The Man Who Mastered Time 6 – Cummings · Verses Across
Literature · Adventure
The Man Who Mastered Time 6Chapter 6
18
Literature · Adventure
The Man Who Mastered Time 6
Chapter 6
CummingsEnglish
Roger's slow, solemn voice died away. He rustled the pages of Loto's message in his hand.
"That's all, gentlemen. All of the message itself. The other pages give detailed instructions--data based on Loto's flight and memoranda for the construction of another plane, gathered from previous notes made by Loto and myself."
There was complete silence when Rogers paused. George decided to speak, but checked himself and relaxed back in his chair.
"I shall start the Frazia Company on another plane at once," Rogers added. "And working on Loto's mechanism simultaneously, I should be ready in ninety days."
He waited, but again no one else spoke. Then he said:
"I am going, of course. It is a great trial for my wife, but I know she is willing."
George turned and flashed an admiring glance at Lylda; her face was strained, but she smiled at him gently.
"Do not be hasty, my friends," Rogers went on quickly. "Any two of you are free to come--or to stay, all of you--as you think best."
"I'm going," said George suddenly. "Loto said I could. And you say so. I'm going."
He jumped to his feet and grasped Roger's hand. "You can count on me, Mr. Rogers."
Rogers smiled. "Thank you, George. I knew I could."
George sat down again. Then he got up and crossed to Lylda, shaking her hand also, and whispering to her. But in another instant he was pacing the room, smoking violently, and frowning.
Rogers was saying to the others, "I will take one more. I realize it is a momentous question. Your lives may be at stake."
The Big Business Man was deep in reverie. "I wonder," he murmured. "I wonder if I do want to go."
"Come on," urged George, stopping suddenly before him. "Take a chance." He did not wait for an answer, but went back to his pacing.
The Banker said, half apologetically. "You don't really need me, do you, Rogers?"
"Of course not," Rogers said heartily. "Use your own judgement. But I knew you'd be offended if I didn't give you the opportunity."
The Banker nodded. "Yes, but you don't need me. I'm an old man--seventy-three, though I hope you'd never guess it. I think I'd better stay where I'm used to things."
"Of course," agreed Rogers.
"But if you need money," the Banker added hopefully, "and you will, naturally--everybody needs money--you'll call on me, won't you? I'm going to see this thing through."
"I don't believe I'll go," the Business Man declared. He met the Doctor's glance, and the Doctor seemed relieved. "You don't really need us, Rogers. I think Frank would prefer to stay also."
The Doctor nodded emphatic agreement.
"Quite so," said Rogers. "I can understand perfectly how you feel."
George stopped his pacing. "Then it's all settled, Mr. Rogers. You and I go; the others stay on guard here. Now listen, everybody, I've got some good ideas..."
Two days before Christmas, another plane lay glistening on the roof of the Scientific Club, walled in from curious eyes by the board enclosure. Sleek, self-satisfied, its every line denoting latent power, it lay motionless, awaiting those human masters who soon were to launch it into another time world.
Occasionally during the afternoon George visited it, anxiously verifying again and again that all was in readiness.
Evening came. The others arrived, singly and in couples. For two hours a bustle of final preparations went on--things forgotten, last minute plans put into execution. But by nine o'clock the moment of departure was finally at hand.
The Banker was in a fluster of excitement. He had appointed himself the leader of those who were to be left behind, and he felt the responsibility keenly.
"Tell me exactly what we've got to do," he insisted. "I don't want anything to go wrong."
Rogers slapped him on the back. "It's nothing to be alarmed over."
"No. But I want to be sure I've got it straight. Tell me all over again."
Rogers repressed a smile. "When we have gone you will all wait some ten minutes to be sure nothing has gone wrong to bring us immediately back. Then you will lock up the enclosure and leave. I have made arrangements with the club to have the enclosure left standing."
"That's all?" asked the Banker anxiously. "We leave the roof open?"
"Yes. In coming back we will want it open, and you cannot tell when we may return."
"But no more than six months," the Banker insisted. "You promise that?"
Rogers nodded.
"Come on," George's voice called. "Let's get started." He had shaken hands with Lylda and climbed up to the doorway of the cabin. "Come on, Mr. Rogers. Let's get started."
Lylda stood apart. Her farewell to her husband was brief. The others turned away, feeling that they should not intrude upon it. When Rogers joined George on the platform of the plane, the Doctor was with Lylda, comforting her.
With a final good-by Rogers slid the door closed. The forward compartment, with its low arch ceiling and its concave walls, was small, but comfortably equipped. The side windows had upholstered seats running under them. In front, to the right, were the Frazia controls, a low seat for the pilot and a small window above the control panel. The time dials and the proton current switch were on the wall to the right. To the left of the seat was the main entrance door.
The division wall between the forward compartment and the engine room behind it held a small doorway with a sliding door.
"Are we ready?" Rogers asked. "I think we should be sitting. The shock of departure, new to us, may be more severe than we anticipate."
His words were calm enough, but they sent a thrill of excitement through George. "All ready," he said. "Go ahead!"
Rogers took a last look about. Then without hesitation, he moved the switch to the first intensity. To George, the humming seemed very different now than when he had heard it outside the plane. It was no louder, but it seemed to hum and vibrate inside his body. He was quivering inside, his head began reeling dizzily; then came that sickening, horrible sensation of falling headlong--a vertigo that turned everything to blackness.
"Are you all right? We've started."
It was Rogers's anxious voice. George opened his eyes; everything seemed glowing, unreal and ghostlike. But he was uninjured, and his head had steadied.
"I'm all right," he managed to say.
The sickness passed quickly. George stood up, steadying himself. "Gosh, how light I feel! Queer in the head--don't you? I never imagined--"
He stopped abruptly. Through a side window the fur-coated figure of the Banker was standing against the wall with the others around him. They were staring toward the plane with an expression that clearly indicated they could not see it.
"We've started all right," George added. "Look at them! We're already in future time to them. They can't see us!"
Suddenly the Banker came forward walking with extraordinary swiftness, and seemingly with little jerks, like a manikin. George held his breath, for the Banker popped forward, his head and shoulders piercing the glowing phosphorescent walls and floor of the cabin. He stood motionless a brief instant, his face close to George's knees. Then, even more rapidly than he had advanced, he threw a swift glance around and retreated.
George recovered himself. "Boy," he said. "Wasn't that weird though? But we're all right. I feel fine now."
The droning of the Frazia motors sounded very faintly above the humming. It was a relief, a help toward normality. The plane was slowly raising into the air.
As it mounted, the roof of the Scientific Club dwindled away below. It was a dark night, with heavy clouds and a cold wind from the east. The city, with snow on its rooftops, was sliding eastward beneath them; vague black shadows, dark buildings dotted with lights, and seemingly empty streets.
They were still mounting diagonally upward, and carried sidewise by the wind, when the Hudson River slid into view.
"Rotten weather, Mr. Rogers," George suggested.
"Yes," Rogers agreed, "but that will not bother us for very long. Are you warm enough?"
"One heater is going," George responded. "I'll switch on another." He had familiarized himself thoroughly with the various mechanical appliances of the plane, and he turned a switch that threw current into another of the small electric radiators.
"Anything else?" he demanded.
"No, I think I shall try the higher intensities of the proton current. I want our time-progress accelerating as much as possible right from the beginning."
George selected a seat hastily.
It was not much of an ordeal. The humming seemed to move up a scale to a higher pitch as Rogers pulled the lever around. The reeling of the senses came again, but passed almost at once.
"There," said Rogers. "I'm glad that's accomplished." "We're at the fifteenth intensity--the highest that Loto used."
George was staring down through the floor window. "I can see lights down here. Are you sure it's the highest speed Loto used? He didn't describe it this way."
"Our acceleration will pick up over several hours," Rogers replied. "Our time-progress is still comparatively slow."
The Frazia motors were still droning.
"How high are we, do you suppose?" George demanded after a moment.
"Possibly five thousand feet. We're blowing westward over New Jersey. And a little to the south, I think. Soon it will be day."
His words were anticipated. The scene lighted swiftly. It was day; a dull, cold-looking, cloudy morning. Below them lay New Jersey, almost a network of villages on the fringe of lowlands. A more congested area of building was almost directly beneath and slid under them as they watched it.
"Newark!" exclaimed George. "And we're into tomorrow. We're making it--we'll soon be with Loto."
They were up higher than Rogers realized--ten thousand feet, at least. And their drift seemed constantly of a more southern trend. It was still uncomfortably cold in the cabin.
"Perhaps we should stay at this level," Rogers remarked. "We seem to have caught a wind from the north."
Night came again in a few moments. Lights dotted the landscape below, but they were vague, flickering lights. Then day, with sunlight. The wind sudsided. The plane's southern drift was stilled. And then came night with a moon plunging across the sky, and stars dizzily sweeping past. Then day again, until presently the daylight and the darkness were blended into gray. The drift was permanently passed. In a blending of all the diversified air currents, the plane remained almost stationary.
The white, snowy hills of New Jersey soon turned to green. The cabin air warmed a little. Then autumn and winter came again--and passed in a moment or two.
Rogers sighed with relief. "We're fairly started. One year out of twenty-eight thousand!"
"And we've got eight hundred or a thousand miles of space to travel also," said George. "We're going to make that simultaneously, aren't we?"
"Yes," agreed Rogers.
George took a last look through the floor window at the blurring gray landscape beneath, and stood up to join him. "Let's talk things over," he suggested. "I've got a lot of questions--plans and things."
Rogers had taken a sheaf of script from his pocket.
"Loto's notes to guide us," he explained. "I've followed them closely so far. We have a flight through time of something more than twenty-five thousand years at the fifteenth intensity, and then we slacken. Simultaneously, we must fly southward some thousand miles or more through space, directing our course for the southern tip of Florida. Loto specifies that we should, under all circumstances, reach the latitude of north Florida coincident with twenty-five thousand years of our time-progress. We will then--or perhaps a thousand years further along--see the island. We cannot miss it, of course. It is so large, and it must certainly endure over a great period of time."
"How long did Loto take to reach twenty-five thousand years?"
"About twelve hours," Rogers consulted the memoranda. "He computes his average speed as equivalent to the twelfth intensity. We are using the fifteenth continuously. Our clocks should register no more than ten hours for the time-flight.
"Ten hours," he added thoughtfully. "And flying directly south at a hundred miles an hour we would reach the island in those ten hours."
"But we haven't started south yet," George protested. "We're moving through time all right, but we're still right over Newark--and look at it!"
The New Jersey metropolis was spreading west to the Orange Mountains, and eastward it seemed to be linked solid with Jersey City. Factories dotted the intervening meadows, which were drained of their stagnant water.
"You're right," exclaimed Rogers. "We have barely nine hours left; we must start our horizontal flight."
In a few moments more they were speeding south and slightly west, at an altitude of some five thousand feet, with their progress through time steadily accelerating.
An hour, by their clocks, had passed. They were over Delaware Bay. Its shores, in the more congested areas, were lined almost solid with buildings. There was a great city on each side of the mouth of the river, with a gigantic bridge connecting them. The bridge rose into being under the eyes of the watchers in the flying plane, but they swept on past and in a moment left it far in the distance behind them.
George was seated on the floor watching the changing landscape; a huge, concave gray surface, shadowless, stretching out and up to the circular horizon. Steadily, like a panorama unrolled, it slid sidewise beneath them. The motion was greatest directly below. To the west, the mountains seemed, by an optical illusion, to be following, speeding forward with them.
The sea or its arms constantly occupied a portion of the scene, for they were still flying south and somewhat west, following the Atlantic coast. And of everything in sight, the sea alone seemed unchanging.
In time-progressing, that height of civilization Loto had described lay under them. They were flying lower now.
Rogers, in his seat at the controls, said: "I think we're making it as we should. That's the four thousand year mark just passed, and we're flying at a hundred and ten miles an hour."
"Are you sure we'll hit it right?" George asked anxiously.
"I think so. It's about as Loto figured so far. Those buildings--what a civilization that must be down there. It will fade presently...in three or four thousand years."
George joined him at the forward window. "Where are we? Are we still over Virginia?"
"Yes, at least I think we haven't crossed into North Carolina yet. That was Chesapeake Bay a while ago. Look! That city over there is melting--going down fast!"
The cabin interior was unlighted and dark, except for that phosphorescence with which everything glowed. In their absorption in the scene below, the travelers had forgotten their own curious aspect, until George suddenly remarked:
"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. 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 the sky was luminous with the mingled light of sun and moon and a myriad starry worlds, all 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. "George, can you take my place?"
George 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 automatic 'copters 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 and the ocean beyond it.
Rogers stretched himself out on one of the leather seats, and lighted a cigar. George 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 George. "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."
George bent over them. "About sixty-five hundred years. Some of the hands are going too fast to read."
"More than I had thought," commented Rogers.
"Do you figure we're still accelerating?"
"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."
George 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're 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 George. "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 George's suggestion they ate a light meal; then they started their flight southward again.
"How about looking at the dials now," George remarked. "They were at sixty-five hundred, thirty minutes ago."
"Eight thousand," Rogers read. "That's fifteen hundred more. It figures out to three thousand an hour. That's our peak, I think."
The flight now was passing through constantly changing conditions; every two minutes the plane was covering 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 to be breaking up. Here and there one stood in its glory; others were mere deserted piles of ruins over which the vegetation crawled, eager to devour. Still other cities and villages appeared over the southern horizon, sturdy and whole--and they 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.
"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 is their reading."
"Quarter of six," announced George.
"We should sight the island shortly," Rogers said. "I'll fly a trifle slower. We must be nearly down to Georgia by now--to where Georgia used to be, I should say. I want to sight the island at twenty thousand years, or thereabouts."
The land was growing white; the vegetation sparser. Small towns and hamlets that endured for no more than fifty or a hundred years 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 lived--the people struggling southward against the threatening, unrelenting cold, which spared nothing but the island of the Anglese.
Rogers was first to notice a radical departure from the normal conformation of the landscape. They were, by their own calculation, over Georgia. George, 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."
He maneuvered the plane into a climb; the gray land and sea tilted and began dropping away. The mountains seemed to be following them 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 their eyes: dark, craggy cliff faces, with snow capped summits, a pure white peak and a gray blue valley beside it. And the whole mass reared ten thousand feet above the sea.
The plane swept forward; the jagged, 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 of gray water, stretching east and west. And beyond that lay 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!"
"The island!" echoed George. "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, the 'copters holding them motionless, Rogers cut down the proton current to the fifth intensity. 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 grew everywhere, and the shoreline formed a broad, curving beach of white sand. 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," Rogers said 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, and two or three small rivers, one of which changed its course suddenly under their eyes; and everywhere that 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 time the 'copters 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 for 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 was separated into two brief, but distinguishable periods. Thus the voyagers sped through the days and nights, the weeks and months and forward into another year. At the beginning of the fourth year, Rogers changed to the third intensity. It was daylight--a yellow-red, swiftly mounting sun; flying blurs of white clouds close overhead; a blue sea, and a bright green island.
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 going.
"He said from the tip of the island," Rogers murmured. "A blue-white, vertical beam of light shining 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 George from his seat on the floor. "Why doesn't he hurry up? 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.
The purple night was momentarily colored with a red moon; 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!
