Avon Fantasy Reader No. 8 — page 41: what you’re looking at

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

THE MACHINE MAN OF ARDATHIA sa ® I came to a breathless stop, awed by the lurid light which suddenly gleamed in the winkless eyes. = “Poor pre-historic mammal,” came the answer, “how could you, groping in the dawn of human existence, comprehend what is beyond your lowly en- vironment! Compared to you, we are as gods. No longer are our loves and hates the reaction of viscera. Our thoughts, our thinking, our emotions are conditioned, molded to the_extent we Etro the immediate environment. There is no such thing as mind—of the . . . But it is impossible to continue. Your vocabulary is too limited. Your mentality—it is not the word I like to use, but as I have repeatedly said, your language is woefully inadequate—has a restricted range of but a few thousand words. Therefore I cannot explain further. Only the same lack—in a. different fashion, of course, and with ob- jects instead of words—hinders the free movements of your limbs. You have command of them, you say. Poor primitive, do you realize how shackled you are with nothing but your hands and feet! You augment them, of course, with a few machines; but they are crude and cumbersome. It is you who are caged alive and not I. I have broken through the walls of your cage; have shaken off its shackles; have gone free. Behold the command I have of my limbs!” From an extended tube shot a streak of white—like a funnel—whose radius was great enough to encircle my seated body. I was conscious of being scooped up and drawn forward with inconceivable speed. For one breathless moment I hung suspended against the cylinder itself, the winkless:eyes not an inch from my own. In that moment I had the sensation of being probed, handled. Several times I was revolved; as a man might twirl a stick. Then I was back in the easy-chair again, whe: shaken. “It is true that I never leave the envelope in which I am renamenes con- tinued the metallic voice. “But I have at my command rays which can bring me anything I desire. In Ardathia are machines—machines it would be use- less for me to describe to you—with which I can walk, fly, move mountains, delve in the earth, investigate the stars, and loose forces of which you have no conception. Those machines are mechanical parts of my body, extensions of my limbs. I take them off and put them on at will. With their help I can view one continent while busily employed in another. With their help I can make time machines, harness rays, and plunge for thirty thousand years into the past. Let me again illustrate.” The tentacle-like hand of the Ardathian waveda tube. The five foot cylinder glowed with an intense light, spun like a top, and so spinning, dissolved into space. Even as I gaped like one petrified—perhaps twenty seconds elapsed— the cylinder reappeared with the same rapidity. The metallic voice announced: “I have just been five’ years into your future.” : “My future!” I exclaimed. ‘ ‘How can that be when I have not lived it yeer? “But of course you have lived it.’ I.stared, bewildered. Cconmieloookks.c© im