When The Future Dies

by Nat Schachner

  He stared blearily at Mrs. Murphy, at poor, dark-haired Tim. Ancient suspicions awaked in him, as they were wont to do on such occasions.

  "Look at 'm!" he shouted. "Black's ace o' spades! A bloody Eytalian, thass wha' he is! Ain't no Murphy 'bout 'm, like Bridget an' Michael. Say—whe-where's my children?"

  Mrs. Murphy rose to magnificent heights. Her voice was filled with grief, with strange triumph.

  "You—drunken—fool!" she said. "A lot you know! Bridget and Michael were not your children! They've been took. Tim is your only child. You—fool!"

  She sat down, panting from the effort, a little frightened now, hugging Tim close against the inevitable outburst.

  Mr. Murphy looked at her with cold-sober eyes. The drink was completely out of him.

  He pushed a hairy hand across his brow.

  "They've been took," he muttered. "Took!"

  He looked across at Tim, and the child flinched away.

  "Tim—only one left!"

  Mr. Murphy's brow cleared.

  "O' course!" he roared, and banged his fist on the table. "I knew it all along! Tim's a real Murphy; there's black Irish in 'm."

  He gestured splendidly.

  "Shure, Mrs. Murphy, ye needn't be thinkin' ye've pulled the wool over my eyes all these years, you ould darlint!"

  The End

  ***************************

  The Time Impostor,

  by Nat Schachner

  Astounding, March 1934

  Short Story - 7270 words

  Out of the future they came to save the man they honored

  THE ROTUND chaplain, black-gowned, closed his book softly and intoned: “May God have mercy on your soul!”

  The warden nodded to him, professionally calm. There was a watch in his hand. “Everything ready?” he inquired of the impassively waiting guard.

  “Everything, sir.”

  The warden gazed at the inexorable dial of his watch. “Thirty seconds yet,” he said softly.

  No one stirred. There was silence in the death chamber, a silence in which Derek Williams, reporter for the New York Globe, could hear the pounding in his veins. He had not thought it would be so hard, this first assignment of his to witness an execution.

  The still, black-shrouded figure strapped to the chair was Mike Spinnot—the most powerful, sinister figure that had arisen in the United States for many a year. Ruthless, dominating, he had organized crime into a national organization, with secret squadrons of machine gunners, rifle men, armored cars. The government itself seemed helpless against his reign of terror.

  Then came a great President, honest, vigorous, forthright. He met the challenge with a swift demand for State action. Failing that, he threatened martial law. The governor of the State clamped down on a rotten, politically complacent, city. The national guard marched against the crime lord, yanked him from behind his gunners, crushed the local organization with ruthless efficiency in a welter of blood.

  And so Derek was waiting, as he had never waited before, for thirty small seconds to pass.

  His eyes took in the silent black figure, enthroned apart, already not of this Earth. The black mask, the metal cap, the slit trousers revealing the bare, shaven leg, the deadly electrodes, struck a discordant unhuman note.

  “Time!”

  The warden snapped shut his old-fashioned watch; nodded imperceptibly to the waiting electrician. That worthy reached for the switch.

  “Damn you all and blast you all to hell!”

  Mike Spinnot, stubbornly silent throughout, was shrieking now, out of control, cursing obscenely at the swift approach of death.

  The knife edges descended, approaching the copper flanges that meant contact. Derek could not remove his fascinated eyes from the inevitable copper. Even the raving blasphemies of the condemned man sounded thin against that awful vision.

  Nearer! Nearer! In a split second the juice would be hurling itself through Mike Spinnot. Ah, there it was!

  But even as Derek wordlessly anticipated the contact, saw the quick quiver of the voltmeter needle over its wide arc, felt rather than saw the first straining surge of the strapped body against its shackles, there came a queer, high, humming vibration, like the buzzing of a million bees.

  The strange sound grew in strength, clothed itself in a faint luminescence that seemed to coalesce before his very eyes into a whirling ovoid of flaming light. It was patently slowing down from an unimaginably terrific speed. Its noise filled the chamber.

  The men in the death chamber froze into strained immobility at the sudden apparition. No one spoke, nor could they have been heard against the high penetrating whine that seemed the wind of the ovoid’s motion. Then it came to a sudden whirling stop.

  An egg-shaped cage sprang into view, a barred cage through which could be seen banks of curious dials and green-glowing instruments. Something moved within, something that resolved itself to the dazzled spectators in the death chamber as a man. And directly behind him—another being—a girl.

  DEREK SHOOK his head to clear the fog away; he was sure that he was weltering in some nightmare. But the vision refused to disappear. The man and girl were flesh and blood, yet there was something strange about them, something that stamped them ineradicably as not of the same race as the dumfounded group in the chamber. Their clothes, for example, luminous pea-green garments, glowing with an inner iridescence, were kilted and caught up at the waist with bands of curious red metal.

  A section of the cage slid smoothly open, and the man stepped out. He was tall, commanding; his brow thrust forward under a toss of silvery hair. But it was his eyes that held Derek. They were the eyes of an enthusiast, a fanatic.

  Then the girl came out from behind him, and Derek gasped. She was slim and straight as an arrow; not tall, but the proud carriage of her head gave an effect of height. Her purple-flecked eyes looked out on the assemblage with an eager curiosity, while the color heightened through her olive-tinted skin.

  It was the man, his eyes aflame, somehow menacing, who broke the hushed silence of the death chamber. He had taken a step forward, was completely out of the cage.

  “What have you done with Michael Spinney?” His voice was vibrant, eager; the English was correct, yet curiously slurred.

  There came no answer. No one of them had recovered yet from the shock of this strange intrusion.

  The face of the man purpled with rage. He lifted a threatening hand. Mechanically, Derek observed tiny metal glints at the ends of the outstretched fingers.

  “Answer, you men of an ancient time!” he roared. “Answer or it will be the worse for you!”

  The warden came out of his stupor. “Who are you,” he demanded, “and how did you get in here?”

  The man was about to answer, when the girl tugged gently at his arm.

  He turned to her with swift anxiety. “What is it, Merle?”

  “Look, Thoron,” she said softly, her voice like the tinkling of tiny bells. “Look yonder.”

  Her rounded bare arm pointed to the yet strapped-in murderer, miraculously reprieved; motionless, masked through all these untoward happenings. Heaven knows what thoughts were passing through the mind of Mike Spinnot behind that mask!

  Thoron’s eyes burst into exultant flame. “We’ve come in time to save our noble ancestor.”

  Heedless of aught else, he ran with great sobbing cries to the side of the crime king; knelt before the shrouded figure, and—yes—kissed the feet of Mike Spinnot, murderer, criminal extraordinary.

  The man called Thoron rose again and with swift, deft fingers unstrapped Mike from the fatal chair.

  The professional instinct of the warden came to the fore with a rush. Everything that had happened was forgotten, everything except the startling fact that a rescue of a condemned criminal was being attempted before his very eyes.

  “Stop!” His voice was harsh with command. “Stop, or I shoot!”

  The blue nose of an automatic gleamed in his hand. The two guards had drawn the
ir weapons also and covered the amazing stranger.

  But Thoron did not seem to hear him.

  The warden’s face grew black. “Seize him!” he barked.

  The guards sprang forward. The man turned slightly at the noise of their attack, thrust out a careless hand. The guards reeled back as from an invisible impact; startled oaths ripped from them.

  The veins swelled in the warden’s neck. Very deliberately he raised his gun, squeezed the trigger.

  The automatic spat in a single sharp explosion.

  Nothing happened!

  There was the light of utter incredulity in the warden’s eyes as his gun barked again and again. The guards leveled their weapons and squeezed triggers. The chamber reverberated with almost continuous bursts of fire.

  THORON paid no more heed to the hail of bullets than if they were a number of harmless flies. Mike Spinnot stood up from the chair, staggering a bit from the impact of the momentary current that had passed through him. Then a measure of strength seemed to flow through his body, and he ripped off the metal cap and mask in almost a single savage movement.

  For a moment he stood there, his black shiny eyes, still filled with the vision of death, darting apprehensively over the mute assemblage. His brutal features were drawn and corpselike. He was trembling; an uncontrollable spasm moved over him in ripples.

  Thoron rested a kindly hand on his shoulder. Mike spun around with a hoarse cry at the impact.

  “Do not fear, O Michael!” soothed the stranger. “You are free. Long years have I worked to this end. You will leave this age that mocked and scorned you; that martyred you like a common murderer. You will come with me to my own time where you shall be greatly honored and revered.”

  The girl darted forward and took up his hairy hands, hands that had wallowed in blood, and kissed them reverently, tenderly.

  “Welcome, most glorious ancestor!” she whispered. “Your youngest descendant greets you.”

  Derek suffered a sudden nausea at the sight of the girl’s obeisance. Again he strove to thrust himself forward, but the charmed invisible circle with which the three were surrounded held taut against his utmost efforts.

  “Don’t touch him!” Derek cried out desperately. “You are making a terrible mistake. That man is a condemned murderer; a criminal and public enemy of the worst type.”

  The girl drew herself up proudly; her eyes flashed indignation. “Of course the emissaries of the tyrant would accuse him of that,” she cried. “That is how you fooled the people when he tried to rescue them from the slavery into which they had sunk.”

  Derek fell back. He felt his mind going.

  “Again I say you are making a mistake,” he repeated. “I don’t know who you are or where you come from, nor how you managed to get into this room. But if you think this man”—he pointed an accusing finger at Mike—“is anything but a rat and a menace to society, you have been badly misinformed.”

  The girl looked at Derek, a bit puzzled and shaken. There had been an authentic ring of sincerity to his voice. Mike’s face, that had been slowly changing to a certain savage exultation, went pasty white. He shifted a bit closer to his newfound protector.

  “Don’t let them take me,” he said. “I was framed; that’s the truth. They’re murdering me for something I never did.”

  “Do not fear, O ancestor,” Thoron assured him, “these hirelings cannot harm you. Come!” He beckoned to Mike and the girl. “It is time for us to depart.”

  He escorted Mike very respectfully into the interior of the cage, seated himself at the controls. The girl followed with a quick sidelong glance at Derek.

  Thoron was already manipulating his levers. The door of the cage was closing slowly. In a minute it would be too late to do anything. They would be gone.

  Derek did not pause to think things out. With every muscle tensed, he leaped forward, bracing himself for his crash against the impalpable wall. Every ounce of wiry strength was in that leap.

  But to his surprise there was nothing to bar the surge of his rush. Braced as he was for resistance, he fell through the half-open door in a tumbling sprawl. His head crashed heavily against the metal base of the instrument board. Before he could recover his reeling senses he heard the click of the door behind him. He was shut within the cage, a prisoner.

  Already the floor was heaving up at him as he lay, half stunned. In a groping gaze he descried dimly the spinning walls of the death chamber; flattened distorted faces that whirled in grinning arcs about him. Then came little flashes of flame that sprang toward him and whined thinly. That must be the guards shooting at them, he thought drowsily. He was fast losing consciousness. All the world seemed to be spinning dizzily around.

  THE ODOR of something pungent brought Derek jerking back from waves of reeling blackness. He opened his eyes weakly. The girl was kneeling beside him, her eyes deep pools of pity. She was spraying his forehead with an odorous liquid that bit deep into his consciousness.

  She gave a little cry of delight when she saw the first flutter of his eyelids. “He’s alive, Thoron, he’s alive,” she said joyously.

  But Thoron was not listening. His regard was fixed firmly on banks of glowing tubes, that winked out and flared up again at the touch of his long mobile fingers on a row of shining buttons. Mike Spinnot was standing next to him, legs bowed to the steady sway of the floor, bewildered, yes—but with the dawning of a cunning look on his thickset features. His heavy brows were knit, as if he was trying to adjust himself mentally to the strange surroundings into which he had been catapulted.

  Slowly Derek tottered to his feet and steadied himself against the bars of the cage. The girl watched him anxiously.

  The cage was rotating and undulating in long heaves; slowly, it seemed, yet outside the open bars was only a gray blur, shot through with hurtling black streaks.

  Derek took a deep breath and called softly, daringly: “Merle.”

  The girl smiled faintly. “What is it, man of long-ago?”

  “Just that, Merle,” he puzzled. “I am Derek Williams, alive and reasonably alert, yet you and your father—I believe Thoron is your father?” She nodded. “Yet you and your father both have referred to me and those others in the chamber as people of an earlier time, as if we were—dead.”

  She nodded gravely, a bit wistfully, he thought, and answered: “You are!”

  The affirmation crushed him. The adventure had partaken right along of every element of unreality, but this was really laying it on a bit thick. He must be the victim of a gigantic hoax. He, Derek Williams, dead! Not if he knew it!

  The girl was smiling now. She glanced backward and noticed her father and Mike in absorbed converse. Thoron was talking, explaining, and Mike was listening with a furtive expression, as if he were face to face with a lunatic. Then she brought her gaze back frankly on Derek.

  “I really shouldn’t tell you, because you are the avowed enemy of Michael Spinney, but you do not look as though you are all bad. It possibly wasn’t your fault that you hounded him; just that you were deluded by the tyrant.”

  Derek opened his mouth to deny this puzzling reiterated imputation; but thought better of it.

  “I am not of your time and age,” Merle continued. “By now you must have realized that.”

  Derek felt his head shaking stupidly. Some dim piercings of light had come to him already, but he had not dared face the issue thus openly.

  “We come from a time that is over six thousand years in the future from what you consider to be your present,” she went on quietly. “To us you are all people of the long-forgotten past, men and women who have lived their lives and are now—dead.” There was a sudden catch to her voice, a faltering on that last fateful word.

  Derek grinned cheerfully. “I’m not yet dead, thank you, but go on.”

  “We have the history of your time, this early, dim year of 1932, and the stirring events that took place then are narrated with tolerable clearness.”

  Derek smiled wryly. “
If only you knew how dull things really are—or were. It’s rather confusing to use tenses; I don’t know now whether I’m past, present, or future. But let me hear what these stirring events are that I’ve been missing.”

  She looked at him suspiciously, but his face was grave, attentive.

  “You seek to mislead me,” she stated firmly, “but you cannot; our record is authentic. You know as well as I that in 1932 the Earth was groaning under a tyranny more brutal, more horrible, than any in all recorded history. One man was in the saddle. Surrounded by bestial soldiery, he rode roughshod over the rights of man. All were slaves to do his bidding, and no one dared to raise his voice in protest.”

  To Derek it sounded as if she were repeating by rote some well-taught tale.

  “But one arose who dared to brave the tyrant’s vengeance. A hero he was, a great man with a dauntless soul in that far-off early day. Up and down the land he went, preaching revolt, calling upon the stupefied peoples to cast off their chains. But they were drugged, brutish slaves, and they did not heed him. At length the soldiers of the tyrant searched him out, and he was dragged to jail, there to be executed like any common felon.”

  She halted, manifestly overcome by the pathos of her own narration.

  Derek gazed at her loveliness wonderingly. “A very pretty tale,” he admitted. “And who was this mighty hero?”

  Again she favored him with a glance filled with suspicion. “Michael Spinney!” She pointed with a splendid gesture to the crime king, still held in speech by Thoron. “The man you call Mike Spinnot.”

  Derek grinned cheerfully. He must humor her. “And the name of the tyrant?”

  “Horver! Herbert Horver!”

  He looked at her in amazed stupefaction. Surely he had not heard aright.

  “What did you say that name was?” he asked hoarsely.