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CHAPTER 6
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.