Adventures in Time and Space

by Raymond J Healy

  Came an irritated scratching upon the outside of the door and a white-tipped paw poked tentatively through one of the holes. The cat backed to a safe distance when Burman opened the door, but looked lingeringly toward the laboratory. Its presence needed no explaining‌—‌the alert animal must have caught a glimpse of those infernal little whizzers. The same thought struck both of us; cats are quick on the pounce, very quick. Given a chance, maybe this one could make a catch for us.

  We enticed it in with fair words and soothing noises. Its eagerness overcame its normal caution toward strangers, and it entered. We closed the door behind it; Burman got his length of pipe, sat by the door, tried to keep one eye on the holes and the other on the cat. He couldn’t do both, but he tried. The cat sniffed and prowled around, mewed defeatedly. Its behavior suggested that it was seeking by sight rather than scent. There wasn’t any scent.

  With feline persistence, the animal searched the whole laboratory. It passed the buzzing coffin several times, but ignored it completely. In the end, the cat gave it up, sat on the corner of the laboratory table and started to wash its face.

  Tick-tick-tick! went the big machine. Then whir-thump! A trap popped open, a shuttle fell out and raced for the door. A second one followed it. The first was too fast even for the cat, too fast for the surprised Burman as well. Bang! The length of the steel tube came down viciously as the leading shuttle bulleted triumphantly through a hole.

  But the cat got the second one. With a mighty leap, paws extended, claws out, it caught its victim one foot from the door. It tried to handle the slippery thing, failed, lost it for an instant. The shuttle whisked around in a crazy loop. The cat got it again, lost it again, emitted an angry snarl, batted it against the skirting board. The shuttle lay there, upside down, four midget wheels in its underside spinning madly with a high, almost inaudible whine.

  Eyes alight with excitement, Burman put down his weapon, went to pick up the shuttle. At the same time, the cat slunk toward it ready to play with it. The shuttle lay there, helplessly functioning upon its hack. Before either could reach it the big machine across the room went clunk! opened a trap and ejected another gadget.

  With astounding swiftness, the cat turned and pounced upon the newcomer. Then followed pandemonium. Its prey swerved agilely with a fitful gleam of gold; the cat swerved with it, cursed and spat. Black-and-white fur whirled around in a fighting haze in which gold occasionally glowed; the cat’s hissings and spittings overlay a persistent whine that swelled and sank in the manner of accelerating or decelerating gears.

  A peculiar gasp came from the cat, and blood spotted the floor. The animal clawed wildly, emitted another gasp followed by a gurgle. It shivered and flopped, a stream of crimson pouring from the great gash in its gullet.

  We’d hardly time to appreciate the full significance of the ghastly scene when the victor made for Burman. He was standing by the skirting board, the still-buzzing shuttle in his hand. His eyes were sticking out with utter horror, but he retained enough presence of mind to make a frantic jump a second before the bulleting menace reached his feet.

  He landed behind the thing, but it reversed in its own length and came for him again. I saw the mirrorlike sheen of its scalpel as it banked at terrific speed, and the sheen was drowned in sticky crimson two inches along the blade. Burman jumped over it again, reached the lab table, got up on that.

  “Lord!” he breathed.

  By this time I’d got the piece of pipe which he’d discarded. I hefted it, feeling its comforting weight, then did my best to bat the buzzing lump of wickedness through the window and over the roofs. It was too agile for me. It whirled, accelerated, dodged the very tip of the descending steel, and flashed twice around the table upon which Burman had taken refuge. It ignored me completely. Somehow, I felt that it was responding entirely to some mysterious call from the shuttle Burman had captured.

  I swiped desperately, missed it again, though I swear I missed by no more than a millimeter. Something whipped through the holes in the door, fled past me into the big machine. Dimly, I heard traps opening and closing and beyond all other sounds that steady, persistent tick-tick-tick. Another furious blow that accomplished no more than to dent the floor and jar my arm to the shoulder.

  Unexpectedly, unbelievably, the golden curse ceased its insane gyrations on the floor and around the table. With a hard click, and a whir much louder than before, it raced easily up one leg of the table and reached the top.

  Burman left his sanctuary in one jump. He was still clinging to the shuttle. I’d never seen his face so white.

  “The machine!” he said, hoarsely. “Bash it to hell!”

  Thunk! went the machine. A trap gaped, released another demon with a scalpel. Bzz-z-z! a third shot in through the holes in the door. Four shuttles skimmed through behind it, made for the machine, reached it safely. A fifth came through more slowly. It was dragging an automobile valve spring. I kicked the thing against the wall even as I struck a vain blow at one with a scalpel.

  With another jump, Burman cleared an attacker. A second sheared off the toe of his right shoe as he landed. Again he reached the table from which his first toe had departed. All three things with scalpels made for the table with a reckless vim that was frightening.

  “Drop that damned shuttle,” I yelled.

  He didn’t drop it. As the fighting trio whirred up the legs, he flung the shuttle with all his might at the coffin that had given it birth. It struck, dented the casing, fell to the floor. Burman was off the table again. The thrown shuttle lay battered and noiseless, its small motive wheels stilled.

  The armed contraptions scooting around the table seemed to change their purpose coincidently with the captured shuttle’s smashing. Together, they dived off the table, sped through the holes in the door. A fourth came out of the machine, escorting two shuttles, and those too vanished beyond the door. A second or two later, a new thing different from the rest, came in through one of the holes. It was long, round-bodied, snub-nosed, about half the length of a policeman’s nightstick, had six wheels beneath, and a double row of peculiar serrations in front. It almost sauntered across the room while we watched it fascinatedly. I saw the serrations jerk and shift when it climbed the lowered trap into the machine. They were midget caterpillar tracks!

  Burman had had enough. He made up his mind. Finding the steel pipe, he gripped it firmly, approached the coffin. Its lenses seemed to leer at him as he stood before it. Twelve years of intensive work to be destroyed at a blow. Endless days and nights of effort to be undone at one stroke. But Burman was past caring. With a ferocious swing he demolished the glass, with a fierce thrust he shattered the assembly of wheels and cogs behind.

  The coffin shuddered and slid beneath his increasingly angry blows. Trapdoors dropped open, spilled out lifeless samples of the thing’s metallic brood. Grindings and raspings came from the accursed object while Burman battered it to pieces. Then it was silent, a shapeless, useless mass of twisted and broken parts.

  I picked up the dented shape of the object that had sauntered in. It was heavy, astonishingly heavy, and even after partial destruction its workmanship looked wonderful. It had a tiny, almost unnoticeable eye in front, but the miniature lens was cracked. Had it returned for repairs and overhaul?

  “That,” said Burman, breathing audibly, “is that!”

  I opened the door to see if the noise had attracted attention. It hadn’t. There was a lifeless shuttle outside the door, a second a yard behind it. The first had a short length of brass chain attached to a tiny hook projecting from its rear. The nose cap of the second had opened fanwise, like an iris diaphragm, and a pair of jointed metal arms were folded inside, hugging a medium-sized diamond. It looked as if they’d been about to enter when Burman destroyed the big machine.

  Picking them up, I brought them in. Their complete inactivity, though they were undamaged, suggested that they had been controlled by the big machine and had drawn their motive power from it. If so, then we�
��d solved our problem simply, and by destroying the one had destroyed the lot.

  Burman got his breath back and began to talk.

  He said, “The Robot Mother! That’s what I made‌—‌a duplicate of the Robot Mother. I didn’t realize it, but I was patiently building the most dangerous thing in creation, a thing that is a terrible menace because it shares with mankind the ability to propagate. Thank Heaven we stopped it in time!”

  “So,” I remarked, remembering that he claimed to have got it from the extreme future, “that’s the eventual master, or mistress, of Earth. A dismal prospect for humanity, eh?”

  “Not necessarily. I don’t know just how far I got, but I’ve an idea it was so tremendously distant in the future that Earth had become sterile from humanity’s viewpoint. Maybe we’d emigrated to somewhere else in the cosmos, leaving our semi-intelligent slave machines to fight for existence or die. They fought‌—‌and survived.”

  “And then wangle things to try to alter the past in their favor,” I suggested.

  “No, I don’t think so.” Burman had become much calmer by now. “I don’t think it was a dastardly attempt so much as an interesting experiment. The whole affair was damned in advance because success would have meant an impossible paradox. There are no robots in the next century, nor any knowledge of them. Therefore the intruders in this time must have been wiped out and forgotten.”

  “Which means,” I pointed out, “that you must not only have destroyed the machine, but also all your drawings, all your notes, as well as the psychophone, leaving nothing but a few strange events and a story for me to tell.”

  “Exactly‌—‌I shall destroy everything. I’ve been thinking over the whole affair, and it’s not until now I’ve understood that the psychophone can never be of the slightest use to me. It permits me to discover or invent only those things that history has decreed I shall invent, and which, therefore, I shall find with or without the contraption. I can’t play tricks with history, past or future.”

  “Humph!” I couldn’t find any flaw in his reasoning. “Did you notice,” I went on, “the touch of bee psychology in our antagonists? You built the hive, and from it emerged workers, warriors, and”‌—‌I indicated the dead saunterer‌—‌ “one drone.”

  “Yes,” he said, lugubriously. “And I’m thinking of the honey‌—‌eighty watches! Not to mention any other items the late patters may report, plus any claims for slaughtered cats. Good thing I’m wealthy.”

  “Nobody knows you’ve anything to do with those incidents. You can pay secretly if you wish.”

  “I shall,” he declared.

  “Well,” I went on, cheerfully, “all’s well that ends well. Thank goodness we’ve got rid of what we brought upon ourselves.”

  With a sigh of relief, I strolled toward the door. A high whine of midget motors drew my startled attention downward. While Burman and I stared aghast, a golden shuttle slid easily through one of the rat holes, sensed the death of the Robot Mother and scooted back through the other hole before I could stop it.

  If Burman had been shaken before, he was doubly so now. He came over to the door, stared incredulously at the little exit just used by the shuttle, then at the couple of other undamaged but lifeless shuttles lying about the room.

  “Bill,” he mouthed, “your bee analogy was perfect. Don’t you understand? There’s another swarm! A queen got loose!”

  There was another swarm all right. For the next forty-eight hours it played merry hell. Burman spent the whole time down at headquarters trying to convince them that his evidence wasn’t just a fantastic story, but what helped him to persuade the police of his veracity was the equally fantastic reports that came rolling in.

  To start with, old Gildersome heard a crash in his shop at midnight, thought of his valuable stock of cameras and miniature movie projectors, pulled on his pants and rushed downstairs. A razor-sharp instrument stabbed him through the right instep when halfway down, and he fell the rest of the way. He lay there, badly bruised and partly stunned, while things clicked, ticked and whirred in the darkness and the gloom. One by one, all the contents of his box of expensive lenses went through a hole in the door. A quantity of projector cogs and wheels went with them.

  Ten people complained of being robbed in the night of watches and alarm clocks. Two were hysterical. One swore that the bandit was “a six-inch cockroach” which purred like a toy dynamo. Getting out of bed, he’d put his foot upon it and felt its cold hardness wriggle away from beneath him. Filled with revulsion, he’d whipped his foot back into bed “just as another cockroach scuttled toward him.” Burman did not tell that agitated complainant how near he had come to losing his foot.

  Thirty more reports rolled in next day. A score of houses had been entered and four shops robbed by things that had the agility and furtiveness of rats‌—‌except that they emitted tiny ticks and buzzing noises. One was seen racing along the road by a homing railway worker. He tried to pick it up, lost his forefinger and thumb, stood nursing the stumps until an ambulance rushed him away.

  Rare metals and fine parts were the prey of these ticking marauders. I couldn’t see how Burman or anyone else could wipe them out once and for all, but he did it. He did it by baiting them like rats. I went around with him, helping him on the job, while he consulted a map.

  “Every report,” said Burman, “leads to this street. An alarm clock that suddenly sounded was abandoned near here. Two automobiles were robbed of small parts near here. Shuttles have been seen going to or from this area. Five cats were dealt with practically on this spot. Every other incident has taken place within easy reach.”

  “Which means,” I guessed, “that the queen is somewhere near this point?”

  “Yes.” He stared up and down the quiet empty street over which the crescent moon shed a sickly light. It was two o’clock in the morning. “We’ll settle this matter pretty soon!”

  He attached the end of a reel of firm cotton to a small piece of silver chain, nailed the reel to the wall, dropped the chain on the concrete. I did the same with the movement of a broken watch. We distributed several small cogs, a few clock wheels, several camera fitments, some small, tangled bunches of copper wire, and other attractive oddments.

  Three hours later, we returned accompanied by the police. They had mallets and hammers with them. All of us were wearing steel leg-and-foot shields knocked up at short notice by a handy sheet-metal worker.

  The bait had been taken! Several cotton strands had broken after being unreeled a short distance, but others were intact. All of them either led to or pointed to a steel grating leading to a cellar below an abandoned warehouse. Looking down, we could see a few telltale strands running through the window frame beneath.

  Burman said, “Now!” and we went in with a rush. Rusty locks snapped, rotten doors collapsed, we poured through the warehouse and into the cellar.

  There was a small, coffin-shaped thing against one wall, a thing that ticked steadily away while its lenses stared at us with ghastly lack of emotion. It was very similar to the Robot Mother, but only a quarter of the size. In the light of a police torch, it was a brooding, ominous thing of dreadful significance. Around it, an active clan swarmed over the floor, buzzing and ticking in metallic fury.

  Amid angry whirs and the crack of snapping scalpels on steel, we waded headlong through the lot. Burman reached the coffin first, crushing it with one mighty blow of his twelve-pound hammer, then bashing it to utter ruin with a rapid succession of blows. He finished exhausted. The daughter of the Robot Mother was no more, nor did her alien tribe move or stir.

  Sitting down on a rickety wooden case, Burman mopped his brow and said, “Thank heavens that’s done!”

  Tick-tick-tick!

  . He shot up, snatched his hammer, a wild look in his eyes.

  “Only my watch,” apologized one of the policemen. “It’s a cheap one, and it makes a hell of a noise.” He pulled it out to show the worried Burman.

  “Tick! tick!�
�� said the watch, with mechanical aplomb.

  V-2-ROCKET CARGO SHIP

  Willy Ley

  It was not the editors’ original plan to include any non-fiction articles in this volume. But when we read incontrovertible evidence that such matters as rocket-propelled space ships were no longer dreams, or even theoretical designs on a drawing board, we felt our readers would find it as fascinating as the most fantastic fiction we could dig up. Mr. Willy Ley, Secretary of the German Rocket Society under the Weimar Republic, refugee from the Nazis, knows as much about rocket theory as anyone in the field. Mr. Ley proves that the Germans should be credited with one accomplishment, utilized, of course, for Nazi barbarism‌—‌in V-2 they perfected a rocket-propelled ship capable of leaving this earth’s atmosphere! This very morning at breakfast we read in an article by a world-renowned scientist that a trip to the moon is not only a possibility, but a probability within our own lifetime. Based on Mr. Ley’s startling information, we predict that the first attempts to reach Luna will be made within a decade. And how would you like to make the trip?

  * * *

  THE FULL and complete story of the German rocket research laboratory near Peenemunde on the Baltic coast will never be written. There will be nobody alive who can write it. Most of those who knew the full story are dead already; those that are still alive will die before the war is over.

  But the main points, the general outline, of the story of the creation of that laboratory, and more especially the results of its work, are known even now, and later efforts will hardly be able to do more than to fill in details.

  First: the location. Peenemunde is, or was originally, a small fishing village on the island of Usedom which blocks the entrance to the Bay of Stettin. Its size was such that it cannot even be found on most maps. Its inhabitants, like those of all other fishing villages along that stretch of the Baltic coast, bolstered their standard of living by taking in summer guests, mostly from Berlin, some four hours away by rail.