Eando Binder - The Time Cylinder.rtf

THE TIME CYLINDER

At the 1939 World's Fair in Flushing Meadows, a time capsule, containing representative samples of our cultural and technological achievement, was buried. So carefully thought out were the enclo­sures that even a copy of a science-fiction maga­zine was placed in the capsule! Our descendants may some day examine the contents of this capsule with interest and astonishment. But suppose we were to find a time capsule. What might it contain? What civilization could have buried it? Eando Binder, popular author of past years, returns to science-fiction to explore this fascinating theme.

"AND you uncovered the time capsule with your plow?" asked Stoddard.

The farmer nodded. He shifted his chew of to­bacco in his cheeks, astounded at all the furor this discovery had caused. "Out in my east forty I found it," he said. "Just cleared that piece. It was timber and scrub land before. My plow hit something hard just under the ground. Figured it was a rock so I scooped away dirt and there it was-or the top of it-that thing. What did you call it?"

"A time capsule," Stoddard said, trying to control his feverish excitement. "Look at it. What else could it be? A long-lasting, bronzelike cylinder twenty-five feet long, completely sealed. Very much like the others we've buried at times for future ages to find. The Archeological Institute sent Jackson and me to inves­tigate your report of it. We thought of course-no offense-it might be simply a wild story."

Jackson also was bristling with excitement. "What a find! Look how it's tarnished and encrusted with mold. A record-crypt from some long past age!"

It lay there, a riddle wrapped in tawny metal. The farmer himself had hitched up his tractor and dragged it free of the ground. What strange, unknown, past civilization had buried this record of itself, fated to be found in 1953?

"The papers will go crazy when the news gets out," Stoddard prophesied. "This is headline stuff." He whirled to the phone. "Time's wasting. I'll tell Professor Beatty at the Institute to send a truck to haul it there. Then for the grand opening. How far back does this date, Jackson? A thousand years? Ten thousand? Who knows?"

But already Jackson was staring at the time cap­sule with puzzled eyes, vaguely sensing that the an­swer promised to be more astounding than they yet dreamed .. .

Sirens wailed through the city streets, a few hours later. An eager crowd already lined the path of the big trailer truck as it hauled the huge cylinder, flanked by its police escort of motorcycles, to the Archeologi­cal Institute.

Extras already proclaimed it in their headlines as-TIME CAPSULE FOUND FROM DAWN OF CIVILIZATION. Radio announcers were hardly less reticent nor more accurate with "Ancient record-crypt may he a million years old." Camera crews from TV networks were at hand, recording everything on film as the giant capsule was carefully maneuvered into the back warehouse of the Institute. Nothing could so fire the imagination of the public as finding something from antiquity, throwing light on Earth's past history.

It was like the discovery of King Tut's tomb all over again, only on a grander scale. Finally the police succeeded in waving the last of the crowd away and the warehouse doors closed on the time capsule.

Professor Beatty, director of the Institute, stared at it with shocked wonder, as if somehow it had no right to exist. "We'll drop everything," he announced immediately. "Even that sorting of Mayan pottery. We'll get at this tomorrow with our whole crew."

Stoddard's face fell. "Must it wait till tomorrow? Professor, how about me and Jackson? Can't we get right to work on it? Why waste a whole day?"

Beatty had to chuckle. "That thing has been buried for untold centuries perhaps. Millions of days. What would one more day matter? All right, go ahead, you two eager-beavers. But you're getting the dirty work, scraping off that mold."

He left, smiling at their youthful enthusiasm. He, too, had been that way, long ago, when he came across his first find of Neolithic arrowheads.

Left alone, Stoddard and Jackson went to work with panting haste. Surprisingly, it was an easy job to chip off the hardened mold and clean the surface. Often it took days or weeks to extract ancient relics patiently from fossilized mud. This bronze cylinder began to gleam bright and clean under the final hand polishing, in less than six hours.

"Funny," Jackson muttered. "You'd think something buried for any really long period of time would be far more corroded than this. What if this thing is a hoax?"

Stoddard yelped at the word, as if it had stabbed him. "Don't say such a thing, Jackson."

But Jackson was persistent with that gnawing doubt. "I'd swear it looks as if it had rested in the ground only a short time. Somebody might have buried it just a few years ago as a practical joke. People have done such things, you know-remember the Cardiff Giant?"

Stoddard had recovered his excitement. "Always the skeptic," he chided. "Listen, what if the makers of the cylinder knew great metal arts? What if they made an alloy resistant to the ravages of time? See? -that would explain it."

"Sure, sure," Jackson agreed with a twisted lip. "That's nice and glib. For a so-called scientist, Stod­dard, you have a most naive attitude."

"May I return the compliment?" said Stoddard, dripping honey from his voice. "You're of the hard-headed school, Jackson. Just a shade short of the lard-headed school."

Thus they worked on as a team, smoothly, oiled by mutual stabs of sarcasm flying back and forth. The casual listener might infer they were bitter personal enemies. But the sensitive observer would see their staunch friendship. Their stinging insults were really words of respect and admiration, merely couched in reverse semantics. If they ever said anything nice about each other, it would be the danger signal that their friendship was precarious.

"There's something peculiar about this whole thing," Jackson said seriously. "What past age could turn out a tooled cylinder like this? Certainly not the Egyptians with their clumsy stone pyramids. Nor the Sumerians with their crude clay pottery. And not any later age like the Greeks and Romans, who were great thinkers but poor doers. That metal container is as good as any we could make with modern technology. What blasted past era could duplicate it?"

"Isn't that what we're trying to find out?" Stod­dard's tone was ironic-but also puzzled. "Yes, what unknown artisans did whip that thing together? How about it, Jackson-shall we open it up now?"

"Professor Beatty didn't give us permission to go that far," Jackson said hesitantly.

"He'd probably be sore if we did," agreed Stod­dard. "And how he can rip you up and down when he's in a rage. We'd be hauled on the carpet and tongue-lashed. We'd be utter fools to open it."

"O.K.," said Jackson. "Let's open it."

They grinned at each other like two conspirators. "Hmm. If we can," amended Stoddard, feeling his way along the smooth cylinder. "How do we open it? The thing has no screw top, like the time capsule buried at the New York World's Fair in 1939. It has no doors or openings of any kind. Solid, smooth, from end to end! Are we supposed to blast it open with dynamite? Or use an oxy-acetylene torch?"

Jackson went over it inch by inch, but it was getting dark now. "I'll turn on the lights and we'll give it a more thorough going-over. It must have some kind of opening, or means of getting inside."

But Jackson's finger paused at the light switch, at a sharp word from Stoddard. "Wait, Jackson-give a look. I don't think we need lights. It glows in the dark!"

Eerily, it was so.

As the gloom within the warehouse deepened with the fading light of day, the time capsule began to glow. Brighter and brighter it shone, until it was gleaming all over with a soft rosy light, revealing its every contour perfectly, by itself.

"Weird!" breathed Stoddard, caught by the wonder of it. "Somehow they incorporated its own light-giving mechanism within the capsule. Maybe to make sure it would be found some day, or for that matter, some night. It would send out light if the least por­tion of it were uncovered from the ground. But figure out how it lights up like that, Jackson-all over, uni­formly. Radioactive principle?"

Jackson was already there with the Geiger coun­ter, a standard item with archeologists who use radioactivity as a yardstick to measure eons of time. "Not a peep from the counter. No radioactivity."

Stoddard was more baffled.

"No sign of luminous paint, or phosphorescent coating. Maybe, Jackson-just maybe that metal is somehow excited by cosmic rays! They stream down on earth all the time, as they did a billion years ago, and as they will a billion years from now. It would be the one sure way of making the time capsule self-luminous for all ages to come, to the end of time."

"Cosmic ray luminosity," echoed Jackson scornfully. "That is in the category of scientific wizardry. How do you think up such fairy tales, Stoddard? It may have happened by sheer accident, as well. Rot­ting stumps become luminous too. Or peat, buried in the ground. If you ask me, this may be a big hoax. It doesn't add up right, somehow."

"You're suspicious," Stoddard muttered, "even when two and two make four, right in front of your eyes. If we could only open it, we'd find the answer. But I've gone over it twice. It's still like the un­broken shell of an egg-"

He stopped. They froze.

A sound came from the enigmatic cylinder. A soft slithering sound. As they stared in paralyzed fas­cination, they saw the unbelievable. Three holes popped open by themselves, in the side of the capsule, and three rods of metal extended themselves silently. Invitingly.

Stoddard stuttered: "The solid metal softened and opened by itself, letting out levers."

"Levers?"

Stoddard pointed. "What else? Look, numerals on the knobs of each. The first is marked with a simple Roman numeral I. The second II. The third III. So we use the levers in that order. A half-witted ape could figure that out."

"Glad you did." Jackson grinned. "All right, go to it."

Stoddard moved the first handle, holding his breath. A low hum rose within the capsule. He waited, then moved number II. The hum changed to a whirr of oiled parts intermeshing. Number III resulted in a soft swish …

The door of the time capsule opened before them.

It was a large, round flap that miraculously de­tached itself from the seemingly solid metal and swung wide. From the inside came a rush of musty dry air or gas, as if the interior had been under pressure.

"Helium, no doubt," Jackson said. "An inert gas, preserving things timelessly, without harm. We sealed many of our relics in helium gas, in our own time capsules."

Stoddard peered in. The interior too was lighted brightly and automatically. It was crammed with preserved items.

"Still a hoax, Jackson?" Stoddard needled. "A bunch of clever junk whipped up by some practical joker?"

"Why not?" replied Jackson. "That's more logical than expecting them to be relics of a great and un­known civilization of Antarctica or wherever. Never­theless, one of us may get a big shock."

Stoddard's eyes were glowing.

"Jackson," he said eagerly. "What an opportunity for us. You and I are the two youngest members of the Institute. Mere apprentices, so to speak. Begin­ners. Neophytes. But what if we pinned down the origin of this amazing mystery tonight? Before Beatty and Henderson and Povkin and the other big guns take over? What a deal for us! But that would mean working through the night, unpacking the capsule. Are you game, Jackson?"

"That," said Jackson, "is perhaps the most silly question asked since the beginning of the cosmos. Who could sleep anyway, thinking about such an exciting riddle? I'm with you. I can just picture their faces tomorrow when we tell them exactly where the time cylinder came from. That is, if luck is with us. Let's get cracking."

In dead silence, Stoddard took the relics out and handed them to Jackson. There was a large, cleared space on the floor of the warehouse, and Jackson carefully laid the items in neat rows.

The two young archeologists were panting in sweat in their hurry. But they were breathless from more than their labors. Through them tingled the thrill of entering the spirit-haunted tomb of an an­cient Egyptian pharaoh. Or it was like finding the fossil bones of some hitherto unknown species of mankind. Or the wreck of a spaceship or flying saucer. All these things and more.

The treasures were books with metallic leaves, printed in an unknown language. There were photographs with a vividly three-dimensional illusion. There were samples of plastic clothing that seemed utterly rip-proof, stronger than steel yet lighter than down.

Item by item piled up, unbelievably.

"All the paraphernalia of a magnificent civiliza­tion more advanced than ours," Stoddard gloated. "Well, Jackson? Is this still a spurious hoax spawned in the twisted mind of a guy playing it for laughs?"

"Why not?" Jackson returned stubbornly, but with an uncertain air. "I want positive proof to the contrary."

"You've got it," Stoddard sang, holding up pho­tographs of startling detail. "Scenes on other worlds! One of these has a canal, like Mars would have. They had space ships and interplanetary travel. When have you been to Mars lately, Jackson?"

"Hollywood," said Jackson, "can make better sets than those. Those scenes prove nothing-not to me."

Stoddard let out a triumphant yell, as he took out what appeared to be a small mechanical model of a spaceship. He touched a tiny stud on its side. It hissed and leaped out of his hand.

It spun up toward the warehouse rafters at blaz...