Avon Fantasy Reader No. 10 — page 70: what you’re looking at

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

That night—I knew it was night when darkness fell in the squares-—I slaked my thirst with a trickle of water ranning from a pipe, swallowed a pellet, and almost instantly sank into the sleep of exhaustion. The next day [ came to a part of the city free of the beast-men. The squares were larger, the radiating arteries were splendid roads, gdbut in the midst of many squares stood circular buildings not met with before. I entered one of them and was surptised to find huge rooms filled with pieces of rusted tools, shovels, spades, chiscls, hammers, axe-heads, all displayed in a kind of chronological order. The thought of its being a museum did not occur to me at once. It was only after a while that I exclaimed to myself, “Why this looks like a muscum!” Then the inevitable conviction came: “It is a museum!’ But who could have arranged it? Certainly not the witless beast-men, and of other men I had seen nothing. This failure to find human beings, on a par with the stupendous buildings and ma- chines all around, filled me with anxious foreboding. I gazed at the cylinders. For the first time it came over me that they were the only uni- versal inhabitants I had scen. Bewildered, amazed, I wandered from building to building, and from floor to floor (for some of the buildings had as many as a dozen floors accessible to myself, gained not by stairways, but by gradually mounting ruo-ways or ramps in citcular wells), engrossed — in what I saw, forgetting for the nonce my terrible plight. There were chambers filled with fragments of machines such as cash- registers, clock-wheels, gasoline engines, and similar devices. Nothing was complete; nearly everything showed the wear and tear of time. And there were others containing various machines more or less correctly reassembled from ancient parts: automobiles, for instance, and locomotives; with an ar- rangement of simpler mechanical forms leading to more complex ones. I. couldn’t comprehend why all those things had been gathered together for preservation and display; nor account for the age of them, their general condition of ruin. Not on that day, nor on the next---it was on the last day that I spent in the. strange future—did I come to the library. And here I must touch on another phase of my adventure. You can have no idea how horrible it became at. times to be alone among hundreds, yes, thousands of whispering cylinders, I was always aware of their subtle and invisible touch. Have you ever felt the antennae of an insect? Like that it was, like that. I recall one time on the Gold Coast. . . . Only it bolstered up my tottering sanity and control to gaze now and then on creatures similar in structure to myself, even if they were but the soulless beast-men of the machines, For in all that vast and intricate city they were the only human beings I could discover, and I began to suspect, to dread, I scarcely knew what. I came to the library, I say, on that last day. I did not know it was a library at first—and perhaps I was mistaken in believing the odd metal disks arranged in piles on shelves and tables, and consulted by the cylinders, to be a species of recording plates--but it was here I found the books. They 68 : Comicbooks.com