Time Travel Omnibus, page 88
She recounted succinctly the events of the night in Anglese City as the guard had told them to her.
Georgie whistled. “They’ve got their hands full. Dee, are you still In communication with Azeela?”
“Yes. They are beyond fifty years,” she said.
“Going how fast?”
“Azeela says, as fast as they can—the twentieth Intensity.”
Georgie made a decision.
“Dee, we mustn’t wait—mustn’t stop for anything. You’re willing to go?”
“Yes,” she declared soberly.
She reached toward the platform. Georgie locked his hands, and she put her small foot Into them. He lifted her—she seemed no heavier than a child—and she swung herself up gracefully and easily to the platform.
Georgie followed and closed the cabin door after them.
“Did you tell the guard what we were going to do?” he asked.
“Yes,” she said. “I told him to tell father later tonight—when things were more quiet at the palace.”
“Good girl. Dee, have you ever been back into time?”
“No. Azeela has. Just a little way—with Loto. He taught her to operate the other plane.”
“Yes. How fast are they going, Dee—the twentieth intensity?”
Georgie’s hand was on the Proton switch. He took a last look around.
“Sit down, Dee. Hold the arms of your chair. Don’t be frightened.”
The cabin was dark; through its windows the blue-white glare outside showed the jagged brown walls of the cavern. The twentieth intensity! Toroh was going as fast as he possibly could!
Georgie pulled the switch. There came a soundless clap in his head; a plunge, headlong into some bottomless abyss; falling for hours—an eternity.
FAHN’S proclamation to the Bas had far-reaching effects. All over the island that night and the next day there was rejoicing. The radio proclaimed a national holiday, which the Bas gave over to festivities.
The murder of Mme. Voluptua was forgotten; the rebellion in Anglese City was a thing of the past. The work of Toroh’s spies was completely undone; everywhere they presented themselves now they were seized by the Bas and delivered to the authorities—until by mid-morning none dared show himself. They remained in hiding in the mountains, and the following night fled the island.
Fahn’s object had been attained. Everywhere, enthusiasm for the war soon mounted to a patriotic frenzy.
But it was not all smooth sailing for Fahn. Within an hour after the first radio proclamation—just before dawn that day—the king called the Scientist to his audience room and demanded that it be retracted. For the first time within generations, a Scientist defied his king.
Fahn gravely refused. The king, with his councillors—brave now since the mob before the palace had dispersed—clustered around him, vigorously tried to overawe the Scientist. But Fahn was obdurate; respectful to the majesty of royalty—but obdurate nevertheless.
The king was powerless, and he knew it. He raged, threatened, but to no avail.
That afternoon, the king’s council met. The Scientists were declared outlaws; a call was Issued for the Aran police, who were scattered throughout the island, to come at once to Anglese City to defend their sovereign.
It was a monarch struggling against all reason to defend what he considered his birthright. Royalty outraged!
But the Aran police did not come. Worse than that, those near at hand in Anglese City prudently vanished.
That same afternoon the Scientists met in Anglese City. Fahn’s action was upheld; and from other cities came similar decisions. The government was taken over by the Scientists for the period of the war. Laws ratifying the new status of the Bas women and children were hurriedly passed—and made permanent. It was the League’s promise to the people, fulfilled.
All that day the radio audibly proclaimed events as they transpired. The Arans were not to be molested; their relations with the Bas were to proceed as always; and the royal family was to be treated with the outward respect to which its birth and position entitled it.
Three days passed—days that for those in Anglese City were full of activity and anxiety. The Arans kept sullenly to themselves; the king and his councillors shut themselves in the palace; the Bas went about their accustomed tasks—feverishly, abstractedly—waiting for the call to war.
The Scientists, trusting nothing to chance, sought out all the Aran police and disarmed them. All weapons were kept in the caverns, where the manufacturing and assembling went steadily forward.
Fahn, Loto, and Rogers, during these three days, lived at Fahn’s home. From Georgie and the two girls, nothing had been heard.
On the afternoon of the third day, Fahn took Loto and his father through the cavern. Loto was pale and tight-lipped; but he seldom mentioned Azeela, and never once had given vent to his feelings. Rogers was curious to see the cavern; older, more philosophical than Loto, he could throw aside his anxiety over Georgie and the girls. Yet he, too, was more worried than he would have cared to admit, even to himself. The war—the fate of the Anglese—was one thing; but that plane was all that could take him back to Lylda—his wife. He could probably never manufacture another plane in this time world; the materials were not available.
It was late afternoon when they started. Work in the cavern now proceeded day and night.
To Rogers the place was one of romantic mystery, with a sinister air to it, too.
The darkness of the cavern walls, the shadows, the flickering blue lights, and the yawning holes with which the interior of the mountain seemed honeycombed, awed and perturbed him in spite of himself.
Far ahead, down a sharp slope, two blue lights showed. To the left a passageway glowed full red.
“What’s that?” Rogers asked.
Fahn turned toward it. They went into the passageway, and from it emerged upon a narrow ledge with a metal railing. Before them spread a huge pit, with the glowing of molten rocks far below—a great pool of lava a thousand feet down—lava that boiled sluggishly, with tiny flames of burning gases licking upward from its surface. To one side, overhead, a rift through the mountain showed a patch of starlit sky.
Visitors to an inferno, they stood clinging to the iron rail. The lurid red light cast monstrous shadows of their figures upward to the rocky ceiling. The sulphurous air was intolerably hot; it choked their breathing. After a moment they all stumbled back into the passageway, coughing, breathing deep of the purer air.
“Fires of the earth so close!” murmured Rogers.
FAHN was leading them forward again. “Yes, almost every mountain on the island is like that. The fires are even closer to the surface at Orleen—we use them in the cavern there.”
“And here is a room of medicine and surgery,” he added.
Something made Rogers shudder. “What is that?” he demanded.
“To create human life,” said Fahn. “For thousands of years, science has tried to do that. We can make a man’s body—but his soul and mind still elude us.”
Rogers was staring at a metal framework, where the organs of a man were hanging joined together, and with a network of blood vessels around them—the fundamental, simplified mechanism of man, without the body. And there was movement to the organs; the heart was beating; the lungs breathing.
It was gruesome; it made Rogers’ gorge rise.
“They will function for a little time,” said Fahn. “But our surgeons have done better than that. They have made the living human body—all but the mind and the soul.”
With a dim blue light above it, a small case was standing on a pedestal. A lump of living flesh lay within—roughly fashioned into human form—arms and legs that kicked.
Rogers backed away.
It seemed a dream, this trip through the Scientists’ cavern. From one room to another they wandered.
From far away recesses, where the main work was going on, the hum of dynamos sounded.
“We will not go into the workrooms tonight,” Fahn said. “I’ll show you them later.”
They entered another, inner cave—high-arched and unusually large. It was the museum; It held relics of bygone ages. Broken mechanisms that the inhabitants of other planets might have left on earth had been dug up and stored here as in a museum. They meant nothing to Rogers, nor did Fahn offer to explain them. But this room more than any other in the cavern seemed to carry with it the power of science—the greater science that to Fahn’s time world was In the pre-historic past. It showed Fahn and his contemporaries in their true light; they were archaeologists—imitators, reconstructors, not real creators.
At last they reached a circular room equipped with the apparatus for taking voices and images from the air. Its side walls were paneled with huge crystals that mirrored distant scenes; and It was filled with millions of tiny voices.
Fahn stood before one of the crystals; his hand was on a lever; the fingers of his other hand rested on a tiny row of buttons. Rogers noticed that there were scores of similar mechanisms dispersed about the room.
“Let us look and listen, a mile away to the west,” Fahn said.
The crystal before them was some six feet square. It was gray and cloudy. Fahn pressed one of the small black buttons, and moved the lever over a notch. The crystal flooded with color. To Rogers it was like looking through a huge window some thirty feet above the ground.
“The viewpoint of our station a mile north of here,” said Fahn.
“A thirty foot tower,” Loto explained. “The lens on It swings in a circle. We are looking westward now—toward Orleen.”
The scene in the crystal showed the red western sky; a white road in the foreground, disappearing seemingly at Rogers’ feet; the green, palm-dotted Island, with twilight shadows creeping upon it; to the left, the island mountain range—peaks rising in serrated ranks, with giant, snow-clad summits.
“It was near here that, day before yesterday, they found the charred bodies of Toroh’s brother and his Noth companion.” Loto added. “A Bas woman—see that shack there by the road—saw a girl and a man passing the night before. It may have been Georgie and Dee.”
The shack at the roadside showed plainly. A Bas woman was sitting at its doorway, crooning to her Infant. Her voice sounded almost as clearly as though the watchers had been sitting on the small tower where the lens and radio mechanism were perched.
“We will turn,” said Fahn.
A panorama unfolding the scene moved slowly sidewise; the sea to the north, with the mountain range beyond it, dim in the gathering darkness; east, back toward Anglese City, where the cavern-mountain itself showed behind the palms; to the south past a distant vista of the city houses; and still swinging it came back to the road and the house and stopped—again facing the west.
“Another station,” Fahn added.
The crystal-face went dark, and then relighted. It was a viewpoint of a hundred feet in the air, this time. Again It swung the points of the compass.
For half an hour Fahn continued his demonstration. There might have been a hundred or more towers scattered over the island; and the scene from any one of them sprang at Fahn’s will into the crystal-window. The Scientist moved about the room to the various mechanisms.
“What are the other crystal-mirrors for?” Rogers asked Loto.
“The island can be searched by several operators simultaneously. Any viewpoint may be thrown Into any crystal; and there are receivers for your ear, so that the sounds you hear will not confuse others in the room.”
The Island was growing dark. The crystal showed a viewpoint from the channel coast halfway to Orleen. It must have been from a very high tower; the sea stretched several hundred feet beneath.
“Those mountains across the water,” Rogers remarked, “can’t be over twenty or thirty miles from our shores. Is that where Torch’s army will gather?”
“From behind them,” said Loto. “To the east—nearer the Atlantic Coast, we think. We—”
Fahn had given a slight exclamation. The room was dark, but the reflected light from the crystal showed the Scientist pointing into the mirrored scene.
“Loto, what is that?”
Above the mountains across the channel, the sky was rose-colored with the fading daylight. A tiny gray shape showed there, silhouetted against the clouds. It was moving. They watched it breathlessly.
“A Frazia plane!” Rogers murmured. Like a giant bird, it seemed, circling. A patch of lighter sky behind, showed it more plainly after a moment. It was a Frazia plane—unmistakably! It was closer than they had thought—over the channel, but it seemed to be flying north, away from them.
“Which one is it?” Loto whispered. “Father—which one is it?”
But that they could not tell. Georgie, or Toroh? One of them had returned. The plane was flying lower, circling again. The dimness absorbed it; then it reappeared. It seemed now to be flying crazily.
“Out of control!” Loto whispered in horror. “It’s falling!”
The plane turned over, fluttered down—was swallowed by the shadows of the distant mountains.
THE interior of the plane was glowing. The familiar humming sounded. Georgie and Dee had started back into time. “Dee! Dee! You all right?”
Her wan smile reassured him. “Where are we?”
“Going back into time,” he said cheerfully. The dials were beside him. “Nearly forty years from where we started slowly. You’ll feel all right soon.”
“I am all right,” she persisted. “I mean, Georgie, are we still in the cavern?”
The question brought an idea to Georgie that made his heart race. They were still in the cavern, at a time forty years previous. What was the cavern like then? Suppose its entrance was closed! How could they get out?
Through the windows nothing could be seen but blackness. Georgie hesitated.
“Dee, can your thoughts still reach Azeela?”
“Yes,” she said. “She was frightened for me. She knows now we are coming after her. She and Toroh are past one hundred years.”
“Still going?”
“Yes.”
“Where are they in space?”
“She says in the air, over the Orleen Cavern. She thought it best to show Toroh how to fly the plane—she was afraid to remain underground.”
“So am I,” said Georgie. “But we’re here—we’d better get out.”
There were headlights on the plane; their glare showed the tunnel. Georgie started up the Frazia motors, slowly; they rolled forward, faster as they left the tunnel mouth and took the air.
The scene was that familiar grayness—new to Dee. Beneath them lay the island—the blurred, gray city to one side.
“Over Orleen,” Georgie mused. “We must get there quickly. Further back in time the city will not be there—we might get lost in space.”
At an altitude of perhaps a thousand feet they flew swiftly westward. Orleen was there when they reached its space, the dials were beyond two hundred years.
“Azeela is here,” Dee announced. “She says the city is dwindling.”
“What do her dials say? Will Toroh let her look at them?”
“Yes. She is very careful. He suspects nothing. She gays the dials are nearly two hundred and thirty years.”
“We’re catching them,” Georgie exclaimed triumphantly. “We’ve got the faster plane. We’ll catch up with them. Where are they exactly? In space, I mean.”
A brief pause.
“Azeela says almost directly over the peak near the east edge of the city—the cavern peak.”
There were twin peaks, not over six hundred feet apart. The cavern peak was the northern one; through the floor window now, Georgie could see the summit of the other, directly beneath his plane.
“How high is Toroh? They’re using the helicopters?”
“Yes.”
“How high up?”
“She says about five hundred feet.”
It was the altitude at which Georgie and Dee were hovering. Georgie gazed through the side window. The other peak showed plainly. Above it was the exact space Toroh and Azeela were occupying. Their plane was invisible, of course—twenty-five years into the past.
Dee sat silent, communicating with her sister; and Georgie fell into a reverie. What a wonderful thing thought was! Of everything, only thought could roam the universe at will—could bridge the gap across the years without regard to time and space.
“They’ve passed three hundred years, Georgie,” the girl’s voice aroused him. “Three hundred years Just now.”
“Two hundred and ninety,” he read from their own dials. “Only ten years away! We’ll overtake them presently.”
In the stress through which they had passed, and their excitement, neither of them had considered what they would do when they overtook Toroh. Indeed, it was Azeela who brought it to their minds with her anxious questions to Dee.
Georgie did not know what they would do; nor did Dee. It had seemed necessary, first, to overtake Toroh; and to accomplish that had occupied their entire attention.
They stared at each other in dismay.
“How about my thunderbolt globe?” Georgie suggested.
“We cannot use It,” she reminded. “If we destroy the other plane, Azeela would be killed.”
It was obvious. They could not attack the other plane under any circumstances. But Toroh was going to stop for weapons. They would have to stay near him, both in space and time; and when he stopped, and perhaps left the plane, they would rush up and rescue Azeela.
It was all either of them could plan.
“Keep as near them as we can,” said Georgie. “That’s the idea. And watch our chance. Tell Azeela to keep you posted on everything.”
They slowed their time-flight a trifle; it would have been foolish to let Toroh see them—merely put him on his guard. At a distance of about ten years, they followed.
At eight hundred years before the events they had left, the city of Orleen had disappeared. The island looked almost the same; the peaks were still there; But now among the palms there seemed only a few rude shacks—the earliest Bas settlers.
