The fawning, nerve-racked folk told all this to Harry Brett in the great living-room in which they were camped like looters. They could not explain much more, but he could fill additional details for himself.
* * * *
Cable had used the second machine. He had been able, of course, to march through the utterly soundless city, and when he coiled the machine’s field-cable about an object in normal time—an object he could not possibly stir—and threw the switch, that object came into accelerated time, and he could do as he pleased with it. He opened doors and entered banks and jewelry shops. He gathered himself a king’s ransom in portable but stolen wealth. Yet he was inherently a fool. He needed admiration. Having gathered riches, he craved applause.
He found one member of his coterie, seemingly frozen and certainly immobile like the rest of the world. He encircled her with the field-cable—it was the lushly beautiful redhead—and brought her to consciousness in the world of gray twilight. Her name was Ruth Jones. She was a girl cub reporter. Maybe Cable had some idea of getting publicity through her story. But the girl instantly became hysterical with terror. She clung to him, however, because he was alive in a world which was like a nightmare of death. He was not afraid—he was a fool and her terror made him feel strong and admirable. He found others of his usual circle of admirers. They wakened to find themselves in this world of no-time, this world of an eternal now. They were terrified, but they followed him docilely because only he could take them back to the normal world.
For days he exulted in his strange position. He was lord of the treasures of the Earth. There was no single object upon the globe that he could not take if he wished. He was master of the lives of those he had brought here. Food? There was food in plenty all about, but it was gray and faintly luminous unless a light from a high-time-rate light shone upon it. And even then it was utterly unreachable. It could not be moved or taken or eaten. Even water could not be drunk unless Cable used his mass-nullifier to turn it to liquid. His victims could not defy him. They could only fawn upon him for life and the means of living.
“He must have had a swell time,” said Harry Brett grimly. “The man’s crazy with vanity. But you left something out. There’s a great deal of jewelry around.”
There was. Even the men had jewelry wherever jewelry could be put. They looked uneasily at each other. But Dr. Harry Brett was now their only hope. So they told him that Cable had, on occasion, grandly distributed largesse. He was master of the treasures of the world. He let them help themselves to wealth. Every one had a small fortune in gems or paper money hidden away in their clothing. But they would give it all, they babbled fearfully, to see sunlight once more and to hear noises that other people made.
“No doubt,” said Brett. “But why can’t he take you back?”
Voices lowered. They looked fearfully at the door. At long last, they said, Cable had consented to return them to the formal world. They had all trooped within the field-cable of his original machine. They were rich, but even then they were nervous and jumpy. Whenever Cable scowled at them, they were filled with panic. Finally he had taken his own place among them and thrown the switch!
Nothing had happened. Nothing had ever happened. He’d worked feverishly, even frenziedly, and a dozen times they’d got within the field-cable’s circuit, but they could not return to normal time. They were marooned in this world in which time did not pass, this world in which it was eternally now.
That had been a long time ago. A terribly long time ago. The machine would only work to bring things from normal time-rate into this, but it could put nothing back!
“He made the machine and got himself here, and got you here, and then couldn’t get back,” said Brett, ironically. “Rather stupid, eh? So at last he had to bring me here! And I happened to be shaking hands with a girl, and he couldn’t speed up the time-rate on one of us alone, so he brought us both. The man’s a fool!”
The door opened again. The lean dark figure of Cable appeared. His eyes blazed. It was plain that he had listened to every word. His followers cringed. He was trembling with rage.
“You think I’m a fool, eh?” he rasped. “Very well. Come on and get to work! I’m the boss this time. You’re working for me. You’ll make that machine work or I’ll have these people roast you over a slow fire until you do. They’ll do it if I order them to. Or else I’ll go away and leave them alone!”
Brett saw stark panic intensified in the eyes of Cable’s victimized admirers. To be abandoned by him meant a death of horror. If Brett failed, they would obey any order he gave. Brett shrugged again.
“Naturally I’m going to try to make the machine work,” he said scornfully. “I want to get Miss Hunt back to normal time, and these poor devils too. But I doubt if you intend for me to join them.”
“Right!” said Cable between grinding teeth. “You are quite right. I don’t. Come get to work.”
CHAPTER III
Murderous Despot
Professor Cable, Dr. Harry Brett and Laura Hunt walked along a street which was like a nightmare. It was recognizably Park Avenue, but only because of the iron-railed grass plots in the center. Their footsteps echoed hollowly upon the pavements. They passed frozen gray shapes on the sidewalk—once a man alone, startlingly perfect as a sculpture in gray stone, but horrible because he was not stone at all. At a little distance he was terrifying because there were no shadows anywhere about him. As he was left behind he appeared to merge into the mist as if withdrawing from substance to become a wraith again. Once they passed a stout woman and a child. Then three young girls together, with trimly-shaped legs—and no shadows.
There were cars in the roadway, too, and they seemed to be mere convolutions of the mist until one drew near. Then they were sardonic mockeries. It seemed as if all this world of gray mist were some gigantic mockery. Fog formed into stone as one drew near, and reverted into fog as one went on.
But the gray shapes were not stone, but human beings petrified in time. And the definite fact that this was Park Avenue was ironic, too, because these humans were faintly luminous, the mist was luminous, and the feeling was that of walking in the maliciously amused dream of a dreary, silent demon. All appeared to be unreal because of the lack of shadows. All appeared ghastly because everything glowed of its own light. Everything reeked of a stilly gray horror because of the deathly silence and the mist.
Professor Cable turned off Park, and led along a twisting route they could not identify. They did not speak. Cable seemed to be filled with an almost overmastering fury. To a man of his rabid vanity, who had demonstrated that he was a fool, the unforgiveable insult was to call him a fool before his victims.
He turned, suddenly, and led the way up two low steps, turned again, up two flights of stairs, and unlocked a heavy door. He struck a match and lighted candles. As their light grew, the room’s interior changed from a featureless gray cavern to a rather musty small workshop. It might have been the shop of a model-maker or of someone who constructed specially designed bits of hand-made jewelry. There was a sturdy safe in one corner. On a workbench by a foot-power lathe and drill, there were various metal parts.
“Here’s where I’ve worked,” rasped Cable. “I’ve built two extra nullifiers, from beginning to end, because I couldn’t find anything wrong with the ones I had. Rut they work no better.”
He brought his hand out of his pocket. It held a squat pistol.
“I’m going to lock you in here,” he announced savagely: “The window is barred. I’ll bring you food. You can’t break down the door. I’ve made everything ready for you. There’s one of the nullifiers. It will bring things to our time-rate, but it won’t send them back to normal. Find out what’s the matter.”
He ground his teeth with anger.
Brett looked at the familiar object on the bench. It wasn’t chromium-plated, as he’d made them, but that should make no difference. Cable’s device was merely a small brass case with a control-switch on it—Brett’s models had had
the switch at the end of a small flexible cord—and a length of flexible field-cable. Inside the case there would merely be a very simple electronic circuit—without tubes, however—a pair of condensers, and two oddly-shaped bits of metal which actually generated the nullifying field and which determined the direction in which the field operated. Very little energy was required, astonishingly little. Brett suspected that this machine actually simply produced a condition in which the static energy of mass converted itself into the kinetic energy of time-velocity. But now he only glanced at the nullifier.
“Find out what’s the matter and then you’ll kill me,” he said drily. “Of course! Two men mustn’t know how to make these things. It’s too dangerous. But I’m going to try to kill you too, Cable. I mention it because you don’t dare kill me, yet.”
Cable snarled savagely as he backed out of the door, his weapon held ready. The heavy door closed. The lock clicked. Then, with somehow the effect of frenzy, the door thumped as two heavy bars went across it top and bottom.
Brett picked up one of the candles and held it to the window.
“Barred, all right,” he said to Laura Hunt. “I think I can depend on him, too, to have made sure I can’t cut through the walls or floor, even if I can put them in a time-rate where it’s practical to try. Let’s look at this nullifier.”
Brett sat down at the work-bench and carefully opened the brass case containing the electronic circuit. He looked almost cursorily within. He pursed his lips and whistled soundlessly. Laura Hunt moistened her lips.
“What’s going to happen?” she asked. “I still feel as if this were a dream, a terrible nightmare.”
“It’s worse than that,” said Brett. “And if Cable gets back to normal time with a nullifier that will work both ways, it’s going to be worse still. He’ll be able to abduct any girl or murder any man on earth, and leave no trace. With his mania for superiority my guess is that he’d wind up trying to terrorize the world into accepting him as—heaven knows what! Emperor, maybe.”
“He couldn’t!”
“He could make a good try,” said Brett grimly. “There’s one trick he could pull which would come close to destroying cities. In fact, he could literally wreck a nation. I hope he doesn’t think of it.”
Then he said “Mmmh!” He was looking in the case of the nullifier. Deliberately he put the cover back on. He looked at a rack of little-used tools over the work-bench. He glanced underneath at a row of flasks, such chemicals as a man doing much soldering and perhaps a little electro-plating would have in his shop. He swung the field-cable around them and threw the switch. Then he worked with them for half an hour, arranging an odd combination of chemicals in one of the flasks. Once he paused and picked up a scrap of paper, looked at it, and put it in his pocket.
He set the flask aside, picked up the nullifier, and removed the switch from the case. With a curiously rueful expression on his face, he spliced on a section of flexible lamp-cord and connected the switch on the end of that. He checked connections and turned to the girl.
“Would you stand there a moment, Laura?” he asked her casually.
She moved to the spot he indicated, her eyes questioning. Then, quite suddenly, he vanished from her sight. She started violently.
“Sorry, I didn’t think,” he said suddenly, from behind her. “This thing works.”
“What do you mean?”
“You stepped in the field and I turned on the machine,” he told her “You went back to normal time, frozen, immovable, like everything in normal time. Then I brought you back.”
“No! I hadn’t any sensation of that,” she answered him anxiously.
“You weren’t in normal time long enough to have any sensations,” said Brett curtly. He was obscurely busy with the nullifier. He seemed almost to be wrestling with the cable.
“Can we return to the normal world, then?” asked Laura desperately. “Can we go before he comes back?”
“You were back,” said Brett. “And I brought you here again. So could he. I’ll send you back when I can make you safe, but I won’t turn that lunatic loose with a really good mass-nullifier! I’ve got to jump him—”
There was clattering of the bars of the door. Laura caught her breath. Brett moved like lightning. He spilled liquid from one of the flasks onto his handkerchief. The pungent reek of ammonia came into the room. He thrust the cloth into her hand. Swiftly he leaned closer to speak into her ear.
“Cable was listening all the time through the door,” he whispered. “Hold this over your nose. Be ready to rush.”
The bars rang loudly as they clattered to the adamantine floor, outside. The key turned. Brett picked up the flask in which he had arranged chemicals with such care. He shook, it and held his thumb as a stopper over its neck.
The door swung wide and Cable stood in the opening. He seemed to tremble with triumphant hate. His weapon bore on Harry Brett.
“So you’ll jump me, eh?” he raged. “You’ve fixed a nullifier, so you’ll jump, me, eh? But now—”
The flask in Brett’s hand made a tiny hissing noise. His thumb was white from the pressure with which he held it down. Now he released it. There was a tiny, indescribable sound and a jet of faintly greenish-yellow vapor, shot out. It struck Cable’s face. Instantly his features contorted with agony.
They were somewhere in the middle of a wide expanse of clear asphalt. The silence was awful. It was such stillness as no human being ever normally experiences. Not only the people and the subways and the traffic were still. The breeze was still. Not even pigeons fluttered above the streets. There were not even insects. There was no sound at all.
“I suppose he’s got the machine you fixed,” Laura said. “Now he’ll go back to normal time and leave us here to die!”
“That’s what he thinks,” said Brett, grinning. “But—look!”
Brett then showed the girl the object he had carried away from Cable’s workshop, concealed beneath his coat, with the heavy rubber-covered wires wrapped around his waist. It was the Time Nullifier.
“Let’s see if the Professor can laugh that off,” said Brett.
CHAPTER IV
Brett’s New Device
Followed by the girl, Brett led the way along a crosstown street until they came to the docks. The water below them was motionless in smooth ripples. It resembled glass. Brett tossed a coin from his pocket, and when it fell on the water, it bounced and rang loudly.
“We don’t need to worry about a ferry or a bridge,” he observed. “The river’s frozen more solidly than it ever could be frozen by cold.”
They explored a great warehouse. In the watchman’s office they found a lantern. Brett produced his nullifier and brought the lantern into accelerated time. The lighted lantern gave the interior of the office an appearance of reality, and its rays disclosed a watchman’s lunch-box Brett looped the field-cable about that, too, and turned the switch. There was a thermos flask of coffee, and sandwiches. Laura devoured one hungrily.
“I’m beginning to have hope,” she admitted. “If that wound of yours isn’t too bad, we may be able to make out all right.”
“I’ll do,” said Harry Brett.
But the wound was painful. Horribly painful. The bullet had gone through the muscle just below Brett’s elbow, and had possibly glanced off a bone. It had not broken the arm, but Brett had lost a great deal of blood.
* * * *
He began to feel the injury as the numbing effects of the shock wore off.
They found a ladder leading down to the water. They descended, and, with a lighted lantern between them, started to walk across the Hudson. Brett knew Cable had not the slightest chance of finding them, once they had taken refuge in the warren of houses on the New Jersey side of the river. But they found their surroundings weird to the extreme. As the mist closed in behind them, there was no object of any sort to give the impression of a material world. The lantern made the surface of the water look normal, and impossible to walk upon. They seeme
d to be suspended above a gulf of liquid into which they ought to sink. The rest of the universe was gray mist.
They walked, and walked, and walked, over the slippery frozen waves. After a long time Harry Brett found himself wabbling from weakness caused by the loss of blood. The hot coffee had helped, but he had been badly weakened.
“I thought that we could keep in a straight line by noticing the—ripples,” he said with an effort. “They’d give us a direction since we can’t see anything. But now we are lost.”
Laura slipped her hand under his arm. It sent a stab of pain through him. He gasped. She put her arm about his waist and sturdily strove to help him that way. She did bear up a great deal of his weight. But they went on endlessly.
“Stop and rest,” he panted presently. “Listen! If we can’t find shore, together, you take the nullifier and go on. Sooner or later you’ll reach land. If you—have to go, don’t try to find me again. No hope of that. Just find some hiding-place. Some place Cable and his gang would never think of searching. Slum, maybe. Put the cable in a circle—stand inside—and throw the switch. If they don’t find you, you’ll be all right. You’ll be back in normal time. Cable’s trouble was that he didn’t realize that the design of the nullifier-case was—part of the apparatus. Its shape helped form the field. When he—put a switch on the case instead of on a cord he changed the capacity constants. With the extension-cord and the switch on the end, it’s the way I designed it…”
“I won’t leave you!” cried Laura fiercely. “Maybe I can help!”
The lantern slipped from her grasp. It fell to the solidified surface underfoot. It cast queer shadows.
“Hold it,” said Bret sharply. “Look! The shadows. That’s the—wake of a boat! If we follow it, we can get on board.”
The possibility seemed to put new strength in both of them. They struggled for fifty yards more. For a hundred. The frozen eddies of the wake grew larger and more turbulent. Then they saw the boat which had made the froth. It was a gray shape upon gray water in a gray mist. It looked rather like something carved out of ice. It looked unspeakably desolate.
The Second Murray Leinster Megapack Page 25