Avon Fantasy Reader No. 9 — page 52: what you’re looking at

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

é At home the lid of i box was unscrewed and i d back, and we saw John, a waxen old man with a long life before him. | Next day, in obedience to what seemed an age-old ritual, they took him from the box, and the mortician undressed him and drew a pungent liquid from his veins and injected the red blood. Then they took him and laid him in bed. After a few hours of stony-eyed waiting, the blood began to work. He stirred and his first breath rattled in his throat. Flora sat down on the bed and strained him to her in a fearful embrace. But he was very-sick and in need of rest, so the doctor waved her from the room. I remember the look on her face as she closed the door. I should have been happy too, but I seem to recall that I felt there was something unwholesome about the whole episode. Perhaps our first ex- periences of the great crises of life always affect us in some such fashion. I love Maot. The hundreds I have loved before her in my wanderings down the world do not take away from the sincerity of my affection. I did not enter her life, or theirs, as lovers ordinarily do—from the grave or in the passion of some terrible quarrel. I am always the drifter. Maot knows there is something strange about me. But she does not let that interfere with her efforts to make me do the thing she wants. T love Maot and eventually I will accede to her desire. But first I will linger a while by the Nile and the mighty pageantry conjured up by its passage. My first memories are always the most difficult and I ee the hardest to interpret them. I have the feeling that if I could get back a little be | yond them, a terrifying understanding would come to me. But I never seem able to make the necessary effort. They begin without antecedent in cloud and turmoil, darkness and fear. Tam a citizen of a great country far away, beardless and wearing ugly con- fining clothing, but no different in age and appearance from today. The country is a hundred times bigger than Egypt, yet it is only one of many. All the peoples of the world are known to each other, and the world is round, not flat, and it floats in an‘endless immensity dotted with islands of suns, not copfined wader a star speckled bowl. ~ Machines are everywhere, and news goes round the world like a shout, and desires are many. There is undreamed-of abundance, unrivaled oppor- tunity. Yet men are not happy. They live in fear. The fear, if I recall rightly, is of a war that will engulf and perhaps destroy us all: It over- hangs us like the dark. The weapons they have ready for that war are terrible. Great engines that sail pilotless, not through the water but the air, halfway around the world to destroy some enemy city. Others that dart up beyond the air itself, to come in attacking from the stars. Poisoned clouds. Deadly motes of luminous | dust. But worst of all are the weapons that are only rumored. For months that seem eternities we wait on the brink of that war. We 50 COMMCIOOKSaCO eT ee ee im