The connection was broken! Azeela was carried back into time. Had
something stopped her message? Would her thought-bond with her sister
hold across the centuries that now separated them?
George could only ask himself these questions with a sinking heart. If
the bond would not hold, then Azeela was lost to them forever. Lost to
Loto, who loved her. And Toroh would get his weapons and win the
war--_inevitably_.
"Nothing yet, Dee?"
"No."
They rode slowly onward. At last Dee gave a cry of joy.
"It comes again! She is all right, George! _All right!_" Her voice rose
in triumph and thankfulness.
George thumped Atal to urge the dog forward. "Then we must hurry, Dee.
They're going back into time?"
"Yes. Azeela is looking at the dials. Twenty-five years back now. She
tells us to hurry. She will watch the dials and let me know where they
are. Toroh does not suspect anything. He is gloating. He thinks he has
won everything."
At last they were ascending the slope to the mouth of the cavern. The
yawning hole showed black in the face of the cliff. On the small
platform above the mouth, a single light disclosed the figures of three
guards sitting there.
In the moonlight the guards saw them coming. A bolt of lightning flashed
downward across the black hole; a peal of thunder rolled out.
They stopped, and Dee called to the guards. One of them descended from
the platform, down a narrow flight of steps cut in the cliff face. He
came forward in the moonlight, a black robed figure.
Dee spoke with him, and, recognizing a daughter of Fahn, he saluted
respectfully. There followed a brief colloquy, then the guard stood
aside.
A moment later they were in the cavern. The huge tunnel was dark and
dank, but blue-white lights glimmered ahead in the darkness. The place
was silent, seemingly deserted.
Down the length of the main tunnel they hurried. The plane stood there
in the open space, in the glare of blue-white light. They stood before
it.
"Dee, shall we send for your father?"
She hesitated.
"Where is he?" George persisted. "Did you ask the guard?"
"Yes. He and Loto and Loto's father are at the palace. There has been
rebellion and murder--the murder of Helene, Mme. Voluptua."
She recounted succinctly the events of the night in Anglese City as the
guard had told them to her.
George whistled. "They've got their hands full. Dee, are you still in
communication with Azeela?"
"Yes. They are beyond fifty years."
"Going how fast?"
"Azeela says as fast as they can--the twentieth intensity."
George made his decision.
"Dee, we mustn't wait, mustn't stop for anything. You're willing to go?"
"Yes," she declared soberly.
She reached toward the platform. George locked his hands, and she put
her small foot into them. He lifted her--she seemed no heavier than a
child--and she swung herself up gracefully and easily to the platform.
George followed and closed the cabin door after them. "Did you tell the
guard what we were going to do?"
"Yes," she said. "I told him to tell father later tonight when things
were more quiet at the palace."
"Good girl. Dee, have you ever been back into time?"
"No. Azeela has. Just a little way--with Loto. He taught her to operate
the plane."
"How fast are they going, Dee? The twentieth intensity?"
"Yes."
George's hand was on the proton switch. He took a last look around.
"Sit down, Dee. Hold the arms of your chair. Don't be frightened."
The cabin was dark; through its windows the blue-white glare outside
showed the jagged brown walls of the cavern. The twentieth intensity!
_Toroh was going as fast as he possibly could!_
George pulled the switch. There was a soundless clap in his head; a
plunge, headlong into some bottomless abyss, falling for hours--an
eternity.
* * * * *
Fahn's proclamation to the Bas had far-reaching effects. All over the
island that night and the next day there was rejoicing. The radio
proclaimed a national holiday, which the Bas gave over to festivities.
The murder of Mme. Voluptua was forgotten; the rebellion in Anglese City
was a thing of the past. The work of Toroh's spies was completely
undone; everywhere they presented themselves they were seized by the Bas
and delivered to the authorities, until by mid-morning none dared show
himself. They remained in hiding in the mountains, and the following
night fled the island.
Fahn's object had been attained. Everywhere, enthusiasm for the war soon
mounted to a patriotic frenzy.
But it was not all smooth sailing for Fahn. Within an hour after the
first radio proclamation--just before dawn that day--the king called the
Scientist to his audience room and demanded that it be retracted. For
the first time within generations, a Scientist defied his king.
Fahn gravely refused. The king, with his councilors--brave now since the
mob before the palace had dispersed--clustered around him, vigorously
tried to overawe the Scientist. But Fahn was obdurate; respectful to the
majesty of royalty--but obdurate nevertheless.
The king was powerless, and he knew it. He raged, threatened, but to no
avail.
That afternoon the king's council met. The Scientists were declared
outlaws; a call was issued for the Aran police, who were scattered
throughout the island, to come at once to the Anglese City to defend
their sovereign.
It was a monarch struggling against all reason to defend what he
considered his birthright. Royalty outraged!
But the Aran police did not come. Worse than that, those near at hand in
Anglese City prudently vanished.
That same afternoon the Scientists met in Anglese City. Fahn's action
was upheld, and from other cities came similar decisions. The government
was taken over by the Scientists for the period of the war. Laws
ratifying the new status of the Bas women and children were hurriedly
passed, and made permanent.
All that day the radio audibly proclaimed events as they transpired. The
Arans were not to be molested; their relations with the Bas were to
proceed as always, and the royal family was to be treated with the
outward respect to which its birth and position entitled it.
Three days passed--days that for those in Anglese City were full of
activity and anxiety. The Arans kept sullenly to themselves; the king
and his councilors shut themselves in the palace; the Bas went about
their accustomed tasks feverishly, abstractedly, waiting for the call to
war.
The Scientists, trusting nothing to chance, sought out all the Aran
police and disarmed them. All weapons were kept in the caverns, where
the manufacturing and assembling went steadily forward.
Fahn, Loto, and Rogers, during these three days, stayed at Fahn's home.
Nothing had been heard from George and the two girls. They were days
full of anxiety--almost despair--for the three men. The guards at the
two caverns reported what had happened. Fahn cursed his inefficiency in
allowing a Toroh spy to remain unsuspected in the League. The man who
had given Toroh the plane was located and put to death, but that helped
matters little.
In the brief interims of inactivity, the three men discussed what George
and Dee might be doing--what the outcome would be. The discussions were
futile; there was nothing to do but wait.
The character of the two Frazia planes, the identity of the visitors,
had never been made public. Only Fahn, his two companions and a few of
the Scientist leaders were aware of the momentous outcome for which they
were so helplessly waiting.
On the afternoon of the third day, Fahn took Loto and his father through
the cavern. Loto was pale and tight-lipped, but he seldom mentioned
Azeela, and never once had he given vent to his feelings. Rogers was
curious to see the cavern; older, more philosophical than Loto, he could
better withstand his anxiety over George and the girls. Yet he, too, was
more worried than he would have cared to admit, even to himself. The
war--the fate of the Anglese--was one thing; but that plane was all that
could take him back to Lylda, his wife. He could probably never
manufacture another plane in this time world; the materials were not
available. He realized now how wrong he had been not to bring Lylda with
him.
It was late afternoon when they started. Work in the cavern now
proceeded day and night.
To Rogers the place was one of romantic mystery, with a sinister air to
it that he could not shake off.
The darkness of the cavern walls, the shadows, the flickering blue
lights, and the yawning holes with which the interior of the mountain
seemed honeycombed, awed and perturbed him.
Far ahead, down a sharp slope, two blue lights shone. To the left a
passageway glowed dull red.
Fahn turned toward it. They went into the passageway, and from it
emerged upon a narrow ledge with a metal railing. Before them spread a
huge pit, a great pool of lava a thousand feet down--lava that boiled
sluggishly, with tiny flames of burning gases licking upward from its
surface. To one side, overhead, a rift through the mountain showed a
patch of starlit sky.
Visitors to an inferno, they stood clinging to the iron rail. The lurid
red light cast monstrous shadows of their figures upward to the rocky
ceiling. The sulphurous air was intolerably hot; it choked their
breathing. After a moment they all stumbled back into the passageway,
coughing, breathing deep of the purer air.
"Fires of the earth so close!" murmured Rogers.
Fahn was leading them forward again. "Yes, almost every mountain on the
island is like that. The fires are even closer to the surface at Orleen;
we use them in the cavern there."
"And here is a room of medicine and surgery," he added. He had turned
unexpectedly into a side cave, a room furnished and draped, and dimly
lighted by braziers hanging from its low roof. Rows of bottles, cases of
instruments, a long, low table, littered with a variety of strange
objects; the room held a confusion of things, most of which were
incomprehensible.
Something made Rogers shudder. "What is that?" he demanded.
"To create human life," said Fahn. "For thousands of years, science has
tried to do that. We can make a man's body--but his soul and mind still
elude us."
Rogers was staring at a metal framework, where the organs of a man were
hanging, joined together and with a network of blood vessels around
them; the fundamental, simplified mechanism of man, without the body.
And there was movement to the organs; the heart was beating, the lungs
breathing.
It was gruesome; it made Rogers' gorge rise.
"They will function for a little time," Fahn explained. "But our
surgeons have done better than that. They have made the living body--all
but the mind and the soul."
A small case was standing on a pedestal, illuminated by a dim blue light
above it. A lump of living human flesh lay within, roughly fashioned
into human form, with arms and legs that kicked.
Rogers backed away.
It seemed like a dream, this trip through the Scientists' cavern. From
one room to another they wandered. Most of the caves were unoccupied;
occasionally a lone worker or a group would stop their tasks
momentarily to meet their leader and his visitors.
From far away recesses, where the main work was going on, the hum of
dynamos sounded.
"We will not go into the workrooms tonight," Fahn said. "I'll show them
to you later."
They entered another inner cave, which was high-arched and unusually
large. It held relics of bygone ages. Broken mechanisms, that
inhabitants of other planets might have left on earth, had been dug
up and stored here as in a museum. They meant nothing to Rogers, nor
did Fahn offer to explain them. But this room more than any other in
the cavern seemed to carry with it the power of science, the greater
science that to Fahn's time world was in the prehistoric past. It
showed Fahn and his contemporaries in their true light; they were
archaeologists--imitators, reconstructors, not real creators.
At last they reached a circular room equipped with the apparatus for
taking voices and images from the air. Its side walls were paneled with
huge crystals that mirrored distant scenes; and it was filled with
millions of tiny voices.
Fahn stood before one of the crystals: his hand was on a lever; the
fingers of his other hand rested on a tiny row of buttons. Rogers
noticed that there were scores of similar mechanisms dispersed about the
room.
"Let us look and listen, a mile away to the west," Fahn said.
The crystal before them was some six feet square. It was gray and
cloudy. Fahn pressed one of the small black buttons, and moved the lever
over a notch; the crystal flooded with color. It was like looking
through a huge window.
"The viewpoint of our station a mile north of here," Fahn pointed out.
"A thirty foot tower," Loto explained. "The lens on it swings in a
circle. We are looking westward now toward Orleen."
The scene in the crystal showed the red western sky; a white road in the
foreground, disappearing seemingly at Rogers' feet; the green,
palm-dotted island, with twilight shadows creeping upon it, and to the
left, the island mountain range, its peaks rising in serrated ranks,
with giant, snow-clad summits.
"It was near here that day before yesterday they found the charred
bodies of Toroh's brother and his Noth companion," Loto added. "A Bas
woman--see that shack there by the road--she saw a girl and a man
passing the night before. It may have been George and Dee."
The shack at the roadside showed plainly. A Bas woman was sitting at its
doorway, crooning to her infant. Her voice sounded almost as clearly as
though the watchers had been sitting on the small tower where the lens
and radio mechanism were perched.
"We will turn," Fahn said.
A panorama unfolding, the scene moved slowly sidewise: the sea to the
north, with the mountain range beyond it, dim in the gathering darkness;
east, back toward Anglese City, where the cavern-mountain itself showed
behind the palms; to the south past a distant vista of city houses; and
still swinging, it came back to the road and the house and stopped,
again facing the west.
"Another station," Fahn added.
The crystal-face went dark, and then relighted. It was a viewpoint of a
hundred feet in the air this time. Again it swung the points of the
compass.
For half an hour Fahn continued his demonstration. There might have been
a hundred or more towers scattered over the island, and the scene from
any one of them sprang at Fahn's will into the crystal window.
"What are the other crystal mirrors for?" Rogers asked Loto.
"The island can be searched by several operators simultaneously. Any
viewpoint may be thrown into any crystal, and there are receivers for
your ears, so that the sounds you hear will not confuse others in the
room."
The island was growing dark. The crystal showed a viewpoint from the
channel coast halfway to Orleen. It must have been from a very high
tower; the sea stretched several hundred feet beneath.
"Those mountains across the water," Rogers remarked, "can't be over
twenty or thirty miles from our shores. Is that where Toroh's army will
gather?"
"From behind them," said Loto. "To the east, nearer the Atlantic Coast,
we think. We--"
Fahn had given a slight cry. The room was dark, but the reflected light
from the crystal showed the Scientist pointing into the mirrored scene.
"Loto, what is that?"
Above the mountains across the channel, the sky was rose-colored with
the fading daylight. A tiny gray shape showed there, silhouetted against
the clouds. It was moving. They watched it, breathlessly.
"A Frazia plane!" Rogers murmured.
It circled like a giant bird. A patch of lighter sky behind showed it
more plainly after a moment. It _was_ a Frazia plane! It was closer than
they had thought, but it seemed to be flying north, away from them.
"Which one is it?" Loto whispered. "Father, which one is it?"
But that they could not tell. George, or Toroh? One of them had
returned. The plane was flying lower, circling again. The dimness
absorbed it; then it reappeared. It seemed now to be flying crazily.
"_Out of control!_" Loto whispered in horror. "_It's falling!_"
The plane turned over, fluttered down, was swallowed by the shadows of
the distant mountains.