The Sunless World by Neil R. Jones

Author:Neil R. Jones
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Science Fiction, American
Publisher: Ace Books
Published: 1967-08-05T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter IV

ACROSS THE YEARS

They moved onward for many decades, finding that a great catastrophe had stricken the Earth. An immense cloud of cosmic dust had enfolded the Earth from out of space in its drifting mass, shutting off the light of the sun. Humanity found refuge in vast, subterranean cities. Another jump of a hundred years, however, found civilization once more living on the surface in rebuilt cities, the Earth free of the cosmic veil. The professor was eager to return and see how it had all happened, but Zlestrm’s food supply was nearly exhausted and they must move onward faster.

In the twenty-third century, the time travelers found that interplanetary navigation had been conquered.

“They have now reached the stage which the Martians reached two hundred thousand years ago,” 744U-21 remarked.

The next hundred years saw colonization of the other planets, inclusive of Mars and Venus. Here and there, Professor Jameson and Zlestrm picked up bits of life contemporary with the period they were visiting. Bandits menaced the colonies of Venus. There was the Durna Rangue, a cult persecuted on Earth because of practices in condemned sciences. The hideous organization had fled to Mars. The time travelers also heard of a sensational escape of a prisoner from the interplanetary penal colony on the Martian moon of Phobos.

Space expeditions to the moons of Saturn came back with strange, manlike creatures from Dione, their arms ending in swordlike protuberances. They were veritable born swordsmen. And from Ganymede, one of Jupiter’s moons, were brought even stranger beings. In no way did they resemble humans. They were more like large rubber balls with appendages for movement, these appendages folding into their body at will.

Another leap of two centuries across the years found all three worlds, the Earth, Venus and Mars, equally settled by mankind. No longer were Mars and Venus the wild, unsettled frontiers of interplanetary colonization. They were firmly established along with the Earth. There were space pirates who menaced interplanetary commerce. These, the Interplanetary Guard often fought, when they could find them. The little asteroids and many other out-of-the-way hiding places of the solar system effectually sheltered the buccaneers of space.

Daring astronauts were sent out alone in their tiny space fliers to follow the flight of wild, careening meteors and extract from them their strange metals and precious stones from far-flung corners of the universe. The courses of dangerous meteors and small planetoids were accurately charted.

Spacecraft seemed to avoid the professor’s rocket. Those there knew of its history and respected it. Others feared it. Radium repulsion rays, designed by the professor to swerve the rocket from the path of meteors, always kept it at a respectful distance from spaceships.

One of the strangest cases ever brought to the professor’s eyes had happened less than six hundred years following his death. A mastery of super-scientific surgery had been performed. A human being killed in a space wreck among the asteroids had been brought back to life. With mangled limbs, a fractured skull and punctured heart, Nex

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