I cannot tell now in full of those terrible last days of change, those days in which in our chance glimpses we saw men making that other terrible step backward, from troglodyte to ape. For Ferson and I were working with the speed of utter despair. Even were Grant's terrible work to be halted, the sun's evolution vibrations again released on earth, it would take them untold ages to raise the brute-like beings about us to the status of men once more. Humanity was passing, had passed, into the brute around us, yet for their sake, for the sake of the humanity that might rise again in the dim future, we kept to our efforts, sought still to halt this awful change, that would otherwise not stop until protoplasmic slime alone was left living on earth.
We had found the correct frequency for the circuits of our recording instruments, and in feverish haste set up those instruments at intervals of a mile, working through the night. The weirdest of work it was, the vast city's streets and structures silent in the night around us, the countless hordes of brute-like beings that once had built them now cowering in the buildings in ape-like fear of the night's mysteries. We took our readings, hastened back to our laboratory, and dawn found us marking those readings on the great chart-map of the section we had ready. Somewhere in that section, somewhere near New York, we knew, Grant lurked with his terrible mechanism, our first readings having shown us that. And now, as with trembling hands Ferson and I drew the graphs on the big chart, we stared for a moment after in complete silence.
Those lines converged at a point in a midtown block of the great city south of us, a block occupied by a single gigantic building whose aspiring tower was in sight of our laboratory's windows!
For moments Ferson and I stared from chart to tower in silence, and then without words we had turned, seen to the filled magazines of the pistols at our belts, and were passing out of the laboratory into the bright sunlight. As silent as ever, we started southward.
Never, were my existence extended a thousand years, could there be blotted from my memory that journey southward through the silent towers of New York that Ferson and I made then. For the great city that lay silent about us beneath the brilliant noon sunshine, was a city of horror unutterable. Dead lay thick in its streets and great dogs, already strange and fierce and wolf-like, ran in packs among them. The rusting wrecks of smashed automobiles were piled at every corner. No window of all we passed remained intact, sidewalks and streets were sprinkled with shivered glass. Westward across the river a great fire was burning in the cities there, pouring a black volume of flame-laced smoke up to the skies. But more terrible than all of these things were the hordes, the swarms of creatures that moved through the streets and ways about us, the countless creatures that once had been the city's people!
Great ape-like creatures they were, not apes such as men had known, but ape-like races such as men had sprung from eons before. In groups and packs of scores they roamed the city's ways. Covered with thick hair, stooped and crouching of gait, the garments that they had worn as men torn and discarded, there was in them no semblance to humanity. They walked stiffly toward each other, stooping to rest hairy forearms on the ground each few steps. They growled and barked in rage, or chattered volubly and meaninglessly. The majority were prowling in wrecked stores for fragments of food. Others moved along the streets in a search for small animals, for insects even.
Growling in rage their groups came toward Ferson and me as we moved onward, but each time a pistol-shot sent them fleeing from us. We moved on, never speaking, Ferson's face icy calm, my own brain reeling. We came at last to the base of the giant building that we knew must hold whatever mechanism Grant was using to withhold the evolution vibrations from the earth.
Ferson turned to speak to me for the first time. "Somewhere in here," he whispered. "We must search, Harker——to find Grant's apparatus——"
"And if he is with it?" I asked, but his only answer was to tighten his grip on the pistol in his hand.