He emerged only when necessary to bring more food into his tent. He could still hear the nothing tapping and sucking in its ceaseless search for a flaw, and he made such emergencies as brief as possible, wishing that he did not have to come out at all. Maybe if he could hide in his tent for a long time and never make a sound, it would get tired and go away. Sometimes he thought of the cruiser and wished they would come for him, but most of the time he thought of the thing that was outside trying to get in to kill him. When the strain became too great, he would draw himself up in the position he had once occupied in his mother's womb and pretend he had never left earth. It was easier there, but always before very long the bubble would tick or whisper, and he would freeze in terror thinking, this time it's coming in. Then one day suddenly two men were peering under his tent at him. One of them said, my God again! And he wondered what he meant, but they were very nice to him and helped him put on his clothes. Later in the cruiser everything was hazy and they kept asking him what he was afraid of. What was it? What did you find? He tried hard to think so he could explain it. It was nothing. What were you and Horn and Silverman afraid of? What was it? The voice demanded insistently. I told you, he said, nothing. They stared at him, and the hazing is cleared a little as he saw they did not understand. He wanted them to believe him because what he told them was so very true. It wanted to kill us. Please, can't you believe me? It was waiting outside the bubble to kill us. But they kept staring and he knew they didn't believe him. They didn't want to believe him. Everything turned hazy again and he started to cry. He was glad when the doctor took his hand to lead him away. The bubble was carefully inspected inside and out and nothing was found. When it was time for Green's replacement to be transferred to it, Larkin reported to Captain McDowell. Everything's ready, Larkin, McDowell said. You're the next one. I wish we knew what the danger is. He scowled. I still think one of my roused abouts from the engine room might give us a sane report six months from now, instead of the babblings we'll get from you. Larkin felt his face flush and he said stiffly, I suggest, sir, that you not jump to conclusions until that time comes. The cruiser vanished back into hyperspace and he was alone inside the observation bubble. Ten thousand light years beyond the galaxy's outermost sun. He looked out the windows at the gigantic sea of emptiness around him and wondered again what the danger had been that had so terrified the men before him. Of one thing he was already certain, he would find that nothing was waiting outside the bubble to kill him. End of The Nothing Equation by Tom Godwin, Recording by Jan Morrison, Eugene Oregon.