TOMORROW THE WORLD!
By Geoff St. Reynard
Can the past affect the future? What if
you remembered to the dawn of time when you
hated man and decided to destroy him--today!
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Imagination Stories of Science and Fantasy
September 1952
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
It was like a cave, a great vaulted cave which echoed back my first
hesitant movements on the slab and tossed them from wall to wall until
the darkness about me was all one vast rustling. I felt my skin prickle
into gooseflesh. In that moment of waking I was oddly frightened. I had
no memory of location. I might have been in a subterranean grotto, with
enormous stalagmites of supergrotesque shape rising all about me in
the thick gloom.
I sat up. The slab was cold beneath me. Directly in front of it towered
a thing like a nightmare skeleton of stone.
It was just that: the fossil of a duckbilled dinosaur. I had gone to
sleep on a marble bench in the palaeontology room of the museum.
I laughed. The panic that had touched me was gone, and I felt ashamed
of myself. Not for falling asleep, because I had been very tired; but
ashamed of the fear.
Lord knew how long I had slept. It was black night without and within,
and no sound save that of my own movements came to me. The museum must
have been closed for hours. The guards had missed me on my bench behind
the dinosaur. I stood and shook myself and smoothed the rumpled suit,
and began to grope my way between exhibits toward the entrance hall. I
left the reptilian skeletons behind--not without a certain relief, for
they were awesome sleepers to pass among--and was striding down a dim
pathway between glass cases when I heard the footsteps.
A watchman was coming toward me. I could see the reflection of his
flashlight. I halted indecisively, growled at myself, and went on. I
had a perfectly valid excuse for being there. They could hardly do
anything to me.
The guard was big, about my size, and his flash jumped in his hand when
he saw me. Then he hurried forward. I grinned into the glare.
"Sorry to scare you--"
"What the hell you doing here, bud?"
I did not like him in the least. "I fell asleep in the bone room. Just
woke up."
"That's what they say, bud, that's what they say." He was breathing in
my face. I do not care for secondhand hamburg with onions. "Who are
you?"
"Bill Cuff, I write for the adventure mags, maybe you've seen my yarns."
"No, I ain't. How come you fell asleep, bud?"
"Cuff," I said, "Bill Cuff. I was knocked out. I mean I was tired. Been
working nights on a piece that doesn't want to jell."
"That's what they say, bud." I was getting good and sick of that line.
Three times was more than enough. He didn't think so. "That's what they
say. Fell asleep, huh? In a room full o' jewelry that'd bring a nice
price even if you melted it down. Relics. We got a brooch over there
that Napoleon gave to Catherine of Aragon. Make a nice haul by itself."
"I dare say, especially as she died some centuries before he was born.
A unique bit of trinketry indeed." I disliked this guard more with
each word. "You knucklehead," I said, "I told you I fell asleep. I was
looking for a watchman just now."
"That's what they say. You come on with me. We got to see a cop, bud."
"For the love of--I can identify myself. Here's my driver's license."
"Stole, probably. We've had sneak-thieves in here before. You come on
with me, bud."
I counted ten. "Cuff, Bill Cuff." His stupidity, his dark stolid bulk
behind the persistent flashlight were angering me. "All right, lets see
a cop."
He gripped my arm. "I don't like to be touched and handled." I said. I
knocked his hand off. "Here, here," he yelped, "don't get tough or I'll
have to rough you up a little."
He clutched my arm again. A scarlet curtain of rage shut down over my
senses. I reached out and took his throat between my hands, dragged
him to my chest, tightened my fingers and pressed and twisted till
his flashlight dropped to the stone floor and went out with a pitiful
tinkle. There in the unbroken dark of the deserted museum I held him
until he was dead, until his head was turned over his shoulder and his
popping eyes stared sightlessly down his backbone. Then I threw him
into a case of snuff boxes, and went on to the entrance and let myself
out and walked away down the moonlit street.
CHAPTER II
For a long while I walked alone with my cold rage. It was, well,
most curious is a mild way to describe it. I had never been a man of
violence and fury. Only in my adventure yarns had I spread gore and
destruction abroad. I thought back over my twenty-eight years of life.
I didn't believe I had ever even hit anyone before tonight. Yet I had
taken enormous pleasure in the wanton brutality. Even after my anger
had died, I felt no regret whatever for the murder of the guard. He had
been a stupid _man_.
I found myself wondering about that after I had said it half-aloud. I
didn't know why I had put the emphasis on _man_. You might have thought
I was a woman.
Going aimlessly up one street and down another, now staring ahead
and now gazing up at the full moon riding in its field of India-ink
sky, I eventually saw that I was near the museum again. Some obscure
curiosity took me past its doors. Just as I passed them, craning my
neck foolishly as though I could see through their oak and bronze, half
a dozen men burst out into the street. Automatically I speeded my pace.
Then they yelled, and were after me. I ran.
What smirking fate had pushed me back to the damned place? From my
position on the sidewalk, my attitude of looking intently at the doors,
my haste thereafter, they had leaped to the thought that I had just
emerged from the museum. I thought of fingerprints, of all kinds of
clues I might have left behind. I ran like a spooked steer.
Reason left me. I caught the last wisp of a fleeting amazement: could
this murderous, panicky creature be Bill Cuff, hitherto a sane and
sober pulp writer?
I turned a corner, vaulted over a hedge and flung myself prone behind
it. The pursuers--museum guards, for evidently the police had not
arrived--pounded by, yelling to each other. When they had gone I darted
over to the building that shadowed this plot of earth, kicked in a
window, knocked away shards of glass from the frame and let myself down
into the basement of the museum. Swiftly I blundered my way between
work-benches and unfinished exhibits until I had found the door. Down
a long black hall I padded, snorting through my nose and peering back
frequently. Like a beast, said a tiny voice in the depths of my brain;
like a stalked beast.
I found a door, steps that led upward. I passed the first floor and
then the second. My shins were barked, my nose bled from a smack
against an unseen wall. I licked the blood off my lips. The stairs
ended and I was on the third floor. Here the moon slanted its cool
rays into the windows, unhampered by nearby buildings. I could see
quite well. My feet seemed to know where they were going. I passed
through the hall of mammals, glancing aside at the dusty elephants,
the two giraffes in their great cage of glass, the family of sea lions
frozen forever in attitudes of stuffy majesty. My leather heels tapped
loudly in the thick silence. I bent and took off my shoes, stuffing
them into the pockets of my coat. Then I came to the central well, and
leaning over the balcony I looked down at the hall of dinosaurs. Their
bizarre frames were jagged splotches of black in a lesser blackness.
Then the lights went up on their floor, and as I, two stories above,
drew back my head with an involuntary snarl, guards hurried across
the floor between the fossils, calling back and forth. I heard them
say something about the broken window. I had trapped myself. I did
not consider that important. Something in me knew I was heading for
sanctuary.
I thrust my head over the railing again, like a fox on a cliff
regarding a pack of hounds at fault. Chance made one of the hounds peer
upward. There was a loud shout from below as the guard saw me.
Dashing along the passage between rail and wall, I entered the art
gallery, traversed it, and came to the geology hall. Here was a replica
of a Pennsylvania cavern, through which visitors could wander to
gawk at stalactites and artificial springs and plaster-and-plastic
underworld creatures--dead-white salamanders, strange little blind
bugs, crawling unnamed worms stuck to the synthetic rock with hidden
adhesives. I dived through the mouth of this weird exhibit, bruising
myself heedlessly; rounded heaps of faked stone, scraped skin off my
knuckles as I fended off obstacles that seemed to hurl themselves
at me in the murk, at last came to the back of the cave and turned
and squatted there on my hams, fingertips trailing against the cool
hardness of the sham rock floor.
The moon was dropping; now it looked in a window opposite the cave,
finding its way between the icicle forms of stalactites, just grazing
my dark blue suit here and there. I bent my head and stared at the
ivory huntress of the skies. Her full round belly was gravid with
portent. I felt that all sorts of shattering events were shaping within
her, that something alien and terrible and withal glorious was about to
be born.