The man who mastered time
The Scientist had hardly spoken. He was pale, grim as ever, but his
gaze, when he looked upon his daughters held a curious softness. What
were his plans. What were they going to do? George asked the questions,
but Fahn ignored them.
The little aerial army approaching from Anglese City was now in sight.
Fahn radioed them to move back, descend, and stop the Bas army and its
dogs. All of them were to return to the capital.
The plane landed on a small level rock near the summit of the higher
peak. On top of the cavern, six hundred feet away, a solitary male
figure stood. The blood light of the sunrise fell full upon it. _Toroh!_
He was standing there, regarding the city.
Fahn leaped to the projector, but Toroh had disappeared.
"Hurry!" exclaimed the Scientist. He still would not let them question
him. He unlashed the projector and they helped him lower it to the
ground. He leaped down after it, adjusting it, swinging it to bear down
upon the lower peak.
"We must hurry," he repeated. He was back on the cabin platform. "They
will be out of the cavern, firing upon us."
The Noths down there were gazing up at the plane; others were now
pouring out of the cavern entrance.
Fahn's projector was trained on the crater of the lower mountain. From
this greater height its depths were visible.
In the cabin of the plane the Scientist's arms went around his
daughters. "Good-by, my girls--for a little time," he whispered in their
own tongue.
They were frightened; suddenly Dee was crying. But he pushed them from
him. He would attack the cavern; they must all stay in the plane--rise
high--very high.
Something in the man's look, the command in his voice, struck them all
silent. They obeyed. He climbed down to the rock. The plane mounted
swiftly into the air.
The sun was above the eastern horizon; the sky was an inverted bowl of
blood. Beneath the plane Fahn's figure, standing beside his projector,
showed clear-cut against the black rock under him. At the base of the
cavern mountain Noths had appeared with apparatus. They were adjusting
it hurriedly.
A blue-white flash from Fahn's projector spat downward across the six
hundred feet and into the crater mouth. Thunder rolled out. Another
flash, another--until they became almost continuous. Far down in the
earth within the crater, the slumbering forces began to answer. A
rumbling sounded--a low, ominous muttering, pregnant with infinite
power. Steam hissed upward; a puff of smoke....
The plane had been ascending rapidly; it was thousands of feet up now.
Fahn's thunderbolts persisted, and at last the angered fires of the
earth were unleashed. The mountain seemed to split apart; the report was
deafening; flaming gases, cinders and ashes were hurled upward and
outward.
The main force of the explosion was sidewise toward the city, but even
so the plane barely avoided the torrent of molten rock and blazing gas
that mounted from below.
The city was engulfed in flames over which a heavy smoke hung like a
pall. A tremendous lake of viscous liquid fire lay where the peaks and
the cavern once had been. The earth was rumbling, shaking, splitting
apart. The scene was vague--dulled by a lurid red glare that struggled
with the blackness of the smoke.
A moment, and a rift appeared. The smoke seemed to part, roll aside.
Through the rift, the burning city showed for an instant clear and
distinct--the crowded city in which no single human or beast could have
remained alive.
Still not content, the earth was heaving over the whole western end of
the island. And from the sea a great tidal wave came rolling up over the
sinking land, hissing, quenching the fires, obscuring everything in a
cloud of steam. Like a mist, the steam presently dissipated. The turgid
waters lashed themselves into furious waves that gradually were stilled.
And then it was daylight, sullen red day, with only the wreckage on the
waters--charred fragments of bodies, thousands of them floating for
miles around--mute evidence of what had gone before.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Once again the plane hung like a shimmering ghost above the towering
piles of steel and masonry--New York City at the peak of its
civilization. For Azeela and Dee, it had been a brief trip of awe and
wonder; a trip northward through space and back through time.
After the cataclysm, they had stayed but a week back in Anglese City.
The entire western end of the island had sunk into the gulf, carrying
Toroh and his Noths and the Arans and their King to destruction. In
Anglese City a new government was formed--a democracy of the Bas, with
Mogruud at its head.
Rogers was impatient to return to his wife in New York City. Azeela and
Dee, left orphans, had no wish to stay. Unobtrusively as it had come,
the Frazia plane departed.
In the humming, glowing cabin of the plane the voyagers were waiting for
the dials to reach the time world for which they were headed. On one of
the side benches, the ghostlike figures of Loto and Azeela sat a little
apart from the others; they were talking softly as they gazed down
through the window beside them.
"You think Mogruud will make a good leader?" she asked. "My father would
have been so strong, so stern, but always just and fair...." Her eyes
had filled with tears.
He pressed her hand sympathetically. "I know, Azeela. But you mustn't
grieve. He gave his life for his people."
"Yes. And he said 'Good-by--for a little time.' Oh, Loto--I did not
realize then what he meant."
"He knew--someday--you would be with him again. And you will." His arm
went around her tenderly. "I shall always try to make you happy. I
promise it, Azeela. Always, as long as we live."
"Beloved," she murmured. "Beloved, who always understands."
Rogers had been talking to George and Dee. He left them to attend to the
motors. Dee was watching the scene beneath the plane; as they fled back
through the centuries the great city was melting away.
"Your city that we're going to," she said after a long silence. "George,
is it like this? Are we almost to its time now?"
"No," he laughed. "It's a very little, puny city I have to show you,
Dee. I used to think it was wonderful. But it's only a conceited
child--learning as fast as it can and thinking it knows everything. I
used to be like that myself. But this sort of trip changes one."
She did not answer.
"I'm glad you're coming back with us, Dee."
"Yes," she said abstractedly.
"Dee," he persisted out of another silence, "I wonder if you know how
happy it makes me to have you--here where we're going. I've wanted to
tell you for a long time--maybe you don't know how I feel. I--"
* * * * *
On this return journey, the plane had now reached the height of its time
velocity. The swiftly changing form of the city blurred the scene into a
confusion of shifting details, among which only the broadest
fundamentals were discernible. The northern section of Central Park
presently lay open. Then the great building that covered its southern
end melted into nothingness, and trees and water were in its stead.
George was at the dials. "One hundred years! We're almost into our own
century!"
Through decreasing intensities of the proton current, they slackened
their time velocity. The park, whitened with winter, turned green again
as the previous summer was reached. Soon the days separated from the
nights. The sun came up from the west, plunged swiftly across the sky,
and dropped into the east.
It was spring, but the retrogression soon brought winter again. A
January snowfall lay white beneath the naked trees of the park. But it
was autumn in a moment.
Rogers was watching the dials closely. Summer again; then spring. In one
of the brief periods of night he threw the switch to the first
intensity. The plane began drifting to the south. The dim stars were
swinging eastward in a murky sky. The city lights shone yellow.
The roof of the Scientific Club came into view among the buildings south
of the plane. Rogers threw off the current completely.
"Look, Dee!" cried George. "Look, Azeela! There it is at last! See the
board enclosure?"
* * * * *
An evening in March. In the large living room of the Banker's Park
Avenue apartment, a group of his friends were gathered. Dinner was over;
a butler was serving coffee and the men were lighting their cigars.
A woman and four men--all in evening dress--were sitting in a group;
mingled with their voices came the soft, limpid tones of a piano. It
stood in a secluded alcove--a grand piano of carved mahogany. On a bench
before its keyboard, a young man in a Tuxedo was playing. George. Dee
stood beside him, leaning against the instrument. She was gazing first
at the page of music with a puzzled frown, then at his fingers as they
roamed the keys, and then, in admiration, at his face.
On a high-back davenport before an open fireplace, Loto sat with Azeela.
There was an artificial black flower in her spun-gold hair; the mourning
custom of her time world. Her milk-white throat was bare, and the blue
of her dress was mirrored in her eyes. She was silent, staring into the
flames licking upward from the huge logs.
"That's very pretty music," she said finally. "So big an
instrument--this piano as you call it--you never would think one could
play it."
"Chopin," he answered. "A piece by Chopin. George plays Chopin mighty
well. Azeela, there is so much I have to show you. Just that one little
thing--Chopin, for instance. I want you to hear the music of some of the
great composers and pianists."
"And the opera," she prompted. "And you promised you would take me to a
theater."
"I will, of course. There are so many things for you to see. Why, it
will be just like a new world, a new life that you're just beginning,
Azeela."
"Yes," she murmured. "A new life in a new world. It seems like that
already."
"And wait till you ride in the subways! You'll be surprised how--"
But she shuddered. "I do not believe I want to do that. It would bring
back memory of the cavern...other things."
George and Dee left the piano and walked over to the fireplace. Azeela
moved over on the davenport. Loto stood up, but George shook his head.
"Thanks. Dee and I thought we'd try the window seat."
Across the room the Big Business Man, the Doctor, and the Banker were
demanding additional details from Rogers.
"That Toroh and his Noths were in the cavern at Orleen" the Banker said
gruffly. "Can't you keep the thing straight? I want to hear it
consecutively--not jumped around in this way."
Ensconced in the window seat, George and Dee gazed out at the yellow
lights of the city around them--a city so different from anything Dee
could have even imagined.
There was a soft, rose-shaded light beside the girl. George was not
looking out of the window, but at her. He had seen Dee in many costumes,
but never, he thought, was she so beautiful as right now.
A girl of his own time world. He had not realized that this was the way
he had always wanted her to look. Her dress, dropping to a few inches
above her ankles, was soft and clinging. Her black hair, like Azeela's,
was dressed high on her head. Like Azeela, too, she wore the dark
mourning flower. The soft light beside her cast a flush on her
milk-white throat and cheeks.
Feeling his gaze, she turned.
"You like the way Lylda has clothed me? It feels very strange."
"Yes," he said. "You look beautiful, Dee."
She turned back to the window in confusion. From below, the hum of the
city floated up to them; the raucous sirens of automobiles.
"Yes," he repeated. "I do like it very much, Dee."
Abruptly his arms were around her; he was kissing her.
"George! Some one will see us!"