"Cannot?" came the bitter voice. "You mistake, Ferson—it must and shall. What are they now but brutes, animals; the world of men that derided and refused my work, that might have transformed them into gods? Brutes, and even more brutal shall they become, going down through form after form to the first protoplasm. They asked for proof——I have given the world proof, have thrown back humanity eons on the road of progress! And I will throw them and all earth's life back farther still! This great projector——it is worth the months it took to build it—months that I toiled here and posed as a scientist studying electrical phenomena, working to finish the projector at last and turn its great damping vibration toward the sun in a mighty ray! A vibration tuned to neutralize and destroy that part of the sun's evolution vibrations radiating toward earth! You have lost, Ferson——Harker, for you both die this moment and this projector shall continue to withhold the evolution vibrations from earth until its life has been thrown back in this world atavism into the primal protoplasm! Until I alone am left living upon——"
His pistol roared, for it was at that instant that Ferson leaped. But even the bullet could not halt Ferson's rush, so swift and unexpected was it, and he struck Grant, knocked him back, I leaped toward the projector.
Grant's pistol was detonating even as he was knocked back, though, and half-way to the machine something seemed to strike me two swift, smashing blows beneath the shoulder. I swayed, staggered on to the projector, was beneath it and reaching toward the cables leading into it. Grant was springing toward me, his pistol at my head. But behind him Ferson, blood on his lips and on his breast, half-raised himself, the pistol in his hand speaking. At its crack Grant swayed, collapsed and fell, the black compact case at his belt, that had preserved him, breaking loose as he struck the floor.
Ferson, leaning, had his dimming eyes upon me, striving to speak. I reached, grasped the cables, tore at them once, twice, and then they had ripped loose. The white light of the disk inside the great projector vanished, and the mechanism that moved it ceased its clicking. The world atavism, that had thrown the races of man back to the state that had been theirs eons before, was ended at last! Ferson, his eyes on mine, seemed to smile feebly in approval. Then his body slipped quietly down and he lay as motionless and silent as Grant.
Afterword
I have been writing here in this silent room for a time, whose length I cannot guess. Westward, though, the sun is touching the horizon, its level rays searching through this room, over the great projector and over Ferson and Grant, lying silent before me.
My life is ebbing swiftly from me with each passing minute, yet with the age-old instinct of man strong in me I have striven thus to leave a record of the great change, that men of the future in some far day may read.
Men of the future! For there will be such, there must be such. The upward surge of evolutionary progress that has been interrupted, set back, here on earth begins again its slow upward climb with the halting of this projector, the coming again of the evolution vibrations that are now playing on earth again. Beneath me, in the silent city, there swarm the ape-like hordes that were once humanity, but through the coming ages they will climb up again through troglodyte and savage barbarian to man!
And it is for those men of the far future that I have written with my last strength these words, as a record and a warning that I shall enclose in the steel box beside me.