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.