«No, do not destroy him,»; he mumbled to the authorities gathered around. «Destroy his machine, yes, but save the parts. I have a better plan, a fitting one, for this man who murdered the world’s greatest scientists.»;
I remembered Leske’s old hatred of me, and I shuddered.
IN THE weeks that followed, one of my guards told me with a sort of malicious pleasure of my time device being dismantled, and secret things being done with it. Leske was directing the operations from his bed.
At last came the day when I was ledforth and saw the huge pendulum for the first time. As I looked at it there, fantastic and formidable, I realized as never before the extent of Leske’s insane revenge. And the populace seemed equally vengeful, equally cruel, like the ancient Romans on a gladiatorial holiday. In a sudden panic of terror, I shrieked and tried to leap away.
That only amused the people who crowded the electrical sidewalks around the plaza. They laughed and shrieked derisively.
My guards thrust me into the glass pendulum head and I lay there quivering, realizing the irony of my fate. This pendulum had been built from the precious metal and glassite of my own time device! It was intended as a monument to my slaughtering! I was being put on exhibition for life within my own executioning device! The crowd roared thunderous approval, damning me.
Then a little click and a whirring above me, and my glass prison began to move. It increased in speed. The arc of the pendulum’s swing lengthened. I remember how I pounded at the glass, futilely screaming, and how my hands bled. I remember the rows of faces becoming blurred white blobs before me….
I did not become insane, as I had thought at first I would. I did not mind it so much; that first night. I couldn’t sleep but it wasn’t uncomfortable. The lights of the city were comets with tails that pelted from right to left like foaming fireworks. But as the night wore on I felt a gnawing in my stomach that grew worse until I became very sick. The next day was the same and I couldn’t eat anything. In the days that followed they never stopped the pendulum, not once. They slid my food down the hollow pendulum stem in little round parcels that plunked at my feet. The first time I attempted eating I was unsuccessful; it wouldn’t stay down. In desperation I hammered against the cold glass with my fists until they bled again, and I cried hoarsely, but heard nothing but my own weak words muffled in my ears.
After an infinitude of misery, I began to eat and even sleep while traveling back and forth this way… they had allowed me small glass loops on the floor with which I fastened myself down at night and slept a soundless slumber, without sliding. I even began to take an interest in the world outside, watching it tip one way and another, back and forth and up and down, dizzily before my eyes until they ached. The monotonous movements never changed. So huge was the pendulum that it shadowed one hundred feet or more with every majestic sweep of its gleaming shape, hanging from the metal intestines of the machine overhead. I estimated that it took four or five seconds for it to traverse the arc.
On and on like this — for how long would it be? I dared not think of it….
DAY by day I began to concentrate on the gaping, curiosity — etched faces outside — faces that spoke soundless words, laughing and pointing at me, the prisoner of time, traveling forever nowhere. Then after a time ? was it weeks or months or years? — the town people ceased to come and it was only tourists who came tost are….
Once a day the attendants sent down my food, once a day they sent down a tube to vacuum out the cell. The days and nights ran together in my memory until time came to mean very little to me….
IT WAS not until I knew, inevitably, that I was doomed forever to this swinging chamber, that the thought occurred to me to leave a written record. Then the idea obsessed me and I could think of nothing else.
I had noticed that once a day an attendant climbed into the whirring coggery overhead in order to drop my food down the tube. I began to tap code signals along the tube, a request for writing materials. For days, weeks, months, my signals remained unanswered. I be cameinfuriated ? and more persistent.
Then, at long last, the day when not only my packet of food came down the tube, but with it a heavy notebook, and writing materials! I suppose the attendant above became weary at last of my tappings! I was in a perfect ecstasy of joy at this slight luxury.
I have spent the last few days in recounting my story, without any undue elaboration. I am weary now of writing, but I shall continue from time to time — in the present tense instead of the past.
My pendulum still swings in its unvarying arc. I am sure it has been not months, but years! I am accustomed to it now. I think if the pendulum were to stop suddenly, I should go mad at the motionless existence!
(Later): There is unusual activity on the electrically moving sidewalks surrounding me. Men are coming, scientists, and setting up peculiar looking instruments with which to study me at a distance. I think I know the reason. I guessed it some time ago. I have not recorded the years, but I suspect that I have already outlived Leske and all the others! I know my cheeks have developed a short beard which suddenly ceased growing, and I feel a curious, tingling vitality. I feel that I shall outlive them all! I cannot account for it, nor can they out there, those scientists who now examine me so scrupulously. And they dare not stop my pendulum, my little world, for fear of the effect it may have on me!
(Still later): These men, these puny scientists, have dropped a microphone down the tube to me! They have actually remembered that I was once a great scientist, encased here cruelly. In vain they have sought the reason for my longevity; now they want me to converse with them, giving my symptoms and reactions and suggestions! They are perplexed, but hopeful, desiring the secret of eternal life to which they feel I can give them a clue. I have already been here two hundred years, they tell me; they are the fifth generation.
At first I said not a word, paying no attention to the microphone. I merely listened to their babblings and pleadings until I weared of it. Then I grasped the microphone and looked up and saw their tense, eager faces, awaiting my words.
«One does not easily forgive such an injustice as this,»; I shouted. «And I do not believe I shall be ready to until five more generations.»;
Then I laughed. Oh, how I laughed.
«He’s insane!»; I heard one of them say: «The secret of immortality may lie somehow with him, but I feel we shall never learn it; and we dare not stop the pendulum ? that might break the time field, or whatever it is that’s holding him in thrall….»;
(MUCH LATER): It has been a longer time than I care to think, since I wrote those last words. Years… I know not how many. I have almost forgotten how to hold a pencil in my fingers to write.
Many things have transpired, many changes have come in the crazy world out there.
Once I saw wave after wave of planes, so many that they darkened the sky, far out in the direction of the ocean, moving toward the city; and a host of planes arising from here, going out to meet them; and a brief, but lurid and devastating battle in which planes fell like leaves in the wind; and some planes triumphantly returning, I know not which ones…
But all that was very long ago, and it matters not to me. My daily parcels of food continue to come down the pendulum stem; I suspect that it has become a sort of ritual, and the inhabitants of the city, whoever they are now, have long since forgotten the legend of why I was encased here. My little world continues to swing in its arc, and I continue to observe the puny little creatures out there who blunder through their brief span of life.
Already I have outlived generations! Now I want to outlive the very last one of them! I shall!
… Another thing, too, I have noticed. The attendants who daily drop the parcels of food for me, and vacuum out the cell, are robots! Square, clumsy, ponderous and four-limbed things ? unmistakably metal robots, only vaguely human in shape.
… I begin to see more and more of these clumsy robots about the city. Oh, yes, humans too ? but they only come on sight ? seeing tours and pleasure jaunts now; they live, for the most part, in luxury high among the towering buildings. Only the robots occupy the lower level now, doing all the menial and mechanical tasks necessary to the operation of the city. This, I suppose, is progress as these self centered beings have willed it.
…robots are becoming more complicated, more human in shape and movements… and more numerous… uncanny… I have a premonition….
