The glory of sunset and moonrise over Corpus Christi Bay remembered from of old, and the thrill of rushing through its phosphorescent waters leaving behind a trail of radiance like a comet’s tail, might have been the subconscious allurement impelling me to purchase the motorboat. Dutifully, I decided to spend my mornings and afternoons pursuing an elusive job and my other hours cruising around the Bay and the nearer waters of the Gulf. Had I foreseen the unprecedented, inexplicable happenings that were to follow in the wake of my investment, I might have hesitated before paying that departing tourist the ridiculously low price he asked.

  Still, I regret nothing, provided I can get back. If I succeed in that, which will involve my disappearance from the world, my aunt will give this document to the public. If I cannot get back, no one will ever know where I was for exactly forty-eight hours between the tenth and twelfth of May 1932. If I tell this tale at all it will be told at a safe distance. Even then my aunt will be instructed to label it “fiction” lest she be incarcerated in a madhouse or arrested in connection with my disappearance. Nevertheless, there is a small circle of her acquaintances that know the real facts underlying much of her “fiction” and these few will be interested in my adventure from a scientific standpoint. Others will regard it as the wildest imagining, but what does it matter? He who tells a man a truth that he is not ready to receive tells him a lie, but he who garbs the truth in the raiment of fiction sometimes teaches the soul a lesson.

  The moon was just beginning to rise over the water as I put out to sea in the very early morning of the tenth of May. The old craft was humming along fine. I was lost in the beauty of the night and wrapped in the seductive mystery of the stars. My imagination was racing along like the phosphorous stream that cut a swath of radiance through the sea. Suddenly—without warning—the thing happened! I felt a checking of my speed, a sickening lurch, the boat shivered beneath me, reared and shot straight upward under the pressure of a shining column of water that carried me fifty feet nearer heaven than I ever expect to be again. Then slowly—ominously—the column of water subsided, carrying me down far more gently than I had ascended, and leaving me flopping around in the middle of the Bay. The boat was nowhere to be seen. It had simply vanished.

  The next thing I noticed was the brilliance of the sun. All at once I remembered that the moon had been shining when I “went up.” Thinking perhaps I had been momentarily stunned, and was merely suffering from the illusion of brightness, I began to take further stock of my surroundings. Imagine my consternation when I saw coming straight toward me a great craft resembling a warship. Yet its design was very strange. But I couldn’t help wondering what a warship, probably of a foreign nation, was doing in Gulf waters. Even more uncanny than this was the fact that she flaunted a coat of shining gold paint for all the world like a 1930 Ford. Of course, it might have been the sun in my eyes, but even then by all the laws of Nature there shouldn’t have been a sun to be seen at this time of night.

  For the next fifteen minutes I was too busy getting rescued to think much about midnight suns, golden battleships, or anything else. Finally I was “hauled over” and dumped unceremoniously on the deck. I rubbed my eyes and looked about me. Then doubting my senses, I rubbed them again.

  Crowding around me was a group of some fifty young men and women with hair of every color of the rainbow—red, green, yellow, purple, and intervening shades unknown to me. Both sexes had curls falling to their shoulders, but the boys, notwithstanding, did not convey the impression of effeminacy. They were perfectly formed, athletic, muscled, and gracefully lithe. The girls were a combination of Venus de Milo and Diana the Huntress. What I mean is that their forms were neither angular nor voluptuous but carried that dual appeal to both the senses and the soul that comes only from the blending of the most refined spirituality with the most perfect health. They were of those pleasing proportions that combine both softness and strength and suggest power expressing itself through delicacy. Both sexes were unusually tall, yet formed proportionately.

  The girls’ costumes—I couldn’t think of their apparel as clothing—had the classical lines of the Ancient Greeks—simple—clinging—revealing—almost devoid of ornament. The boys were garbed in abbreviated tunics cut somewhat after the Roman fashion and made of a shining material that resembled scales of gold. A graceful cloak was thrown across the shoulders. Both sexes wore sandals of a silver or golden sheen evidently designed more for ornament than for use. Bracelets and even anklets were in evidence but not in profusion. Around the heads of the young men were plain gold bands set with a central jewel whose scintillating splendor I have never seen matched before. The headdresses of the girls were varied, consisting of gorgeous plumage rivaling the feathers of birds of paradise, wreaths of flowers so fresh and beautiful that at first I thought them natural, or long transparent veils of rainbow colors held in place by golden circlets.

  My first illogical idea was that this might be a motion picture company in the costume of another age—but what age? These youthful godlike beings had robbed all the ages of their choicest secrets of adornment and had magically blended them into one harmonious galaxy of grace.

  Any further dazed impressions that might have come to me were interrupted by the sound of voices—English voices. A green-haired damsel of be-wildering beauty was executing a war dance right in front of me and crying out in a high extremely musical voice vibrant with excitement:

  “Well! We’ve got it! Roped it in! Captured it! Style of the twentieth century! Pants! Shirt! Shoes! Everything!”

  “Oh, do be quiet, Iris!” interrupted a well-modulated voice that I later discovered belonged to a young man named Therius. “He may be hurt—frightened.”

  This friendly evidence of civilized consideration loosed my paralyzed tongue but all that I could accomplish in the way of speech was the trite old formula, “Where am I?”

  “You’re just about where you were before, comrade,” replied Therius, “so far as space is concerned. In regard to time, however, you are, if I place your epoch correctly, about 800 years in your future.”

  THE GOLDEN AGE

  Reason rebelled against this preposterous joke that I thought was being played upon me.

  “Impossible!” I retorted. “Why, this is a modern battleship.”

  “Of your age?” questioned Iris with the wide-eyed serious simplicity of a child.

  I began to feel decidedly queer. At least these people were not joking, whatever else might be the matter with them.

  “Certainly it might have been of his time,” remarked a gorgeous purple-haired young princess. “This boat was used to carry on their wretched wars in about 1980—to murder each other, you know, to appease the fetishes that they called patriotism and democracy and—” She faltered for lack of the right word.

  “Hundred percent Americanism,” tersely supplemented Therius.

  At last I realized that there was something more to all this than a practical joke and that these young people had nothing in common with my day and age. Still slightly dazed, I staggered to my feet, assisted by the friendly hand of Therius. Another youth brought me an enormous velvet cushion and indicated that I was to be seated upon it. The other young people likewise appropriated numerous cushions that were lying around the deck in Oriental profusion. They grouped themselves gracefully around me gazing into my face with the eager, smiling expectancy of highly intelligent children.

  “How did I get here?” I demanded, determined to satisfy my own curiosity first.

  “You were accidentally captured,” said Therius, who seemed to have elected himself spokesman. “You were literally snatched out of your dimension, out of your time, into ours. Our time flyer had been left open and at your period and was therefore receptive to anything which might have been in the neighborhood subject to its pull.”

  “This invention,” I questioned excitedly, “is it a machine?”

  “Certainly,” replied Therius. “Why way back—shortly after your time—science and metaphysics declared a truce and united their forces. They realized at last that the wind power of the latter could operate only through the instruments of the former. By different routes the ancient rivals had arrived at the same truth, namely, that to operate through time, energies must be provided with material instruments through which to function. Science eventually had perfected machinery so delicately sensitive that the hitherto un-captured elements of the time curve could be conducted through the centuries as electricity was captured and directed through wires. But science, having neglected the laws of mind, did not know how to so concentrate and focus this energy as to make it usable. So they turned to the metaphysicians, who through the centuries had been studying and perfecting the laws of mind and finding them as definite and invariable as the laws of chemistry. Thus ended the warfare between science and metaphysics through the mutual discovery that each school had what the other lacked.

  “It was—just after radio—” he explained rather haltingly, “that the first thought transmitters were put into practical operation, and—just before Socialism, they began to run nearly all machinery by means of thought-vibration. During the final revolution known as the Revolt of Youth, the deadly disintegrating ray controlled by thought-power was invented by rebel scientists and turned the tide of victory in their favor.

  “After Socialism, when the need for government save in its broader sense had practically vanished, the reintegrating ray was discovered and controlled by the same process. Finally, what we thought to be the summit of human achievement was attained in the so-called ‘creation of matter’ through the materialization of thought. Now we know that there is no end to the unfoldment of the divine potentialities within us, so long as we use them in the furtherance of the Undeviating Plan. You, yourself, are a living testimony that we have not only discovered and controlled the mighty energies of our own age, but have reached back through time and brought into the Golden Age a splendid representative of the age of gold.”

  With this graceful compliment Therius paused, but I still had many questions.

  “This battleship,” I asked him, mentally reaching out to it as to a tangible link that bound me to reality, “is it also navigated by thought-waves?”

  “Of course. Everything is so operated. All our machinery, which is really quite simple, is nothing more or less in most cases than thought-focusing crystals and thought-projecting mirrors. In your day machinery was so alarmingly complicated that the scarcity of it in even our largest cities will, no doubt, astonish you. Of course, the great secret of our thought-machines lies in the composition of the crystals and the mirrors. They are made from a synthetic substance, the key to whose discovery was found by experimentation with the so-called ‘magic’ crystals of the Orient. We found that their peculiar properties lay in the fact that they facilitated the concentration and projection of thought.”

  CHAPTER 2

  Ageless Race

  “Why is this ship in such a remarkable state of preservation? And why,” I asked him, “in such an obviously warless age, have you seen fit to retain its accoutrements of destruction?”

  “The golden substance with which it is coated throughout is the secret of its preservation. This substance, and anything protected by it, is as indestructible as thought itself, for it is thought materialized. We have preserved this battleship and its war equipment along with several other gruesome relics of your time, for historical purposes.”

  “Good Lord,” thought I, “if its old crew could only hear the ship called a gruesome relic.”

  “We are using it also,” he continued, “as a sort of floating university. We have junked its clumsy machinery, of course, and turned that space into a gymnasium and a reading room. Our regular college curriculum requires a year of travel during which our students visit all the important centers of the World-State. Thus it has come about that this old battleship represents the University of Nirvania, of which institution I have the honor to be president.”

  “You! Its president!” I cried incredulously. “Why, you are only a boy yourself.”

  “I may seem so to you,” he answered smilingly, “but I shall be ninety-six my next birthday. We have discovered the secret of rejuvenation; hence, you will never witness the crumbling specter of old age among us. Disease and death have retreated far back into the charnel houses of antiquity along with war, and poverty and greed.”

  “But ‘death!’” I exclaimed incredulously. “How have you conquered it?”

  “Well, generally, the process has become automatic.” He seemed to be searching for words to convey to my complex mentality a truth divinely simple. “Why, it just doesn’t come. When we discovered that mind is the creator, controller, and destroyer of matter, we began to study and apply the laws of mind. The whole secret is contained in a verse of a book you folks once set great store by but never proved its truth. This Bible of yours said, ‘Be ye transformed by the renewing of your minds.’

  “Humanlike, we didn’t find the secret there. In those days we preferred to grope through the labyrinthine mazes of science rather than to take the straight and narrow path of revelation. That would have been too simple and we are out for complexity. The new school of psychoanalysis, after it had discarded quackery and settled down to serious investigation, satisfied all our yearnings for complexity. It delved down into the musty catacombs of our twisted brains and brought out the gibbering ghosts of dead desires that we had thrust back into the slime of the subconscious, afraid to face the facts of our own natures. Man finally began to live normally, and better than all, he no longer carried with him the burden of the consciousness of sin. ‘We are not fallen gods,’ we courageously asserted, ‘we are risen beasts. As the water lily pushes upward from the ooze of the riverbed, so the soul of man has emerged from the primeval slime and has pushed upward to the sun.’ This we have done because of that spark within us that has burned steadily in the darkness of savagery even as now it flames in laughter and in light. Thus we left behind us the clanking chains of impure thinking that had been fastened on us by the festering moralists. At last we realized that all of God’s works are perfect, that to impute impurity to any of God’s manifestations is to impute impurity to God Himself, to poison the stream of life at its sacred fountainhead.”

  I stared at him open-mouthed. Was this man mad? Were they all mad? He seemed to divine my thought. “Hear me out,” he said.

  “When our mentality changed, our institutions changed accordingly, though not so peaceably, as you shall presently learn. Our innumerable agencies of repression became channels of expression, glorified expression on higher planes.

  “At last it happened that the physical ills that follow in the wake of mental repressions, in the wake of the consciousness of impurity, vanished along with the mental stagnation that had bred them. For we had learned that mental stagnation—crystallization—is death, and mental plasticity—eternal flux of mind—is youth eternal. Thus were we transformed by the renewing of our minds, by the eradication of the prejudices, intolerance, impurity, and bigotry that caused the soul of man to shatter its crystallized instrument in its struggle to expand.

  “Long before this, science had eradicated the germs of contagious disease and had purified the bloodstream of hereditary contamination. The only ills remaining were imaginary ones and all that was needed to insure immortality was to purify the imagination. Scientists even in your day had boldly stated that there was no inherent necessity for death—our scientists proved that statement.

  “Notwithstanding, even now we become a little emotionally twisted at times. I say emotionally, because we have purposely kept alive our emotions. We have deliberately intensified and refined them until we have attained a capacity to enjoy and suffer that would have spelled madness to those of your day, when there was so little to enjoy—so much to suffer. But when we get mentally twisted now-a-days we just go to a specialist and get taken apart and reassembled, the same as when we have an accident.”

  “Taken apart! Reassembled!” I gasped. “What do you mean?”

  “We go and get our mental twists removed,” he explained. “By a process of psychoanalysis, highly refined mental twists are straightened out just as any twisted thing is. It is nature’s law that the parts of any given organism will continue to vibrate in perfect harmony with each other unless some foreign influence disturbs their relations. In the human organism, perfectly adjusted to its environment, this distortion, this disharmony that produces disease and death, can occur only through mental or emotional perversion. During the restorative process following the untwisting, our minds and emotions automatically resume their natural relations to each other, just as a spring would return to its normal state once pressure is removed. Our physical ills disappear, and the mind, aware of its errors and working consciously to rectify them, is in a position to make a fresh start. Ordinarily we can take ourselves in hand and iron out the kinks unaided, but if we let ourselves slip too far, we can always fall back on science.”

  “It’s all too unbelievable!” I exclaimed.

  “No, it’s all too simple,” amended Therius. “That’s what held humanity back so long; expecting to find life’s greatest truths most wrapped in mystery, in complexity. At last we had to learn that there is nothing complex in all God’s universe except the twisted ideas of human minds.”

  A Twenty-Eighth-Century Diet

  “You speak of God,” I told him. “Why, we had almost discarded God in my age. Surely you don’t believe in a personal deity.”

  “Of course not. That would be an absurdity. But there is the eternal spirit in all things, the flaming essence that throbs and pulses at the heart of life, that dances in the atom, thunders in the tempest, holds the stars to their courses, the mind to its aspirations, the soul to its mate. It is that spark within us, within all humanity, that has led upward through the long, dark eons of frustrations to the Splendor—and the Laughter—and the Light—”