The Time-Raider by Edmond Hamilton - HTML preview

EPILOGUE

So our great adventure ended, and so this record of it comes to a close. We destroyed the time-car, and burned all of our written records of the experiments connected with it. For never again, through the knowledge that we gathered, shall men venture into time.

Yet because we felt that some part of what we had learned belonged to the world of science, Lantin and I, in this history and in our two technical works, have striven to record part of what we saw and did. Reading, men will not be able to build time-cars for themselves, but they may gain suggestions and do work that will make better our own life, our own world.

Lantin and I live quietly enough, now, sharing a small Long Island cottage. Yet for all our work at the Foundation, and our contacts with our friends there, I do not think that either of us takes much interest in the world around us, or in our fellow-men. I think that the day's best hours, for each of us, are those of evening, when we can sit quietly together, recalling to mind the things we saw and did in that far time which the world will not see for fifteen thousand years to come.

We speak often of that strange being of alien terror which we called the Raider. Speak, too, of the Kanlars and their city of cylinders, of the barbaric city of the pit, and the Babel-like hordes that filled it, of Kom and the men of Kom. And sometimes, gazing musingly into our fireplace in the length of the winter evenings, Lantin will speak of Cannell, whom we crossed a hundred centuries to rescue, and who plunged down to a voluntary death to save his friend.

Always, though, sooner or later, there comes a halt to our speech and we look up with a common impulse to a spot where a sheaf of four swords is fastened to the wall. Four strange weapons, from four different ages.

One is a thick shortsword of bronze, its edges scarred and dented. Another is a saw-toothed weapon, the like of which you may see in more than one museum, but which I saw flashing in deadly action. The third blade is a long one, a silver fleur-de-lys inlaid upon its heavy hilt. And the last is a slender, flexible rapier, which took toll of half a hundred lives in our last mad battle.

Where are they now, our four friends, who stood with us on the great stair when six men held back thousands, who planned and fought and bled with us until together we brought about the destruction of the Kanlars and the Raider? Shall we ever see them again?

I do not know. But one thing I do know, that was known even to the supreme wisdom of Kethra and the men of Kom. And that is that there is a power above man's, a wisdom above his, secrets that will never be his. So if, on the other side of death, there lies a timeless world, we'll yet foregather there with our four friends, strike hands in friendship once again, and range that world together, as once we ranged through time.

THE END