The Second Murray Leinster Megapack (35 page)

“I won’t leave you!” cried Laura fiercely. “Maybe I can help!”

The lantern slipped from her grasp. It fell to the solidified surface underfoot. It cast queer shadows.

“Hold it,” said Bret sharply. “Look! The shadows. That’s the—wake of a boat! If we follow it, we can get on board.”

The possibility seemed to put new strength in both of them. They struggled for fifty yards more. For a hundred. The frozen eddies of the wake grew larger and more turbulent. Then they saw the boat which had made the froth. It was a gray shape upon gray water in a gray mist. It looked rather like something carved out of ice. It looked unspeakably desolate.

But when the rays of the lantern shone upon it, it lost its appearance of ghostliness and changed back to honest planks and solid untidiness. They saw its name, “Sarah J. Loomis, N. Y.”

* * * *

It was doubly difficult to make the last few yards to its side. The otherwise mirror-smooth surface of the river was here heaved up into great, rounded, glassy mounds, over which they slid horribly. But at long last they reached the side of the tug, and Brett put out the last remnant of his strength, and Laura pushed his bulk desperately. He reached the deck.

The door of the cabin was open. Laura tremblingly adjusted the field-cable about the bunk. Its blankets and mattresses ceased to be frozen and immovable, and became soft and inviting. She helped Brett to the mattress. He almost collapsed upon it.

“Now,” said Laura resolutely, “I’m going to see what I can do for you.”

She left the lantern burning in the cabin. She went away with a flashlight and the nullifier. In twenty minutes or so she came back with water. Hot water. And towels. And antiseptic.

“I’m an expert with the nullifier now,” she said cheerfully. “And on a boat they have everything. There’s an oil stove, and the machine made it work, and water in a tank, and food in an ice-box. I opened that. When I’ve re-bandaged that wound of yours, I’ll fix something to eat.”

They stayed on the tug for a period of which there could be no measure, of course, but which must have been equivalent to days. Laura was tireless in helping Brett. At first he grew feverish and horribly weak. He repeated his instructions to her in case anything should go wrong.

“But Harry, after all, with the nullifier as you’ve fixed it, we can both return to normal time,” she said anxiously. “We’re not likely to be found here.”

Brett shook his head grimly.

“My life’s not important enough to be saved that way. Listen, my dear! Cable is so vain he’s almost a maniac. Now that he’s trapped in this—this eternal now, he’s apt to go literally crazy from disappointment. Do you realize what he could do?”

Laura nodded, her features pinched.

“He could abduct people, as he did those poor friends of his. But if you have to have a doctor, and can’t help it, I don’t see why you should bother.”

“That’s not the point,” Brett told her; “It’s a matter of radio-activity. Radium has a half-period of about two thousand years. Uranium’s is infinitely longer, five times ten to the ninth—five billion years. Suppose Cable wanted to get even with the normal world in which he never cut a figure? Suppose he brought radium into accelerated time? What would happen? It’s always three degrees hotter than its surroundings. It’s always giving off heat. Suppose its time-rate were accelerated so that its half-period became a fraction of a second of normal time?”

“There’s not much radium,” Laura said faintly.

“Not much would be needed for damage. Figure the result if radium were brought into this time. To us, it would simply become deadly to handle. But in the normal world, if it took a full second to disintegrate, its temperature would go up to about three billion degrees, and iron turns to steam at three thousand. It would be literally one million times hotter than necessary to vaporize iron. Metal, stone, and even bricks would turn into incandescent vapor, which would give off cosmic and X-rays fierce enough to burn and maim for heaven knows how far, and would expand or explode with a violence beside which TNT would be a zephyr. But I think,” added Brett grimly, “that our time-rate is faster than that. I don’t think it would take a whole second for radium to destroy itself and everything around it.”

Laura shivered.

“Or he could use uranium,” said Brett more sternly still. “It might not seem as bad. But where there are milligrams of radium there are tons of uranium to be had. If he brought a mass of it into our time it might not create an explosion in normal time. It might disintegrate at what would seem a leisurely rate. It might take a year to destroy itself. But even a milligram of radium is nothing to play with, and this would be two thousand times as deadly. Do you know how much a milligram is? If you crush three aspirin tablets and divide the powder into a thousand parts, each part will be a milligram. A milligram of speeded-up uranium would make a nearly incurable burn in a fifth of a second, and there could be tons of it! If Cable put masses of that stuff about New York, nobody could approach it. No metal shield could stop its rays. Its radiation would make the very air radio-active, so that a hundred miles away you might breathe in poison which would sear your lungs. The same radiation would sterilize human beings whom it did not kill, and milder doses still would cause mutations or human monsters if babies were unlucky enough to be born!”

Laura twisted her hands together.

“I see,” she said slowly. “You can’t risk that!”

“No, I can’t! And once I return to normal time I can never come back to this instant unless I’m dragged back. If I stay in normal time a single second—how many years of this time would that amount to? I have to stay here and fight Cable!” Then Brett’s face became stern and implacable. “I’m stronger now. I’ll be up—well—we’ll call it tomorrow. I’ve designed a new nullifier which will take you and itself back into normal time, and then fight any other nullifier that tries to bring you back here. Get back to normal time with one of those around you, and you’ll stay.”

He did get up the next day, though there had been no faintest change in the gray silence about the motionless tugboat. He found a workbench down in the engine-room and worked there, with what metals and tools he found and brought into accelerated time. The members of the crew came to be familiar, standing like the naturally painted statues the Greeks were so fond of. Once, as he worked, he grinned and turned to Laura.

“I feel like I know these men,” he said drily. “They’ve been standing around so long. It’s funny that they’ll never know me. I hope some day to pay them back for what we’re doing to them.”

“Doing to them?” asked Laura, puzzled.

“We’re robbing them,” said Brett ruefully. “We have to. And they’re going to be very badly puzzled. For instance, there’s the stove. You’ve brought it into our time. The cook in the galley had merely turned his back to it. When, in normal time, he turns back to it—why—it will have been rusting in this time for several centuries. It will seem to him to have fallen into a heap of rust while he looked the other way. The bunks we’ve rested on—we had to make the blankets and mattresses soft—won’t have blankets or mattresses when they look at them. There’ll be only a little fine dust there. The ice-box will be simply a pile of rust-scales and cobweb, and what food we don’t use will be simply a fine powder so long decayed it will have no odor at all. I hope to pay for this damage, but it’s going to bother them. And I do hate to spoil these tools, but I need them!”

He was making two miniature nullifiers. When they were finished he tested them, and then carefully added the devices which would automatically counteract the field of any other nullifier which essayed to bring them into accelerated time.

Six meals later—as good a way of measuring time as any—he had altered the larger nullifier in the same way. He had Laura put one of the miniatures on herself. Only the cable showed, and it was not conspicuous. She could reach the tiny switch with ease.

“Now we invade New York,” he told her. “As soon as we get ashore, Laura, and on solid ground, you go down into a subway station or into a phone booth somewhere, and go back to normal time. Now Cable can’t bring you back to this time-rate, even if he finds you. I’ll go on and attend to him!”

But Laura smiled. They were in the cabin of the tug.

“My dear!” she said with soft eyes. “Do you think I would?”

“Why not?” demanded Brett. “What else do you propose?”

“Why, I’m going to stay with you!” said Laura fiercely. “After I’ve known you this long, and nursed you when you were hurt, do you think I’d desert you when you were going into danger?”

Brett tried to frown at her, and failed.

“I didn’t think you’d be so obstinate,” he admitted. “Hmmm. You’re safe, though. Throw that little switch and you go back to normal time and neither Cable nor I or anybody else can drag you back. So you can—escape me if you like. But I’m trying to guess what you’ll do if I—kiss you.”

He moved close to her. He touched her shoulder lightly, smiling down at her. She swayed toward him a little, her eyes shining.

Time really stood still before they separated.

“Now, I wonder why I didn’t guess that, either,” he said. “Come along, girl! We’ve got to wind up Cable so, we can run down to the City Hall—in normal time, my dear—and attend to some business.”

They left the tug behind them. They moved through the mist toward the New York shore. At long last they found it, and made their way up from the river’s surface. Brett’s first idea of finding a place to work in Jersey City had been altered by the discovery of the tug. It had turned out to be a lucky accident as he had been able to use tools in the machine-shop which he might not otherwise have chanced upon.

“First we must go to that building on Park Avenue where Cable hangs out and learn what’s happened,” Brett said to Laura when they reached the street level. “We must also see what’s happened to his friends.”

Laura looked puzzled. “But how do you know which building on Park Avenue it was, Harry?”

“The address was on a doormat at the bottom of the stair-well. I was using a flashlight freely then, you may remember. A swank apartment-house. No name. Just an address.”

He threw a flashlight on a street-sign so that the numerals would show out through the gray luminosity of all objects. Then they knew where they were. They walked briskly. Harry Brett now had in his pocket a revolver which he had found on the tug, and Laura was more adequately protected, but insensibly the atmosphere of gloom and of horror affected them. The blank-windowed, shadowless buildings, and the mist, and the silence. Especially the silence!

“I’m frightened!” said Laura, under her breath, presently.

“We’re there,” said Brett in a low tone. “This is the door.”

They went cautiously within the gray, glowing cave which was now the appearance of the foyer they had last seen lighted by candlelight. Now there was nothing. But they heard a noise. Somewhere, a woman was sobbing hysterically. It was a low-pitched, throaty gasping which grew higher and higher until her throat seemed to close. Then there was silence, and then it began again and went on, monotonous and uncontrollable. There was despair in those sobs, and horror, and something like mounting insanity.

Harry Brett switched on his flashlight. It shone through the open inner door and illuminated the figure of the lushly beautiful red-haired girl, Ruth, the girl reporter. She was bound cunningly in a chair so that she could not move hand or foot. With the beam focused upon her, she seemed the only real object in a world of unsubstantial dream-stuff. Her eyes were wide and fixed. Her features were drawn into the ultimate expression of horror. She sobbed again.

When the flashlight fell upon her, she shrieked. And instantly from all about her there burst a bedlam of cries and sobbings. It was sheer pandemonium, the inarticulate outcry of a dozen voices. Harry Brett’s flashlight swept from side to side. He saw the rest of Cable’s coterie. All of them were wrapped in ropes until they were like cocoons. Only their heads emerged. Their faces now almost were the faces of mad men and women. They cried out at Brett, screaming at him, cursing him hoarsely, gasping at him, or else pleading in voices which would have melted a stone.

Laura shrank close to the young scientist. The unholy tumult made his flesh crawl. He shivered. Then he turned his flashlight on himself.

There was a sudden, stark, incredulous silence. Then the tumult broke out again. But its tone was utterly different, if no less desperate.

His fingers shaking with a sick rage, Brett struck a match. There were candles everywhere. They were not burned out. They had been extinguished only after these poor folk were rendered helpless, so that they would have only the gray twilight about them and so that they would see each other as gray and unhuman images—and so that they would go mad with the horror of their situation. Cable had left them here to suffer, as punishment for having witnessed his humiliation at his own and Brett’s hands.

Brett set to work to free the nearest prisoner. When the first victim could complete his own release, Brett went on to the next. The red-headed girl fainted dead away as she tried to arise from the chair in which she had been bound. Laura lighted more candles until the room was once more ablaze with light. Toward the end of the task of releasing them, Brett spoke to them jerkily.

“I’ve found a way to return you to normal time,” he told them grimly. “It’s permanent. Cable will never be able to drag you back to this time again. But I need some help. He can do enormous damage if he isn’t caught. Who’ll help me catch him?”