Chapter I: Front Matter

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.