The Project Gutenberg EBook of Lost in the Future, by John Victor Peterson

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Title: Lost in the Future

Author: John Victor Peterson

Release Date: April 30, 2009 [EBook #28645]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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_Did you ever wonder what might happen if mankind ever exceeded the
speed of light? Here is a profound story based on that thought--a
story which may well forecast one of the problems to be encountered
in space travel._

lost
in
the
future

_by ... John Victor Peterson_

They had discovered a new planet--but its people
did not see them until after they had traveled on.

Albrecht and I went down in a shuttleship, leaving the stellatomic
orbited pole-to-pole two thousand miles above Alpha Centauri's second
planet. While we took an atmosphere-brushing approach which wouldn't
burn off the shuttle's skin, we went as swiftly as we could.

A week before we had completed man's first trip through hyperspace.
We were now making the first landing on an inhabited planet of
another sun. All the preliminary investigations had been made via
electronspectroscopes and electrontelescopes from the stellatomic.

We knew that the atmosphere was breathable and were reasonably certain
that the peoples of the world into whose atmosphere we were dropping
were at peace. We went unarmed, just the two of us; it might not be wise
to go in force.

We were silent, and I know that Harry Albrecht was as perplexed as I was
over the fact that our all-wave receivers failed to pick up any signs of
radio communication whatever. We had assumed that we would pick up
signals of some type as soon as we had passed down through the
unfamiliar planet's ionosphere.

The scattered arrangement of the towering cities appeared to call for
radio communications. The hundreds of atmosphere ships flashing along a
system of airways between the cities seemed to indicate the existence of
electronic navigational and landing aids. But perhaps the signa