We sat on a little metal bench beside Doris; whispered to her, comforting her. How terrible all this must have been to her, in her eternal darkness! Tork quite evidently had followed her and me when I took her home; and then he had gotten in, seized her, with a drug that had rendered her unconscious. . . .
"Two thousand ten," Tork said suddenly to his men. He chuckled. "We are making speed—and no more stops, this trip.
Blake and I stared out the window between its luminous, faintly humming grey bars. During all this time I had been aware that at first there was alternate light and darkness outside—brief periods which marked the passing days and nights as we sped into Time. There was a steady acceleration; light and darkness which soon were brief puffs. And then their speed blended them; a greyness outside. I had seen a green tinge to it, alternating with white—the summers, the winters, and then they too were blended into drab monochrome of grey as the years, merged with one another, sped by.
I stared, breathless, awed and then with murmured words tried futilely to describe it to Doris. The ghostly grey outlines of the landscape and the city outside our window were changing with a slow flow of movement. Great shadowy buildings rose. It was a strange form of movement; things melting down, leprous and in a second gone, and others, always larger, rising to take their place.
The time-dials in front of Tork were whirring. The dial for the years was a blur with its whirling pointer. Great New York!—It had flowed up and around us, engulfing us. Monstrous metal terraces, gigantic arches, buildings that towered into the sky. All grey with the blended daylight and darkness, winter and summer.
But now I could see spots of color. Buildings of glistening yellow metal which endured for a hundred years or more, and then were gone with something else replacing them. Great archways on which permanent lights were mounted, so that at least for what to us was a second or two, we could see the spots and glare of the lights.
Had the great city here reached its height? It seemed so. Down the slope, where the little Spuyten Duyvil Creek wound into the broad Hudson, all had been engulfed by the bridges, terraces and arcades.
Now we plunged into blankness. Great structures were built on this space we were occupying. A blankness here, with our ship perhaps within the metal itself of the vast structure. Then that was gone and we came again into the open.
THE great city at its height. I could envisage all the myriad little events transpiring here—the daily movements of millions of people here in these buildings, on the towering terraced streets. The giant vehicles in the air. A billion-billion little events, so brief that they were merged into a grey nothingness before us.
Beyond where the Spuyten Duyvil and the Hudson now doubtlessly flowed submerged beneath solid arcades under them, a monstrous spired tower swiftly rose into the air. Fifty years perhaps to build it. For what to us was a moment or two, it held on its top a great multi-colored beacon—a ring of red and green eyes. They endured—a hundred, two hundred years.
Then all in the blinking of an eye, the tower was gone, A leprous hole there; a grey leprous patch to the left and to the right; a blur down where a segment of the Hudson was exposed,
