by Earl
Colonel Manson unlocked the door, which he had padlocked a year before, and stared at them for a moment as though unable to believe they were back.
“You haven’t changed a bit,” he gasped. “You haven’t aged a minute!”
“We didn’t live that year, you know,” explained Gregg. “We skipped it.”
The colonel, on the other hand, distinctly showed the marks of another year’s burden. He was slightly more stooped, more shrunken than before.
“Welcome back!” he said more heartily, recovering. “You’re late, incidentally. It’s May sixteenth, nineteen-forty. You left May twelfth, nineteen thirty-nine.”
“The vernier dial is four days off then,” nodded Gregg. “Nothing serious. We can make allowances for that difference.” Enthusiasm crept into his usually calm voice. “Outside of that, the time machine worked like a charm! What do you say, Milt? Shall we go right on into the future?”
“Oh, no, you don’t!” Colonel Manson grabbed their arms and dragged them to the door. “You’re going to spend at least a couple of hours with me. Don’t forget I haven’t seen you boys for a whole year!”
HARBLE and Gregg found it intriguing to look at a newspaper and find current events advanced a year. The war in Europe dismayed rather than startled them. But other events had gone on. An obscure aviator had circled the globe in eighty hours. The Mount Palomar telescope had been used, confirming the canals of Mars. The New York World’s Fair, in its second year, was trying to recoup from its bad 1939 season.
“Why not,” suggested the colonel, “take in the World’s Fair before you leave again? You won’t have another chance. Or—uh—will you?” He looked up, puzzled.
“We will,” laughed Gregg. “We’ll have the distinction of going into the future, reading about the Fair being over, and then coming back to see it!”
“I don’t believe it!” objected Colonel Manson weakly. He appealed to his nephew. “You can’t do that, can you, Milt? If the Fair is over without you two being in it, you never were in it. Don’t tell me different, dang it.” Harble’s eyes were thoughtful. “We’re going to run into some paradoxes when we try coming back.” He shrugged. “Ignoramus! No, not you, Unk. That’s a Latin expression meaning ‘We do not know’.”
Several hours later, while there was yet light to see by, they swung open the hinged side of the shed and trundled the plane out. Before it stretched a stubble field, suitable for takeoff. The tanks were filled with gas, the tires inflated, the motor tuned. All this had been done a year and four days before. Yet as far as the plane was concerned, it had been done just that morning.
The farewell handshake with the colonel was more significant this time. They were going to hop further into the future, consuming a stretch of years limited only by circumstance. There was hardly need to word the fact that the colonel would be in his grave.
“Goodbye,” said the old soldier simply.
“Au revoir!” retorted Gregg meaningly, leaping for the cabin.
After the motor had idled for five minutes, the plane taxied down the field and rose. Colonel Manson watched it till it was a circling dot. Minutes later, when it abruptly vanished, plunging into the mists of futurity, he shook his head and turned away.
“Danged if I’ll ever see them again,” he muttered. “It wouldn’t be common sense.”
Fervently, he hoped he was wrong.
CHAPTER II
World in Ruins
IN the ship, Gregg had set the time vernier again for a year ahead.
“I think it’s best,” he said, “to play the part of caution. We’ll go a year ahead several successive times. We won’t stay in each year more than a few minutes, and we’ll remain in the air all the time. Then, when we’re sure the time machine will stand the gaff, we’ll bite off a bigger chew and go beyond the normal span of our lives.”
The plane was up two thousand feet now, making a wide circle around the vicinity of Colonel Manson’s country place. Long Island stretched to the northeast.
In the west loomed the spires of Majestic Manhattan.
The scene clicked off and on again as Gregg threw the switch.
The sun, in that timeless interval, magically flashed to the other horizon. It was morning, instead of evening, a year later—1941. Nothing else was changed. The general topography was identical in its gross detail.
The steady roar of their motor, save for a slight flicker, had not altered. But they did notice their thermometer rising and their barometer falling. May 16, 1941, was a somewhat warmer, storm-promising day than May 16, 1940, had been. Only Gregg wasn’t sure he had reentered the normal time-world precisely on May 16.
As a check, he turned on the ship’s radio receiver. He caught a “May seventeenth” and a political commentator’s mention of the new Congress and President of the United States.
“Hm!” murmured Harble. “I’m sure I didn’t help vote them in.”
“Hold on!” warned Gregg, satisfied that he had checked the date, unconcerned about all else. “Another year hop!”
Again the queer on-and-off flicker of the universe. This time rain greeted them and the date was May 14, 1942. Gregg decided his time vernier could not “tune” closer than two days in a year. A news item informed them that the war in China was over. Japan had collapsed and retreated, the tail unable to wag the dog.
“Huh!” grinned Harble.
May 17, 1943, was a beautiful day, as Gregg warped into it. Their plane purred softly through a cloudless blue sky. The world seemed at peace, but instead it turned out, when they tuned the radio, that the powers of Europe were still locked in deadly struggle.
Instantly, Gregg snapped the time switch and flipped their plane into 1944. It was the night of May 15. They noticed immediately that New York was blacked out. But it was only a precaution. America had not joined the war, which in Europe had solidified to a Siegfried-Maginot stalemate. In fact, America had built the Nicaragua Canal, and had started a coal industry in Antarctica.
“Making hay while the sun shines,” approved Harble.
AT Gregg’s next manipulation, their time-line crossed the world time-line at May 16, 1945. Before turning on the radio, he faced his friend.
“Milt, this will be our last short flight. The time machine’s in A-l condition. Batteries almost fully charged. We can make some real jumps now. We’ve seen history in the making, like reading the titles of chapters. But now we can move fifty years and get a panorama view of the past. As long as we get the batteries recharged, there’s no limit to how far we can go into the future!”
Harble was silent for a moment. “Will,” he spoke soberly, “I’m not sure any more about getting back. There’re some unpredictable terms in the time-travel equation—paradoxes. Maybe we won’t get back.”
“I don’t care particularly.” Pain darted from Gregg’s dark eyes. “Ever since Edith—”
Harble, sympathetic, touched his arm. There could only be one love in the life of a man like Will Gregg, and she had chosen another man. It suddenly became clear to Harble that Gregg’s fanatic conquest of time had been rooted in that tragic affair. He might feel he could not live in the same world any more. The future was escape. Even if he could, he might not want to return. . . .
“Okay, Will,” Harble said. “On we go.”
Gregg looked up. “But you—”
“I’m more interested in going on, too, round-trip or not. No ties in the present, except for the colonel. Anyway, I want the answer to my formulae.”
As a last contact with their present times, Gregg snapped on the radio and tuned for news. An announcer’s voice, slightly harried behind its trained suavity, issued from the speaker.
“The creatures are now definitely known to be Martians. So far, thirty-four Martian space vessels have landed, containing numberless swift rocket combat ships that have overflown all Earth craft. Their deadly death-beam, probably an ultra-violet ray, is superior to our armament.
“The Martians that landed in Rus
sia three weeks ago have paralyzed Europe already. The powers that so lately were bitter enemies stand shoulder to shoulder against the alien invader—but futilely, it seems. Whole armies, fleets of powerful Earth craft, batteries of big guns, have been wiped out by the Martians. Europe may be forced to surrender soon.
“Here in America, we were luckier, but there is no longer hope. Landing in Georgia, the invaders have swept northward. Philadelphia fell, a smoking ruin, yesterday. It is feared that New York will be the Martians’ next objective—”
“Bad taste,” Harble said critically, “considering the bloody war in Europe at present. Remember the panic over the Orson Welles drama? They’ll have the same thing again, with people’s nerves jittery for so long.” He stopped as Gregg clutched his arm.
“Look! Is that smoke over the city?”
THEY shot their plane higher for a better view. Then they stared, horror-struck. Billowing clouds of dense, sooty smoke puffed up from somewhere on the west side of New York City. Many of the taller spires were veiled in the pall over the great city.
“Lord!” cried Harble. “Bombers from Europe! America’s in the war!”
“From Europe!” choked Gregg, suspicion engraved on his face.
He switched the radio to another station. A nervous voice shouted out.
“New York has been attacked by the Martians There is no hope for the city. Philadelphia was razed in a short week. All southern routes are blocked. Evacuation must precede to the north—”
And now, looking down, they saw what seemed to be a tidal wave bursting from the doomed city. Trucks, cars, bicycles, running humanity, swarmed to the north, routed out by the alien menace.
The two time-travelers stared at each other, in realization.
“It’s not a program!” moaned Harble. “It’s real—horribly real!”
A half hour later they were back, circling over Colonel Manson’s place. High over Manhattan, they had seen the great, flat Martian airships, upheld by rocket jets. Singing, iridescent beams stabbed down, whose touch brought fire. Even stone and steel became instantly incandescent. The George Washington bridge had been destroyed and they were methodically spraying the Hudson River waterfronts with their aerial fire.
Harble made aimless, helpless motions with his hands.
“The city will be leveled in a week,” he cried in horror.
Gregg reached suddenly for the time vernier, set it a hairbreadth ahead—about a week. The smoke pall to the west flicked off and on. But, during the timeless interval, it had increased. It was now a fog overlying all the countryside, so thick they could barely see.
Gregg sent the ship into a climb. At four thousand feet he leveled and raced for the city.
“Look!” cried Harble. “Most of the city is still intact!”
Much of New York’s sky-piercing masonry reared unharmed. Throughout the area, black heaped patches lay like a blight. Here and there, groups of Martian ships were creating more black patches.
“New York is a bigger city than they’ve tackled before,” remarked Gregg, calmly. “It would take them another week.” His voice was preoccupied.
Harble’s mouth suddenly opened in a roar—a plain, animal roar.
“Will, for God’s sake! What a pair of utter fools we are!”
Gregg stared.
“We have a time machine, haven’t we?” Harble went on, the words spilling Cut. “We can go into the future, no matter how far, and find a future weapon. One that’ll beat the Martians. And somewhere in the future, finding atomic power for our time-warp, we can come back with that weapon. Save New York, save civilization! We’ve got to hurry!”
“I’d thought of that, Milt,” Gregg spoke quietly. “There’s no hurry.”
“But New York is already half destroyed, man!”
“Look,” Gregg said. “If we do go into the future, and get that weapon, we can bring it back to any time we choose. To the time before New York was attacked, or even before the Martians came! It doesn’t matter when we start.”
HE set the time-warp another week ahead and threw the switch. Bathed in June sunshine, they looked out over New York City. The smoke was gone. There was no fire. The black patches were no more numerous than they had been a week before. Below, streaming in from the north, were returning refugees, to fill the city again with its teeming life and activity. Not a Martian ship clouded the sky.
“You see?” Gregg breathed. “Now we know we did get the weapon, or future help of some sort. This is a case of checking up on what you did before you did it!”
“Wait a minute,” frowned Harble. “How do we know we did it? Maybe the Martians were stopped by something else. Disease germs, for instance, like in H. G. Wells’ story.” Gregg nodded and tuned the radio. Almost instantly, a commentator’s voice rang out.
“The Martians are making a last stand around the space ships in which they came. We don’t know what unknown genius produced the weapon used by our air forces, but it’s certainly terrific. It seems to be some form of atomic power, released as a mysterious ray that blasts like lightning. Its range and effectiveness are far superior to the Martian ray. Thus they have been beaten. In Europe, our forces have begun blasting the space ships—”
Harble smiled grimly at what he heard.
“You win, Will. We’re that ‘unknown genius,’ only we didn’t produce the weapon. We brought it back from the future!”
The stunning realization struck him full force. For a while he and Gregg were silent, amazed, shaken. Outside was the steady drone of their motor as the ship slowly circled over Colonel Manson’s place.
Gregg stirred presently, perplexed lines etched in his face.
“One thing puzzles me. We must have brought the weapon before this, in chronological time. Probably during or just before the attack on New York. Why can’t we remember?”
Harble snapped his fingers.
“That explains one of my terms in the time formulae,” he cried. “Memory follows the order in which we do things. In our case, our memory does the same, irrespective of normal time. That’s part of the immutability of time. We won’t remember bringing back the weapon till we do it. Going by the world’s clock, though, it has already been done. Paradox number one!”
“I see,” Gregg murmured. Then, in a hurried voice: “I think we’d better go now, into the future—”
“Wait,” said Harble. “I wonder just what we brought back, and how we got the weapon to the authorities. Probably my uncle did it. And we can check on that. Drop down and land, Will. We’ll ask the colonel!”
“No, Milt.”
“Why not?” Harble grinned. “We may as well know all about it in advance—”
He broke off, staring down. His grin froze into an empty grimace. There was a black, burned patch down below, where Colonel Manson’s home had stood. A stray Martian beam, perhaps, had centered there during the holocaust.
“The only answer to what happened in the past lies in the future,” Gregg said gently. Under his breath he added, “Paradox number two.”
CHAPTER III
Paradise Found
TO the two time-travelers, fifty-five years flicked by as instantaneously as the one-year intervals had. Gregg had set his dial for the year 2000 A.D.
But the scene that materialized before his eyes was markedly changed. Not coastlines and horizons, but the mark of man-made things. Great New York sprawled beneath them, even covering ground on Long Island that had been open fields and farms a half-century before. Spires and towers pierced a half-mile into the sky. Gregg rose to avoid them. It was extravagantly unreal, a page from the Arabian nights.
Aircraft hummed in lanes marked by floating buoys. Gregg had an idea what would happen when a waspish ship of red darted toward them and paralleled their course. Traffic police! A semaphore affair at its nose wiggled peremptorily. Using his common sense, Gregg lowered for the broad flat roof of a building on which other small craft were parked. Obviously satisfied, the police ship zoomed away.
Landing, they stepped out. A uniformed attendant rushed up, as though waiting. “Your ship will be parked,” he said in a queer, slurred accent. “Which tour are you interested in, gentlemen? Follow me.”
“Wait a minute!” gasped Harble. “What is all this?”
The attendant, a young, alert man, smiled patronizingly. Gregg and Harble immediately sensed they were “hicks” in his eyes.
“This is the City Tour Agency,” informed the attendant meticulously. “We park your ship and then take you around the city, showing you all of interest. Meals are provided. There are tours of various length and detail. Two hours, five hours, a day, or a week. Your choice. Sleeping quarters also provided.”
“What—uh—are the charges?” Gregg asked.
The young man looked astonished. “None, of course. This agency welcomes all visitors to the city. My name is Jak Roger. I am to be your guide. Now if you will follow me—”
“Why not?” grinned Harble at Gregg. “You can get something for nothing in this age!”
After locking the ship’s cabin and seeing it safely trundled onto a parking elevator, they followed their guide, whose motto seemed only to please. The succeeding hours were like excerpts from a glorified Arabian Nights, to the two men from the past. 2000 A.D. unfolded its marvels.
Swift rides in inertialess monorail trains . . . Giddy views from needlelike towers . . . Television news flashes from all the world . . . Three-dimensional movies . . . An experimetal telepathy broadcast, hazy but astounding . . . A science display of transparent steel, cold light, lab-made meat chops, moving pictures of dancing atoms.
BUT what intrigued them most was the Period Museum. In the Decade of 1930-1940 room they saw autos, aircraft, furniture and photos more real to them than all else they had seen. Jak Roger stopped, staring, before an old, obsolete airship.
“Yours looks almost like this one,” he observed. “Is your ship fifty years old? Only one of that model afloat, I’d say.”