INTO THE FUTURE

"Zero hour, Wheeler," said Lantin, who stood in the car itself, his

head projecting through the round manhole in its upper side. Our

strange vehicle lay ready for its flight into the future, on the

apartment building's roof, for this was the night we had chosen for our

departure.

I paused at the roof's edge to glance for a last time at the ever-new

panorama of the metropolis around us. Though moonless, the sky above

was brilliant, flecked with blazing stars, but even these were dimmed

by the great up-gush of white light from the city's streets. A soft

little breeze fanned my face as I looked out. Down in the bay, there

was a great hooting of tugs as a big liner went out to sea. And in the

river, a battleship's great search-lights stabbed and circled.

I turned away, reluctantly enough, and followed Lantin into the car.

Crouched on the padded floor, in a half-sitting, half-lying position,

he was already giving the car's machinery a last inspection, and at his

command I clanged shut the round metal door that sealed the entrance. I

then took up a position on the floor beside him.

His hands were moving over the gleaming controlling switches,

searching, pulling, twisting. Abruptly something clicked under his

fingers and the car rose smoothly in the air some fifty feet above the

roof and hung motionless. There was a curious little humming now, that

seemed to come from the floor beneath us, caused, as I knew, by the

invisible streams of electronic force that lifted and held us.

Under the pressure of a little wind, the car drifted a short distance

sidewise, and now hung directly over the streets. I glanced down

through the dead-light in the floor of the car, and saw that from the

height we had already attained, autos and pedestrians were but tiny

specks moving in the blurred glare of the street-lights.

Without turning, Lantin spoke. "We'd better try the power of the

time-wave," he said, "before going any distance in space."

I nodded, and again his hands moved over the car's intricate controls.

He turned a large knob, and a rising, purring whine filled the car,

while outside there was a growing roar of sudden wind. At the same time

there came to me a staggering sensation of falling, and for a moment

I seemed to be plunging helplessly down into unfathomable abysses. It

lasted but an instant, and when my mind cleared, I heard the winds

outside the car shouting with higher and higher intensity, caused, as

I knew, by our swift passage through time.

I looked down into the streets below, and for a second could see no

obvious changes, then noted that the autos and people seemed to have

suddenly vanished. In place of them were misty blurs of undefined

motion, and even these vanished as our progress on through time grew

greater. The winking electric signs of the city had ceased to flash on

and off, and appeared to be steadily illuminated.

I looked up, through one of the glasses in the car's top surface, and

then gasped, prepared as I was for what I saw. The whole firmament was

moving, its starry hosts moving slowly but visibly toward the west.

Steadily it turned, and in hardly more than a minute a gray light began

to grow over the eastern horizon, flushing swiftly to rose. Then, from

the center of the growing light, sprang up the sun, crimson and mighty,

leaping up above the horizon in a single bound, it seemed, and moving

swiftly, ever more swiftly, up toward the zenith.

The winds had steadily risen to a cyclonic gale, and now I heard

Lantin's voice, striving to make itself heard above them.

"We're going through time all right," he shouted, his voice thin and

piping in sound, above the roar of the gale. "We may as well head west

now, too."

I did not answer, but saw the buildings and streets below slide away to

the east, as the car moved off in the opposite direction. By now the

sun had traversed its whole circuit in the sky and was tumbling down

behind the western heights. Before we had crossed above the Hudson,

darkness had plunged down upon us, and as we rocketed over the Jersey

meadows, I saw the stars again wheeling across the sky, but much faster

than before. Our time-speed was steadily accelerating, now, as Lantin

turned on more and more of the time-wave's power, and I knew that

shortly we would be racing through the years with lightning speed.

Again the cycle of darkness and dawn was repeated, with the sun

hurtling across the sky faster and faster, while the winds of our

double progress through time and space were deafening. Day and night

followed each other so rapidly that I could obtain but vague glimpses

of the ground below us. We were progressing through space at the rate

of a hundred and fifty miles an hour, holding an even altitude of a

mile above the earth's surface.

Soon day and night had merged, had given way to a perpetual greenish

dusk through which we raced with nightmare speed. I glanced at the

dials that recorded our progress and position in time, and noted that

already we had gone ahead almost four months into the future, while

our progress was now doubling every few minutes. Passing over northern

Pennsylvania, I saw the ground below turning to a blotched, patchy

gray, the composite impression of weeks of snow and ice, below. The

gray soon faded, changed to green, with the coming of spring. The

cycle of green and white was repeated, again and again, until we were

speeding through the years too swiftly to see it, and white and green

had merged into a drab color that hung over all the landscape below.

By the time we passed over western Ohio, our car was racing into the

future with a speed of nearly ten years a minute. At this speed, we saw

little of human activities below. There were blurred, vague outlines of

cities now and then, but these were only hazy, indefinite masses that

passed from view as we fled on westward in the car.

Soon, though, Lantin slowed the car's progress through space and began

to give close attention to the physical features of the country below

us. He consulted maps constantly, now, and finally, after a number of

stops and starts, brought the car to rest, in space, above the juncture

of two small rivers. Hanging there, we still sped on through time,

and above the winds Lantin shouted, "Stop there," pointing to the

maps he held and then down toward the ground below. I understood his

meaning, and knew that he had reached the spot in Illinois which he had

calculated to be the Raider's home.

Intently we scanned the ground beneath the car. Gray and splotchy as it

appeared, from alternate summer and winter, yet there were nowhere any

buildings or signs of life, nothing but the two little rivers and the

rolling fields that extended away to the horizon.

A glance at the dials told me that we had progressed through time some

twelve thousand years, since our start. I heard Lantin utter a low

exclamation, and looked up to see him gazing intently toward the north,

through one of the side windows. Moving over beside him, I looked also,

and saw, away on the distant northern horizon, a speck of gleaming

white. We were still racing on through time, and as we watched, that

white spot spread, expanded, grew to a thick line of dazzling white

that lay across all the north horizon.

The white expanse grew still, coming nearer and nearer toward us,

rolling slowly south and covering all the country it passed over with a

blanket of whiteness. It came nearer toward us, moving with very slow

speed, considering the rapidity of our progress in time. Now, above the

shrill winds around us, there came the dull, grinding roar of the white

blanket's passage. South rolled the gleaming sheet, until it had almost

reached the ground directly beneath the car. I recognized, now, the

material of that gleaming expanse.

"Ice!" I shouted in Lantin's ear, and he started, glanced down toward

it, then nodded. A moment he studied the grinding wave below, then

leaned over and shouted a single word in my ear:

"Glacier!"

The word was like a blinding flood of light on my thoughts. A glacier!

And that was the meaning of this white tide from the north, this vast,

resistless flood of ice that was rolling south over the world as it

had rolled ages before. The mightiest force on earth, and the slowest,

moving with deliberate, unswerving steadiness, calm and majestic,

carving mountains and valleys, changing the very face of the earth. It

had swept down over the earth before, had forced primeval man down to

the very equator before it receded, and now the thing was re-enacting

itself before my eyes. Fascinated, I watched the white masses forging

south.

* * * * *

While we hung high above it, the gleaming, solid flood rolled on

until it had obscured the last speck of land on the southern horizon,

so that as far as we could see stretched nothing but the glistening

fields of ice. The air in the car had become suddenly bitter cold, and

as frost and rime began to congeal on the windows, I hastened over to

the heating apparatus and switched it on. The glasses cleared soon,

and we sped on into the future, but the white expanse below us seemed

changeless.

I plucked at Lantin's sleeve, and when he turned, shouted to him, "Go

back?", pointing to the gleaming frozen masses below.

"No!" he yelled, over the roar of the gale; "I'm going to circle a bit."

With the words, he snapped off the time-wave, and we came to a rest, in

time. The dials now registered a little over fifteen thousand years,

and with our stopping, the winds outside the car died away and we had

a chance to converse in normal tones.

"Nothing but ice here," said Lantin, "and we can't tell how long it

will last. I think the best plan would be to sweep around in a great

circle, and look for any signs of the Raider's presence. If we see

nothing we can go on into time and stop every few hundred years to

circle again."

I agreed, and we put the idea into effect at once, rising to a height

of nearly two miles and then racing away to the west in a curving

course that would eventually bring us back to our starting point. As

we sped on, both Lantin and myself were at the observation windows,

scanning the landscape in every direction, but only boundless fields of

ice met our eyes.

We reached a point some two hundred miles north of our starting

position, and had begun to curve back toward that position, when Lantin

uttered a sudden exclamation and hastily stopped the car's progress.

"Look!" he cried, excitedly, pointing away to the north.

At first I could see only the glaring ice, when I gazed in that

direction, but gradually my eyes made out a distant spot of black

against the horizon. Before I could comment on it, Lantin headed the

car around and opened up on the power so that we shot north toward that

distant spot with full speed.

On we went, until the spot had changed to a thick line, and its color

from black to green. And as we neared it, we saw that there the ice

ended, and beyond it were green fields and hills and valleys, with

patches of gnarled, stunted trees here and there.

On we fled, still north, until the ice-fields had faded from view

behind us, and the chilling cold we had felt above them had given

way to a summer warmth. And the first dwarfed trees had changed to

towering giants of the forest, though mostly the country below us was

open fields and ranges of green-clad hills.

"I can't understand it," I told Lantin. "Who ever heard of a warm,

semi-tropical country like this existing farther north than fields of

glacial ice?"

"It is strange," he admitted, "but it's understandable, at that. You

remember the explorer who found that warm, sunken valley in Alaska,

somewhere? It was heated by steam, literally, for the interior fires

of the earth had in some way bulged up near the surface of the ground,

there, and their heat acting on the valley's springs and rivers made it

a great steam-heated depression of almost tropical warmth. Probably the

same thing has happened here, a shift of the earth's interior forcing

up part of its inner molten core, the heat of which would counteract

the glacier and keep it from covering this section of the country.

Strange things happen under the earth's surface, Wheeler."

"You may be right," I said, "but there's no life here, Lantin. No--"

I broke off, suddenly, staring out of the car's western windows. The

western sky was glowing, for it was near to sunset, and there, far

away, standing out black against the brilliant sky, was a city.

It was a city of enchantment, seen from our car. The jagged, serrated

outline of its buildings loomed blackly against the glowing light,

like the skyline of New York at the same hour. The buildings were all

square and solid in appearance, and at the center of them there rose

one building that towered far above the others, to a mighty height,

its straight, perpendicular sides and flat roof standing up above the

others, frowningly, brutally dominating them.

There was a gasp at my side, and I turned to see that Lantin was also

gazing at the outline of the distant city. He had brought the car to

rest, and together we looked away toward that metropolis of the future.

"We must go there," I said rapidly. "Spy out the place from a distance,

learn what we can about it. Do you think that it is the home of the

Raider?"

"It may be," he said, "but we must be careful, Wheeler. It wouldn't do

to enter that place blindly, not knowing what manner of people inhabit

it. Nor can we risk having the car destroyed or taken from us, as it's

our only way to get back to our own time. The best plan would be to

hide the car some distance from the city, and then go nearer on foot,

learning as much as we can about the place before venturing inside."

And so we decided. Starting the car again, we sped along low over the

ground, and finally, some five miles away from the city, came across a

little range of rugged hills which appeared quite wild and uninhabited,

like all the rest of the country we had traversed so far. On the slope

of one of these hills was a little, shelflike clearing, patched with

small trees, and we selected this for our hiding place, bringing the

car gently down to rest on the ground there.

We stepped out, cramped and stiff from our hours in the car, and then

proceeded at once to hide it, breaking off big branches from the trees

around us and planting them in the ground in such fashion that any

casual passer-by would never have suspected the car's existence. When

it was concealed to Lantin's satisfaction, we made a hasty meal from

the food brought with us, and then prepared for our trip toward the

city.

The rifles we left in the car, as they were too heavy and cumbersome to

carry through the thick underbrush that lined the slopes around us, but

we looked to the pistols in our belts, which were of almost as heavy a

caliber as the rifles. Then, with a last look at the car, we made our

way down the slope to the bottom of the little valley which was formed

by two low ranges of hills, on one of the slopes of which our car lay

hidden.

We followed this valley north for some distance, the hills on each side

leveling down to mere dunes as we approached its ends. A thick little

wood lay directly across the end of it, and through this we forced our

way, as quietly as possible. It gradually grew thinner, and then with a

sudden shock we emerged from it into open fields.

Instinctively, we looked first toward the west. The sun was

setting, now, and we saw that the city was not of wide extent, not

extraordinarily large, but that the buildings that made it up were

very large and were closely grouped together. And above them all rose

the titanic central pile, an edifice that we judged to be all of two

thousand feet in height, and half that in width.

Behind us there was a sudden yelping shout, and we turned quickly and

then shrank back. Across the open fields toward us was running a group

of men, a score or more in number, men in brazen armor and helmets,

who carried spears and swords and who were bearing down on us with

their lances outstretched toward us. Their eyes were gleaming, and they

uttered wolflike shouts as they came on.

Flight was impossible, so close were they, so I jerked forth the pistol

in my belt and fired hastily at the oncoming men. Too hastily, in fact,

for the shot went wild and the mechanism of the pistol jammed before

I could fire again. Lantin's pistol barked behind me, and one of the

men in front staggered and went down, with a neat hole drilled through

his armor, but the rest never hesitated, and before Lantin could fire

again, they were upon us.

_CHAPTER 7_