by Earl
Gregg smiled.
“Yes. My father had it and took good care of it.” He and Harble had previously decided against revealing who they were and from what time, unknowing of what the reaction would be. He asked a question in turn. “Is there anything like atomic power in use?” He caught himself before he added “in this age.”
“Lord, what things you hicks expect!” their guide’s look plainly said. Aloud, he answered: “No. Scientists have been working on it since nineteen-twenty, but no success as yet.”
“The reason I ask,” pursued Gregg, “is that I seem to have read the Martians were defeated by some atomic power weapon, back in nineteen-forty-five.”
Jak Roger of 2000 A.D. immediately looked thoughtful.
“Yes, they were. That’s one of the greatest mysteries of history, though. The records are not at all clear. It seems, just when it was needed, atomic power became available. In the general confusion of that terrible time, the truth was never found out.”
“But after the battle. The atomic power weapons—”
“Had burned out,” finished Jak Roger. “No clue remained as to how they worked. It’s just a mystery.”
Later they had food, exotic and rich. Gradually, they grew aware that 2000 A.D. was a soft, foppish period, nestled in the lap of prosperity. Clothing was lacy, highly adorned, men’s even more than women’s. At social gatherings people spoke everything in rhymed couplets, a fad of the times.
Gregg and Harble were not loath to accept further hospitality and slept wearily in a gaudily furnished hotel. In the morning they found their ship’s motor tuned, tanks filled, tires tested. Their batteries, partly drained, had been recharged. Not one question had been asked.
“Thanks a lot, Jak,” said Gregg, ready for departure.
“You’re a couple of queer ducks,” confided Roger, grinning. “But I like you. Come back again.”
He rushed off to a landing ship, to conduct farmers from Iowa, perhaps, around the most magnificent city in Earth’s history.
THEY were in the biplane, zooming up for the clouds.
“A city of childish, shallow minds,” commented Gregg. “If all civilization today is like that—”
“Even so, better than a world dominated by Martians,” Harble replied quietly. “We saved civilization. We made this city possible. Far in the future, we’ll equip our time-warp with atomic power and take back a weapon to defeat the Martians—55 years ago. But we haven’t done it yet!” His eyes widened. “What if we were killed before then? Or something prevented us from going on?”
Gregg smiled. “We did it, so nothing prevented—will prevent—us.”
“Fatalism!” snorted Harble. “We have voluntary will. Suppose we simply refused, now, to carry on the cycle.” He stopped, gasping.
For the first time, that monstrous thought crept into their brains. . . .
Gregg let out a chuckle, pointing. Flashing up from the city, he had broken about every aerial traffic regulation there was, being ignorant of them. Now a wasp ship of red darted for them, semaphores wagging angrily.
“Sorry, mister, can’t stay for tea.”
Gregg set his time-dial and snapped the switch. The police ship vanished, and half of New York’s skyline with it.
They were again in a sunny sky. Below and around lay a far different New York from what they had known, either in 1940 or 2000. Most of it was parklike expanse, huge green areas bordered by a fringe of gleaming buildings. Here and there, where the old-type grouped buildings remained, the avenues were lined with trees and flowers. Little lakes and orchards dotted the sward areas.
This arboreal New York stretched interminably along Long Island. It was breath-takingly beautiful, peaceful, almost pastoral. Its voiceless charm seemed to express the charm of a whole world that knew a good life.
It was the year 2500 A.D., for which Gregg had set the dial. They were five centuries in their future, a realization that could not but awe them. They were as far from their times as their times had been ahead of Columbus and the pre-machine days.
“Surely now they have atomic power,” Harble whispered.
But mainly they were impressed with the incredibly lovely city. They felt like two soiled vultures, descending upon an angelic realm, as Gregg headed downward. Where to land?
At random, Gregg picked a residential section in which individual homes were widely spaced among groves of rustling trees. The plane rolled to a halt across smooth lawn, before a gleaming white house with rose-tinted eaves and window frames. They stepped out and drew in deep breaths of sweet air filled with the perfume of the flower beds that spread in all directions.
“This is as close to Heaven as I deserve to come!” Harble murmured. He pointed suddenly. “And look, here comes an angel!”
A SLIM white figure arose from the shaded porch, approaching. It was a young girl, a vision of loveliness in silvery robes, her dark hair and eyes glinting with golden highlights in the strong sun. Her smile, as she greeted them, was entrancing.
“You will come in,” she said without preamble. “You will be our guests!” Her language was English, but the accent was so lilting and soft that the two men barely understood. Their own speech, they realized, would sound guttural, barbaric.
Harble nudged Gregg quizzically, and then noticed he had nudged a frozen statue. Gregg broke from a trance, nodding vaguely. They followed the girl to the cottage.
It was all like a dream. They learned that it was the custom, all over this peaceful, friendly world, for total strangers to stop at anyone’s home and promptly become guests.
There had been no war of any kind for several hundred years. It was an era of mellow good living, set like a jewel at the crown of civilization’s history.
The girl, Gloria Dewar, lived with her father, a kindly man who made them as welcome as she had. He worked daily, for four hours, in a “factory” nearby, whose outside architecture was more stately than a cathedral, and whose inside was as clean and white as a hospital. The robot machinery barely required attendance, and made no noise or smoke.
“Utopia!” breathed Milt Harble and Will Gregg nodded soberly.
They stayed two weeks. It was almost hypnotic, this grand and yet sublimely simple life.
In the evenings there were dances and social gatherings. Dressed in the togalike style of the time, which Gloria had procured for them, the two men from the 20th century felt like Greek gods in ancient Athens. Everyone seemed cultured, intelligent, uninhibited. In their many hours of leisure, literature, art and pure science research abounded. There were paintings that stung the eyes with their beauty, fiction that read like the tinkle of gold and jewels, and science that had conquered most diseases and suffering.
Gregg danced often with Gloria. Harble saw that he had forgotten Edith and the pain in his heart. Gregg’s lean face was once again youthful, vibrant, alive. Harble almost hated to ask the question they had been putting off, by tacit consent, for two weeks. But ask they must.
“What about atomic power?” he queried of the girl’s father one evening at their meal in the quiet cottage. “Has your science utilized that?”
“No,” smiled Dewar. “That type of energy has not been sought too strenuously since the development of sun engines in twenty-two or four. With that, and coal and oil, civilization’s power needs are easily met.” His smile became slightly puzzled. “You speak as though you come from another—”
He stopped, flushing, and Gloria’s face also tinted. It was one of the rules of hospitality in that time never to ask guests personal questions, unless the information was volunteered.
Gregg’s head came up as though he had rudely awakened from a dream.
“We did come from the past, in a time machine,” he blurted. He told the rest. “We will have to go on now, seeking atomic power.”
GLORIA and her father were obviously startled, but believed instantly.
“Gloria and I,” Dewar said, “had conjectured”—he flushed again—“something of t
he sort, from your accent and plane. Well, if you must leave, I’ll have your ship checked over and your batteries recharged.”
Gloria’s shining eyes were on Gregg. “You have saved this world for us!” she whispered. “You have made all the happiness and beauty of this time possible!”
Suddenly her face fell. Half in wonder, half in sadness, she went on.
“But you haven’t done it yet, have you? You must go into the future, find the weapon that saved Earth, and then go back to your past with it!” She was looking into Gregg’s eyes, with a soft light in her own. “You will then come back—to me?”
Gregg sprang up with a glad cry. “You ask me to come back to you, Gloria? Then I will!”
And Harble knew that his friend had once more found a meaning in life. He spoke slowly.
“Why not stay, Will? You have no reason to go. Why leave Gloria, and these wonderful times?” He paused, with a peculiar light in his eye, then resumed. “In fact, I don’t know why either of us is leaving! Our age was a time of distress, war. It doesn’t attract me. And, Will, if we elect to stay in this time, for the rest of our natural lives, who or what can stop us? Earth is saved from the Martians, now, without our doing a thing more.” Again that stunning realization swept over them. It had become almost a sinister conception, crawling evilly within their brains, like an unanswerable enigma.
Gregg shook his head dazedly.
“We must go on, Milt, if only to find the answer to it.” But his tone was uncertain. His arm had stolen about Gloria. He was looking into her eyes, fighting himself.
“We’re staying!” Harble’s voice was emphatic. “Just to make sure, we’ll dismantle the time apparatus tomorrow. The answer lies in my equations. There must be a loophole in time, somewhere. It’s not immutable. But anyway, we’re staying in this world of peace and plenty.”
And Gregg argued no more.
CHAPTER IV
Paradise Lost
NEXT morning, the two from the past climbed into their plane’s cabin, tools in their hands. Harble looked in surprise as Gregg turned on the power tubes of the time machine.
“We agreed to stay, Will.”
Gregg nodded. “I know. Just an impulse. In a way, I hate to dismantle it. Write finis to our time-traveling. Don’t you?”
“No.” Harble was moodily earnest. “Because, Will, I’m not sure we could get back! Those paradoxes we would run into—” His voice trailed away.
Gregg started, as if suddenly remembering.
“But what of the paradox of the Martians being defeated, by us?”
“The answer is in my equations, I tell you!” Harble almost snapped. “And by staying, we’re proving all previous time theory false. We’re thwarting time, to put it that way. Here, turn off that power before something hap—”
He took a step forward, reached for the dials. He stumbled across a rod in the narrow cabin. Clutching for support, he twisted. His elbow smashed against the time-warp switch, closing it!
There was the familiar blinking sensation. Both knew without saying that they and their plane had plunged ahead into futurity.
Recovering, cursing under his breath at his own clumsiness, Harble looked at the time dial. It had been set to zero. There should have been no shift in time.
He started.
“My finger must have flicked it over a little,” he muttered lamely, not daring to meet Gregg’s eyes.
“How much?”
“Ninety-eight years, Will—”
Gregg’s breath caught. Seconds passed before he said anything.
“Then Gloria is dead!” he whispered. “The only way to get back to her is to go on for atomic power!” He laughed a little wildly. “We’re going on after all, Milt, despite our plans not to. Maybe we had to. Maybe time is immutable!”
“We’ll see!” Harble promised grimly. He shook his fist as if challenging all the blind forces of the Universe. Taking out a notebook, he wrote busily in his log-record, finishing with an equation balanced by a question-mark.
High in the air, a little later, Gregg set his dials for a jump of 1,000 years.
“That’s about our limit, with battery power,” he stated. “The last jump of five hundred years depleted our batteries by half.”
“That will be thirty-five hundred A.D.,” Harble nodded. “And a good chance to find atomic power.”
DELIBERATELY, Gregg shoved the time-warp switch. Below them, the arboreal New York City of 2500 vanished like a dream, to be replaced by the New York of ten centuries later.
Looking down, the scene stabbed into their minds like a cruel knife. It was still aboreal New York, in broad detail. But something had happened. The buildings were dark, stained, dilapidated. The park areas were bare of orderly grass or flowers, overgrown with ugly weeds. It had a slum look about it. All the brightness, all the beauty, were gone. This New York had gone through centuries of deterioration.
“It was too good to last,” Harble groaned. “What happened? War? Revolution? Economic collapse?”
They landed on a stretch of barren ground. A group of dirty, ragged urchins and mangy dogs crowded about, hooting and making a din. It was as different from the New York they had left as black was from white. Gregg hailed a passing man, but he rewarded them with no more than a surly glance. No one passing took the least interest.
“This time has great troubles,” surmised Harble. “Whenever times are hard, people become rude and indifferent to other’s.”
But finally a tall, lean man turned toward them. Despite his ragged clothes and unkempt appearance, he had an air of refinement. He peered at the airplane’s engine narrowly.
“Does it run on gasoline?” he asked. By a quirk of language evolution, his accent was more nearly 20th century than Gloria’s had been a thousand years before. “You must be rich!” he added.
“Why?” queried Gregg.
“Why?” repeated the stranger with a snort. “Because gasoline is expensive nowadays.”
The two time-travelers’ puzzled expressions seemed to touch the man off, as though he had often gone through the same tirade.
“All the ills of civilization today can be traced to lack of power. Our oil supplies ran out five hundred years ago. Coal is rapidly approaching zero. We simply haven’t enough power to run the machines of industry. There are rows and rows of factories gathering dust. The world faces a crisis! You men in the street don’t quite realize it.”
“What about sun power?” Gregg asked, remembering the great sun mirrors of 2500 A.D.
“It isn’t enough, and it’s not dependable,” responded the stranger. “Sun power can only be gathered half the time, during the day, if there are no clouds. It supplemented coal power nicely, but alone it falls far short. Wind power is just as bad. Waterfalls and tide power are steady, but limited to locality.
“Civilization must realize the problem it is facing. There are two possible solutions. One is to fall back into a purely agricultural stage, which is rapidly occurring.
“The second possibility is”—he paused dramatically—“atomic power!”
Gregg and Harble looked at each other.
“Atomic power? Has that been achieved?” Gregg queried.
“No, but it will be soon,” prophesied the stranger. “All scientists are laboring over the problem as they’ve never labored before. Now that it means the salvation of civilization, it must come.” He lowered his voice. “Our laboratory is close to the secret now, we believe.” He smiled apologetically. “I’m a scientist. We’ve been saving on clothes to buy important apparatus. Everything is so expensive. Well, I’ll have to be off.”
HE waved and strode away. Gregg stared at his back.
“There, for all we know, goes the man who discovered atomic power!” Harble was more practical.
“Perhaps. But no use waiting for him, or any others of this time. It won’t be a highly-developed thing for years. But our search has narrowed down. Our next jump of a thousand years ought to land us right in th
e middle of widespread use of atomic power, for going back. We’ll also find the weapon we would need to defeat the Martian attack of nineteen forty-five—” He laughed shortly. “Need, did I say? The Martians were defeated fifteen hundred years ago, without our moving a step.”
“Stop it!” groaned Gregg. “Don’t keep saying that. It’s madness! If we did bring it back, we have to bring it back. Time is immutable. It got us out of twenty-five hundred when we were determined to stay.”
“That was an accident,” grunted Harble. “We still have voluntary will.”
Having their batteries charged proved a problem. Electricity was an expensive commodity, and only the rich had homes lighted by electric lights. After some wandering, they found a battery shop. They lugged each of their batteries back and forth, paying $50 in gold, which they had taken along for just such an emergency.
“Robbers!” grumbled Harble. “Let’s get out of this time of super-depression.”
Their plane climbed into the sky again. The next flicker of their time-warp revealed a 46th century New York that hummed with activity. It was a bustling, throbbing, vitally alive city. The arboreal New York of 2000 years before was completely absorbed in a forest of skyscrapers much like in the 20th century, but vastly more magnificent. From huge landing fields and dromes here and there swarmed endless aircraft, flying swiftly with belching orange flames.
“Rocket motivation!” exclaimed Harble. “A dream of science come true!”
They watched a gigantic torpedoshaped craft thunder up and keep on going till it vanished in the heavens.
“Space travel, too!” added Gregg.
“This age has atomic power without question.” Harble turned to his companion. “Soon, Will, we’ll be going back—into paradox!”
Air traffic was too complicated over the city for Gregg, and he headed their plane to the outskirts, to land on a smooth, sandy stretch on Long Island Sound. They clambered out and strode toward the nearest building. It was a large residence with a square brick adjunct that somehow suggested a laboratory.
