Time Travel Omnibus, page 205
“No, Hank. I’m afraid not.”
“What’ll he do, Walter, wherever he is, huh?”
“Go on being an engraver, I suppose. That’s his trade, you know—engraving. He—hey, listen! What—what’s that?”
“What?”
“That!”
I heard it all right, only I didn’t want to.
“Listen, Hank.”
I listened again. I heard it again. I moaned.
“Hank.” It was a whisper, deep-hidden in some frozen crater of the moon. “Hank . . . we’re mad. D’you know that, Hank? Mad as loons . . .!”
From faraway outside it had come—that thudding and hoarse shouting. From faraway down the road. Then nearer, nearer it came, until we could make out words—words being cried out in a wild voice.
Walter and I were staring at each other, petrified. Then Walter broke. “That voice—” he choked, “can it be—?”
It was a barroom baritone, and it was bawling: “The Redcoats are coming . . . up, up, and to arms!”
But I couldn’t believe we were insane. “Walter,” I babbled, “is it—can it—?”
“No—Good Lord, no!”
But all the time the hoofbeats grew louder, and so did that hoarse voice. Together they came thundering down the road toward Walter’s place while we held our breaths. The hooves were thudding away just outside now—a moment more and they’d be past. But no—they stopped!
“Whoa!” crackled a human klaxon, just outside our door—“Whoa, I said, confound it!” That voice was unmistakable—I could almost smell the ale come floating through the door when it spoke. “Whoa, plague take thee!”
Then out of that night and into our shack thundered our Paul Revere. The door slammed open with a crash and a burly figure in lace shirt and white pants stood limned against the darkness, waving its triangle hat like a drunken college boy. “To arms, good people! The British regulars—” But they never came in that particular sentence. It rattled away as though someone had stuffed Revere’s big mouth with pebbles. I could have tightened up those bulging eyeballs with my wrench, the way they popped out of their sockets.
“Odd’s blood, gentlemen, is it thee again?” He was appalled.
“How the devil did you get back here?” Walter shouted.
Revere made no reply; he simply wheeled and dashed for the steps.
But Walter and I were right after him. “Get him, Hank,” screamed Walter, spilling down the steps, landing a-sprawl in the dirt. I leapt over his rolling body and dashed after Revere. Before he even got near his horse, I had him around the waist.
“Pox take thee, let me be! What devil’s potion have I drunk this night to have such visions? Let me go, quietly, I beg of you, sir Devils.”
But Walter had now picked himself up. “It’s only us, Mr. Revere—there’s been some kind of an error.” Judging from his agonized expression, this was scarcely good news to our captive, and he trembled like a leaf.
“Prithee, good demons,” he was pleading like a child, “only let me go.”
Then Walter let out a yelp. He dangled a wrist before my face. “Let’s step on it, Hank—we’ve still half an hour to midnight! There’s still a chance!”
Between us we managed to drag the big hulk inside, though we had to do it by his bootstraps to keep him from bolting. As it was, he writhed in a frenzy of despair and fear, clinging for a full minute to the doorknob, swinging there as if it were the handle of the Pearly Gate itself, before we could pry him loose and shut the door.
“No, no, good gentlemen, I beg you!” he blubbered. “I prithee, pretty devils, let me be!”
“Can it, boy,” I barked. “It’s just a bad dream, see? But if you don’t sit still, I’ll wrap this monkey wrench around your ears. Get me?”
Walter flew around the room. I thought he had a dozen hands, the way he was working over that control board and jamming do-businesses into the stomach of our battered machine.
“BE ready in a minute,” he was rattling. “Put him back in the cage . . . I hope we get him back in time, I hope! We still got ten minutes . . . Keep him still, Hank! Mullivaney’s nag, he must’ve had, eh, Hank? Hand me that insulator. Wasn’t in the Past at all, just thrown horizontally half a mile along the Fourth, through solids and all . . . I hope we got her set right—but we got to take the chance ’cause we’re lost anyway, if we don’t.
. . . Ah, now, Hank! Hold him steady—we’re ready to shoot!”
“Revere,” I breathed, “fly away home! You get the first nag you see—”
“What, good sirs—” I swear I could almost see tears in his rolling eyes—“again?”
“Yes—you want the colonies to get the jump on the Redcoats, don’t you?”
“Ido, by God!”
I’ll be darned if he wasn’t a real American, too!
“Great, then!” crackled Walter. “In exactly two seconds you’ll be back in the Revolution—”
He stopped, like a phonograph running down. I felt my own heart clanking into my boots.
For, with one wild cry, his face turning ocean green, Paul Revere had melted out of my grasp and slipped prone on his face in the cage of the Time Swing. The rocket-trip through the Fourth Dimension and our mauling had been too much for his cargo of mixed ale and Scotch. The Man of History was out!
And once more the hungry hands on the clock began eating up our precious minutes!
We had been through all this once before tonight, but this time we were up against a stupor which would have done credit to Bacchus himself! It seemed like centuries, the time it took to get one of those tightly-clenched eyes open again—and yet it seemed that those clock-hands were romping over toward midnight like race horses on the stretch.
Finally, with less than six minutes to go before Zero Hour, Paul Revere groaned and tried to sit up.
“I—I’m not—not well,” he whispered, in a masterpiece of understatement, the ocean green of his face ebbing and flowing like a tide.
“Oh, Lord—try to get up!” wept Walter. “Try, Revere—you must try!”
“Five minutes!” I screamed at them both. “Five!”
But screaming and moaning and even trying were all no good. It had been a feat of sheer superhuman will for Revere to open that one eye—he had shot his bolt. He was through.
“Hank,” Walter’s restless syllables kept running on and on, “Hank, we got to get him up. Hank, if we only had a few minutes more, Hank, we got to—”
“Four minutes to twelve,” I heard myself groan. Then I shut up. Walter had got a solution. I saw it in his glazed eyes.
Two seconds he spent in unhooking the control panel from its moorings. One second more he took to plug in a long cord in its place, with a complicated gadget from his desk dangling from its end. Another second and he had shoved me clean off my feet into the swaying, rickety cage, smack on top of our prone hero. And then, with a chortle that must have been heard round the world, he plunged home a button-series on the gadget he held in his hand and leapt on the bodies of me and Revere.
The cage began to quiver.
“Hey—” it was my voice, but I didn’t know I was yelling. “Hey—the machine is moving!”
Walter had a funny grin on his face. “I know,” he said, rolling off me and sitting up. “You and me are taking Paul Revere home!”
I nearly fainted dead away. Because we were!
I HAD trouble in focusing my eyes: they persisted in trying to look about three ways at once. Then they drew blank for what may have been a minute or one hundred and fifty years. And then we stopped with a thud.
I smelled dirt. I rolled off of Walter and struggled to sit up. The landscape whirled about me like a merry-go-round gone mad. Before I could see clearly, I scrabbled around with my fingers and felt grass below me. Anyway, I kept on telling myself silently, we’re not in the house.
All at once, with a jolt, it all settled down. On a patch of greensward, before a lighted old barn of a place, sat Walter and me. Beside us lay a very quiet Paul Revere. One look at that house before us told me we had made the trip all right; nothing like that shack was ever built in Oakville!
“Well,” breathed Walter, awe in his voice, “how does it feel to be in good old ’75, Hank?”
I didn’t answer. I didn’t feel like it.
“Come on—bring the hero.”
Walter had climbed to his feet and was staggering off toward the lighted house, which bordered a road of sorts. I squinted through the darkness of a moonless night and saw that Walter was reeling in a long piece of cord. I remembered that he had thrown the coil of it into his pocket back—back there, before we started. He was winding it in, and I figured he must be looking for the crack in Time we had slipped through—for on the other end of that precious cord was the Time Swing and 1940!
I helped Revere to his feet, and we plodded unsteadily after Walter. He was heading straight toward the house ahead of us, reeling in wire as he went.
“Be with you in a minute,” he called over his shoulder to me; “but if we lose this cord, we don’t get back home!”
“Take all the time you want, pal,” I urged. Saving America might be pretty vital, but so was getting home again.
As we neared the building across the road, I made out a sign swaying above its door: INNE of Ye FOWLE & SPITTE. I could tell by the sudden pulse of life in the hulk I was dragging behind me that Paul Revere had caught that sign, too.
“Your local tavern?” I asked, and he nodded weakly. I began to worry about the Redcoats again. “Your horse must be hereabouts, then, eh?” I went on.
“Here is where I stood,” he managed thinly, “when your incantations found me. Yonder stands Brondelbuss . . .”
“Some horse,” I said, spotting the plug as he spoke; and then I turned to call out to Walter. “It’s just about twelve by my clock. What do we do now?”
At my words, a sad-hearted hound bayed mournfully at the lumpy moon above us. In the still night air, the braying must have carried for miles.
Walter was holding up a hand. “Listen to that, Hank!” he breathed. I saw he was pretty awed by it all. “That dog brayed that way in the middle of the night a hundred and fifty years before we were born! Think of it, Hank! We’ve rolled back the years to Boston, 1775!—Boston—a little village in a brand new continent—with its few hundreds of souls all asleep around us . . . men and women who have been dead for more than a century! But tonight, Hank, thanks to us, we know they are alive again!”
I decided it was time we did something. I felt creepy. “Snap out of it, dreamy,” I said, shaking him. “If you got that cord safe, let’s spread the word about the British before it’s too late.”
“Lord, yes!” gasped Walter. “I’d almost forgotten our mission, in the miracle of just being here. Old Boston, Hank! 1775!”
He was in a most wonderful mood suddenly, fears and doubts gone like nothing. “Maybe this inn has a road map,” he cracked, pushing open the oaken door.
I followed and Revere wobbled along behind me. A thick smell assailed us that was no different than that in any gin mill in 1940. Walter forged on ahead, like a man in a dream.
“HO!” rang a basso voice from behind the stout, reeking old bar. “Revere, I thought ye’d slipped anchor to perform a duty this night!”
Revere did not reply. He left me to roll over to a nearby table, where he plunked himself down limply, his head held between his hands.
“Revere,” the giant behind the bar was booming again, a note of anxiety and suspicion in his voice, “Methought ye’d be in Lexington by this. Who are these—men?”
Walter had followed a line of electric cord straight across the smoky, candle-lighted room, saying not a word to anyone. Then, while the bartender stared, and I stared, and Revere didn’t even look up, something very peculiar occurred.
Right smack at Walter’s feet there came a hissing and a whirring—and before our staring eyes the thick oaken planks of the floor seemed to melt, and the top of the cage of the Time Swing rose up through it!
It was uncanny, to say the least. And not a soothing sight to the monster who owned the joint! The bartender reached up for a huge blunderbuss high above the bar, and even Revere got to his feet.
“By my tops’le and spanker,” croaked the barkeep, slamming the gun on his bar, “what in Satan’s own name is going on over there?”
Walter, sneezing from the dust which was still settling in a cloud about that end of the big room, answered. But it was me to whom he spoke. “Look at that, Hank, there’s a funny one for you! After we stopped, the cage moved on—through the Fourth Dimension—a few additional space-seconds. The last couple of yards of this cord just materialized through Time-Space. Wonderful!”
If this was gibberish to me, it was worse than that to the barkeep. He looked sternly at Revere and bawled angrily: “Revere, you sot! Who are these friends of yours who come wrecking my inn? I thought—”
But Revere interrupted him with a wail: “They are not my friends! They’re not men at all—they’re wicked demons conjured up by some British magician!”
In a moment of stunned silence that followed, I began to sweat cold drops as big as grapes. You could scarcely blame Revere for thinking we were evil spirits summoned to fight against him by witchcraft, after all the hard luck he’d had with us and our manufactured miracle. But it did put us in a bad spot. One peep at the size of barkeep convinced me he could rub me and Walter together until we were powder. And by the look on his face, I knew he wanted to.
What with machinery which would not yet be invented for a hundred years, popping up from his cellar—I could readily believe he thought we were exactly what Revere had called us—good old-fashioned, New England-hatched demons!
“Walter, never mind the Redcoats,” I whispered, “pull that cord and let’s get home!” Home! What a wonderful word!
WALTER, unheeding, said, “I—I know this looks a bit unusual, but there is a national crisis tonight, and we—we came over to help . . .”
“Stow it!” Barkeep was in an ugly mood. He strode across the tavern floor in three steps. The stout oak planks creaked beneath his weight. He picked up a small tree-trunk and slammed it into place across the door, barring us inside with his wrath.
“Revere,” he grated like the roar of a bull, “tell me this. Be ye drunk or drugged?”
“Drugged,” Revere managed to grunt, without lifting his head from the table. “Demons—and they drugged me. I swear it.”
Barkeep put his heavy hands on his hips and glared at Walter and me. He spat into a cuspidor with venom and force. He hoisted his pants, and I noticed that, as his arms flexed, his muscles bulged tightly beneath his shirt.
I forgot all about the colonies. “Walter, let’s you and me go home!”
“Stow it!” Barkeep drowned me out. “Hark, ye slithering things in the guise of men.” Slowly he began rolling up his sleeves. “Now, be ye men or be ye demons, I know by the work ye’ve done tonight that the pair of ye are British-sent scum. Ye’ve kept matey here from his ridin’, and now ye’ll answer to Jim Toddy for it.”
And then he lowered his thick head and ran for us.
I leapt for the cage, which stuck out of the floor like a cellar-door, yelling: “Walter—he thinks we’re trying to help the Redcoats! Come on!”
But Walter never budged. Something came over his thin body. He tensed, stiff as a ramrod. Then Toddy lunged past the spot where a second ago Walter had been standing. I had never seen Walter move so fast. He had waited solidly as a rock until the man’s rush closed the distance between them. Then he had whipped aside like a toreador, and stuck out his foot. And the barkeep flashing by, roared like a bull and went down with a crash that shook the ground.
I looked at Toddy’s face as he picked it off the floor, and ducked my head. But I had to raise it again to see how Walter was going to die.
Walter stood firm: white and pale, but firm. Toddy roared in at him, seized poor Walter in a bear’s grip and his baboonish thumbs went round Walter’s throat. But Walter, though blue with pain, was not licked yet. He whipped a hand behind him, seized a bottle by the neck.
Crash! Spangles of glass shot out like sparks. Toddy shuddered, shook his thick head, and went sprawling onto the floor with a sound like thunder.
Walter struggled up, color coming back into his face with every pump of his pounding heart. He clutched the bottle neck, now all that was left whole of his make-shift weapon, and stared at the huge man at his feet. There was no need for further action, though. Toddy was prone among sawdust and glass fragments; the blow had removed him from combat.
“How—how did you think of doing that, Walter?” I managed to ask, climbing out of the cage again.
He shook his head, wiping his brow with a shaky hand. “I don’t know. I only thought of how mad I was that this big lump should try to stop us from our duty . . .”
“Come on, man,” I said. “If it’s duty you’re after, let’s get some horses.”
Walter was hiding the precious coil of wire which held the switch of the Time Swing in its end, when suddenly there came a thumping at the door. I froze where I stood.
REVERE had been dazedly trying to pull himself together. Whether he saw the fight, I don’t know. But now he was staggering over to the door, fumbling to open it.
“Don’t open that!” I cried out.
He ignored me. “Just a moment, dear,” he was saying, “I saw you looking through the window.” He struggled to hoist the bar from its slots, and then lifted up the latch, just as the pounding began again. Revere fell back, as the door swung open, and began feverishly to straighten his messy clothes.
It was a woman.
“Oh, ye did see your wife through the window, did ye now, ye old reprobate?” she cried, bustling up to Paul Revere, oblivious to the rest of us. “Ye told me ye were out on civic business, out on patriotic duty, didn’t ye, Paul Revere? And where I find your horse tonight I’ve found the beast a dozen times—hitched before Jim Toddy’s saloon!”
“Listen, dear,” Revere explained, frantically dusting off his wig and wriggling into it, “I was delayed by these—”
