Only recently there came a wan ray of hope. It was as we were transferring the last pieces of furniture from the Jefferson to our shacks. In the berth that had been Danny Wilson's—gay, laughing Danny!—I found pile upon pile of those amusing, colorful "magazines" that Danny loved.
They are old and ragged; many of them are coverless. But most of them—for such was Danny's preference—are the kind which Mallory once called "science fiction." Dreams of the world-to-be, pathetic in the face of that which now confronts us.
But it is my only ray of hope, these magazines. I brought them to my shack. I am culling them carefully, one by one. There is a faint, and oh! so faint, chance that....
Yet I fear it is a hopeless search. There is so much of fancy in these little books, so little simple fact. Had but one of those imaginative writers of years ago thought to include in one of his stories that which must have been, to him, a commonplace formula—that for chlorophyll—I could yet do that which Mallory demanded of me. Here we are rich with ores, the soil teems with every element known to man. We have a well-equipped laboratory, we could synthesize anything. But we cannot create this "chlorophyll" because we do not know what it is, nor what elements combine to form it.
Hope dwindles as I read. There remains but one more slim pile of magazines before me. If the answer is not in one of them, then we must perish. I turn pleading eyes to the past, to the year 1940, before I was born. But there is no one to hear my plea. Unless, in one of these remaining—
(Here the manuscript ends.)
POSTSCRIPT
Common sense tells me there can be little doubt but that this "manuscript," purported to be written by one Brian O'Shea, a soldier in the Army of the Democracies in the year 1963, A.D., is a deliberate and painstaking hoax.
Who is responsible for it, I cannot begin to guess. Somehow I can't bring myself to believe that Dr. Edgar Winslow (whom I have investigated and found to be exactly what he claimed, a fellow in the psychology department of one of our nearby Southern universities) would lend himself to such a fantastic trick.