Part 3

Ferson turned to speak to me for the first time. "Somewhere in here," he whispered. "We must search, Harker----to find Grant's apparatus----"

"And if he is with it?" I asked, but his only answer was to tighten his grip on the pistol in his hand.

We passed into the great building's marble entrance hall, a place of dim shadows, through which we stumbled over prostrate dead. We went quickly through the looted, wrecked rooms that had been the luxurious shops of its first level. Then the stairs, and we were going upward, level after level, searching through the immense building's numberless offices and rooms. In one or two were dead, and some had been wrecked, but in none, in no part of the building, it seemed, were any of the ape-like throngs. That seemed encouraging, somehow, and with beating hearts we pressed on upward.

Level after level. We were high in the immense building; its floors here were smaller of extent because of its pyramidal form. Yet there was no sound from the shadows about us, no sign of what we sought. Despair was growing in us, for we were high in the great tower that was the building's uppermost part, and had found nothing. Through the shadowy halls we pressed still, and through the silent rooms lit with the gold of the westward-swinging sun. But as we moved up the narrow stair toward the last and highest level of the great tower, something flamed in Ferson's eyes as in mine.

A sound had come from above to our ears, a steady, slow clicking as of a great clock. Pistols in hand, we moved up, found ourselves in a small hall at the tower's side. The unused elevator-shaft was beside us, and the stairs that led to the roof. But before us was the single door that gave access, apparently, to the whole space of the tower's uppermost level. And from behind it came the slow clicking to our ears!

As one we crossed the hall toward that door. Ferson's hand on its knob turned slowly, and slowly, astoundingly, the door swung open. Our pistols lowered for the moment in our amazement, we stepped through, stopped. A dozen feet before us stood Grant, a heavy automatic in his hand trained upon us.

Silence. In it Grant's eyes held ours. His dark-browed powerful face was lit with unholy triumph, with sardonic exultation. I saw that before us was the whole space of the tower's highest level, thrown into one great room. Huge black-cased and powerful batteries were ranged upon each other in scores at one side of the room. Armored cables led from them through incalculable generators and transformers to a great object at the big room's center. It was like a giant searchlight, a dozen feet or more in diameter, swung in a frame resembling gimbals, so that it could be turned in any direction. The twelve-foot disk inside it glowed silently with white light, and the great thing was turned to face exactly the sinking sun westward. It was slowly following the descending sun, turning slowly under the action of a great clock-mechanism, whose clicking was loud in our ears still.

Grant, Ferson and I----we were silent there in the room, all motionless, until Grant spoke. His voice was metallic, controlled, mocking.

"Ferson and Harker," he was saying. "Ferson and Harker, who believed in my theory, my power, it seems, when none else on earth did. Who made projectors like the one that I wear, and have escaped the world doom that I have released. Have escaped and have come in search of me, with pistols in their hands, even!"

My brain was racing. I knew that to lift the arms in our grasp meant instant death. Grant's sardonic mirth lashed suddenly out in scorn.

"To come through the city toward this building firing shots!" he mocked. "Shots that made those brute-swarms beneath us flee, but that warned me at the same time of your coming! To steal clumsily in upon me that way, thinking to surprise me and halt the work that's not yet finished!"

"That work has gone on too long, Grant," said Ferson slowly, his voice strange. "It cannot go on longer."

"Cannot?" came the bitter voice. "You mistake, Ferson--it must and shall. What are they now but brutes, animals; the world of men that derided and refused my work, that might have transformed them into gods? Brutes, and even more brutal shall they become, going down through form after form to the first protoplasm. They asked for proof----I have given the world proof, have thrown back humanity eons on the road of progress! And I will throw them and all earth's life back farther still! This great projector----it is worth the months it took to build it--months that I toiled here and posed as a scientist studying electrical phenomena, working to finish the projector at last and turn its great damping vibration toward the sun in a mighty ray! A vibration tuned to neutralize and destroy that part of the sun's evolution vibrations radiating toward earth! You have lost, Ferson----Harker, for you both die this moment and this projector shall continue to withhold the evolution vibrations from earth until its life has been thrown back in this world atavism into the primal protoplasm! Until I alone am left living upon----"

His pistol roared, for it was at that instant that Ferson leaped. But even the bullet could not halt Ferson's rush, so swift and unexpected was it, and he struck Grant, knocked him back, I leaped toward the projector.

Grant's pistol was detonating even as he was knocked back, though, and half-way to the machine something seemed to strike me two swift, smashing blows beneath the shoulder. I swayed, staggered on to the projector, was beneath it and reaching toward the cables leading into it. Grant was springing toward me, his pistol at my head. But behind him Ferson, blood on his lips and on his breast, half-raised himself, the pistol in his hand speaking. At its crack Grant swayed, collapsed and fell, the black compact case at his belt, that had preserved him, breaking loose as he struck the floor.

Ferson, leaning, had his dimming eyes upon me, striving to speak. I reached, grasped the cables, tore at them once, twice, and then they had ripped loose. The white light of the disk inside the great projector vanished, and the mechanism that moved it ceased its clicking. The world atavism, that had thrown the races of man back to the state that had been theirs eons before, was ended at last! Ferson, his eyes on mine, seemed to smile feebly in approval. Then his body slipped quietly down and he lay as motionless and silent as Grant.

Afterword

I have been writing here in this silent room for a time, whose length I cannot guess. Westward, though, the sun is touching the horizon, its level rays searching through this room, over the great projector and over Ferson and Grant, lying silent before me.

My life is ebbing swiftly from me with each passing minute, yet with the age-old instinct of man strong in me I have striven thus to leave a record of the great change, that men of the future in some far day may read.

Men of the future! For there will be such, there must be such. The upward surge of evolutionary progress that has been interrupted, set back, here on earth begins again its slow upward climb with the halting of this projector, the coming again of the evolution vibrations that are now playing on earth again. Beneath me, in the silent city, there swarm the ape-like hordes that were once humanity, but through the coming ages they will climb up again through troglodyte and savage barbarian to man!

And it is for those men of the far future that I have written with my last strength these words, as a record and a warning that I shall enclose in the steel box beside me.

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. But, dying, I know that after their passing there must come with the slow upward climb of evolution new races, new civilizations, as surely as after sunset and night must come the----

The End