The Exile of Time

by Ray Cummings

  He fired again at the doorway. Tina had disappeared. Larry was now out of range, standing on the ridge, shouting and hurling rocks.

  But Tugh did not heed him. He was shambling for my doorway. He would pass within twenty feet of me as I crouched outside the cage at its opposite corner. I could take him by surprise.

  And then he saw me. He was less than a hundred feet away. He changed his direction and fired again, full at me. But I had had enough warning, and, as the beam struck the cage corner, I ran back along the outer wall of the cage and appeared at the other corner. Tugh came still closer, his weapon pointed downward as he ran. Fifty feet away. Not close enough!

  I think, there at the last, that Tugh was wholly confused. Larry had come much closer. He was shouting: and from the ridge behind me Tina was shouting. Tugh ran, not for where I was lurking now, but for the corner where a moment before he had seen me.

  Now he was thirty feet from me.... Twenty.... Then nearer than that. Wholly without caution he came forward.... I leaned around the edge of the cage and fired. For one breathless instant the voices of Tina and Larry abruptly hushed.

  My beam struck Tugh in the chest. It caught him and clung to him, bathing him in its spreading, intense white glare. He stopped in his tracks; stood transfixed for one breathless, horrible instant! He was so close that I could see the stupid surprise on his hideous features. His wide slit of mouth gaped with astonishment.

  My beam clung to him, but he did not fall! He stood astonished; then turned and came at me! For just a moment I was stricken helpless there before him. What manner of man was this? He did not fall! My ray, which had decomposed the body of Alent, the guard, and left his skeleton stripped and bleached in an instant, did not harm Tugh! He had walked into it, taken it full and he did not fall! He was still alive!

  I came to my senses and saw that Larry, seeing my danger, had run into the open, dangerously close, and hurled a rock. It struck Tugh upon the shoulder and deflected his aim, so that his flash went over me. I saw Tugh whirl toward Larry, and I rushed forward, ripping loose the cylinder of the ray projector from its restraining battery cord. In the instant the cripple was turned half way from me I landed upon him, and with all my strength brought the point of the small heavy cylinder down on his skull. There was a strange splintering crack, and a wild, eery scream from his voice. He fell, with me on top of him.

  Crowning horror! Tugh lay motionless, twisted half on his back, his thick arms outstretched on the rocks and his weapon still clutched in his hand. Culminating, gruesome horror! I rose from his body and stood shuddering. Amazing realization! The bulging misshapen head was splintered open. And from it, strewn over the rocks, were tiny intricate cogs and wheels, coils and broken wires!

  He was not a man, but a Robot! A Super-Robot from some unknown era, running amuck! A mechanism so cleverly fashioned by the genius of man that it stood diabolically upon the threshhold of humanity!

  A super-mechanical exile of Time! But its wild, irrational career of destruction through the ages now was over. It lay inert, smashed and broken at my feet....

  CHAPTER XXIV

  The Return

  I think that there is little I should add. Tugh's last purpose had been to hurl himself and Mary past the lifetime of our world, wrecking the cage and flinging them into Eternity together. And Tugh was luring our cage and us to the same fate. But Mary, to save us, had watched her opportunity, seized the main control lever and demolished the vehicle by its instantaneous stopping.

  We left the shell of Tugh lying there in the red sunlight of the empty, dying world, and returned to Tina's palace. We found that the revolt was over. The city, with help arrived, was striving to emerge from the bloody chaos. Larry and Tina decided to remain permanently in her Time. They would take us back; but the cage was too diabolical to keep in existence.

  "I shall send it forward unoccupied," said Tina; "flash it into Eternity, where Tugh tried to go."

  Accompanied by Larry, she carried Mary and me to 1935. With Mary's father, her only relative, dead, she yielded to my urging. We arrived in October, 1935. My New York, like Tina's a victim of the exile of Time, was rapidly being reconstructed.

  It was night when we stopped and the familiar outlines of Patton Place were around us.

  We stood at the cage doorway.

  "Good-by," I said to Larry and Tina. "Good luck to you both!"

  The girls kissed each other. Such strangely contrasting types! Over a thousand years was between them, yet how alike they were, fundamentally. Both, just girls.

  Larry gripped my hand. In times of emotion one is sometimes inarticulate. "Good-by, George," he said. "We, we've said already all there is to say, haven't we?"

  There were tears in both the girls' eyes. We four had been so close; we had been through so much together; and now we were parting forever. All four of us were stricken with surprise at how it affected us. We stood gazing at one another.

  "No!" I burst out. "I haven't said all there is to say. Don't you destroy that cage! You come back! Guard it as carefully as you can, and come back. Land here, next year in October; say, night of the 15th. Will you? We'll be here waiting."

  "Yes," Tina abruptly agreed.

  We stood watching them as they slid the door closed. The cage for a moment stood quiescent. Then it began faintly humming. It glowed; faded to a spectre; and was gone.

  Mary and I turned away into the New York City of 1935, to begin our life together.

  (The End)

  Footnotes

  [Footnote 1: It will be recalled that Tugh passed Alent's gate, and with Tina and Larry went to the palace roof. Perhaps, while Larry was with the Council during that time when the Robot revolt was first sweeping over the city, Tugh may again have prowled down here in these lower corridors. Then he went upstairs, brought Tina and Larry down and they started for the Power House.]

  [Footnote 2: Had Migul at that juncture traced Tina's movements, her hand where it went along the tunnel-wall, we would have found the light switch. But it chanced that the Robot's fingers went at once to the ground and caught the foot-trail of Tugh.]

  [Footnote 3: The cylinder of the white-ray which I carried was not the one with which Tugh murdered Harl. Mine was portable, and considerably smaller.]

  [Footnote 4: Tugh had been in the Power House before. He knew the operations of its various controls. But he had come always by the surface route; he had heard of the existence of the secret tunnel, but had never before this night been able to find out where it was.]

  [Footnote 5: There was a similar gate and wall-barrier at the Jersey entrance to the dam, and both gates operated together. The nearby Jersey section was, is still, an agricultural district save for a few landing stages for the great airliners. The robots had spread into Jersey; but since few humans were there, with only Robot agriculturists working the section, the unimportant Jersey events have not figured in my narrative.]

  [Footnote 6: It was afterward found that many of the Robots, heedless of the rain as they ran about the city intent upon their murderous work, had exploded by getting too wet.]

  Ray Cummings – A Short Biography

  Writer Raymond King Cummings was born on August 30th, 1887 in New York. He is considered one of the “founding fathers” of science fiction.

  There is little recorded information about Cummings’ early life and education, but it is well documented that Cummings worked with inventor Thomas Edison as a personal assistant and technical writer from 1914 to 1919. No surprise then that Cummings became interested in writing about brave new worlds and imaginary scientific devices.

  Cummings most loved work was published in 1922. The novel The Girl in the Golden Atom was an expansion of an earlier short story of the same name. (A sequel to that story, The People of the Golden Atom, had also been published in 1920.) These tales weave a romantic fantasy of sub-atomic worlds visited by gentlemen scientists. Cummings would return again and again to the shrinking human trope, which he explored thoroughly in doze
ns of stories, novellas, serials and novels.

  Cummings was nothing if not prolific, penning more than 750 works for pulp magazines such as Weird Tales and literary publications such as Argosy. Cummings generally wrote under his own name but also as Ray King, Gabrielle Cummings and Gabriel Wilson (a joint pseudonym with his second wife, writer Gabrielle Wilson).

  Cummings is credited with being the first to write of such notions as artificial gravity, invisibility cloaks and paralyzer rays – many of these concepts appeared in novel-length “space operas” and serializations such as The Man Who Mastered Time (1924), Brigands of the Moon (1930), The and Blood of the Moon (1936).

  Like Edmond Hamilton and other colleagues, Cummings also eventually turned his hand to writing for comics, a genre that exploded in popularity in the ‘30s and ‘40s even as the excitement around pulp and science fiction waned. He worked anonymously for Timely Comics, a predecessor to Marvel Comics, on the Captain America, the Human Torch and Sub-Mariner titles. Nonetheless, it is his work in the sci-fi, crime and horror genres for which he is remembered.

  Raymond King Cummings died in Mount Vernon, New York in on 23rd January 1957.