Edison Tesla Marshall

“ But yet he could not go back to the Avison place nor to Agnes—at least until the memory of the familiar face in the coffin had faded from the minds of those at home. He shut it out of his own mind.
Then he thought of his machine out in the great deserted barn. They had found the wreck of the dead man’s machine—and machines do not have ghosts. He felt more himself every day. ”

“ A few nights later the farmers, thirty miles from Avison’s home, might have observed a few spots of light hovering in the air over the wide field of a deserted farm. They might have discerned the light-spots dart back and forth, then down, then up a way, and then descend to earth. But it is not recorded that any man was awake to see.
Charles Avison unscrewed the round door of the Vulcan and crept out. Instantly the light died from its windows. At first he could not stand, but staggered twice and fell in a heap under the curved side of the machine. ”

“ He knew the quiet fields of grain, the pretty farm-homes, the horses in the fields. Yet he felt—he knew it now—that something was terribly different.
He saw the farmers on their way to the dairy-barns. He heard the windmills creaking, and the call of the hired men as they hitched their teams to the farming-implements. The world about him was commonplace and ordinary—just as always on a late spring morning in the country. ”

“ If I stay here the old dualism will be broken still more, and our two worlds would soon become most different places. It is broken, anyway, now, for there is a man’s body beneath the grass of Here, that is not There. ”

“ So one day he had his beard and mustache trimmed, put on a large pair of dark glasses, and went out to talk to the head of the astronomy department.
“I am Vunden, of Heidelberg,” he told Gray, the old astronomer, “and I would like a position. The money part of it is of no importance to me.”
This did not surprise Gray. He knew many men on the faculty who worked only for the love of it. He questioned the young man, whose knowledge of the stars he found amazing. So Gray procured “Vunden” a position on a low salary, and Avison went to work again at his old love. ”

“ Both being of the same size, gravity overcame the centrifugal force at exactly the same distance in space from the sun.
The two cooled the same time, of course, their oceans formed coincidentally, and the first germs of life appeared upon There at the identical instant as that when they appeared Here.
I have already told you enough to enable you to understand what occurred. There is no fate or chance in life—everything is cause and effect, cause and effect.
So as life developed There, its exact counterpart developed Here. ”

“ The people stood up, the young scientist with them. Agnes in black, her face tear-stained, was in front. Near her stood his sister, weeping. He dared not approach them. There was his uncle—all of his cousins. Slowly and wearily the train of people began to walk past the long coffin of black. Avison followed than. ”