"Yeah," said Harrison. "And the wart-cure. Too bad you missed that; it might be the cancer cure they've been hunting for a century and a half."
"Oh, that!" muttered Jarvis gloomily. "That's what started the fight!" He drew a glistening object from his pocket.
"Here it is."
TWILIGHT
by John W. Campbell
First published in 1934, under the pseudonym, "Don A. Stuart"
"Speaking of hitch-hikers," said Jim Bendell in a rather bewildered way, "I picked up a man the other day that certainly was a queer cuss." He laughed, but it wasn't a real laugh. "He told me the queerest yarn I ever heard. Most of them tell you how they lost their good jobs and tried to find work out here in the wide spaces of the West.
They don't seem to realize how many people we have out here. They think all this great beautiful country is uninhabited."
Jim Bendell's a real estate man, and I knew how he could go on. That's his favorite line, you know. He's real worried because there's a lot of homesteading plots still open out in our state. He talks about the beautiful country, but he never went farther into the desert than the edge of town. 'Fraid of it actually. So I sort of steered him back on the track.
"What did he claim, Jim? Prospector who couldn't find land to prospect?"
"That's not very funny, Bart. No; it wasn't only what he claimed. He didn't even claim it, just said it. You know, he didn't say it was true, he just said it. That's what gets me, I know it ain't true, but the way he said it—Oh, I don't know."
By which I knew he didn't. Jim Bendell's usually pretty careful about his English—real proud of it. When he slips, that means he's disturbed. Like the time he thought the rattlesnake was a stick of wood and wanted to put it on the fire.
Jim went on: And he had funny clothes, too. They looked like silver, but they were soft as silk. And at night they glowed just a little.
I picked him up about dusk. Really picked him up. He was lying off about ten feet from the South Road. I thought, at first, somebody had hit him, and then hadn't stopped. Didn't see him very clearly, you know. I picked him up, put him in the car, and started on. I had about three hundred miles to go, but I thought I could drop him at Warren Spring with Doc Vance. But he came to in about five minutes, and opened his eyes. He looked straight off, and he looked first at the car, then at the Moon.
"Thank God!" he says, and then looks at me. It gave me a shock. He was beautiful.
No; he was handsome.
He wasn't either one. He was magnificent. He was about six feet two, I think, and his hair was brown, with a touch of red-gold. It seemed like fine copper wire that's turned brown. It was crisp and curly. His forehead was wide, twice as wide as mine.
His features were delicate, but tremendously impressive; his eyes were gray, like etched iron, and bigger than mine—a lot.
That suit he wore—it was more like a bathing suit with pajama trousers. His arms were long and muscled smoothly as an Indian's. He was white, though, tanned lightly with a golden, rather than a brown, tan.
But he was magnificent. Most wonderful man I ever saw. I don't know, damn it!
"Hello!" I said. "Have an accident?"
"No; not this time, at least."
And his voice was magnificent, too. It wasn't an ordinary voice. It sounded like an organ talking, only it was human.
"But maybe my mind isn't quite steady yet. I tried an experiment. Tell me what the date is, year and all, and let me see," he went on.
"Why—December 9, 1932," I said.
And it didn't please him. He didn't like it a bit. But the wry grin that came over his face gave way to a chuckle.
"Over a thousand—" he says reminiscently. "Not as bad as seven million. I shouldn't complain."
"Seven million what?"
"Years," he said, steadily enough. Like he meant it. "I tried an experiment once.
Or I will try it. Now I'll have to try again. The experiment was—in 3059. I'd just finished the release experiment. Testing space then. Time—it wasn't that, I still believe. It was space. I felt myself caught in that field, but I couldn't pull away. Field gamma-H
481, intensity 935 in the Pellman range. It sucked me in, and I went out.
"I think it took a short cut through space to the position the solar system will occupy. Through a higher dimension, effecting a speed exceeding light and throwing me into the future plane."
He wasn't telling me, you know. He was just thinking out loud. Then he began to realize I was there.
"I couldn't read their instruments, seven million years of evolution changed everything. So I overshot my mark a little coming back. I belong in 3059."
"But tell me, what's the latest scientific invention of this year?"
He startled me so, I answered almost before I thought.
"Why, television, I guess. And radio and airplanes."
"Radio—good. They will have instruments."
"But see here—who are you?"
"Ah—I'm sorry. I forgot," he replied in that organ voice of his. "I am Ares Sen Kenlin. And you?"
"James Waters Bendell."
"Waters—what does that mean? I do not recognize it."
"Why—it's a name, of course. Why should you recognize it?"
"I see—you have not the classification, then. 'Sen' stands for science."
"Where did you come from, Mr. Kenlin?"
"Come from?" He smiled, and his voice was slow and soft. "I came out of space across seven million years or more. They had lost count— the men had. The machines had eliminated the unneeded service. They didn't know what year it was.
But before that—my home is in Neva'th City in the 3059."
That's when I began to think he was a nut.
"I was an experimenter," he went on. "Science, as I have said. My father was a scientist, too, but in human genetics. I myself am an experiment. He proved his point, and all the world followed suit. I was the first of the new race.