The man who mastered time
watching all the time you're away. Good-by, Loto."
"Good-by, Father." The cabin door closed upon him.
At a distance of twenty feet the men stood in a solemn group, watching.
"What will it look like going?" George whispered.
But no one answered him.
Presently a low hum became audible. It grew in intensity, until it
sounded like the droning of a thousand winged insects. The airplane
rocked gently on its foundation. It was straining, trembling in every
fiber.
A moment passed. Then the plane began to glow, seemingly phosphorescent
even in the light of the electric bulbs on the scaffolding beside it.
Another moment. There was a fleeting impression that the thing was
growing translucent--transparent--vapory. For one brief instant the
vision and sound of it persisted--_then it was gone_!
The men stood facing a silent, empty space, where a few loose boards
were lying, with a discarded hammer, a saw, and a keg of nails.
They had forgotten the woman. In an opposite corner of the enclosure
Lylda was seated alone, crying softly and miserably to herself.
* * * * *
George sat alone on a little bench in the roof garden of the Scientific
Club. On the ground beside him, stretched on a broad leather cushion,
Rogers lay asleep. It was well after midnight. There was hardly a breath
of air stirring, and only a few fleecy clouds to hide the stars. In the
east, a flattened moon was rising.
George sat with his chin cupped in his hands, staring out over the
lights and the roofs of the city. The growing moonlight gleamed on his
soft white shirt and white flannel trousers.
Rogers stirred and sat up. "Are you awake, George?"
"Go on to sleep. I'm good for nearly all night."
But Rogers rose, stretching. "What time is it?"
"Quarter of two. Go on to sleep, I tell you."
"I've had enough." The older man sat down on the bench and lighted a
cigar. "You'd better take a turn, George. You'll wear yourself out."
"I can't. I'm too excited. How long has he been gone now?"
Rogers calculated. "About twenty-eight hours."
"Do you think he'll get back tonight?"
"I don't know. Perhaps."
"I wonder what he's doing right now," George persisted after a silence.
Rogers did not answer.
"You don't think anything could have happened to him, do you?"
"No. I--I hope not."
"I hope he brings that girl back with him," George said after another
silence. "I certainly would like to meet her."
Rogers plucked a flower from the trellis beside them, breaking it in his
fingers idly. "He may get back tonight. It was our idea that--"
He stopped abruptly, and simultaneously George gripped him by the arm.
They both saw it; a little blob of radiance in the air just beyond the
flower trellis; a shining spot small as a puff of tobacco smoke gleaming
silvery in the moonlight.
George murmured tensely, "Over there...something."
A transparent radiance. But in a moment it was congealing, turning into
a glistening, solid shape. The faint hum of it sounded as it hung in
mid-air by the trellis.
"Not the plane," George murmured. "Then what is it?"
The humming ceased. They could see the little object clearly now; a
metal cube, each of its faces some twenty inches in diameter. It hung
for another moment, then dropped with a little thump to the rooftop.
Both the men were on their feet. Rogers said, "A message from him. An
emergency..." He picked up the cube.
George stared wonderingly. "You know about this?"
"We arranged it--only for an emergency. If he could not come, or felt
it unwise, he was to send this. We did not want to worry
anyone--particularly his mother--so we didn't mention this
possibility."
* * * * *
In a downstairs club room, the men and Lylda were gathered, all of them
gazing mute and solemn as Rogers opened the cube. Much of its interior
was filled with the intricate time-mechanisms. To one side a sheaf of
manuscript pages was crowded, closely written with Loto's script.
"His message," George murmured. "I do hope he found the girl, and that
they're all right."
"I'll read it to you." Rogers' fingers were trembling as he drew out the
pages. He lighted a cigarette, steadied himself. "The first thing he
says--he's all right--"
"Of course he's all right," the Banker growled. "That boy is
resourceful."
"He wants us to know that he's safe and well. It says...."
CHAPTER THREE
First I want you all to know, I'm quite safe and well. _Mamita_ dear,
please try not to worry about me. Remember, Father we anticipated I
might decide it best to send you a message. I do hope I have calculated
the space-and time-factors correctly, and that I've set the mechanisms
of the cube so that it will come back to you within a day or two after
my departure. I'm assuming that is so.
You will understand, of course, that as I have lived time, it has been
far longer than that. Much has happened to me, and I want to tell you
now what I can of it.
You recall that night when I left you--to me now it seems so long ago. I
remember your solemn faces as I closed the door of the cabin after me. I
was in the forward one of the three compartments--you saw it when you
inspected the plane the night I started.
In this compartment are the controls for the Frazia motors and the
flying controls. The controls of my own mechanism are there also. These
are simple; merely a switch to regulate the proton current, as Father
and I call it, and a series of small dials for recording the
time-change. These dials are geared, with one for days, another for days
in multiples of ten, one for years, and others for years in multiples of
tens, hundreds, and thousands.
I took my seat behind the Frazia controls. I was not going to use them
at once, because there was no immediate need to raise the plane into
the air. But I wanted to be seated; I could not tell what the shock of
starting might be. The dials and switch were on the wall at my right. I
moved the lever of the switch over to the first intensity. There was a
low hum. The floor seemed to rock under me. The humming increased; it
roared in my ears. Everything was vibrating with an infinitely tiny,
trembling quiver that penetrated into my body, into my bones, even
coursed through my blood.
They were swift sensations, I suppose, lasting no more than a few
seconds. I felt, as near as I can explain it, as though some force that
holds my own body together, cell by cell, were being tampered with; as
if, had the struggle continued, I might be shattered into a myriad of
tiny fragments, like a puff of exploded powder.
The humming grew still louder, and I remember trying to stand up. A wild
impulse to throw back the switch and stop the thing came to me, but I
resisted it. Then I was conscious of a sensation of falling headlong; a
dizzy, sickening reeling of the senses, rather than the body.
I lost consciousness--for only a moment or two, I think. I was sitting
in my seat, uninjured. The humming was still in my ears, insistent. But
it was not so loud as I had thought, and after a time I forgot it almost
entirely.
My first impression now was that everything about me was glowing,
radiating a phosphorescent light. I looked down at my knees; my clothes
were glowing. I could no longer distinguish color; my hands and my shoes
were the same--all that same glowing phosphorescence. It gave a sense of
unreality to everything. And then I saw that everything _was_ unreal;
nothing had any substance. I could distinguish the side of the cabin
through my hand, and beyond the cabin wall I could see the solidity of
the board enclosure where the plane was resting. It was as though my
body and the cabin interior were shimmering ghosts. But when I gripped
my knee with my hand, I felt solid enough.
I have given you details of my sensations as I remember them now, but I
do not suppose that more than a minute or two had elapsed since I had
first pulled the switch. I glanced at the dial recording the passage of
days but there was no movement.
I stood up, conscious of a nausea and a strong feeling of
light-headedness. I peered through one of the side windows. Outside,
everything looked at first glance as though I had not yet started. The
walls of the enclosure were clear, solid and as distinct as before. Then
I saw George staring directly at me, and I could tell by the expression
of his face that he was looking, not at the plane, but at an empty space
where the plane had been.
It was all as real outside as though I had been part of it myself--until
I saw the others move across the enclosure. They were walking extremely
fast and their gestures were rapid; two or three times more rapid than
normal.
For what seemed like five or ten minutes I stood there watching you all.
It was like a moving picture being run too fast--and being constantly
accelerated. I saw you roll back the canvas roof, and then you went
scurrying out through the door--the last of you so fast that the figure
blurred in my sight.
I was left alone. For a while I sat there, a little dazed. There is a
small clock on the side wall of the cabin. It might have been completely
radium-painted, by the look of it at that moment, but even though it
glowed as intangible as a ghost, I could make out the hands. I was sure
they would be traveling through space at their accustomed speed and thus
give me the time of the world I had left. I had started at about ten
minutes of ten; the clock now showed about five minutes after ten. I had
been gone fifteen minutes. Above the enclosure, to the east, I saw the
moon. It was about an hour up, I judged. And that gave me a basis to
compute my starting acceleration. The moon an hour up would have made
your time ten minutes of two--four hours after I started. I had passed
through those first four hours in fifteen minutes!
This was with my control at the weakest intensity of the current. There
are twenty subdivisions of power. I pushed the handle around from one
to the other of them quickly, pausing only an instant on each, and
stopping at the tenth. There was no change of sensation, except that the
humming seemed to grow, not louder exactly, but more powerful--more
penetrating. The interior of the cabin and my own body lost visible
density in appearance. You had switched off the electric lights outside,
but in the moonlight I could still see the board walls, not only through
the windows, but through the metallic sides of the cabin.
I was tingling all over, but the sensation, now that I was used to it,
was pleasant rather than the reverse; a feeling of lightness, buoyancy
and strength.
With the power increased tenfold, the acceleration of time-movement was
enormous. The movement of the rising moon became visible; the heavens
were turning over, the stars progressing from point to point with ever
increasing speed.
About ten minutes after ten by the clock, the moon was near the zenith,
and the sun rose an instant later. I was conscious of a flash of
twilight, and the sun's disk shot up from the horizon. The world was
plunged into daylight.
From my position inside the enclosure I could see nothing outside but
the sky and one or two of the tallest buildings near at hand. There was
no visible movement of anything but the sun. You can understand that, of
course. Had any of you come into the enclosure, or had an airplane
passed overhead, I would not have seen either one. The movement would
have been too rapid for my vision.
In perhaps a minute or two the sun was directly overhead, and in another
fraction of a minute it had set. Darkness was upon me. Then the moon
rose again and flashed across the heavens. Clouds formed and disappeared
so quickly I could hardly see them.