The Man Who Mastered Time 11 – Cummings · Verses Across
Literature · Adventure
The Man Who Mastered Time 11Chapter 11
18
Literature · Adventure
The Man Who Mastered Time 11
Chapter 11
CummingsEnglish
Still side by side, George and Dee rode back toward Anglese City. It was further than George had thought; then he realized that the girl had turned into a different road. He shouted a question at her.
"A shorter way to the cavern," she explained.
The wind whistling past them made conversation difficult. George understood that they were skirting the city to where the cavern stood on the other side. They were still in the open country; a road of white sand, palm lined, with a forest jungle all around, and only an occasional house.
George's mind was in a turmoil. Toroh taking the other plane into time! Memory came to him of all those greater civilizations he and Rogers had seen though the centuries they had passed. Toroh was going back to those civilizations to secure weapons! The thought turned George cold all over. With the weapons from former, greater ages, Toroh and his army of Noths would be invincible.
Words in the wind sweeping by startled George into sudden alertness.
"Death to disloyal Bas!"
It seemed as though some tiny voice had whispered it to him.
Dee had checked both the dogs abruptly.
"What's that?" George demanded.
It came again:
"Death to disloyal Bas! Death to disloyal Bas!"
The air was whispering it, then calling it; a myriad voices echoed it everywhere.
"Look there!" cried Dee.
Ahead of them, a mile or so away, a blue light was standing up into the sky. There was a house near at hand, a Bas shack. From it a woman and two naked children came running out into the moonlight, panic-stricken at the dread words with which the air resounded.
And then the words changed:
"Bas women will not be exiled! Bas children will be free!"
The woman in front of the shack clutched her children, listening, rejoicing--almost unbelieving.
Dee had started the dogs forward again. Swiftly she explained to George what she thought it might mean--a radio proclamation from Fahn. In a few moments the light over the cavern had vanished; the voices in the air died away.
George's mind reverted to their own situation; the incident had given him an idea.
"Dee, where are Azeela and Toroh now?"
She thought an instant; momentarily the mental bond with her sister had been broken.
"Very near Orleen, she thinks. They have heard the voices. Toroh is very angry. He had hoped much that the Bas would rebel. It would have helped him."
"Near Orleen!" George echoed. "Can't we get to the Anglese Cavern first?"
"I think so." She had started Rotan into a run, but George called her to stop. Even at the risk of losing more precious time, he questioned her.
"Dee, listen. Are the caverns of Orleen and Anglese City connected by radio?"
"Yes," she said.
"Then listen. We'll get to Anglese City first and tell them to inform the guards at Orleen. When Toroh and Azeela arrive they can seize them--if we warn them ahead."
She nodded with instant comprehension.
"All radio isn't broadcast audibly, is it?" he added.
"No," she said. The dogs were running faster. She called back over her shoulder. "We'll do that. I'll tell Azeela."
They swept forward, the dogs settling low to the ground as they ran.
A great weight seemed to have lifted from George. It would be simple enough, after all--merely notify the Orleen Cavern by radio, and Toroh would be seized when he presented himself with Azeela.
George contemplated the outcome. With Toroh in their hands, the Noth attack would collapse. There would be no war.
It was a race then; the only thing that could go wrong would be if Toroh got to the other cavern first. Rotan and Dee were ahead; the girl's slight figure clinging to the dog showed in the moonlight. George whispered to Atal, thumped the dog's flank with his hand.
As they caught up with Dee, he shouted, "Where's Azeela now? Will we make it?"
"Yes," she answered. "I think so."
The mountain that housed the cavern loomed ahead through the palms; houses lay to the right, the outskirts of Anglese City. Half a mile more and they would be there.
Atal's upflung head brought George out of another reverie. The dog, still running at full speed, was sniffing the air. George heard Rotan growl, and Dee's sharp command for silence.
Another command from the girl, and both dogs stopped; Atal slid on his haunches, checking himself so abruptly that George was flung to the sand.
He was unhurt. He picked himself up to find Dee beside him.
"Someone is coming," she said sharply. "Someone the dogs know is not a friend."
She spoke to the dog, and pulled George to the side of the road where a cluster of banana trees cast an inky shadow. Together they stood there in silence. Atal and Rotan had disappeared. The road was a white ribbon in the moonlight. George listened, but could hear nothing. He tried to question Dee, but she silenced him.
Presently there came the thud of running feet; from the direction of Anglese City two running dogs with riders swept into view. The riders were men, black cloaked and wearing masks. Arans, from the festival, George thought.
They would have passed without seeing the lurking figures under the banana trees had not Atal and Rotan, in spite of Dee's command, suddenly charged them from the shadows across the road.
The two men, shouting in anger and alarm, tumbled from their mounts. The four dogs tangled in a snarling, biting mass.
Still George and Dee were unseen in the shadows. One of the men in the road had lost his cloak and mask; the moonlight showed his face.
"One of Toroh's brothers," Dee breathed into George's ear. In the dimness he could see she was raising the small, crescent-shaped weapon. Some noise that she or George made must have alarmed the men, who were no more than ten feet away. They looked sharply across the road, and then, evidently seeing nothing, they turned back to where the dogs were still fighting with a deadly fury.
Sparks leaped suddenly from Dee's outstretched hand. The men turned. One of them cried out in terror, but they both stood stiff and motionless.
"We've got 'em!" George shouted. "Good work, Dee!"
He would have leaped forward, but her free hand gripped him.
"Quick! The globe!"
One of the men, supposedly stricken beyond the power to move, was, by some superhuman effort of will, slowly raising his hand; his fingers clutched a tiny black globe. It came up very slowly, as his almost paralyzed muscles struggled with its weight.
But George recovered his wits. He snatched his own globe from his pocket, pointed it, pulled the trigger.
The night was split by a flash, a tiny, sizzling snap of thunder; the globe recoiled in George's hand. Across the road the bodies of the two men lay motionless on the sand.
Dee was leaning against a banana trunk panting. Her face had gone white, but she smiled as George turned to her.
"They almost got us," she said.
George himself was trembling, but he would not let her see it.
"Almost, Dee. Next time I'll be ready. I didn't realize..."
Among the trees across the road the dogs were still fighting. One of the Noth dogs lay motionless, torn and bleeding. Atal and Rotan together were attacking the other--the three rolling and tumbling as they bit and tore at each other, their huge bodies trampling down the banana trees as they fought.
"Dee, could I use the thunderbolt on them?"
She shook her head. "Wait."
It lasted only a moment more; the second Noth dog was down, with Atal's fangs buried in its throat.
The two dogs came leaping back to their mistress, their bodies torn, and matted with dirt and blood.
Dee patted them affectionately as they stood licking their wounds. "But you should have minded me," she said.
George had taken one look at the two charred figures lying in the road; he drew the girl away.
"Come on. I wouldn't look over there. We must hurry, Dee."
They mounted the dogs and started forward, more slowly this time, for the animals carried them with difficulty.
Again George remembered. Toroh would be at the Orleen Cavern by this time. They had lost! This delay had been the one unexpected thing that could defeat them.
"Dee--"
But the girl had anticipated him.
"They are in the plane." She half whispered the words. "Azeela has been trying to tell me for a long time. Toroh had a spy at the cavern entrance, a man whom we trust as a Scientist. He let them in--Azeela had no chance to make an outcry. They are in the plane now. Azeela telling Toroh she cannot operate it. Wait! Now he's trying the proton switch himself."
A silence.
"Dee! What is it?" George pleaded.
She shook her head. "Nothing comes. Nothing!"
The connection was broken! Azeela was carried back into time. Had something stopped her message? Would her thought-bond with her sister hold across the centuries that now separated them?
George could only ask himself these questions with a sinking heart. If the bond would not hold, then Azeela was lost to them forever. Lost to Loto, who loved her. And Toroh would get his weapons and win the war--inevitably.
"Nothing yet, Dee?"
"No."
They rode slowly onward. At last Dee gave a cry of joy.
"It comes again! She is all right, George! All right!" Her voice rose in triumph and thankfulness.
George thumped Atal to urge the dog forward. "Then we must hurry, Dee. They're going back into time?"
"Yes. Azeela is looking at the dials. Twenty-five years back now. She tells us to hurry. She will watch the dials and let me know where they are. Toroh does not suspect anything. He is gloating. He thinks he has won everything."
At last they were ascending the slope to the mouth of the cavern. The yawning hole showed black in the face of the cliff. On the small platform above the mouth, a single light disclosed the figures of three guards sitting there.
In the moonlight the guards saw them coming. A bolt of lightning flashed downward across the black hole; a peal of thunder rolled out.
They stopped, and Dee called to the guards. One of them descended from the platform, down a narrow flight of steps cut in the cliff face. He came forward in the moonlight, a black robed figure.
Dee spoke with him, and, recognizing a daughter of Fahn, he saluted respectfully. There followed a brief colloquy, then the guard stood aside.
A moment later they were in the cavern. The huge tunnel was dark and dank, but blue-white lights glimmered ahead in the darkness. The place was silent, seemingly deserted.
Down the length of the main tunnel they hurried. The plane stood there in the open space, in the glare of blue-white light. They stood before it.
"Dee, shall we send for your father?"
She hesitated.
"Where is he?" George persisted. "Did you ask the guard?"
"Yes. He and Loto and Loto's father are at the palace. There has been rebellion and murder--the murder of Helene, Mme. Voluptua."
She recounted succinctly the events of the night in Anglese City as the guard had told them to her.
George whistled. "They've got their hands full. Dee, are you still in communication with Azeela?"
"Yes. They are beyond fifty years."
"Going how fast?"
"Azeela says as fast as they can--the twentieth intensity."
George made his 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. George 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.
George followed and closed the cabin door after them. "Did you tell the guard what we were going to do?"
"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 plane."
"How fast are they going, Dee? The twentieth intensity?"
"Yes."
George'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!
George pulled the switch. There was 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 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 councilors--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 the 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.
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 councilors 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, stayed at Fahn's home. Nothing had been heard from George and the two girls. They were days full of anxiety--almost despair--for the three men. The guards at the two caverns reported what had happened. Fahn cursed his inefficiency in allowing a Toroh spy to remain unsuspected in the League. The man who had given Toroh the plane was located and put to death, but that helped matters little.
In the brief interims of inactivity, the three men discussed what George and Dee might be doing--what the outcome would be. The discussions were futile; there was nothing to do but wait.
The character of the two Frazia planes, the identity of the visitors, had never been made public. Only Fahn, his two companions and a few of the Scientist leaders were aware of the momentous outcome for which they were so helplessly waiting.
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 he given vent to his feelings. Rogers was curious to see the cavern; older, more philosophical than Loto, he could better withstand his anxiety over George 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. He realized now how wrong he had been not to bring Lylda with him.
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 that he could not shake off.
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.
Far ahead, down a sharp slope, two blue lights shone. To the left a passageway glowed dull red.
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, 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. He had turned unexpectedly into a side cave, a room furnished and draped, and dimly lighted by braziers hanging from its low roof. Rows of bottles, cases of instruments, a long, low table, littered with a variety of strange objects; the room held a confusion of things, most of which were incomprehensible.
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," Fahn explained. "But our surgeons have done better than that. They have made the living body--all but the mind and the soul."
A small case was standing on a pedestal, illuminated by a dim blue light above it. A lump of living human flesh lay within, roughly fashioned into human form, with arms and legs that kicked.
Rogers backed away.
It seemed like a dream, this trip through the Scientists' cavern. From one room to another they wandered. Most of the caves were unoccupied; occasionally a lone worker or a group would stop their tasks momentarily to meet their leader and his visitors.
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 them to you later."
They entered another inner cave, which was high-arched and unusually large. It held relics of bygone ages. Broken mechanisms, that 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 prehistoric 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. It was like looking through a huge window.
"The viewpoint of our station a mile north of here," Fahn pointed out.
"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, and to the left, the island mountain range, its 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--she saw a girl and a man passing the night before. It may have been George 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," Fahn said.
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 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.
"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 ears, 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 Toroh's army will gather?"
"From behind them," said Loto. "To the east, nearer the Atlantic Coast, we think. We--"
Fahn had given a slight cry. 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.
It circled like a giant bird. A patch of lighter sky behind showed it more plainly after a moment. It was a Frazia plane! It was closer than they had thought, 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. George, 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.
