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ARMAGEDDON--2419 A.D.
_By Philip Francis Nowlan_
_Here, once more, is a real scientifiction story plus. It is a story which will make the heart of many readers leap with joy._
_We have rarely printed a story in this magazine that for scientific interest, as well as suspense, could hold its own with this particular story. We prophesy that this story will become more valuable as the years go by. It certainly holds a number of interesting prophecies, of which no doubt, many will come true. For wealth of science, it will be hard to beat for some time to come. It is one of those rare stories that will bear reading and re-reading many times._
_This story has impressed us so favorably, that we hope the author may be induced to write a sequel to it soon._
Foreword
Elsewhere I have set down, for whatever interest they have in this, the25th Century, my personal recollections of the 20th Century.
Now it occurs to me that my memoirs of the 25th Century may have anequal interest 500 years from now--particularly in view of that uniqueperspective from which I have seen the 25th Century, entering it as Idid, in one leap across a gap of 492 years.
This statement requires elucidation. There are still many in the worldwho are not familiar with my unique experience. Five centuries from nowthere may be many more, especially if civilization is fated to endureany worse convulsions than those which have occurred between 1975 A.D.and the present time.
I should state therefore, that I, Anthony Rogers, am, so far as I know,the only man alive whose normal span of eighty-one years of life hasbeen spread over a period of 573 years. To be precise, I lived the firsttwenty-nine years of my life between 1898 and 1927; the other fifty-twosince 2419. The gap between these two, a period of nearly five hundredyears, I spent in a state of suspended animation, free from the ravagesof katabolic processes, and without any apparent effect on my physicalor mental faculties.
When I began my long sleep, man had just begun his real conquest of theair in a sudden series of transoceanic flights in airplanes driven byinternal combustion motors. He had barely begun to speculate on thepossibilities of harnessing sub-atomic forces, and had made no furtherpractical penetration into the field of ethereal pulsations than theprimitive radio and television of that day. The United States of Americawas the most powerful nation in the world, its political, financial,industrial and scientific influence being supreme; and in the arts alsoit was rapidly climbing into leadership.
I awoke to find the America I knew a total wreck--to find Americans ahunted race in their own land, hiding in the dense forests that coveredthe shattered and leveled ruins of their once magnificent cities,desperately preserving, and struggling to develop in their secretretreats, the remnants of their culture and science--and the undyingflame of their sturdy independence.
World domination was in the hands of Mongolians and the center of worldpower lay in inland China, with Americans one of the few races ofmankind unsubdued--and it must be admitted in fairness to the truth, notworth the trouble of subduing in the eyes of the Han Airlords who ruledNorth America as titular tributaries of the Most Magnificent.
For they needed not the forests in which the Americans lived, nor theresources of the vast territories these forests covered. With theperfection to which they had reduced the synthetic production ofnecessities and luxuries, their remarkable development of scientificprocesses and mechanical accomplishment of work, they had no economicneed for the forests, and no economic desire for the enslaved labor ofan unruly race.
They had all they needed for their magnificently luxurious and degradedscheme of civilization, within the walls of the fifteen cities ofsparkling glass they had flung skyward on the sites of ancient Americancenters, into the bowels of the earth underneath them, and withrelatively small surrounding areas of agriculture.
Complete domination of the air rendered communication between thesecenters a matter of ease and safety. Occasional destructive raids on thewaste lands were considered all that was necessary to keep the "wild"Americans on the run within the shelter of their forests, and preventtheir becoming a menace to the Han civilization.
But nearly three hundred years of easily maintained security, the lastcentury of which had been nearly sterile in scientific, social andeconomic progress, had softened and devitalized the Hans.
It had likewise developed, beneath the protecting foliage of the forest,the growth of a vigorous new American civilization, remarkable in themobility and flexibility of its organization, in its conquest of almostinsuperable obstacles, in the development and guarding of its industrialand scientific resources, all in anticipation of that "Day of Hope" towhich it had been looking forward for generations, when it would bestrong enough to burst from the green chrysalis of the forests, soarinto the upper air lanes and destroy the yellow incubus.
At the time I awoke, the "Day of Hope" was almost at hand. I shall notattempt to set forth a detailed history of the Second War ofIndependence, for that has been recorded already by better historiansthan I am. Instead I shall confine myself largely to the part I wasfortunate enough to play in this struggle and in the events leading upto it.
Seen upon the ultroscope viewplate, the battle looked asthough it were being fought in daylight, perhaps on a cloudy day, whilethe explosions of the rockets appeared as flashes of extra brilliance.]
It all resulted from my interest in radioactive gases. During the latterpart of 1927 my company, the American Radioactive Gas Corporation, hadbeen keeping me busy investigating reports of unusual phenomena observedin certain abandoned coal mines near the Wyoming Valley, inPennsylvania.
With two assistants and a complete equipment of scientific instruments,I began the exploration of a deserted working in a mountainous district,where several weeks before, a number of mining engineers had reportedtraces of carnotite[1] and what they believed to be radioactive gases.Their report was not without foundation, it was apparent from theoutset, for in our examination of the upper levels of the mine, ourinstruments indicated a vigorous radioactivity.
[1] A hydrovanadate of uranium, and other metals; used as a source of radium compounds.
On the morning of December 15th, we descended to one of the lowestlevels. To our surprise, we found no water there. Obviously it haddrained off through some break in the strata. We noticed too that therock in the side walls of the shaft was soft, evidently due to theradioactivity, and pieces crumbled under foot rather easily. We made ourway cautiously down the shaft, when suddenly the rotted timbers above usgave way.
I jumped ahead, barely escaping the avalanche of coal and soft rock, butmy companions, who were several paces behind me, were buried under it,and undoubtedly met instant death.
I was trapped. Return was impossible. With my electric torch I exploredthe shaft to its end, but could find no other way out. The air becameincreasingly difficult to breathe, probably from the rapid accumulationof the radioactive gas. In a little while my senses reeled and I lostconsciousness.
When I awoke, there was a cool and refreshing circulation of air in theshaft. I had no thought that I had been unconscious more than a fewhours, although it seems that the radioactive gas had kept me in a stateof suspended animation for something like 500 years. My awakening, Ifigured out later, had been due to some shifting of the strata whichreopened the shaft and cleared the atmosphere in the working. This musthave been the case, for I was able to struggle back up the shaft over apile of debris, and stagger up the long incline to the mouth of themine, where an entirely different world, overgrown with a vast forestand no visible sign of human habitation, met
my eyes.
I shall pass over the days of mental agony that followed in my attemptto grasp the meaning of it all. There were times when I felt that I wason the verge of insanity. I roamed the unfamiliar forest like a lostsoul. Had it not been for the necessity of improvising traps and crudeclubs with which to slay my food, I believe I should have gone mad.
Suffice it to say, however, that I survived this psychic crisis. I shallbegin my narrative proper with my first contact with Americans of theyear 2419 A.D.