The Frank Belknap Long Science Fiction Novel

by Frank Belknap Long

  “But this is madness!” Joyce exclaimed, shielding her eyes to shut out the fierce glare of the sun, which was directly overhead now. It burned through the pane through which they were staring until they feared that it might at any moment catch fire, curl up in smoke and disappear. If the window was moving swiftly through time, it was impossible to know how much of that terrible, swift change would leave it unaltered, for its molecular construction could hardly have resembled that of an ordinary pane of glass and as probably unimaginably strange. Tiny bubbles seemed constantly to form and dissolve on its shining surface in a way that was vaguely alarming.

  But then Wilmont remembered that the—yes, he would think and say it now—time-machine was equally strange in its ability to break the time barrier, and a little of his alarm left him. He was able to answer the unspoken question in Joyce’s eyes without her suspecting how unnerved he had become.

  “We know now, don’t we? I think it’s important that we should know, and keep it constantly in mind. The UFOs which have caused so much consternation are actually time-machines. It is not inconceivable that they should travel in space as well, and have followed planes and that the many ‘sightings’ have been confirmed. To think of them as spaceships from another planet was a natural enough mistake. It could scarcely have been avoided, since they are circular and closely resemble flying saucers spinning through the sky.

  “And don’t you see—a machine that can travel in time, into the future or into the past, would have to be a flying vehicle as well, or it would risk destruction every time it arrived at a particular locality in time, whether in the future or in the past.

  “There would be so many changes, Joyce—most of them topographical. Mountain ranges rise and fall, inland lakes appear in the midst of a desert, shorelines shift with the passing of the centuries. Suppose they pinpointed a certain area that was important to them—an area in the past or in the future they wished to explore. What would happen if they came out at the bottom of a lake or even—well, encountered a tall building instead of a level stretch of land. A machine that can travel in space as well as in time can avoid such accidents very easily.”

  “Even if I understood all that,” Joyce said, “how can we actually be looking at something that won’t take place until long after we’re dead and buried. How can you travel into a future that doesn’t exist yet? How can they come from a future that will never exist for us?”

  “It exists for us now,” Wilmont said, “in a very real way.”

  “In a very strange way. How fast is the time-machine traveling? So fast that some ages vanish in a few seconds, while others remain unchanged for several minutes? Nothing has changed out there for almost five minutes now. It just doesn’t make sense. We saw those two tanks—if they were tanks—engage in a battle that must have lasted four or five minutes, just as if the time-machines were standing still. Then we saw the survivors of an age of atomic warfare that could very easily have lasted for centuries. There must have been, at the very least, a time gap of fifty or a hundred years. But we didn’t see the skipped interval at all.”

  “It does make sense, Joyce—if you think about it. Do trains or automobiles always travel at the same speed? There may be slow-downs and speed-ups, and we’ve had a glimpse of the future that a brief slow-down allows us to see. As for the gaps—the machine may travel so fast at times that centuries sweep past with only a faint blurring for a second or two.”

  It seemed incredible to Wilmont that he could talk so calmly when the events were so tremendous, so totally beyond the scope of what the human mind might conceive. So little was known about the nature of ultimate reality and the complex and unsuspected relationship that might exist between past, present and future time in some higher dimension of space.

  Joyce’s ability to accept all this somewhat calmly amazed him too. She seemed to have controlled the emotions that had made her incapable of speech and to have accepted as an inescapable reality the changes that were taking place on the plain.

  It was as though nothing beyond the window was real. It was a frail raft to cling to in a stormy sea, where every wave was of hurricane force, and could crash down in a solid, three-dimensional way. Between wisdom and folly there could be no middle ground. To walk into a rose garden and see, amidst the flowers, the grinning face of a monstrous dwarf, might give one the feeling that the dwarf was unreal. But it would be both foolish and dangerous not to consider the possibility of it being a dwarf—accepting the idea that a sight so nightmarish could mean only that total madness had possessed the beholder’s mind.

  Suddenly, the view beyond the window changed again. A thin haze now overhung the plain, and through it there towered tall, breathtakingly beautiful buildings of intricate design. Some of them were pylon-shaped, and others had wide, pagoda-like roofs and great pillars at their base, and still others were surmounted by enormous domes that glowed through the thin mist, their colors constantly changing from blue to red to gold and back to blue again.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Wilmont stared intently at each pagoda-like roof and dome, observing the pace of the changing colors. The possibility that the time-machine had come to a full stop, he dismissed as unlikely; for he saw that the tall buildings were changing in many ways, almost imperceptibly at first and then with a rapidity that left him in no doubt that the machine was not maintaining a constant speed. Although the age through which it was traveling had not been left behind with a sudden blurring and a leap forward of many centuries.

  Some of the buildings became taller, shorter or wider, as if some new construction work had substantially reshaped them. And once or twice he could detect through the haze, aerial traceries that might well have been networks of scaffolding, with tiny human figures moving about high in the air as agilely as spiders repairing their webs in the teeth of a gale.

  And suddenly beyond the window, there was blowing the fiercest of gales, and all of the tall buildings were gone. A sand twister was moving across the plain toward the distant mountains, leveling everything in its path. But in its path there were only tall cactus growths again and numerous small animals scurrying for the safety of a wind-lashed ledge of rock protruding from the sand like the prow of a sunken ship or the skeleton of some gigantic, prehistoric beast that had been exposed to view by a millennium-long wearing away of the plain.

  The plain had not looked so desolate before, for now all evidence that it had once been the home of an advanced people and had provided rich soil for cultivation, had totally disappeared. Even the mountains seemed eroded by age, less sharp in their outlines, more completely at the mercy of the elements.

  The storm that was now raging seemed to increase in violence as they watched, and for a moment Wilmont was almost sure that he could hear the torrential screaming of the wind as it lashed against the window.

  But that had to be a deception, of course, or he would have heard sounds a thousand times louder in the ages through which the machine had taken them.

  Had the long human journey come to an end? Had another atomic age and perhaps even a third or a fourth come and gone, leaving the Earth a sterile waste no longer capable of supporting life?

  Almost instantly he realized that the plain could have undergone no such destructive change, for it was not pitted and scarred with craters and the soil did not have the glassy or blackened look that repeated thermonuclear holocausts would have left in their wake. And all life had certainly not vanished, for the small mammals that were fleeing from the fury of the storm were very much alive, but seemed to be fatter than the wild hares, weasels, and ground hogs that he had known as a boy in the bleak stretches of desert surrounding his home.

  There were no birds in wind-buffeted flight above the plain. The absence of buzzards, the most common of desert birds, could be accounted for by the absence of man. He could not explain the chilling somber thought that flashed across his mind. Vultures had surely not waited f
or the coming of man to breed and multiply and go searching for food in the waste places of earth, even though man provided them with an unexpected bounty.

  “I’ve a feeling that each time the machine slows down a long leap ahead follows,” he heard Joyce say close to his ear, her voice tremulous with strain. “The city we just saw must have taken generations to build. And there’s not a trace of it left. How long does it take stone ruins to crumble into dust? You’d think there would be a few stone or metal fragments scattered about—some slight indication at least that a city as large as New York or London once occupied that empty stretch of desert.”

  “I know,” Wilmont said, nodding. “It’s a wasteland, all right. But we’ve seen the same kind of vegetation before. It may not mean too much—only that the ruins have been buried deep in the shifting sands by a great many other storms as furious as that one.”

  “But we’ve never seen a sandstorm like that. I haven’t, and I was born in Kansas, and know how destructive tornados can be. Couldn’t it also mean that we’re so far in the future now that even the climate has changed?”

  Suddenly Wilmont felt her tense. Their shoulders were touching and he could feel her shoulders jerk and stiffen as her hand went out to point at the change that was taking place on the plain.

  “There was a dimming for an instant,” she exclaimed. “And now… I think we’re passing into another age. It could be just a shift in the weather. But a blizzard would have to last for weeks to pile up all that ice and snow.”

  The sand twisters had vanished and a whiteness had come into view, blanketing the entire plain and covering the mountains from base to summit, so that their snowy crests no longer stood out in sharp contrast to the gray granite slopes that had cast long shadows on the plain.

  The slopes now seemed to blend with the plains in a completely shadowless way. Every craggy surface feature was buried deep in snow and ice, and reflected back the sunlight with a brightness that was almost blinding.

  It was Wilmont who voiced the thought that was in both of their minds.

  “There are no glaciers, but the landscape in a temperate zone might look just about like that if a new ice age was just starting. It could be merely a seasonal change, as you say—a heavy winter snowstorm. But there is nothing to suggest that the climate is as harsh as when we saw the first dwellings and people moving about with bare arms and shoulders.”

  “There’s nothing moving about out there now,” Joyce said. “The desolation frightens me more than anything we’ve seen. How severe would a new glacial age have to be to destroy every vestige of life on earth? In a few million years the sun will begin to grow cooler. Could we have traveled that far into the future?”

  “I don’t think so,” Wilmont said. “Man survived the glacial age that began far back in the Pleistocene Age when the mammoth and the mastodon were heading toward extinction. If he could live through a thermonuclear holocaust to become a builder of cities again he must have developed a genius for survival by this time.”

  Joyce drew in her breath sharply and spoke a few words that Wilmont could not catch, for her voice did not rise above a whisper. He stood transfixed before the window, and there seemed to be a slight humming in his ears, as if the shock of what was taking place on the frozen waste, where no human form had appeared, had brought a quick rush of blood to his temples.

  Six towering metal robots appeared. Each was well over fifty feet in height and had similar, light-projecting apertures in the middle of their conical heads which cast a pale violent radiance over the snow as they moved back and forth in front of a huge, boxlike object. The giants carried what appeared to be enormous, mechanically operated shovels, which they used to clear away the snow and ice on all four sides of the metal box.

  Presently a wide area of dark, denuded soil stretched from the box to a barrier of piled up snow which completely encircled it.

  As soon as the six metal figures had completed their task they returned across the plain toward the glacier. They vanished behind it and for a long moment there was an absolute stillness on the plain. Then, all over the metal box, small, window-like openings appeared, and what could only have been a gliding entrance panel opened—it did not swing outward like a door—and four men clad in heavy fur garments walked out upon the plain. They were quickly joined by three women and a child.

  The snow seemed suddenly to pile up in vast mounds, both near the window and at the base of the distant mountains and something that bore a striking resemblance to a high-walled, deeply creviced glacier came into view in the middle distance and began to move across the plain with a snail-like slowness. Then, abruptly, it ceased to move.

  It was stationary when they saw the first of the metal giants. It strode out from behind the towering barrier of snow and ice and set something down on the plain that looked like a square metal box a third as large as itself. The metal giant’s body consisted of a cylindrical shaft of coppery sheen and it had segmented arms and legs that glittered in the sunlight. Its head tapered and a pale violet light streamed out over the plain from what may or may not have been eyes, set quite far apart in the conical head. Its enormous metal face was otherwise featureless, and if it had not been so humanoid in aspect it would have been impossible to think of it as anything but a mechanical contrivance that had been built to perform a specific task in the frozen waste beyond the capacity of the men who had built it.

  That it was such a contrivance—a robot shape that moved with mechanical precision but appeared to be limited in its movements—Joyce was the first to realize. It took Wilmont only a moment longer to reject as an absurdity a possibility that would have been a threat to his sanity—that the earth had been invaded by a race of metallically gleaming monsters, vaguely man-like in aspect, from another planet and that man himself had, in all probability, been annihilated.

  “Gigantic robots!” Joyce gasped, wonderstruck. “They must have been robots. But why would they be used in that way? To carry a metal house into a frozen waste—”

  “It may seem strange to us,” Wilmont said quickly. “We’ve never had the remotest idea, actually, of what the future would be like. You can dismiss all of the speculations in books of imaginative fiction. They mean nothing—they are wild guesses, at best. This is the reality and it seems strange, unbelievable only because we’ve no previous yardstick to measure it by.”

  “But it seems—well, such a complex and elaborate way to transport a house with human beings inside to a frozen waste.”

  “Only to us. Look at it this way. Man will build many gigantic and complex machines in the far future. It would be contingent upon his survival, of course, but we now know that he has survived—thermonuclear warfare, another glacial age—everything. And such mechanisms can take many forms.

  “Some of them would be more likely than not to be humanoid in appearance, because the human body is highly functional. The advantages of a functional simplicity alone could have dictated that choice of form, all apart from the fact that there may be something deep-seated in human nature that makes us take a perverse kind of pleasure in creating complex machines that look manlike. We’ve done that already. Think of Univex and some of the other big-brain computers.”

  “But robots so gigantic—to accomplish what? Look! Those eight people haven’t moved. They’re just standing there, blinking in the sunlight. They look bewildered, dazed. The glare must be half-blinding them. Why would they want to live on a frozen plain, cut off from all human companionship?”

  “I can think of a dozen reasons,” Wilmont said. “That house may be…well, a weather station, set down in a frozen waste to collect meteorological information. Exploration and research would be of vital importance to a highly civilized race with a survival problem to contend with. The robots could hardly have come from a great distance, so there must be a large operational base somewhere in the vicinity. Or possibly those eight people are daring pioneers, de
termined to find out just how much man can endure in an environment like that. If they can make a go of it there may be hundreds of such dwellings on the plain before there’s another change.”

  “One is coming! The house is gone!” There was a stricken look in Joyce’s eyes now, and Wilmont could see just how close to the breaking point she was.

  “Darling, how is it going to end? Where are they taking us? Just the fact that we’re traveling into the future is frightening enough. But not to have the remotest idea how it is going to end—”

  She broke off abruptly and Wilmont, too, was struck speechless by the change that had taken place on the plain. The ice and snow had vanished. The whole of the plain was covered with enormous flowering growths that surpassed in luxuriance the vegetation of a tropical rain forest. And now there were birds in abundance, with flaming plumage. Some were larger than flamingoes and others as tiny as humming birds, as they flashed past the window or were impaled for an instant against it by a mild flurry of wind.

  Another change had taken place at the end of the metal-walled tunnel behind them. But they heard no sound and the thought of turning to make sure that they were still alone, as they had done several times previously, came to their minds, so totally absorbed were they in the view beyond the window. They remained unaware of the two tall, cloaked figures that had emerged from the tunnel until they were gripped by the elbows from behind and dragged relentlessly backwards.

  Joyce cried out and began furiously to struggle. But Wilmont was quick to realize that to resist would have been worse than useless and would only have increased their peril.

  There could be no escape from a prison cell if the slaying of a guard started alarm bells ringing, and the outer walls could not be scaled, and they were trapped in a prison that was traveling into the future, its outer walls moving through time.