Time Travel Omnibus, page 154
It was a nightmare of a chase; up one boulevard, down another. Never once did she look back; always she hurried ahead, intent on her errand of sacrifice. Derek gained on her, but not enough. He groaned, knowing that she would reach her destination before he could catch up. Never once did he think of his own danger in thus openly traversing the public highways. Luckily it was early yet. Hardly any one was stirring. Once or twice he met with a man of the future, who turned and stared curiously after the racing savage-looking figure. Once he heard a shout behind him, but he did not pause in his headlong pace.
IN THE distance a high translucent wall reared itself. Derek recognized it. He saw Merle hesitate a moment; then brace herself as if for some ordeal. She disappeared through, and the wall gleamed blandly as before. So intent was Derek on marking the exact spot where she had entered that he collided violently with a man who had just emerged from an intersecting thoroughfare.
“Sorry!” Derek muttered automatically, and tried to disengage himself from the reeling figure. Then he stiffened suddenly. Recognition was mutual. A hoarse cry broke from the other: “The minion of the tyrant.”
It was Thoron. His hand shot up to the familiar position, his fine old features twisted in fanatic rage.
Derek ducked as a blue flame sizzled harmlessly over his head. “You damned fool!” he gritted, and let him have it squarely on the chin. Thoron went down heavily.
“You asked for it,” Derek panted as he ran on.
The wall loomed high in front. Behind him were gathering shouts. He shot a hasty glance backward.
There were men running toward him. Thoron was on his feet again, shaking a trembling fist.
Derek jumped for the little hollow where he had seen Merle stand. There was a little spurt, a streak of fire, and a round hole appeared in the wall, a little to one side. Another sizzle, and another hole appeared as if by magic. They were raying him. He swore violently, as the slide stubbornly refused to open. The wall had the appearance of a riddled fort by now. A ray scorched the hair on his head; there was a stab of heat at his side. Luckily it was a glancing thrust. But they were getting the range. The next beam would catch him square.
He shifted his position desperately. “Open sesame!” he shouted, as if the ancient incantation could help. Surprisingly, it did, or maybe it was the shift of his body to the right spot. The slide was open, revealing an oblong of garden.
There was a great shout behind him as he dived through. But the door had gone noiselessly shut again, and for the moment he was safe.
He cast about in the vast tree-clouded garden like a bloodhound on the trail. Where was Merle? She had disappeared. He raced through forestlike glades, calling her name, reckless of being overheard by others.
A thin scream came to him—it was Merle’s voice, lifted in tearing fright and agony. To Derek it seemed to come in the direction of a particularly dense clump. He went crashing through it like a bolt from the blue. Behind there was a sudden swelling of sound. The men of the future had penetrated the wall, were in fierce pursuit. But this did not matter—not now. Derek’s whole being was immersed in that last faint shriek of Merle’s. What was happening to her?
He broke through at last, into the spacious, fountain-splashed sward where he had first come into this land of the future. There he saw something that made the heated blood boil in his veins.
The time-traveling machine lay like a monstrous egg on the close-cropped grass. Merle was struggling weakly in the powerful arms of Mike Spinnot. He was dragging her, one hairy hand over her mouth to silence her cries, into the interior of the machine. There was a thick oily grin on his ill-favored face.
Derek acted swiftly. The distance between them was about a hundred yards. He swung over in a wide circle so as to be behind the struggling pair. Mike was already tugging the girl’s half-conscious body through the entrance to the cage when Derek let out a final burst of speed, throwing over all attempt at concealment. Once they were safely within, it would be too late.
WITH A final heave, Spinnot thrust the girl bodily into the machine, turned to pull the switch that closed the door. Then for the first time he saw Derek, bearing down upon the cage like a thunderbolt.
The startled crime king let out a yell and fumbled the switch. He recovered quickly and jammed it down. But that fumbled second had been enough. Derek had dived through, thrust Merle out of the cage onto the soft thick grass, in one swift clean movement. Then the slide shot home—behind him.
Mike’s hand came up with a quick jerk, but the momentum of Derek’s forward thrust carried him clutching against Spinnot’s legs. Spinnot tottered, sagged against the instrument panel, and crashed heavily upon Derek’s prone body.
The next instant the machine leaped into roaring, rocking life. Through the already swirling bars, Derek caught a glimpse of a horde of furious faces outside, in the foremost of which he recognized the fanatic gleam of Thoron’s. He was shouting something unintelligible in the high whine the cage was developing. A spatter of blue flashes twisted harmlessly around the circling bars, then a swift blur, and the machine spun dizzily off into time.
Both men were on their feet almost simultaneously.
Mike’s face was a mask of hate, his lips drawn back from his teeth in an animal snarl. “Damn you!” he roared. “I’ll cut your heart out for this.”
He lashed out. Derek ducked and bored in with a rapid one-two to the stomach that brought a grunt of pain from Spinnot. Mike reached out with his long arms and caught the reporter in a fierce bone-crushing hold. Derek squirmed to get loose, but all his squirmings seemed only to tighten the grip. He felt his ribs cracking under the strain of that bearlike hug. Mike’s hot mouth breathed on his face, whistling with the effort.
Then the machine rocked heavily; there was a thump, as if it had met with some obstruction in its wild careening through time. Both were thrown heavily. Derek broke loose and tottered to his feet.
Back and forth they fought, bruised, battered, panting, swinging dizzily to the whining motion of the cage. Derek felt himself going. It could not last much longer. Stepping back suddenly, and putting every last ounce of his remaining strength behind the blow, he shot clean for the point of the chin.
Mike’s eyes went glassy; he swayed drunkenly, and collapsed in a limp sprawling heap. Derek tottered in a daze, then the brutal punishment he had taken claimed his aching body. He, too, went down, sprawling over the motionless crime lord. His last weltering thought was that the machine seemed to be slackening in its tremendous motion.
DEREK came up for air to find the prison physician bending gravely over him. In the background were figures, familiar ones—the warden, the chaplain, the guards, his brother reporters, just as if the whole adventure had been merely a dream. Yes; and there was Mike Spinnot, masked, black-gowned, enthroned in the death chair, metal cap in place, the slit trousers revealing the bare, shaven leg, the deadly electrodes clamped into position.
“What happened?” he asked in a weak voice.
The warden told him “When you barged into that strange machine, the door closed, and the next instant it was gone, a whirling flash of light. We hardly had time to turn our guns on the disappearing cage when it appeared again, slowing down to a halt. We found you dead to the world on top of Spinnot, and the girl and the old man gone.”
Derek shook his head dazedly. “But we’ve been gone over a day!” he protested.
The warden shook his head pityingly. “Not longer than it takes to say Jack Robinson,” he said. “It was the clout on your head as you hit the cage and bowled Mike over that’s giving you ideas.”
Derek thought of all he had been through and opened his mouth to protest. Then he changed his mind. They would not believe him.
“Everything ready?” inquired the warden of the impassively waiting guard.
“Everything, sir.”
He pulled out his huge old-fashioned watch, snapped open the case.
“Thirty seconds to go,” he stated calmly, professionally.
A heavy breathing silence fell suddenly upon the chamber. Mike Spinnot was about to pay the extreme penalty of the law for his crimes.
Derek lay quietly, his eyes averted from the death chair. Merle Spinney was not born yet, would not be for thousands of years. His eyes turned to the resting ovoid. They lighted up with a strange gleam.
Then he caught his breath.
Spinnot—Spinney—Time often changed names more than that—
Once the current was turned on, Merle Spinney might never be born!
SIDEWISE IN TIME
Murray Leinster
FOREWORD.
LOOKING BACK, it seems strange that no one but Professor Minott figured the thing out in advance. The indications were more than plain. In early December of 1934 Professor Michaelson announced his finding that the speed of light was not an absolute—could not be considered invariable. That, of course, was one of the first indications of what was to happen.
A second indication came on February 15th, when at 12:40 p.m., Greenwich mean time, the sun suddenly shone blue-white and the enormously increased rate of radiation raised the temperature of the earth’s surface by twenty-two degrees Fahrenheit in five minutes. At the end of the five minutes, the sun went back to its normal rate of radiation without any other symptom of disturbance.
A great many bids for scientific fame followed, of course, but no plausible explanation of the phenomenon accounted for a total lack of after disturbances in the sun’s photosphere.
For a third clear forerunner of the events of June, on March 10th the male giraffe in the Bronx Zoological Park, in New York, ceased to eat.
In the nine days following, it changed its form, absorbing all its extremities, even its neck and head, into an extraordinary, egg-shaped mass of still-living flesh and bone which on the tenth day began to divide spontaneously and on the twelfth was two slightly pulsating fleshy masses.
A day later still, bumps appeared on the two masses. They grew, took form and design, and twenty days after the beginning of the phenomenon were legs, necks, and heads. Then two giraffes, both male, moved about the giraffe inclosure. Each was slightly less than half the weight of the original animal. They were identically marked. And they ate and moved and in every way seemed normal though immature animals.
An exactly similar occurrence was reported from the Argentine Republic, in which a steer from the pampas was going through the same extraordinary method of reproduction under the critical eyes of Argentine scientists.
Nowadays it seems incredible that the scientists of 1935 should not have understood the meaning of these oddities. We now know something of the type of strain which produced them, though they no longer occur. But between January and June of 1935 the news services of the nation were flooded with items of similar import.
For two days the Ohio River flowed upstream. For six hours the trees in Euclid Park, in Cleveland, lashed their branches madly as if in a terrific storm, though not a breath of wind was stirring. And in New Orleans, near the last of May, fishes swam up out of the Mississippi River through the air, proceeded to “drown” in the air which inexplicably upheld them, and then turned belly up and floated placidly at an imaginary water level some fifteen feet above the pavements of the city.
But it seems clear that Professor Minott was the only man in the world who even guessed the meaning of these—to us—clear-cut indications of the later events. Professor Minott was instructor in mathematics on the faculty of Robinson College in Fredericksburg, Va. We know that he anticipated very nearly every one of the things which later startled and frightened the world, and not only our world. But he kept his mouth shut.
Robinson College was small. It had even been termed a “jerkwater” college without offending anybody but the faculty and certain sensitive alumni. For a mere professor of mathematics to make public the theory Minott had formed would not even be news. It would be taken as stark insanity. Moreover, those who believed it would be scared. So he kept his mouth shut.
Professor Minott possessed courage, bitterness, and a certain coldblooded daring, but neither wealth nor influence. He had more than a little knowledge of mathematical physics and his calculations show extraordinary knowledge of the laws of probability, but he had very little patience with problems in ethics. And he was possessed by a particularly fierce passion for Maida Haynes, daughter of the professor of Romance languages, and had practically no chance to win even her attention over the competition of most of the student body.
So much of explanation is necessary, because no one but just such a person as Professor Minott would have forecast what was to happen and then prepare for it in the fashion in which he did.
We know from his notes that he considered the probability of disaster as a shade better than four to one. It is a very great pity that we do not have his calculations. There is much that our scientists do not understand even yet. The notes Professor Minott left behind have been invaluable, but there are obvious gaps in them. He must have taken most of his notes—and those the most valuable—into that unguessed-at place where he conceivably now lives and very probably works.
He would be amused, no doubt, at the diligence with which his most unconsidered scribble is now examined and inspected and discussed by the greatest minds of our time and space. And perhaps—it is quite probable—he may have invented a word for the scope of the catastrophe we escaped. We have none as yet.
There is no word to describe a disaster in which not only the earth but our whole solar system might have been destroyed; not only our solar system but our galaxy; not only our galaxy but every other island universe in all of the space we know; more than that, the destruction of all space as we know it; and even beyond that the destruction of time, meaning not only the obliteration of present and future but even the annihilation of the past so that it would never have been. And then, besides, those other strange states of existence we learned of, those other universes, those other pasts and futures—all to be shattered into nothingness. There is no word for such a catastrophe.
It would be interesting to know what Professor Minott termed it to himself, as he coolly prepared to take advantage of the one chance in four of survival, if that should be the one to eventuate. But it is easier to wonder how he felt on the evening before the fifth of June, in 1935. We do not know. We cannot know. All we can be certain of is how we felt—and what happened.
I.
IT WAS half past seven a.m. of June 5, 1935. The city of Joplin, Missouri, awaked from a comfortable, summer-night sleep. Dew glistened upon grass blades and leaves and the filmy webs of morning spiders glittered like diamond dust in the early sunshine. In the most easternly suburb a high-school boy, yawning, came somnolently out of his house to mow the lawn before schooltime. A rather rickety family car roared, a block away. It backfired, stopped, roared again, and throttled down to a steady, waiting hum. The voices of children sounded among the houses. A colored washerwoman appeared, striding beneath the trees which lined this strictly residential street.
From an upper window a radio blatted: “—one, two, three, four! Higher, now!—three, four! Put your weight into it!—two, three, four!” The radio suddenly squawked and began to emit an insistent, mechanical shriek which changed again to a squawk and then a terrific sound as of all the static of ten thousand thunderstorms on the air at once. Then it was silent.
The high-school boy leaned mournfully on the push bar of the lawn mower. At the instant the static ended, the boy sat down suddenly on the dew-wet grass. The colored woman reeled and grabbed frantically at the nearest tree trunk. The basket of wash toppled and spilled in a snowstorm of starched, varicolored clothing. Howls of terror from children. Sharp shrieks from women. “Earthquake! Earthquake!” Figures appeared running, pouring out of houses. Some one fled out to a sleeping porch, slid down a supporting column, and tripped over a rosebush in his pajamas. In seconds, it seemed, the entire population of the street was out-of-doors.
And then there was a queer, blank silence. There was no earthquake. No house had fallen. No chimney had cracked. Not so much as a dish or windowpane had made a sound in smashing. The sensation every human being had felt was not an actual shaking of the ground. There had been movement, yes, and of the earth, but no such movement as any human being had ever dreamed of before. These people were to learn of that movement much later. Now they stared blankly at each other.
And in the sudden, dead silence broken only by the hum of an idling car and the wail of a frightened baby, a new sound became audible. It was the tramp of marching feet. With it came a curious clanking and clattering noise. And then a marked command, which was definitely not in the English language.
Down the street of a suburb of Joplin, Missouri, on June 5, in the year of our Lord 1935, came a file of spear-armed, shield-bearing soldiers in the short, skirtlike togas of ancient Rome. They wore helmets upon their heads. They peered about as if they were as blankly amazed as the citizens of Joplin who regarded them. A long column of marching men came into view, every man with shield and spear and the indefinable air of being used to just such weapons.
They halted at another barked order. A wizened little man with a short sword snapped a question at the staring Americans. The high-school boy jumped. The wizened man roared his question again. The high-school boy stammered, and painfully formed syllables with his lips. The wizened man grunted in satisfaction. He talked, articulating clearly if impatiently. And the high-school boy turned dazedly to the other Americans.
“He wants to know the name of this town,” he said, unbelieving his own ears. “He’s talking Latin, like I learn in school. He says this town isn’t on the road maps, and he doesn’t know where he is. But all the same he takes possession of it in the name of the Emperor Valerius Fabricius, emperor of Rome and the far corners of the earth.” And then the school-boy stuttered: “He—he says these are the first six cohorts of the Forty-second Legion, on garrison duty in Messalia. That—that’s supposed to be two days’ march up that way.”
