Time Travel Omnibus, page 252
Reggie Vliet’s jaw was grim, purposeful, and he wheeled his steed in the direction toward which the dynamic figure on the knoll was facing. Over there, he knew, on the opposite side, would be the soldiers of Wellington. The men milling around him were—and suddenly Reggie’s jaw fell slack and he gulped hastily. He was on the French side of the battlefield, and it had never occurred to him until this instant!
Milling around on a white horse in the uniform of an English general. Nonchalantly dashing through hordes of fighting Frenchmen!
REGGIE shut his eyes tight, and wondered frantically why someone hadn’t shot him down by now, or dragged him captive from his horse. He dug his spurs in deeper, urging his mount on, praying that his luck would hold, praying that the French wouldn’t realize they had an English general in their midst. Ahead, perhaps two hundred yards, he could see the ditch, the sunken road, that he would have to span to get to the English sides of the lines. He flayed the sides of his horse again.
And then, in the midst of the shouting, shooting and confusion, someone grabbed the halter of his horse. Grabbed tightly, jerking the animal’s neck back violently, while rough hands reached up and dragged Reggie down from the saddle. French hands!
“They’ve got me,” Reggie bleated desperately, even as he was being dragged downward. “I’ll be shot as an English spy, or something!”
Two French battery gunners were holding Reggie. Their faces and uniforms were blackened by gunpowder and sweat.
“General,” cried one, “we cannot permit you to make such a heroic, such a foolish, charge into the midst of our enemy, the English. We will not allow you to sacrifice yourself, Sire!”
Reggie blinked dazedly at them. What was this? French soldiers addressing him as—and then Reggie noticed with a sudden sweeping wave of horrified despair. Their uniforms were the same as his own! He had taken an unfamiliar French uniform, instead of an English uniform as he had imagined! The general, the fellow he had left back in the tent—the chap who was now cowering in his long underwear—was a Frenchman!
Reggie groaned. Groaned and threw his hands to his face.
“You must go to the rear, General,” the French battery gunners begged him. “We will hold off Wellington’s charge, Sire, even though we die!”
But Reggie wasn’t even listening. Cannons thundered all about him, louder than before. And from the hill where Napoleon stood, the French Old Guard Cavalry swept down in a sudden charge toward the sunken road and the English lines!
Reggie’s heart was in his heels, for even as he watched this gallant, reckless charge, he knew that he had failed, that this was the end of the Little Corporal.
An Empire was tumbling about the ears of Reggie Vliet, and there on the other side of the ditch, where Wellington waited with cannon that would wither the gallant French Cavalry, another Empire was being born.
A sudden, awful premonition hit Reggie Vliet. He had not only failed to save the day for Napoleon by filling the ditch, but he had also—
His hand shook as he brought forth the note which the orderly had handed him just as he started from the camp over an hour ago. The note which had been intended for the general.
“General,” the note read. “Bring your reserves to the battle immediately. The time is set, any delay will be fatal. Our Emperor wishes you luck.
—General Ney.”
And Reggie realized, now, that it was he who had caused the ultimate, the final, crushing defeat of Napoleon. That it was he who had left the general of the missing reserves crouching almost naked in his tent while France fell because of one man’s embarrassment.
“I hope,” Reggie told himself, “I’m satisfied.” His voice was bitter and filled with self-accusation.
And then, just as Reggie was about to be engulfed in a vast wave of self-pity and terrible remorse, something exploded terrifically less than four yards from where he stood. Instead of the wave of self-pity, Reggie heard thunder in his ears as he was engulfed by a wave of utter, ebon blackness . . .
SOMEONE was sloshing water on his face when Reggie opened his eyes again. The sounds of thundering cannon and crackling rifle fire were gone, but the acrid stench of gunpowder was still in the air, while all around him Reggie could hear voices.
Reggie tried to sit up, but found that his head was much too heavy to lift from the damp ground on which he was lying. Then, the swimming panorama before his eyes stopped swirling long enough for him to bring his surroundings into focus.
It was twilight, Reggie realized, and he was on or somewhere near what had been the battleground of Waterloo. The growing darkness and the trampled ground around him told him these two things. There were other like-uniformed men lying everywhere beside him. Some were on cots, others, like himself, on the cold earth. All were bandaged, and with a start, Reggie realized that his own arm was swathed in a sling.
And then he knew that somehow—possibly by a cannon explosion—he had been knocked out cold, not to mention injured. Suddenly he was looking up at a face, a kindly sympathetic face. The face belonged to a tall man in a military uniform and, as faces go, looked horsey.
“Where am I?” Reggie addressed the kindly horse-face, drawing on his vast store of original remarks.
“You’ll be shipshape presently,” said the tall, horse-faced fellow. “Just your arm that got banged a bit, General.” Reggie blinked in amazement. He’d been called “General” ! But then he remembered that he’d been dressed in a French general’s tunic at the time that everything had blacked out on him.
“Napoleon,” Reggie asked hoarsely, “did he, did he—”
The kindly horse-face shook his head. “Sorry, old boy, but your Emperor took a beating. It’s all over for you Frenchmen. Wellington’s the cock of the roost.”
With a horrible premonition, Reggie began to realize precisely where he was, and precisely what his status amounted to.
“You mean,” Reggie gasped, “that you are English? That I’m—”
The horse-face nodded.
“Sorry old boy. You put up a dashed good fight of it, but you are now the prisoner of the King’s forces. I imagine your release will be shortly forthcoming, just as soon as prisoners are exchanged.”
It came to Reggie, for the first time since regaining consciousness, that he was in a bit of a predicament. He hadn’t—quite frankly—intended to stick around for the aftermath of Napoleon’s defeat. If the damned cannon hadn’t acted up and knocked him out, he would have fled this particular time era by now. But here he was, prisoner of Great Britain. This fact, in itself, was galling enough to Reggie. But even greater and deeper anguish to his soul was the realization that he had failed, utterly, miserably, in his efforts to alter the course of history and botch up the record of the Vanderveer clan.
For not only had he failed; he had been the cause of history’s panning out the way it did. If he’d only left the French general alone, hadn’t stolen his uniform, the French reserves would have arrived on the spot in time to gain victory for Napoleon!
Reggie felt sick inside. Unconsciously, he groaned aloud.
“Poor fellow,” a voice muttered. “Painful thing, that arm.” And Reggie looked up to the voice and remembered that horse-face was still standing over him. Moreover, horse-face was reaching into a little black bag he carried, and pulling forth a bottle containing pills.
“Wait a minute,” Reggie bleated quickly. “Put that stuff away, old boy. I feel fine, absolutely. I don’t need any pills, any sedative. I’ve got things to do. All sorts of things. I can’t stick around. Much as I’d like to, I can’t—mughulppph!” Reggie’s protests were cut short as two soldiers stepped up from nowhere, grabbing his arms and prying open his jaws as horse-face skillfully opened the bottle of pills and popped three or four of them into Reggie’s mouth.
“Mughulppph!” Reggie repeated frantically. He was determined not to swallow the pills. Then, quite suddenly, fingers massaged his Adam’s apple, and, in spite of himself, the pills slithered down his throat.
For what seemed to be hours after the horse-faced English medico had left him and gone on to other patients, the two soldiers continued to hold Reggie down. And in spite of anything Reggie could do to prevent it, Reggie was aware that he was becoming irresistibly drowsy, drowsy, drowsy . . .
He had a swimming vision of Sandra’s face wheeling above his head, while Colonel Vanderveer, Napoleon, Lowndes, and the English medico leered in the whirling background. Then, while a roaring grew in his ears, the faces stopped wheeling and a thick blanket of fog settled down over his brain . . .
CHAPTER III
An Amazing Revelation
REGGIE VLIET opened one eye very slowly. Then, with equal care, he opened the other. He found, much to his amazement, that his head was still on his shoulders, and that the roaring in his ears had ceased completely. Even his arm had stopped throbbing.
While he looked quizzically around him, Reggie realized two things. He was flat on his back on a straw mattress in a small room, and there was the unpleasant aroma of manure all about him.
Reggie looked down at his garments and found that he still wore the now ragged tunic of a French general. Then, unpleasantly, the recollection of the English medico and his remarks about Reggie’s being a prisoner, returned to him.
The same deep despair that had assailed Reggie as he lay wounded on the battlefield contemplating Napoleon’s defeat and his own stupidity, now flooded briefly back to Reggie, giving him a sickening jolt.
“Oh, lord,” Reggie moaned, “I am a benighted ass, nothing more.” And for another moment he lay there motionless considering this gloomy self-description. Then, rolling over on the elbow of his uninjured arm, Reggie rose from his straw mat.
“A prisoner of war,” Reggie mumbled woefully. “What a hell of a note.” He sighed. “Trapped back here like a . . . a . . . rat, in a time era that is over a century away from where I want to be.” He put his hand over his eyes, as if to shut out the picture.
“Not a chance to get out,” he added despairingly, peering through the web-work of his fingers at the securely locked door to his room.
Just to convince himself, he stepped over to this door, tried it. It felt as though it were heavily barred on the outside, budging not an inch behind the pressure he put against it.
“Probably guards out there anyway,” Reggie muttered dourly. He turned then, giving his tiny room closer appraisal. His hope that he might have ignored another avenue of escape promptly died on the realization that his stall was without a window. The aroma of manure now seemed overpoweringly oppressing.
Reggie sat down on his cot with heavy, morbid resignation. He was a goner. There was no way out. And at that moment he realized for the first time that this meant he should never see the fair face of Sandra Vanderveer again.
A tear trickled from the corner of Reggie’s left eye.
MENTALLY, he was with her in the gardens at the Vanderveer Manor, holding her hand and looking lovingly into her eyes. A sense of nobility was stealing over Reggie, something akin to triumphant sorrow. For this disaster which now engulfed him was caused directly by his efforts to win the hand of the fair Sandra. Somewhat like a knight of Olde, he had gone to battle for his loved one. And now, a prisoner in chains, he was about to die for her.
This glorious picture was somewhat disrupted by his realization that he wasn’t really in chains, and that for all he knew he might not have to die. It was further disrupted by the nasty recollection that his actions had been far from glorious or heroic. He’d been stupid and clownish.
“A benighted ass,” he repeated again. Reggie sighed heavily. There would be no chance now to go on with his plans against the Vanderveer family tree. His campaign had been nipped in the bud. He was a failure, a joke.
Suddenly Reggie sat bolt upright. The furrows in his brow disappeared. The corners of his mouth twitched in a happy smile.
“Why,” he snapped his fingers. “I’m not licked, not at all. There’s still another era of history in which I can ruin the Vanderveer name. There’s the Civil War. I’d planned to go there anyway, after this battle, to make a complete wreck of the Vanderveer family tree. Why, dammit, even if I haven’t messed things up for the Napoleonic Vanderveer, I can still raise hell in the era of the Civil War, Sheridan’s Ride, Vanderveer!”
He was pacing excitedly back and forth now. Suddenly he stopped, breaking into a heavy chuckling.
“Why,” he gasped between chuckles, “here I was moping around about imprisonment, failure, and what have you, and I have only to press a button to get the blazes away from here and into another time era.”
Reggie laughed happily.
“A breeze, that’s what it’ll be,” he chortled. “I’m not really locked in here at all. Boy, will they be surprised to find that one of their most prized prisoners has quite mysteriously flown the coop!”
Reggie continued to chuckle fondly at his own stupidity in not remembering his time machine until now. Quite a joke, that. But what a blessed relief to remember it now. Still smiling, he looked down at his wrist to make the proper adjustments on the machine.
His smile froze at the halfway mark.
His jaw fell slack in stupefied, nauseating horror.
The time machine was not on his wrist!
THE shock was far too much for the now watery substance of Reggie Vliet’s knees, and slowly they collapsed as he sank to the floor. It was as if every muscle, every fiber, of Reggie’s being were immersed in ice water, numbed by the chilling terror of his predicament.
For fully five minutes, Reggie sat there on the floor like a man in a trance. His mouth was foolishly agape, and he opened and closed it wordlessly while the room spun giddily around his head.
Before, when he hadn’t had sense enough to remember that escape was instantly attainable in his time machine, Reggie’s feelings had been merely those of dull, somewhat hopeless remorse over his imprisonment.
Now, however, since he had realized that escape was a simple matter, the staggering loss of his one means to effect that escape came as a hundred-fold dreadful blow. He felt much like a Bedouin who, having crawled thirst-crazed across an endless desert, comes at last upon the stream he’d seen in the distance—only to find a mirage.
But somehow reason began to return gradually to Reggie Vliet, and with it a sort of strength and newborn determination. At last he managed to pull himself to his feet. He was conscious now of only one motivation, and that was the necessity of getting back his time machine.
“Wait,” Reggie muttered, “until I get my hands on the chap who filched that thing!”
It was obvious that his time machine had been appropriated by one of the soldiers who had held him helpless while the effects of the drugs crept over him. They would be the most likely thieves. Of course, Reggie’s jailer could have had a hand in the theft. Or the English commander, perhaps, could have ordered the confiscation of the private effects of all French prisoners.
At any rate, Reggie was now passionately determined to regain his one means of escape from the predicament that engulfed him. He moved to the door of his tiny room and removed one of his boots. Then, with the boot in his hand he began a furious pounding against the door. After a moment he stopped, listening. Then he began pounding again. He stopped once more and listened. A look of grim satisfaction crept over his face. Footsteps could be heard outside, moving to his door.
Reggie stepped back from the door a pace.
There was a rattling of chains. Then heavy bolts were slid away. The door opened inward, while Reggie stood there breathlessly. A head peered in around the door.
A smarter man than Reggie Vliet would have used poisons, or body-changes, or elaborate ruses to escape from a prison. But Reggie Vliet was a simple soul. He raised his heavy boot high, as the head peered into the room, and brought it smashing down mightily upon the exposed surface of said peering head.
The result was simple and satisfying. A soldier—who belonged to the head—toppled face forward and unconscious into Reggie’s cell-like little room.
BREATHING heavily now, for he’d put every last ounce of strength into the blow, Reggie bent over the prostrate form of the English soldier. With typical buoyant optimism, Reggie lifted the fellow’s arms and looked swiftly at his wrists. He wore no time machine. Undaunted, Reggie began a through search of his pockets. Still no time machine.
It occurred to Reggie, then, as he looked disgustedly down at the unconscious soldier, that there would be more to this escape business than he had originally planned on. In a short while more soldiers would be popping into his cell to see what had become of their comrade. Reggie realized that he didn’t have any ready explanations for them. He realized, too, that his French uniform made him somewhat conspicuous in an English camp.
Two minutes later Reggie buttoned an English uniform over his French general’s tunic. The size of the English guard’s clothing had forced Reggie to be double clad. Half a minute after that, he was out in the hall. A quick glance up and down the hall showed him that he’d been imprisoned in a rather large stable—which accounted for the unpleasant aroma and the piles of ever-present straw.
He could hear voices, coming from one of the large rooms off the narrow hallway, and while his heart hammered in excitement, he forced himself to stroll nonchalantly in their direction.
A soldier passed him before he’d walked fifty feet, and while Reggie held his breath, looked at him casually and moved by. So far so good.
Then Reggie was outside one of the large stable rooms. The one from which he’d heard the babble of voices. There was a certain sound to the voices that rang reminiscently in Reggie’s ears. He’d heard men’s voices raised in that peculiar pitch in the back of saloons off Broadway.
