Dynasty of the Small

by John Russell Fearn

  And the lighting! It was still night, but instead of the usual street illumination there were great elliptical globes swinging in mid-air somehow and casting a brilliance below that had no shadows. Everything had the pallid brightness of diffused day­light.

  “Anything the matter?” a pleasant voice asked me.

  I turned sharply as a passerby paused. Until now I hadn’t noticed that the men and women passing up and down the sidewalk were rather odd in their attire—the women in particular. The absurd hats, the queer translucent look of their clothes, the multi-colored paints to enhance their features.... Still women, eternally feminine—but different. And now this stranger. He was tall and young with pleasant eyes and the most amazingly colorful shirt.

  “I noticed you hesitating,” he explained, pass­ing a curious but well-mannered eye over my attire. “Can I help you?”

  It surprised me to find anybody so courteous.

  “I’m just wondering—where I am,” I replied haltingly. “This is London, isn’t it?

  “Yes, indeed.”

  “Bond Street?

  His look of surprise deepened. “Why, no,” he said. “You’re on Twenty-Seven Street. Don’t you remember that all street names were abolished ten years ago to avoid duplication?”

  I could only gaze at him fixedly, and he gave a slight smile.

  “Look here, you’re mixed up somewhere,” he said, taking my arm. “It’s part of the city’s ‘Lend­-a-Hand’ policy for us to help each other, so I’m going to make you my especial charge.... Inci­dentally, the ‘Lend-a-Hand’ policy is a good idea, don’t you think?” he asked, forcing me to stroll along with him. “It’s done away with a lot of the old backbiting.”

  “Oh, surely,” I agreed, weakly. “But look here— Er— what sort of cars are those? They’re very quiet.”

  “You mean the atom-cars? Say, where have you lived? And if you’ll forgive me, that’s an awfully old-fashioned coat you’ve got on. I know it’s a breach of courtesy, but....”

  I dragged to a stop and faced him directly. “You won’t credit this,” I said, “but only what seems about ten minutes ago I was running down Bond Street, for an ordinary gasoline-driven bus. Then I ran into a fog, or something and—suddenly I was here!”

  “It would be ill-mannered for me to disbelieve,” he said slowly, regarding me, “but I am puzzled. It may help you if I explain that you are in London—which was resurfaced with plastic in 2030. The present date is October the twelfth, 2038.”

  2038. Twenty-five years! Great God!

  Somehow I had slipped a quarter of a century ahead of my own time of 2013. You can think of such things, but you dare not believe them. Yet, damnit, it had happened! And—

  But I had no opportunity to ask my genial friend anything more, for he was graying in the return of the mist and I was back again in that blank world where nothing is, or ever was, that is outside time, space, and understanding. I stood wondering and fearful, waiting. This time I sensed that the inter­val was longer...but when the mist evaporated it revealed that I was back again in familiar Bond Street, only I had moved some two hundred yards from the bus stop—or in other words the precise distance I had walked with the stranger!

  I blinked, mopped my perspiring face, then glanced up at a nearby clock. It was 6:20, the exact time when I had started to run for the bus. I had left the office at 6:15—five minutes to get down the street.... Then had my other adven­ture taken up no time whatever?

  With an effort I pulled myself together as I saw one or two passersby looking at me curiously. I had to think this one out—maybe talk it over with Betty Hargreaves since I apparently still had time to meet her.

  But she never arrived to keep the appointment. Finally I rang up her apartment, and it was only after the storm with her had subsided that I realized I had arrived back in the same place on the following evening—twenty-four hours later!

  I smoothed things over with her as best I could, said I had been sent out of town on urgent business, and we promised to meet at the same time and place the following evening. I didn’t add “I hope!” even if I felt like it.

  Troubled, I began a contemplative wandering through the city, heading in the general direction of my rented apartment— Just the same, I never reached it. To my alarm I once more found myself sailing into grayness, and there was nothing I could do to avoid it. My last vision was of a distant lighted clock pointing to 11:15; then it was gone and I was helpless, baffled, frightened.

  In this gray enigma all sense of direction, time, and space vanished. I found it safest to stand still and wait until it cleared. It did so eventually, and I discovered I was lying in bed in a quiet little room with a gray oblong of window revealing the night sky. I stirred restlessly, puzzled, and reached out a hand for the bedside lamp. When I scrambled out of bed and looked down at myself I got an even bigger shock.

  I had the figure of a boy of seven years! I was just as I had looked at seven! With a kind of auto­matic instinct I went to the dressing table and stared at myself in the mirror. There was no doubt about it. I was a child once more, in my own little bed­room at home in Manchester. My parents must be asleep in the next room, but somehow I didn’t dare go and look.... Yet I had the memory of everything I had done up to the age of thirty-two!

  Impossible! Idiotic! I had grown backwards!

  Returning to the bed I threw myself upon it and struggled to sort the puzzle out. But gradually that impalpable mist came creeping back, and I left the world of my childhood, wandered for a while in blank unknown, and then merged back into the street from which I had disappeared.

  The first thing I saw was that lighted clock ahead. It was still at 11:15. Presumably I had once again been absent exactly twenty-four hours—and I had traveled twenty-five years backwards, even as on the other occasion I had traveled twenty-five years forwards.

  Can you wonder that I was sick at heart, per­plexed? It appeared then that my intervals in ‘normal’ time last lasted about five hours—or to be exact, four hours, fifty-five minutes. Queer how I cold­ bloodedly weighed this up. I felt like a visitor who has only five hours to stay in a town before going on his way.

  When presently I encountered a police officer I asked him what day it was, and his rather suspicious answer confirmed my theory of a twenty-four hour absence. I got away from him before he ran me in and went straight to Betty Hargreaves’ apartment. Fortunately she had not yet gone to bed, and she eyed me with chilly disfavor when we were in the lounge.

  “I suppose I cooled my heels because you had urgent business again?” she asked, going over to the sideboard and mixing me a drink. “I’ve got a tele­phone, you know. You could have told me!”

  “I’m sorry about that appointment, Bet. I just couldn’t keep it. I—er—” I hesitated over the right phrasing. “I sort of keep coming and going.”

  “You’re telling me?”

  She handed me my drink and raised a finely lined eyebrow. Betty is a pretty girl, a slim blonde with eyes that are really blue and hair that is really golden. But when she looks annoyed— Whew!

  “I never heard of a financier’s chief clerk coming and going as much as you do,” she commented pre­sently, sitting down on the divan beside me. “What’s happening, Dick? Is there a merger on, or what?”

  “No. It’s—er—” I put the drink down and caught at her arm. “Bet, I need help! I’m in one hell of a spot.”

  “Money, or a girl?” she questioned dryly. “If the former I can help you out. Dad didn’t exactly leave me penniless. If the latter then let’s say good night and thanks for the memory.”

  “Nunno—it’s neither,” I said. “It’s so hard to explain.... You see, I—I keep seeing the future and the past!”

  Be it said to her everlasting credit that she did not even blink. She just gazed, as one might at lunatic, a baby, or a dipsomaniac. And while she gazed I talked, the words tumbling over themselves. I told her everything, and when I had finished I expected her to laugh i
n my face. Only she didn’t. Instead she was thoughtful.

  “It’s mighty odd,” she said seriously. “And because I know you haven’t a scrap of imagination and are too gosh-darned honest to lie for no reason I believe you. But—it’s crazy!” She hugged herself momentarily. “And what are we going to, do about it?”

  ‘We!’ Bless the girl! She was on my side.

  “I dunno,” I muttered. “As far as I can estimate I am allowed five hours to live like an ordinary man—then off I go! I don’t know if a doctor could explain it, or maybe a psychiatrist.”

  “Hardly a doctor, Dick.” She shook her fair head musingly. “It isn’t as though you’ve got a pain. It’s more like an illusion. You might do worse than see Dr. Pembroke. He’s a psychiatrist in the Aldwych Trust Building. I know because a cousin of mine went to him for treatment.”

  I made up my mind. “I’ll see him at the first opportunity. It won’t be in the morning because I expect I’ll be veered off again at about four fifteen in the small hours. When I can catch up on nor­mal working hours I’ll see what he can do for me.”

  For ridiculous conversation this probably hit an all time high, yet so sure was I of the things that had happened to me and so staunch was Betty’s loyalty, we might have been talking of the next foot­ball match. Anyway she was a great comfort to me, and when I left her around 12:30 it was with the resolve to master my trouble when it came upon me again.

  I went home to my rooms, learned from a note under the door that my firm had telephoned to in­quire what had happened to me—and then I went to bed! Funny, but I wasn’t tired in spite of every­thing, and I must have gone to sleep quite normally; but when I awoke again I was not in my bedroom though I was in pyjamas.

  It took me several minutes to get the hang of an entirely new situation. I was lying on my back on closely cropped and very green grass. The air was chilly but not unpleasantly so, and the sky overhead was misty blue with the sun just rising. I judged it was still October, but extremely mild.

  As I stood up I got a shock. A small group of men and women—attired so identically it was only by their figures I could tell any difference in sex—was watching me. Embarrassed, I stared back at them across a few yards of soft grass, then I was astonished to behold the foremost man and woman suddenly float over to me with arms outstretched on either side. They settled beside me and silver-­coloured wings folded back flat on their backs.

  “I know,” I sighed, as they appraised me. “I’ve no right to be here and I’m in the future. All right, lock me up: It won’t make any difference.”

  The man and woman exchanged glances and I had the time to notice that they were both remark­able specimens—tall, strong, athletic-looking, with queer motors strapped to their waist belts from which led wires to the wings on their backs.

  After a good deal of cross-talk I found out that they belonged to the local police force, made up of an equal number of men and women, and that I was, of course, both a trespasser and an amazing specimen to boot.... But this time, it appeared, I had slipped ahead not twenty-five years but two hundred!

  I suppose, were I a literary man, I could fill a book with the marvels I discovered, but here it is only policy to sketch in the principal advancements. I learned that their amazing system of individual flight had led to the abolition of ordinary aircraft; that they had conquered space, mastered telepathy, overcome the vagaries of the climate, and completely outlawed war. Yes, it was a fair and prosperous land I saw in 2213.

  In the end they locked me up for examination by their scientists, but of course it did them no good, for as time passed I faded away from the prison cell and was back again in London, still in my pyjamas, in the middle of a street—and (I soon discovered) at 4:15 in the morning! Once again, twenty-four hours—since presumably I had vanished while asleep at 4:15 twenty-four hours before.

  To be thus thinly clad on an October early morn­ing is no picnic. I took the one sensible course and presented myself at a police station, told the ser­geant in charge that I had been sleepwalking and had just awakened. I was believed and I got shelter and a borrowed suit of clothes in which to creep home to my rooms in the early dawn hours.

  Now I was getting really frightened! If this were to go on— Lord! I did some computing and figured that I had until about 9:15 in the morning before I’d take another trip—so before that time I had got to see Dr. Pembroke. Unlikely that he would be at his office so early unless the urgency of the reason were stressed.

  I rang up Betty, told her what had occurred, and asked her advice. She suggested that I tell Pem­broke over the phone at his home what had hap­pened, and try .to get him to be at his office before nine. She promised to be there.

  Dr. Pembroke did not sound at all enthusiastic at first, but he warmed up a trifle when I went into explicit details. Finally he seemed interested enough to agree to be at his consulting rooms by 8:45. So it was arranged, and promptly at quarter to nine I was there with Betty, very serious and determined, beside me.

  Grant Pembroke was up to time—a tall, eagle-nosed man with very sharp gray eyes and a tautly professional manner. He ushered us both into his consulting room with its rather overpower­ing looking apparatus, and then switched on softly shaded lights and motioned me to be seated in their immediate focus while Betty sat in the margin of the shadows.

  “So, Mr. Mills, you keep imagining you float away into the future and the past at regular inter­vals, eh?” he asked slowly, settling down and fixing me with those piercing eyes.

  “I don’t imagine it, Doc—it actually happens,” I told him. “And in about fifteen minutes it should happen again, then you’ll see for yourself.”

  “Mmmm.” He made a brief examination of me as though he were a medical man, then sat back in his chair again and put his fingertips together. “And while you are away twenty-four hours elapse here?” he questioned thoughtfully.

  “That’s correct, yes.”

  “Do twenty-four hours elapse in the place you—er—visit?”

  “No. It varies a lot.... Only definite timing I’ve noticed is that on the last occasion I leapt two hundred years ahead instead of the former twenty­-five.”

  “Just so, just so.... A most interesting side­light on Time.”

  “I don’t want to be an interesting sidelight!” I protested fiercely. “I want to live like any other man, marry the girl I love, and keep my job. As things are I look like losing the lot.... This sort of thing is—unthinkable!”

  “Mmm, just so,” he agreed. “But there is the other side, you know— We are dealing with a paradox of Time that has so far only been a theory and never proven. You may have the good fortune to be that living proof!”

  I could only assume that he had queer ideas on what constitutes good fortune; and so I kept quiet. For another long minute he studied me, then turning to his desk he began to scribble something down on a notepad. He also made calculations and a drawing that looked like a plus sign with a circle running through it I was just about to ask him the purpose of this doodling when things happened—once again.

  Even as I felt myself drifting into gray mist I noticed the electric clock stood at exactly 9:15; that Betty and Pembroke had jumped to their feet in stunned amazement— Then off I went. And this movement was backwards in Time, not for­ward.

  When the mists cleared I was seated on a wagon, driving a horse leisurely along a winding country load. I saw I was wearing rough breeches and a flannel shirt, while a hot sun was blazing down on my battered straw hat. A yokel? A farmer? A pioneer? I had never been any of these things as far as I could remember—yet here it was.

  Glancing inside the wagon I saw a woman and a boy and girl asleep—and far behind my wagon were many more of similar design kicking up a haze of dust across the desert.

  I had to work discreetly to find out what was going on, and very astonished I was to discover that my name was Joseph Kendal, and that the three in the wagon were my wife and two children. We were heading for Georg
ia, and this—according to my wife—was 1813. We were changing our domicile, every one of us.... But all that signified to me was that I had dropped back two hundred years even as before I had gone ahead for a similar period.

  I scarcely remember what happened while I was there. It seemed to be an endless trip across the desert with all the old pioneering flavor about it. I fitted into it without any effort: everything I did seemed reasonable and natural, and secretly I was rather sorry when it all had to come to an end just after sunset and I was in the gray mists of Between, Beyond, or whatever it is.

  I returned to normalcy seated in that same chair in Dr. Pembroke’s consulting room. He was appo­site me, looking very weary and untidy. Betty, who had apparently been half-asleep in the chair on the rim of the shadows jerked into life as I sat gazing at her. I glanced round and noticed two white-coated nurses and two men who looked like scien­tists—­ My eyes moved to the clock. 9:15, and judging from the window it was daylight.

  “Twenty-four hours to the minute!” Pembroke exclaimed, getting up and coming over to me. “Upon my soul, young man, you didn’t exaggerate— We’ve been waiting; and waiting, ever since you disappeared from view. I summoned the nurses in case of need, and these two gentlemen here are scientists with whom I’ve been discussing your problem.”

  “The point is: have you got the answer?” I asked irritably.

  “Yes. Yes, indeed,” Pembroke assented, and the two scientists nodded their heads in grave confirma­tion. “But,” he added, “it is rather a grim answer....”

  “I don’t mind that,” I said. “Can I be cured?”

  They were silent. I set my jaw and glanced helplessly at Betty. She could only stare back at me, tired from the long vigil, and I thought I saw tears in her eyes as though she were trying to con­trol an inner grief. At last I looked back at Pem­broke.