The Time Cylinder - Otto Binder, ebook, Temp
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The Time Cylinder
Eando
Binder
At the 1939 World's Fair in Flushing Meadows, a time capsule, containing representative samples of our
cultural and technological achievement, was buried. So carefully thought out were the enclo-sures that
even a copy of a science-fiction maga-zine was placed in the capsule! Our descendants may some day
examine the contents of this capsule with interest and astonishment. But suppose we were to find a time
capsule. What might it contain? What civilization could have buried it?Eando Binder, popular author of
past years, returns to science-fiction to explore this fascinating theme.
"AND you uncovered the time capsule with your plow?" asked Stoddard.
The farmer nodded. He shifted his chew of to-bacco in his cheeks, astounded at all the furor this
discovery had caused. "Out in my east forty I found it," he said."Just cleared that piece. It was timber and
scrub land before. My plow hit something hard just under the ground. Figured it was a rock so I scooped
away dirt and there it was—or the top of it—that thing. What did you call it?"
"Atime capsule,"Stoddard said, trying to control his feverish excitement. "Look at it. What else could it
be? A long-lasting,bronzelike cylinder twenty-five feetlong, completely sealed. Very much like the others
we've buried at times for future ages to find. The Archeological Institute sent Jackson and me to
inves-tigate your report of it. We thought of course—no offense—it might be simply a wild story."
Jackson also was bristling with excitement. "What a find! Look how it's tarnished and encrusted with
mold.A record-crypt from some long past age!"
Itlay there, a riddle wrapped in tawny metal. The farmer himself had hitched up his tractor and dragged it
free of the ground. What strange, unknown, past civilization had buried this record of itself, fated to be
found in 1953?
"The papers will go crazy when the news gets out," Stoddard prophesied. "This isheadline stuff."He
whirled to the phone. "Time's wasting. I'll tell Professor Beatty at the Institute to send a truck to haul it
there.Then for the grand opening. How far back does this date, Jackson? A thousand years?Ten
thousand? Who knows?"
 But already Jackson was staring at the time cap-sule with puzzled eyes, vaguely sensing that the an-swer
promised to be more astounding than they yetdreamed .. .
Sirens wailed through the city streets, a few hours later. An eager crowd already lined the path ofthebig
trailer truck as it hauled the huge cylinder, flanked by its police escort of motorcycles, to the
Archeologi-cal Institute.
Extras already proclaimed it in their headlines as—TIME CAPSULE FOUND FROM DAWN OF
CIVILIZATION. Radio announcerswere hardly less reticent nor more accurate with "Ancient
record-crypt may he a million years old."Camera crews from TV networks were at hand, recording
everything on film as the giant capsule was carefully maneuvered into the back warehouse of the Institute.
Nothing could so fire the imagination of the public as finding something from antiquity, throwing light on
Earth's past history.
It was like the discovery of KingTut's tomb all over again, only on a grander scale. Finally the police
succeeded in waving the last of the crowd away and the warehouse doors closed on the time capsule.
Professor Beatty, director of the Institute, stared at it with shocked wonder, as if somehow it had no
right to exist. "We'll drop everything," he announced immediately."Even that sorting of Mayan pottery.
We'll get at this tomorrow with our whole crew."
Stoddard's face fell. "Must it wait till tomorrow? Professor, how about me and Jackson? Can't we get
right to work on it? Why waste a whole day?"
Beatty had to chuckle. "That thing has been buried for untold centuries perhaps.Millions of days. What
would one
more
day matter? All right, go ahead, you two eager-heavers. But you're getting the dirty
work, scraping off that mold."
He left, smiling at their youthful enthusiasm. He, too, had been that way, long ago, when he came across
his first find of Neolithic arrowheads.
Left alone, Stoddard and Jackson went to work with panting haste. Surprisingly, it was an easy job to
chip off the hardened mold and clean the surface. Often it took days or weeks to extract ancient relics
patiently from fossilized mud. This bronze cylinder began to gleam bright and clean under the final hand
polishing, in less than six hours.
"Funny," Jackson muttered. "You'd think some-thing buried for any really long period of time would be
far more corroded than this. What if this thing is a
hoax?"
Stoddard yelped at the word, as if it had stabbed him. "Don't say such a thing, Jackson."
But Jackson was persistent with that gnawing doubt. "I'd swear it looks as if it had rested in the ground
only a short time. Somebody might have buried it just a few years ago as a practical joke. People have
done suchthings, you know—remember the Cardiff Giant?"
Stoddard had recovered his excitement. "Always the skeptic," he chided. "Listen, what if the makers of
the cylinder knew great metal arts? What if they made an alloy resistant to the ravages of time? See?
—that would explain it."
"Sure, sure," Jackson agreed with a twisted lip. "That's nice and glib. For a so-called scientist,
 Stod-dard, you have a most naive attitude."
"May I return the compliment?" said Stoddard, dripping honey from his voice. "You're of the
hard-headed school, Jackson.Just a shade short of the lard-headed school."
Thus they worked on as a team, smoothly, oiled by mutual stabs of sarcasm flying back and forth. The
casual listener might infer they were bitter personal enemies. But the sensitive observer would see their
staunch friendship. Their stinging insults were really words of respect and admiration, merely couched in
reverse semantics. If they ever said anything
nice
about each other, it would be the danger signal that their
friendship was precarious.
"There's something peculiar about this whole thing," Jackson said seriously. "What past age could turn
out a tooled cylinder like this?Certainly not the Egyptians with their clumsy stone pyramids.Nor the
Sumerians with their crude clay pottery. And not any later age like the Greeks and Romans, who were
great thinkers but poor doers. That metal container is as good as any we could make with modern
technology.
What
blasted
past
era could duplicate it?"
"Isn't that what we're trying to find out?"Stod-dard's tone was ironic—but also puzzled. "Yes, what
unknown artisans did whip that thing together? How about it, Jackson—shall we open it up now?"
"Professor Beatty didn't give us permission to go that far," Jackson said hesitantly.
"He'd probably be sore if we did,"agreed Stod-dard. "And how he
can
rip you up and down when he's
in a rage. We'd be hauled on the carpet and tongue-lashed. We'd be utter fools to open it."
"O.K.," said Jackson. "Let's open it."
They grinned at each other like two conspirators."Hmm. If we
can,"
amended Stoddard, feeling his way
along the smooth cylinder.
"How
do we open it? The thing has no screw top, like the time capsule buried
at the New York World's Fair in 1939. It has no doors or openings of any kind. Solid, smooth, from end
to end! Are we supposed to blast it open with dynamite? Or use an oxy-acetylene torch?"
Jackson went over it inch by inch, but it was getting dark now. "1'11 turn on the lights and we'll give it a
more thorough going-over. It must have
some
kind of opening, or means of getting inside."
But Jackson's finger paused at the light switch, at a sharp word from Stoddard. "Wait, Jackson—give a
look. I don't think we need lights. It
glows
in the dark!"
Eerily, it was so.
As the gloom within the warehouse deepened with the fading light of day, the time capsule began to
glow. Brighter and brighter it shone, until it was gleaming all over with a soft rosy light, revealing its every
contour perfectly, by itself.
"Weird!"breathed Stoddard, caught by the wonder of it."Somehow they incorporatedits own light-giving
mechanism within the capsule. Maybe to make
sure
it would be found some day, or for that matter, some
night. It would send out light if the least por-tion of it were uncovered from the ground. But figure out
how it lights up like that, Jackson—all over, uni-formly.Radioactive principle?"
Jackson was already there with the Geiger coun-ter, a standard item with archeologists who use
radioactivity as a yardstick to measure eons of time." Not a peep from the counter. No radioactivity."
 Stoddard was more baffled.
"No sign of luminous paint, or phosphorescent coating. Maybe, Jackson—just maybe that metal is
somehow excited by
cosmic rays!
They stream down on earth all the time, as they (lid a billion years ago,
and as they will a billion years from now. It would be the one sure way of making the time capsule
self-luminous for all ages to come, to the end of time."
"Cosmic ray luminosity," echoed Jackson scorn-fully. "That is in the category of scientific wizardry. How
do you think up such fairy tales, Stoddard? It may have happened by sheer accident, as well. Rot-ting
stumps become luminous too. Or peat, buried in the ground.if you ask me, this may be a big hoax. It
doesn't acid up right, somehow."
"You're suspicious,"Stoddard muttered," even when two and two make four, right in front of your eyes.
If we could only open it, we'd find the answer. But I've gone over it twice. It's still like the un-broken
shell of an egg—"
He stopped. They froze.
A sound came from the enigmatic cylinder.A soft slithering sound. As they stared in paralyzed
fas-cination, they saw the unbelievable. Three holes popped open by themselves, in the side of the
capsule, and three rods of metal extended themselves silently.Invitingly.
Stoddard stuttered: "The solid metal softened and opened by itself, letting out levers."
"Levers?"
Stoddard pointed." What else? Look, numerals on the knobs of each. The first is marked with a simple
Roman numeral I.The second 11.The third III. So we use the levers in that order. A half-witted ape
could figure that out."
"Glad you did." Jackson grinned. "All right, go to it."
Stoddard moved the first handle, holding his breath. A low hum rose within the capsule. He waited,then
moved number H. The hum changed to a whirr of oiled parts intermeshing. Number III resulted in a soft
swish . .
The door of the time capsule opened before them.
It was a large, round flap that miraculously de-tached itself from the seemingly solid metal and swung
wide. From the inside came a rush of musty dry air or gas, as if the interior had been under pressure.
"Helium, no doubt,"Jackson said."An inert gas, preserving things timelessly, without harm. We sealed
many of our relics in helium gas, in our own time capsules."
Stoddard peered in. The interior too was lighted brightly and automatically. It was crammed with
pre-served items.
"Still a hoax, Jackson?" Stoddard needled. "A bunch of clever junk whipped up by some practical
joker?"
 "Why not?" replied Jackson. "That's more logical than expecting them to be relics of a great and
un-known civilization of Antarctica or wherever. Never-theless, one of us may get a big shock."
Stoddard's eyes were glowing.
"Jackson," he said eagerly. "What an opportunity for us. You and I are the two youngest members of the
Institute. Mere apprentices, so to speak.Begin-ners.Neophytes. But what if we pinned down the origin of
this amazing mystery
tonight?
Before Beatty and Henderson andPovkin and the other big guns take
over? What a deal for us! But that would mean working through the night, unpacking the capsule. Are
you game, Jackson?"
"That," saidJackson, "is perhaps the most silly question asked since the beginning of the cosmos. Who
could sleep anyway, thinking about such an exciting riddle? I'm with you. I can just picture their faces
tomorrow when we tell them exactly where the time cylinder came from. That is, if luck is with us. Let's
get cracking."
In dead silence, Stoddard took the relics out and handed them to Jackson. There was a large, cleared
space on the floor of the warehouse, and Jackson carefully laid the items in neat rows.
The two young archeologists were panting in sweat in their hurry. But they were breathless from more
than their labors. Through them tingled the thrill of entering the spirit-haunted tomb of an an-cient
Egyptianpharaoh. Or it was like finding the fossil bones of some hitherto unknown species of mankind.Or
the wreck of a spaceship or flying saucer.All these things and more.
The treasures were books with metallic leaves, printed in an unknown language. There were
photo-graphs with a vividly three-dimensional illusion. There were samples of plastic clothing that seemed
utterly rip-proof, stronger than steel yet lighter than down.
Item by item piled up, unbelievably.
"All the paraphernalia of a magnificent civiliza-tion more advanced than
ours,"
Stoddard gloated. "Well,
Jackson? Is this still a spurious hoax spawned in the twisted mind of a guy playing it for laughs?"
"Why not?"Jackson returned stubbornly, but with an uncertain air. "I want positive proof to the
contrary."
"You've got it," Stoddard sang, holding up pho-tographs of startling detail."Scenes on other worlds! One
of these has a canal, like Mars would have. They had space ships and interplanetary travel. When have
you
been to Mars lately, Jackson?"
"Hollywood,"said Jackson," can make better sets than those. Those scenes prove nothing—not to me."
Stoddard let out a triumphant yell, as he tookout what appeared to be a small mechanical model of a
spaceship. He touched a tiny stud on its side. It hissed and leaped out of his hand.
It spun up toward the warehouse rafters at blaz-ing speed. Then it turned as if sensing the roof against
which it might crash, swooped down like a boomerang, and wheeled in wide circles over their heads.
Finally it slowed down and came to ahalt .. .
In mid-air!
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