From time to time during the vigil in the space ship, Kane turned thin-lipped from the broadcasts to attempt contact with a secret transmitter in the New York area. Finally, thirty hours after the dust had started on its way, he got through and talked with an underground leader he knew.
“It’s out of our hands,” the man on Earth reported tersely. “At first we made some headway in organizing the revolt. We’re still trying to influence the mobs in the direction of elementary caution, but it’s thankless work and even dangerous. The people are following demagogues sprung from nowhere, following whatever voice promises the most killing. I think they’re even fighting each other in some places . . .”
“Anarchy,” said Kane numbly. “A new Dark Age——”
“What else did you expect?” demanded Vzryvov scornfully. “Surely not that people enslaved so long would promptly proceed to set up orderly self-government as soon as they were free? The Dark Ages have been everywhere, except in Germany, for the last century; you don’t imagine that because Germany falls, the rest of the world will become civilized again?”
“No . . . But I must have hoped it; I think we all did. Guess you’re the only realist I know, Igor.” Kane straightened his shoulders. “We might as well land. Maybe there’s still a chance to bring something decent out of this mess when the smoke clears. Anyway, I’d rather get into the thick of it than sit out here listening any longer. We shouldn’t have anything more to fear from the Germans.”
Manning, who had sat for long brooding silently over the controls, looked up sharply. “Before we start down,” he said, “I’d like to ask a last favor.”
MANNING smiled grimly. “One way or another. I just want one of those emergency-escape gliders we saw when we were hiding down below. You, mean to land in America, I guess, but before you do I wish you’d take a little swing out of your way and drop me off in one of those over Germany. I don’t know whether Eddie will want to go with me——”
“Hell, what do you take me for?” asked Dugan aggrievedly. “Maybe you’ve cracked up—but I’ll take a chance.”
“I think you have gone crazy,” said Kane “If the Germans didn’t get you, the dust would.”
“It’s a chance, all right . . . But I’ve been thinking about how Kahl’s time machine disappeared, back there in the Black Forest. It was powered by ordinary storage cells, and when he turned it on and left it on it used them up in a hurry. But in rapid discharge polarization will stop the flow of current in a battery before the charge is all gone—and after it’s rested a little, it’ll give out some more. I think that’s what happened. We left the switch closed, and when the batteries depolarized they gave another kick. So the time traveler went on—into the future again. Not very far, maybe. Maybe only a couple of days.”
“So—you think it may be there now. And if it is?”
“Those gliders have a battery-powered auxiliary motor, don’t they? If we land near the machine, we can get it going again and return to our own time, or a few years earlier.”
“I don’t blame you for wanting to, but——”
“It’s not just that.” Manning’s eyes met Kane’s and held them with odd intensity. He asked slowly: “Wouldn’t it have been better, Kane, if the last hundred years of history had never happened?”
Kane stared at him, first blankly and then with dawning understanding. “But—that’s impossible,” he stammered. “A paradox.”
“Paradoxes are an occupational disease of time travel, I guess . . . I don’t know just what we can do, if we do get back. We’d have to be careful or we might end up in a padded cell. We couldn’t hope to prevent the development of atomic energy—that seems inevitable, with progress—but we might warn America in time to assure our beating the Germans to the punch.”
Kane said quietly, “It’s true that our world has taken a wrong turning. What you suggest, Manning, is quite unimaginable—but it’s possible, all the same—an experimental destiny, perhaps. Anyway, I’ll help you get the glider ready.”
“Would you like to come with us?”
Kane shook his head. “Whether this world is real or not, I belong to it. And you’ll be bucking enough paradoxes as it is.”
THE glider dropped at first like a stone from the great height; then its wings began to find support and it descended in vast looping turns that in the troposphere became at last a tightly circling glide over the Schwarzwald. The air over Germany was empty; now, short hours before the coming of the dust, everyone who could command aerial transportation had escaped from the country. But the roads, from the great Autobahnen to the narrowest country lanes, were crawling with traffic, snarled and choked by the fear that drove it.
Manning strained his eyes for landmarks as they lost altitude; he wanted to spare the batteries in the glider.
“Say,” remarked Dugan worriedly, “if we find the thing, how far do you figure on going back?”
“Mmm—say 1935. We’ll need a few years to work if we’re going to change history.”
“We might meet ourselves!” Dugan voiced his fears.
Manning grinned. “We ought to be able to duck ourselves. We know where we were, don’t we?”
Dugan digested that, then advanced another problem: “If we go back to 1935, I’ll only be thirty when the war starts. What do they do when two of a guy try to enlist in the Army at once, especially if he’s already missing four years later?”
“Maybe there won’t be any war.”
“Want to bet?”
“No,” answered Manning soberly. But a moment later his face lit as he recognized, only a couple of miles away, the big clearing on the plateau where the time traveler had rested.
Minutes later, he set the glider bumpily down on the meadow. From on high the sun had been visible, but here only a gray dawn was breaking. Where the forest fire had passed the trees raised black desolate arms to the light, but those still green were greeting the morning with cool balsam scent and awakening bird song, oblivious of the rain of death falling through space to wipe out all life in this land.
They climbed out of the glider—and froze, for in the same moment both saw the two long black cars, one with an official swastika on its sleek flank, that were parked under the trees, and the uniformed men who were springing to their feet around the vehicles and lifting rifles.
“Turn on your invisibility unit and run for the woods!” hissed Manning. The soldiers gaped for seconds at the spot where the arrivals from the sky had vanished, then fired a useless volley at the glider and huddled together in panic.
Both of the Americans were wearing the units Kane had given them, but had tucked the hoods under their belts. Manning stumbled, unable to see his own feet as he ran, and paused on the edge of the woods to cram his hood down over his head. As he did so he saw Dugan a few yards away, doing likewise.
“Somebody’s got the same idea as us!” called Manning. “Maybe Kahl convinced them, or——We’d better get there fast!”
They plunged through the fire-cleared woodland toward their goal. From behind a voice shrieked warning to someone ahead: “Hutet euch! Zwei Unsichtbare!”
Then they saw among the trees the cubical bulk of the time machine. Its door was open, and around it was a squad of soldiers who gripped their weapons with shaking hands and peered wild-eyed about them.
“Never mind them!” gasped Manning. “There’s somebody inside——”
THE WORDS died on his lips. In the doorway of the traveler had appeared a big man in civilian clothes. His face was hidden beneath a hood exactly like their own, in his hands was a machine gun, and he was looking at them.
“Schwinzog!” Manning recognized the beefy figure.
“Sie kennen mich? Aber naturlich—you are the other two time travelers!” The gun’s muzzle moved in a peremptory arc. “Remove those masks, please. I want to be sure that it is really you who have come to see me off.”
Manning wavered, torn by a suicidal impulse to rush the machine gun and get it over wi
th. But despair lamed him. He thought numbly, “Time is immutable after all, and something was sure to stop us from changing what’s already happened. The fatalists are right.” He bowed his head and slipped off the wired hood; then he could no longer see it or his own hands. He felt still more like a ghost, impotent to stir reality.
“Now the invisibility units,” ordered Schwinzog. “Throw them in front of you.” As Manning and Dugan became visible, the goggling soldiers that surrounded them snapped up their rifles to cover them.
Schwinzog pushed back his hood and eyed them with satisfaction. “It is good that you are accounted for—though I was not much worried about you, and I understand you do not know the principle of the Zeitfahrer. And you have brought me two more specimens of the invisibility device, which will be useful for study to the German scientists of four years ago—before they were invented in America.” He chuckled at the thought. “You realize, the debacle of Germany, the frightful catastrophe engineered by American cunning—will—never take place. I will see to that—that this now shall be only the illusion of might have been . . . As to what will become of you, that is an almost metaphysical problem—I think I will set the Herr Doktor Kahl to work on it, when more pressing affairs have been seen to.”
“You will do what?” broke in a weakly querulous voice.
In the entrance of the time traveler had appeared the hunched figure of Kahl. He blinked at the light; his goatee was tattered and his face twitched. Behind him the massive shoulders of Wolfgang blocked the doorway; he wore a twenty-first century German uniform and an air of contentment that showed him, at least, to have found his niche in the world of the future.
Schwihzog half turned. “What I will do is my own business,” he said curtly. “And you—will refrain from asking unnecessary questions. The Zeitfahrer is ready?”
“It is ready for a displacement of four years, which you told me was to be only a test—before we return, as you promised, to the twentieth century, and use this era’s knowledge to prevent Germany from conquering the world——”
“Of course, said Schwinzig smoothingly. “That is what we shall do.”
“You are lying!” Kahl glared at him, his fists clenching. “I heard what you told the Americans.”
Schwinzog shrugged. “All right, I am lying.” He looked contemptuously down at the little physicist. “Do not bring on yourself again the consequences of stubbornness. You have earned the gratitude of the Reich, and I will see that you are rewarded if you are sensible——”
The other had begun to tremble. “I want only one reward. That is to see Germany saved from the curse of world empire! From the hatred of the whole Earth, which almost destroyed our country in my time and has destroyed it in this! Better even that we Germans should be the oppressed, rather than reap the oppressor’s harvest of hate . . .”
Schwinzog’s lips curled. “The Herr Doktor has lost his mind. I will have to operate the Zeitfahrer myself—Muller!” The tall Wolfgang sidestepped and thrust out an arm, stopping Kahl’s stumbling rush for the doorway and sending the old man staggering to sprawl at Schwinzog’s feet.
“You would leave without us?” inquired the Gestapoleiter mockingly. “For that, it would be only just to leave you here—but do not fear. You will still be useful. And now we have no more time for——”
WITH a burst of strength that seemed in him incredible, Kahl surged to his feet and flung himself on Schwinzog with an animal scream. The big man, caught off balance in his negligent pose, was hurled backward and fell clutching; his head thudded solidly against the time traveler’s metal sheathing. Kahl twisted free and swayed to his feet, and the machine gun was in his hands; it bucked and spat as he swung it in a jerky arc. Wolfgang, caught in mid-leap, crashed to the ground and rolled, and the German soldiers scattered wildly, firing a few shots that were aimed more away from Schwinzog than at Kahl. One man was too slow and dropped at the edge of the unburned thicket, and a couple of others yelped as they fled.
Dr. Kahl went on raining bullets into the bushes for seconds after there were no more targets; then he stood breathing hard and glaring about him at the bodies sprawled on the scorched turf.
One of the bodies got unhurriedly to its feet and faced Kahl. It was Manning. The fatalistic paralysis that had gripped him had passed off abruptly when he saw Schwinzog fall, and he had thrown himself flat under the sweeping bursts of machine gun fire.
He said coolly, “Good work, Herr Doktor. Now we can get back to our own century.”
Kahl did not answer or seem to hear. The muzzle of the weapon he held was centered on Manning’s chest, and the eyes above it were mad.
“We must return now, and carry out your plan,” Manning urged softly. As he talked he was walking without haste toward the gun. He did not dare glance aside to see what had happened to Dugan, or let even his expression betray his terrible eagerness to seize the moment—before Kahl went completely off the deep end, or before the Germans back there in the bushes collected their wits.
“You are American,” scowled Kahl. “One of those who hate us. What have I to do with you?”
“I will help you,” said Manning. “Your plan is good. Germany and all the world will revere your name when they know.” He halted, almost touching the gun muzzle. In a moment now he had to grab it.
“I do not know——” began Kahl, blinking. Then his eyes widened blankly; something had plucked at Manning’s sleeve, and from somewhere in the thicket came a rifle’s crack. The Herr Doktor crumpled to the ground.
From behind him appeared Dugan, straightening from a crouch; without a word he sprang for the door of the time traveler. Manning followed, ducking under another bullet from the woods. He slammed the door shut.
“What’d you take a chance like that for?” demanded Dugan bitterly. “I was sneaking round behind him all the time.”
Manning didn’t answer. He was surveying the apparatus-covered table, hesitating over its complexity.
Outside rifles began banging steadily. The metal shell of the machine rang and splinters flew from the wooden door as bullets came through to ricochet dangerously inside. Manning’s mouth set and with a quick wrist-flip he closed the starting switch.
And there was silence.
DUGAN peered cautiously through a shattered door-panel. “There hasn’t been any fire,” he said almost without wonder. “The trees are green.”
Manning bent tensely over the table. “Four years backward,” he nodded. “Now, if I can just find out how much power that took . . .”
Half an hour later for them, it was 1935, an evening with the first chill of fall in the air.
“Too bad we lost the invisibility units,” grieved Manning. “There’s nothing now to prove we ever travelled in time——except the traveler itself, and we can hardly carry that with us to America . . . And Kahl and Wolfgang make another paradox we didn’t think of. They died in a time that never will be.”
“Hell, what’s another paradox,” said Dugan. “We’ve got our work cut out for us without worrying about them.” Regretfully they smashed the time-traveler’s mechanism—lest it fall into still other hands anxious to remodel history—and set out on foot with a good chance of making the Swiss border by dawn.
THE GIANTS RETURN
Earth set itself grimly to meet them with corrosive fire, determined to blast them back to the stars. But they erred in thinking the Old Ones were too big to be clever.
IN THE LAST HOURS THE STAR ahead had grown brighter by many magnitudes, and had changed its color from a dazzling blue through white to the normal yellow, of a GO sun. That was the Doppler effect as the star’s radial velocity changed relative to the Quest III, as for forty hours the ship had decelerated.
They had seen many such stars come near out of the galaxy’s glittering backdrop, and had seen them dwindle, turn red and go out as the Quest III drove on its way once more, lashed by despair toward the speed of light, leaving behind the mockery of yet another solitary and lifeless luminary u
naccompanied by worlds where men might dwell. They had grown sated with the sight of wonders—of multiple systems of giant stars, of nebulae that sprawled in empty flame across light years.
But now unwonted excitement possessed the hundred-odd members of the Quest III’s crew. It was a subdued excitement; men and women, they came and stood quietly gazing into the big vision screens that showed the oncoming star, and there were wide-eyed children who had been born in the ship and had never seen a planet. The grownups talked in low voices, in tones of mingled eagerness and apprehension, of what might lie at the long journey’s end. For the Quest III was coming home; the sun ahead was the Sun, whose rays had warmed their lives’ beginning.
KNOF LLUD, the Quest III’s captain, came slowly down the narrow stair from the observatory, into the big rotunda that was now the main recreation room, where most of the people gathered. The great chamber, a full cross-section of the vessel, had been at first a fuel hold. At the voyage’s beginning eighty per cent of the fifteen-hundred-foot cylinder had been engines and fuel; but as the immense stores were spent and the holds became radioactively safe, the crew had spread out from its original cramped quarters. Now the interstellar ship was little more than a hollow shell.
Eyes lifted from the vision screens to interrogate Knof Llud; he met them with an impassive countenance, and announced quietly, “We’ve sighted Earth.”
A feverish buzz arose; the captain gestured for silence and went on, “It is still only a featureless disk to the telescope. Zost Relyul has identified it—no more.” But this time the clamor was not to be settled. People pressed round the screens, peering into them as if with the naked eye they could pick out the atom of reflected light that was Earth, home. They wrung each other’s hands, kissed, shouted, wept. For the present their fears were forgotten and exaltation prevailed.
Knof Llud smiled wrily. The rest of the little speech he had been about to make didn’t matter anyway, and it might have spoiled this moment.
Complete Fiction (Jerry eBooks) Page 23
