‘Who are you, I say?’ repeated the speaker.
It was Del who answered. He gave particulars of his own group, and countered with a like request. The new arrival put away his tube.
‘I am Hale Lorrence, and this is my companion, Julian Tyne.’ He indicated the other silk-robed man. ‘We have come from the year 3920.’
‘And the third member of your party?’
The man who called himself Hale shrugged his shoulders. ‘She has told me that her name is Jessica Tree. She claims to have started from a.d. 2200.’
The vaguely seen figure stepped forward. She revealed herself as a girl of perhaps twenty-four or twenty-five. A russet tunic, heavily worked with metallic thread, covered her to her knees. Her legs were a sunburnt brown, and her feet were encased in shoes to match her tunic. Black hair, cut short, clustered about her softly oval face, and she surveyed the company from a pair of lustrously dark eyes. Her tone, as she spoke, betrayed her dislike of Hale’s manner.
‘It is more than a mere claim,’ she said, coldly. ‘It is a fact that I come from 2200____What year is this?’
Del shrugged his shoulders. ‘That is what we all want to know.’
‘I don’t,’ cried Betty’s voice, viciously. ‘I don’t care a damn what year it is! The one thing I’m certain about is that I have been kidnapped. And if somebody doesn’t do something to get me back where I belong—and do it darned quick—there’s going to be trouble around here. See?’
Hale Lorrence regarded her speculatively for a moment, and then turned to Del.
‘We are hungry and thirsty. Is there any food here?’
Kal had ascertained that there were dishes of water at the other end of the cavern, but no food.
After they had drunk, Roy started on an exploratory tour of their prison. He could discover no opening other than that closed by the metal door. The walls would have easily revealed any crack, for they were smooth and unornamented. The finish to them puzzled him not a little. Although they were hard and smooth, the effect was not that obtained by any mechanical finishing process. It was, he felt, the kind of result one would expect if a giant hand had attempted to shape the material in its plastic state, without the use of tools.
The end of the circuit found him no wiser than the beginning. He returned to find the rest of the party endeavouring to clear away some of their mystification. Del was saying:
‘… therefore, this must be a kind of “dead” spot in time. It is as though our machines had been thrown into the flow of time and swept along until, for some unguessable reason, they met an obstruction at this point. Every one of us has arrived here because his machine was faulty in some way or other. To take an illustration—a bad one, I admit, but enough for our purpose—one may consider time as a river. You may turn boats adrift on it at many points, and they will all collect together at the same serious obstacle, whether they have travelled a hundred miles or two miles. We are now at some period where the straight flow of time has been checked—perhaps it is even turning back upon itself. We know no details at present, but it is certain that the same curious phenomenon has thrown us all together.’
‘But,’ Hale objected, ‘time, like space, surely is curved?’
‘It may be—in fact, it must be; but I see no reason why there should not be interruptions in time. After all, are not the stars interruptions in space?’
‘You mean that space may interrupt time in the same way that time distorts space?’
‘Roughly, yes—if you can consider the two apart, which I find impossible. I merely repeat that we have struck some barrier and been thrown up like so much jetsam.’
‘Then there may be others, besides ourselves?’
‘As many others as made faulty time-travellers.’
Julian Tyne joined in the conversation. He spoke with a lazy drawl which irritated his listeners.
‘But what is all this?’ He waved a languid arm. ‘This place, these queer machines—both the tall, red things and the smaller, white ones which caught us—what are they all doing? It doesn’t seem to make sense.’
Del glanced at him. ‘Suppose an alien form was plunged into your world of 3920,’ he said. ‘How much do you suppose he would understand? I doubt whether it would “make sense” to him. In fact, I would go so far as to suggest that you would have very little understanding of the organisation of my world of 10,402, had your machine taken you there instead of here.’ Roy broke in, dragging the conversation back to the main issue: ‘But what do you think these machines are? Slaves of greater intelligences—robots? Or have the machines indeed beaten men, as Samuel Butler, at the end of the nineteenth century, feared they might?’
‘I don’t yet pretend to be able to offer any explanation,’ Del replied, shaking his head, ‘but of one thing I am certain, and that is that they are not robots. You notice, for instance, the irregular finish of this building, both inside and outside. Indisputably, if it had been built by machines, the construction would be mathematically exact. I am convinced that somewhere at the back of all this we shall find a biologically developed intelligence.’
‘And it is up to us,’ remarked Hale, ‘to see that whoever, or whatever, it is doesn’t get things all his own way. What weapons have we?’
He and Julian Tyne produced black tubes, which Del and his companions examined with some amusement. Julian appeared nettled.
‘What have you?’ he asked.
Kal and Ril showed tubes similar to that which Del had lost in the river. They had come prepared with two each.
‘Ten times as powerful as yours,’ Del explained, ‘and for all practical purposes, inexhaustible.’
Roy’s revolver was inspected with much the same mirthful contempt as a catapult would have received. Del made an inventory.
‘Four high-power heat tubes, two low-power tubes, one solid bullet projector. Not too bad an armoury, though I am sorry that my own heat-ray was lost.’
CHAPTER FOUR
THE ‘NUMEN’
The clang of the metal door roused the whole party from sleep; though how long they had slept, they could not tell. Roy sprang suddenly to a sitting position. He could see by the dim glow that a number of white metal machines were scuttering towards them. Hale was fumbling for his ray tube.
‘No,’ said Del’s voice. ‘Your tube has not enough power to hurt them—besides, we are trapped. They may intend no harm.’
The machines advanced with tentacles extended. Roy felt one wrap firmly around his waist and lift him again into the air. It was in his mind to show fight, but Del had advised against it, and he was coming to have a respect for the dwarf’s judgment. The rest of the party quietly submitted to like treatment, and were carried towards the still open door.
For a time they passed through corridors in utter blackness. Again they were aware of movement all around them: the clicking and scraping of invisible machines, orderly and unhurried, as they passed to and fro. At last an arch of daylight showed, wanly and minutely, ahead. Roy breathed a sigh of relief at the prospect of leaving the oppressive gloom of their’ strange prison. But he was to be disappointed. Forty yards from the passage mouth, the machines stopped, and it was light enough for him to see one of them plunge a feeler into a hole in the wall. There came a familiar clatter as a metal door slid up.
The hall which they now entered was far larger than their ’ former prison, and was lit by the soft, white rays of more than a dozen of the luminous globes. The machines evidently had sufficient knowledge of their prisoners to realise that light was necessary. A surprised exclamation broke from Del. The others, following the line of his pointing finger, observed a row of mechanisms arranged along one wall.
‘Our time-travellers!’ Hale exclaimed.
Roy identified the remains of his cylinder and Del’s damaged cage, but was puzzled to see that there were more than a dozen other queer-shaped constructions in company with them.
Without a pause, they were carried on towards a large machine which occup
ied the centre of the room. Like their bearers, its body-case was ovoid in shape, but unlike them, it possessed no legs and stood half as high again. Save for a pair of lenses and a bunch of metallic tentacles, it lay like a
monstrous egg with a gleaming shell. The prisoners were drawn into a line before it, and the bearers scuttled away, closing the door behind them.
‘Well,’ said Roy, ‘what do you suppose is the next move?’ Del was staring at the machine. Its tentacles were flourishing back and forth, weaving intricate patterns in the air. A hand suddenly grasped Roy’s arm. He looked at Jessica Tree, standing beside him.
‘What is it-?’ he began. ;
She only pointed. Three shambling figures had emerged from behind the central machine. Roy looked at them amazedly, as they came forward to join the party. All three stood well over six feet, superbly muscled and completely naked. Their heads were small, and seemed even smaller above their
magnificent chests and the broad spread of their shoulders. A look of bewilderment in their eyes gave way, as they caught sight of Kal and Ril, to relief, mingled with a piteous gladness. They bowed before the two dwarfs in a trustfully submissive manner, and the latter, after momentary confusion, acknowledged the salute by raising their arms in some ancient greeting. Then the three newcomers slouched back a few steps and stood waiting, while Kal and Ril hurriedly conferred.
‘Tak Four A?’ Kal suggested, cryptically.
‘Undoubtedly, but this must have taken many centuries,’ answered Ril.
‘What are they?’ Roy was still regarding the unclassifiable men. Kal offered explanation.
‘I imagine they are the result of Tak Four A’s artificial selection. He held that we were becoming too atrophied physically —you see we are dwarfs, compared with you—and he decided that a more muscular race, which he proposed to call “Numen,” must be created. It looks as if he had been extremely successful.’
‘Then these are the masters of the world, now?’
‘I don’t think so. They seem more confused and surprised than we are.’
He turned and spoke, clearly and carefully, to one of the tall creatures. For a moment the other looked puzzled, then the light of intelligence came into his eyes. He spoke excitedly, and jabbed with a finger in the direction of the derelict time-travellers by the wall.
‘So they are in the same jam with us,’ mused Roy. ‘But surely they could not have built-’
‘Certainly they could not,’ Kal agreed. ‘At a rough guess, I should say they were taught to work the thing and sent on an experimental trip by an inventor who valued his own life.’ Jessica, her first fright abated, looked at them with understanding.
‘Poor things,’ she murmured. ‘For all their size, they’re scared to death—frightened, like lost children.’
Del’s voice suddenly brought their attention back to the central machine.
‘The thing is trying to communicate with us, but we’ll never be able to make anything of all that waving of feelers.’
The whole party stared blankly at the writhing tentacles, flashing in meaningless gestures. Abruptly, as though realising that this form of signalling was making no progress, all the feelers save one withdrew and coiled up. The one still extended dropped to the floor and began to scratch a series of queer characters on the earthen surface.
It stopped. The feeler pointed first to them and then to the marks it had made. Del stepped forward and inspected the scratchings more closely. He shook his head. The machine grasped the meaning of the gesture. It smoothed the ground and began again. The characters it produced on the second attempt were undeniably different forms from the first, but were no more intelligible.
Patience was evidently the machine’s long suit. Four times it had repeated the smoothing and scratching before they craned over to stare at its moving tentacle in excited silence.
‘M,’ it wrote.
‘M—E—N?’
Del dropped to his knees. Swiftly he traced a large ‘YES,’ ini the dirt.
‘HOW?’ it asked, after an interval.
Del pointed to the time-travelling machines, and ran across the room to indicate the broken part of his own. The machine understood his meaning, and its feeler fell to scratching what proved to be the beginning of a tedious written conversation.
‘For the Lord’s sake,’ said Roy some time later, ‘tell it to give us some food—we’re all in pretty bad need of it! ’
The door opened, a few minutes later, in response to some unknown method of communication, and a machine scuttled in bearing circular objects a foot in diameter and three inches thick. Roy picked one up, examined it, and then knocked it, experimentally with his knuckles. It gave an unmistakable sound.
‘Wood’ he said, disgustedly. ‘What the dickens does it think we are? Try it again, Del. Say “fruit” or something like that.’
Some hours later, feeling very much better for the fruit which had been produced in generous quantities, Roy sat beside Jessica and watched the three dwarfs hard at work on one of the time-travellers. The damage to Del’s machine had been less serious than he had feared. Such parts as had been ruined could be supplied from the duplicate contrivance in which Kal and Ril had travelled. A couple of hours’ toil saw the replacements almost completed.
‘Not that it’s going to help us any,’ said Betty, complainingly. ‘You couldn’t get more than four into that cage affair, even at a pinch.’
Del agreed. ‘But this’—he pointed to the tentacled machine ‘is intelligent. Maybe it can duplicate it for us from a pattern.’
‘That’s good!’ Betty sneered. ‘I suppose you’re trying to kid me that you’re not going to slip off in that traveller and leave us here?’
‘We have no intention of doing such a thing.’
Betty shrugged her shoulders and moved away. She favoured Roy with a contemptuous glance as she passed him, and made her way to the side of the moody Hale Lorrence. It was noticeable that, a few minutes later, much of his moodiness had evaporated and the two were deeply engaged in a whispered conversation.
Jessica was puzzled by the relationship between Roy and Betty.
‘But I don’t understand why you brought her,’ she said. ‘You’re not in love with her.’
Roy agreed, with a slow nod.
‘No, I’m not in love with her—not now. But in 1941, I was. She disappeared that year, and for ten years afterwards I devoted myself to building a time-traveller, so that I might find her again. I can see, now, that for all that time I was idealising her. By 1951, I was no longer in love with Betty, but with an ideal girl of my own imagining—a Betty I had built up in my own mind. You understand?’
‘I understand. So when you went back to the real Betty…?’
‘It was to fetch her from 1941 to 1951. On the return trip, the machine let me down. And,’ he added, in a voice so low that she could scarcely hear it, ‘I’m glad it did.’
He paused a moment before he went on: ‘Tell me, how did you get here—and alone?’
‘There’s very little to tell. It happened entirely by accident. I had been helping my father to build the machine. Perhaps helping is rather a grand word for the little part I took, but he had no other assistant. My part of the work was far more practical than theoretical. I was very hazy as to the principles of the machine, but I was frequently called upon to make tests of the wiring and connections. Yesterday—thousands of years ago, it is now—I was testing some switches in the traveller. My father must have made the main battery connections and forgotten to warn me. The next thing I knew was that the laboratory had disappeared and there was a sandy plain all around me.
‘I realised at once what had happened, and I worked the levers desperately. Nothing responded. I got out of the machine, with an idea of going to find help. Then a red thing came marching over the plain. I was frightened, so I hid as best I could. The thing came up without noticing me. It lifted up the traveller and threw it down on one side, breaking it badly. Then it went on, and
I think I lost my head for a time, for I knew I could never mend the machine. I never
remember crying in my life before, but I felt so terribly desolate and alone. A little later, the white machines came along and found me.’
‘Well, you’ve got company now, at any rate,’ said Roy. ‘And I don’t think there is any need to be sad. Del will get us back somehow. I’ve a great faith in that little chap, queer as he looks.’
Hale Lorrence and Betty rose to their feet and began to saunter in the direction of Del and his fellow-workers. After some moments close examination of the cage, Hale said: ‘Your machine is on a slightly different plan from mine. Will you explain it?’
Del indicated the controls and settings, while his assistants put finishing touches to the repairs. Betty climbed into the traveller and began fingering the switches. Roy stopped talking to Jessica and watched. There was a furtiveness about the pair that he did not like. Hale seemed to be edging round, as though he wanted to gain a coveted position. Kal looked up and proclaimed that the work was finished. Immediately, a gleam came into Hale’s eyes.
‘Look out! ’ Roy shouted. But he was too late. Like a flash, Hale snatched a high-power heat-ray from Kal’s belt.
‘Back! ’ he roared, pointing it at them. ‘Back, all of you! ’ There was no disobeying the command. Kal and Ril drew ray tubes, but both hesitated to use them—the precious time-traveller stood right behind Hale. As they backed away, the egg-shaped metal creature in the middle of the room stirred its limbs, as though realising what was afoot. One metal tentacle came snaking across the floor towards Hale. Without hesitation, he pressed the catch of his tube and lopped the shining limb away. Another came shooting in his direction, and it too fell to the ground. He turned, and sent a savage jet of heat searing full at the metal body. He swung back, glaring at the group of men; it seemed for a moment that he was minded to end their existences with a final sweep of the heat-beam.