2000 Years On

by John Russell Fearn, Vargo Statten

Genres: Science Fiction; Sci-fi Action & Adventure; Space Opera

Synopsis

Jeremy Clyde is a young scientist who discovers that Time is a circle, and that deep within the human brain is a memory 'hangover' of future and past events. He carries out an experiment on himself and succeeds in mentally projecting his body 2,000 years into the future. Here he learns that his arrival in 3950 has been anticipated, and incredibly, he is appointed as the nominal ruler of the four inhabited inner planets, Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars. But he discovers he is only a puppet for a ruthless governing system being secretly maintained by malign Jovians. Clyde joins forces with his counterparts on the three other planets and battles to throw off the alien yoke...

Release date: March 31, 2015

Publisher: Gateway

Print pages: 93

Sample

Jeremy Clyde had never forgotten Professor Einwold’s lecture. He had written down every word of it in short-hand because it seemed to him that at the time the famous physicist had been inspired. He had delivered facts concerning Time which, for Jeremy at least—unless he had the type of mind unusually well equipped for receiving them—had seemed to offer a workable basis for practical demonstration.

“Time does not really exist,” Professor Einwold had said. “It is purely the term which science applies to a condition of a space which it does not really comprehend. We know there has been a past; we know there is a future. We can prove the one but not the other. Hence the term ‘Time,’ so that an insurmountable difficulty may become resolved into common understanding.”

When that statement had been made Jeremy Clyde had been a young physics student, with rare claims to brilliance. In five more years, at the age of twenty, he had become an analyst in a government department—a purely bread-and-butter job whilst he worked, and worked, and still worked, on the dim beginnings of the theory Professor Einwold had outlined.

Four more years passed. By this time Jeremy Clyde had read everything ever written by Einstein, Eddington, Jeans, and all the other imposing array of scientists. He had worked out a scheme for himself, and made practical tests in the little laboratory attached to his home—a sacrosanct territory where his parents did not dare to tread.

“Time,” Jeremy Clyde declared one evening, entirely to himself, “definitely does not exist! It is a conception engendered by the limitations of a physical body. And a physical body, according to Eddington and Jeans, is the outward manifestation of thought itself. Change the thought and you change the body in like proportion. You believe you know the past: so, adjust your mind to the situation and there is no reason why you shouldn’t know the future!”

Another two years of experiment led him to add an amendment, and in his notes it read—

Time is a circle, in which thought itself and all its creations go in an everlasting cycle, repeating the process without end. Therefore, if you have in a remote past done the same things you are doing now, it is logical to assume that some hangover of memory may be left behind—a hangover from the past which, from the present standpoint, will be the future, so far back is it in the time circle.

The medium for thought is the brain. Therefore, any hangover must be in the brain. Find that, and you have the key to future time. All you will really do is awaken a memory from the remote past.

It was at this point that Jeremy Clyde really knew he had got something, and the “something” took the shape of complicated masses of apparatus contrived from hard-earned savings and erected in spare time. Again and again he built and rebuilt, tested and experimented, finally commandeering assistance from two other young men with ideas similar to his own, though they had not his technical brilliance.

When he had things as he wanted them he summoned his two friends one Saturday evening and indicated his apparatus.

“Boys, I have it!” he declared. “You know my theory regarding the memory hangover. This”—he motioned to a piece of apparatus—“is the Probe.”

His two friends were silent, looking first at him and then the equipment. Jeremy Clyde studied their reactions intently. He was a black-haired, blue-eyed young man, with the sharp features of both thinker and doer.

“You don’t mean you’re going to use this stuff on your brain to probe for the right spot, do you?” one of his friends—Len Seaton—demanded.

“Just that.”

“And what then?”

“Tell you better when I know something,” Jeremy grinned. “For the moment I want you and Harry to follow instructions.”

Jeremy seated himself in the chair immediately under the wilderness of odd-looking lenses, lamps and tubes. Following instructions, Len Seaton busied himself with the switchboard. One projector gave forth a violet ray which enveloped Jeremy’s head completely.

Opposite him, so he could see it clearly, a squared and numbered screen came into life and gave a perfect silhouette, X-ray fashion, of his skull. It differed only from X-ray in that the convolutions of the brain were clearly shown with more vividness than any other part.

“There!” Jeremy cried. “Look in Section Nine, Square Five! There’s a black oval mark—a blind spot. That is a hangover!”

He pressed a switch on the chair arm.

“Taking a photograph,” he explained. Then giving the order to cut off the entire apparatus he got to his feet. Within a few minutes the self-developing tank had produced a finished print. He handed it round in obvious delight.

“So what?” Harry Carlton growled. “Now you have a blind spot what good does it do you? You still can’t see the future!”

“But I shall!” Jeremy Clyde’s voice was tense. “You notice that that blind spot is exactly where we might expect it to be? In the subconscious area. To get a clear knowledge of what the spot contains there is only one method to use.”

“A surgeon should link up the blank portion of your brain with the active portion,” Len Seaton said. “And would that be a ticklish job!”

“I don’t need a surgeon,” Jeremy answered. “And why a real nerve? A nerve is only a fleshy means of carrying minute electrical sensations. A small electric device can do it just as well. In short—an external mechanical nerve!”

He turned aside and brought forth an object not unlike a stethoscope. At both ends were suction caps and small dry batteries. Between the caps was a length of strong cable.

“A brain gives off minute electric charges: everybody knows that,” Jeremy resumed. “This mechanical device can accomplish the thing through the skull bone. Thereby the blind spot and normal brain area would be linked. At least that’s the way I see it.”

“Sounds like committing suicide to me,” Harry Carlton commented.

Jeremy shrugged. “Anyway I’m going to try it!”

Again he switched on his brain-reading equipment, studied the screen and the photograph for a moment, and then he clamped one end of the artificial nerve device on to his skull. The other suction cup he moved indecisively around his head, positioning it by watching it on the screen. Time and again he fished round the blind spot, then finally pressed the cap home.

A sensation of deadly sickness crawled through him, as if his body were slowly being turned inside out. His laboratory, the tensed faces of his friends, misted mysteriously and were gone. Images as though reflected from disturbed water rippled through his brain.

Then suddenly a chaotic mass of impressions slammed into his consciousness. There were scurrying people superimposed on ragged cliffs, against which plunged foaming seas. From the cliffs there seemed to sprout towers from an unknown, remote, incomparably beautiful city, catching the light of an unseen sun.

Machines—people—mist. Deadly pain, dying away.

Jeremy opened his eyes to find he was sprawled on the laboratory floor, brandy scorching the back of his throat.

“Jerry, you’re a damned fool!” Len Seaton told him bluntly. “You went out like a light. Good job we switched off the apparatus otherwise——”

“I saw the future,” Jerry whispered.

“Eh?” His two friends looked at him, then at each other.

“I saw it!” he insisted. “Just for a moment—I’d have seen more only you must have cut off the equipment—”

With their help he got to his feet and went on talking urgently. “Don’t you understand what it means? I’ve succeeded!”

“It’s crazy, Jerry,” Harry Carlton said uneasily.

“Crazy it may be, but it happened! If I had concentrated at that moment my mind would have controlled my body. Suppose, for instance, I had concentrated on a time two thousand years ahead of now? My body would have gone there because it would have to obey my mind. Time, you see, just doesn’t exist when you’re in that state. The mind can go anywhere, and the body follows automatically.”

Jerry swung round, looking at the apparatus. Then he seemed to make up his mind.

“I’m trying again,” he said earnestly. “Whilst I’ve got the hang of the thing. And this time, don’t switch off!”

He flung in the controls on the panel and then settled himself once more under the lenses, lamps, and tubes. Len Seaton came over and regarded him anxiously.

“Look, Jerry, just what are you planning to do?”

“I’m going to see if the body does obey the mind. “I’m concentrating all my brain power on the year 3950, which is two thousand years ahead of now. If this idea works, I’ll fade from this time and reappear in the future one.”

“But how the hell do you come back?” Harry Carlton snapped. “Be sensible, man!”

Jerry relaxed for a moment and grinned. “If I succeed I’ll have proved my point,” he said. “I shall not come back because I will have caused my physical body to move into a totally different space and time. 3950 can’t be any worse than this present age so I’ll take the risk. Adjust the time-set to 3950 please!”

Plainly his mind was made up and there was nothing the two friends could do. Jerry, utterly absorbed by his experiment, no longer considered them in his scheme of things. He again fixed the suction caps in position—and the moment his brain began to reel he threw every ounce of his concentration into visualising the figures 3950 which, in his present state of mind, were not just meaningless symbols but the era of a future time.

He felt as though hell itself had broken loose within his skull. A thrilling, racking current seemed to surge through him—so pitiless and agonising that it took him all his time to hold on to his one burning concentration—3950.

The laboratory had gone, and everything in it. He was flying through abysmal space with stars gyrating crazily. He was hot. He was cold. He fought in emptiness and then amidst forces which had no explanation or meaning. Cities, oceans, wildernesses, people, animals—they flashed over his mental vision like things seen transiently in a blaze of lightning.

Darkness. He was falling. The height seemed endless. He was Jeremy Clyde. No, he was a god! Now he was amoeba. Now he was nothing. Smothering in darkness and silence, lost to all he had ever known and held dear——

The Universe was still.

Jerry stirred slowly, then became still again with a feeling of delightful comfort. As he lay, the remembrance of things accomplished came back to him. The laboratory! The experiment! The attempt to c. . .