by Anthology
Jim Dunning fought for his life in a seething welter of waters. A hatch-cover, torn from its hinges, thudded against him. With a last, instinctive effort he hauled himself across the cleated plank, clung to it desperately as consciousness left him.
A reckless bet with some of his club members had sent Jim Dunning out from ’Frisco, six weeks before, on his disastrous attempt to cross the Pacific, single-handed, in a thirty-foot, auxiliary-engined yawl. And now in the graying dawn, his still shape floated on the tiny raft amidst a mass of wreckage. About him the vast circle of the horizon enclosed a waste of heaving waters, vacant of any life. Only a light breeze ruffled the sea’s surface, calm again after the sudden disturbance of the night.
Eventually his eyes opened. Hopelessly, he raised his head. A curious object that looked like a large spherical buoy, floating half submerged, met his gaze. But what was a buoy doing here, a thousand miles from the nearest land, in water a half mile deep?
Dunning kicked off his shoes and swam strongly through the cool brine. The great ball hung above him as he floated, its exterior glass-smooth. He swam slowly around it, searching for some projection that would enable him to get to its summit. Inches above the water a threadlike crack showed. It made a rectangle three feet wide by five. Was it an entrance to the interior of the ball whose floating showed it to be hollow? There was no handle, no means of opening it.
Dunning trod water and with the flat of his hand he pushed against the unyielding sector, inward, then side-ward, with no result. In sudden exasperation he drove his fist against the polished surface and yelled: “Open, damn you, open up and let a fellow in!”
Amazingly, the metal moved! Dunning stared as the curved panel jogged inward for an inch, then slid smoothly aside.
“It’s like the Arabian Nights,” he muttered. “I yelled ‘open sesame’ and it opened.” A prickle along his spine did deference to the uncanny happening. Then, oddly enough, he chuckled.
“That’s it! An electric robot. Nothing to be scared of.”
Only a week before Dunning’s departure Tom Barton had demonstrated to him this latest ingenuity of the electrical wizards. It was installed in Barton’s garage, a phono-electric cell so adjusted that at the coded honking of a horn it would set a motor in motion to open the doors. Barton had picked up the idea at the airport; where the same device turned on the floodlights in response to a siren signal from an approaching airplane.
“If honking horns and howling sirens can open doors, why not the human voice? Well, let’s take a look at the Forty Thieves.”
Gripping the opening’s lower edge Dunning leaped out of the water and through the aperture. He was in a confined chamber, its walls and ceiling the vaulted curve of the sphere itself.
Sprawled across the flat floor was a girl, unmoving. Dunning caught his breath at the white beauty framed by long black hair that cascaded along her slim length.
“No!” he groaned. “She can’t be dead!”
Dunning bent over the girl and lifted one limp hand, feeling for a pulse. There was a slow throb. A long whistle of relief escaped him. She was breathing, shallowly but steadily, and her dark lashes quivered a bit where they lay softly against the curve of her pale cheeks.
There was a couch just beyond the girl. He lifted her to it, laid her down. Gently he straightened her robe of some unfamiliar, shimmering material—and whirled to some inimical presence glimpsed from the corner of his eye.
He crouched, his spine tingling with ancestral fear, his brawny arms half curved, his great fists clenched. But the man did not stir. Seated at a desk-like object just beyond the opening, he stared straight before him. It was his uncanny rigidity, the fish-white pallor of his face, that were so menacing. He was dead.
Dunning moved cautiously across the floor toward the seated corpse. It toppled as he reached it, thumped soggily to the floor.
The acrid odor of burned flesh stung Dunning’s nostrils. There was a huge cavity in the cadaver’s chest, its gaping surface blackened and charred by some searing flame!
Dunning swung his back to the wall, and his glance darted about the room.
The dead man and the unconscious girl were the only other occupants of the hemisphere. Had someone killed the man, struck the girl down, and escaped? But how had he managed it? There was no room for an attacker between the body and the contrivance before which it had been seated.
That strange object was of some unfamiliar, iridescent metal. It had somewhat the size and contour of an old-fashioned roll-top desk, minus the side wings. Across the center of the erect portion, where the pigeonholes should be, stretched a long panel of what appeared to be milky-white glass, divided into two portions by a vertical metal strip. Above and below, tangent to the edge of the long panel at the ends of the metal strip, were two round plates of the same clouded glass. In spaces to left and right of these disks were arrayed a number of dial-faces; gauges or indicators of some kind.
On a waist-high, flat ledge were little colored levers, projecting through slitted grooves. From the forward edge of this a metal flap dipped down some four inches. Through this metal flap a hole gaped, its curled edges melted smooth by a flame, by the flame that had killed the man at his feet!
Something hard thrust into his back.
“Don’t move! Twitch a muscle and you die!”
Dunning froze rigid at the crisp command. That voice from behind, vibrant with threat, was yet unmistakably feminine.
Dunning obeyed. A vague strangeness in the words bothered him. They were oddly accented. The low-timbred, contralto voice was speaking English, but an English queerly changed, glorified in sound, lambent with indefinable majesty.
A hand passed over his body.
“You seem to be unarmed now—turn around, slowly.”
The girl was standing a yard away, pointing a black tube steadily at him. Her lips were scarlet against the dead white of her skin. Her eyes were dilated. Rage—and fear—stared forth from their grey depths.
“What have you done to Ran? Why have you killed him?”
“Nothing. I—”
“You lie!” she blazed at him. “You lie! You’re one of Marnota’s helots—sent to murder me! But how did he dare—open assassination? There is still law in the land—in spite of him.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about, sister,” Dunning drawled. “My yawl was wrecked last night. When I came to, I saw your—this thing, whatever it is, and swam to it. The hatchway opened, you were on the floor, dead to the world. I lifted you to the couch, looked around, and found—this. I know less than you do how Ran was killed:”
A flicker of doubt crossed the girl’s face. There was an almost imperceptible relaxation of her tenseness.
“Your voice is so strange, you speak so queerly. Where do you come from? What are you?”
“I am an American.”
Suspicion flared again, and hate. Dunning waited what seemed ages for a flash from the cylinder of death.
“But—somehow—you don’t seem a murderer,” she said. “You have not the brutish appearance of Marnota’s mercenaries. There is something strange here, something I don’t understand.” The tube wavered, dropped a bit.
Dunning saw his chance. His hand flicked out, closed on the uncanny weapon; wrenched it away. The girl gasped. She was white, congealed flame.
“Go ahead,” she whispered defiantly. “Finish your task. Press the button and kill me.”
“I haven’t any desire to kill you, or to harm you,” Dunning chuckled. “I only want to know what this is all about. I’m Jim Dunning. What’s your name?”
“I am Thalma, Thalma of the house of Adams,” she proclaimed proudly.
“Sorry, Miss Adams. The name means nothing to me.”
Amazement showed in her mobile features.
“You do not know me!” she exclaimed, wonderingly. “And you say you are an American?”
“I left San Francisco six weeks ago. Have you become famous since then?”
&
nbsp; She shook her head, still bewildered. Dunning continued.
“Up to then I’m sure I knew what was going on. I read the papers. New York had just won the World Series. Franklin Roosevelt was President of the United States—”
A startled exclamation came from Thalma. Her weapon dropped from a hand flung up as if to ward off a blow.
“Roosevelt—President! Why—that’s ancient history. What year was that?”
“What year? This year, of course, 1937.”
“Nineteen-thirty-seven! What are you talking about? This is 2312 A.D.”
CHAPTER II
NO WAY BACK
Jim Dunning was staggered. Twenty-three, twelve! She was cra—No, she wasn’t. There was no madness in her wide eyes, only dawning comprehension—and fathomless terror.
“Marnota!” Thalma said fiercely. “What has he done to me?”
“What—” Dunning forced past the constriction in his own throat. “What do you mean?”
“He—Marnota—somehow he’s thrown me back in time. Four hundred years back in time!”
The statement thudded against his ears, and, incredible as it was, he knew it for truth. There was something about the girl, about this queer sphere and its contents, about the very clothing of the girl and her murdered companion, that convinced him, against all reason.
“What shall I do?” Thalma’s whimper was the frightened cry of a small child, alone with the dark and with blind, overwhelming fear.
Dunning took two steps to her side. His arm went around her shoulder, protectingly.
“You just trust your Uncle Jim! Everything’s going to be all right, sure as God made little apples. Just sit down over here, and powder your nose, or whatever they do in your time. Then you can tell me all about it.” They moved toward the couch.
But they never reached it. The globe lurched and sent them reeling dizzily to the wall. They were buried beneath a crushing weight of bitter water. They were caught in a storm. The floor careened again, and they were sliding toward the open hatchway through which the invading wave soughed out. Mountainous waves were piled high against a slanting, jagged horizon. Dunning’s feet struck the sill. Braced against it, he saw the girl’s white form plunge past him. He snatched at her, just managed to clutch her foot and wrest her from the grip of the out-swirling wave.
Just above him was the door-slide. He surged to his feet and thrust the panel home.
The sphere’s interior was aglow with a soft light that came from everywhere and nowhere. The imprisoned remnant of the wave rushed crazily across the lurching floor. Dunning steadied himself against the wall.
From somewhere above him he heard the girl’s voice, shrill through the clamor of the storm:
“Wait! I’ll get us out of this in an instant.”
He looked up. Thalma was pulling herself along the wall, up the steep slope. The floor’s slant reversed itself, and she was flung against the desk-like object where Ran had met his death. She caught at it, swung around to its front, was leaning over the panel through which a hole had been melted as if by a flame. One arm reached forward to the levers.
“Stop!” Dunning bellowed from a suddenly dry throat. “Don’t touch that thing!” He hurled himself through space, threw the girl headlong from the board. “You fool! You little fool!”
She beat at him with her puny fists as the sphere lurched again, and whirled dizzily.
“What are you doing? We must get up and out of this storm! The stratocar will be wrecked!”
Dunning thrust her away, threw himself to the floor, rolled on his back, jerked his head and shoulders within the space beneath the level desk that held the colored handles. He reached in and wrenched at something, then slid out again.
“Look at this!” he growled.
He held up a black cylinder to Thalma. It was the counterpart of that with which she had threatened him except that the trigger-button was missing, and that two fine wires dangled from the place where it had been. He struggled to his feet.
“That,” he said grimly, “is what did for your friend Ran.”
Thalma paled. “And would have blasted me had I touched the levers! You have saved my life. How did you know it was there?”
“Had to be. The shot that finished him must have come through that hole in the panel. I had just figured that out when you jumped me. When I looked, just now, I could see these wires didn’t belong there, that they were spliced crudely. And this was exactly like your weapon.”
For a moment the tempest had lulled, but now it gripped the ball again. The orb whirled, tossed insanely.
“You said something about getting us out of this.” Dunning had to shout to make himself heard. “Better do it, now, if you can, or we’re done for.”
He braced Thalma against the board. She pushed a red-tipped lever. Dunning felt the floor thrust against his feet. The sphere steadied, and the silence was startling after the tumult. The girl returned the lever to its original position and pressed a button at the corner of the board. The milky-white panels on the upright cleared.
Dunning was gazing through what seemed like open windows at a vast panorama. In the lower disc, black clouds billowed. Mountains of vapor thrust up from the rolling mass, were illumined by the sun’s brilliant rays. In the halves of the long, rectangular panel he looked far over the storm clouds, to where a green, untroubled sea rose and fell. In the left-hand section the sun itself rode dazzling in a clear sky, a sky, whose deep blue was repeated in the upper disc. Against the whiteness of a cloud to the right Dunning saw a round black blotch that he realized with a shock was the shadow of the sphere in which he rode.
“Why,” he exclaimed, “those screens show everything outside—all around, above and below!”
“Of course! How else could the stratocar be navigated?” Thalma seemed astonished at his surprise. “I forget. The visoscope was invented late in the twenty-second century. You couldn’t know anything about it.”
Dunning looked at the girl ruefully.
“I must seem like a child to you. It’s hard to recall that you are four hundred years ahead of me. Do I understand rightly, that this ‘stratocar’ is some kind of flyer, like our airplanes?”
“Certainly! But it is far more efficient. It can navigate the stratosphere at speeds that to you would be unthinkable. It utilizes the terrestrial lines of force and stored solar energy. The power coils are all housed in the lower half of the ball. They are tremendously complex, but the navigation is very simple. Look here!”
Thalma turned to the control board.
“Move any of these levers away from you, and the stratocar responds. Return the handle to its original position and motion in the direction indicated stops. The red lever is to ascend, the green to descend. White is straight ahead.”
Her slim fingers touched each small handle lightly as she talked.
“Black is to—” Suddenly her voice dropped, her brow wrinkled puzzledly as her hand fluttered to two levers that were uncolored. “I’ve never seen these before. I wonder what they’re for. Could they be—” Before Dunning could stop her she had pushed one.
Across the visoscope a flame shot, crimson, whirling. The stratocar’s interior was a timeless, spaceless place, where there was no up, no down; no sound, no sight; nothing but a vast heatless glare through which the pinpoint that was his consciousness fell endlessly, rose endlessly, and endlessly was motionless. He had no body, almost no mind.
He was an atom at the center of a tiny vortex, he was vast, gigantic as the Universe itself. Then—was it after eternities or in the next instant?—he was himself again, and the stratocar was around him, and Thalma was there at his side! The two looked dazedly at each other. The girl reeled, would have fallen if he had not caught her.
“What on earth did you do that for?” he asked excitedly.
She didn’t hear him.
“That,” she said slowly, “that was how I felt before, and then everything went black, and the next thing I saw you at the contro
l board, and Ran was lying dead on the floor. I remember now, he had just said something about dipping to the thousand foot level.”
“There must have been two trick connections to the descending control; one to the ray-gun, the other to one of these two levers. That’s how you were thrown back to 1937 the same moment Ran was killed. But that’s neither here nor there. Do you realize what you’ve done? You’ve sent us chasing, through time. God alone knows whether we’ve gone forward, or back, or to what age. We knew where, or rather when, we were before you did that. We might have figured out how to get you back. But now—” He threw his arms wide.
“Then—then we’re lost in time!” Her eyes were big and round, her lips trembled. “We’re lost in time!”
CHAPTER III
MURDER WITHOUT A CLUE
The phrase echoed and re-echoed, beat its terrifying meaning into Jim Dunning’s brain. “Lost in time!” The vast reaches of eternity seemed to stretch before him, eons upon eons through which he and the girl were doomed to flee, searching despairingly for a familiar world. In the visoscope nothing showed but a cloudless sky and a vast green sea that heaved like oil. Had the sphere and its human contents been thrown back to the very dawn of history? Or forward into the dim future of a dying world?
A choked sob broke in on Dunning’s thoughts, and a little hand grasped his arm.
“What are we going to do now?”
“Look here, young lady, there’s nothing to worry about,” he mollified the tearful Thalma. “Why, we’re making progress. We know how to navigate in time now. All we have to do is to find out what year we’re in, and then—zip, presto—we’ll have you back in 2312.”
A voluntary smile responded to his buoyant tone.
“I never thought of that. There are two strange levers. If one sends us one way, the other will do the reverse. There must be some way of regulating the mechanism.”
“Of course there is!” No use worrying her, but that was just the difficulty. How control the time-traveling mechanism while one was merely a bodiless consciousness? “First thing to do is find some land, some people, and locate ourselves in time. Do you know which of these levers to pull?”