Edmond Hamilton

“ But more terrible than all of these things were the hordes, the swarms of creatures that moved through the streets and ways about us, the countless creatures that once had been the city's people!
Great ape-like creatures they were, not apes such as men had known, but ape-like races such as men had sprung from eons before. In groups and packs of scores they roamed the city's ways. Covered with thick hair, stooped and crouching of gait, the garments that they had worn as men torn and discarded, there was in them no semblance to humanity. ”

“ So, they learned, Ferson had cried to the assembled scientists. "All earth's animal life is beginning to slip back, and man, as the most recently developed animal, is slipping first, is going back toward the savage state, toward the cave-man or troglodyte, toward the ape! He is losing control of his passions as he goes back, which accounts for the violence that now fills earth! And he is losing the mental capacity of modern man, which accounts for his inability to operate longer our modern machines! A world atavism that is beginning with the atavism of the human races!" ”

“ In the shadow of the tall towers of New York, and in the brick and stone acres of London and the boulevards of Paris, thousands and hundreds of thousands of these savages swarmed, the ways choked with corpses of the slain. At night they crouched fearfully in hallways and offices and corridors, the vast cities lying dark and silent beneath the stars. Shapes of prowling animals were being seen in some of them by night. No wheel turned in all the world now, for none seemed left with intelligence enough to operate the simplest machine. ”

“ Even were Grant's terrible work to be halted, the sun's evolution vibrations again released on earth, it would take them untold ages to raise the brute-like beings about us to the status of men once more. Humanity was passing, had passed, into the brute around us, yet for their sake, for the sake of the humanity that might rise again in the dim future, we kept to our efforts, sought still to halt this awful change, that would otherwise not stop until protoplasmic slime alone was left living on earth. ”

“ Civilization seemed crashing, with this oncoming dissolution of its organization and institutions. Had humanity gone insane, indeed? Swiftly, with full realization of the peril upon it by then, a conference of the world's most noted scientists had been called some days before at New York, to explain and to halt, if possible, this wave of seeming insanity that was gripping more of the masses of humanity each day and that was disintegrating civilization. ”

“ The sun's various vibratory forces affect all living things on earth profoundly, each in a different manner. Without the light-vibrations earth's life would fade and die, the absence of the ultra-violet waves being fatal in time. Without its heat-radiations all life would freeze. And without this evolution vibration playing ceaselessly upon earth, all life upon earth would no longer be pressed upward through the paths of evolution, would slip back swiftly down those paths, down the myriad roads up which it has surged for so long. ”

“ But what force was it that pressed earth's life thus upward through the paths of change? What force was it that caused all this vast, slow evolution of earth's creatures into different creatures, that had begun with the first jelly-like life-forms on earth and had forced the tide of life up from them to the forms of today, that still was slowly changing them? ”

“ A warning that their civilization be never cast back from man to brute as ours has been. And if God send that they heed that warning, none among them ever shall die as I die now, the last man of all men, looking down through the sunset into the familiar but infinitely strange city, where roam the hordes that once were men. Sunset! Sunset for our civilization, our races, as for the earth. ”

“ More than a hundred people had gone to death in the crash of two thundering passenger trains in Colorado, a crash that had been due to the failure of an engineer to heed the plainest of signals. Two train wrecks in northern England had taken a toll of life almost as great, and there were reports of many other crashes from various parts of earth. In every one the accident had been due to the inexplicable failure of the human element, the failure of dispatcher or switchman or engineer to perform the duty that habit should have made automatic. ”

“ For none of them could manipulate so complicated a thing as a firearm. All earth's hundreds of millions were prowling their way in just such brutal bands, thrown back to the state that had been man's before history's dawn. And ever more brutal and hairy and animal-like they were becoming as they slipped back farther still, back from troglodyte to ape! Mankind was gone, transformed into these still-changing brutes—all except Ferson and me. ”

“ And while the cause was thus argued, the great wave of crime and utter lawlessness that had rolled across earth seemed increasing in volume.
The number of deaths by violence that were each day recorded had grown now to an appalling figure. Murderous attacks were common in every one of earth's great cities. Men hurled themselves at each other's throats, apparently for a word, a gesture. Nor was this all. A strange erratic insanity seemed seizing more and more of earth's millions. ”

“ For the cause of evolutionary change has always been the supreme problem of biology. Long ago Darwin and Wallace and Lamarck and their fellows had laid the processes of evolution bare. They had shown to an astonished world that life on earth was not static in forms that had always existed and always would exist, but that it was in constant change and movement up through constantly changing forms. ”

“ For they, like the rest of humanity, seemed incapable now of clear and sustained thought upon any subject. Even Ferson and I, working day and night in the isolated upper Manhattan laboratories of the university, were able to see clearly what was happening about us. We were living, eating, sleeping at the laboratories by this time, for all means of transportation and all industrial activities were ceasing. Great masses of men roamed the streets of the city, some forming into gangs that made life terrible for the others, the rest engaged in indiscriminate looting. ”

“ Civilization was crashing with a prolonged roar of falling laws and institutions and customs echoing across the world. The ordinary methods of transportation and production having completely broken down days before, the stream of food into the great cities had abruptly ceased. The brutal throngs that filled those cities subsisted by looting the existing food supplies for a time, but soon these were exhausted and then terrible battles took place between the rioters for food which they had found. ”

“ I think that that great proof that Grant promised in his rage to give the world is the world atavism that is upon humanity now! I think that Grant in some inconceivable way has used his knowledge and his power to deflect or dampen the evolution vibrations coming toward earth from the sun, and that it is because of the absence of those vibrations that earth's life is slipping backward! ”

“ There are many others, known to us, and still more of which we know nothing as yet, a vast welter of vibratory forces flooding endlessly outward from the sun. And it is one of those vibrations, one which we well may call the evolution vibration, which is responsible for the evolutionary change of all life on earth. ”

“ Grant's statement said, "I have held that since evolutionary change is unquestionably caused by some definite and omnipresent force acting upon all life on earth, it should be possible to discover the nature of that force. I will not recount the work of months which I have spent in constant search for this force, but will say that finally I have been successful, have identified the force which my experiments show beyond all doubt to be the single force responsible for the upward course of evolution on earth. ”

“ Within a few days more utter lawlessness reigned over New York, corpses lay in its streets and looters were everywhere. The university buildings, deserted now by all but ourselves, were not attacked except on a few occasions by the looting swarms, there being no food or other desirable things in them, and Ferson and I had rifles and pistols in our laboratory to repel the ragged and brutal gangs that might attack us. ”

“ The great felines that had roamed earth had evolved into smaller forms and into tame cats. A certain branch of ape-like forms had evolved into great hairy troglodytes and then into modern men. All life on earth was constantly changing, evolving, forced ever upward through the diverging channels of evolution into new and different forms. ”

“ That force is a vibratory force, a vibration unknown to earth's physicists prior to my discovery of it, which has as its source the sun!
"The sun, we know, is a vast mass of incandescent matter which ceaselessly pours out part of its matter transformed into energy. The energy thus formed, flooding out in all directions from the sun through space, takes various forms. At a certain vibratory frequency, it takes the form of light and illuminates our day. At another frequency, it is radiant heat, warming our world. ”

“ An English physicist, who suggested that earth was passing through strange mind-affecting gases in space, was assaulted by the proponent of another theory. And still more furious and incredulous, the world learned, was the reception given to the explanation of a New York biologist named Ferson, who claimed that the whole great terror was the result of the human races slipping backward on the road of evolution!
"World atavism! A throwback of all the world's life on the road of evolution!" ”

“ We two are already a little affected as all men are, more or less. Our lapses of memory, the difficulties we have in our work now, these things in the last days are the result of this world atavism in us, just as the crimes and accidents filling earth are. ”

“ The famous American alienist who had voiced his opinion days before reiterated his belief that the minds of men were giving way en masse beneath the strain of modern civilization. A Rumanian bacteriologist claimed that the thing was the result of a contagious new brain disease spreading over earth, and claimed even to have isolated the bacterium of that disease. The scientists, gripped seemingly by something of the erratic condition of mind they were striving to explain, argued these theories and others with utmost passion, sometimes attacking each other. ”

“ It was impossible, they stated, that such a so-called evolution vibration could in reality be responsible for the course of evolution on earth. And it was even more absurd to suggest as Grant had done that were that force withdrawn, were the evolution vibration to cease to play on earth from the sun, the living beings of earth would slip swiftly backward on the road of change. ”

“ The sun's rays have been credited with many beneficial powers. It is a universally conceded fact that the sun is necessary to good health; not only because of its warmth-giving rays, but also because of some other element, directly a health-giving factor, which has since been more or less successfully duplicated in the laboratory—in the form of Alpine lamps and what not. It is also said, however, that there are certain properties in the rays of the sun which might be used as life-giving rays. ”

“ In the end it required machine-guns to disperse them.
A similar great outbreak in New York was curbed quickly a day later by the use of planes and tear-bombs, but two days after there came a huge riot of unexampled bloodiness in Chicago, which cost several thousand lives and which resulted in the burning of a third of the city. Beginning as a race riot and developing into a savage general battle for loot, it was notable for the fact that the troops, called to suppress it, broke up even before they reached the scene and occupied themselves in brutal looting and battle of their own. ”

“ Man, the most recently evolved of all animals, is changing first, and will go back through troglodyte and ape to the forms before them, back through changing beast-forms. By then the other animals of earth will be changing also, thrown back along the evolutionary road, and that great atavism will continue until earth's life has all changed back into the first crude protoplasmic forms from which eons ago it sprung! ”

“ Those in high places as in low were gripped by the insanity that had apparently seized earth, and from the Cabinets and Congresses of a score of nations came declarations of war against other nations, for the slightest of reasons or for none at all. ”

“ The method of producing the evolution vibrations we knew, for as I have mentioned, they had been artificially produced in a small way by physicists upon Grant's first announcement of his theory. The second day, therefore, saw our projectors complete, small flat black cases that were strapped to our belts without being noticeable, each holding the tiny but marvelously powerful batteries that were the current-source, and the compact little generator that automatically and unendingly released the vital evolution vibrations for a range of several feet. ”