The Time Trap

by John Russell Fearn

  The voice died away, and all the twiddling of knobs that Nick gave the set failed to restore it to life.

  “That announcer’s crazy!” Betty Danvers exclaimed. “It’s long past midnight—twenty past two, in fact. For the love of heaven, what sort of a nightmare have we landed in?”

  “If my guess is right,” Dawlish said, thinking, “daylight should come eventually, and then we may be able to assess the position more easily. Until then I think we ought to try and sleep. The air is warm, we have plenty of rugs, and I took the liberty of preparing the picnic basket, sir, in case you decided on extra traveling.”

  “Extra traveling is right!” Nick commented dismally.

  “Sleep?” Bernice repeated. “Under these frightful con­ditions I couldn’t sleep a wink! Don’t be so ridiculous, Dawlish!”

  “I’m sorry, miss, but are the conditions so awful? We have peace all around us. Frankly, and with the greatest respect, I might say that I find things here more restful than in the ordinary way.”

  That awkward silence came back again. It appeared that, quite unobtrusively, Dawlish was taking things into his own hands—perhaps because he knew far more about the situation than anybody else.

  Nick cleared his throat. “I think Dawlish has the right idea. Come on, girls, take the back seat, cover yourselves with the rugs, and do what you can to snooze. We men will take the front.”

  There were plenty of grumbles—but he was finally obeyed.

  * * * *

  When Nick awoke again it was daylight and Dawlish’s lean, immobile face was stooping over him. He was holding a plastic cup in which tea was steaming.

  “Good morning, sir. Somewhat incongruously, I am afraid, I have here your morning cup of tea.”

  “Thanks.”

  Nick took it, hoping for the moment that he would find himself in bed at home with the satin curtains drawn back. But no! He was still in the car with a cloudless sky over­head and a considerable amount of heat beating down upon him from an invisible sun. It was the weirdest awakening he had ever known. Then he remembered the others and looked about him.

  The girls were still in the back of the car, nibbling at the picnic sandwiches and balancing cups on their knees. They looked pasty, disheveled, and thoroughly miserable—even Betty Danvers, who usually managed to keep a bright smile under all circumstances.

  Some distance away from the car, contemplating the land­scape as he slowly turned on his heel, was Harley Brand. Now and again he scratched his head, then shrugged to himself.

  “How’s life, girls?” Nick asked, absently watching Daw­lish busy with the small picnic oil cooker.

  “Rotten!” Bernice declared with finality.

  Nick drank his tea and surveyed. He could hardly have contemplated a more dreary panorama. Everywhere, save in the direction he took to be the east, were the endless fields of dry, brownish-green grass, flat as a billiard table, Nowhere a hill or mountain. To the east, though, there was a curious gray blur that could have been a distant ocean. Otherwise, not a bird, not a movement, not a flower.

  “I think, sir,” Dawlish said, when the “breakfast” was about over, “that we should hold a conference. I’ll ask Mr. Brand to join us.”

  Harley came over immediately and leaned on the edge of the car morosely, waiting for somebody to say something. Nobody did, except Dawlish.

  “I think,” he said, “that we can take it as an accepted fact that we have strayed into some space contiguous to our own. A fourth dimension does exist, but up to now it has only been in the realms of mathematics. But it is also a fact that other spaces and planes exist alongside our own, and now and again there is an overlap. As the ocean plunges its waves forwards and then retracts them, carrying with it driftwood which is borne out on the ebb, so other dimensions occa­sionally overlap our own and, by chance, somebody or something is perhaps picked up and drawn away on that ebbing, dimensional tide. Space within space, angles within angles, is the top and bottom of the Universe.”

  “Marvelous, for a chauffeur!” Nick declared, grinning.

  “I still think we’re on a circular road!” Harley insisted.

  “That you can forget completely, sir,” Dawlish told him. “The missing shadows, and absence of visible sun and moon in a cloudless sky is sufficient evidence of the fact that we are, at this moment, in a different space from our own. Light has undergone a change, so probably has time itself—as witness the announcer last night telling us it was just on midnight when we knew it was twenty past two.”

  “But how did we get here?” Nick demanded.

  “We may never discover that, any more than we can re­member ourselves being born. We were shifted from one space to the other, and our only clue was the queer sound of the last note of twelve as it struck from the clock tower.”

  Nick gave a start as he remembered. “You noticed it too, then? A sort of cut-off effect?”

  “Yes, sir. At that moment we must have crossed from one space to the other.”

  “But surely,” Lucy Brand asked, “we can find our way back if we follow this road as far as it will go?”

  Dawlish shook his head. “I’m afraid not. Just as one can never be sure that the waves on a shore will strike the same spot twice, so we cannot be sure of finding the way out. If we get out at all it will be by the merest chance; just as the merest chance brought us here.”

  There was dead silence—until Nick exploded.

  “Dammit, man, do you realize what you’re telling us? You are as good as saying we’ve got to stop here for the rest of our lives!”

  “Yes, sir. I base my opinion on the fact that those who came here before us never returned to the everyday world.”

  Harley raised his head and looked blank. “Who the blazes ever came here before us?”

  “Quite a few, sir. The records of missing people show that many thousands of people vanish every year without trace. Take two examples—Henry Potter of Maida Vale, who on the nineteenth of January, 1916, stepped back into his home to pick up an umbrella he’d forgotten, and was never seen again! Or the case of Dorothy Arnold of New York, who vanished from a busy shopping center in the middle of a summer afternoon. As for ships, they have dis­appeared in endless numbers and nobody has ever solved how, or why.”

  Harley straightened up. “So our names can now be added to the world’s record of missing people? How very nice! However, we are pretty healthy at the moment, but what happens when the picnic stuff gives out? I’ve seen neither food nor water in this confounded place.”

  “Water there must be or grass would not grow,” Dawlish answered. “We’d find water if we dug down.”

  “I’m doing no digging!” Bernice declared impatiently.

  “Before long, Miss Forbes, you may have to do many things in order to survive. As for food, I think we have an ocean in the distance there, and it may contain fish. I think we ought to remove everything we need from the car and then bead towards that ocean—on foot, of course.”

  The women looked in dismay at their light evening shoes and costly dresses, the latter showing under the opened coats.

  “Back to the primitive in one easy lesson!” Betty Danvers said finally. “Well, I’m game. Let’s go, girls!”

  But for her there would probably have been trouble with the grumbling Bernice and Lucy Brand, but against the younger woman’s example they could not stand out, so they descended stiffly to the dusty ground and stretched aching limbs.

  Nick clambered out too and joined Dawlish. Harley came wandering round the rear of the car and stood on the outside of the group, hands in the pockets of his evening trousers. He was unshaven and completely despondent.

  “Rugs, picnic equipment, and stove,” Dawlish said, hand­ing out the various articles to one or other. “This is all we need. I am sorry to abandon the car, sir.”

  “Thirty thousand pounds down the drain,” Nick sighed. “Ah well, we’re still alive.”

  He began walking, dust stirring round his shoes, and
as he went he slipped his arm through Bernice’s so that she had to keep pace with him. She gave an angry glance.

  “Things are bad enough without you looking so disgust­ingly cheerful!” she exclaimed.

  “No use being miserable, Berny. If we’re to die let us do it with a smile on our lips.”

  “The rugged individualist,” Betty commented dryly. “Just the same, there’s a lot in what you say, Nick. I know be­cause I’ve tried it.”

  Nick frowned as the party struggled onwards. “Tried what, Betty? What are you talking about?”

  “Myself, as usual.” Betty gave a laugh. “This experience we have stumbled into is more amusing for me than anybody because, even in the normal world, I wouldn’t have lasted above six months.”

  The party halted, startled by the revelation. Betty had a defiant look on her pert face.

  “I know all of you have got me down as a girl whose main abject in life has been to get rid of father’s money,” she continued. “But you’ve had the wrong angle. Since it does­n’t matter much what we confess to each other I may as well tell you I’ve been having a last fling. Who wouldn’t, with only six months to go?”

  “You mean,” Bernice asked in horror, “that you have only six months to live?”

  “That’s it.” Betty shrugged and continued walking, her high heels catching in the rutted, dusty ground. “Something wrong with my heart. I heard about it six weeks ago, so I resolved to have the time of my life—and now look what’s happened! I’m not the only one who’s been given a death sentence! All of you have! Can you wonder I want to laugh?”

  “But you won’t, Miss Danvers,” Dawlish murmured, com­ing up beside her with the picnic case in his hand and a rug over his shoulder.

  She glanced at him quickly. She was noticing that he was far younger than she’d thought. No more than thirty-five.

  “Why won’t I?” she demanded.

  “Because I think you are too generous-minded to laugh at people in the same boat as yourself.”

  Betty raised a critical eyebrow and said no more.

  “After this,” Bernice wailed suddenly, “I’ll never feel clean again in all my life!”

  “If that’s an ocean ahead you can take a swim,” Nick said.

  “Can I? In what?”

  Nick hesitated, and then Harley Brand broke in: “I’m wondering how Consolidateds have broken this morning—”

  “Dearest, it doesn’t matter,” Lucy told him patiently.

  “What doesn’t? Consolidateds matter a great deal—”

  “You and Consolidateds may never meet again,” Lucy went on. “Do try and get things in focus, Harley. We may finish up dying as savages, with no food, no clothes, and no hope. Your checkbook in your wallet will be so much waste paper.”

  “Rubbish! We’ll return. Dammit, we’ve got to!”

  “Which means we must have organization,” Dawlish said. “Not so much for getting ourselves home, but for survival here. And organization demands a leader. I suggest—myself.”

  “Good enough,” Nick said, before anybody could object. “You seem to know more about this mess than anybody, so it’s only right. Okay, everybody?”

  There were slow nods, nothing more.

  CHAPTER TWO

  SHIP OF THE DEAD

  Halfway to the blue smudge on the horizon, which by now had taken on all the evidences of an ocean, a halt was called. One biscuit each and a small drink of cold tea was permitted, then followed a rest—particularly for the women who were looking jaded and smolderingly angry.

  Then on again, and at last the first sounds in this silent, oppressive land became evident, sounds other than those the party itself was making. The growing roar of the sea, of breakers crashing on shore.

  Towards four in the afternoon, according to Dawlish’s watch, and checked by those of the others, the shore was reached. Utterly fagged out, the party sank down, close to­gether, and Nick and Harley smoked half a cigarette each. Dawlish, being a non-smoker, was not troubled. He was gazing out to sea, weighing up the situation.

  The sky was blue and empty, yet there was the definite heat of an unseen sun. No seagulls flew; nor was there a smudge on the horizon to reveal a distant ship.

  “Dead,” Bernice whispered hopelessly. “What did we ever do to deserve being flung into a place like this?”

  Presently Dawlish got up. He walked down to the tide line, mooched along it, and finally picked up some seaweed and studied it. He still had it in his hand when he returned.

  “This is edible,” he said. “Just as ordinary seaweed is if you know how to prepare it.”

  “Do you suggest,” Bernice asked blankly, “that we should descend to eating seaweed?”

  “Have you any other solution?” Dawlish asked politely.

  Bernice opened her mouth and shut it again. She still had not fully realized that food had gone, that without something, no matter how unpalatable, death would inevitably follow.

  “It will come out like cabbage,” Dawlish added. “There is a good deal of driftwood with which we can start a fire. We have lighters; and, back along the route, we can dig down to fresh water. The picnic equipment will provide a make­shift saucepan. The brine is removed from the seaweed by constant boiling and change of water. When the cigarette lighters give out we shall have to resort to spinning a rod in our palms.”

  “I’ll give a hand to get these things set out,” Nick said, getting up.

  Harley moved too and began to sort out the picnic tackle whilst Nick went back to the tide line with Dawlish to collect more seaweed. Amongst the women Betty Danvers spoke first.

  “I suppose we ought to help,” she said, pulling off her dustcoat and throwing it down. “Though I don’t see what we can do.”

  “Go back along the road and get some water for these containers,” Harley instructed, handing them over.

  “And with what do we dig?” Bernice asked coldly.

  “Your hands, Berny, and forget the manicure.”

  Bernice tugged off her heavy fur coat impatiently, then she snatched the container offered her and walked back up the shelf of beach. Lucy Brand followed after her and at last Betty went too. Harley watched them go, his lips tight. He was wondering what would happen if inclement weather sud­denly descended. The need of a shelter was obvious, and he pointed it out to Dawlish as, with Nick, he returned with the seaweed.

  “We’ll build a bungalow, sir,” Dawlish answered.

  “With what? Sand?”

  “No—trees. Look over there.”

  Harley and Nick turned. It was apparent to them now that the sea coast was formed into a bay some ten miles distant, and fronting the bay were cliffs. Capping this headland were masses of trees that probably stretched quite a distance ahead.

  “So there is something besides grass!” Harley exclaimed.

  “Evidently so. Naturally, if grass will grow in profusion then trees must too. We can easily get our timber from there. For the moment, however, we must concentrate on preparing our meal. Where are the ladies?”

  “Gone to dig up water, as you suggested.”

  Dawlish said nothing. He began to break up the seaweed into one of the picnic containers.

  “I’ll help the girls.” Nick said. “I fancy they won’t be relishing looking for water.”

  He was right. He found the three women half a mile away lying on their faces, scooping to arms’ length into the earth—and so far they had not reached water. But when Nick lent his aid, scooping far deeper than they could, the moisture at last began to become apparent, until ultimately there was enough of it to fill the two containers.

  “Fresh, too,” Nick said, tasting it. “That seems to prove it does rain here sometimes.”

  “Or else there are underground streams,” Betty responded. “I’ll bet we get pains after drinking this stuff, too.”

  “It’ll be boiled,” Nick told her, leading the way back to the shore.

  When the water was handed to him Dawlish prono
unced himself satisfied.

  “Good!” he said. “The land behind being higher than sea level the water is bound to be fresh. There’s a big billycan here. Fill it to capacity, please.”

  “After all we’ve done?” Bernice objected.

  “I’m afraid so. Water is the most essential thing of all.”

  “Dawlish is boss,” Nick said. “Better do it, girls.”

  “Meantime,” Dawlish added, “we’ll look for fish. I would be glad of the help of you gentlemen. The seaweed can start boiling.”

  Fortunately, there were fish in the ocean, of a small size and peculiar shape. Two hours later the party were seated on the warm sand eating the quite delectable fish and not too unpleasant de-salted seaweed. For drink there was only water.

  “For some time to come, fish and seaweed are likely to form our staple diet,” Dawlish said, when the meal was over. “At least let us be grateful for that much. We shall not starve. The next thing after that is to create a home, so we’d better take a look at that distant wood. We might even make our home there since one part of the shore is as good as another.”

  “But will there be water there?” Nick questioned.

  “Should be. Soon find out.”

  The camping tackle was collected, coats were shouldered, and then the march began. The sand was too difficult to walk upon so they took to the hinterland, wandering across the dry, scrubby fields and towards the distant outcropping.

  “It seems odd to me,” Nick remarked, as they tramped, “that although there are fish there doesn’t seem to be any other form of life. Is it just a Fish Age here, or something?”

  “Probably a matter of light-waves and their behavior in this plane,” Dawlish replied. “The fish, evidently, reflect light normally enough and so we see them. It is quite pos­sible there are other forms of life about us at this moment but invisible to our eyes—as we are, probably, to them. On the other hand there is also the possibility that our physical form is such that we are at this very moment walking through walls, and even people, without being aware of it. Just as it sometimes happens that beings from other planes walk through the midst of us and we sometimes catch a glimpse of them.”