The man who mastered time
"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