Time Travel Omnibus Volume 2

by Anthology

  Blake shot him dead, swung off his horse, and stripped the toga from him. He flung it to Maida.

  “Take this!” he said savagely. “I could kill—”

  There was now no question of his leadership. He led the retreat from the villa. The eight horses headed north again, straight for the luridly flaming forest.

  They stopped once more. Behind them, another building of the estate had caught from the first. Sheer confusion ruled. The slaughter of the master disrupted all organization. The roof of the slave barracks caught screams and howls of pure panic reached even the fugitives. Then there were racing, maddened figures rushing here and there in the glare of the fires. Suddenly there was fighting. A howling ululation arose.

  Minott worked savagely, stripping clothing from the bodies slain in that incredible, unrecorded conflict of Confederate soldiers and Roman troops, in some unguessable pathway of space and time. Blake watched behind, but he curtly commanded the salvaging of rifles and ammunition from them dead Confederates, if they were Confederates.

  And as Hunter, still gasping hysterically, took the load of yet unfamiliar weapons upon his horse, the eight felt a certain incredible, intolerable vertigo and nausea. The burning forest ahead vanished from their sight. Instead, there was darkness. A noisome smell came down wind; dampness and strange, overpowering perfumes of strange, colored flowers. Something huge and deadly bellowed in the space before them which smelled like a monstrous swamp.

  The liner City of Baltimore plowed through the open sea in the first pale light of dawn. The skipper, up on the bridge, wore a worried frown. The radio operator came up. He carried a sheaf of radiograin forms. His eyes were blurry with loss of sleep.

  “Maybe it was me, sir,” he reported heavily. “I felt awful funny for a while last night, and then all night long I couldn’t raise a station. I checked everything and couldn’t find anything wrong. But just now I felt awful sick and funny for a minute, and when I come out of it the air was full of code. Here’s some of it. I don’t understand how I could have been sick so I couldn’t hear code, sir, but—”

  The skipper said abruptly: “I had that sick feeling, too-dizzy. So did the man at the wheel. So did everybody. Give me the messages.”

  His eyes ran swiftly over the yellow forms.

  “News flash: Half of London disappeared at 2:00 A.M. this morning S.S. Manzanillo reporting. Sea serpent which attacked this ship during the night and seized four sailors returned and was rammed five minutes ago. It seems to be dying. Our bow badly smashed. Two forward compartments flooded . . . Warning to all mariners. Pack ice seen floating fifty miles off New York harbor . . . News flash: Madrid, Spain, has undergone inexplicable change. All buildings formerly known now unrecognizable from the air. Air fields have vanished. Mosques seem to have taken the place of churches and cathedrals. A flag bearing the crescent floats . . . European population of Calcutta seems to have been massacred. S.S. Carib reports harbor empty, all signs of European domination vanished, and hostile mobs lining shore . . .

  The skipper of the City of Baltimore passed his hand over his forehead. He looked uneasily at the radio operator. “Sparks,” he said gently, “you’d better go see the ship’s doctor. Here! I’ll detail a man to go with you.”

  “I know,” said Sparks bitterly. “I guess I’m nuts, all right. But that’s what come through.”

  He marched away with his head hanging, escorted by a sailor. A little speck of smoke appeared dead ahead.

  It became swiftly larger. With the combined speed of the two vessels, in a quarter of an hour the other ship was visible. In half an hour it could be made out clearly. It was long and low and painful black, but the first incredible thing was that it was a paddle steamer, with two sets of paddles instead of one, and the after set revolving more swiftly than the forward.

  The skipper of the City of Baltimore looked more closely through high glasses and nearly dropped them in stark amazement. The flag flying on the other ship was black and white only. A beam wind blew it out swiftly. A white death’s head, with two crossed bones below it the traditional flag of piracy!

  Signal flags fluttered up in the rigging of the other ship. The skipper of the City of Baltimore gazed at them, stunned.

  “Gibberish!” he muttered. “It don’t make sense! They aren’t international code. Not the same flags at all!”

  Then a gun spoke. A monstrous puff of black powder smoke billowed over the other ship’s bow. A heavy shot crashed into the forepart of the City of Baltimore: An instant later it exploded.

  “I’m crazy, too!” said the skipper dazedly.

  A second shot. A third and fourth. The black steamer sheered off and started to pound the City of Baltimore in a businesslike fashion. Half the bridge went overside. The forward cargo hatch blew up with a cloud of smoke from an explosion underneath.

  Then the skipper came to. He roared orders. The big ship heeled as it came around. It plunged forward at vastly more than its normal cruising speed The guns on the other ship doubled and redoubled their rate of fire. Then the black ship tried to dodge. But it had not time.

  The City of Baltimore rammed it. But at the very last moment the skipper felt certain of his own insanity. It was too late to save the other ship then. The City of Baltimore cut it in two.

  XI

  The pale gray light of dawn filtered down through an incredible thickness of foliage. It was a subdued, a feeble twilight when it reached the earth where a tiny camp fire burned. That fire gave off thick smoke from watersoaked wood. Hunter tended it, clad in ill-assorted remnants of a gray uniform.

  Harris worked patiently at a rifle, trying to understand exactly how it worked. It was unlike any rifle with which he was familiar. The bolt action was not really a bolt action at all, and he’d noticed that there was no rifling in the barrel. He was trying to understand how the long bullet was made to revolve. Harris, too, had substituted Confederate gray for the loin cloth flung him for sole, covering when with the others he was thrust into the slave pen of the Roman villa. Minott sat with his head in his hands, staring at the opposite side of the stream. On his face was all bitterness.

  Blake listened. Maida Haynes sat and looked at him. Lucy Blair darted furtive, somehow wistful, glances at Minott. Presently she moved to sit beside him. She asked him an anxious question. The other two girls sat by the fire. Bertha Ketterling was slouched back against a tree-fern trunk. Her head had fallen back. She snored. With the exception of Blake, all of them were barefoot.

  Blake came back to the fire. He nodded across the little stream. “We seem to have come to the edge of a time fault,” he observed. “This side of the stream is definitely Carboniferous-period vegetation. The other side isn’t as primitive, but it isn’t of our time, anyhow. Professor Minott!”

  Minott lifted his head. “Well?” he demanded bitterly.

  “We need some information,” said Blake. “We’ye been here for hours, and there’s been no further change in time paths that we’ve noticed. Is, it likely that the scrambling of time and space is ended, sir? If it has, and the time paths stay jumbled, we’ll never find our world intact, of course, but we can hunt for colonies, perhaps even cities of our own kind of people.”

  “If we do,” said Minott bitterly, “how far will we get? We’re practically unarmed. We can’t—”

  Blake pointed to the salvaged rifles. “Harris is working on the arms problem now,” he said dryly. “Besides, the girls didn’t take the revolvers from their saddlebags. We’ve still two revolvers for each man and an extra pair. Those Romans thought the saddlebags were decorations, perhaps, or they intended to examine the saddles as a whole. We’ll make out. What I want to know is, has the time-scrambling process stopped?”

  Lucy Blair said something in a low tone. But Minott glanced at Maida Haynes, She was regarding Blake worshipfully.

  Minott’s eyes burned. He scowled in surpassing bitterness. “It probably hasn’t,” he said harshly. I expect it to keep up for probably two weeks or more
of duration. I use that term to mean time elapsed in all the time paths simultaneously. We can’t help thinking of time as passing on our particular time path only. Yes. I expect disturbances to continue for two weeks or more, if everything in time and space is not annihilated.”

  Blake sat down.

  Insensibly Maida Haynes moved closer to him. “Could you explain, sir? We can only wait here. As nearly as I can tell from the topography, there’s a village across this little stream in our time. It ought to be in sight if our time path ever turns up in view, here.”

  Minott unconsciously reassumed some of his former authoritative manner. Their capture and scornful dismissal to the status of slaves had shaken all his selfconfidence. Before, he had felt himself not only a member of a superior race, but a superior member of that race. In being enslaved he had been both degraded and scorned. His vanity was still gnawed at by that memory, and his self-confidence shattered by the fact that he had been able to kill only two utterly brutalized slaves, without in the least contributing to his own freedom. Now, for the first time, his voice took on a semblance of its old ring.

  “We know that gravity warps space,” he said precisely. “From observation we have been able to discover the amount of warping produced by a given mass. We can calculate the mass necessary to warp space so that it will close in completely, making a closed universe, which is unreachable and undetectable in any of the dimensions we know, for example, that if two gigantic star masses of a certain combined mass were rush together, at the instant of their collision there would not be a great cataclysm. They would simply vanish. But they would not cease to exist. They would merely cease to exist in our space and time, They would have created a space and time of their own.”

  Harris said apologetically, “Like crawling in a hole and pulling the hole in after you. I read something like that in a Sunday supplement once, sir.”

  Minott nodded. He went on in a near approach to a classroom manner. “Now, imagine that two such universes have been formed. They are both invisible from the space and time in which they were formed. Each exists in its own space and time, just as our universe. does. But each must also exist in a certain, well, hyper-space, because if closed spaces are separated, there must be some sort of something in between them, else they would be together.”

  “Really,” said Blake, “you’re talking about something we can infer, but ordinarily can’t possibly learn anything about by observation.”

  “Just so.” Minott nodded. “Still, if our space is closed, we must assume that there are other closed spaces. And don’t forget that other closed spaces would be as real, are as real, as our closed space is.”

  “But what does it mean?” asked Blake.

  “If there are other closed spaces like ours, and they exist in a common medium, the hyper, space from which they and we alike are sealed off, they might be likened to, say, stars and planets in our space, which are separated by space and yet affect each other through space. Since these various closed spaces are separated by a logically necessary hyper-space, it is at least probable that they should affect each other through that hyper-space.”

  Blake said slowly, “Then the shiftings of time paths, well, they’re the result of something on the order of tidal strains. If another star got close to the sun, our planets would crack up from tidal strains alone. You’re suggesting that another closed space has got close to our closed space in hyper-space. It’s awfully confused, sir.”

  “I have calculated it,” said Minott. harshly. “The odds are four to one that space and time and universe, every star and every galaxy in the skies, will be obliterated in one monstrous cataclysm when even the past will never have been. But there is one chance in four, and I planned to take full advantage of it. I planned—”

  Then he stood up suddenly. His figure straightened. He struck his hands together savagely. “By Heaven, I still plan! We have arms. We have books, technical knowledge, formulas, the cream of the technical knowledge of earth packed in our saddlebags! Listen to me! We cross this stream now. When the next change comes, we strike across whatever time path takes the place of this. We make for the Potomac, where that aviator saw Norse ships drawn up! I have Anglo-Saxon and early Norse vocabularies in the saddlebags. We’ll make friends with them. We’ll teach them. We’ll lead them. We’ll make ourselves masters of the world and—”

  Harris said apologetically: “I’m sorry, sir, but I promised Bertha I’d take her home, if it was humanly possible. I have to do it. I can’t join you in becoming an emperor, even if the breaks are right.”

  Minott scowled at him. “Hunter?”

  “I-I’ll do as the others do,” said Hunter uneasily. “I-I’d rather go home.”

  “Fool!” snarled Minott.

  Lucy Blair said loyally: “I-I’d like to be an empress, Professor Minott.”

  Maida Haynes stared at her. She opened her mouth to speak. Blake absently pulled a revolver from his pocket and looked at it meditatively as Minott clenched and unclenched his hands. The veins stood out on his forehead. He began to breathe heavily.

  “Fools!” he roared. “Fools! You’ll never get back! Yet you throw away.”

  Swift, sharp, agonizing vertigo smote them all. The revolver fell from Blake’s hands. He looked up. A dead silence fell upon all of them.

  Blake stood shakily upon his feet. He looked, and looked again. “That—” He swallowed. “That is King George courthouse, in King George County, in Virginia, in our time I think. Hell! Let’s get across that stream.”

  He picked up Maida in his arms. He started.

  Minott moved quickly and croaked, “Wait!”

  He had Blake’s dropped revolver in his hand. He was desperate, hunted, gray with rage and despair. “I-I offer you, for the last time, I offer you riches, power, women, and—”

  Harris stood up, the Confederate rifle still in his hands. He brought the barrel down smartly upon Minott’s wrist.

  Blake waded across and put Maida safely down upon the shore. Hunter was splashing frantically through the shallow water. Harris was shaking Bertha Ketterling to wake her. Blake splashed back. He rounded up the horses. He loaded the salvaged weapons over a saddle. He shepherded the three remaining girls over. Hunter was out of sight. He had fled toward the painted buildings of the courthouse. Blake led the horses across the stream. Minott nursed his numbed wrist. His eyes blazed with the fury of utter despair.

  “Better come along,” said Blake quietly.

  “And be a professor of mathematics?” Minott laughed savagely. “No! I stay here!”

  Blake considered. Minott was a strange, an unprepossessing figure. He was haggard. He was desperate. Standing against the background of a Carboniferous jungle, in the misfitting uniform he had stripped from a dead man in some other path of time, he was even pitiable. Shoeless, unshaven, desperate, he was utterly defiant.

  “Wait!” said Blake.

  He stripped off the saddlebags from six of the horses. He heaped them on the remaining two. lie led those two back across the stream and tethered them.

  Minott regarded him with an implacable hatred. “If I hadn’t chosen you,” he said harshly, “I’d have carried my original plan through. I knew I shouldn’t choose you. Maida liked you too well. And I wanted her for myself. It was my mistake, my only one.”

  Blake shrugged. He went back across the stream and remounted.

  Lucy Blair looked doubtfully back at the solitary, savage figure. “He’s brave, anyhow,” she said unhappily.

  A faint, almost imperceptible, dizziness affected all of them. It passed. By instinct they looked back at the tall jungle. It still stood. Minott looked bitterly after them.

  “I’ve something I want to say!” said Lucy Blair breathlessly. “D-don’t wait for me!”

  She wheeled her horse about and rode for the stream. Again that faint, nearly imperceptible, dizziness. Lucy slapped her horse’s flank frantically.

  Maida cried out, “Wait, Lucy! It’s going to shift—” An
d Lucy cried over her shoulder, “That’s what I want! I’m going to stay.”

  She was halfway across the stream more than halfway. Then the vertigo struck all of them.

  XII

  Everyone knows the rest of the story. For two weeks longer there were still occasional shiftings of the time paths. But gradually it became noticeable that the number of time faults in Professor Minott’s phrase were decreasing in number. At the most drastic period, it has been estimated that no less than twenty-five per cent of the whole earth’s surface was at a given moment in some other time path than its own. We do not know of any portion of the earth which did not vary from its own time path at some period of the disturbance.

  That means, of course, that practically one hundred per cent of the earth’s population encountered the conditions caused by the earth’s extraordinary oscillations sidewise in time. Our scientists are no longer quite as dogmatic as they used to be. The dialectics of philosophy have received a serious jolt. Basic ideas in botany, zoology, and even philology have been altered by the new facts made available by our travels sidewise in time.

  Because of course it was the fourth chance which happened, and the earth survived. In our time path, at any rate. The survivors of Minott’s exploring party reached King George courthouse barely a quarter of an hour after the time shift which carried Minott and Lucy Blair out of our space and time forever. Blake and Harris searched for a means of transmitting the information they possessed to the world at large. Through a lonely radio amateur a mile from the village, they sent out Minott’s theory on short waves. Shorn of Minott’s pessimistic analysis of the probabilities of survival, it went swiftly to every part of the world then in its proper relative position. It was valuable, in that it checked explorations in force which in some places had been planned. It prevented, for example, a punitive military expedition from going past a time fault in Georgia, past which a scalping party of Indians from an uncivilized America had retreated. It prevented the dispatch of a squadron of destroyers to find and seize Leifsholm, from, which a viking foray had been made upon North Centerville, Massachusetts. A squadron of mapping planes was recalled from reconnaissance work above a Carboniferous swamp in West Virginia, just before the time shift which would have isolated them forever.