by Jerry eBooks
“I shouldn’t complain,” he said. “After all, you saved my life.”
She blushed. “You were right when you accused me of eavesdropping. When I listened in on your talk with Flaherty that day, I reported to the others that you were after Lehman and were dangerous. We took a vote and the majority decided on eliminating you. I disagreed. I thought that perhaps you could be persuaded to drop the case.”
They do it for science, Hayssen. I thought, or they do it for friendship or they do it because of a maternal instinct. But they’ll never admit that they do it for love.
“You’re sure there wasn’t any personal reason?”
She was suddenly very furious, recalling his kiss when he had rescued her from Lehman.
“You are very foolish, Donald! I could never love a man thousands of years in the past. Besides, that is expressly forbidden by the rules!”
He had her in his arms. She struggled for a moment and then abruptly relaxed.
“I love your cute futuristic accent,” he said softly.
“Is that all you love about me?” she murmured plaintively.
He kissed her mouth and she shut up.
“You’re more of a sociology student than a straight history student, aren’t you, Cathy?”
She smiled. “You’re right. How did you guess?”
“My business as a detective, darling. You knew what ink-sticks and flukum were when I mentioned them to you. It isn’t the sort of knowledge that any secretary would have.”
“I knew I had made a slip there. Like saying I had been named after a famous actress. You caught that one too, didn’t you?”
“I did, but it never made sense. And there’s something else that’s puzzling me. You called me at my apartment that one time to warn me. Why didn’t you call when your friends were waiting to kidnap me, the day I came home from work?”
“I did. Only you had gone home by then.”
It was nice to know she had been at his side all the way through, Hayssen thought.
Well, what’ll we do about Lehman now?”
Cathy looked up.
What do you mean ‘we’ ?”
He grinned. “The only safe place for me to be is with you, every minute. And I imagine you have plans about Lehman.”
She frowned. “Well, I guess I’ll make my report on him and then wait for further instructions.”
“We could keep after him,” he said slowly. “You and I. I still have a few scores to settle with him anyway.”
His neck still ached where Lehman’s powerful fingers had dug deep. And there was the slight matter of some bruises on Cathy. Lehman had done his best to get Cathy to co-operate, to betray her future.
“I was wondering, Cathy—is there any other age that Lehman could go to, where he could change things like he can here?”
“I don’t think so. Our bureau of research concluded that it would be easiest to change the fabric of time in the Twentieth Century.”
“Then he must still be around, still trying to get at Flaherty.”
She looked worried. “We have Flaherty pretty well covered but there’s always a chance—”
“Then we’ll have to find Lehman as soon as possible. I kind of wonder, though, if he would take off—go farther back in time—if we got too close to him.”
“We could follow in my own chrono-machine,” Cathy suggested. “But we’d have to get after him quickly.”
Hayssen suddenly thought of something. “Your apartment is a time-machine like Lehman’s office was, isn’t it?”
She nodded. “Why do you ask?”
“How big is it?”
“Fourteen by sixteen feet. You see, we have to live in them. You can’t park a time machine in an empty lot or leave it in a warehouse. So we live in them and have offices in them when we travel.” She laughed softly. “Sometimes we have trouble finding places where they fit. Once I had to rent a dungeon in Elizabethan England to hold mine!”
“You have your own power supply, don’t you?”
She nodded.
That explained the lack of use of the electric outlets, he thought.
He told her about Martin Green and how Green had been in his room one moment and gone the next.
“The man you call Green is one of Lehman’s confederates, Donald.”
The clerk in the license bureau probably was too, he thought. He could have notified Green that he was about to be visited and Green would naturally have been home when he called. Green had probably rented the room to lend a note of authenticity to Lehman’s references in case someone should look them up.
It wouldn’t have been at all difficult for Green to hop in a time machine and he in his apartment when Hayssen had called. The chrono-machines were maneuverable in space, as well as time.
He kissed Cathy again. “Come on, we’ve got work to do.”
It was easier than he thought. Lehman was too anxious, too ready to try again. He found him through the papers. It was a business personal ad, just a small ad for a health salon. But the wording was such that it would catch the eye of an old duffer like Flaherty. It had good advertising appeal, hinting that you could be healthier and live longer if you came to the salon. And there was a catch line about cancer buried in the ad.
It could be just another quack, he thought. But it was too pat, too smoothly professional, for it to be anybody else but Lehman.
When he got to the address he was just a second too late. There was the same ghostly phosphorescence, the same shimmering outlines of Lehman, sneering openly at him.
He took a tiny “printed” transceiver from a brief case and gave Cathy the news.
“Go down to the street and wait for me, Donald. I’ll be there in exactly thirty seconds!” Her voice was warm and confident.
He ran down the stairs and out into the street.
Lehman’s new office had been in a building at the corner of Lawrence and Broadway. The streets were full of mid-afternoon shoppers and honking automobiles. A traffic cop stood at the intersection and guided the streams of traffic. Fie probably tried to close a bookie, Hayssen thought briefly, and got sent to this corner as punishment.
He searched the air above the street closely. A few of the shoppers noted his concentration, stared at the open air, and then went on their way, nodding wisely to one another and pointing suggestively at him.
Suddenly there was a glimmering and then the shadowy outlines of the time machine came into view.
Traffic screeched to a halt and pedestrians were frozen in their tracks. There, ten feet above the street, was a full-sized room with transparent walls, hanging unsupported in midair!
Cathy slid the door open and lowered the machine until it just grazed the tops of the automobiles in the street.
Hayssen vaulted through the crowds and grasped the bottom _of the open doorway. He pulled himself aboard and Cathy started the machine and they slowly disappeared from view.
He couldn’t help grinning to himself. Several thousands of people had seen what had happened lint it would be a miracle if there were ten who would agree on what they had seen.
The papers would run riot, he thought, but then some savant from the University would probably save the day by swearing that it was a mass hallucination and there were hundreds like it on record.
Cathy was busy at the instrument board and since there was nothing he could, do to help, Hayssen bent his attention to the view through the transparent walls.
Below him, in the street he had just come from, he could see the traffic slowly moving backwards and people disappearing into stores. The whole colorful kaleidoscope was slowly winding up. In a minute or so all the traffic had disappeared and the light was dimming.
It was near morning, he thought, before the people started going to work.
Far in the distance, through one of the side walls, he spotted a little cube of red.
Cathy looked up from the instrumental panel at his question.
“That’s Lehman’s chrono-machine,
Don. We’ll have to follow him until he stops. There’s nothing we can do until then.”
He turned back to watch the city. The endless passage of days and nights had resolved itself into a featureless light gray that seemed to blanket the city. It was like seeing it through a very light fog. Some of the newer buildings were missing and a few older ones had taken their place.
He caught a fleeting glimpse of a human figure dressed in the style of the late Twenties and then they were going too fast to see people. Forests and brush had grown up and engulfed a good section of the city.
They were over the downtown area, now, about a mile from Lehman’s machine. The Chicago Loop was vaguely outlined but the El structure had disappeared and so had the Board of Trade building and the Tribune Tower and other famous landmarks. In another heartbeat Chicago was nothing but a collection of wooden houses and mud streets. Then a stockade, nestling where the Chicago River and Lake Michigan joined together.
Lehman’s machine slowly swung over the continent toward the East and Hayssen and Cathy followed. Chicago had disappeared entirely. Only prairie land and forests stood by the southern tip of Lake Michigan. They were near the east coast before they hit cities again.
They hung over New York for half an hour or so and watched that fabulous port dwindle down to a tiny village of log huts and then disappear entirely into a stretch of virgin timber. A minute later a few small boats hastily put out from the Massachusetts coast and sped rapidly backwards to Europe.
They had followed Lehman over to England when Hayssen thought of something.
“Cathy, I kind of wonder why Flaherty took me off the case. That was something I hadn’t expected. I still can’t see why the old duller did it.”
She smiled and an impish light shone in her eyes.
“All I did was tell him that I had looked you up and found that you were perfectly unreliable and that the best thing he could do was discharge you on the spot!”
He laughed and looked at the view outside the machine again. Cathy was standing at his side and his arm crept around her waist.
They were fleeing backwards in time, he thought, past the uncounted ages. They watched the fall of Rome and saw the glory that was Greece. They saw the pyramids gradually torn down, block by block slowly taken away and replaced in the enormous quarries. And Cathy told him how she had once been a priestess in a temple of Ra.
Civilization had receded now from the vast plains and forests of Europe. A small colony of thatched huts held sway for a moment along the banks of the Nile and then they, too, were gone. What human life there was existed in small isolated groups that lived in caves. Gradually these groups drifted back to the shelter and the comfort of the trees.
It was weird, Hayssen thought. From proud, upright man to brutish, beetle-browed creatures who caught and ate small animals raw because they hadn’t yet discovered the magic of fire.
Several hours after they had started, a call came for Cathy on the small radio that allowed communication between the students in the various eras.
She answered it and turned to Hayssen with a sober look on her face.
“We have eliminated Martin Green.”
Hayssen tore himself away from untitled story the view through the transparent walls.
“How?”
“Green stopped his chrono-machine in Spain during the Inquisition. One of the students there managed to wreck his machine and block his escape. Then, in the guise of a monk, he accused Green of heresy.”
He could see Green, fat and sweating, before the Inquisitors. He probably hadn’t been aide to answer their questions satisfactorily so naturally he would be tortured to give the right answers. And poor Green probably hadn’t known them.
He tried to keep his attention on the scenery.
They had followed Lehman all over the globe now, a trip that was a fascinating tour of the ages.
Land bridges appeared between England and Europe and Asia and America. Then the continents themselves subtly altered shape and changed and flowed in an almost fluid fashion.
He saw great sheets of ice creep down from the poles and cover huge sections of America and Eurasia, and then crawl back even faster.
The time machine was gaining speed, rocketing through the years.
Huge forests of the carboniferous era sprang up and died overnight. They slowed flown once over a continent that looked like a badly distorted map of Africa and Hayssen saw huge saurians wallowing in the swamps and lumbering over the lush plains.
Then the dinosaurs themselves dwindled and disappeared and the only life was the teeming forests of ferns and the little things that wriggled and dove in stagnant pools of water.
The machine was slowing down and Cathy maneuvered it closer to the reddish cube that was Lehman’s.
The land was a nightmare now. Fields of rubble and tumbled stone and volcanic ash. The light was tinged a lurid red and active volcanoes belched huge columns of acrid smoke and flames high into the air.
The machine stopped.
Lehman’s machine was about a city block from theirs. The door to it swung, open and Lehman appeared, haggard and worn. He hesitated a moment and then he was outside, running on the soft, hot ash. “Open the door, Cathy.”
Her face was frightened.
“You don’t need to, Don! We—”
“Open it, Cathy!”
She bit her lip and punched the button on the control board. The door slowly swung open.
It was like standing at the open door to a furnace. Waves of heat beat in at him and the air was hot and smelled of sulphur.
He stood there for a moment and then plunged outside after Lehman.
The acrid air cut into his lungs and brought tears to his eyes. Lehman was a dim figure in the distance, half obscured by wisps of smoke.
He could feel the heat from the hot ash seep through his soles and start to burn his feet. He wouldn’t be able to stand it long. He’d have to catch up with Lehman in a hurry.
He caught Lehman on a rocky mound past which flowed a small stream of molten lava. Lehman had turned and was facing him, hate and determination on his face.
“You made a mistake, Hayssen,” he shouted. “You came out unarmed!”
Lehman had a flame pistol in his hand and Hayssen promptly dropped to the ground. A beam of purple light flared through the air, cutting through the spot where he had been.
He couldn’t stay there forever, he realized. The hot ground was burning his chest and the steamy, sulphurous vapors were eating at his nostrils.
He was on his feet, ducking and twisting toward Lehman. Lehman’s eyes were red and watering and he had difficulty aiming at Hayssen.
Then Hayssen was on him, grabbing and twisting his arm. Lehman’s fingers relaxed and the pistol fell into the lava stream.
They were fighting silently now, atop a cindery hill a billion years back in time. Lehman fought tenaciously and well, rolling with Hayssen’s punches and slowly edging him toward the side of the mound. Thirty feet down, small flames leaped and ran over the lava.
They were practically naked, clothing that was wet with sweat long since having been burned off and torn. Hayssen could feel the soles of his feet blistering. His lungs choked and burned for oxygen.
He got Lehman by the throat and started to rain blows on his head. They twisted and rolled and then Lehman was up, half crazed with pain, backing off, scrambling back like a crab, one hand feeling along the ground for a loose rock.
Lehman was at the brink and suddenly his hand felt nothing beneath it. He screamed and scrabbled for a grip.
His last scream died in a wailing gurgle.
Hayssen crawled to the edge and peered down. Something lay charred on the surface of the lava flow, something that flared for a minute with a bright harsh flame and then was nothing but flaky cinders.
He felt sick and turned to go back to the time machine.
There was no way back! The way was choked by fiery fingers of molten rock. And the hill he stood
on was gradually being submerged by the flow.
He coughed and staggered back to the summit. There was nothing to do but wait for death.
A moment later he felt something settle nearby. It was Cathy and the time machine. He half fell and was half pulled through the open doorway. Then he felt cool hands caress his face and start to strip from his feet the twisted and burned pieces °f leather that had once been his shoes.
Hayssen woke with a slow feeling of wonder. His blistered feet and seared lungs no longer pained him. He was dressed in clean, cool clothing and was lying on a couch in what seemed like an anteroom.
Cathy was smiling, at him.
“You didn’t expect to recover like this, did you?”
She sat on the couch and stroked his forehead. “Really, Don, don’t you think that medical techniques have improved some since your time? Blistered feet and twisted ankles are as minor as a cold now.”
He thought of the time when he had tripped over the I-beam at the apartment site and twisted his ankle. That had been a clue he had overlooked.
I wonder what the A.M.A. would think, he thought.
“What happens now?” he asked.
“We are to await judgment before the Council.” Her smile was somewhat sad.
Hayssen was on his feet. “What for?”
“We—changed things slightly, Don. When I picked you up off the streets of Chicago that time. If it hadn’t been for the distraction of the chrono-machine, a certain girl going shopping that day would have met and fallen in love with a young man who worked in one of the stores.
“It’s one of those things that hardly ever happen, Don, but it did and the future was changed, Their descendants disappeared from history. It wasn’t a large line or a strong one but there are several slight differences now. One of the students who was studying your time has disappeared, so has a member of the Council.”
He felt his heart sink. This council of hers wouldn’t be lenient, he thought.
She opened a door and he got up to follow her through it. He felt something rub his legs and he looked down.
