Time Travel Omnibus, page 139
“The picture continued; there was more to come. For five minutes the audience sat in silence or whispered speculation. Then, as suddenly as it had gone the machine was back again, but, save for the dwarf in his cabin, it was empty . . .
A World Aroused
“THE world was roused at last. No type was heavy enough for the newspapers, no terms weighty enough for the radio announcers. The casualties (as they were determined to call them) at the sixty odd stations came well on towards the 200,000 mark. The old cry went up—something ought to be done. The prestige of governments was at stake. The vermin must be wiped out.
“The members of the investigation committee were hastily summoned and this time received a better though no more profitable hearing. A stern-faced official faced me across a broad desk. His manner suspected me of complicity, his method savoured of third degree.
“ ‘What we want to know first is, where’s this base of theirs?’
“ ‘I’ve told you as near as I can. All I know is that we seemed to go south-southeast from the Algerian coast, as far as I could tell by the sun. We went that way for about three hours so if you know the speed of the ship, it ought to give you a rough idea of the district.’
“ ‘You must’ve seen some landmarks, at the height you were.’
“ ‘Precious lot of landmarks in that desert—and as we didn’t know beforehand where we were likely to be going, nobody happened to have a pocket map of the Sahara on him.’
“ ‘No need to get fresh. We’ve got to get a line on this business somehow, and it’ll be better for you if you help us all you know how.’
“ ‘Well,’ I said, ‘I’ll tell you this. If you ever find that base, you’ll have to thank luck—not cross-questioning.’
“ ‘What’re you gettin’ at?’
“ ‘Just this. Not one of us has any idea where this place is, or what makes it different from any other place that has a lot of sand, but even if you get there it’s pretty good odds against you seeing the building. Do you seriously think that a gang who hypnotize a crowd of three or four thousand men and women into an overgrown birdcage can’t stop a few pilots from seeing them?’
“The man snorted.
“ ‘When one of our pilots knows where they are—he began.
“ ‘—then there’ll be one less pilot in the force,’ I finished for him.
“Of course they got none of the information they wanted from us—we hadn’t it. Even then I had begun to realize that if we knew a whole lot we’d still be as helpless as sheep against men.
“ITALIAN, French, English and German scoured the desert, failed to find a trace and brought home their bombs. A report of the position of the base reached Tripoli. Through hurry, the Italian officers in charge omitted to verify the information. Their rocket shells destroyed a French desert fort. Feeling already ran high against France who was thought in some circles to be in league with the dwarfs. Undoubtedly they were on French territory. A French pilot made matters no better by announcing his destruction of the dwarfs’ cylindrical flyer at approximately the same moment that the Germans reported that one of their airships had been bombed by a French plane. Notes began to pass between countries and the threat of war added fuel to the excitement.
“It was then that someone at the Suez English base made an inventory with the startling result that five days of profitless searching showed twelve English airships and nearly a hundred planes unaccounted for.
“The French, German, Italian and Egyptian authorities investigated and revealed a similar state of affairs in their own air forces. The fate of all those craft remained a mystery. Solo searching over the desert became less popular with the result that, instead of single machines disappearing, whole flights vanished together.
“It fell to an Italian pilot to do the world the worst possible service with the best possible intentions.
“He had become separated from his unit and was heading for home in accordance with the regulations that single planes must not be risked, when he saw almost below him the shining building for which all the world was searching. Whether his mind was not susceptible to their control (as was found to be the case with a few) or whether they were off their guard, never was known and did not really matter. What did matter was that his five great bombs flashed down together.
“It must have been a rude shock to that pilot when, during his congratulations and celebrations, the voice spoke again.
“ ‘People of the Twenty-Second Century,’ it began with usual formality, ‘we appealed to you first as reasoning creatures. You failed to reason. You even failed to understand that if we are not successful, man will count for nothing—he will have lived in vain. Then we treated you as children who must be led—you spoke of it as a tragedy. You described as ‘casualties’ men and women who are now living in the future, not one cell’s life the worse for the journey.
“ ‘Now you have taught us to know you for savages. Your ridiculous bombs did no harm to our building, but you killed thirty of our men who were outside. Those thirty were worth a thousand of you and you killed them by an action no more reasoned than that of a frightened brute. We shall not kill you in revenge—the art of living is not killing, but we warn you that those who remain here three weeks from now will start to kill one another. For the rest the transporters will be at their stations. Make good use of them.’
“Hundreds of thousands laughed.
“ ‘We’ve killed some of ’em—we’ll beat the lot,’ was their attitude.
“But other thousands heeded the warning, surging in crowds to the machines.
“Mary and I were of neither party. I suppose it was sentiment which held us. The road to safety was plain, for the dwarfs never lied, yet the call of familiar things was too strong. We were standing by the world we loved till the last. Going down with our civilization.
Chapter VI
Nearing the End
“ALL governments published futile edicts forbidding approach to the transporters. Planes were headed off, trains stopped, roads blocked, but still the crowds swept forward on foot. Infantry and tanks sent to turn the stream, joined it. The authorities reached their wits’ end.
“The English sent rocket shells against the Salisbury Plain station. Hundreds of their own people died. The transporter was scarcely scratched.
“In California two men finding themselves immune from the dwarfs’ influence, attempted to steal a small time traveller—they were never seen again. Thereafter the dwarfs arrived in pairs, one to work the transporter while the other guarded their travellers.
“For the full three weeks the huge machines made their two or three journeys a day, but the hundreds of thousands they carried were like a few spoonfuls from a full bucket.
“And now, standing in my dark room, I knew that the end had come. Men and women had started to fight insanely in frenzy of fear. Soon they would become hungry. They would prowl like famished beasts, ready to eat even each other. The dwarfs had thrust our ultimatum upon us. It would not be long now before the multitudes were besieging the only means of escape from a maddened world—the transporters.
“In my mind a plan was growing, a slender chance. First I must get out of this crazy city and find Mary.
* * *
“TOGETHER we lay in a clump of low bushes. Not far from our hiding place, a line of haggard men and women was struggling towards a transporter.
“ ‘The evacuation of a world,’ I heard Mary murmur.
“Some dragged barrows of possessions, some could barely drag themselves. There was no need now for suggestion to impel the crowds. They were striving their utmost towards those feared or despised machines which had become glittering symbols of rescue. Many staggered from fatigue to fall in their tracks.
“ ‘If the dwarfs use suggestion, to help on the fallen ones—count,’ I said. ‘They won’t need much power and if you keep your mind full it can’t touch you. Fill it up with figures. Multiply and multiply so that there’s room for nothing else. It’s our only safeguard.’
“Luckily there was no test of our concentration. Friends pulled the stragglers up and urged them along the last lap of the journey. At last the transporter was filled. The entrances clicked together. Those who were shut out retired to throw themselves on the ground. They would have to wait for the next load.
“ ‘Get ready,’ I whispered to Mary as I drew a rocket pistol from my pocket.
“The two small time travellers appeared. One dwarf ran to the transporter; the other sat on guard in his saddle. I reckoned that the big machine would be away in about twenty minutes since it would take that long for the weary crowd to file out. As the first dwarf vanished with the transporter, I drew my aim on the second.
“It is a horrible thing to kill a man who is off his guard, but it was necessary. Merely wounded, he might bring his friends about us in a few seconds.
“ ‘Now,’ I cried. Together we sprang for the travellers as the dead dwarf rolled from his seat.
“ ‘Get on,’ I ordered, setting the dials. I put Mary’s hand on the lever.
“ ‘Pull,’ I said. But, instead, she leaned out and pressed her lips to mine.
“ ‘I love you,’ she said. She said it as though she knew the end had come. Then her hand flew back to the lever. I shouted to stop her, but it was too late—she had gone.”
Jon paused in his tale. We did not interrupt; the grief in his face held us silent.
“Where is she now, I wonder?” he said slowly.
“When she drew back her hands it brushed one of the dials. I had been so careful—worked out the position of each to a hair so that there might be no delay in our coming here. So that we might travel together far away from our world of chaos, far away, too, from the threat of a dying world. One hasty move she made which may have carried her further than the earth’s death or beyond its birth. She is a castaway somewhere in the jumble of time and space.”
“But you?” asked Lestrange. “How—?”
“Oh, I jumped on the other machine. The crowd had seen us. A hundred or more of them were pelting across the field. It was as though I had the one lifebelt on a sinking ship. They jumped at me. The traveller rocked as they hit it. It was falling as I pulled the lever—it fell in your laboratory.
“But what’s the good of it all? I’m alone. Better to have gone on to the end with the people of my time. Why did I come here when I knew she couldn’t be here? If I’d kept the machine, I might have searched—I’d have searched all time to find her.”
A bell on the wall shrilled suddenly.
“Quick, Wright,” said Lestrange, jumping from his chair. “The laboratory alarm. Somebody’s spying—take this.”
He handed me a pistol and held one himself. Silently we raced to the laboratory wing and flung back the door.
A familiar silver framework glittered at us. Beside it stood a figure clad like our visitor.
“Mary, by heaven,” said Jon’s voice behind us.
“Jon, Jon,” the figure cried and ran towards us.
A few moments later Jon Lestrange walked over to the traveller and examined its controls curiously. He looked up with a smile.
“Obviously, Mary,” he said, “some patron saint guides your hand. You might have altered the setting by six hundred years or six thousand, but you did only alter it by six hours.”
He turned towards Professor Lestrange.
“If you please, great-great-great-grand-father,” he said, “I should like another piece of string.”
THE END
AFTER 1,000,000
J.M. Walsh
AS Mr. Walsh states in his foreword, time travelling is filled with interesting paradoxes, that should provide endless mental speculation.
The ability of man to travel into the future or past and alter the events of either time, are doubted by most of those who have given the matter serious thought. To alter the future whose events flow from immediate happenings, or the past that is gone, is to kill altogether the sequence of events.
Yet the newer science of physics seems to offer some hope that this might be possible. We know now that events do not happen continuously but in jerks and spasms, and that they do not happen in absolute accordance with cause and event, but with the laws of probability. Although the interruption of a stream of events, by the intrusion of something entirely foreign, like the invasion of a twentieth century man into the world 1,000,000 years ahead, may strike us now as being impossible, a future world may understand and accept it.
Mr. Walsh, the author of “Vandals of the Void” in the summer WONDER QUARTERLY, makes a new success for himself in this interesting little story.
Admittedly time-travelling is a subject for theorizing. Admittedly also it is a subject full of paradoxes. I have tried in the following story to deal in a necessarily brief fashion with such paradoxes as arose in the course of the narrative. There may be others that I have omitted. Neither have I tried to deal with the aspect a future civilization may present to a visitor from today. That is pure speculation. Some may say one thing, and some another.
Human nature being what it is, however, the chances are that civilizations will rise and fall, as they have in the past, that discoveries will be made and lost, and made again. That much I have suggested in passing.
I have not enlarged on the mechanical side of time travelling. The mechanics, at least in theory, are fairly well understood by all who like this branch of scientific fiction. Once assume that they can be put into practice, and the rest is easy. Whether the subject has ever before been treated from precisely the angle I have taken I do not know.
I wrote simply to clear my mind of the one idea that I believe has never been elaborated before,—that time used must be accounted for. To put it more plainly, if I leave here, for instance, at 5 p.m. on Wednesday, travel a century into the future, and remain there exactly one week, I do not believe that I can return precisely to my own era at 5 p.m. on the day I started. I have lived a week in the interval. That week must be docked from the period of my existence. When I return I shall come back perhaps to the exact hour of the clock, but I shall be a week older. My calendar will show that seven days have passed from my life. I cannot live those seven days over again. That much is clear. This is not to say, admitting the possibility of time traveling, that if I am to have a life-span of seventy years that I may not spend thirty of those years in the twentieth century and the remaining forty in the twenty-fifth century. I cannot live the whole seventy in both centuries, that is all.
* * *
I AM the last man, the last man of all Earth’s teeming millions to be left alive on this once populous planet. I have seen this world, woefully, incredibly aged, bleak and desolate, writhing in its death-throes—yet I have escaped to tell this tale.
So much I write, then turn to look out my window on the busy, crowded street below. I hear the hum of traffic and I see the movements of people, many thousands of them. I know that I am somewhere in the center of a city of eight million souls. Not one of them realizes the doom ahead. If they did, it would not matter. They will all be dead and gone long before it comes to pass. Seeing that, realizing this, my story seems well-nigh incredible, even to myself, who went through it all.
I can hardly expect to be believed. At times I can hardly credit it myself. But for two things I should end by fancying that I had dreamed it all, that I had been a victim of some particularly vivid nightmare. But no dream, no nightmare could possibly linger with its details so sharply etched in my mind. And, as I say, there are two things left me from that time, two proofs, if one can call them, that my experience was not altogether the product of a disordered mind. Why such an adventure should have come to me of all men I cannot say. It came—that is all—and I must record it as best I can.
My name? It is John Harling, my status that of a real estate broker, surely a prosaic profession. That much no doubt is proof for the credibility of my tale; my clan is unimaginative; we cannot invent such tales. But let that rest.
My story opens out-of-doors on a summer day in the third decade of this, the twentieth century. I was, to put it plainly, hiking, dressed in the conventional costume for such a pastime, my rucksack on my back, a staff in my hand. I was making for the crest of one of those deserted, paths of leafy Surrey hills. A way not yet invaded by the ubiquitous London motorist.
The crest of the rise lay before me. I had nearly reached it. In my mind there was forming already the pleasant picture of a halt, a drink and a bite beneath the shade of the trees before I proceeded on my way. There was nothing then to tell me that a million years would pass before I drank or ate again. Unless that seeming hint of thunder in the air had anything to do with it.
Abruptly I saw a flash. Lightning, I thought, out of a clear sky at that; and I wondered why I had heard no peal. Then on the heels of the flash some branches crashed with a rending sound, as though some heavy object had torn its way through them. A lucky escape for me. The lightning might easily have struck me rather than that tree towards which I stared.
Then I rubbed my eyes. What I saw was so different from what I had expected.
It might have been the original fiery chariot from Heaven. Such was my first confused thought, for even at a glance I could see that it was no vehicle such as I was familiar with. It seemed much like an airplane minus the wings. Yet there was a subtle difference. The body was slightly stream-lined, but nose and tail were blunt, with a cluster of sinister-looking tubes fore and aft. From these a thin golden vapor rose in thin, lazy wisps.
The machine itself—I could hardly think of it as anything else—was of an odd kind of metal, weird and strange. It was the green of an emerald, so that I might have taken it at first to be some species of crystal did not everything in me cry out that it was metal. I learnt later that such it was. The length of the machine was studded with bosses, seemingly of quartz. Portholes, windows, perhaps doors. Their exact function did not appear at the moment.
