CHAPTER 18
EIGHT MINUTES!
It was hours later, toward the end of the hot, brilliant afternoon, that we parted at last from Kethra and his men. On the green earth around that brown pit where once had stood the city of cylinders, the Khlun air-boats were resting, ready for their long flight homeward across the ice. Our own time-car lay behind us, for in that tense moment before the city had collapsed under the sound-rays' vibrations, a hovering air-boat had spied our car in the little glade where we had left it, and had managed to raise it from the ground before the crash. And now, with our four friends, we stood beside it, bidding Kethra farewell.
We had heard from him the story, as amazing as our own, of what had befallen his forces when they pursued the Raider into the future, how they had chased him almost to the world's end, indeed, pursuing him into time so far that the sun grew old and small, and the world a world of death and twilight; of how they had forced the Raider to desert the Kanlar cars it held, which they had destroyed; and of how it had eluded them in time and come racing back to confront us on the temple's roof. He told, too, of how the messenger sent through time by Lantin and me had finally found him and brought him back in the nick of time to destroy Raider, hordes and city.
Kethra, and all his men, had pressed us to return with them to Kom, but we refused. An intolerable nostalgia, a longing for our own time, filled us, and our four friends were as eager to return to their own centuries as we were. And so, standing with them beside our time-car, we bade our friends of Kom farewell.
"You do wisely, men of the past," said Kethra. "It is not good that a man should leave his own time and venture into others. The secret of time-traveling is an evil secret. And when our fleet has returned to Kom, every car in it will be stripped of the time-wave apparatus, and all those time-wave mechanisms will be destroyed by us. For now that our end has been accomplished, and the Raider destroyed, none of us will ever again venture into past or future."
"You speak truth," said Lantin, sadly; "for though we came on through the ages ourselves, we could not save our friend. And when we have returned our four friends here to their own ages, and reached ours again, we too will destroy this car. And the secret of time-traveling will remain with us, a secret."
We each grasped Kethra's hand, waved farewell to the hundreds in the air-boats on the ground around us, and then entered our own car. With our four friends, its interior was crowded, but there was enough room for Lantin to manipulate the controls, and so the car rose swiftly, circled for a moment above the air-boats on the ground, then fled swiftly toward the southwest.
Behind us the green, warm land of the Kanlars faded to a speck against the ice, and as we sped on, we moved through time also, passing swiftly into the past.
Three hours later we hung above a vast highland country, having penetrated into the past to the year 1520, four hundred years before our own time. And below us hung the white city of Tenochtitlan, metropolis of the Aztec people.
We slanted down toward it, through the darkness, for we had come to it at night. Toward the city's edge was the glimmer of a broad lake, and from great pyramids flashed burning fires of crimson. In its dark streets was a stir of movement, and up to us came the roar of a fierce battle, with cries of wounded, and twang of bows, and here and there the roar of an arquebus or cannon.
Ixtil leaned toward the window, gazed down with tense interest. "It is my people," he said, turning to us, "my city, my time."
And so, swooping down upon the city through the concealing darkness, we halted the car on a flat, white roof, and Ixtil stepped out. He turned, and with more emotion than I had ever yet seen upon his fierce face, bade us farewell.
D'Alord, Denham, Fabrius, each wrung his hand silently, and then the Aztec turned to me. He drew the saw-edged sword from his belt, and handed it to me, hilt-foremost.
"Take it," he told me. "I can give you nothing else, and it may remind you of our fight on the stair, comrade, when you have reached your own time."
I took the weapon, stammered my thanks, and he inclined his head gravely, then turned and sped from the roof, down through the building to the battle in the street below, racing toward it with fierce haste.
D'Alord broke the silence that followed. "What a fighter!" he exclaimed. "And now he is gone. Well, on, friends!"
So we rose again from the roof, above the body-choked streets, where we knew the conquistadors of Cortez strove with the city's people. The car rose high, and then raced east with the power opened to the last notch.
In the hours that followed, as we rocketed over the gray Atlantic at a speed of nearly ten miles a minute, we were again speeding into the past, back still farther, so that when the green, leg-shaped peninsula of Italy lay beneath us, we had gone back to the First Century of the Christian era, as nearly as possible to the year which Fabrius claimed as his own.
We left him there, on a bare, grassy hilltop outside the city of Rome. Before parting, he too unbuckled his heavy shortsword and handed it to me. "Ixtil gave you his sword," he said, "and when it is your car that has brought me back to my own world, I can do no less." He stepped back and said simply, "Vale!" and then we had sped on into time and left him.
We turned, now, in time, sped on to the first year of the Seventeenth Century, and in space fled north till we hung over southern France. And with D'Alord guiding our course from the window, exclaiming at every familiar landmark on the ground below, we came finally to the little village where he desired to be left.
"'Twas there I was stationed when the Raider seized me, curse him!" he told us; "so set me down outside it."
Again the car came down to the ground, in a field beyond the village, just at sunrise. D'Alord opened the car's door, then hesitated.
"Sacré!" he exclaimed. "When I was in the pit I was afire to get back to my own time, but now I half wish that we could have stayed together, comrades. But Kethra was right. Every man to his own time."
He drew and regarded his long, heavy sword. "It's for you, comrade," he told me. "Like Ixtil and Fabrius, it's all I can give you. Though I don't think you'll need it to make you remember our fight on the stair, eh?" His laugh rang out. "Dieu, what a fight was that!"
He grasped the hands of Denham and of Lantin and me, and with forced gayety slapped us on the back, then sprang quickly out of the car, and stood beside it. I closed the door, and our car rose swiftly above the field. And looking down, I saw the receding figure of D'Alord, still standing where we had left him, waving his hat toward us in a final gesture of farewell, the wind of dawn blowing through his hair.
And so we left him, and raising the car high above the earth, sped back again across the broad Atlantic. And too, we came on farther into time until when we came into view of the New Jersey coasts, we had come on into time a space of almost two hundred years, for the dials registered the fact that our car had reached the year 1777, when Denham had been seized by the Raider.
We had offered to land him in England, but he had refused. "I'm a soldier," he told us, "and it would be desertion. Let me down at Philadelphia, or near it." So the car planed down through the darkness to a field beyond Camden, and there came to rest in deep snow, for we had stopped our time-progress in the dead of winter, and at night.
Denham stepped out of the car, and we followed him. There was no moon, but the stars above were brilliant, the sheen of their light reflected from the glistening, silent fields around us. It was bitterly cold, and we shivered, standing there.
"And so the last of us part," said Denham. "Curse me if I like it, either. Think of it, Wheeler: Ixtil and Fabrius and D'Alord are already dead and dust, have been for centuries."
"They're not, Denham," I said. "They're only separated from us by time, as well as space. At least we have learned one thing, that time is largely a delusion, after all, and that the men of one age are not much different from those of another."
"It's so," he said. "And I never had better friends than Ixtil and D'Alord and Fabrius, and Lantin and you. We've seen some things together, since we met in the city of cylinders, Wheeler. Well, we shan't meet again. And so—good-bye."
He shook my hand, and Lantin's, and then, like the other three, drew and handed to me his slender rapier.
"You have four swords now, Wheeler. And each from a different time. It may be that they'll remind you of all we went through together, in the city of cylinders and in the pit below it. I am only sorry that we could not find your friend Cannell in time to save him. But it was fate."
"It was fate," Lantin repeated, "and he died nobly. So, in a measure, I am content."
Lantin and I stepped back into our car, now. Outside, as we rose above the ground, Denham called to us again.
"Good-bye, Wheeler! Good-bye, Lantin!"
I answered, waving to him at the car's window, and thus we left him, a dark, dwindling figure against the starlit fields of snow. We raced north, now, and sped on toward our own time, back to the year, the month, the day, when we had started. We swept down upon pinnacled Manhattan, through the warm darkness of the summer night, and after hovering for a time above the perplexing maze of buildings, sank gently down upon the roof from which we had started.
The car stopped, and we stepped out on the roof, looking around us strangely. The scene was the same as when we had left, the panorama of the city's lights around us, the brilliant stars above, and the stabbing search-lights of the anchored battleship.
Lantin stepped across the roof into his apartment. He snapped on the lights, then called to me. When I entered the room and stood beside him, he pointed mutely toward a clock above the fireplace. I looked, and a strange feeling swept over me.
We had made our momentous start from the roof at 10 o'clock exactly, when we had first ventured into time. And now it was but eight minutes past 10, but eight minutes later in that same night.
Eight minutes!
We had gone on into the future fifteen thousand years, had lain for days imprisoned, in the city of the cylinders and the city of the pit. We had met our friends of the pit, had planned and executed our daring escape, had fled madly to our car, pursued by the guards, and had then flashed south across countless leagues of ice. We had stayed for days at Kom, amid the wonders of Kom, had raced back north with the great fleet of Kethra, had met and battled the Kanlars, and had held the ravening thousands of the pit in check upon the great stair, with our friends. We had seen the Raider destroyed, had sped back in time to hang above the wonder-city of the Aztecs, while Aztec and Spaniard battled in the streets below us. Had sped across the world to Rome, in the days of its imperial glory, back through time to Seventeenth Century France, and so on to our own land, to stop once and part with the last of our friends and then speed down to the very roof from which we had made our start. From the far past to the far future, we had ranged through time, from the Rome of the Cæsars to the mighty city of the Khluns.
Eight minutes!