Hart brought out a bill fold. He counted out bank notes.
“Tell me when to stop,” he said.
Androvitch wet his lips and watched the notes pile up on the table before him.
Finally he raised his hand.
“I will do it,” he said. “I will start work tomorrow.”
His hand reached out and clutched the notes.
“Thank you, Mr. Hart,” he said.
Hart nodded and turned to the door. Behind him the scientist greedily counted and re-counted the bills.
V.
RUSH CULVER shook hands with Ash Anderson, football scout for Coach August Snelling.
“I’m glad I didn’t hang one on you that night you came into my room, Ash,” the fullback said. “This has been the thrill of a lifetime. Any time you fellows need another good fullback just come back and get me.”
Anderson smiled.
“Maybe we will if the Control Board doesn’t change the rules. They’ll probably rip Rule Eighteen all to hell now. And all because of a lousy newspaperman who had to spill the story. No loyalty, that’s what’s the matter with those guys. They’d cut their grandmas’ throats for a good story.”
The two stood awkwardly.
“Hate to say good-by,” said Rush. “One time I kind of thought I’d like to stay up ahead in your time. But there’s a girl back here. And this stuff you gave me will help us get settled soon as I graduate. Right clever, the way you fellows struck off old money.”
“They’ll never know the difference,” said Ash. “They’ll accept it as coin of the realm. The money we have up ahead wouldn’t help you any here. As long as we had agreed to pay you, we might as well give you something you can use.”
“Well, so long, Ash,” said Culver.
“So long,” said Ash.
Rush walked slowly down the street. The music hall clock tolled the hour. Rush listened. Gone only an hour—and in that time he had lived over six months in the future. He jingled the coins in the sack he held in his hand and struck up a tune.
Then he wheeled suddenly.
“Ash—wait a minute! Ash!” he shouted.
But the man out of the future was gone.
Slowly Rush turned back down the street, heading for the house he had quitted less than 60 minutes before.
“Hell,” he said to himself, “I forgot to thank him for helping me with math.”
A TINY BELL tinkled softly again and again.
Arthur Hart stirred uneasily in his sleep. The bell kept on insistently. The editor sat up in bed, ran his hands through his hair and growled. The ringing continued.
“The Morning Space-Ways,” he said. “Getting out an extra. Now just what in the doubled-dipped damnation would they be getting out an extra for?”
He pressed a lever and stepped up the intensity of the light in the room. Walking to a machine, he snapped a button and shut off the ringing bell. Opening the machine, he took from a receptacle within it a newspaper still wet with ink.
He glared at the second of the three news-delivery machines.
“If the Star beats the Rocket to an extra I’ll go down and take the place apart,” he snarled. “We been scooped too often lately. Probably isn’t worth an extra, though. Just Space-Ways doing a little more promotion work.”
Sleepily he unfolded the sheet and glanced at the headline.
It read:
“TIME MACHINE
SCIENTIST SLAIN
BY GANGSTERS”
Hart’s breath sobbed in his throat as his eyes moved down to the second deck.
“ALEXIS ANDROVITCH TORCHED ON STREET FROM SPEEDING CAR. POLICE BELIEVE MARS-EARTH GAME MAY BE CLUE.”
The Rocket news-delivery machine stormed into life. Another extra.
Hart snatched the paper from the machine.
He read:
“GANGSTERS SILENCE
SCIENTIST ON EVE
OF GAME HEARING”
Stunned, Hart sat down on the edge of the bed.
Androvitch was dead! The only man in the world who could set up a Time-tunnel to reach Jimmy!
It was all plain—plain as day. The gambling syndicate, afraid of what Androvitch might say, had effectively silenced him. Dead men do not talk.
Hart bowed his head in his hands.
“The best damn reporter I ever had,” he moaned.
He sprang to his feet as a thought struck him and rushed to the visaphone. Hurriedly he set up a wave length.
The face of Coach August Snelling appeared in the glass.
“Say, coach,” said Hart breathlessly, “have you sent all the boys back to the past?”
“Hart,” said Coach Snelling in an even voice filled with cold wrath, “after the way the newspapers have crucified me I have nothing to say.”
“But, coach,” pleaded Hart, “I’m not asking you for publication. What you can tell me will never be printed. I want your help.”
“I needed your help the other day,” Snelling reminded him, “and you told me news was news. You said you owed it to your readers to publish every detail of any news story.”
“But a man’s life depends on this,” shouted Hart. “One of my reporters is back in the time where you trained the team. If I could use one of the other tunnels—one of those you used to bring the boys forward in Time—I could shoot it back to the correct time. Then I could travel to where Jimmy is and bring him back—”
“I’m telling you the truth when I say that the boys have all been sent back and all the tunnels are closed,” Snelling said. “The last player went back this afternoon.”
“Well,” said Hart slowly, “I guess that settles it—”
Snelling interrupted. “I heard about Russell,” he said, “and if he’s trapped back with those Indians it’s what I’d call poetic justice.”
The glass went back as Snelling cut the connection.
The Star machine bell hammered. Hart wearily shut off the extra signal and took out the paper.
“Hell,” he said, “if we’d had Jimmy here we’d scooped even the Space-Ways on this yarn.”
He looked sadly at the three editions.
“Best damn reporter I ever knew,” the editor said.
PROF. EBNER WHITE was lecturing to Elementary Astronomy, Section B.
“While there is reason to believe that Mars has an atmosphere,” he was saying, “there is every reason to doubt that the planet has conditions which would allow the existence of life forms. There is little oxygen in the atmosphere, if there is an atmosphere. The red color of the planet would argue that much of whatever oxygen may have been at one time in the atmosphere—”
At this point Prof. White was rudely interrupted.
A young man had risen slowly to his feet.
“Professor,” he said, “I’ve listened to you for the last half hour and have reached a conclusion you know nothing about what you are saying. I can tell you that Mars does have an atmosphere. It also has plenty of oxygen and other conditions favorable to life. In fact, there is life there—”
The young man stopped talking, realizing what he had done. The class was on the verge of breaking into boisterous gayety and gales of strangled guffaws swept the room. No one liked Prof. White.
The professor sputtered feebly and tried to talk. Finally he did.
“Perhaps, Mr. Culver,” he suggested, “you had better come up here while I come down and occupy your seat.”
“I’m sorry, sir. I forgot myself. It won’t happen again. I publicly and sincerely apologize.”
He sat down and Prof. White went on with the lecture.
Which incident explains why Rush Culver became a tradition at the University of Wisconsin.
Marvelous tales were told of him. He was voted the man of the year in his senior year. He was elected a member of outstanding campus organizations which even his great football prowess in his junior and sophomore years had failed to obtain for him.
From a mediocre student he became regarded as a brilliant mind.
Students to whom he had formerly gone for help with mathematics and other studies now came to him.
At one time he took the floor in a political science discussion hour and used up the entire hour explaining the functioning of a Utopian form of government. Those who heard him later said that he sounded as if he might have seen the government in actual operation.
But his greatest glory came from the credit which was accorded him for Wisconsin’s football triumphs. Rumor on the campus said that he had worked out and given to the coach a series of plays, based upon gridiron principles then entirely new to the game. Rush, when approached, denied he had given them to the coach. But, however that may be, Wisconsin did spring upon its opponents that fall a devastating attack. Team after team fell before the onslaught of the Badgers. The team traveled to Minneapolis and there it marched through the mighty Golden Gophers with apparent ease, while fans and sports-writers grew faint with wonder and the football world trembled with amazement.
Clamorous popular demand forced the Big Ten to rescind its ruling against post-season games and at the Rose Bowl on January 1, 1945, the Badgers defeated the Trojans 49 to 0 in what sports-writers termed the greatest game ever played in football.
JIMMY RUSSELL was up a tree. He had been lucky to find the tree, for there were few in that part of the country and at the moment he reached it, Jimmy was desperately in need of a tree.
Below him patrolled an enormous grizzly bear, fighting mad, snarling and biting at the shafts of arrows which protruded from his shoulders. The bole of the tree was scarred and splintered where the enraged animal had struck savagely at it with huge paws armed with four-inch talons. Low limbs had been ripped from the trunk as the beast reared to his full height, attempting to reach his quarry.
In a gully a quarter of a mile away lay the ripped and torn body of Chief Hiawatha. The bear had singled the Indian out in his first charge. Jimmy had sent his last arrow winging deep into the animal’s throat as the beast had torn the life from his friend. Then, without means of defense and knowing that his companion was dead, Jimmy had run, madly, blindly. The tree saved him, at least temporarily. He still had hopes that that last arrow, inflicting a deep throat wound, from which the blood flowed freely, would eventually spell death to the maddened beast.
Sadly he reflected, as he perched on a large branch, that if he ever did get down alive the rest of the trip would be lonely. It was still a long way to Mexico and the Aztec civilization, but the way would not have seemed long with old Chief Hiawatha beside him. The chief had been his only friend in this savage, prehistoric world and now he lay dead and Jimmy faced another thousand miles alone, on foot, without adequate weapons.
“Maybe I should have waited at the village,” Jimmy told himself. “Somebody might have gotten through to me. But maybe nobody wanted to get through. Funny, though, I always figured Hart was my friend, even if he did get hard-boiled every time he saw me. Still—I waited three years and that should have given him plenty of time.”
A lone buffalo bull wandered up the gully and over the ridge where the grizzly stood guard under the tree. The bear, sighting the bull, rushed at him, roaring with rage. For a moment it appeared the bull might stand his ground, but before the bear covered half the distance to him, he wheeled about and lumbered off. The grizzly came back to the tree.
Far out on the plain Jimmy located a skittering band of antelope and watched them for a long time. A wolf slunk through the long grass in a gully to the west of the tree. In the sky vultures began to wheel and turn. Jimmy shook his fist at them and cursed.
Twilight came and still the bear kept up the watch. At times he withdrew a short distance and lay down as if he were growing weak from loss of blood. But in each instance he came back to resume the march around the tree.
The moon came up and wolves howled plaintively from the ridges to the east. Jimmy, tearing a buckskin strip from his shirt, lashed himself to the tree. It was well he did so, for in spite of the danger below, despite his efforts to keep awake, he fell asleep.
The moon was low in the west when he awoke. He was stiff and chilled and for a moment he did not remember where he was.
A slinking form slipped over a ridge a short distance away and from somewhere on the prairie came the roaring grunting of a herd of awakening buffalo.
With a realization of his position coming to him, Jimmy looked about for the bear. He did not locate the beast at first, but finally saw its great bulk stretched out on the ground some distance away. He shouted, but the animal did not stir.
LATE AFTERNOON saw Jimmy heading southwest across the plains. He was clad in tattered buckskins. He was armed with a bow and a few arrows. At his belt swung a tomahawk. But he walked with a free swinging tread and his head was high.
Behind him a mound of stones marked the last resting place of all that remained mortal of Chief Hiawatha. Ahead of him lay Mexico, land of the Aztecs.
There he would find the highest order of civilization in pre-Columbian North America. There he would find people whose legends told of a strange white god who came to them in ancient days and taught them many things. This was the story they had told the Spanish conquistadores. That was why they had hailed Cortez as a god likewise, to their later sorrow.
“A white god who taught them many things,” said Jimmy to himself and chuckled. Might he not have been that white god? Could he not have taught them many things? But if he had been a god to the Aztecs, why had he not warned them against the Spaniards?
Jimmy chuckled again.
“A newspaperman should make one hell of a good god for a bunch of redskins,” he told himself.
Over the River and Through the Woods Page 25