Electro-episoded in A.D. 2025

By E. D. Skinner
Inserting a needle-point barely beyond and to the left of the higher of the two mountain peaks, he took a delicate copper wire and connected this with “Local.” Throwing the clutch back into “Local” the faint outline of the mountain disappeared, and a vivid picture of the “Parker Pass” replaced it....
Humor, we have been told by some of our critics, can never amount to much in scientifiction. If we may let a secret out of the bag, the Editor has been on a rampage, lately, to find a scientifiction story in which there really could be a subtle humor without weakening the narrative. Well, we believe we have found it in this tale, which not only has all of the above-mentioned qualifications, but a fine O. Henry ending thrown in for good measure. Only when you have read it for the second time will you appreciate it to its fullest extent.
If Lieutenant-Colonel Algernon Sidney St. Johnstone, N.Y.N.G., had been in a normal condition, he would certainly have been aware of a peculiar buzzing sensation in the region of his upper left-hand vest pocket; but unfortunately it so happened that his actual physical state was most emphatically sub-normal. Still he could hardly avoid the suspicion that something out of the ordinary had disturbed him; and, with blinking eyes, he searched the apartment for possible inordinate things.
The first to attract his attention was a neatly folded copy of the eleven o’clock edition of the Hourly Bulletin , bearing the date: “Tuesday, January 7, 2025”; which, with its “up-to-the-minute” Wall street market quotations, lay unread upon the desk before him. This he swept to the floor with an impatient sweep of his arm!
Next his left hand instinctively sought, with practiced precision, a black bottle on a side-desk close by. Holding the bottle to the light, his eyes told him that it was empty. Tipping it upside down above his wide-open mouth, his tongue repeated the information with emphasis. Dejectedly keeping the bottle before him, he glared in an insane fury at two green labels—one the trade mark of a by-gone century, and the other a “Bottled in Bond” stamp dated: “July 1, 1916”—which his wisdom told him were both forgeries.