Mists of Dawn

CHAD OLIVER

Jacket and Endpaper Designs by Alex Schomburg

THE JOHN C. WINSTON COMPANY
Philadelphia
•
Toronto

Copyright,
1952
B
y
C
had
O
liver

Copyright in Great Britain and in the British Dominions

and Possessions Copyright in the Republic
of
the Philippines

first
  
edition

Made in the United States
of
America

L. C. Card
#52-8974

If
you
were
asked
to
name
the
basic
drives
and preoccupations
of
this
strange
creature
called
man, your
answer
would
no
doubt
depend
upon
how
much psychology,
history,
economics,
and
what-have-you that
you
had
been,
or
had
not
been,
exposed
to.
It
is a
safe
bet,
however,
that
you
would
not
be
tempted to
list
time
travel
among
man’s
strongest
yearnings.

And
yet,
stop
a
moment!
It
is
curious
indeed
how much
of
our
time
is
taken
up
with
exactly
that—the vague
desire
to
travel
through
time.
You
are
perhaps skeptical,
and
rightly
so.
You
are
possibly
inclined
to protest
that
you,
personally,
never
had
the
foggiest notion
of
traveling
in
time.
But
consider:
what
were the
games
you
played
as
a
small
child?
Did
you
pretend
that
you
were
an
office
worker,
or
a
Certified Public
Accountant?
You
may
have
done
just
that,
for all
I
know,
but
I
would
hazard
a
guess
that
you
spent many
more
hours
playing
Cowboy
and
Indian,
or Kings
and
Queens,
or,
like
Tom
Sawyer,
imagined yourself
to
be
the
Black
Avenger
of
the
Spanish
Main. These
days,
in
a
world
of
science,
you
have
no
doubt fancied
yourself
living
in
the
future
as
well,
in
a
civili
zation
of
silver
spaceships
and
the
fascination
of
other worlds.

What
is
all
this
but
time
travel?
Somehow,
man
is never
satisfied
with
what
he
is.
He
always
wants
to
go somewhere
else,
be
something
different.
He
imagines himself
in
another
age,
made
more
romantic
by
the gulf
of
time.
It
is
not
beyond
belief
that
children
of the
future
will
amuse
themselves
by
playing
that
they lived
in
that
long-ago
and
wonderful
period
of
the 1950’s
through
which
we
ourselves
are
living.

Perhaps
responding
to
this
old
fantasy
of
mankind, science
fiction
has
long
concerned
itself
with
time travel
as
a
major
theme.
Ever
since
H.
G.
Wells
wrote the
classic
The
Time
Machine,
writers
have
been having
a
lot
of
fun
traveling
through
time.

It
would
be
untrue,
however,
to
present
the
idea of
a
time
machine
as
anything
but
what
it
is,
an
intriguing
literary
device,
part
of
the
bag
of
tricks
of the
science
fiction
writer.
We
have
no
time
travel
in the
sense
of
actually
having
a
time
machine
at
our disposal,
and
thus
there
is
no
such
thing
as
a
“science” of
time
travel.
This
is
not
to
say
that
such
a
device
is
impossible;
it
is
simply
that
we
know
nothing
whatever
about
it.

The
best
we
can
do
is
guess.

Nevertheless,
we
need
not
be
discouraged.
There
is
a
way
we
can
travel
through
time,
in
fact
as
well as
in
fiction.
The
human
mind
is
a
time
machine
that can
carry
us
backward
or
forward
at
will,
and
we
have far
more
than
guesswork
to
guide
us
in
our
travels.

Science
fiction,
like
everything
else
in
the
world, has
changed.
In
modern
science
fiction,
the
emphasis, the
focus,
of
the
story
is
far
different
from
what
it once
was.
It
used
to
be,
back
in
the
days
of
Jules Verne,
that
writers
were
concerned
with
the
all-important
how.
How
could
a
ship
travel
from
the
Earth to
the
Moon?
How
could
a
man
travel
backward
in time?
This
is
still
an
important
factor,
but
a
new
element
has
been
introduced.
The
question
today
is
not so
much
how
the
characters
got
where
they
were going,
but
rather
what
happened
after
they
got
there?

Many
modern
science
fiction
stories,
in
other
words, start
where
the
old
ones
ended.
This
is
not
to
imply that
the
social
sciences
have
replaced
the
physical
sciences
as
a
framework
for
fiction—surely
with
actual space
flight
almost
upon
us
this
is
not
the
case—but simply
that
science
fiction
has
acquired
a
new
dimension.
We
still
have
our
technology
and
our
physics and
our
machines—but
now
we
include
human
beings as
well.

So
it
is
that
the
real
science
in
this
book
is
not
time travel
at
all.
Instead,
it
is
a
science
called
anthropology.