Time Travel Omnibus, page 77
“What will it look like going?” Georgie whispered.
But no one answered him.
Presently a low hum became audible. It grew in intensity, until it sounded like the droning of a thousand winged insects. The airplane rocked gently on its foundation. It was straining, trembling in every fiber. The droning increased—a hum that seemed to penetrate not only the air, but the very marrow of the men who were listening to it.
A moment passed. Then the plane began to glow—seemingly phosphorescent even in the light of the electric bulbs on the scaffolding beside it. Another moment. There was a fleeting impression that the thing was growing translucent—transparent—vapory. For one brief instant the vision and sound of it persisted—then it was gone!
The men stood facing a silent, empty space, where a few loose boards were lying, with a discarded hammer, a saw, and a keg of nails.
“Oh,” murmured Georgie at last. “It isn’t there. It’s—it’s disappeared!” And then, “I do hope he finds that girl and brings her back. I want to meet her.”
They had forgotten the woman. In an opposite corner of the inclosure Lylda was seated alone, crying softly and miserably to herself.
CHAPTER II
THE GIRL CAPTIVE
GEORGIE sat alone on a little bench in the roof garden of the Scientific Club. On the ground beside him, stretched on a broad leather cushion, Rogers lay asleep. It was well after midnight. There was hardly a breath of air stirring, and only a few fleecy clouds to hide the stars. In the east a flattened moon was rising.
Georgie sat with his chin cupped in his hands, staring out over the lights and the roofs of the city. The growing moonlight gleamed on his soft white shirt and white flannel trousers.
Rogers stirred and sat up. “Oh, you’re awake, Georgie?”
“Yes. Go on to sleep. I’m good for nearly all night.”
But Rogers rose, stretching. “What time is it?”
“Quarter of two. Go on to sleep, I tell you.”
“I’ve had enough.” The older man sat down on the bench and lighted a cigar. “You’d better take a turn, Georgie. You’ll wear yourself out.”
“I can’t. I’m too excited. How long has he been gone now?”
Rogers calculated. “About twenty-eight hours.”
“Do you think he’ll get back tonight?”
“I don’t know. Perhaps.”
“I wonder what he’s doing right now,” Georgie persisted after a silence.
Rogers did not answer.
“You don’t think anything could have happened to him?”
“No. I—I hope not.”
“I want him to bring that girl back With him,” Georgie said after another silence. “I want to meet her—awfully.”
Rogers plucked a flower from the trellis beside them, breaking it in his fingers idly. “He may get back tonight. It was our idea that—”
He stopped abruptly, and simultaneously Georgie gripped him by the arm. An airplane motor was drumming directly overhead!
The familiar, gleaming white triplane hung there, seemingly motionless, only a few hundred feet above them. Its helicopters were revolving; it was preparing to descend.
“Thank God!” murmured Rogers fervently.
But Georgie did not hear him. “He’s back! There he is!” He leaped to his feet and ran through the garden toward the head of the stairway that led below. “He’s here! I’ll call’em up! He’s here!”
They came up hurriedly from their rooms below; the men, sleepy-eyed but excited; the woman with relief and happiness lighting her tired face.
The Frazia plane had settled in its place within the wooden enclosure when they arrived. Its cabin door opened; Loto appeared.
Rogers called instantly, “You’re all right, Loto?”
“Yes, sir; I’m all right. Have I been away long?”
He swung to the ground and they crowded around him. His cheeks were haggard and smeared with dirt; but that was temporary. The startling change was in his expression. His mouth had taken on a different look—a firmer set to the Ups—and his eyes were the eyes of man who had seen too much.
He smiled wanly. “Well, I’m here. Where’s mother? Is mother all right?”
Again Lylda was standing apart.
Loto pushed past the men, and the woman’s arms opened and took him in.
“But—but where’s the girl?” Georgie protested. “Didn’t you find her, Loto? Didn’t you bring her back here with you?”
Loto turned, with his arm about his mother’s shoulders. “I found her; but I couldn’t bring her back—just yet. I’ll tell you it all when I get rested. Mamita, I’m hungry. I want a bath and some supper.” In a secluded room of the club they waited impatiently while Loto finished his meal. Then, with his mother clinging to his hand, he yielded to Georgie’s eager, reiterated questions.
“Yes, I found her—in that house about a quarter of a mile north of here. She was—”
“Won’t you please begin at the beginning?” the Banker interrupted.
“Yes, sir.” Loto smiled. He looked more like himself now, but still there was that curious, somber, brooding look in his eyes. “I will. Of course.”
He hesitated a moment, then began slowly and earnestly:
“It was all so strange, so extraordinary, that even though I was prepared for almost anything, I could not have guessed how remarkable it would be.”
“You mean your sensations?” the Big Business Man put in.
“He means what he saw when he found the girl,” Georgie declared. “Don’t you, Loto? That world of the future where you stopped to locate her—”
“Both,” said Loto. “It was an experience that I find difficult to describe—to picture adequately to you—”
“You went half a mile from here in space,” the Doctor suggested. “How far did you go in time?”
“My idea would be to let him tell it,” commented the Banker caustically. “If you people had any idea how irritating it is to me—”
“That’s reasonable enough,” agreed the Doctor readily. “Tell us just what happened, Loto—in your own way.”
“I closed the door of the cabin after me,” Loto began again. “I was in the forward one of the three compartments. It’s a room perhaps eight feet wide and a little longer—a one-third section of the entire cabin. It has curving side walls, concave inside; and its arched ceiling is about seven feet high. It has two windows of heavy plate glass facing forward. A wider window on each side, and there is a floor window also.
“In this compartment are the controls for the Frazia motors and the flying controls. The controls of my own mechanism are there also. They are simple—merely a switch to regulate the Proton current, as father and I call it—and a series of small dials for recording the time-change. These dials are geared, with one for days, another for days in multiples of ten, one for years, and others for years in multiples ten, hundreds, and thousands. But I can show you all this in the plane itself.”
“I noticed it,” said the Doctor. “I looked in through one of the side windows just before you started.”
“Go on, boy,” the Banker urged.
“Yes, sir. I took my seat behind the Frazia controls. I was not going to use them at once, because there was no immediate need to raise the plane into the air. But I wanted to be seated; I could not tell what the shock of starting might be.”
“I thought you said you had made a test,” the Big Business Man put in, ignoring the Banker’s glare.
“We did; but only with a small model. The dials and switch were on the wall at my right hand. I moved the lever of the switch over to the first intensity.”
THERE was a breathless stir among the men. Loto went on, still more slowly, with obvious careful thought to his words. “There was a low hum. The floor seemed to rock under me. The humming increased; it roared in my ears. Everything was vibrating, with an infinitely tiny, trembling quiver that penetrated into my bones, even coursed through my blood.
“I’m not making myself clear. They were swift sensations, I suppose lasting no more than a few seconds. I felt, as near as I can explain it, as though some force that holds my own body together, cell by cell, were being tampered with—as though, if the struggle continued, I might be shattered into a myriad tiny fragments, like a puff of exploded powder.
“The humming grew still louder; I have heard something like it in my ears just before fainting. I remember trying to stand up. A wild impulse to throw back the switch and stop the thing came to me, but I resisted it. Then I was conscious of a sensation of falling headlong—a dizzy, sickening reeling of the senses rather than the body.
“I lost consciousness—for only a moment or two, I think. I was sitting in my seat—uninjured. The humming was still in my ears, insistent. But it was not so loud as I had thought, and after a time I came to forget it almost entirely.
“My first impression now was that everything about me was glowing—radiating a light almost phosphorescent. I looked down at my knees; my clothes were glowing. I could no longer distinguish color; my hands and my shoes were the same—all that same glowing phosphorescence. It gave a sense of unreality to everything.
And then I saw that everything was unreal. There seemed no substance. I could distinguish the side of the cabin through my hand, and beyond the cabin wall I could see the solidity of the board inclosure where the plane was resting. It was as though my body and the cabin interior were shimmering ghosts; nothing but the world outside was substance. But when I gripped my knee with my hand I felt solid enough.
“I have given you details of my sensations, as I remember them now, but I do not suppose that more than a minute or two had elapsed since I had first pulled the switch. I glanced at the dial which records the passage of days. I could not as yet see any movement.
“I stood up, conscious of a nausea and a strong feeling of lightheadedness. I peered through one of the side windows. Outside, everything looked at first glance as though I had not yet started. The board walls of the enclosure were clear, solid and as distinct as before.
“Then I saw Georgie staring directly at me, and I could tell by the expression of his face that he was looking, not at the plane, but at an empty space where the plane had been. Over in the corner, mother was sitting. I could see she was crying, and father was comforting her.”
Loto turned and smiled gently at his mother, then went on:
“It was all as real outside as though I had been part of It myself—until I saw the others move across the enclosure. They were walking extremely fast; their gestures were rapid—two or three times more rapid than normal.
“For what seemed like five or ten minutes I stood there watching you all. It was like a moving picture being run too fast—and being constantly accelerated. I saw you roll back the canvas roof—with movements incredibly swift. Then you went scurrying out through the door—the last of you so fast that the figure blurred to my sight.
“I was left alone. For a while I sat there, a little dazed. There is a small clock on the side wall of the cabin. It might have been completely radium-painted, by the look of it at that moment, but even though it glowed as intangibly as a ghost, I could make out the hands. I was sure they would be traveling through space at their accustomed speed and thus give me the time of the world I had left.”
“Why, that’s so!” Georgie exclaimed. “I never thought of that. Our measurement of time is nothing but the movement of clock hands over space, is it?”
Loto did not heed the interruption. “I had started at about then minutes of ten. The clock now showed about five minutes after ten—I had been gone fifteen minutes. Above the enclosure, to the east, I saw the moon. It was about an hour up, I judged. Do you know what time it rose last night?”
“About ten minutes of one,” said Rogers.
Loto nodded. “That gives us a basis to compute my starting acceleration. The moon an hour up would have made your time ten minutes of two—four hours after I started. I had passed through those first four hours in fifteen minutes!
“This was with my control at the weakest intensity of the current. There are twenty subdivisions of power. I pushed the handle around from one to the other of them quickly—pausing only an instant on each, and stopping at the tenth. There was no charge of sensation except that the humming seemed to grow, not louder exactly, but more powerful—more penetrating. The interior of the cabin and my own body lost visible density in appearance. You had switched off the electric lights outside, but in the moonlight I could still see the board walls, not only through the windows, but through the metallic sides of the cabin.
“I was tingling all over, but the sensation, now that I was used to it, was pleasant rather than the reverse—a feeling of lightness, buoyancy and strength.
“With the power increased tenfold, the acceleration of time-movement was enormous. The movement of the rising moon became visible; the heavens were turning over, the stars progressing from point to point with ever increasing speed.
“About ten minutes after ten by the clock, the moon was near the zenith, and the sun rose an instant later. I was conscious of a flash of twilight, and the sun’s disk shot up from the horizon. The world was plunged into daylight.
“From my position inside the enclosure I could see nothing outside but the sky and one or two of the tallest buildings near at hand. There was no visible movement of anything but the sun. You can understand that, of course. Had any of you come into the enclosure, or had an airplane passed overhead, I would not have seen either. The movement would have been too rapid for my vision.
“In perhaps a minute or two the sun was directly overhead, and in another fraction of a minute it had set. Darkness was upon me. Then the moon rose again and flashed across the heavens. Clouds formed and disappeared so quickly I could hardly see them.
“I glanced at the dial recording days. Its hand was moving. One day had passed, and the hand was traveling toward the next.
“FOR ten minutes or so I sat there, while day succeeded night, and night came again—only to be followed almost instantly by the daylight. Soon I could distinguish only thin streaks of light as the sun and moon crossed above me—streaks that came closer together, merged into one, and separated again as the month passed. And then the days became so brief that they blurred with the nights. A grayness settled upon everything—the mingled twilight of light and darkness. I could see nothing overhead now but a blur.
“The hand of the day dial was sweeping around swiftly. I looked at the dial beside it, which recorded days in multiples of ten. Its pointer was also moving. Forty-odd days were recorded and the movement was accelerating every instant.”
Loto paused. “Have you any questions?”
“No,” growled the Banker. Beads of moisture stood out on his thin, blue-veined forehead. “No questions. Go on, boy.”
“I thought then I had better leave the rooftop,” Loto continued with his same slow voice. “I started the Frazia helicopters, and rose about a thousand feet. Then I slowed them down until a balance with gravity was maintained, and I hung stationary. You gentlemen, if you think of it at all, may be surprised that the flying mechanism was effective while I was sweeping so swiftly through time. If our atmosphere did not persist in time, the propellers would have exerted no pressure against it. But the air does persist, and so does gravity.
“There was apparently no wind. The transient winds and storms of a few hours were all blended. The result, however, must have been a slight influence to the northward, for I found myself drifting very slowly in that direction. After a few moments my time-velocity had so increased that even that drift was averaged. I hung motionless.
“From this height—a thousand feet above the southern boundary of Central Park—the scene below me was a strange one. At first glance I might have been hanging in a balloon, on a dull, soundless day very heavily overcast. Except that the sky, instead of showing dark clouds, was a queer, luminous gray blur that distinguished nothing.
“The city below me lay clear cut, but absolutely shadowless, which gave it a very extraordinary look of flatness—a vista of buildings painted upon a huge, concave canvas. There were colors distinguishable, but they were abnormally grayish and drab. Vague, unreal pencil points of light dotted the scene—electric lights that were on every night in the same spots, and off in the daytime—the blended effect of which was visible. There was no sound. I could not have heard it above that insistent humming, even had there been. But I knew there was not. Nor was there motion. It looked a dead, empty city. The streets seemed deserted—not even a blur to mark those millions of transitory movements of humans and vehicles that I knew were taking place.
“I had been conscious of a brief period of chill, and for a moment or two the scene had assumed a whiter aspect, especially in the park. I conceive this was from a blending of several heavy, lingering snow-falls of the winter.
“The lowest dial, marking days, now showed only a blur as its pointer swept around. And the year-dial pointer was visibly moving. I had passed one year and was well into the second. The clock showed ten thirty. I had been gone forty minutes!
“I said there was no visible movement in the scene beneath me. That was so, at first, but I soon began to see plenty of movement. The white look had come and passed again—far briefer this time—when my attention was caught by a building on Broadway, along in the Fifties somewhere. It was a broad but low building, no more than eight or ten stories high—the lowest in its immediate vicinity. It seemed now to be melting before my eyes! That is the only way I can describe it—melting. Parts of it were vanishing! It was dismembering, as though piece by piece unseen machinery and human hands were taking it apart and carrying it away. Which, gentlemen, is exactly what was happening.
“Can you form a mental picture of that? I hope so, for it was characteristic of all the movement that now began to assume visibility throughout the silent city. This building that melted—I come back to that word because it seems the only one suitable—was gone in a moment or two. Try to conceive that I did not see actual movement—not the physical movement we’re accustomed to. They were tearing down that building—doubtless over a period of weeks. But I could not see any specific things being done—any part of the building come off and move away. All such details were too rapid—far too rapid. What I saw, rather, was the effect of movement—a change of aspect—not the movement itself. The building progressively looked smaller—until at last It was not there.
