Avon Fantasy Reader No. 8 — page 36: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

32 3 Pes FRANCIS FLAGG” ra your kind live in cities and houses. You eat, digest, and reproduce your young, much as do the animals from which you have sprung. You use crude machines and have an elementary understanding of physics and chemistry. Correct me it Iam wrong, please.” | “You are right to a certain extent,” I replied. “But I am not interested in having you tell me what I am. I know that. I wish to know what you are. You claim to have come from some thirty thousand years in the future, but you advance no evidence to support the claim. How do I know you are not a trick, a fake, an hallucination of mine. You say you can move freely in time. How is it you have never come this way before? Tell me something about yourself; I'am curious.” ae ; : i “Your questions are well put,” replied the voice, “and I shall seek to answer them. Know then, that I am a Machine Man of Ardathia. It is true we are beginning to move in time as well as in space; but note that I say ‘beginning.’ Our Time Machines are very crude as yet, and I am the first Ardathiam to penetrate the past beyond a period of six thousand years. You must realize that a time traveler runs certain hazards. At any place_on the road, he may materialize inside of a solid of some sort. In that case, he is almost certain to be blown up or otherwise destroyed. Such was the constant danger until I perfected my enveloping ray of I cannot name or describe it in your tongue, but if you approach me too closely you will feel its resistance. This ray has the effect of disintegrating and dispersing any body of fatter inside of which a time traveler may materialize. Perhaps you were aware of a great light when I appeared in your room? | probably took shape within a body of matter and the ray destroyed it.” | | “The rocking-chair!” I exclaimed. “It was standing on the ‘spot you now occupy.” | “Then it has been redticed to its original atoms. This is a wonderful moment for me. My ray has proved an unqualified success for the second time. It not only removes any hindering matter from about the time-traveler but also creates a void within which he is perfectly safe from harm. But to resume. “It is hard to believe that we Ardathians evolved from such creatures as you. Our written history does not go back to a time when men nourished them- selves by taking food into their stomachs through their mouths, digested it, or reproduced their young in the animal-like fashion in which you do. The earliest men of whom we have any written records were the Bi-Chanics. They | lived about fifteen thousand years before our era and were already well along the road of mechanical evolution when their civilization fell. The Bi-Chanics vaporized their food substances and breathed them through the nostril, excret- ing the waste products of the body through the pores of the skin. Their chil dren were brought to the point of birth in ecto-genetic incubators. There is enough authentic evidence existing to prove that the Bi-Chanics had perfected the use of mechanical hearts and were crudely able to make . . . I cannot ee 3 EOmMicboo