14. THE PYRAMIDS

I like magic! Early next morning I was dreaming. That is I believed I was dreaming. As on the previous days, some early morning birds were chirping so I am not sure. When I turned around in bed, the small box was there once again. Nothing rattled inside. I opened the box. There were some sheets of paper. I wanted to read chapter 14.

14. THE PYRAMIDS

- Later is now, I read. Wondering.

I got a weird sensation someone was watching me from behind. As I turned, the time traveller was standing there in a white robe. I continued reading.

-         -  I have been waiting for you, he said.

-         - Why, I whispered between lips I could hardly open.

Clearly I was reading about myself.

-        - You remember you helped building the pyramids of Egypt?

-        -  I still have the lens you gave me, and I have not forgotten where the crystal mineral is.

-       -  Good. You will need all you can get of the mineral where we are going. To Atlantis, to the future.

There was a blur in the air, then a sudden chill that lasted for several minutes before the sky cleared.

-        - What you experienced as a spell of low temperatures was the last ice age of more than twenty thousand years.

-        - I always heard that there was going to be a spell of global warming?

-        - Not true. The global climate change did happen, but it turned out to be the beginning of the next ice age. What followed when the ice sheets crept south in the northern hemisphere, was panic, complete disaster. The major powers in the north had to move their populations. As everybody knows there was no place to go. Devastating wars were raging for centuries. Nuclear bombs decimated population to only a few ten millions. By sheer luck low radiation weapons were developed. There were sustainable wars, almost friendly to the environment as most people just disappeared and left a greener world behind. When the ice sheet retreated, there were few traces of major cities.

-        - That is why we time travellers are here, I exclaimed. – We can restart everything?

-       -  Exactly what I hope for. In the past before the pyramids in Egypt were built, I tried to tell stories from the old civilization of Atlantis about what could happen if the desire to control everything was not curbed. Even in old Hellas there were myths about many things. I can mention a few – Centaurs, Basilisks, Medusa, Cyclopes, The Minotaur, Cerberus, and Mermaids. Atlantis was a hoax. All of these creatures were real in the future before the big freeze, the time of hubris. Things came out of control. As time traveller, I thought the myths I brought from the future to ancient Egypt and Hellas, would stop people from interfering with the fabric of life. It did not. For them and later generations these were only stories about stupid beliefs.

-        - That is what I was told all the time.

-        - Around 2100 things started to go wrong. Experiments came out of control as with The Minotaur. The Minotaur could be locked up. Experimental life could not. Then there was the big freeze. People started fighting for hundreds of years. Ice sheets were growing all over the northern and southern hemisphere. Now, 20,000 years later, is the time for a new beginning. You have the lens from building the pyramids of Egypt?

-        - Yes, I have.

-       -   I knew it was not possible for a time traveller to change the future. Still I tried. In vain. Now we stand on the treshold between the past and what is to come. Before the big freeze the work with fusion reactors had almost succeeded. The problem of heating the plasma to almost two million degrees and control the heat was on the brink of solution. This is where the crystals can help. Creating the high temperature needed for fusion, and withstanding the immense heat of the plasma for a long time, not to say forever. There is enough deuterium and tritium, isotopes of hydrogen, to give mankind energy as long as there is a solar system.

-        - And years from now people will travel in space and try to find habitable planets in our galaxy?

-          That is a possibility. Let us begin the work.

End of chapter 14. To be continued in chapter 15.