“And you think you could do that now—with this panel? The change would have to be more than visual to make the panel glide open.”
“It may well be more than visual, if those dots are charged with the kind of thought potential I mentioned. At least, I can try.”
She started to reply, but he silenced her with a look. She knew that he was following a train of thought an interruption could derail.
She remained silent as he lowered his eyes again to the lenses which he was holding a few inches above the dots.
She studied his face in profile as his lips tightened and he raised the glasses a little higher, to achieve the best magnification before they blurred. The overhead light slanting down over his features gave him a monkish look. Perhaps there was some obscure relationship between that kind of light and deep meditation.
Some kind of inner illumination was taking place in Wilmot’s mind; his fingers tightened on the lenses and his lips began to move silently.
Then he was whispering, in a voice so low she had to strain to catch the words.
“The dots…are changing. They are shifting about. A new pattern. Hard to believe. It seemed so…but yes, yes, I think I was right.”
It happened more swiftly than either of them could have anticipated. The panel began to move—slowly at first and then so rapidly they found themselves staring at a metal wall four or five feet distant from them. The panel had completely vanished.
The opening was about two feet wide, and beyond it there was a pale blue glimmering. The wall stood out clearly in the glow, but they could not see the ceiling that must have arched above it from where they were standing. They knew only that they were staring at what appeared to be a passageway of some kind.
They had been herded into the compartment through another, much wider panel, after passing through a passageway of similar width and it had seemed most likely that the passageways outnumbered the compartments, as they did in most seagoing ships. Though they had been cast adrift on unknown seas in a craft that had never sailed the oceans of Earth, nevertheless, space to move freely about was a vital necessity for navigators, human or otherwise.
It was that thought which seemed to weight most heavily on Wilmot’s mind, for he remained silent when Joyce gripped his arm and cried out. The incredible miracle that had taken place, the accuracy of his wild surmise—surely it could not have been more dramatically confirmed—seemed suddenly to concern him less than a fear which Joyce had shared, but had momentarily forgotten.
“Will this do us any good at all?” he exclaimed, his voice tight with strain. “They’ll be everywhere, moving constantly about. On an ocean liner if a passenger does anything to endanger the safety of the ship he’ll get a tap on the shoulder in half a minute. The watchfulness here must be just as close. If we’re lucky, we may be able to stay out of sight long enough to do a little exploring. But the chances are against it.”
“The risk is worth taking,” Joyce said quickly. “Knowing more about them is of vital importance. We don’t even know if they’re human, closely as they seem to resemble us. They could be scaly monsters. I’m sure they don’t wear hoods when they’re not in our presence.”
“All right,” Wilmont said. “I’ll see what I can find out. I’ll get a good look at them before they drag me back here—if they do. They may not want me to tell the others what I learn about them.”
Joyce paled and drew in her breath sharply. “You mean you think they might—”
“Silence me, yes. But they could do that in a great many ways.”
“No, say it,” Joyce said. “They might kill you.”
“All right, they might. That’s part of the risk. But you said it was worth taking. Have you changed your mind?”
“You don’t have to ask me that. I’ve changed it and it’s going to remain changed. You’re staying right here.”
“Listen to me,” he said, taking firm hold of her arm. “There’s one thing you can do that makes sense and it has to be done right now. Go over and talk to anyone who may get the idea I’d prefer not to go alone. That includes you, darling.”
“I won’t let you go alone,” Joyce said. “I hope you realize that, because if you don’t I’ll follow you anyway. You can’t make the panel glide shut again, because all of the dots are out of sight. They may know how to do it, but I don’t think you can. If I thought—”
She broke off abruptly, to stare in concern across the compartment. “Everyone saw the panel open,” she said. “I’ll have to be even more persuasive than I was when I got you the glasses, or we’ll be followed the instant we leave. Frightened people are funny that way. The children will have to be sternly controlled. I think we can depend on the Wentworths and a few of the others.”
“I know we can. They’re getting up, so it will have to be quick. Hurry, darling—please. I don’t want the children swarming all over me.”
“I’ll be right back,” Joyce said, turning. “If you slip out while I’m talking to them I’ll be all alone when I follow you. Remember that.”
Wentworth and his wife were half-way to where she had been standing when they saw she was agitated and came to an abrupt halt.
“He got the panel open, didn’t he?” Wentworth said, his gaunt, attractive face filled with concern. “I saw it glide open. If it wasn’t for my children—”
“He’s staying right here,” his wife said, echoing Joyce’s words of an instant before. Women in love she thought, having identical thoughts when a man’s recklessness gets out of hand.
“That’s what I wanted to talk to you about,” Joyce said quickly. “Joseph got the panel open. He feels he has earned the right to ask you not to risk your lives by leaving the compartment before he gets back. If five or six of us went with him the danger would be much greater. And the children must be watched. I’m going with him because we’ve just ourselves to consider. My four children aren’t… I mean, I’m not…”
“I understand,” Helen Wentworth said. “You’re not exactly a mother and that makes a difference. Don’t worry. We’ll look after them. And we’ll keep the panel open if Richard has to block it with his body. He has a lot of strength and he seldom loses an argument.”
“Tell Wilmont I’m in his corner all the way,” Wentworth said. “He’s the right man to undertake something that requires a cool head and the kind of confidence in a dangerous situation that always seems to diminish a little when you’re over thirty, no matter how much mature experiences rushes in to take up the slack. It’s more than just courage—”
“I’ll return the glasses,” Helen Wentworth said, cutting him short, her eyes on the metallic gleaming in Joyce’s hand.
“Oh, yes…of course,” Joyce said. She’d almost forgotten about the glasses.
She found herself hoping, a little wildly, that she wouldn’t forget anything else of importance before she returned to Wilmont.
He was looking at her now in an impatient, almost pleading way. The children had stopped playing and everyone in the compartment was converging on the Wentworths, as if they resented the fact that they were keeping her from continuing on and talking to each of them in turn.
She was relieved when Helen Wentworth said: “You’d better go now. The longer that panel remains open the less time you’ll have to move freely about outside. They are sure to discover that you’ve left the compartment within the next ten or fifteen minutes. They must keep a close check.”
“Helen’s right,” Wentworth said. “You’ll have to face up to the fact that they’ll probably discover what happened before you can return. You’ll be trapped outside. But if Wilmont is willing to accept that as almost inevitable—”
“We’re both willing,” Joyce said.
“All right, go now,” Helen Wentworth urged again. “We’ll take care of everything. There’s a remote chance that you can get back. The panel will still be open if t
hey don’t find out.”
Joyce turned, ignoring the jostling of adults and children pressing close and returned across the compartment to Wilmot’s side.
“The Wentworths will see that no one follows us,” she told him. “But we’d better hurry.”
“That’s good,” he said. “I’ll go first.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
The walls of the passageway into which they emerged had the same bright metallic sheen as the walls of the compartment. It was long and straight and very narrow, and the low lamp-studded ceiling which arched above it had a tunnel-like look. The floor mirrored the radiance in weaving splotches which swirled up about them as they moved over its polished surface, until they seemed to be wading through small lakes of fire as they passed from darkness into light and then into darkness again.
“Stay close to me,” Wilmont cautioned, his face set in tight lines. “We must guard against becoming separated, even by a few feet. Distances can widen fast when something looms up in front and you lose your head and start backing away from it. If we get separated call out, shout as loud as you can.”
Their footsteps did not set up an echoing clatter as they had feared they might, but made only a slight swishing sound. Apparently great care had been taken to make the passageway soundproof.
Once they halted, straining their ears to catch what had seemed to be the sound of someone moving about at a distance—a faint shuffling noise. It had seemed to come from the far end of the passageway, but when it was not repeated, they continued on in silence.
And presently they were no longer in the passageway, but immersed in a sudden brightness, and directly ahead of them there towered a vertical transparency at least sixty feet in height.
The enormous window was as transparent as glass. But ii resembled more a vertical sheet of running water, and if it had been in a horizontal position it would have had almost the look of a swift-flowing brook, so sparkling bright that every pebble, and waterplant and darting minnow beneath the racing water would have stood out with a startling clarity.
But it wasn’t the sandy bottom of a brook that Wilmont and the woman at his side saw as they stared out at a sight that made them draw close together and look at each other in shunned disbelief.
A vast gray plain stretched out beyond the window to a long line of snow-capped mountains, darkly silhouetted against a sun-reddened sky. Across the plain, through the haze of a smoky sunset which made distant objects a little vague, ten or twelve strange-looking vehicles were moving. Most of them were quite distant, but two were so close to the window that they could see every spoke in wheels that guttered as they revolved. The wheels gave the vehicles the look of Victorian-age bicycles dominated by an enormous wheel with a much smaller one behind it.
But when they looked more closely at the strange vehicles, they could see that they bore only a superficial resemblance to bicycles, Victorian or otherwise. They were covered with a projecting hood of shining metal which looked not unlike the carapace of a beetle and so completely concealed the riders that even their legs were invisible. What force propelled the wheels was not evident.
For a moment the strange vehicles remained visible and then, quite suddenly, they dimmed and vanished. Instantly there came into view two other vehicles, if vehicles they could be called, facing each other in what appeared to be the center of the plain. It was impossible to determine their exact size, but they were at least fifty times as large as the bicycle-shaped vehicles and their dull gray bulk completely blotted out the swollen red disk of the sun, which had changed its position in the sky. It did not appear to be the same sunset, however, for it was not so smoky and cast deeper and sharper shadows at the base of the mountains, where the light was dwindling fast.
The two vehicles were bristling with what appeared to be armaments of incredible size—great tubes that rotated as they moved cumbersomely about and glistened with an iridescent sheen, and tapering objects that looked like gigantic ballistic missiles held aloft by segmented metal arms terminating in claw-like metal hands.
They were quite clearly not pleasure vehicles, designed to provide swift, short-distance transportation for their invisible occupants. With their enormous size and the formidable-looking gadgetry which projected from them, they bore resemblance to military tanks.
Both vehicles seemed to be simultaneously convulsed by the violence that ensued. Long sheets of sweeping flame came from the glistening tubes, lighting up the desert for miles, and sand spurted skyward in pulsing jets, as if a dozen oil wells had come uncapped before the first blinding flash of light could be succeeded by a second and a third.
Instinctively, Wilmont clapped his hands to his ears and looked away, sure for an instant that a glare so incandescent would be followed by a deafening blast. Then the fact that he had heard no sound at all up to that moment made him realize that no sound could penetrate the transparent barrier through which he was staring, and he dropped his hands to his side.
Near the mountains, two mushroom-shaped clouds began to arise. Since there were no human habitations on the plain that could have been destroyed by the blasts, Wilmont was sure they were looking at a battle of two heavily armored desert fortresses engaged in a thermonuclear artillery duel.
There could be no other possible interpretation of what was taking place. But what stunned him the most was the realization that some of the blasts were going wild and that could only mean that the armaments were so formidable that the engagement had gotten out of control and the only way one of the fortresses could hope to survive was to unleash all of its weaponry in an all-out attack, surpassing in destructiveness the most massive of aerial bombing missions, with no saturation point decided on.
Three more mushroom-shaped clouds arose, much closer to the two moving fortresses, and with each blast they seemed to change shape and spiral more furiously skyward. As the battle continued to rage, a jagged fissure appeared in the plain and widened. Finally a direct hit appeared to have been scored. One of the fortresses had stopped moving. A steady incandescence spread outward until enveloped the second fortress.
There was no doubt in Wilmot’s mind that the blasted wreckage that would be strewn across the plain when the incandescence vanished would point up the sheer insanity of such a double attack with thermonuclear weapons. But they were mercifully spared that sight by the sudden appearance of clouds in the sky that had not been there an instant before and a sun that was just rising far to the east.
An incredible change had taken place. The entire desert was now covered with high cactus growths and scattered about between the grotesque-looking vegetation, were small stone structures that bore a striking resemblance to Eskimo igloos. There were at least a hundred such structures fairly close to the window, and perhaps a thousand others grouped unevenly across the plain, and running along the base of the mountains in three parallel and unbroken rows.
There could be no doubt that they were human dwellings, for men and women were moving around in front of them clad in dun-colored pelts, and leopard skins. There were fires burning close to many of the dwellings. Women and children huddled around the high-leaping flames, or carried large metal pots from the fire to the dwellings and stopped, now and then, to talk to the men.
Some of the men were sprawled out in the sun, and others were busily working at stripping the flesh from antelope-like animals hanging suspended from T-shaped poles. Their long sharp knifes glittered in the dawn light.
Joyce spoke then, for the first time since she had come to a halt before the window. Wilmont too, had been stunned by the swift and frightening changes that had taken place on the plain.
“What can it mean?” she breathed, tightening her grip on his arm. “We can’t be…on another planet. Those men and women resemble us too closely. And everything keeps changing. Days must have passed since—”
“Not days, Joyce,” Wilmont heard himself replying. “Years, certain
ly—centuries, perhaps—must have passed since those armored tanks were destroyed by atomic weapons that couldn’t have existed until considerably later than the Apollo mission. We possess no weapons so complex and only the mushroom-shaped clouds were familiar. And what we are seeing now appears to be aftermath of an age of continuous thermonuclear warfare.”
“Right here on Earth, you mean?”
“It’s something we’ve always thought of as more or less inevitable, isn’t it? We’re looking at it, I think. People living in primitive stone dwellings, clad in the skins of animals. The new barbarians.”
“But if it’s true, we must be traveling through time, into the future. We can’t possibly be on some unknown planet or a UFO base on the moon—or Venus or Mars.”
“I’m sure it’s true. How can we doubt it now? How can we possibly doubt it? If we were on Mars or Venus, or the planet of another star, that scene out there wouldn’t keep constantly changing, all apart from the fact that parallel evolution—if it exists at all—could never have led to the appearance, on another world, of human beings identical with ourselves. Humanoid creatures, with big brains and a primate aspect perhaps, but never Man as we know him.”
“But I can’t believe—”
Before Joyce could go on another change took place on the plain. The low stone dwellings vanished and larger dwellings appeared, with sloping roofs and windows with gleaming panes that caught and mirrored the sunlight. There were gardens in front of the dwellings and winding roads leading up to them and on the roads, men and women, no longer clothed in animal skins but wearing tunic-like garments of woven cloth were walking singly and in pairs. A few rode small gray animals that might have been donkeys, for they had a peculiar dwarfish look. But there were no vehicles of any kind and no mechanical contrivances, although to manufacture window glass hinted at the recovery of a little of the past’s technological knowledge, and the development of advanced tools.
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