by Anthology
“I am called Elaise.” She dipped in a graceful curtsey. “Tirewoman I am to Milady Melisante, spouse to Sir Aglavaine of Silbury Keep.”
“I’m Ronald Stratton—Ronny to my friends.”
“Ronny. It falleth trippingly from the tongue. Ronny.”
“Sounds swell when you say it. Strikes me we’d better try to find some way out of here. I’m not hankering to spend the night in these woods. Might be damned unhealthy, judging from what we’ve seen here already.”
“Whither thou goest I follow, Squire Ronny.” She said it demurely, hut he could have sworn there was a glint of amusement in the blue eyes over which her luxuriant lashes drooped. “Having saved my life from the ogre it is forfeit to thee. All I have and am is thine to command.”
“The hell you say!” Stratton muttered. “Come on then.” Was the minx laughing at him?
“Perchance thou mayst have need of this, Ronny,” he heard her say behind him. He threw a glance backward over his shoulder, saw her tugging the dagger from the ape-man’s breast. She got it out, started after him, wiping the blood from its blade with a handful of leaves. He shuddered at her callousness. Then he recalled the brawling, ribald, tempestuous age from which she came. Handling a gory dagger then was no more than cleaning a muddy tennis ball to the girl of now?
Then—Now. Those terms no longer had any meaning. The concepts of a dead past, a living present, a future yet unborn—all were false, utterly false. All Time exists simultaneously, in the same manner that all space exists simultaneously. Minutes, hours, years, centuries are merely measurements of location in terms of time; just as yards, miles, light-years are measurements of location in terms of space.
Space-time, time-space—the terms of the mathematical physicists, their theories that had seemed to Ronny Stratton’s realistic mind so much fairy-tale nonsense, had suddenly become breathing truths. If he had only paid more attention to them, tried to understand them! Didn’t Einstein talk about ether-warps, about eddies in the flux of space and time? Was there such an eddy on Silbury Hill, through which he had slipped into some alien dimension? Did the ancient Druids know it; was that why they had selected the spot for their savage rituals? Had they erected those monstrous circles to warn their charges from the very fate that had overtaken Elaise and himself?
“Ronny! Ronny!” The girl’s cry recalled Stratton to awareness of his surroundings. “What enchanted domain is this?”
They were at the edge of the forest, at the edge of the plateau it covered. Ten feet from where they stood, the terrain dropped away in a precipitous, headlong descent.
Sheer down for a thousand feet the high cliff fell, and far below a great plain spread mile after mile to a vague and murky horizon, a limitless expanse of tumbled, grotesque rock. Queerly angular, strangely distorted, the tortured stone soared in needle-like spires toward the lurid sky, or lay strewn in the fractured fragments of some gigantic cataclysm; piled here in gigantic mounds, there flattened to jagged fields.
Nowhere in that far-flung tumulus was there any sign of verdure, nowhere the glint of water; the hint of human habitation. But it was not alone the infinite desolation of that vast vista that gave it the eerie, ominous cast of a nightmare landscape. Color ran riot there. Violent greens warred with oranges virulent as the venom of the cobra. Fiery scarlet streamed shrieking between the yellow of a finch’s breast and blue cold as Polar ice.
“Ronny!” Elaise had shrunk against him. Stratton was abruptly conscious of the quivering warmth of her body against his, of the fragrance of her hair in his nostrils. “See there. What manner of beings are those that dwell in this outland of hell?” His arm went around her, drawing her closer still, but his gaze followed the gesture of her shaking hand. There was movement, just below. He saw them?
Apparently they had come out of some cavern in the face of the very cliff on whose brink he stood, and they were half walking, half crawling, as though seeking to take advantage of every bit of shelter the broken ground offered. Dwarfed though they were by the great height, Stratton could yet sense in their poses an odd combination of fear and aggressiveness. They were both hunter and hunted. They were stalking some as yet unseen enemy, dreading him and yet determined to attack him.
The American was by this time beyond astonishment, yet a chill prickle crawled his spine as he gazed down on the curious file. Their leader was a Roman centurion, the short skirt of his peplum swishing against swart thighs, breast and back protected by burnished armor, small round shield on one arm, stubby sword in the other.
He was followed by a squat, half-naked individual whose long blond hair and yellow, walrus mustachios set him off as one of the Britons whom Caesar’s legions conquered. Behind came a gigantic, steel-capped Viking with strung draw-bow, then a hairy aborigine . . . Had the eddy on Silbury Hill plucked from out of the dead years, one of each race of England’s long history to make up that small company? Jute, Pict, Saxon, they were all there, bound together with their common trait of cruel savagery!
The shadow of a cloud drifted across the great plain. The Roman saw it, crouched suddenly low behind an emerald rock. The others dropped prone. Stratton was aware of a whirring sound. A flash of light darted across the field of his vision. The Briton—vanished!
Where he had lain was a small pit in the rock, its edges glowing red-hot!
The faint sound of a barked order came up to Stratton. The men he watched sprang up, dashed helter-skelter for the shelter of the cliff whence they came. Before they passed from sight two others had whiffed into nothingness with the appalling spontaneity of the first. The whirring was louder, seemed to beat all about the watchers on the cliff with some indescribable threat. Something was in the air, level with Stratton, an egg-shaped metallic object suspended there without visible support. It flashed on him that this was the source of the spark that he had seen smash three humans into nothingness. Elaise whimpered, watching the wingless flyer hover and then it was darting straight toward them!
Terror fanged the youth. His muscles exploded to throw him backward into the obscurity of the forest, carrying Elaise with him. His heel caught on a gnarled root and he sprawled, the girl on top of him. The whirring filled the forest with its menace. Stratton scrambled to his feet, jerked the girl erect. Side by side the two ran through the thicket, blindly, fear lending them wings, the fear of a terrible unknown from which they must escape. They plunged into a clearing.
A tree flared into flame, ahead of them. “This way,” Stratton grunted, twisting to the right. Another forest giant was a column of fire, barring their passage. Behind, a third flamed.
“Oh-h-h,” Elaise gasped. “The fiend ringeth us around with the flame of his breath. We are doomed.”
They were surrounded by a roaring, torrid blaze. Heat beat in upon them, unendurable heat of an oven. Tongues of flame lapped toward them through the brush. They could not escape.
Stratton clutched the girl to him. “We’re licked,” he murmured. “We’re licked, honey, before we start.”
Her heart beat against his chest, her arms were around his neck. “We die, my Ronny,” she cried. “But we die together.”
“Together.” What was there in the blue eyes looking up into his that quenched the despair surging in his blood, that sent a thrill of ecstasy through him? What did these red and luscious lips demand? “Together!” Stratton’s own lips found her avid mouth, clung. It was almost pleasant—to die like this.
“Curious,” a dry, shrill voice squeaked. “Curious indeed.”
Charred, leafless trunks surrounded them, but the fire was gone. The ovoid flying-machine rested in the clearing, and a man stood before a black opening in its sleek side. “I must note the reaction,” he continued, “Really, I must note it at once.” This must be a native, Stratton thought. Surely there was never anyone on earth like him. His bulbous head, with fish-belly-white scalp utterly hairless, accounted for a full half of his height. The rest—his shrunken body, clothed in some tight, iridescent fabric of
spun metal; his spidery legs—seemed too fragile to support that great mass. Eyes large as small saucers stared unblinkingly out from under a bulging, immense forehead. His nostrils were gaping tunnels, his ears huge, flapping appendages, but his mouth was a tiny, toothless orifice. He was like some surrealist’s caricature, like the spawn of some evil dream . . .
“No,” the monstrosity squealed. “You are wrong. I am Flaton, an Earthman like yourself. Some forty centuries of evolution make the differences between us.”
What the hell! The fellow had answered him. But he hadn’t spoken! Stratton was sure he hadn’t spoken!
“You need not have,” the response came. “I know what you are thinking as well as you do yourself. Nor am I talking to you, in your sense of the word. What you think you hear is the projection of my thoughts into your brain. Evidently in your period, telepathy had not yet replaced oral communication.—What was that period?”
“Nineteen thirty—” Stratton started to say. He did not need to finish.
“The twentieth century, in your reckoning!” The American felt a reaction of pleased triumph from his interrogator! “What luck! Wait till Gershon sees you. The fool insists the Fifth Glacier was down as far as the Fiftieth parallel, and life there extinct, by the beginning of the eighteenth. When I produce you he will have to admit that I was right in setting the beginning of the last Ice Age much later . . . And this other is a female.” His unfathomable gaze shifted to Elaise, and he fell silent. No! Evidently his eerie method of communication was focused by the direction in which he looked, for the girl was curtseying. “Five hundred and a score years since Our Lord’s birth, master,” she quavered. “An it please thee.”
Another moment of silence, then she was speaking again. “I am hight Elaise, and this squire Ronny.” It was like listening in on one side of a telephone conversation. She could not, of course, understand that she was not really hearing Flaton’s questions. Stratton himself could not actually comprehend how it was accomplished, though, child of the Radio Age as he was, there was no magic in it for him. Were his thoughts exposed to the man of the future, he wondered, while the fellow’s eyes were not on him? It might be important to know?
Looking carefully at the odd craft that had brought Flaton here, he thought: “Maybe he’s more developed than I, but he’s weaker. Physical development has been sacrificed to mental. I can break him in half with my fist. I’m going to try it. Now! “
Nothing happened. In the youth’s wrists a pulse throbbed. There was limit, then, to Flaton’s powers.
Elaise screamed. “No,” she shrilled. “No! Thou canst not do that to me! The Virgin Mary forfend—”
Stratton whirled to her. She was rigid, statuesque with terror. Her dilated eyes were fastened on Flaton’s imperturbable countenance, but the fellow hadn’t touched her, hadn’t approached her.
“What is it, Elaise? What’s scared you?”
She was shuddering within the protecting circle of his arms. “Didst not hear? Art thou once more bewitched?”
A cold chuckle within Stratton’s skull was the echo of Flaton’s cynical amusement. “Mankind no longer is divided into male and female, so I informed her that we should have to dissect her to confirm our records. Her reaction is curious?”
“You devil!” Stratton shouted, and leaped for him. Started to leap, abruptly he was without power to move, as his every nerve, his every cell, was shredded by unutterable anguish. Through a dancing haze of pain he saw a small, black cylinder in one of Platen’s tentacular hands, saw a peculiar green nimbus haloing the end that was pointed at him.
“Fool,” the future-man’s thought battered at his understanding. “If you were not the sole specimen of your era we have found here I should have disintegrated you before you could pass over a tenth of the space between us. You saw what happened to those on the plains below who were stalking one of our geological parties. A slightly increased pressure of my thumb and every molecule of your frame would he blasted into its component atoms.”
Agony twisted through Stratton, knotting his muscles, wrenching at his sinews.
“Stop it!” he moaned. “Stop it! I can’t stand it!”
The green nimbus flicked out. The excruciating torture relaxed, though his sinews still quivered with remembrance. “All this is a waste of time,” Flaton said. “Come, both of you. Get aboard my stratocar. Quick, now.”
Resistance was useless. Stratton turned his back to Flaton.
“We’ll have to do what be says, Elaise. We can’t fight him.” He was between the girl and their captor, shielding her from that omniscient gaze of his. “Not now, anyway; but don’t give up hope. I’ll find a way out. Don’t think about that when he’s watching you. Don’t think about anything except how helpless we are. We’ll fool him yet.”
CHAPTER III
LAIR OF THE FUTURE-MEN
Elaise was like a small, frightened kitten huddling in Ronny Stratton’s arms on the strange curved floor of Flaton’s curious conveyance. That floor was of no metal Stratton had ever seen. Darting with tremendous speed through the air it had been silvery, but now he could see that it shimmered with ever-changing striations embracing the whole spectrum in their deep, variegated colors.
It was blood-warm to touch, too, and almost it seemed alive, vital with some force yet undreamed of in the twentieth century. Had the people of the future solved the obscure identity of energy with matter just dawning on the scientists of his present? Was this fabric fashioned of some element man and not God had created?
Flaton sprawled at ease in the bow of the sky-craft, his grotesque frame cushioned on a billowing, smoky sub-stance, cloudlike in appearance. Although no machinery was anywhere visible, his pencil-like fingers played along a serrated bank of tiny levers; and in a screen, placed just where he could watch it with a minimum of effort, the weird landscape of this weird space was blurred by projectile-like flight. He was taking them to others like himself. Was their advent here also accidental, or—
“No. We are an expedition sent to examine the specimens trapped here.” Stratton was once more startled by the pat answer to his thought. “We are checking the fossil records of the rocks the Great Glacier left behind.” Flaton’s back was toward him. But a mirror to his right, the American saw now, brought to him a reflection of the prisoners. “History will be an exact science when we return.”
“When we return!” Return was possible, then! The thought sank deep into Stratton’s consciousness. If they could escape—Good Lord! He had forgotten! He fought frantically to make his mind a blank, to bar from it even the flicker of a plan that Flaton, with his uncanny powers, might read and forestall.
“I’m a damn fool to think escape is possible,” he forced to the surface of his brain. “I’m as much in his power as the Neanderthal Man would be in mine if I had him handcuffed and chained, with a machine-gun trained on him. After all, Science must be served. Why should I object even to death if it will advance the knowledge of his wonderful civilization?”
Had he struck the right chord? A wordless communication from Flaton seemed to tell him so, although the future-man’s gargoylesque visage betrayed not the slightest expression. It was sexless, soulless—neither cruel nor evil, but more sinister than both in its utter lack of emotion. There was no pity in the man, no mercy.
“I am afraid,” Elaise whimpered. “Oh, Ronny, I am dreadfully afraid. Whither doth he take us?”
“Hush, honey,” Stratton whispered, pressing her quivering body to him. “There isn’t any use in being afraid. We’ve got to take what comes, and take it smilingly. We can’t do anything to avoid it.”
In the television screen the rushing terrain below was slowing, was becoming more distinct. Evidently they were reaching their destination end the landing was absorbing all of the future-man’s attention. The varicolored rocks were taking on definite form. The stratocar was hovering over a circular pit in the plain which held a building of some sort.
They dipped lower still. Strat
ton could make out another grotesque creature like Flaton, staring up at them. Then they were within the rock-walled crater. It was that, he saw, rather than a pit.
So smoothly had the landing been accomplished it was not until Flaton rose that Stratton realized the stratocar was no longer moving. A wave of the future-man’s tentacular arm and a hatchway opened in the vessel’s side, apparently of its own motion.
“Get out,” the voiceless command came. “We have arrived.”
The surface upon which they stepped out was level and glass-smooth, as though the rock had been melted and poured into the cup of its stony walls? Ronald Stratton brought his eyes back to Flaton in time to catch his thought, addressed to the man who had awaited him.
“Wait till Gershon sees this one, Talus. A man from the twentieth century. How he will howl to discover his chronology errs by at least two hundred years.”
“I am troubled,” Talus replied. “Gershon and Frotal have sent no messages for three quarter-hours. Have you seen anything of them?”
Flaton was undisturbed. “They were being hunted by some barbarians near the cliff they went to explore. I turned those back with a few blasts of the disintegrator ray. Our colleagues are probably making discoveries so interesting that they forgot your request for periodic signals.”
“They should not. I don’t understand?”
“Naturally. Being merely a representative of the World League’s Administration, you could not expect to understand how we scientists react to the acquisition of new knowledge.”
Stratton sensed discord here, a schism between the practical men of the Earth of the future and the students. Forty thousand years, he mused, had not served to reconcile that ancient conflict.
“By the same token I am anxious to begin the examination of my own finds. Beside the twentieth century individual I have a female. Just think of that!”
Flaton flung around to Stratton and Elaise. “To the laboratory,” he repeated the thought, making of it a command. “At once!”