The man who mastered time

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. CHAPTER TWELVE The interior of the plane was glowing. The familiar humming sounded. George 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 already. You'll feel all right soon." "I am all right," she persisted. "I mean, George, are we still in the cavern?" The question brought an idea to George 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. George 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 George. "We'd better get out." There were headlights on the plane; their glare showed the tunnel. George started up the Frazia motors, slowly; they rolled forward, faster as they left the tunnel-mouth and took to the air. The scene was that familiar grayness, new to Dee. Beneath them lay the island with the blurred, gray city to one side. "Over Orleen," George 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 says the dials are nearly two hundred and thirty years." "We're catching up with them," George exclaimed triumphantly. "We've got the faster plane. 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, George could see the summit of the other, directly beneath his plane. "How high is Toroh? They're using the 'copters?" "Yes." "How high up?" "She says about five hundred feet." It was the altitude at which George and Dee were hovering. George 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. "They've passed three hundred years, George," the girl's voice informed him. "Three hundred years just now." "Two hundred and ninety," he read from their own dials. "Only ten years away! We'll overtake them shortly now." 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. They stared at each other in dismay.