Time Travel Omnibus, page 185
“You’ve got to, man! Try. Try hard!”
Silence fell in the round-walled cubicle, a thick silence that seemed to quiver with tension. Stratton stared at the future-man, concentrating on his thoughts, on that storehouse of forgotten but never eradicated brain-impressions the psychologists call subconscious memory.
No words came to him, but pictures seemed to form on his retina, pictures like the hazy visions of a dream. They grew more definite in outline. He saw Flaton resting on his grey cloud cushion. He saw the view-screen in front of him. It was a porthole looking out on a platform thronged with hundreds of creatures in the nightmarish shapes of the world of the future. Silhouetted against a blue sky were towering pinnacles of gleaming crystal, fairylike highways leaping from facade to facade in a gossamer arabesque, clouds of ovoid stratocars?
The view-screen drifted upward and he saw the lever-banks. Thin, boneless fingers reached out, pushed one down in its short slot. In the view-screen the crowded platform shot down.
“I have it!” Stratton shouted, and leaped to the bow of the stratocar. He glimpsed the real view-screen, glimpsed a steel-capped Viking rushing in through it, a crowd of others behind him. His shaking hand found a lever, pushed it down.
The uprush of the stratocar flung him down on Talus, crushing the future-man as Stratton had crushed Flaton in his irate onslaught. But the flier was rising. The crater was dwindling in the television screen, was once more a pit in the plain’s boundary-less surface.
Ronald Stratton struggled back to the control levers. “I’ve got to stop this or we’ll keep on going up forever.” Talus was dead, could not help him any longer. He pushed the tiny handle back into the central point of its slot. The precipitate rise stopped; the stratocar hovered, motionless in the air.
Stratton stared at the control board. He saw now that the switch lifting the stratocar was the topmost of a vertical row of three, that to left and right of the central lever there were two more.
“It looks simple enough,” he muttered, “Now that I’ve got a starting point. Top—up. Bottom—down. Middle—forward. Left—left. Right—right. Let’s try it. I’ll push down the middle one. Here goes!”
THE craft leaped forward. The problem was solved! He could fly the stratocar. But where? Where in this terrible place was safety for him? For Elaise?
“Look, Ronny!” the girl exclaimed. “It waxeth light again. The night here is indeed very short.”
The strange red glow that passed here for day was growing in the screen. “It’s just some kind of fluctuation of the light, sweetheart,” Stratton thought aloud. “You see, there could not really be any day or night here because there isn’t any Time.”
Below, the eerily colored plain was visible once more, stretching undisturbed to a featureless horizon. No. There, straight ahead, something bulked against the lurid sky, a familiar, grateful green margining its upper edge.
“How would you like to come home with me, Elaise?” Stratton whispered. “Home to England?”
“Ronny!” She was wordless, but her arms around his neck, her kiss on his cheek, was enough.
“All right,” he said. “Here goes.”
The stratocar came down in the clearing, where Flaton had captured them. Stratton stepped out of it, helped Elaise to descend. They turned shuddering away from the gruesome remnants of the last of the future-men.
“We came from that direction,” Stratton Said. “Maybe if we go back there we’ll find the eddy once again.”
“Whither thou goest I will go,” Elaine murmured. “I am thine, my knight, soul and body?”
“Not more than I’m yours, honey. Remember that when we get back to 1936. Come on.”
The underbrush rustled against their knees, the trees whispered overhead. They passed the still body of the Neanderthal Man. Then—a wall confronted them, a wall of hazy, swirling nothingness.
“Here goes! Together does it, Elaise, One—two—three!” His arm around her warm waist, Ronald Stratton stepped into the haze.
CHAPTER VI
THROUGH THE EDDY
IT was as if he had walked over the brink of an abyss, save that he did not fall. He was standing on the gentle slope of Silbury Hill. A great monolith loomed above him, black and gaunt against a dusk sky grey and haunting with the death of day. Not a minute, not a second had elapsed since he had taken the fateful step in the other direction.
“Look, Elaine.” Ronald Stratton said. “Look down there. See the spire of Avebury Church? We can find a minister there, to wed us.” She didn’t answer.
“Elaise!” he said sharply, turning to her. She wasn’t there beside him. She wasn’t anywhere?
“Elaise!”
But she had walked into the eddy, close against him. She must have walked into it. What had happened? Where was she, the girl he had found in the Timeless Zone, who had fought so bravely by his side? The girl he had learned to love, the blue-eyed, fair-haired girl from the days of King Arthur?
From the days? Abruptly he understood. He remembered his first explanation of their strange adventure. “We’ve shot along the year-spokes of that great wheel, each from our own time, and met here at the center?” The reverse, too, was true. Returning, they had each gone back along his own year-spoke, he to 1936, she to A. D. 520. Some vibration of their cosmos, some esoteric, unknown quality, had provided for that. They were fourteen centuries apart.
Ronald Stratton started slowly down the hill, descending toward the valley whose moor was already dark with the gloom of night. Little stars sprinkled it, lights in the homes of people like himself. Of people of the twentieth century. Above them, the red and green winglights of an airplane drifted across the dusk.
“I don’t care how advanced your era is; if you haven’t got love, I pity you.” He had said that to Flaton. “It’s the greatest thing in life.”
Stratton halted, turned back to the monumental double-ring the Druids had built to warn their people of the terrible thing that lay within. Abruptly he was running back to the high stone that marked the boundary of the eddy. He stopped on its very edge.
“Elaise!” he cried into that dread maelstrom of haze. “Elaise!”
Mad! He would be mad to plunge back into it. She wouldn’t be there, in the forest. She was hastening down Silbury Hill, fourteen hundred years ago so as not to be late for evening prayers. She—
“Ronny!”
Her voice came out of the mists. He hadn’t heard it, couldn’t have heard it, across fourteen centuries. He was mad!
“Ronny!”
“I’m coming, Elaise. Wait for me! I’m coming!”
* * *
Above a forest of tall and ancient oaks a lurid sky bent its eerie dome. A tiny horse, three-toed and knee-high to a full-grown man, peered through the underbrush at the couple walking, hand in hand, into the lowering, threatening future of the Land Where Time Stood Still. Hand in hand, heart to heart, the man of the twentieth century and the maid of the sixth went, together, into the Unknown.
TRAPPED IN ETERNITY
Ray Cummings
A Strange Time Machine Merges Past, Present and Future into One!
I MET the surgeon’s gaze as he replaced the bandages on Dora’s eyes.
“I’ll talk to you outside, Mr. Blair,” he said.
Dora’s hands groped for me as I stooped over her reclining chair, her sensitive fingers—all her seventeen years of life the eyes of her blindness—caressed ray face.
“I’ll be back in a moment, Dora,” I said. “You just lie quiet.”
The surgeon faced me on the veranda outside the living room of Dora’s little bungalow here in the Westchester suburbs of New York City.
“She will never see,” the surgeon said. “The operation failed.”
Poor little Dora. She had hoped that the science of surgery would dispel her eternal darkness.
“All right, Doctor,” I said quietly. “I’ll tell her.”
Dora and I sat that evening in the little moonlit garden beside the house. She had removed the bandage. Slim, blond girl, having a queerly ethereal beauty as though her blindness had set her apart from this world: Blue eyes pale, seeming always questing.
My name is Alan Blair. Details of me are unimportant, save that I was twenty-four, that August, 1936. I had met Dora Kean the year before. Her aged father, a retired professor, was her only close relative. He had died suddenly, leaving her alone, with this little bungalow and a small annuity. Dora and I were engaged now; to be married within a few months.
We Bat, that momentous night of August 30th, 1936, with the moonlight filtering through the trees and the world a vision of beauty around us. Dora had been brave over her disappointment. She was smiling gently now. Her hands brushed my face; her smile was quizzical. “You’re very handsome, Alan. I’m a lucky girl.”
I laughed. “Maybe you are, and maybe not.”
Then suddenly I was gripping her, and she heard my startled gasp.
“What is it, Alan?”
“Something—over there near the house. Good Lord—”
Incredible thing. I stared. In the shadows of the garden between us and the little stucco bungalow, a shape was shimmering. Wraithlike outlines, where a moment before there had been nothing.
The ghostly outlines of a cage. A cubical thing ten feet high, fifteen feet square, set upon the ground like a lion cage painted luminous, shimmering so that for the first second or two it could have been conjured by my own startled fancy.
Then I heard a vague electrical whine. And then the materialized cage was no longer shimmering. Reality I Dark lattice of bars. Small windows of a luminous transparency. A solid door. It had an interior light. The door slid sideward with a rasping click. The light silhouetted a figure peering out. A man. Then he stepped from the doorway.
He was hardly more than twenty feet away from us—a man as tall as myself, with a bullet head of closely clipped black hair. Queer figure indeed. Wide-shouldered fellow in a leather garment queerly shaped.
“Do not be afraid,” he said, in an English queerly intoned. He took a few steps toward us; and as we leaped to our feet he stopped, and stood smiling.
“I am Sah Groat,” he began. “I live here.” He gestured with a thick powerful arm at our little moonlit garden. “This is my home. I have come back to visit you.”
AMAZING visitor! He sat presently, cross-legged on the ground beside us while we gaped at him and listened to his amazing words. Visitor from the future I Our garden—the living room of his home, six hundred years from now I This cage his vehicle with which, at will, he was traveling back and forth through the centuries!
We sat, feeling like untutored savages, while he tried to make us understand the mysteries of this science which to him was so comprehensible.
“Between the four planes of Space—length, breath, thickness and time,” he said, “there is no essential distinction. Science, ever since the days of your Albert Einstein, has recognized that Time is a property of Space. A house has length, breadth and thickness. And duration. Without duration, it would have no. real existence.”
Space-time. The blending out of which the Universe is built. And then he tried to show us how the future and the Past, co-exist with what we call the Present; the same Space-dimensions, but with the Time-dimension altered.
“I don’t think I can conceive that, I said.
“No,” he agreed, “because your whole conception of Time is illogical. For instance: Suppose, with your human intelligence, you were a tree, rooted here in this garden. Suppose that the normal order of things was that New York City would come slowly toward you and pass before you. Time normally does that for us. But you, if you were that tree, could you conceive going across Space and reaching New York City? Could you believe that New York City exists there now? We humans can imagine—moving through Space—because we have always done it. But the tree would say, ‘New York City will be here. It will exist.’ The future! You understand? The tree would never realize the present, unperceived existence of New York City, and the possibility of swiftly going there by altering one’s Space-dimensions!
“The same is true with Time. It has a normal change of dimension, so that if we do nothing to alter that dimension, we are like the tree. We think that nothing exists until Time brings it before us!”
Amazing thing, but I seemed to be grasping it. “You mean,” I said, “you are able to cause an abnormal change in the Time-dimension?”
“Yes.” He smiled. “We define it, altering substance by altering the rate and character of the motion that constitutes the electrical vortex we call the proton.”
“That,” I said, “I most positively do not understand.”
“Because,” he retorted, “you are not aware of what all substance really is. Matter—with its dimensions of Space-time—it is molecules, composed of atoms. But what is an atom? A ring of electrons—which are particles of negative, disembodied electricity, revolving at very high speeds around a central nucleus of positive electricity, which we call a proton. But of what substance—what character—is the proton? Why even in nineteen-twenty-three, or perhaps before that, the theory was established that the proton merely is a vortex. A whirlpool. An electrical whirlpool in Space! That robs Matter of the last vestige of substance I A thing built merely of movement!
“Everything is electrical—or akin to it. The character of everything depends upon Matter’s inherent vibratory motion. Thus, to alter the Time-dimension, we alter the rate and character of that vibration—that basic vortex—the proton.”
He gestured to his time-vehicle. “I can give you only fundamentals—the machine itself is not abstruse, merely mechanically intricate. Every particle of Matter in that vehicle—and my own body when I am in it—is electrical in its basic nature. The mechanism circulates a current through every particle of that Matter. An electronic current. It causes the inherent vibratory movements of the protons of Matter to change their character. The matter changes its state. It acquires a different Time-factor. A different Time-dimension. A series of different dimensions, I should say—so that the progressive changes constitute a traveling through Time. Like the tree, uprooted, changing its position in Space.”
TIME traveling! And here, in this same space that now held Dora’s little bungalow and garden, Sah Groat’s home existed in the year 2536. He was a research physicist. Suddenly I envisaged all the immensity of things and events of what we call the Past, Present and Future, that crowded bur little garden! The moonlight fell upon our strange visitor as he sat cross-legged on the ground. Strange man from the future. I guessed that he might be thirty years old. Or perhaps far older. His facial skin was drawn tightly over high cheek-bones. It was a queerly luminous skin. Weird.
A different soft of human? I found myself suddenly shuddering, as though here, gazing at him, I was trying to fathom the unknown. Something about him—weird, indefinable—and frightening. His gestures were queer—all his movements abnormal to the aspect of any man I had ever seen before; and frightening, because I could not define their abnormality.
Absurd thoughts! I tried to dispel them. Then suddenly I realized that he was queerly staring at Dora as she sat tense, with her sightless eyes questing the sound of his voice.
“Your mate?” he said abruptly.
“We are going to be married soon,” I answered.
Still his gaze clung to her. I stared at his eyes. They were strangely brooding. The eyes of one who has seen too much. Or was there something lacking in this weird man’s eyes? Something that should be there, but was not?
“She is very strangely beautiful,” he said quietly.
Did Dora have some intuition? I saw her smile abruptly fade, and over her sensitive face came a vague expression of revulsion and fear.
“I have never seen a woman’s beauty like hers,” Groat added. “Her eyes see nothing. You should have that fixed.”
I told him how we had tried. Still his look never left Dora’s face. And suddenly he said, as though abruptly he had made a decision.
“My surgeon could fix that—in a few minutes: A pre-natal optical defect—not a disease. A little mechanism of lens and nerves to be repaired.” He shrugged his high wide shoulders, with a queer jerking gesture. “I will take you to my surgeon.”
It made my heart leap. A surgeon of six hundred years from now, with all the skill and knowledge that the centuries had brought!
Dora gasped, “Why—oh, if you only could.”
“How—how long will it take?” I murmured.
“The trip? How long? That means nothing. I can make it take what seems a few minutes of your consciousness.”
A few minutes—to get to this super-surgeon! An excitement struck at me so that I lost all caution.
Groat was gesturing again. “My surgeon lives just down that little hill—he will come at once if I send for him.”
I LED Dora over the threshold of the little cage—a rectangular metal room glowing with soft violet light; a few strangely fashioned metal chairs; an instrument table of fragile-looking tubes, dials, levers and coils.
“Do not be afraid,” Groat said softly. “Sit here by this bull’s-eye—” He seemed reluctant to tear his luminous brooding gaze from Dora. Then he sat at the instrument table.
I saw a long row of time-dials marking the centuries, the years, months and days. In the silence the small lever clicked as he shoved it. There was a low hum. The dark bars of the, cage abruptly glowed luminous—a pallid glow that suffused all the cage, bathed us in its electric light.
I felt my senses reel as we swept off into Time. But within an instant my senses steadied. The pallid light in the cage was soft but so strangely intense that I could fancy it was penetrating every atom of my body, every tiny cell within me vibrating from its touch. It connected the mesh of the cage bars so that we seemed in a luminous room of translucent walls.
But the one bull’s-eye beside us remained transparent. Amazing sight!
I saw the moon and all the stars swinging from the zenith to the horizon. The sun of Tomorrow rose and plunged in a swift arc; the day was gone.
