by Earl
Don’s mind whirled up through jumbled impressions like a straw twisting in a whirlpool. What did this mean?—tall trees on every side of him! Then he remembered and sprang to his feet.
He found himself on a little hillock overgrown with coarse grasses. On all sides loomed a forbidding wall of jungle-like forest, steaming in the hot summer sun. Far in one direction were the white peaks of mountains. Look as he might, he could see nothing of buildings or a city. Well—that was not so strange. But mountains here in Kansas—how could that be? For Professor White had stated that he would materialize—or rather, the universe would slow down to his vibration rate—in exactly the same spot he had left.
How strange! On this spot, then, thousands of years before, had stood the laboratory. The jungle had then been a city. Those mountains had been prairie land. How the world had changed! And the people he had known were dust. Elaine was but a memory!
There came a loud roar from the bottom of the little hill. Don was startled to see a great lion-like creature standing there, its green eyes glittering at him. Lions in Kansas, too! Yet it was not a lion, being much larger, and thick-furred like a bear.
The animal bounded halfway up the slope and crouched, swishing its long tail. Don stood in a hypnosis of fear. Should he run? But how hopeless to think of outrunning that sleek, smooth-muscled machine! Was his gamble with an unknown future to be ended in one bloody moment? So it seemed, as the beast tensed its great muscles for a leap.
At that moment a faint crashing sound came from near by. The lion creature twitched its ears, eased back on its haunches, then leaped away with an ear-splitting roar. The next moment Don saw the cause of the disturbance. A cyclopean half-round object on six long legs of jointed steel was crashing through the jungle, bowling over trees as though they had been sticks. It was no less than fifty feet high and shook the ground as the metal plates at the ends of the jointed legs moved rhythmically up and forward and down.
The machine stopped. The housing barely cleared the tops of the trees. Then Don heard a thunderous sound and down from the cloudless sky swooped a cylindrical object, like a meteor. Silently—the noise had just been the shriek of disrupted air—the airship circled the motionless walking machine.
Suddenly it seemed that ten cannon had all begun at once. Searing flashes of light swept over the jungle land. Don instinctively threw himself flat. The smell of singed wood permeated the air. Tremendous shocks ran through the ground. Jagged tree trunks, huge boulders and pieces of flying metal swept through the air.
It was over in a minute, and the sun smiled down again on peace and quiet. Don arose to see the house on legs lumbering in his direction. Two of its motor appendages dangled brokenly, and one smooth side of the housing was blackened and dented. Apparently, in the battle of giants, it had been victorious, for the airship was nowhere to be seen.
Like a nightmare creature the machine stalked up, flicking trees aside disdainfully, and paused at the foot of the slope. It seemed to stare at the naked man speculatively. A horrible thought struck Don. Maybe the thing was just a machine—a soulless, thinking being of metal! Anything was possible in this distant age to which he had come from thousands of years back in Time.
THE machine approached close, its five-foot bottom plates sinking a foot into the hard ground from the great weight above. Don could now hear the faint sound of gears and wheels. What did the incredible iron monster want? Was it going to crush him flat with one of its great foot-plates, in sheer mechanical pitilessness? A huge foot came up, loomed over him. Then it eased to the ground not a yard away.
Don felt some invisible force grasp him gently and lift him off the ground. Up and up he went. A sliding panel opened beside the aperture from which the lifting force came, and his shoulders were thrust up through the bottom of the hanging car. Two soft hands grasped Don’s.
They were human hands and they helped him erect in the lighted interior of the strange walking craft. Standing on cushioned flooring, surrounded by a bewildering maze of queer apparatus, Don turned to face his rescuer. He was a man like himself, but with a smaller body and a larger head. The lips were thin and small, the nose pinched, the large skull practically hairless. He was dressed in a gaudy outfit with spangles of bright jeweled ornaments. His eyes were large and reflected a deep curiosity.
The stranger spoke first; Don shook his head. The language did not even remotely resemble English. Don then tried his language on the other, without result. The curiosity in the stranger’s eyes grew greater; he muttered something to himself.
At this moment a buzzing sound came from the complicated control mechanism of the walking car. The vehicle’s lone pilot swung around and peered at dials over which little lights were winking. Suddenly his long delicate fingers jabbed at the controls. Don felt the housing sway forward. Through a large window he could see tree tops swishing by. The incredible thing, like a sentient iron giant, was stalking through the jungle land that stretched limitlessly in every direction. Considering its tremendous size, and the crude means of locomotion, its progress was amazingly smooth.
Don, inexplicably tired from his journey through time, felt his eyes grow heavy. The subdued whining of gears and cogs acted as a lullaby. As in a daze he sank to a soft couch against one wall and sleep overcame him.
WHEN he awoke, Don had the strange feeling that something had happened to him while he was asleep. Wondering, he noticed his friend of a day was gone. He was startled till he saw that the trapdoor in the center of the housing was open.
Don stepped to the opening, peered down. The vehicle was motionless, four of its spidery steel appendages spread widely. Looking for the other two, which he remembered had been damaged in the battle with the strange silent airship, Don saw his mysterious friend perched halfway down the length of one. Around his body was a peculiar harness to which were attached several strange apparatuses.
Don wondered if he could be dreaming, for the man was hanging in thin air! He was pointing at the metal beam of the leg a small nozzle from which streamed blue powder—blue powder that filled a gash in the steel as rapidly and solidly as though being welded on! In a few seconds it was done, no sign of the previous damage visible. Don saw that both crippled legs had been repaired completely.
Now the man who wielded such miraculous apparatus touched a finger to his harness. Like a feather he arose, supported by nothing tangible. He slung his harness onto a hook on the wall, after ascending to the interior of the cabin, and faced Don, smiling pleasantly.
“There wasn’t much to repair after all,” he said in perfect English, “although I thought by the way it started I would lose all my car’s legs completely. I mean that battle I had yesterday with Algy-A-23. But he was no match for me. I gave him a little ZY beam on his power unit. That’s the second time I’ve defeated him.”
Don stared. “You—you speak—English?” he stammered.
“Sure, as well as you do, now. It’s a queer language, but it will do. Your name is Don Jones and mine Tosto, with a number that means nothing to you. And I’m curious to know, strange man with the strange mind, where you are from and how you came into Anarchy. Are you one of the Degenerates? But then you don’t look particularly atavistic. Puzzled that you could not speak the language that has been on earth for ten thousand years, I used hypno-2Y-beam on you while you slept and recorded the language with which your mind thinks. I know you are from a past age, but how have you survived for those long eons?”
“I didn’t survive,” answered Don haltingly. “My vibration rate was slowed down to correspond with this present time.”
The other’s high smooth brow furrowed. “Vibration rate! What can you know of that? It is one of the lost secrets!”
“I don’t really know anything about it,” admitted Don. “But it was through that that I was projected into the future. If Professor White were here——”
Thereupon Don told of Professor White and his pioneer researches in wave mechanics, how the old but brilliant scient
ist had stumbled upon a great discovery—that all matter, all life, all the universe, was made up of vibration; that the flow of time was simply a decrease of the vibration rate.
Before Don realized it, while the stranger listened attentively, he told his own personal story—of his recurrent epilepsy, his love for Elaine White, his consenting to become the subject of Professor White’s experiment, allowing himself to be catapulted into the future by having his vibration rate greatly decreased.
“It was for the best,” finished Don with a forlorn tone. “I was furthering the cause of science, and at the same time solving my own—and Elaine’s—problems.”
“What a strange time you lived in!” commented the stranger known as Tosto. “It goes back probably more than ten thousand years. I shall have to find out sometime. But now that you are here, what are you going to do?”
“I don’t know, and I don’t care!” said Don savagely. “It’s just as well to be dead as epileptic. Elaine, that girl—you see.”
The other man shook his head, puzzled. “I can’t quite understand that part. You leave your time and age because you wanted to mate with a certain girl and couldn’t because of epilepsy—whatever that is. Were women rare, or too strong to subdue in that time? Was she the only one you could approach?”
“She was the only one!” agreed Don, but his meaning did not strike the stranger.
Suddenly, at the snap of an automatic switch over a winking light, a raucous voice rang through the cabin. There was a note of sarcasm or derision in it, and the man called Tosto answered sharply into a small cup-shaped microphone. The voice came again, still more bitingly arrogant. This time Tosto half arose, snarling into the mouthpiece. There was a short interchange of clipped words and then Tosto snapped off the voice-tube with a wild laugh that vibrated in anger.
BEWILDERED, Don watched his companion manipulate his knobs and levers with a threatening sneer on his face. The house on legs immediately increased its pace; Don could feel by the pounding of its steel feet that it was actually running! Every now and then the cabin would shake as one of the great metal legs crashed against a sturdy tree, uprooting it completely.
The pell-mell pace kept up for a long hour. Don began to get tired of the jerky motion. And to what were they going? What had the raucous, belligerent voice said? And why was Tosto fuming in silent anger?
The answer came sooner than Don might have wanted. First there was a flickering of small pilot lights on the control board. Tosto’s fine hands streaked to them eagerly. The iron giant stopped dead. Don peered in the direction his companion did and saw through the front window a gigantic single-wheeled vehicle rolling toward them. It had a cabin similar to theirs, attached to a grooved wheel that slid within the broad outer one.
The newcomer, crushing trees in its steady advance, came to a dead halt a hundred yards away. It seemed to stand there defiantly. Some amazing power held the huge hundred-foot wheel erect. Tosto barked a word venomously into his microphone. A sharp bark came back. Tosto’s hands darted toward levers other than those which motivated the legs.
Don was never quite clear as to what happened then, or in what sequence. If that battle he had witnessed the day before had been deafening, this was twice as thunderous. Peal after peal of ear-shattering sound rang through the cabin. Great sheets of fire and lightning seemed to fall from the sky. Thump after thump rocked the craft till Don feared it would topple over. And so the strange battle raged on.
Suddenly their vehicle lurched drunkenly. The floor tilted dangerously. Don pictured himself mangled in a mass of wreckage. The scene outside swung crazily, pivoted, veered around. Muscles tensed for the crash, Don suddenly became aware that the cabin had righted itself. Pounding of metal feet told him the machine was moving forward. Don raised his eyes They were running to attack!
The wheeled vehicle, standing broadside, was belching torrential lightnings and colored beams. Don winced as a flaming bolt shot arrow-like straight for the front window. But three feet from its mark the livid bomb swerved as though it had encountered a blanket of impenetrable rubber. Some sort of magical cushion was protecting the cabin from harm. All the violent forces which were blasting the trees to smoking splinters ricocheted harmlessly away from the cabin itself—all except one.
Don saw it, a ten-foot oval of white incandescence which leaped from the wheeled enemy like a miniature sun. Some intuition made Don duck. An instant later there was a tremendous concussion, followed by the tinkling thud of glass on metal. The entire front window and frame had smashed against the spot where Don’s head had been a second before!
Marveling that he was alive, Don raised his head in the utter silence that followed. He expected to see Tosto a bloody heap flattened against the wall, for he had been directly in front of the fire-bomb. But Tosto, sweating and grinning, was just picking himself off the floor.
“That’s that,” he announced calmly. “Look at Sigag-T-34, who dared to challenge me!”
Don stared out of the gap which the fire-bomb had blown and saw the huge wheeled vehicle, strangely twisted and torn, lying flat in a smoldering heap of fallen trees. Some titanic force had taken out a full quarter of its broad outer rim.
“Good Lord!” spluttered Don. “He’s finished!”
As if to belie him, the enemy’s voice came over the radio, but it had lost its insulting tone. It sounded chastened. Tosto answered with bragging inflection and snapped the instrument shut with a gesture of exultation.
“Two victories in as many days!” he gloated. “I will soon be able to challenge Virdi, the Invincible!”
Don, gazing at the fallen enemy, saw the cabin detach itself from the struts which held it to the twisted frame within the outer wheel. It rose fifty feet in the air, then scuttled off over the trees. Somehow it seemed to have the air of a dog with its tail between its legs. Don sighed in relief. At least this titanic battle had not ended in a death.
He turned to the still grinning Tosto. “What were you fighting over?” he asked.
Tosto turned in surprise. “Fighting over? Why, nothing in particular! Sigag there challenged me, thinking he was mighty, and we fought it out. What is there to fight over anyway?”
“Wh-what?” Don was incredulous. “Fought it out over nothing? Neither land, nor money, nor—a woman?”
“How ridiculous!” returned Tosto. “If there was a woman involved, I would have fought her, not him! What sense to fight him and then her?”
“What I mean,” explained Don, “is that if you both loved the same woman and fought to see which could—er, marry her.”
“Marry her? You mean mate with her? What could Sigag have to do with any woman I wanted? I would have to fight her to mate with her, not Sigag nor any other person on earth!”
“I’ll be damned!” cried Don, more amazed at this than at anything before. “You fight women to marry them, and you fight men over nothing at all!”
“Of course,” agreed Tosto. “That’s life. Without fighting, life wouldn’t be worth living. Women—of course it is pleasant to be their lovers, but the battle to win that privilege adds ten times the zest to such an affair.”
As if this cleared the whole issue, Tosto turned away. Donning his repair harness, he opened the floor hatchway, dropped through, and floated with apparently supernatural ease from place to place, surveying the damage done to his vehicle.
Don watched him, trembling still in reaction to the furious battling which had just ended. Perfectly calm, as though nothing of note had happened, Tosto patched up his walking house. Welding and cutting and bending the steel with invisible beams of force, it took him but an hour to hide the scars of battle. In another half-hour he had installed a new window, fashioning it from igneous stone.
DON had heard of transmutation, and even with his unscientific perceptions he knew that this was a miraculous transformation of matter undreamed of by the science of his time.
Tosto came into the cabin, tossed his harness aside, spoke: “I’ll have to se
t aside a few days sometime and build me a new car. This one has been patched too many times to be of much protection any more. I’ve used this war-car in twenty-one battles already, all of them victories.”
“If one of you had been killed in this last battle,” asked Don, “would the authorities have punished you, or is this sort of dueling allowed?”
“The authorities!”
Tosto laughed heartily for a long minute. Then he faced Don with a wide grin. “There are no authorities!”
At Don’s incredulous stare, he went on: “I see that you can hardly believe me. Well, sooner or later I must tell you all about it, so sit down and listen. Life today is in the ideal state—the state of anarchy! Each man is his own government—and each woman. It has been this way for ten thousand years.
“You see, man from the childish past, it all came about through the discovery of the secret of mass-energy conversion—atomic power, you would call it. Fifty thousand years ago mankind fell heir to limitless power—matter converted into pure energy. It ushered in a new era of luxury and plenty. Atomic power extracted enough energy from a spoonful of sand to supply a man for months. And that same wonderful, cheap power gave men everything they needed—through transmutation. Food, clothing, machinery, power—all from transmutation.
“From then on evolution took a different trend. Instead of tending to increase population, the advent of atomic power decreased it! Why? Because, eliminating the necessity of laboring to live, it allowed tremendous expansion of the mind. The better minds saw no reason for allowing poorer, duller minds to exist, and warred on them. Of course, victory was easy. Shocking to you, no doubt, but the poor mind, a drag on the race, has no excuse for living that you can invent. As the years rolled by, the limits narrowed and the population decreased still more. It reached a stationary point ten thousand years ago, when the last vestige of farcical government was overthrown, and complete anarchy prevailed.
