Adventures in Time and Space

by Raymond J Healy

  “I guess I must have received the mail you saw.”

  “Well, you might ask Mr. Herald. He’s in the newspaper office next door. But I’m sure there’s no one in this town by that name.”

  “You publish a newspaper here?”

  The woman laughed. “We call it that. Mr. Herald owns the bank and a big farm and puts this out free as a hobby, It’s not much, but everybody in town reads it. On Saturday he puts out a regular printed edition. This is the daily.”

  She held up a small mimeographed sheet that was moderately legible. Jim glanced at it and moved towards the door. “Thanks, anyway.”

  As he went out into the summer sun there was something gnawing at his brain, an intense you-forgot-something-in-there sort of feeling. He couldn’t place it and tried to ignore it.

  Then as he stepped across the threshold of the printing office he got it. That mimeographed newssheet he had seen‌—‌it bore a startling resemblance to the lessons he had received from M. H. Quilcon. The same purple ink. Slightly crooked sheets. But that was foolish to try to make a connection there. All mimeographed jobs looked about alike.

  Mr. Herald was a portly little man with a fringe around his baldness. Jim repeated his inquiry.

  “Quilcon?” Mr. Herald pinched his lips thoughtfully. “No, can’t say as I ever heard the name. Odd name‌—‌I’m sure I’d know it if I’d ever heard it.”

  Jim Ward knew that further investigation here would he a waste of time. There was something wrong somewhere. The information in his correspondence course could not be coming out of this half dead little town.

  He glanced at a copy of the newssheet lying on the man’s littered desk beside an ancient Woodstock. “Nice little sheet you put out there,” said Jim.

  Mr. Herald laughed. “Well, it’s not much, but I get a kick out of it, and the people enjoy reading about Mrs. Kelly’s lost hogs and the Dorius kid’s whooping cough. It livens things up.”

  “Ever do any work for anybody else‌—‌printing or mimeographing?”

  “If anybody wants it, but I haven’t had an outside customer in three years.”

  Jim glanced about searchingly. The old Woodstock seemed to be the only typewriter in the room.

  “I might as well go on,” he said. “But I wonder if you’d mind letting me use your typewriter to write a note and leave in the postoffice for Quilcon if he ever shows up.”

  “Sure, go ahead. Help yourself.”

  Jim sat down before the clanking machine and hammered out a brief paragraph while Mr. Herald wandered to the back of the shop. Then Jim rose and shoved the paper in his pocket. He wished he had brought a sheet from one of the lessons with him.

  “Thanks,” he called to Mr. Herald. He picked up a copy of the latest edition of the newspaper and shoved it in his pocket with the typed sheet.

  * * *

  On the trip homeward he studied the mimeographed sheet until he had memorized every line, but he withheld conclusions until he reached home.

  From the station he called the farm and Hank, the hired man, came to pick him up. The ten miles out to the farm seemed like a hundred. But at last in his own room Jim spread out the two sheets of paper he’d brought with him and opened up lesson one of the correspondence course.

  There was no mistake. The stencils of the course manuals had been cut on Mr. Herald’s ancient machine. There was the same nick out of the side of the o, and the b was flattened on the bulge. The r was minus half its base.

  Mr. Herald had prepared the course.

  Mr. Herald must then be M. H. Quilcon. But why had he denied any knowledge of the name? Why had he refused to see Jim and admit his authorship of the course?

  At ten o’clock that night Mr. McAfee arrived with a special delivery letter for Jim.

  “I don’t ordinarily deliver these way out here this time of night,” he said. “But I thought you might like to have it. Might be something important. A job or something, maybe. It’s from Mr. Quilcon.”

  “Thanks. Thanks for bringing it, Mac.”

  Jim hurried into his room and ripped open the letter. It read:

  Dear Mr. Ward:

  Your progress in understanding the principles of power coordination are exceptional and I am very pleased to note your progress in connection with the tenth lesson which I have just received from you.

  An unusual opportunity has arisen which I am moved to offer you. There is a large installation of a power coordination engine in need of vital repairs some distance from here. I believe that you are fully qualified to work on this machine, under supervision which will be provided and you would gain some valuable experience. The installation is located some distance from the city of Henderson. It is about two miles out on the Balmer Road. You will find there the Hortan Machine Works at which the installation is located. Repairs are urgently needed and you are the closest qualified student able to take advantage of this opportunity which might lead to a valuable permanent connection. Therefore, I request that you come at once. I will meet you there.

  Sincerely,

  M. H. Quilcon

  For a long time Jim Ward sat on the bed with the letter and the sheets of paper spread out before him. What had begun as a simple quest for information was rapidly becoming an intricate puzzle.

  Who was M. H. Quilcon?

  It seemed obvious that Mr. Herald, the banker and part-time newspaper publisher, must be Quilcon. The correspondence course manuals had certainly been produced on his typewriter. The chances of any two typewriters having exactly the same four or five disfigurements in type approached the infinitesimal.

  And Herald‌—‌if he were Quilcon‌—‌must have written this letter just before or shortly after Jim’s visit. The letter was certainly a product of the ancient Woodstock.

  There was a fascination in the puzzle and a sense of something sinister, Jim thought. Then he laughed aloud at his own melodrama and began repacking the suitcase. There was a midnight train he could get back to Henderson.

  It was hot afternoon when he arrived in the town for the second time. The station staff looked up in surprise as he got off the train.

  “Back again? I thought you’d given up.”

  “I’ve found out where Mr. Quilcon is. He’s at the Hortan Machine Works. Can you tell me exactly where that is?”

  “Never heard of it.”

  “It’s supposed to be about two miles out of town on Balmer Road.”

  “That’s just the main street of town going on down through the Willow Creek district. There’s no machine works out there. You must be in the wrong state, mister. Or somebody’s kidding you.”

  “Do you think Mr. Herald could tell me anything about such a machine shop. I mean, does he know anything about machinery or things related to it?”

  “Man, no! Old man Herald don’t care about nothing but money and that little fool paper of his. Machinery! He can’t hook up anything more complicated than his suspenders.”

  Jim started down the main street toward the Willow Creek district. Balmer Road rapidly narrowed and turned, leaving the town out of sight behind a low rise. Willow Creek was a glistening thread in the midst of meadow land.

  There was no more unlikely spot in the world for a machine works of any kind, Jim thought. Someone must be playing an utterly fantastic joke on him. But how or why they had picked on him was mystifying.

  At the same time he knew within him that it was no joke. There was a deadly seriousness about it all. The principles of power coordination were right. He had slaved and dug through them enough to be sure of that. He felt that he could almost build a power coordinating engine now with the proper means‌—‌except that he didn’t understand from where the power was derived!

  In the timelessness of the bright air about him, with the only sound coming from the brook and the leaves on the willow trees beside it, Jim found it impossible to judge time or distance.

  He paced his steps and counted until he was certain that at least two miles had been covered.
He halted and looked about almost determined to go back and re-examine the way he had come.

  He glanced ahead, his eyes scanning every minute detail of the meadowland. And then he saw it.

  The sunlight glistened as if on a metal surface. And above the bright spot in the distance was the faintly readable legend:

  HORTAN MACHINE WORKS

  Thrusting aside all judgment concerning the incredibility of a machine shop in such a locale, he crossed the stream and made his way over the meadow toward the small rise.

  As he approached, the, machine works appeared to be merely a dome-shaped structure about thirty feet in diameter and with an open door in one side. He came up to it with a mind ready for anything. The crudely painted sign above the door looked as if it had been drawn by an inexpert barn painter in a state of intoxication.

  Jim entered the dimly lit interior of the shop and set his case upon the floor beside a narrow bench that extended about the room.

  Tools and instruments of unfamiliar design were upon the bench and upon the walls. But no one appeared.

  Then he noticed an open door and a steep, spiral ramp that led down to a basement room. He stepped through and half slid, half walked down to the next level.

  There was artificial lighting by fluorescent tubes of unusual construction, Jim noticed. But still no sign of anyone. And there was not an object in the room that appeared familiar to him. Articles that vaguely resembled furniture were against the walls.

  He felt uneasy amid the strangeness of the room and he was about to go back up the steep ramp when a voice came to him.

  “This is Mr. Quilcon. Is that you, Mr. Ward?”

  “Yes. Where are you?”

  “I am in the next room, unable to come out until I finish a bit of work I have started. Will you please go on down to the room below? You will find the damaged machinery there. Please go right to work on it. I’m sure that you have a complete understanding of what is necessary. I will join you in a moment”

  * * *

  Hesitantly, Jim turned to the other side of the room where he saw a second ramp leading down to a brilliantly lighted room. He glanced about once more, then moved down the ramp.

  The room was high-ceilinged and somewhat larger in diameter than the others he had seen and it was almost completely occupied by the machine.

  A series of close fitting towers with regular bulbous swellings on their columns formed the main structure of the engine. These were grouped in a solid circle with narrow walkways at right angles to each other passing through them.

  Jim Ward stood for a long time examining their surfaces that rose twenty feet from the floor. All that he had learned from the curious correspondence course seemed to fall into place. Diagrams and drawings of such machines had seemed incomprehensible. Now he knew exactly what each part was for and how the machine operated.

  He squeezed his body into the narrow walkway between the towers and wormed his way to the center of the engine. His bad leg made it difficult, but he at last came to the damaged structure.

  One of the tubes had cracked open under some tremendous strain and through the slit he could see the marvelously intricate wiring with which it was filled. Wiring that was burned now and fused to a mass. It was in a control circuit that rendered the whole machine functionless, but its repair would not be difficult, Jim knew.

  He went back to the periphery of the engine and found the controls of a cranelike device which he lowered and seized the cracked sleeve and drew off the damaged part.

  From the drawers and bins in the walls he selected parts and tools and returned to the damaged spot.

  In the cramped space he began tearing away the fused parts and wiring. He was lost and utterly unconscious of anything but the fascination of the mighty engine. Here within this room was machine capacity to power a great city.

  Its basic function rested upon the principle of magnetic currents in contrast to electric currents. The discovery of magnetic currents had been announced only a few months before he came home from the war. The application of the discovery had been swift.

  And he began to glimpse the fundamental source of the energy supplying the machine. It was in the great currents of gravitational and magnetic force flowing between the planets and the suns of the universe. As great as atomic energy and as boundless in its resources, this required no fantastically dangerous machinery to harness. The principle of the power co-ordinator was simple.

  The pain of his cramped position forced Jim to move out to rest his leg. As he stood beside the engine he resumed his pondering on the purpose it had in this strange location. Why was it built there and what use was made of its power?

  He moved about to restore the circulation in his legs and sought to trace the flow of energy through the engine, determine where and what kind of a load was placed upon it.

  His search led him below into a third sub-basement of the building and there he found the thing he was searching for, the load into which the tremendous drive of the engine was coupled.

  But here he was unable to comprehend fully, for the load was itself a machine of strange design, and none of its features had been covered in the correspondence course.

  The machine upstairs seized upon the magnetic currents of space and selected and concentrated those flowing in a given direction.

  The force of these currents was then fed into the machines in this room, but there was no point of reaction against which the energy could be applied.

  Unless‌—‌

  The logical, inevitable conclusion forced itself upon his mind. There was only one conceivable point of reaction.

  He stood very still and a tremor went through him. He looked up at the smooth walls about him. Metal, all of them.

  And this room‌—‌it was narrower than the one above‌—‌as if the entire building were tapered from the dome protruding out of the earth to the basement floor.

  The only possible point of reaction was the building itself.

  But it wasn’t a building. It was a vessel.

  * * *

  Jim clawed and stumbled his way up the incline into the engine room, then beyond into the chamber above. He was halfway up the top ramp when he heard the voice again.

  “Is that you, Mr. Ward? I have almost finished and will be with you in a moment. Have you completed the repairs. Was it very difficult?”

  He hesitated, but didn’t answer. Something about the quality of that voice gave him a chill. He hadn’t noticed it before because of his curiosity and his interest in the place. Now he detected its unearthly, inhuman quality.

  He detected the fact that it wasn’t a voice at all, but that the words had been formed in his brain as if he himself had spoken them.

  He was nearly at the top of the ramp and drew himself on hands and knees to the floor level when he saw the shadow of the closing door sweep across the room and heard the metallic dang of the door. It was sealed tight. Only the small windows‌—‌or ports‌—‌admitted light.

  He rose and straightened and calmed himself with the thought that the vessel could not fly. It could not rise with the remainder of the repair task unfinished‌—‌and he was not going to finish it; that much was certain.

  “Quilcon!” he called. “Show yourself! Who are you and what do you want of me?”

  “I want you to finish the repair job and do it quickly,” the voice replied instantly. “And quickly‌—‌it must be finished quickly.”

  There was a note of desperation and despair that seemed to cut into Jim. Then he caught sight of the slight motion against the wall beside him.

  In a small, transparent hemisphere that was fastened to the side of the wall lay the slug that Jim had seen at the post office, the thing the woman had called an “armadillo.” He had not even noticed it when he first entered the room. The thing was moving now with slow pulsations that swelled its surface and great welts like dark veins stood out upon it.

  From the golden-hued hemisphere a maze of cable ran to instrument
s and junction boxes around the room and a hundred tiny pseudopods grasped terminals inside the hemisphere.

  It was a vessel‌—‌and this slug within the hemisphere was its alien, incredible pilot. Jim knew it with startling cold reality that came to him in waves of thought that emanated from the slug called Quilcon and broke over Jim’s mind. It was a ship and a pilot from beyond Earth‌—‌from out of the reaches of space.

  * * *

  “What do you want of me? Who are you?” said Jim Ward.

  “I am Quilcon. You are a good student. You learn well.”

  “What do you want?”

  “I want you to repair the damaged engine.”

  There was something wrong with the creature. Intangibly, Jim sensed it. An aura of sickness, a desperate urgency came to his mind.

  But something else was in the foreground of Jim’s mind. The horror of the alien creature diminshed and Jim contemplated the miracle that had come to mankind.

  “I’ll bargain with you,” he said quietly. “Tell me how to build a ship like this for my people and I will fix the engines for you.”

  “No! No‌—‌there is no time for that. I must hurry‌—‌”

  “Then I shall leave without any repairs.”

  He moved toward the door and instantly a paralyzing wave took hold of him as if he had seized a pair of charged electrodes. It relaxed only as he stumbled back from the door.

  “My power is weak,” said Quilcon, “but it is strong enough for many days yet‌—‌many of your days. Too many for you to live without food and water. Repair the engine and then I shall let you go.”

  “Is what I ask too much to pay for my help?”

  “You have had pay enough. You can teach your people to build power co-ordinator machines. Is that not enough?”

  “My people want to build ships like this one and move through space.”