Time Travel Omnibus, page 292
GARR had been right. He had said to Zorn, “If you shoot one of them, you will have to fight thousands!” He could have added that if you shoot thousands, you will have to fight millions! Zorn might kill Captain Kelly. He might blast to rubble and ruin all the buildings surrounding him. He might stand at bay for hours, and fight eventually to the death, but eventually he would certainly die. There were hundreds of very angry men in the darkness around him. Although we could not hear them, I knew that all over Chicago sirens were screaming as squad cars loaded with men raced to this place. If everything else failed, the trench mortars, operating from blocks away could lob shells into the lab and blow it, and everything in it, to bits.
Garr and Zorn were doomed!
“They ought to surrender,” Rommer said. “They don’t have a chance!”
Except for occasional desultory shots, the shooting had stopped. The police captains were holding their men well away from the laboratory. There was no point in attacking. To attempt a charge would only result in needless loss of life.
There was silence over the area. Zorn had stopped using his weapon. Neither he nor Garr gave any indication that they realized the size of the forces that were being marshalled against them. But I could imagine Garr going slowly crazy as he saw his dreams crumbling around him. He was one would-be dictator who would never get to first base. The silence was broken by a low hum coming from the laboratory.
“What’s that?” I asked.
“They’re using the time machine,” Lucy answered. “That noise is a transformer hum that comes when the current is turned into the field coils.”
“Why should they be using the time machine?” Rommer whispered.
“I don’t know,” she answered. “What—what’s that?”
“My God, look!” Rommer gasped. The whole side of the laboratory suddenly bulged outward. Something came out of the lab. The door had been quickly opened, and it leaped through the opening, as though seeking to escape. Since the door was not big enough for it, it enlarged the door by knocking down part of the wall.
The wan light dimly revealed it. Larger than an elephant, a long neck ending in a mouth studded with huge teeth, it was one of the meat-eating dinosaurs. For a second it stood there beside the lab. Then, as though making up its mind, it lunged outward.
CHAPTER V
The Beasts of the Past
MADNESS stalked through the night. A dinosaur, a creature out of the Mesozoic Age, out of the dawn of time, was loose in Chicago. He surged out into the street. Water was still dripping from him, water that had come from some pre-historic swamp. He didn’t know what had happened. His nervous system was slow and sluggish. His head was twisting around and he seemed to be snuffing the air. He sensed danger.
There was stillness in the city. The street had long since been blocked off, so no traffic was passing. The police were paralyzed. They would have faced death, they would have faced a band of gangsters, but would they face this? Voices began to speak.
“If you love me, Cassidy, will you tell me if you see the same thing I think I see?”
“Is that damned thing real?”
“I’ve heard of pink elephants but—”
“Where in the hell did it come from?”
“I haven’t had a drink, and yet I see something like this!”
Rommer saw what was going to happen. “Tell your men to withdraw still farther!” he hissed to the captain who had been talking over the radio to headquarters.
“H—huh?” the captain gasped. “W—what is that thing?”
“It’s a dinosaur!” Rommer snapped. “Pull your men back before a panic starts.”
He was afraid the police force, suddenly confronted with this huge beast, would go into a panic.
“H—huh?” the captain grunted. “I don’t get it. How would a dinosaur get here?”
A shot rang out.
Rommer suddenly cursed. “Back out of the way!” he snarled at Lucy and me.
Another shot echoed the first. Hell broke loose.
The beast screamed. The sound was a cross between a grunt and a gulp, ending in a high screech that was part hiss. It was a meat-eater, one of the carnivorous dinosaurs, and it saw meat. It went crazy. There was a group of cops in the middle of the street. It charged them. They emptied their guns at it. That huge mountain of beef and bone could absorb lead indefinitely. Pistol slugs would not stop it. Maybe an anti-tank gun would knock it down but there weren’t any anti-tank guns here. The cops tried to run. The long neck snaked down, the fanged mouth opened. The beast actually bit the policeman into two pieces. It gulped at the pieces, swallowing them whole.
Then it started looking for more meat. It was one huge gullet. Probably it had never had enough to eat in all its life. Certainly it had never found such excellent hunting. The two-legged beasts that screamed and ran before it, were toothsome bits. It gulped one down and started to hunt for more.
The police force would have faced anything else. They would face this, when they recovered from the first mad shock of panic. But the sight of the beast, its sudden appearance, the impossibility of such a monstrous animal being in Chicago, un-nerved them. They fled in helpless, blind panic.
THERE was another grumble from the transformers in the laboratory that housed the time machine. A second beast surged from the building. Unlike the first, this was one of the grass and vegetation eating dinosaurs. It was not interested in meat. But the police didn’t know that. And if anything it was bigger than the first one. It was not trying to kill anyone. It was scared and all it was trying to do was escape, but the thunder of its feet, its high, shrill screams as it blindly sought to hide, were even more un-nerving than the actual deadliness of the meat eater.
In their efforts to run from the two dinosaurs and in their attempts to kill the beasts, the police forgot all about Garr and Zorn.
In a protected areaway, Rommer swore bitterly. “It’s a ruse,” he raged. “That damned giant deliberately used the time machine and brought those beasts here to distract the police so he and Garr would be able to escape!”
He stepped to the entrance, looked up and down the street. Sounds of furious battle filled the night, but no more dinosaurs had appeared. A squad car, abandoned by police who had tried to run on foot, stood at the curb. Rommer walked out to it, opened the back door. He took out a tommy-gun.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“I’m going to sneak up on those devils,” he said. “And I’m not going to walk up to the front door and ask them to surrender. I’m going to slip up on the side, poke this thing through a window, and start shooting.”
“But—” Lucy started to protest.
“Okay,” I said. I walked out into the street. “Is there another gun in this car?”
There wasn’t a second machine gun, but there was something almost as good—a sawed-off shotgun. I picked it up. In the darkness I was aware of Rommer’s silent scrutiny.
“I said I was going to do the sneaking,” he said.
“And I heard you,” I answered. “Let’s go.”
He shrugged and started away. I looked over my shoulder at Lucy. “You stay here,” I said.
Her voice was only a squeak but it was firm and determined. “I won’t. I’m going with you.” She sounded as if she meant it but I argued her out of it.
A couple of Comanches on a horsestealing expedition would not have showed more caution in approaching their quarry than Rommer and I did in approaching that laboratory. Except for the throbbing of the transformer, which had died to a steady hum, there was not a sound from the building. Rommer looked in through a broken window.
“Damn it!” he said, and climbed inside.
The laboratory was empty. Garr and Zorn and Garr’s two thugs were gone.
“They won’t get far!” Rommer said bitterly. He took a pencil flashlight out of his pocket and flashed the beam around. The lab was pretty badly messed up. The time machine was still running. While we were examining it, a step sounded in the room. Both of us jerked up our guns.
“Don’t shoot,” a girl’s voice whispered.
“Lucy! I told you—” I gritted my teeth. I might have known she would not stay where she had been put.
“So they’re gone,” she said quietly. “I was afraid they would be.”
“They won’t get away,” I promised her.
“I’m afraid they’ve already gotten away—to a place where they will be hard to find.”
“What do you mean?” Rommer questioned.
“The time machine is still running,” she said. “They’ve gone into time.”
Rommer and I stared at each other in consternation. Both of us had assumed that Garr and Zorn had merely escaped from the lab and would try to hide somewhere in Chicago. Finding them in Chicago would not be hard. But to find them in time—to search for them somewhere in the vast infinity of time itself—
FROM the way Rommer and I looked at each, both of us knew the answer. No matter what the hazards, we had to follow Garr and the Rmoahal into time itself. Lucy seemed to guess what we were thinking.
“I’m going with you,” she said firmly.
“Somebody has to stay here and watch the time machine,” I said. “If it stops, we won’t be able to get back. Since you know how it works, you will have to take care of this end.”
“It will continue working,” she answered. “We’ll bring the police in, as a guard. Either I go with you, or I follow you. Is that clear?”
It was clear enough, and if it was unsatisfactory, there was nothing Rommer and I could do about it. We went looking for the police. They were already coming back, grim-faced men in blue. They had recovered from their panic.
“We got those damned beasts!” a sergeant said. “Grenades stopped them.”
“Good,” said Rommer. “Do you have any more grenades?”
“Plenty of them. Why?”
Rommer didn’t answer but he helped himself to a couple of the little iron pineapples. We took the cops in the laboratory and told them what they were to do.
“If anyone except us comes out of this time machine, shoot first and ask questions afterwards,” Rommer said.
“You can damned well bet we’ll do that,” the sergeant grimly answered. He disposed his men around the time machine until it was completely covered by a semi-circle of sub-machine guns. Anything that appeared there would receive a hot reception!
Lucy, meanwhile, had been making a careful inspection of the machine. Here, Rommer and I had to take a back seat. Neither of us knew the first principle about the thing. She checked every lead, every connection, to make certain nothing had been tampered with, crawling almost out of sight into the very heart of the device.
“This draws current from the city electric mains,” she said to the police sergeant. “Under no circumstances is the current to be turned off until we return. This is of vital importance.”
“We’ll keep the juice running,” the sergeant answered.
She looked at us. “We’re ready to go.”
The time machine in reality consisted of a maze of apparatus built around a room about fifteen feet square. With the exception of a button on the floor, there was nothing in this room. One side was entirely open. The electric currents were concentrated within the square and anything within that square, depending on the actual setting of the machine, was sent into time. The machine itself did not move.
Lucy put her foot on the button set into the floor. “Ready?” she asked.
We nodded.
She pressed the button.
Somewhere in the laboratory a transformer grunted as it absorbed a sudden load. There was a click and a hum. Something that moved with incredible rapidity flashed before my eyes. I took a deep breath and unconsciously shut my eyes. Lucy and Rommer were standing beside me.
“When are we going to start?” I asked.
“We’ve already started—and arrived!” Lucy answered.
Emerson’s laboratory was gone. The semi-circle of cops was gone. The maze of equipment surrounding us had changed. The huge electromagnets, the connecting cables had suddenly become stream-lined. The square cage had enlarged.
In the twinkling of an eye, uncounted milleniums of time had rolled past us.
WE were in what seemed to be a dome, a semi-spherical bubble similar to the dome of an observatory. It was made of some kind of glass that was so nearly perfect that you had to feel it before you were certain it was there. The dome was apparently located on top of a building or on a small hill, for we could look out and see miles in every direction. The view that met our eyes was startling.
Chicago was gone. Like mist before a rising wind, the great city had vanished. Lake Michigan was no more. There was not even a depression to show where the lake had been. As far as I could see, the land stretched away, and except where something had gouged out a hole, it was flat and lifeless. No vegetation grew anywhere, no trees, no shrubs, no grass.
I heard Rommer whisper. “What did we do—arrive in the middle of a desert?”
We had left Chicago in the night but we had arrived in the world of the Rmoahal in the daytime. The sun was overhead. It was shining down through a sky in which there was not a trace of a cloud.
Something had happened to the sun. It looked bigger, and instead of being a bright yellow, it was a dull red. It seemed to be almost heatless.
“I—I don’t understand,” Lucy whispered. “The Rmoahal came from the past, from the time of the mesohippus and the dinosaurs. The earth was a mass of swamps, then. It wasn’t a desert—like this.” Her eyes swept the horizon.
“Did we come to the wrong time?” She was talking to herself, trying to understand what had happened.
Something was wrong! That much was obvious.
“Maybe North America was a desert four million years in the past,” I suggested. “In four million years a lot of changes would have taken place.”
“That might be,” she said doubtfully. She began to make a swift examination of the time machine that had been built into this dome of glass. “This is really a time machine,” she said. “But—”
“And we’ve come to the right place,” Rommer interrupted. “Come here.”
On one side of the room was an arched doorway. He was looking through it. As we approached, he motioned us to be quiet.
Beyond the arched opening, a sort of ramp led downward into another huge room. The place looked like a gigantic laboratory that also served as living quarters.
Garr and his two thugs were there! Surrounding them were twenty to thirty Rmoahals. Oddly, I noticed that a few of the Rmoahals seemed to be females. There were, also, two or three small ones that looked like children.
“It’s a whole damned family of Rmoahals!” I whispered.
“That’s what I think!” Rommer answered. “Either a family or a tribe. But what are they doing?”
Six or seven of the Rmoahals, including one that I recognized as Zorn, were standing around Garr. The others were frantically busy. They were carrying laboratory equipment, weapons, and something that I took to be food into what looked like a small sized dirigible balloon. It was an air-ship of some kind, and was apparently of an advanced design for it was tear-drop in shape and was perfectly stream-lined though it was without propellors or rudders. If it could be flown, it operated on some principle of which we knew nothing. I had a strong hunch that it would fly!
We watched them for several minutes. Garr and Zorn seemed to be having some kind of an argument but they were too far away for us to hear what they were saying.
“We’ve got to get closer,” Rommer said. “We have to know what they are planning to do. Otherwise, we won’t know what to do ourselves.”
He knew and I knew that we were totally unprepared to cope with any situation that might arise. The Rmoahals, if they once suspected our presence, could blast us out of existence. When we had gone into time, we had accepted the possibility that we would run into a situation that was beyond us. Our only hope had been that by stealth we might overcome Garr and the Rmoahals!
AT BEST, it was a dim hope. But both Rommer and I had flown too many planes into too many desperate battles ever to hesitate because we had only a slim chance of winning.
“I’m going to try to get closer,” he said. “I think, once I get through this arch, I can hide behind the machinery in there and they won’t see me. Since they aren’t looking for me, I’ll have an excellent chance of succeeding.”
Good old Rommer! He didn’t mind risking his life.
But I had a better plan.
“I’ll go down and find out what’s going on,” I said.
“Why you?” he demanded.
“Because I can walk up to them without being in any danger!”
“Like hell you can!”
“Yes, I can,” I insisted. “Remember, you once asked me what hold Garr had over me? Well, he doesn’t have it any more, but he doesn’t know that. I can go down to them and tell him that I came through the time machine to warn him that the police have the laboratory surrounded back in our time. He’ll believe me. He thinks he controls me.”
“Yeah?” Rommer’s eyes drilled into me. “I hate to mention it, but how do I know he doesn’t control you?” Because he insisted on knowing, I told him about the scar-faced man. Until I had seen the man alive, I had thought I had killed him. Not two weeks after I had gone to work for Garr I had gotten tight, had gotten into a fight with the scar-faced man. When I recovered consciousness, I had found the scar-faced man dead. Garr had told me I had killed him. To my dazed mind this had seemed possible. Garr had removed the body and afterwards he had held the murder over me, threatening to reveal the facts to the police if I disobeyed him. I told the whole story to Rommer. There was compassion on his face.
