"No. But I want to be sure I've got it straight. Tell me all over
again."
Rogers repressed a smile. "When we have gone you will all wait some ten
minutes to be sure nothing has gone wrong to bring us immediately back.
Then you will lock up the enclosure and leave. I have made arrangements
with the club to have the enclosure left standing."
"That's all?" asked the Banker anxiously. "We leave the roof open?"
"Yes. In coming back we will want it open, and you cannot tell when we
may return."
"But no more than six months," the Banker insisted. "You promise that?"
Rogers nodded.
"Come on," George's voice called. "Let's get started." He had shaken
hands with Lylda and climbed up to the doorway of the cabin. "Come on,
Mr. Rogers. Let's get started."
Lylda stood apart. Her farewell to her husband was brief. The others
turned away, feeling that they should not intrude upon it. When Rogers
joined George on the platform of the plane, the Doctor was with Lylda,
comforting her.
With a final good-by Rogers slid the door closed. The forward
compartment, with its low arch ceiling and its concave walls, was small,
but comfortably equipped. The side windows had upholstered seats running
under them. In front, to the right, were the Frazia controls, a low seat
for the pilot and a small window above the control panel. The time
dials and the proton current switch were on the wall to the right. To
the left of the seat was the main entrance door.
The division wall between the forward compartment and the engine room
behind it held a small doorway with a sliding door.
"Are we ready?" Rogers asked. "I think we should be sitting. The shock
of departure, new to us, may be more severe than we anticipate."
His words were calm enough, but they sent a thrill of excitement through
George. "All ready," he said. "Go ahead!"
Rogers took a last look about. Then without hesitation, he moved the
switch to the first intensity. To George, the humming seemed very
different now than when he had heard it outside the plane. It was no
louder, but it seemed to hum and vibrate inside his body. He was
quivering inside, his head began reeling dizzily; then came that
sickening, horrible sensation of falling headlong--a vertigo that turned
everything to blackness.
"Are you all right? We've started."
It was Rogers's anxious voice. George opened his eyes; everything seemed
glowing, unreal and ghostlike. But he was uninjured, and his head had
steadied.
"I'm all right," he managed to say.
The sickness passed quickly. George stood up, steadying himself. "Gosh,
how light I feel! Queer in the head--don't you? I never imagined--"
He stopped abruptly. Through a side window the fur-coated figure of the
Banker was standing against the wall with the others around him. They
were staring toward the plane with an expression that clearly indicated
they could not see it.
"We've started all right," George added. "Look at them! We're already in
future time to them. They can't see us!"
Suddenly the Banker came forward walking with extraordinary swiftness,
and seemingly with little jerks, like a manikin. George held his
breath, for the Banker popped forward, his head and shoulders piercing
the glowing phosphorescent walls and floor of the cabin. He stood
motionless a brief instant, his face close to George's knees. Then, even
more rapidly than he had advanced, he threw a swift glance around and
retreated.
George recovered himself. "Boy," he said. "Wasn't that weird though? But
we're all right. I feel fine now."
The droning of the Frazia motors sounded very faintly above the humming.
It was a relief, a help toward normality. The plane was slowly raising
into the air.
As it mounted, the roof of the Scientific Club dwindled away below. It
was a dark night, with heavy clouds and a cold wind from the east. The
city, with snow on its rooftops, was sliding eastward beneath them;
vague black shadows, dark buildings dotted with lights, and seemingly
empty streets.
They were still mounting diagonally upward, and carried sidewise by the
wind, when the Hudson River slid into view.
"Rotten weather, Mr. Rogers," George suggested.
"Yes," Rogers agreed, "but that will not bother us for very long. Are
you warm enough?"
"One heater is going," George responded. "I'll switch on another." He
had familiarized himself thoroughly with the various mechanical
appliances of the plane, and he turned a switch that threw current into
another of the small electric radiators.
"Anything else?" he demanded.
"No, I think I shall try the higher intensities of the proton current. I
want our time-progress accelerating as much as possible right from the
beginning."
George selected a seat hastily.
It was not much of an ordeal. The humming seemed to move up a scale to a
higher pitch as Rogers pulled the lever around. The reeling of the
senses came again, but passed almost at once.
"There," said Rogers. "I'm glad that's accomplished."
"We're at the fifteenth intensity--the highest that Loto used."
George was staring down through the floor window. "I can see lights down
here. Are you sure it's the highest speed Loto used? He didn't describe
it this way."
"Our acceleration will pick up over several hours," Rogers replied. "Our
time-progress is still comparatively slow."
The Frazia motors were still droning.
"How high are we, do you suppose?" George demanded after a moment.
"Possibly five thousand feet. We're blowing westward over New Jersey.
And a little to the south, I think. Soon it will be day."
His words were anticipated. The scene lighted swiftly. It was day; a
dull, cold-looking, cloudy morning. Below them lay New Jersey, almost a
network of villages on the fringe of lowlands. A more congested area of
building was almost directly beneath and slid under them as they watched
it.
"Newark!" exclaimed George. "And we're into tomorrow. We're making
it--we'll soon be with Loto."
They were up higher than Rogers realized--ten thousand feet, at least.
And their drift seemed constantly of a more southern trend. It was still
uncomfortably cold in the cabin.
"Perhaps we should stay at this level," Rogers remarked. "We seem to
have caught a wind from the north."
Night came again in a few moments. Lights dotted the landscape below,
but they were vague, flickering lights. Then day, with sunlight. The
wind sudsided. The plane's southern drift was stilled. And then came
night with a moon plunging across the sky, and stars dizzily sweeping
past. Then day again, until presently the daylight and the darkness were
blended into gray. The drift was permanently passed. In a blending of
all the diversified air currents, the plane remained almost stationary.
The white, snowy hills of New Jersey soon turned to green. The cabin air
warmed a little. Then autumn and winter came again--and passed in a
moment or two.
Rogers sighed with relief. "We're fairly started. One year out of
twenty-eight thousand!"
"And we've got eight hundred or a thousand miles of space to travel
also," said George. "We're going to make that simultaneously, aren't
we?"
"Yes," agreed Rogers.
George took a last look through the floor window at the blurring gray
landscape beneath, and stood up to join him. "Let's talk things over,"
he suggested. "I've got a lot of questions--plans and things."
Rogers had taken a sheaf of script from his pocket.
"Loto's notes to guide us," he explained. "I've followed them closely so
far. We have a flight through time of something more than twenty-five
thousand years at the fifteenth intensity, and then we slacken.
Simultaneously, we must fly southward some thousand miles or more
through space, directing our course for the southern tip of Florida.
Loto specifies that we should, under all circumstances, reach the
latitude of north Florida coincident with twenty-five thousand years of
our time-progress. We will then--or perhaps a thousand years further
along--see the island. We cannot miss it, of course. It is so large, and
it must certainly endure over a great period of time."
"How long did Loto take to reach twenty-five thousand years?"
"About twelve hours," Rogers consulted the memoranda. "He computes his
average speed as equivalent to the twelfth intensity. We are using the
fifteenth continuously. Our clocks should register no more than ten
hours for the time-flight.
"Ten hours," he added thoughtfully. "And flying directly south at a
hundred miles an hour we would reach the island in those ten hours."
"But we haven't started south yet," George protested. "We're moving
through time all right, but we're still right over Newark--and look at
it!"
The New Jersey metropolis was spreading west to the Orange Mountains,
and eastward it seemed to be linked solid with Jersey City. Factories
dotted the intervening meadows, which were drained of their stagnant
water.
"You're right," exclaimed Rogers. "We have barely nine hours left; we
must start our horizontal flight."
In a few moments more they were speeding south and slightly west, at an
altitude of some five thousand feet, with their progress through time
steadily accelerating.
An hour, by their clocks, had passed. They were over Delaware Bay. Its
shores, in the more congested areas, were lined almost solid with
buildings. There was a great city on each side of the mouth of the
river, with a gigantic bridge connecting them. The bridge rose into
being under the eyes of the watchers in the flying plane, but they swept
on past and in a moment left it far in the distance behind them.
George was seated on the floor watching the changing landscape; a huge,
concave gray surface, shadowless, stretching out and up to the circular
horizon. Steadily, like a panorama unrolled, it slid sidewise beneath
them. The motion was greatest directly below. To the west, the mountains
seemed, by an optical illusion, to be following, speeding forward with
them.
The sea or its arms constantly occupied a portion of the scene, for they
were still flying south and somewhat west, following the Atlantic coast.
And of everything in sight, the sea alone seemed unchanging.
In time-progressing, that height of civilization Loto had described lay
under them. They were flying lower now.
Rogers, in his seat at the controls, said: "I think we're making it as
we should. That's the four thousand year mark just passed, and we're
flying at a hundred and ten miles an hour."
"Are you sure we'll hit it right?" George asked anxiously.
"I think so. It's about as Loto figured so far. Those buildings--what a
civilization that must be down there. It will fade presently...in
three or four thousand years."
George joined him at the forward window. "Where are we? Are we still
over Virginia?"
"Yes, at least I think we haven't crossed into North Carolina yet. That
was Chesapeake Bay a while ago. Look! That city over there is
melting--going down fast!"
The cabin interior was unlighted and dark, except for that
phosphorescence with which everything glowed. In their absorption in the
scene below, the travelers had forgotten their own curious aspect, until
George suddenly remarked:
"Look at us! Ghosts flying through space! Doesn't it make you feel
queer, Mr. Rogers?"
The dim cabin interior, with its vague, luminous human figures, did
indeed seem unreal. But the unreality was matched now by the scene
beneath; their forward flight through space, combined with a
time-progress now tremendously accelerated, made everything below a
shifting, sliding kaleidoscope of changing effects. Details were
transient things, blurred one into the other.
The broad fundamentals, however, were obvious. The gray, concave land,
ridged with mountains, the indented coast line, the gray, changeless
sea--all were distinguishable. And overhead the sky was luminous with
the mingled light of sun and moon and a myriad starry worlds, all
blended darker by nights of rain and snow and storm.
* * * * *
They were over North Carolina when Rogers, at the Frazia controls, grew
tired. The clock stood at two five. They had been gone some five hours.
"I must rest," said Rogers. "George, can you take my place?"
George hesitated. "I've flown a bit, but never in a Frazia. I think I'd
better not experiment--not on this flight."
"All right," Rogers agreed. "I'll use the automatic 'copters for a
while. Half an hour will rest me up."
In a few moments they were hovering, seemingly motionless, over North
Carolina. Far away to the east, over a bulge in the coast line, they
could just make out Cape Hatteras and the ocean beyond it.
Rogers stretched himself out on one of the leather seats, and lighted a
cigar. George sat beside him.
"I figure we should be at least halfway to the northern coast of the
island," the older man said. "We have flown some four hundred miles in
four hours."
"But Loto will be waiting at the southeastern tip of the island,"
protested George. "That will be easily two or three hundred miles
further, won't it? I wonder how far along we are in time."
"Look at the dials."
George bent over them. "About sixty-five hundred years. Some of the
hands are going too fast to read."
"More than I had thought," commented Rogers.
"Do you figure we're still accelerating?"
"I think we have just about reached our greatest speed," Rogers answered
slowly. "Let us see. We've done an average of thirteen hundred years an
hour. We must be progressing at double that now."
George was figuring on the back of an old envelope. "Twenty-six hundred
an hour. In five more hours at that rate we'll be close to twenty
thousand. We can fly down to the north coast of the island easily by
then."
"Exactly. We're a little ahead in our space flight. I'm glad of it. We
shall have to slow our time-progress to almost nothing at the end. We
must take no chances of missing Loto's light signal."
"Twenty-six hundred years an hour," mused George. "That's what we're
making now. Forty-five years a minute. A century almost every two
minutes!"
The clock had registered thirty minutes more when Rogers declared he was
sufficiently rested. At George's suggestion they ate a light meal; then
they started their flight southward again.
"How about looking at the dials now," George remarked. "They were at
sixty-five hundred, thirty minutes ago."
"Eight thousand," Rogers read. "That's fifteen hundred more. It figures
out to three thousand an hour. That's our peak, I think."
The flight now was passing through constantly changing conditions; every
two minutes the plane was covering some three or four miles of space and
a century of time. They crossed above North Carolina and came to the
coast again. The cities of the civilization beneath them seemed to be
breaking up. Here and there one stood in its glory; others were mere
deserted piles of ruins over which the vegetation crawled, eager to
devour. Still other cities and villages appeared over the southern
horizon, sturdy and whole--and they melted as they slid beneath the
plane, into crumbling piles that passed out of sight to the north.
Soon desolate areas appeared. The scene grew vaguely whiter; the snow
was coming down from the north faster than the plane was flying. Changes
in the coast line became apparent; unfamiliar arms of the sea swept into
view, and were crossed and left behind. A small, unfamiliar island lay
close to the South Carolina coast. But as a whole, the land and sea held
their own, even against the ravages of so many centuries.
"The north wind is with us--the wind Loto described that blew southward
almost all the year. What time is it?"
"By the clock or the dials?"
"The clock. I have the dials here. Eighteen thousand four hundred years
is their reading."
"Quarter of six," announced George.
"We should sight the island shortly," Rogers said. "I'll fly a trifle
slower. We must be nearly down to Georgia by now--to where Georgia used
to be, I should say. I want to sight the island at twenty thousand
years, or thereabouts."
The land was growing white; the vegetation sparser. Small towns and
hamlets that endured for no more than fifty or a hundred years were
springing up everywhere, and melting into nothing in a moment or two.
The vegetation was shifting, changing, but always the scene was growing
whiter. The villages were sparser, smaller and shorter lived--the people
struggling southward against the threatening, unrelenting cold, which
spared nothing but the island of the Anglese.
Rogers was first to notice a radical departure from the normal
conformation of the landscape. They were, by their own calculation, over
Georgia. George, watching the dials closely, had just noted twenty-two
thousand years. Far ahead, over the rim of the southwestern horizon, a
line of mountains was rising.
"Look!" exclaimed Rogers softly. "The mountain chain running east and
west. The new mountains! The island must be just beyond them."
He maneuvered the plane into a climb; the gray land and sea tilted and
began dropping away. The mountains seemed to be following them up,
higher and closer, until at last the plane was over them, barely a
thousand feet above their rocky spires.
It was a scene of wild grandeur that now spread out beneath their eyes:
dark, craggy cliff faces, with snow capped summits, a pure white peak
and a gray blue valley beside it. And the whole mass reared ten thousand
feet above the sea.
The plane swept forward; the jagged, tumbled land slid northward, close
beneath it. Then, abruptly, the crags and peaks dropped away; it was as
though the plane had leaped ten thousand feet into the air. Far below
lay a narrow channel of gray water, stretching east and west. And beyond
that lay another land, its outer coast curving to the south.
"_The island!_" exclaimed Rogers softly. "What a cataclysm was here--a
rift that let the sea in and buckled up the mountains!"
"The island!" echoed George. "And we're at twenty-three thousand five
hundred years! We've some distance yet to fly," he warned. "Hadn't we
better slacken our time progress?"
With their flight through space temporarily checked, the 'copters
holding them motionless, Rogers cut down the proton current to the fifth
intensity. Eagerly they looked below them.
Beyond the channel lay the island, curving up in an arc from the south
and out to the west. They could not see across it, but only to a ridge
of mountains at its center. Huge palms grew everywhere, and the
shoreline formed a broad, curving beach of white sand. An island
paradise--though their time progress still laid a gray cast over the
green, blurred the water into a formless haze along the beach and
shifted the vegetation into a confusion of changing forms.
"We must get started," Rogers said at last. "At twenty-eight thousand
years we must be within sight of the southern tip."
It was a flight almost due south. Lakes occasionally were visible, and
two or three small rivers, one of which changed its course suddenly
under their eyes; and everywhere that tropical verdure, mounting and
melting, always shifting with its rapid growth and decay.
In some three hours more--with another longer rest for Rogers, during
which time the 'copters held them poised motionless--they sighted the
southern tip of the island. It had narrowed here to a point no more than
two miles wide, ending with a curving beach and the broad, empty ocean
beyond; a beach with a palm-covered mountain slope close behind it.
Rogers had made several changes of time progress during the latter part
of the trip, and they were poised over the sea near the tip of the
island for no more than a few moments when the dials recorded
twenty-eight thousand two hundred years.
Rogers consulted Loto's notes. "He landed in this time world at
twenty-eight thousand two hundred and four years. We must stop at the
beginning of that year and watch for his light."
Using the fourth intensity, the daylight and darkness was separated into
two brief, but distinguishable periods. Thus the voyagers sped through
the days and nights, the weeks and months and forward into another year.
At the beginning of the fourth year, Rogers changed to the third
intensity. It was daylight--a yellow-red, swiftly mounting sun; flying
blurs of white clouds close overhead; a blue sea, and a bright green
island.
The sun plunged across the sky and sank blood red, with an instant of
glorious colors suffusing the western sky. Night came, with its deep,
purple mystery. Then day again.
Thus the days of that fourth year went by; each hardly a minute long,
but slow to the two men so anxiously watching. They were tired to the
point of exhaustion, but the excitement and anxiety kept them going.
"He said from the tip of the island," Rogers murmured. "A blue-white,
vertical beam of light shining for a day and a night...we couldn't
miss it. A minute would show it to us plainly."
"I haven't taken my eyes off that island for a second," commented George
from his seat on the floor. "Why doesn't he hurry up? He's down there,
why doesn't he give us the signal?"
Rogers did not answer. The sun dropped below the horizon. The turning
world, with its motion made so visible, was dizzying to one who watched
the sky.
The purple night was momentarily colored with a red moon; it rose and
swiftly plunged into a thick bank of clouds that swept down upon it.
Abruptly, from the tip of the island, a shaft of blue-white light shot
into the sky. It wavered an instant, then stood motionless: _clear_,
_distinct_, _unmistakable_!