The Project Gutenberg eBook ofThe time-raiderThis ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this ebook or online atwww.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this eBook.Title: The time-raiderAuthor: Edmond HamiltonIllustrator: Hugh RankinRelease date: July 9, 2022 [eBook #68483]Most recently updated: October 18, 2024Language: EnglishOriginal publication: United States: Popular Fiction Publishing Company, 1927Credits: Greg Weeks, Mary Meehan and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE TIME-RAIDER ***
This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this ebook or online atwww.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this eBook.
Title: The time-raiderAuthor: Edmond HamiltonIllustrator: Hugh RankinRelease date: July 9, 2022 [eBook #68483]Most recently updated: October 18, 2024Language: EnglishOriginal publication: United States: Popular Fiction Publishing Company, 1927Credits: Greg Weeks, Mary Meehan and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
Title: The time-raider
Author: Edmond HamiltonIllustrator: Hugh Rankin
Author: Edmond Hamilton
Illustrator: Hugh Rankin
Release date: July 9, 2022 [eBook #68483]Most recently updated: October 18, 2024
Language: English
Original publication: United States: Popular Fiction Publishing Company, 1927
Credits: Greg Weeks, Mary Meehan and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE TIME-RAIDER ***
The TIME-RAIDERBy EDMOND HAMILTON[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced fromWeird Tales October, November December 1927 and January 1928.Extensive research did not uncover any evidence thatthe U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced fromWeird Tales October, November December 1927 and January 1928.Extensive research did not uncover any evidence thatthe U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
"He dangled helplessly in the thing's embrace."
"He dangled helplessly in the thing's embrace."
"He dangled helplessly in the thing's embrace."
CHAPTER 1
THE CANNELL MYSTERY
In beginning this account of our great adventure, it must be understood that I attempt no complete history of the matter. There will be gaps, many gaps, in the continuity of my story, for that story remains, after all, simply a record of my own contacts with the Raider, and with those people whose lives he entered and darkened. So that my tale here is necessarily one of personal experience, except for a few places where I have summarized general knowledge.
Besides this history of what I may term the more human side of our experience, Dr. Lantin has dealt with its scientific aspects in his epochal work on time-displacement and in our joint monograph on electronic acceleration. Although several salient features of the affair have been omitted, for reasons that will figure later, yet the two works mentioned and the present record give a broad outline of the whole matter, from the beginning.
From the beginning! But where was that beginning? Ages back in the past, or ages ahead in the future? To place the true beginning of it all would be to know much about it that we do not know. So I start at the point where the matter definitely entered my own life and world. And that point, that event, is the Cannell Mystery, as it was then termed.
You will find it in the newspapers of the day, the bare facts wrapped in clouds of speculation. Professor Ferdinand Cannell, of New York, disappearing inexplicably in the jungles of Indo-China, vanishing from the world of men as though blotted out.
At that time, Cannell was undoubtedly one of the very greatest of living archeologists. Nominally attached to a great New York museum, he was really a free-lance student and excavator, roaming about the world in search of proof for his numerous and startling theories. His first fame had been established by his researches into the Dravidian remnants in lower India, and he had followed that brilliant achievement by another as great, the monumental Warren Society investigation into the walled ruins of Zimbabwe, in South Africa.
With two such successes behind him, Cannell then boldly proposed to make the subject of his next researches the mighty ruined city of Angkor, in the heart of the Cambodian jungle. Angkor has long been a colossal challenge to modern wisdom, a gigantic, towered metropolis of gray stone, once noisy with the life of swarming millions, but silent and dead now, unutterably dead. A thousand years the huge ruin has lain in the jungle, wrapped in silence, inhabited only by snakes and bats and tigers. Its past, the history of its builders, has been a vast enigma always, which Cannell had determined to solve.
So he sailed for Hongkong, and Dr. Lantin and I were on the dock when his ship cleared. My own acquaintance with Cannell was recent, but Lantin and he had been close friends for years. Their friendship dated back to their university days, and had continued after they diverged into different lines of work, Cannell's taking him to the remnants of past peoples, while Lantin's interest in radio-chemistry had brought him to the great New York laboratories of the Downe Foundation, with myself as his laboratory assistant.
For all their warm friendship, there was a strong contrast between the two men. Cannell was the younger by a few years, a blond giant of thirty-five or thirty-six, with snapping blue eyes and a habit of talking with machine-gun rapidity. Altogether the antithesis of Dr. Lantin, who was dark, medium of stature and quiet of manner, with friendly gray eyes that could take on the glint of steel, at times.
Together we had waved farewell to Cannell and a few weeks later had received a cable from Saigon, in Indo-China, briefly announcing his arrival. He had then proceeded up the Mekong River into the wilderness of the interior, and finally over a network of winding creeks to Angkor itself. The latter stage of the journey was made in canoes, some seven or eight natives poling along Cannell and his outfit, but no other white man was in the party.
No more was heard of the venture until a week later, when the natives of Cannell's party straggled into a little up-river village, without him. They explained, volubly, that on the third night after reaching Angkor, the white man had been seized and carried away by the devils of the ruins. None of them had actually seen this but they had heard his scream, from a distance, and when they conquered their fears enough to search the ruins, had found no trace of him. It was clear that the powerful spirits of the dead city were angered, and had snatched away the white man who dared to disturb them, so the terror-stricken natives had at once fled from the place with all speed.
On hearing this tale, several French planters made their way to Angkor, forcing the unwilling natives to accompany them, but they found no trace of Cannell, who seemed to have vanished completely. His tent and outfit were found, quite undisturbed, which tended to corroborate the natives' story regarding their sudden flight.
So when the little search-party returned, it was advanced as its opinion that Cannell had been seized and carried away by a roving tiger, his scream and disappearance being interpreted by the natives as a visitation of demons, since they were known to be extremely superstitious in regard to the dead city. While this explanation was faulty enough, it seemed the only rational one available, and was accepted by the authorities at Saigon.
And so the matter rested. Cannell's only relatives had been distant connections, and except for Lantin he had had scarcely one intimate friend, so after the first shock of surprize his passing caused little stir. The newspapers speculated briefly, and the archeological journals expressed regrets, referring to his splendid achievements. But that was all. New stars soon rose to fill his place in the scientific firmament. And Cannell was forgotten.
Time drove on. Days ... months ... years....
CHAPTER 2
CANNELL'S STORY
I pass to that June night, over three years after Cannell's disappearance, when my own part in the drama may be said to begin. Lantin and I were working late in our laboratory at the Foundation, when we were interrupted by the telephone bell. We had reached a critical point in our experiment, and as Lantin hurried over to the instrument, I heard him muttering threats to have it removed. I did not catch his first answer, but after a minute's silence he flung out a single word, in a strange voice, that startled me.
"Cannell!"
At once I hastened over to his side, and as I did so, he turned toward me a face eloquent of astonishment, still holding the receiver to his ear. "I'll be there in ten minutes!" he shouted into the instrument, then hung up and turned to face my excited questions.
"Good God, Wheeler," he cried, "it's Cannell!"
"What?" I asked, stupidly, dumfounded by the assertion.
"Cannell," he repeated, "at my apartment. He says to meet him there at once. Where could he have been, these three years?"
But I was already reaching for my hat and a moment later we were on the street outside, hailing a cruising taxi. Lantin's bachelor home was in the west 70's, a little roof-bungalow set on top of a big apartment building, and we sped up the avenue toward it with the highest legal speed.
Lantin did not speak at all, on the way. He was plainly highly excited, but my own agitation was fast calming. After all, I thought, the thing might be a stupid practical joke, though an unforgivable one to perpetrate. Still, if Lantin had recognized the voice—Before I could ask him about that, the cab stopped, and we hastened into the building, to the elevator.
When the cage stopped at its highest point in the building, Lantin was instantly out and striding eagerly across the foyer of his apartment. He flung the door open, then stopped short. Standing behind him, I peered over his shoulder into the room inside. There was a man there, a man who jumped to his feet and came quickly toward us. It was Cannell, I saw at once. Cannell—but changed.
His face was drawn and haggard, and instead of his former impatient, challenging expression, it bore the impress of an unearthly fear. A fear that showed even in the tense, half-crouching position of his body, as he came across the room toward us, searching our faces with his burning eyes. He came closer, gripped Lantin's hands, struggled to speak.
"Thank God you came, Lantin!" he cried, chokingly.
We stood speechless, and with a sudden reaction of feeling he stepped back and sank wearily into a chair, running his hand tiredly over his eyes. Lantin found his voice then for the first time.
"Where have you been, man?" he shouted. "Three years! For God's sake, Cannell, what happened to you? Where were you all that time?"
Cannell gazed up at us, strangely, somberly, a brooding darkness settling on his face. "All that time?" he repeated, musingly. "Three years? Three years to you, perhaps, but not to me. But not to me."
A sudden glance flashed between Lantin and myself. Was the man mad? Did that account for his strange disappearance?
Cannell saw and interpreted that glance. "I know what you're thinking," he told us, "and sometimes I think you're right, that I really am crazy. I would be better off if I were," he concluded, darkly. But before we could comment on his strange words, his mood changed abruptly and he motioned us to chairs beside him, bending toward us in sudden eagerness.
"But you two," he said, "I can tell you what I saw, what happened. I could not tell others—no! They would never have believed, and it may be that even you will not. But it is all truth—truth, I tell you!" And on the last words his voice rose to a high-pitched, ragged scream. Then, mastering his shattered nerves with an effort, he went on.
"You know why I went to Angkor, what I planned to do there. I went up the Mekong by steamer, then hired natives to take me the rest of the way in canoes. Up winding waterways they took me, through narrow creeks and old canals, and out over a great lake, in which a forest lay submerged. Then up another creek and finally by bullock-cart to Angkor itself.
"There is no use trying to describe the place to you. I have seen most of the great ruins of the past and the great buildings of the present, but Angkor towers above them all, the most magnificent thing ever built by the hands of men. It is a vast city of carven gray stone, a city whose lacelike sculptured walls and crenelated battlements have looked down for a thousand years on nothing but the jungle that hems it in, and the silence and death that lie incarnate in itself. Literally acres of ruined buildings, square miles of crumbling stone, and set in the heart of that great mass of remnants, the palace, Angkor Thom, a great ruin whose courts and walls and terraces lie as desolate and broken as the city around them.
"A deep moat surrounds the city, and out over it leads a great causeway, built of huge blocks of stone, a wide, level highway that leads through the jungle for a short distance to the supreme glory of the place, Angkor Wat, the gigantic temple. Unlike the palace and city, the temple has not fallen into ruins but remains nearly the same as it must have been when the city was living and splendid. It towers up to a tremendous height, its dark, frowning walls looming far above the green jungle around it. When I walked into it for the first time, the mighty grandeur of the place was so awesome and compelling that I felt presumptuous—ashamed. The stifling, brooding silence seemed to flow down on me like a tangible wave, humbling me, dwarfing me.
"I spent my first two days in a superficial exploration of the palace and city, wandering through the miles of crumbling streets and fallen buildings. But I pass over that to the third day, when I started my examination of Angkor Wat. All of that day I spent in the temple, alone, for the natives feared to venture into it. Along its marching walls life-sized figures were carved in exquisite relief, warriors, kings and elephants, battles and ceremonies, literally miles of lavished, delicate sculptures. I lingered with them, absorbed, until the sun had set and the swift tropical darkness was descending, then abruptly came to a realization of my surroundings and started for my camp.
"Through the deepening shadows of the temple's halls I went, stumbling here and there against fallen stones, and finally came with a slight sensation of relief to the stone-paved courtyard in front of the edifice, from which the great causeway led back to the city and to my camp. It was quite dark, now, but I stopped for a moment there, since the moon was just rising and the scene was one of perfect beauty—the calm moonlight flooding over the silent ruins, the dark, looming walls behind me, the black shadows that lay across the silver-lit courtyard. For minutes I stood there, fascinated, but finally turned to go.
"I walked across the courtyard, then stopped abruptly and looked up. A strange sound had come to my ears from above, a sound that was like distant, shrill whistling. It hung for a moment, faint and eery, then grew much louder, like a score of men whistling piercingly in different keys, varied, tumultuous. I half expected to see birds passing above, but there were none. The air had been heavy and still for hours, but now a puff of wind smote me, a little, buffeting breeze that changed suddenly to a hard wind and then to a raging gale that whipped the sun-helmet off my head and nearly twisted me from my feet. And with that sudden change, the whistling chorus above had changed also, had waxed to a raging tumult of wind-shrieks, piercing, tempestuous! Abruptly, now, there flashed into being in the air forty feet above me—a thing!
"It was a swirling mass of dense gray vapor, looking in the moonlight much like a drifting cloud of steam. But this smoky mass was alive with motion of its own, spinning and interlacing, and from it came the shrill chorus and the raging winds. And, too, I saw that somewhere inside those shifting mists glowed three little circles of green light, one set above the other two, three tiny, radiant orbs whose brilliance stood out even in the mellow moonlight.
"Abruptly, as I stared up at the thing, those three circles of vivid green luminescence changed to purple, no less brilliant. And at the same instant, there came a change to the spinning mists around them. Those mists seemed to contract, to shrink, to solidify, and then they had vanished and in place of them hung a thing of solid matter, a mass of what seemed to be gray, resilient flesh, and at the center of which hung steadily the little triangle of purple lights. Nor was this solid mass any more unchanging than the misty one had been, for it seemed to have no one form, flashing with incredible speed through a myriad half-glimpsed shapes. It folded and unfolded, contracted, elongated, spun and writhed, a protean changing of shapes that my eyes could scarcely follow. But always the three little orbs of purple hung unchanged at its center.
"Scarcely more than a minute had elapsed since the thing first had appeared above me, and now as I gazed up at it, stupefied, I sensed dimly that the whistling sounds and the winds had died away. Then, before my dazed mind could fully comprehend the strangeness of the creature that hung in the air above me, that creature floated swiftly down beside me, so near that I could have touched it. And out from the changing, inchoate mass of it reached a long, twisting tentacle, straight toward me!
"I staggered weakly back, and screamed. But that arm circled and gripped me, then pulled me in toward the central mass of the thing. It was cold to the touch, an utter, numbing cold, like the chill of something from outer space, utterly alien to our earth and life. That cold shock stabbed through me and paralyzed me, and I dangled helplessly in the thing's grip, while at its center, seen, somehow,throughthe mass of the thing, the triangle of purple orbs seemed to watch me.
"All this had been enacted in a few moments, and now the inexplicable thing that held me began to rise again, to float up some distance above the ground. It still gripped me tightly, and now the purple orbs changed again to brilliant green, while again the solid, twisting mass of the thing changed, expanding and swirling, until it was again the drifting, spinning mass of vapor which I had first glimpsed. I floated in those mists, gripped as tightly as ever by their unseen holds, and now began again the shrill, piercing whistling, from all around me, while a rising torrent of wind roared around the thing that held me.
"At the same time, glancing up, I saw the moon racing across the sky above with incredible speed, bounding across the zenith like a shooting star and sinking down in the west. Hardly had it disappeared when there was an up-gush of gray light from the eastern horizon, and then the sun leapt up, red and flaming, and hurtled across the sky with even greater speed. I caught a glimpse of Angkor beneath, bathed in tropical sunlight. And a half-minute before it had been deepest night!
"A deadly sickness seized me, and while I strove against it the sun raced down into the west and it was night again, with the shining moon again flashing across the sky with nightmare speed. Again it disappeared and again the sun sprang up and rocketed headlong across the zenith. And for the first time there came to my numbed brain some realization of what was happening.
"This inexplicable thing that held me—this being of changing mists and vapors—was taking me on through time. It was whirling me on into the future, with some undreamed-of power of its own.
"The sun was racing across the sky with comet speed, now, a streak of golden light, and day and night followed each other like the flipped leaves of a book, faster and faster. In a few minutes they had become indistinguishable, had merged into a green twilight in which I could see but dimly the ground below. And even as we thus sped on through time, with ever-increasing speed, the thing that held me began to move through space also, and I caught a glimpse of ruined Angkor sliding away from beneath me.
"The thundering roar of the winds grew even louder as we moved simultaneously through time and space. I caught fragmentary glimpses of land flashing by beneath, with tremendous speed. And all the while I hung there in the grip of the thing, held by the smoky mist-spirals, swinging helplessly around and around the three circles of radiant green light at the thing's center.
"With a sudden surge of desperate courage, I tried to move in the remorseless grip that prisoned me, endeavored to raise my right hand to my belt, putting all my force into the effort. Slowly my hand came up, inch by inch, struggling against the unseen grip of iron that grasped me. It came up, with infinite slowness, until it was high enough to grasp the automatic in my belt-holster. I clasped the pistol's stock and threw off the safety catch, then, with another great effort, swung up the pistol until it pointed directly at the triangle of radiant orbs, and pulled the trigger.
"The report snapped out thinly above the thundering of the winds. And instantly the grip of the unseen, vaporous arms around me relaxed, releasing me utterly, and I plunged down through space.
"Down I fell, all of a hundred feet, and struck water, sinking down and down into it, ever more slowly, then hurtling up to the surface again, gasping for air. It was night, and above was no sign of the thing that had held me, so I judged that it had gone on into time. The water I swam in was salt, and I knew from the long, easy swells that I was in the open sea. There was no shore in sight, nor any sign of one, so I wasted no effort in swimming but strove only to keep afloat.
"For over two hours I floated, treading water easily, and had just decided that it would be best to give over my useless efforts and sink down to rest and peace, when a spark of light showed on the horizon, a spark too low to be a star. It grew larger, coming nearer, until I could make it out as one of the upper lights of a ship. In the course it was following, it would pass me at some distance, so I struck out in a direction that would bring me across its path.
"My hours in the water had told on my strength, though, and my progress was so slow that the ship had nearly passed me when I came within hailing distance of it. There were few lights on its decks, and no answer to my frantic cries. But when it had passed a little beyond me, I heard voices shouting and the rattle of a boat's tackle. I knew then that I was saved.
"The ship proved to be an oil-tanker, bound from Hongkong to Galveston. And as I found out, it had picked me up in the open Pacific, at a spot some three hundred miles east of Manila. The thing that held me had carried me that far, in space.
"I represented myself as the sole survivor of a wrecked tramp-steamer, and was not questioned overmuch. I dared not tell my story to those sailors, lest they prison me as a mad-man. I asked them a few discreet questions, though, and received an answer to one that staggered me. For I was no longer in my own year, the year in which I had been seized there at Angkor. I was in a year three years later! Three years! And it had seemed only a few minutes to me. I had been carried on, that far, into time.
"I took my place as one of the crew, on the voyage to Galveston, and worked my passage, though I was hard put to it to uphold my assertion that I was a seaman. We sailed on, forging across the Pacific and heading toward Panama. A night came when we were only a few hundred miles west of the canal. I was stretched in a forecastle bunk, vainly trying to sleep away the haunting fears that still filled me. The night was quite calm, with only the throb of the engines and the slap of waves on the hull breaking the silence. Then, faint and far, but sounding to me like the thunder of doom, came a distant, eery whistling, a piercing chorus that I knew well.
"It grew, it waxed to a tumult of roaring winds, while I lay crouched in the bunk, trembling. It seemed to swoop down on the deck above, and there rang out a great scream, a shriek of horror that burned into my brain. The roaring winds began to lessen, to draw away. I ran up onto the deck and looked wildly around. To the north, a little above and beyond the ship, was a hazy mass that I glimpsed vaguely in the moonlight, and that suddenly disappeared, still heading straight north. And the whistling chorus of winds died away.
"I sank down on the deck, sick at heart. For I knew what I had seen, knew that half-glimpsed thing to be the thing that had seized me at Angkor, and from which I had freed myself. Two of the watch, the only men on deck at the time, were missing, and all around me the sailors who had poured up onto the deck were speculating as to their disappearance, and the cause of the sudden, roaring winds. But I told them nothing. I knew well that the thing that had snatched me away before had come again to seize me, tracking me down, God knows how, perhaps by some mystic mark or brand that its grip had sealed upon me. I knew that it had come for me, and not finding me, had taken the two men on deck at the time. But I said nothing.
"It was finally agreed by the ship's officers to report the event as the loss of two sailors, swept overboard by a sudden gale. It went down in the ship's log, thus, and we sailed on. But the crew was fearful, whispering....
"The ship came safe to Galveston, though. The wages due me as a seaman were enough to get me to New York. I came at once to your apartment, and the rest you know.
"What is that thing that seized me, that enigmatic Raider through time? God alone knows, if even He is aware of its existence. But I know that it swept down on me through time and seized me, that it flashed with me through those three years in almost as few minutes. And I know that it has marked me for its victim and will come for me again, maybe in pure revenge for that shot of mine that released me.
"Where is there refuge from a thing like that, that can speed through time and space at will? Twice I have escaped it, but I fear I can not escape it again, when it comes to claim me. And sooner or later, it will come!"
CHAPTER 3
THE RAIDER
A silence hung over the room when Cannell ceased to speak. I drew a long breath and turned to Lantin, my brain awhirl, but already he was calmly questioning the archeologist.
"This thing you call the Raider," he began; "I don't understand your description very well, Cannell. Do you mean that it was just misty gas or vapor, able to change into solid form at will, and change back? And, withal, a living, intelligent thing?"
"I mean just that," Cannell told him. "The thing is undoubtedly a sentient, living being of extraordinary intelligence and powers, able to assume either a solid or gaseous form. The phenomenon of the three shining orbs, changing from green to purple and back, is connected with that change in form, I assume. And at the same time I believe that triangle of the three lights to be the center of the thing's consciousness and intelligence, its brain and sense organs.
"Such a thing is not impossible, Lantin," he went on. "You and I, intelligent, living creatures, are composed of solid and liquid elements, but there is no real reason why life and intelligence could not be present in an entirely gaseous creature. And as I believe, this creature only assumes the gaseous form when it is traveling through time. The winds that accompany its passage through time are undoubtedly caused by the fact that as it flashes on into a different time, it leaves in the atmosphere a sudden vacuum, and the surrounding atmosphere rushing in to fill this vacuum causes the gusts of wind."
"But where could the thing come from?" Lantin objected. "Where was it taking you?"
Cannell's face darkened. "I believe that it comes from the far future," he said slowly. "Who can say what manner of creatures will inhabit earth a million years from now? And it may be that this thing, a being of some future age, has discovered a way to travel through time and now sweeps back at will, snatching up luckless humans in every age. The purpose of these raids, who can say? Maybe for victims or slaves or food even. It is all a mystery, even to myself. One thing alone is clear to me, that the thing does come from some future time, since it was speeding back into the future with me when I escaped it."
I found a chance to interject a query. "But how?" I asked. "That's what interests me, the method of traveling through time at will. I've heard theories on that subject, but this actual accomplishment, this power to race into past or future—have you no idea as to how that is done, Cannell?"
He considered before answering. "The transformation into a gaseous form when time-traveling is a significant detail," he said. "I have an inkling of what power the Raider utilizes to speed through time. I was in the thing's grip only for a few minutes, but I noticed some things, even in that short time, that set me thinking, afterward. I formed a rough theory concerning the method of time-traveling, and on the voyage home I jotted down some notes concerning it, intending to investigate the matter later."
Reaching into an inside pocket, he brought forth a little packet of soiled envelopes and folded sheets. "My own idea about it—" he began, then suddenly broke off speaking and sat motionless, listening tensely. Astonished, we listened likewise, but the only sound was the far dim roar of the city below, and the curtains at the open French windows, billowing gently in a soft breeze. From an adjoining room came the faint chime of a clock.
Relief dropped on Cannell's face, and its tense outlines relaxed. "I thought I heard—" he murmured, then abruptly stopped and jumped to his feet, his eyes wild. My heart gave a sudden great throb, for through the open windows came the sound of a high, thin whistling, far and faint and crystal-clear, an eery chorus of piercing knife-blades of sound, that shrilled out louder and louder, swelling to a roaring tumult of wind-sounds. The window-curtains whipped up madly, in a buffeting gale, as through the windows came a breath of icy air.
Abruptly the lights of the room went out, plunging us into darkness. There was a shout from Lantin: "The switch!" and I heard him running toward it. Outside the wind-shrieks had risen to a thundering bellow, and there were cries and running feet, somewhere in the building below us. A dark, erect figure appeared in the open window, silhouetted blackly against the brilliant lights of the distant streets. It poised there a moment, then passed out onto the outside roof, walking stiffly and unhumanly, like a puppet pulled by unseen strings.
"Cannell!" I cried; "get back!" I raced across the room toward the window, and in the darkness collided with Lantin, who was making for the same objective. We staggered, recovered our balance, rushed together to the window, and then recoiled.
Standing at the roof's edge, darkly outlined against the city's splendid brilliance, was Cannell, and down upon him from the upper air was dropping—what? A changing, inchoate shape of gray, at the center of which burned a little triangle of three radiant circles of purple light, one above the other two. In the moment that the thing swept down on Cannell, the roaring winds hushed for an instant, and we saw a writhing, shapeless arm reach out from the central mass, grip Cannell and draw him in. The gray mass hung for a moment, then the purple lights flashed into green, and at the same time the thing had changed into a swirling cloud of dense gray vapor, the three green orbs at its center, and the roaring winds shouting again with renewed power. The thing rose swiftly above the roof, holding Cannell, hung for a moment above us, a tornado of whistling winds, then vanished like a clicked-off cinema scene.
But as it disappeared before our eyes, as its raging, piercing winds died away to a mere whisper, out from the empty air where it had been rang an eery, fading cry, Cannell's voice, coming faintly down through time.
"Lantin! Follow—follow—"
Then the last word, coming dimly to us like a ghostly echo out of space and time, but with a world of fear and horror in it:
"The Raider!"
CHAPTER 4
INTO TIME
"And you really mean to try it?" I asked incredulously.
"I do," Lantin quietly replied. "I am going to find that secret of time-traveling and go after Cannell."
I stared at him doubtfully. A day had passed since we had seen Cannell seized by the misty shape of horror he called the Raider, and now, in the same room in Lantin's apartment, we were discussing what we had seen. After the first hours of dazed terror following the seizure of Cannell, I had fallen to sleep on a couch in that room, and when I woke in late afternoon, the whole thing seemed only a tortured nightmare.
"It seems impossible," I told Lantin. "We saw Cannell taken, yes, and we saw—the Raider. But after all, we have no proof that he was taken into time. That thing, the Raider, may have merely thrown a veil of invisibility around itself, and thus vanished. A crazy idea, I admit, but not as wild as this one of time-traveling."
"You do not believe your own words, Wheeler," answered my friend. "You heard Cannell's story, and in your heart you believe it. I believe it utterly, for it is the only way of accounting for that three-year disappearance. You noticed that Cannell seemed no older, after those three years? And then, as further proof, came the thing he described to us, the Raider itself."
"We saw that," I admitted, "but all argument aside, Lantin, this idea of moving through time at will seems absurd. Of course, I've heard fantastic ideas on the subject, but how could anyone really tamper with time, the most unalterable and remorseless quantity in life?"
Lantin considered me before replying. "Such an achievement is beyond our present science," he conceded, "but it may be quite possible to the science of the future. You see my meaning? Remember, Wheeler, it is only within the last few years that our science has learned anything at all about time. Previously it was considered one of the last mysteries, never to be investigated or explained. But now, with the recent work of Einstein and Lorentz and Minkowski, we are beginning to learn something about this time. We have learned, for instance, that it is only another dimension of space itself, and that the four dimensions of any object are thus length, breadth, thickness, andduration.
"We know now that time is not fixed and unchangeable, but relative and varying, that the time of Venus is not the time of earth, and that the time of Sirius is different from either. And remember, all of this we have learned within the last few years.
"What, then, may not be learned in the next thousand years, the next ten thousand, the next million? Is it not reasonable to suggest that men will advance farther and farther in their knowledge concerning this elusive thing, time, until they finally will advance so far that they will be able tocontroltime, to travel in it at will, and thus sweep back from their own day, back to our present age? Is it not possible that men can do this, in some century to come?"
"Thatmencan do this?" I repeated. "Men, you say, but the thing we saw was no man, Lantin. That thing, the Raider, was very far from human."
"It is so," he admitted, "but that proves nothing. The Raider may be some thing of the far future, either a strange product of ages of change and evolution, or a visitor from another planet, racing through time and snatching up victims in every age and land. You remember that Cannell was seized at Angkor? And a thousand years ago, Angkor was a mighty city, and who knows but the Raider was speeding back to the days of Angkor's life and greatness, when it chanced on Cannell there? It is a strange business, Wheeler; but one thing I am certain of, and that is that the Raider does come from some time far in the future, and that it has taken Cannell back with it to that time."
"But the method," I insisted, "the method of traveling through time? How is that accomplished? Cannell spoke of a theory he had concerning it. And he gave you those notes—"
"I've examined those notes," Lantin said, "and rough and fragmentary as they are, I think that in them lies the secret of time-traveling. Cannell knew something of modern science, Wheeler, and the conclusions he drew concerning the Raider are significant. It was his theory that as time is the fourth dimension of matter, there is no basic reason why we can't move at will along that dimension. We can move as we wish in the other three, up-and-down, right-and-left, and back-and-forward, so why not in the fourth, that is, sooner-or-later?
"And his idea, as expressed in his notes, was that the Raider's movement along the time-dimension was based on electronic acceleration. You know the electronic system as well as I, and realize that the smallest division of matter, the atom, is nothing but a number of electrons, or particles of electricity, revolving around a nucleus. Cannell believed, and I think he was right, that that movement of electrons is the basis of the movement along the time-dimension.
"To make you understand that, let me take an example. Suppose all motion on earth stopped entirely, so that there was not the least bit of visible motion in earth or heavens. Sun, moon, stars, ships, clocks, trains, rivers, people, every form of motion stopping completely, so that the earth was a completely motionless world. Then would it not be a timeless world also? In other words, without change there would be no such thing as time, for time depends on and is measured by change. So that all movement along the fourth or time-dimension is intimately related to movement along the other three or space-dimensions.
"It is exactly the same with a single, isolated object. Take a metal ball, for instance. It moves steadily along the time-dimension,fromthe pasttowardthe future, only because the electrons that compose it are constantly moving along the space-dimensions, are constantly revolving around their nucleus, at the same unvarying speed. If you stopped that revolving of electrons, the ball of metal would become static, timeless, would cease to move along the time-dimension. But suppose instead of stopping the electronic movement, you accelerated it, speeded it up? Then the ball of metal whose electronic activity was thus accelerated would move on through timefaster. Everything around it would still move along the time-dimension at the same rate, but it would be going faster, would speed on into the future, ahead of the things around it. And the more its electronic motion was accelerated, the farther into the future it would go.
"In the same way, if the electronic motion was reversed, the metal ball would gobackwardalong the time-dimension, would speed back into the past. Thus you see how such a principle could be applied practically and enable one to speed into past or future at will, simply by accelerating or reversing the motion of the electrons making up his vehicle, or car."
"It seems reasonable," I admitted, "but the difficulty remains, for how could the movement of electrons be thus accelerated or reversed at will? Why, no man has ever even seen an electron, or ever will, they're so infinitesimally tiny. Then how affect their speeds, their directions?"
"You mention a difficulty," Lantin replied, "but it could be overcome, Wheeler. As you say, no man has ever seen an electron, but for all that, men have done some strange things with electrons. They have shot them through films of water-vapor and have thus been able to record their speeds and courses, without seeing the actual electrons. And just recently, an American scientist was able to change the course of electronic motion entirely, and shoot a stream of electrons in any direction at will, the so-called cathode rays. When that has been done, it doesn't seem altogether impossible to change their motion in another way, by accelerating or reversing it."
"But there's another thing, Lantin," I said; "even though you achieved the impossible and found a way of time-traveling, how would you find Cannell? How could you find him, without knowing what age or what place the Raider has taken him to? It seems like hunting for a needle in a haystack, a thousand times magnified in difficulty."
Without answering, Lantin went to a cabinet and brought forth a big globe, which he placed on the table before me. "I have a theory on that, too," he said. "Note the lines I've drawn on this globe," he added, indicating some long black pencil-lines that had been drawn on the round surface in the region of the Pacific Ocean.
"Cannell was seized at Angkor, as we know, and he was dropped in the open Pacific at a point a few hundred miles east of Manila. I have marked that point with a dot here, for Cannell learned the latitude and longitude of the spot and jotted it down. Now is it not reasonable to suppose that when the Raider dropped Cannell, through the pain or surprize of his shot, it was progressing in a straight line toward its own base, or home, or lair? Of course, it was moving through time also, but in space it was probably heading straight toward its home. So if we draw a straight line from Angkor to this dot, on the globe, and then continue that line straight across the globe, it's reasonable to assume that somewhere along that continued line is the Raider's home.
"Now, you heard Cannell say that when the thing came to the ship and fled away with the two sailors it seized, it was heading due north when it vanished from sight. So from this dot west of Panama, representing the ship's position, I have drawn another line straight north. You see, the same reasoning applies here, for the thing would again head straight toward its lair with its victims. The two lines cross each other, as you see, in southern Illinois. And if my theory is correct, somewhere near that point of crossing is the Raider's home, though in what age I do not know. So if one could find the secret of time-traveling, and speed into the future, hovering near that spot, there is a chance that you would find the Raider—and his victims. It is a long chance, of course, but the only one."
I was silent, pondering the things he had said. But I felt the question in his eyes, and sensed his appeal before he voiced it.
"And you, Wheeler, will you help me? Together we can do this, can find this secret of time-traveling and go after Cannell, follow him as he cried for me to do. I know that he was not your close friend, as he was mine, but I am asking you to help, nevertheless, for you are the only one I can go to for aid. Who would credit the thing we saw, if I told it? But you saw, and you know, you understand. And if we could work on this together—"
Without replying, I stepped to the window and looked out, inwardly struggling for an answer. While we talked, night had fallen, and again the brilliant lights of the city had blossomed, like burgeoning flowers of flame. A day had passed since we had seen Cannell seized, from this same window. Just twenty-four hours!
I must have spoken my thought aloud, for Lantin, who had come up and was standing beside me, repeated it. "Just twenty-four hours—to us, Wheeler. But how long to Cannell, I wonder? Where is he tonight, do you think; what thousands, what tens of thousands of years ahead? And wondering if we will come after him, if we will save him—"
He stopped, but the thought persisted. WherewasCannell, now? Caught in some web of utter evil, far in the future, some unholy lair of that hellish thing, the Raider? I remembered the fear on Cannell's face, the fear in my own heart when the Raider had flashed down on us. Could I venture against such a creature, even though we found the way to cross time? Would I dare to pit myself against a being like that?
There at the window I battled my own fear, and when I finally turned, it was to extend my hand to Lantin.
"I'm with you," I told him shortly; "if we can discover the secret of the Raider's power, we'll follow Cannell—into time!"
CHAPTER 5
THE BUILDING OF THE TIME-CAR
It is not my intention to relate here the details of the work that occupied our attention in the following weeks. It has been dealt with at length in two technical treatises by Lantin and myself. The theoretical side of our work has been very fully discussed in those two books, but the concrete details are purposely slurred over. The most valuable part of our achievement, the time-wave itself, is hardly mentioned in them.
There is a reason for this, and that reason is the firm intention of Dr. Lantin and myself not to impart any information that would enable anyone to duplicate our own experiment. Thus it is of necessity that parts of this present record are vague and indefinite.
I may say, though, unquestionably, that without the notes that were left us by Cannell, we could never have achieved the success we did achieve. Those notes, brief and unsatisfactory as they were, were yet enough to set our feet on the right path, in our quest of the time-traveling secret. To us, then, the problem was one of accelerating electronic activity, and all our experiments were directed toward that goal.
Fortunately, Lantin had virtually a free hand at the Foundation, and we were able to use the matchless resources of its great laboratories to further our quest. Working constantly together and maintaining complete secrecy regarding the object of our experiments, we sought for some force capable of controlling the movement and speed of electrons, at will.
The weeks dragged by, and we seemed no nearer success than ever. And at the Foundation, some curiosity was being evinced regarding our work, which ill-fitted with our desires. We had made trial of every form of vibration, it seemed, and all without success, for none affected the electronic movement in the way we wished. In the end, it was by a combination of electro-magnetic waves and light rays that we finally achieved success.
I say "we," but it was Lantin's triumph. He had the inspiration to combine high-frequency Hertzian vibrations and light-rays, merging the two dissimilar vibrations into a single wave, which we called "the time wave" and which had power to affect the very electronic structure of matter, all electronic movement within its radius being stimulated and accelerated by it. And with it, we proved the correctness of Cannell's theory, for when we turned the wave upon small objects on the laboratory table, they vanished, reappearing a few seconds later, having been driven into the future for those few seconds by the force of the time-wave.
By reversing the action of the wave, the electronic movement was reversed also, and thus the basis of our needs was found and we had a force that could sweep all things in its radius into past or future at will. Then it was that Lantin began to speak of a car, a car containing a time-wave projector powerful enough to convey the car and all its occupants into past or future. It was vitally necessary, he thought, that such a car should be able to move in space, as well as time, and to acquire this power we had recourse to a discovery accidentally made in the course of our experiments.
In our efforts to change the movement of electrons, we had found that when a stream of them was shot out in a concentrated ray, in any one direction, it produced an invisible but powerful repulsion. It was on this fact that Lantin relied to move our car in space, directing electron-streams toward the ground to raise and hold us in space, and directing other rays obliquely down toward earth, to move the car from side to side in any direction.
The work went on. Six weeks after the seizure of Cannell, our car was nearing completion, and a strange-appearing vehicle it was. It was a short, thick cylinder of steel, tapering to a point at each end, its greatest diameter some five feet and with a total length of fifteen, from point to point. Windows of heavy glass were set at regular intervals along its length, and entrance into the car's interior was through a circular door or manhole in its upper surface, the car being quite air-tight when this was closed.
Inside, the cylinder's bottom was flat-decked and covered with upholstery, since the small diameter of the cylinder made it necessary for us to either sit or lie on that floor, when operating the car. The time-wave apparatus, covered by a metal shield, was placed in the fore end of the cylinder, with the mechanism that produced the repulsion ray beside it. A small, square switch-board held the centered controls of both these.
In the back end of the car was an oxygen-producing apparatus, which gave us independence of outside air for some hours, though normally our car was intended to be ventilated from the outside. A small heater held place beside this, and it was our intention to place what equipment we took with us in that end of the car.
Complete, the car weighed several thousand pounds. We had kept to secrecy in the making of it, having the main shell and other parts of it made for us by different firms, and assembling them in a room of Lantin's apartment. The actuating mechanisms we installed ourselves, and finally the car lay complete on the roof of the building, secured from prying eyes or hands by a padlocked cover of heavy wood.
One trial we made of the car's abilities, testing its power to move in space. Waiting until darkness concealed our trial, we entered the car and rose easily some five hundred feet above the city, the heavy car easily upheld and moved by the powerful repulsion rays. Then, circling once or twice, Lantin pointed the car east and opened up the power. A whistling gale rose outside as we rocketed across the Atlantic with tremendous speed, attaining a velocity of almost five hundred miles an hour, speeding through the atmosphere like a pointed bullet. We made no trial of the time-wave apparatus, postponing that until our real start, and returned to the roof of Lantin's apartment building without being sighted.
In a few days after that test flight, we had gathered our outfit and placed it in the car. Besides a complete but very compact camping outfit, we carried compressed foods that would be sufficient for a long period to keep us from starving. Our weapons were two high-power repeating rifles, with ample ammunition. Besides the rifles, we each carried a heavy automatic in a belt-holster.
Our last preparation was to stow away in the car apparatus with which it would be possible to construct a duplicate of the time-wave mechanism of the car. We intended taking no chance of being stranded in some age of the future.
Every detail of the car's working mechanism was given a final test and found satisfactory, a leave of absence from the Foundation was asked for and granted, and so, at last, two months after the seizure of Cannell, our preparations were completed and we stood on the very threshold of our unparalleled adventure.
CHAPTER 6
INTO THE FUTURE
"Zero hour, Wheeler," said Lantin, who stood in the car itself, his head projecting through the round manhole in its upper side. Our strange vehicle lay ready for its flight into the future, on the apartment building's roof, for this was the night we had chosen for our departure.
I paused at the roof's edge to glance for a last time at the ever-new panorama of the metropolis around us. Though moonless, the sky above was brilliant, flecked with blazing stars, but even these were dimmed by the great up-gush of white light from the city's streets. A soft little breeze fanned my face as I looked out. Down in the bay, there was a great hooting of tugs as a big liner went out to sea. And in the river, a battleship's great search-lights stabbed and circled.
I turned away, reluctantly enough, and followed Lantin into the car. Crouched on the padded floor, in a half-sitting, half-lying position, he was already giving the car's machinery a last inspection, and at his command I clanged shut the round metal door that sealed the entrance. I then took up a position on the floor beside him.
His hands were moving over the gleaming controlling switches, searching, pulling, twisting. Abruptly something clicked under his fingers and the car rose smoothly in the air some fifty feet above the roof and hung motionless. There was a curious little humming now, that seemed to come from the floor beneath us, caused, as I knew, by the invisible streams of electronic force that lifted and held us.
Under the pressure of a little wind, the car drifted a short distance sidewise, and now hung directly over the streets. I glanced down through the dead-light in the floor of the car, and saw that from the height we had already attained, autos and pedestrians were but tiny specks moving in the blurred glare of the street-lights.
Without turning, Lantin spoke. "We'd better try the power of the time-wave," he said, "before going any distance in space."
I nodded, and again his hands moved over the car's intricate controls. He turned a large knob, and a rising, purring whine filled the car, while outside there was a growing roar of sudden wind. At the same time there came to me a staggering sensation of falling, and for a moment I seemed to be plunging helplessly down into unfathomable abysses. It lasted but an instant, and when my mind cleared, I heard the winds outside the car shouting with higher and higher intensity, caused, as I knew, by our swift passage through time.
I looked down into the streets below, and for a second could see no obvious changes, then noted that the autos and people seemed to have suddenly vanished. In place of them were misty blurs of undefined motion, and even these vanished as our progress on through time grew greater. The winking electric signs of the city had ceased to flash on and off, and appeared to be steadily illuminated.
I looked up, through one of the glasses in the car's top surface, and then gasped, prepared as I was for what I saw. The whole firmament was moving, its starry hosts moving slowly but visibly toward the west. Steadily it turned, and in hardly more than a minute a gray light began to grow over the eastern horizon, flushing swiftly to rose. Then, from the center of the growing light, sprang up the sun, crimson and mighty, leaping up above the horizon in a single bound, it seemed, and moving swiftly, ever more swiftly, up toward the zenith.
The winds had steadily risen to a cyclonic gale, and now I heard Lantin's voice, striving to make itself heard above them.
"We're going through time all right," he shouted, his voice thin and piping in sound, above the roar of the gale. "We may as well head west now, too."
I did not answer, but saw the buildings and streets below slide away to the east, as the car moved off in the opposite direction. By now the sun had traversed its whole circuit in the sky and was tumbling down behind the western heights. Before we had crossed above the Hudson, darkness had plunged down upon us, and as we rocketed over the Jersey meadows, I saw the stars again wheeling across the sky, but much faster than before. Our time-speed was steadily accelerating, now, as Lantin turned on more and more of the time-wave's power, and I knew that shortly we would be racing through the years with lightning speed.
Again the cycle of darkness and dawn was repeated, with the sun hurtling across the sky faster and faster, while the winds of our double progress through time and space were deafening. Day and night followed each other so rapidly that I could obtain but vague glimpses of the ground below us. We were progressing through space at the rate of a hundred and fifty miles an hour, holding an even altitude of a mile above the earth's surface.
Soon day and night had merged, had given way to a perpetual greenish dusk through which we raced with nightmare speed. I glanced at the dials that recorded our progress and position in time, and noted that already we had gone ahead almost four months into the future, while our progress was now doubling every few minutes. Passing over northern Pennsylvania, I saw the ground below turning to a blotched, patchy gray, the composite impression of weeks of snow and ice, below. The gray soon faded, changed to green, with the coming of spring. The cycle of green and white was repeated, again and again, until we were speeding through the years too swiftly to see it, and white and green had merged into a drab color that hung over all the landscape below.
By the time we passed over western Ohio, our car was racing into the future with a speed of nearly ten years a minute. At this speed, we saw little of human activities below. There were blurred, vague outlines of cities now and then, but these were only hazy, indefinite masses that passed from view as we fled on westward in the car.
Soon, though, Lantin slowed the car's progress through space and began to give close attention to the physical features of the country below us. He consulted maps constantly, now, and finally, after a number of stops and starts, brought the car to rest, in space, above the juncture of two small rivers. Hanging there, we still sped on through time, and above the winds Lantin shouted, "Stop there," pointing to the maps he held and then down toward the ground below. I understood his meaning, and knew that he had reached the spot in Illinois which he had calculated to be the Raider's home.
Intently we scanned the ground beneath the car. Gray and splotchy as it appeared, from alternate summer and winter, yet there were nowhere any buildings or signs of life, nothing but the two little rivers and the rolling fields that extended away to the horizon.
A glance at the dials told me that we had progressed through time some twelve thousand years, since our start. I heard Lantin utter a low exclamation, and looked up to see him gazing intently toward the north, through one of the side windows. Moving over beside him, I looked also, and saw, away on the distant northern horizon, a speck of gleaming white. We were still racing on through time, and as we watched, that white spot spread, expanded, grew to a thick line of dazzling white that lay across all the north horizon.
The white expanse grew still, coming nearer and nearer toward us, rolling slowly south and covering all the country it passed over with a blanket of whiteness. It came nearer toward us, moving with very slow speed, considering the rapidity of our progress in time. Now, above the shrill winds around us, there came the dull, grinding roar of the white blanket's passage. South rolled the gleaming sheet, until it had almost reached the ground directly beneath the car. I recognized, now, the material of that gleaming expanse.
"Ice!" I shouted in Lantin's ear, and he started, glanced down toward it, then nodded. A moment he studied the grinding wave below, then leaned over and shouted a single word in my ear:
"Glacier!"
The word was like a blinding flood of light on my thoughts. A glacier! And that was the meaning of this white tide from the north, this vast, resistless flood of ice that was rolling south over the world as it had rolled ages before. The mightiest force on earth, and the slowest, moving with deliberate, unswerving steadiness, calm and majestic, carving mountains and valleys, changing the very face of the earth. It had swept down over the earth before, had forced primeval man down to the very equator before it receded, and now the thing was re-enacting itself before my eyes. Fascinated, I watched the white masses forging south.
While we hung high above it, the gleaming, solid flood rolled on until it had obscured the last speck of land on the southern horizon, so that as far as we could see stretched nothing but the glistening fields of ice. The air in the car had become suddenly bitter cold, and as frost and rime began to congeal on the windows, I hastened over to the heating apparatus and switched it on. The glasses cleared soon, and we sped on into the future, but the white expanse below us seemed changeless.
I plucked at Lantin's sleeve, and when he turned, shouted to him, "Go back?", pointing to the gleaming frozen masses below.
"No!" he yelled, over the roar of the gale; "I'm going to circle a bit."
With the words, he snapped off the time-wave, and we came to a rest, in time. The dials now registered a little over fifteen thousand years, and with our stopping, the winds outside the car died away and we had a chance to converse in normal tones.
"Nothing but ice here," said Lantin, "and we can't tell how long it will last. I think the best plan would be to sweep around in a great circle, and look for any signs of the Raider's presence. If we see nothing we can go on into time and stop every few hundred years to circle again."
I agreed, and we put the idea into effect at once, rising to a height of nearly two miles and then racing away to the west in a curving course that would eventually bring us back to our starting point. As we sped on, both Lantin and myself were at the observation windows, scanning the landscape in every direction, but only boundless fields of ice met our eyes.
We reached a point some two hundred miles north of our starting position, and had begun to curve back toward that position, when Lantin uttered a sudden exclamation and hastily stopped the car's progress.
"Look!" he cried, excitedly, pointing away to the north.
At first I could see only the glaring ice, when I gazed in that direction, but gradually my eyes made out a distant spot of black against the horizon. Before I could comment on it, Lantin headed the car around and opened up on the power so that we shot north toward that distant spot with full speed.
On we went, until the spot had changed to a thick line, and its color from black to green. And as we neared it, we saw that there the ice ended, and beyond it were green fields and hills and valleys, with patches of gnarled, stunted trees here and there.
On we fled, still north, until the ice-fields had faded from view behind us, and the chilling cold we had felt above them had given way to a summer warmth. And the first dwarfed trees had changed to towering giants of the forest, though mostly the country below us was open fields and ranges of green-clad hills.
"I can't understand it," I told Lantin. "Who ever heard of a warm, semi-tropical country like this existing farther north than fields of glacial ice?"
"It is strange," he admitted, "but it's understandable, at that. You remember the explorer who found that warm, sunken valley in Alaska, somewhere? It was heated by steam, literally, for the interior fires of the earth had in some way bulged up near the surface of the ground, there, and their heat acting on the valley's springs and rivers made it a great steam-heated depression of almost tropical warmth. Probably the same thing has happened here, a shift of the earth's interior forcing up part of its inner molten core, the heat of which would counteract the glacier and keep it from covering this section of the country. Strange things happen under the earth's surface, Wheeler."
"You may be right," I said, "but there's no life here, Lantin. No—" I broke off, suddenly, staring out of the car's western windows. The western sky was glowing, for it was near to sunset, and there, far away, standing out black against the brilliant sky, was a city.
It was a city of enchantment, seen from our car. The jagged, serrated outline of its buildings loomed blackly against the glowing light, like the skyline of New York at the same hour. The buildings were all square and solid in appearance, and at the center of them there rose one building that towered far above the others, to a mighty height, its straight, perpendicular sides and flat roof standing up above the others, frowningly, brutally dominating them.
There was a gasp at my side, and I turned to see that Lantin was also gazing at the outline of the distant city. He had brought the car to rest, and together we looked away toward that metropolis of the future.
"We must go there," I said rapidly. "Spy out the place from a distance, learn what we can about it. Do you think that it is the home of the Raider?"
"It may be," he said, "but we must be careful, Wheeler. It wouldn't do to enter that place blindly, not knowing what manner of people inhabit it. Nor can we risk having the car destroyed or taken from us, as it's our only way to get back to our own time. The best plan would be to hide the car some distance from the city, and then go nearer on foot, learning as much as we can about the place before venturing inside."
And so we decided. Starting the car again, we sped along low over the ground, and finally, some five miles away from the city, came across a little range of rugged hills which appeared quite wild and uninhabited, like all the rest of the country we had traversed so far. On the slope of one of these hills was a little, shelflike clearing, patched with small trees, and we selected this for our hiding place, bringing the car gently down to rest on the ground there.
We stepped out, cramped and stiff from our hours in the car, and then proceeded at once to hide it, breaking off big branches from the trees around us and planting them in the ground in such fashion that any casual passer-by would never have suspected the car's existence. When it was concealed to Lantin's satisfaction, we made a hasty meal from the food brought with us, and then prepared for our trip toward the city.
The rifles we left in the car, as they were too heavy and cumbersome to carry through the thick underbrush that lined the slopes around us, but we looked to the pistols in our belts, which were of almost as heavy a caliber as the rifles. Then, with a last look at the car, we made our way down the slope to the bottom of the little valley which was formed by two low ranges of hills, on one of the slopes of which our car lay hidden.
We followed this valley north for some distance, the hills on each side leveling down to mere dunes as we approached its ends. A thick little wood lay directly across the end of it, and through this we forced our way, as quietly as possible. It gradually grew thinner, and then with a sudden shock we emerged from it into open fields.
Instinctively, we looked first toward the west. The sun was setting, now, and we saw that the city was not of wide extent, not extraordinarily large, but that the buildings that made it up were very large and were closely grouped together. And above them all rose the titanic central pile, an edifice that we judged to be all of two thousand feet in height, and half that in width.
Behind us there was a sudden yelping shout, and we turned quickly and then shrank back. Across the open fields toward us was running a group of men, a score or more in number, men in brazen armor and helmets, who carried spears and swords and who were bearing down on us with their lances outstretched toward us. Their eyes were gleaming, and they uttered wolflike shouts as they came on.
Flight was impossible, so close were they, so I jerked forth the pistol in my belt and fired hastily at the oncoming men. Too hastily, in fact, for the shot went wild and the mechanism of the pistol jammed before I could fire again. Lantin's pistol barked behind me, and one of the men in front staggered and went down, with a neat hole drilled through his armor, but the rest never hesitated, and before Lantin could fire again, they were upon us.
CHAPTER 7
THE CITY OF CYLINDERS
I had a confused vision of bronzed, black-bearded faces leaping toward me, and I know that I struck out with my pistol-butt at these, but the weapon was knocked from my grasp by a blow on the wrist, my hands were seized from behind and pinioned, and I waited for the spear-thrust that I expected.
It did not come. Those who held me turned to one who was evidently their leader, a tall man with armor more rich than that of the others, who carried no spear. They spoke to him, in a tongue strange to my ears, evidently asking questions concerning our disposal. This leader came nearer and inspected me, felt my muscles for a moment, then snapped out a brief order. He made similar inspection of Lantin, gave another order, and then the men behind me pushed me forward, toward the city in the west, a prod from a spear-handle emphasizing their commands. Lantin was similarly treated, walking beside me, but when I attempted to speak to him, another prod from behind warned me that no conversation between us was allowed.
So we marched on toward the city, our captors talking and jesting in their own language. Twilight was descending on the land, now, darkening quickly, and as we drew nearer toward the city, lights flared out here and there on its heights, steady and brilliant lights of red and yellow. And high above all these shone a single flashing beam of vivid purple, which I knew must be placed on the top of the big building we had seen from a distance.
We struck a road, smooth and wide and hard-surfaced, and marched along it. In the broad fields on either side of this road were what appeared to be great machines of some sort, that seemed to be rooting in the ground, with a panting, throbbing sound, but I could see these only dimly in the thickening dusk. And, too, we began to pass other men like those who had captured us, bronzed, bearded men in the same armor, who looked at us curiously and called out jests and greetings to our captors.
Buildings began to line the road, and I saw that all of these were of the same design, all being in the form of an erect cylinder, quite windowless and unbroken of surface, except for a single open entrance in their lower part. They were of white stone, I thought, glimmering faintly in the twilight, and were of many differing sizes, but whatever the size, all that we saw were of the same shape and proportions, that of a thick cylinder, standing erect.
Out of the doorways of these buildings streamed ruddy light, and now and then we passed one from which came shouting or laughter. More and more of the armored men met and passed us. And there were other men, not in armor, men black and brown and white and yellow, who were clad in a single robe of white cloth and who walked stiffly, like automatons. I shuddered as one of them brushed against me in passing, for he had come near enough for me to glimpse his face, and it was utterly repellent in the blankness of its expression. The eyes held no intelligence at all, staring straight ahead or turning mechanically from side to side, while the stiff movements, the rigid carriage of the body and the obliviousness to all around them made these men seem more dead than alive. All, or nearly all, were carrying tools or vessels of some sort, and it was easy to see that they were slaves.
I noticed now, scattered here and there among the buildings, little towers of metal on the top of which were placed globes of a gleaming material like glass. The towers were found at even intervals along the road, and each one could not have been less than thirty feet in height, much like a miniature Eiffel Tower, while the shining globe on top of each must have been five feet in diameter. Awhile I puzzled over their nature and purpose, but forgot even these in the wonder of the city we were now entering.
There was no wall or definite dividing line between the city and the suburbs around it. As we went on, the buildings grew thicker, larger, and the road became a street, a wide street that led directly toward the looming central pile, which I now saw was of the same cylindrical shape as all of the other buildings here. The white cylindrical buildings now were set farther back from the road, or street, and were very much closer to each other.
Overhead, aircraft were buzzing to and fro, flickering swiftly across the sky. They seemed to rise from and alight on the roofs of the cylindrical buildings, so that I could not glimpse their occupants.