Time Travel Omnibus, page 83
“Look at us! Ghosts flying through space! Doesn’t it make you feel queer, Mr. Rogers?”
The dim cabin interior, with its vague luminous human figures did indeed seem unreal. But the unreality was matched now by the scene beneath; their forward flight through space, combined with a time-progress now tremendously accelerated, made everything below a shifting, sliding kaleidoscope of changing effects that the eye could see, but the mind grasp only imperfectly. Details were transient things blurred one into the other.
The broad fundamentals, however, were obvious. The gray, concave land, ridged with mountains, the indented coast line, the gray, changeless sea—all were distinguishable. And overhead spread the sky, blurred and gray also—luminous with the mingled light of sun and moon, and a myriad starry worlds, and blended darker by nights of rain and snow and storm.
THEY were over North Carolina when Rogers, at the Frazia controls, grew tired. The clock stood at two five. They had been gone some five hours.
“I must rest,” said Rogers. “Georgie, can you take my place?”
Georgie hesitated. “I’ve flown a bit. But never in a Frazia. I think I’d better not experiment—not on this flight.”
“All right,” Rogers agreed. “I’ll use the helicopters for a while. Half an hour will rest me up.”
In a few moments they were hovering, seemingly motionless over North Carolina. Far away to the east, over a bulge in the coast line, they could just make out Cape Hatteras, with the ocean beyond it.
Rogers stretched himself out on one of the leather seats, and lighted a cigar. Georgie sat beside him.
“I figure we should be at least halfway to the northern coast of the island,” the older man said. “We have flown some four hundred miles in four hours.”
“But Loto will be waiting at the southeastern tip of the island,” protested Georgie. “That will be easily two or three hundred miles further, won’t it? I wonder how far along we are in time.”
“Look at the dials.”
Georgie bent over them. “Sixty-five hundred years. About that. Some of the hands are going too fast to read.”
“More than I had thought,” commented Rogers.
“I think we have just about reached our greatest speed,” Rogers answered slowly. “Let us see. We’ve done an average of thirteen hundred years an hour. We must be progressing at double that now.” Georgie was figuring on the back of an old envelope. “Twenty-six hundred an hour. In five more hours at that rate we’ll be close to twenty thousand. We can fly down to the north coast of the island easily by then.”
“Exactly. We are a little ahead In our space flight. I’m glad of it. We shall have to slow our time-progress to almost nothing at the end. We must take no chances of missing Loto’s light signal.”
“Twenty-six hundred years an hour,” mused Georgie. “That’s what we’re making now. Forty-five years a minute. A century almost every two minutes!”
The clock had registered thirty minutes more when Rogers declared he was sufficiently rested. At Georgie’s suggestion they had eaten a light meal; then again they started their flight southward.
“How about looking at the dials again?” Georgie remarked. “They were at sixty-five hundred, thirty minutes ago.”
“Eight thousand,” Rogers read. “That’s fifteen hundred more. It figures three thousand an hour. That is our peak, I think.”
The flight now was under constant conditions—in every two minutes the plane was passing some three or four miles of space and a century of time. They crossed above North Carolina, and came to the coast again. The cities of the civilization beneath them seemed breaking up. Here and there one stood in its glory; others were mere deserted piles of ruins over which the vegetation was crawling with an eagerness to devour. Still other cities and villages appeared over the southern horizon, sturdy and whole—and melted as they slid beneath the plane into crumbling piles that passed out of sight to the north.
Soon desolate areas appeared. The scene grew vaguely whiter; the snow was coming down from the north faster than the plane was flying. Changes in the coast line became apparent; unfamiliar arms of the sea swept into view, and were crossed and left behind. A small, unfamiliar island lay close to the South Carolina coast. But as a whole, the land and sea held their own—even against the ravages of so many centuries.
“We’re making more than a hundred miles an hour,” Rogers said suddenly. “A hundred and twenty-five at least. The north wind is with us—the wind Loto described that blew southward almost all the year. What time is it?”
“By the clock or the dials?”
“The clock. I have the dials here. Eighteen thousand four hundred years.”
“Quarter of six,” announced Georgie.
“We should sight the island shortly,” Rogers said. “I’ll fly a trifle slower. We must be nearly down to the State of Georgia by now—to where Georgia used to be, I should say. I want to sight the island at twenty thousand years, or thereabouts.”
Rogers was very tired—as much from trying to grasp the gigantic changes flowing beneath him, as from flying the plane.
The land was growing white; the vegetation sparser. Small towns and hamlets that endured for no more than fifty or a hundred years—shadowy, vague and unreal with their changing form—now were springing up everywhere and melting into nothing in a moment or two. The vegetation was shifting—changing. But always the scene was growing whiter. The villages were sparser, smaller and shorter—a people struggling southward against the threatening, irresistible cold, which spared nothing but the island of the Anglese.
The cataclysm which formed this island may have come at ten thousand years—beyond our present—or at twenty. At all events, the island was there when the plane reached its space and its time. Rogers was first to notice a radical departure from the normal conformation of the landscape. They were, by their own calculation, over Georgia; Georgie, watching the dials closely, had just noted twenty-two thousand years. Far ahead, over the rim of the southwestern horizon, a line of mountains was rising.
“Look!” exclaimed Rogers softly. “The mountain chain running east and west! The new mountains! The island must be just beyond them. It is what Loto told us we would see.”
He drove the plane into a climb—a long incline up to higher altitudes. The gray land and sea tilted and began dropping away. The mountains seemed following up—higher and closer; until at last the plane was over them, barely a thousand feet above their rocky spires.
IT WAS A SCENE of wild grandeur that now spread out beneath the eyes of the watchers in the plane. Crags were tumbled about; dark, riven cliff faces, with snowcapped summits. A peak pure white; a gray blur valley beside it. And the whole as a mass was reared ten thousand feet above the sea.
The plane swept forward; the jagged, I tumbled land slid northward close beneath it. Then, abruptly, the crags and peaks dropped away. It was as though the plane had leaped ten thousand feet into the air. Far below lay a narrow channel—gray water stretching east and west. And beyond that another land, its outer coast curving to the south.
“The island!” exclaimed Rogers softly. “What a cataclysm was here—a rift that let the sea in, and buckled up the mountains!”
Looking behind them, the travelers could I see the southern slopes of the range, with a greenish verdure shifting and crawling i—verdure that was green, but with a whitish cast, for in the winters the snow was coming down from the peaks above.
“The island!” echoed Georgie. “And we’re at twenty-three thousand five hundred years! We’ve some distance yet to fly,” he warned. “Hadn’t we better slacken our time-progress?”
With their flight through space temporarily checked, and the helicopters holding them motionless, Rogers cut down the Proton current to the fifth intensity. The sickness passed quickly. Eagerly they looked below them.
Beyond the channel lay the island, curving up in an arc from the south and out to the west. They could not see across it, but only to a ridge of mountains at its center. Huge palms lay thick upon it everywhere; a broad, curving beach of white sand edged it. An island Paradise—though their time-progress still laid a gray cast over the green, blurred the water into a formless haze along the beach and shifted the vegetation into a confusion of changing forms.
“We must get started,” said Rogers at last. “At twenty-eight thousand years we must be within sight of the southern tip.” It was a flight almost due south. Lakes occasionally were visible, two or three small rivers, one of which changed its course suddenly under their eyes, and everywhere that same tropical verdure, mounting and melting—always shifting with its rapid growth and decay.
In some three hours more, with another, longer rest for Rogers during which helicopters held them poised motionless—they sighted the southern tip of the Island. It had narrowed here to a point no more than two miles wide, ending with a curving beach and the broad empty ocean beyond—a beach with a palm-covered mountain slope close behind it.
Rogers had made several changes of time-progress during the latter part of the trip; and they were poised over the sea near the tip of the island no more than a few moments when the dials recorded twenty-eight thousand two hundred years.
Rogers consulted Loto’s notes. “He landed in this time world at twenty-eight thousand two hundred and four years. We must stop at the beginning of that year, and watch for his light.”
Using the fourth intensity, the daylight and darkness were separated into two brief but distinguishable periods. So the voyagers sped through the days and nights, the months and forward into another year. At the beginning of the fourth year of that new century, Rogers changed to the third intensity. It was daylight—a yellow-red, swiftly mounting sun, with flying blurs of white clouds close overhead; a blue sea, and a bright green island at the side.
The sun plunged across the sky and sank blood-red, with an instant of glorious colors suffusing the western sky. Night came, with its deep, purple mystery. Then day again.
Thus the days of that fourth year went by—each hardly a minute long, but slow to the two men so anxiously watching. They were tired to the point of exhaustion; but the excitement and anxiety kept them up.
“He said, from the tip of the island,” Rogers murmured. “A blue-white, vertical beam of light into the sky. For a day and a night. We couldn’t miss it. A minute would show it to us plainly.”
“I haven’t taken my eyes off that island for a second,” commented Georgie from his seat on the floor. “Why doesn’t he hurry up? He got here in January or February. It must be June or so already. He’s down there, why doesn’t he give us the signal?”
Rogers did not answer. The sun dropped below the horizon. The turning world, with its motion made so visible, was dizzying to one who watched the sky. But they had both long since learned to avoid that.
The purple night was colored with a moon—red as it rose and swiftly plunged into a thick bank of clouds that swept down upon it.
Abruptly, from the tip of the island a shaft of blue-white light shot into the sky. It wavered an instant; then stood motionless—clear, distinct, unmistakable!
THE Proton current had been entirely cut off. The interior of the cabin was solid in appearance once more. The Frazia helicopters were still droning; the plane hung motionless in a night that was without wind. The green island was bathed in moonlight—a moon almost at the zenith now—a small moon, silver, tinged with red, with a red-white, fleecy cloud slowly floating nearby. And from the tip of the island, quite near its southern beach, Loto’s narrow beam of blue-white light was pouring upward into the sky.
They descended, not with the helicopters, but in a gentle glide. The beach was broad and firm. They landed upon it, swooping along. It was like racing an automobile along the sand in the moonlight, with the ocean on one side—far out at low tide now; and on the other side a jungle of green tropical vegetation.
Rogers, at the controls, saw a number of human figures standing on the beach ahead of him. They scattered hastily, and the plane rapidly losing velocity, went past them and stopped a hundred yards farther.
“We’re here!” cried Georgie. “Let’s get out. Was that Loto we passed? Where’s the light? Are we near it?”
The light could be seen no more than a hundred feet away among the palms. They climbed hastily from the plane. A figure was coming forward along the beach at a run—a slight figure in wide trousers of white cloth, a short, flapping jacket, and bareheaded.
“Loto!” shouted Georgie. “That you Loto?”
The figure answered: “Hello-o—Georgie!” It increased its speed. It was Loto.
“Oh,” he exclaimed, as he shook their hands. “You got here right away, didn’t you? I’ve only had that light up two or three hours.”
“We’re tired out,” said Rogers, when the greetings were over. “Do we stay in the plane, or can we leave it?”
A man was standing fearfully at the edge of the green Jungle nearby. Loto called him forward—a man in wide trousers, like Loto’s except that they were smeared with dirt and sand; and with bare feet and naked torso. He came, timidly, and Loto spoke to him apart. The man nodded his head, with understanding of his orders. Then he trotted away, joining three or four others of his kind, gesticulating toward the plane. After which they all approached it reluctantly.
Georgie plucked at the flaring sleeve of Loto’s short jacket—his only garment above the waist. How’s Azeela, Loto? Is she—is everything all right?”
“Yes. She’s all right. But—I thought I needed you and father here. Wait! Not now. I’ll tell you later.”
Rogers joined them. “We’re about exhausted, Loto. We must have some sleep.”
“Yes, sir. I knew you’d be. I’ve a house near here—only a hundred yards or so. They’ll guard the plane. His gesture indicated the men who were now on the sand, moving about the plane but evidently afraid to touch it.
“You can trust them?”
“Yes, sir. Implicitly.”
They followed Loto. Georgie was tired, but so excited that he did not realize it. The night air was warm and heavy with moisture. It was oppressive, it reminded him somehow of the steam room of a Turkish bath. He found himself perspiring profusely.
They left the moonlit beach, and following a tiny white-sand path, plunged into the depths of the jungle.
It was dark in the jungle here, and very silent. The steamy air was redolent with perfume—orange blossoms. Georgie told himself. The light-signal was nowhere to be seen. Georgie wondered if it had burned out, or if Loto had ordered those men to extinguish it.
“Here we are,” said Loto abruptly.
A house was standing at the right, in an open space with the moonlight gleaming on it—a large, tropical-looking bungalow. There was a broad veranda on three sides, with windows opening into the house. The whole was raised some four feet off the ground on coconut posts; and a brown thatched roof spread over everything like a mound.
It seemed a house that might have ten rooms at least. Georgie wondered what made it look so peculiar. Then he realized that its board walls were not vertical, but sloped inward toward the top, so that its rooms would be smaller at the ceiling than the floor. It made the thing look somewhat as though it were built of cards, leaning against each other.
Loto had turned into another path.
A short flight of wooden steps led to the veranda. There Loto stopped.
“I think we should retire at once,” said Rogers. “We have so much to talk of—but it will wait, Loto?”
“Yes,” Loto agreed. “Come with me, father. Georgie, you stay here, I’ll be right out.”
Georgie sat down on the veranda, with his back against a round palm-trunk that was supporting its roof.
In a moment, when Loto returned to take him to the room they were to occupy together, he found Georgie sleeping peacefully.
GEORGIE awakened with the morning sun streaming through a window. He was on a broad couch, and in a chair beside him, Loto was reclining comfortably, smoking his little black briar pipe. He smiled.
“Oh, you’re awake, are you? You ought to be—it’s hours after sunrise.”
A vague memory of being taken Into the house by Loto the night before came to Georgie. He remembered being half asleep and talking to his friend; but it was all like a dream.
The room was small—queer-looking with its walls sloping together toward the ceiling. Rut it was bright and clean, with brown fibre matting on the floor.
The air was as moist and heavy as ever—and even warmer. Georgie sat up, mopping his forehead with his shirt sleeve.
“I’ve got your clothes,” said Loto. He indicated a stool with garments lying on it. “You don’t need much, in this heat. Get up and try them on.”
Georgie was presently arrayed, like Loto in low, tight slippers of soft hide—clipped dog-skin, Loto told him—wide trousers of white material, bulging above the knees and tight at the ankles; and a brown and green cloth Jacket, ornamented with little metal coins. The jacket was square-cut and short. It just covered the waist-band of the trousers in back. It had quaint, flaring sleeves that ended at the elbow. It was lined with something soft, thin and yet absorbent; and it felt smooth and comfortable next to Georgie’s skin. But it would not meet in front; it left Georgie’s chest and stomach bare. He stood regarding it ruefully until Loto showed him how to fasten it closed across his stomach.
“Nice and cool—when you get used to it,” Georgie commented, staring down at his exposed chest. “How do I look? Kind of queer, don’t I?” He twisted himself around, trying to see down over the side bulge of his trousers.
Roger’s voice, calling, interrupted them. Loto darted away.
“I’ve got a million things to talk to you about,” Georgie shouted after him. “Hurry it up—I’ll be outside in the garden.”
They met, a few minutes later, on the side veranda, where they were to have the morning meal. Georgie’s self-consciousness vanished immediately. Rogers was dressed almost exactly as he was—and he flattered himself he looked at least as well as his companion.
