Time Travel Omnibus, page 140
I stood and stared, even then not quite convinced that my senses had not played me some strange trick. Then gingerly I reached forward my staff. The machine seemed real enough. It was solid to the touch. More daringly, I tried it with my hand. It was warm to the feel, yet not unpleasantly so.
A door opened in the machine. A section of the side slowly slid away into the hull, and I waited, wondering what was to be revealed. I think I was more curious than frightened, and the one idea in my mind was that this undoubtedly was a visitant from some other planet. To me, first of all men, was to be given the privilege—or the horror, which I knew not—of meeting the strangers. As the door slid gently open, speculation after speculation raced furiously through my mind. I tried to picture a hundred different and alien forms of life, any one of which it might be my lot to view.
I was wrong.
ONE person only stood framed in the opening, a being in human form. More staggering still, it was a girl. Call her that, though at a glance she looked more mature. A Juno-esque figure, clad in something that looked oddly like chain-mail. It was golden and it seemed to glow—a little. The head was bare, though I saw she held some sort of a helmet in one gloved hand.
I am no weakling; I am built, if anything on a large size, without unnecessary flesh. But this girl was every inch as tall as I, though naturally better proportioned.
While one could count ten we stood and stared at each other. I take it that she was quite as surprised at my appearance as I was at hers, each of us fumbling for words adequate to the situation.
Then she spoke. It was a soft musical voice in its way, though it held an odd hint of power that I did not like. Had she spoken in some language utterly unintelligible, I don’t think I would have been at all surprised; the fact that she was using English of a sort—queer, distorted, and to my ears archaic—was more astounding. Yet it was not hard to follow. One could sense the drift of what she was saying.
Actually she was asking me what year this was. I told her. 1935. She frowned a little.
“I have made an error, an error in calculation,” she said, “but a few years out in a million is not so much after all.”
A million? I gasped. Then: “Who are you? What do you mean? Where do you come from?” I asked with a rush.
She smiled a little, as one of superior wisdom to a child.
“I am Leela Zenken,” she said simply, “and I have not come from anywhere—in space. But in time I have come from an age a million years ahead of this.”
“In that thing?” I said, taking a step forward.
She nodded. We were becoming more intelligible to each other now, our pronunciations seeming less odd. “Yes. A time traveller. That is it. But is not this London?” She stared about her at the green trees.
I shook my head. “You are perhaps twenty miles from the nearest part of Greater London,” I told her. “It doesn’t extend as far as this—yet. Perhaps in fifty years—”
She did not wait for me to finish, but darted inside the machine, was gone a second, and returned.
“That is it,” she said breathlessly. “An error. Fifty years out in time. And thirty feet in space. In my day the land, this point, is that much higher. But you, what are you, what do you do?”
I told her briefly. Though at first she did not understand the function of a real estate broker, she did at last. She did not seem so pleased.
“I had hoped for perhaps a scientist;” she was watching my face as she spoke. Some passing shadow must have given her a wrong idea of what was in my mind. “I mean,” she added hastily, “I wanted one who would not discredit what he cannot understand.”
It was all Greek to me. That some object lay behind her words I did not doubt, but at the moment what it was was not apparent.
“What exactly,” I said, “do you want, and what precisely is it you hoped to do?”
Her answer was evasive enough in one sense. “I had hoped to reach the year 1985,” she said. “My reasons—she waved them aside, unuttered, perhaps because they were no concern of mine. “It is a strange world to me, a strange time, a strange people. But we seem to understand one another. If this had been 1985 no doubt you would have helped me.”
One idea after another chased through my mind. After all, even though it was not 1985, why should I not help her? I was young, unattached, no relatives, no one but myself to worry about . . . and this was adventure, of the sort one might never come across again.
“Why shouldn’t I help you now?” I said, greatly daring.
She looked me up and down. “You are of the wrong age,” she said deliberately. “I go fifty years ahead.”
“But the people of fifty years time should not be so radically different from what they are today,” I protested.
“That is true. I might after all . . .” She looked back again into the interior of the machine, thought a moment, then, “Come,” she said.
I had little or no idea just what was in her mind, but I obeyed her invitation and stepped inside. No sooner was I in than she touched a lever and the door slid closed. She touched another lever and there came a roar of sound from outside.
A Miscalculation
“WHAT are you doing?” I asked bluntly.
“Raising the machine,” she said calmly. “I miscalculated before. It has taught me a lesson. In the years the land has risen. If we went back to my own day we might arrive to find ourselves thirty feet under the earth. In fifty years’ time, who knows but that we might come to rest inside a building, with disastrous consequences.”
“Then we are not yet travelling in time?
“No, only rising. It is better to do the travelling in free air.”
“I see.” I bent over the bank of keys and dials in front of her, and tried to make something of their arrangement. But I could not. The theory of time travelling I had read of vaguely. The idea of time like a river. One could travel with the current, drift from source to mouth. Mechanically one could quicken one’s speed on that river, beat the drift of the current, as it were. The faster one moved the further behind would be left the particular patch of water surrounding the boat when one started. Conversely, the boat could travel against the current.
That much, admitting the analogy between the flow of time and the flow of a river was, clear enough. The mechanical means necessary to achieve this result were a trifle more complicated. Her explanation of it all was. necessarily brief. Some of it I grasped, and some I did not. In many respects the science of her age was couched in terms unintelligible to me.
She cut her explanation short. “Are you ready? Then please sit down.” She pointed to one chair, and seated herself in the other. “We will start our flight through time. Not long, only fifty years.”
She leaned forward, and set a pointer on one of the dials, then pressed a button immediately beneath it. The machine seemed to behave crazily. I had an impression of walls whirling and dissolving and I fancied I heard a stifled cry from the girl. Then . . . nothingness.
I came back to myself abruptly, with a growing sense of strangeness, a feeling that all was not as it should be. The girl herself had slid to the floor; her head was resting against the back of the chair, and her eyes were closed. From the look of her I knew she was unconscious, but whether she had fainted or it was the result of the time travelling I could not say. The bank of keys ahead of her looked oddly twisted; the glass stuff of some of the dials had broken, and everything looked crushed and crumpled as though it had impacted heavily against something.
But the machinery’s injuries could wait. I turned to the girl, wondering how I could revive her, but she saved me the trouble. Her eyes opened, flickered, closed again, then with an effort of will, opened once more and remained open.
She sprang to her feet with a little cry the moment she got command of herself, glanced at the dials, then rushed to one of the porthole-like objects and stared through it. She remained there some time. What she saw I do not know, but when she turned back to me it was with an expression of consternation on her face.
“I have failed,” she said. “But the fault is not altogether mine. First my original miscalculation, then the jolt the machinery received when I landed in your era, both together may have caused it.”
“Tell me,” I said, with a queer sense of tightness about my heart, “just what has happened.”
She looked me squarely in the eyes, and—I liked this—though she felt the fault was hers, she did not flinch before my gaze.
“It is this,” she said a trifle unsteadily, “I am back here in my own age, you with me, a million years ahead of yours. The machinery did not function as it should have. The moment I pressed the lever we were shot with an extreme time velocity back to the point from which I started.”
“Well,” I said, for one age seemed quite as good as another now I had taken to timetravelling, “I don’t see that it matters much—as far as I am concerned.”
“But you don’t understand,” she said quickly, with an edge of consternation in her voice. “Unless I can manage, to repair the machinery, which I doubt, you are marooned in time, a million years ahead of your day. That in itself might not matter so much to you or to me, were it not that the very days of this Earth, which is the home of us both, are numbered. Is that not sufficiently appalling for you?”
IT was. I sat down heavily, and stared at her unbelievingly. For the moment I did not know what to think. The prospect was too stupendous for me to take it all in. She left me to my thoughts.
In a little while I saw that she was opening the door that led outside the machine, and she beckoned me to come with her.
“But first,” she said, “you must put this on.” It was a suit similar to the one she was wearing, designed, I learned, to protect the wearer against any extremes of cold that might be met.
Something of my numbed state I had no doubt put down to the shock her announcement had given me. Now I began to realize that the air was cold, almost like the blast of a refrigerating chamber. Perhaps the Earth was passing through another ice-age. That may have been what she had meant.
Or perhaps the planet had tilted again, as it had already done more than once in its history, and the poles had shifted. I did not know. I could only wait and see for myself what had happened. At least she made no move to enlighten me then, but instead seemed all impatience to be about whatever business she had in mind.
We stepped out of the machine. I had expected to find myself in the open air, but instead, looking up, I saw we were in a vast building made of some transparent substance like glass. The air in it was keen, almost icy, and I looked in vain for signs of life. We two seemed the only human beings alive.
The girl did not speak, but merely motioned me to follow her. We passed down through the huge building to one part that had been partitioned off into rooms. Since they, too, were made of the same glass-like substance as the rest of the building, it looked as though the divisions had been made more for the convenience of work than for the sake of privacy. Despite the warmth given out by the electrically heated suits we were wearing, the girl shivered a little.
“It’s colder than it was,” she said in a low voice. “The power must be giving out, the heaters running down. I pray nothing has happened. I have been away so long . . .”
“Why? What does it all mean?” I asked.
“Presently,” she returned. “It is a long tale. I cannot tell it all to you now. First I must learn what has happened.”
We came to a room. The floor was bare, but the walls were covered with a profusion of dials, keys, and plates not unlike those of television screens. She studied the apparatus carefully for some seconds, then made some adjustments with switches and levers. One of the television screens glowed to life. I became aware that I was looking at a vast building, similar in some respects to that we were in. She made other adjustments, localized the view, so to speak, so that we were looking at one particular section of the building, vastly magnified. It was full of people, men and women dressed after the fashion of the girl by my side. They were sprawling about in all manner of attitudes, but everyone of them was dead, frozen stiff. The cold of space had crept in and killed them where they lay.
An hour or more we spent there while the girl searched one screen after another, the television eye roaming from one point of our globe to another, and always with the same result. Nowhere on the whole round of the Earth was there life! It was a dead world.
At last with a little moan she turned away, then dropping abruptly, to a crouching position on the floor buried her head in her hands, and began to sob. Woman to the last. After a million years, the sex had altered but little.
I caught her by the arm, and raised her, a little roughly, I am afraid, but I felt she needed to be shaken out of her bog of despair.
“Tell me,” I said, “what has happened. I am still very much in the dark. I think it is time that I should know.”
She faced me with burning eyes. “It is all my fault,” she declared vehemently. “I have been the last hope of my race and I have failed . . . lamentably.”
“But how? All may not yet be lost. Perhaps I can be of some help. Not much, I’m afraid, but the telling of your story may throw a new light on something hitherto obscure. Who knows?”
“I doubt it,” she said, almost sullenly—anger with herself—“but it is right that you should know. I have brought you here. It is for you to judge me.”
A Tale of Doom
WITH that she started her tale, making it under the circumstances, necessarily brief. Some I understood of what she said, and some I did not. Remember, in many ways the science of her age was a million years ahead of ours, and again they had forgotten many things we know.
A tale of a world suddenly faced with the prospect of dissolution. The Solar System swimming into some uncharted reach of space encountered a stretch of unknown substance, a gaseous entity, a hole in space—no one seemed able to say with any degree of certainty just what it was—that possessed the singular power of intercepting the heat-giving, life-giving rays of the sun.
“Then,” I interrupted, “it is not a case of a dying sun? The sun still lives?”
She nodded. “Look,” she said. She pressed a button. One of the television screens came to life. I found I was looking at the sky, not materially changed from that which I had known. The sun was climbing towards the zenith, no smaller, no larger than I remembered it, but it was a sickly red in hue. I could look at it without hurt to the eyes. I might have been regarding it through heavily smoked glasses.
“Go on,” I said. I was beginning to understand a little.
She went on. This unknown element, a substance with the power of shutting off the heat of the sun in the same way that a lead shield will cut off the emanations of radium, augured death for the earth. Time was short. From the day the fantastic properties of this unknown element had first been discovered, scarcely two years were left before the curtain would be drawn completely between the sun and its family of planets.
The scientists of the world were mobilized. Some suggested one thing. Some suggested another. None were of any practical help. In the million years that had passed since my day secrets had been discovered and lost again, inventions made and destroyed. The story of human history was the story of good things used not always wisely. There had been conflicts between nations, between the inhabitable planets even; civilizations had risen and had perished; a graph of human progress would have shown a series of alternating peaks and depressions. Old records that might have been of use had been lost or destroyed in one or other of the many conflicts when the red lust of destruction had been let loose.
It narrowed down to this in the end. To save humanity some means of replacing the sun’s heat must be found. The desperate need spurred men on to further efforts, the while the glass-roofed cities were built in the hope of staving off the final calamity for years if all else failed. Old records, such as remained, were feverishly searched. Mention was made in them from time to time of the discovery of a principle of atomic energy, light-and heat-giving. If such a thing could be re-discovered the world would be saved, for it was felt that the blotting out of the sun’s power was only temporary, that in the course of time the Solar System would have passed out of the area of malefic influence.
Feverish work, almost to no purpose.
Leela Zenken had her own ideas. Her mind ran on the possibilities of time traveling. If she could construct a machine that would take her back through the myriad years she might be able to make contact with one or the other of those men of the past who claimed to have discovered the principle of atomic energy. For a time she was laughed at.
Time-travelling was a theory then as now. The mechanical difficulties seemed insuperable. But she worked away, making this experiment and that, failing always, yet always seeming just within measurable reach of success. And at last it came. She discovered the vibratory rate necessary to make travelling through time a feasible proposition.
Yet even then much remained to be done. She must search backward through time, a long and wearying process, for the data on which she had to work was meagre. Some of the alleged discoverers of the power she sought must have been charlatans, since there was no record of their discoveries ever having been put to practical use, an unthinkable thing had they done what they claimed. In this she overlooked one solitary possibility.
HER SEARCH began. She left her world almost in despair. So many things had failed that they had little faith in this last hope. She came back through time, pursuing her enquiries. The people of other ages treated her badly. She met with incredulity, contempt, derision, everything but belief and help. In some eras she was even regarded as a mad-woman. Once, during one of the Interplanetary wars she was treated as an invader, and barely escaped without injury. The machine itself was slightly damaged before she could get it to start.
