The man who mastered time

amazed. Unlike any beam of light he had ever seen, this one was curved; It descended in a slightly bent bow, ending at the barge. Fahn whispered a swift explanation to Rogers. To the Noths, looking upward along the beam, it would not appear curved, but straight. The figures of the girls, by an optical illusion, would be seen, not where they actually were, but to one side. The girls held their curved ray steady. And plunging down the beam, following its slightly curved path, were the figures of Azeela and Dee. The Noths saw them coming; a dozen bolts leaped into the air, one upon the other, but they flashed harmlessly to one side of their mark. Within twenty seconds the two girls were close to the barge; yellow-red spurts of flame leaped from their weapons--flame that could be hurled thirty feet but no farther. It enveloped the barge with licking, seething, burning liquid gases that withered everything they touched. A puff of darkness, which the retreating girls had left behind them, blotted out the scene. An instant later Azeela and Dee emerged from the darkness, safe. The shaft of light from the girls above was extinguished as the two rose to join them. When light shone again around the barge, it was sinking. Soon the swirling water held nothing but black, twisted figures. The maneuver could not be repeated successfully. From the other barges the Noths would have seen the curved beam, understood it and made allowances for it. Azeela and Dee, triumphant and flushed with their success, pleaded to try it again, but Fahn would not let them. The afternoon was waning; the western sky was red and overhead clouds were gathering. And then Fahn ordered a general attack on all the barges. The sun had set; the twilight deepened into night--a night of flashing lights, crackling, artificial thunder, spurts of lurid flame and the hissing of fire against water. At intervals, rockets came up; bursting, they cast a blue-white glare that for the space of a minute clearly outlined the menacing, darting figures for the Noths. The atmospheric disturbance of the past hours suddenly brought forth an electrical storm. Nature, more powerful than man, shot forth her own bolts to add to the din. They were, in character, very different from the harnessed, man-made lightning; forked, jagged, crackling with their nearness, they leaped downward out of the low-hanging clouds. The storm was as brief as it was severe. It swept away and the moon rose, blood-red, casting its lurid light over the water. Another Noth vessel had been sunk. There were only three barges left afloat, and they were in distress. Many of their swimming dogs lay dead in harness. Aboard all three of them, figures were fighting the flames. They clustered in a group near the center of the channel. Loto had withdrawn his forces, reduced now to half their original number. With ammunition almost exhausted, they hovered out of range above their adversaries. The wounded were still straggling back through the air; a few of them had already arrived at the cavern. Again Fahn ordered his army down. It would be the last attempt. In the cavern room, Fahn had not moved from his seat for hours. Often he could not see the battle plainly, for Loto, disobeying orders, had many times cast himself into the thick of it. But now Loto was aloft; by the moonlight and the glare of the rockets and bombs, Fahn saw that another Noth vessel had appeared--a very small barge. It was close to shore, coming swiftly forward and little objects of gleaming silver were mounting from it. One after the other they came sailing up. Fahn rasped an order; Loto's voice roared it out. The men and girls who were descending to the attack halted, circling about, wondering what had happened. The first of the white objects came sailing slowly horizontally across the channel. It seemed to be a whirling white disc some foot or two in diameter. Loto was still some distance away from it when a group of girls passed between him and the disc. The thing seemed to turn toward them. One of the girls became confused; it struck her and she fell. The disc, its rotation halted, fell also. Loto saw then what it was: broad, thin, crossed blades of steel, inclined to each other like the blades of a propeller. It had risen up and sustained itself in the air by rotation. Loto remembered the defeat of the flying thunderbolt platforms which Fahn had sent northward to Toroh's encampment. These whirling knives were what had destroyed them! The newly arrived barge was now sending up, in every direction, a slow but steady stream of the whirling knives. They seemed so easy to avoid that the aerial army at first paid them little heed. Loto's warning from Fahn rang out, but it came almost too late. The knives sought out the figures in the air. They began falling--cut, mangled by the whirling blades. There was confusion. The army mounted higher, but other knives had been sent straight upward and were floating down. Uncannily, they seemed to single out their victims. Fahn understood now. This was the weapon Toroh had procured from that time-world of the past. These whirling knives were strangely, powerfully magnetized; they followed the human bodies passing near them, seeking contact. The Scientist leader had ordered his fighters to the sea level; the knives, as they came lower, seemed to have spent themselves. They could be avoided. But nearly forty of the Anglese had met death before the lesson was learned. The three larger barges were again advancing toward the Anglese coast. Without warning, without orders from Fahn, the little remnant of girls led by Azeela and Dee, darted at them. It was a movement, not foolhardy, but well and swiftly planned. The girls, holding close to the surface, got themselves between two of the barges. The Noths could not fire, for they would have struck each other. A puff of inky darkness spread over the ships, and out of it, at close range, jets of fire sprang at the Noths; then the girls came back. One of the Noth vessels was a mass of flames; the other two wavered--and began retreating. For a moment there was silence and darkness, lighted only by the moon and the flickering light from the blazing barge. The whirling blades were no longer being launched; the Anglese were again poised in the air. Fahn had ordered that the small barge be attacked when, abruptly, a low hum sounded from it. George and Loto were hovering together at the moment; the barge was some five hundred feet below them and slightly off to one side. There didn't seem to be any dogs on it; only a few men under its wire cage, and a single large piece of apparatus. The hum grew louder, more intense, as though some gigantic dynamo had been set into motion. "What's that?" George demanded. But Loto did not know. Mogruud, with the remains of his division, was in the air half a mile away. He was on the other side of the small barge; his men, moving in scattered groups, began passing over it. The hum was rising in pitch, up the scale until it became a shrill electrical scream. Mogruud's men wavered--struggled as though to avoid being pulled downward. Then Loto realized that it must be the rest of the apparatus Toroh had secured out of the past--a giant electromagnet of some unknown variety. It was pulling at every figure in the air, drawing them irresistibly toward it. Loto and George could feel the pull; invisible fingers were snatching at them. The girls near at hand were fighting against it. Mogruud was moving forward with an effort, like a swimmer struggling with the clutch of an undertow. Several of his men, closer to the barge, had been drawn to it, flattened helplessly against its wire caging. Fire was leaping through their bodies...they were electrocuted. In the cavern Fahn sat tense, impotent. He could hear, as plainly as though he were out there over the sea, the scream of that uncanny thing that was reaching out its invisible electrical fingers to gather in its victims. At his side, for the past hour, Rogers had been operating the larger mirrors, flashing into them scenes from the various towers along the coast. Now Fahn heard him give a sharp, horrified exclamation. Rogers was staring at a mirrored scene from a coast tower near Orleen: moonlight, purple, starry sky and the deep purple of the channel; to one side, the dim outlines of the Orleen houses. And from the channel off Orleen, lights were flashing; a bomb burst and its glare shone on crowded barges close inshore! One of them, already at the beach, was disgorging its men and brutes! CHAPTER SIXTEEN Once again, Toroh's trickery was disclosed. To Fahn, the tactics of the Noths were now understandable. The Noth attack on Anglese City, at which Fahn had hurled all his armed forces, had been no more than a ruse to cover up Toroh's main offensive at Orleen. Toroh's orders, doubtless, had been to prolong the engagement until, under cover of night, his main forces could effect their landing at the other end of the island. This small barge with the magnet had probably been ordered to slip by, hugging the north shore of the channel, and proceed to Orleen. But its commander had, at what he must have considered a decisive moment, used it against the remnant of the little aerial army. Toroh's landing at Orleen was taking place; the channel expedition had served its purpose. The two remaining barges off Anglese City were in full retreat toward the open sea. The smaller barge, with its screaming magnet, was heading swiftly down the channel toward Orleen. The figures in the air were struggling against its pull. Some were losing, being hurled forward with control of themselves lost; others were forcing their way down to the water-level where the attraction seemed less. Still others had succeeded in escaping upward beyond its range. They circled high overhead, seeking some way of helping their unfortunate comrades. The double disaster was more than Fahn could cope with, or even watch closely in the two mirrors. Orleen lay on a peninsula some ten miles broad, with water on three sides of the city. The Noths were landing, spreading around the shores; across the land from shore to shore they were massed, but as yet they had not entered the city. Thousands of Arans were there--the king and his royal family--penned like rats in a trap. And there was only the small cavern with its meager garrison of Scientists to defend them. George found himself near the outer edge of the magnetic attraction. He could see the figures in the air nearer the barge struggling to escape from it. He did not know where Loto was, or Azeela or Dee. He saw Mogruud, with fifteen or twenty of the Bas about him. They were passing swiftly below. George wondered what he should do. The two larger barges were withdrawing. Some of the aerial figures were following them, and George started moving that way. The figures were attacking the barges from down near the surface of the water. Mogruud and his men were there now. George hastened. This last attack of the Anglese was one of desperate fury. George could see the flash of the bolts close to the water. One of the barges must have fired through its own darkness and struck its mate. As the blackness cleared, George saw that both the Noth vessels were blazing. One of them sank a moment later; from the flames on the other, figures were plunging into the water. The Anglese--one of them mounting--cast loose a light-bomb. In the brilliant glare, the aerial figures were darting about over the surface of the water, seeking out the Noth men and dogs who were swimming toward the island and striking them with the little thunderbolts, or with