The Second Murray Leinster Megapack (36 page)

But these men were half-crazed and utterly broken by the terror they had been through. They babbled hysterically, ignoring the call for volunteers. They only pleaded desperately to be returned to the normal world again.

In the end Brett bunched them all in the middle of the room, crowding them as closely as possible. He put the field-cable of the modified nullifier—modified at the tugboat’s work-bench—around them so they would all be within its influence, its action could not be reversed—not until they were in normal time, nor until they reversed it themselves. But by the time they had taken one breath in normal time every object or living thing left in accelerated time would have turned to dust or crumbling oxide.

“Now listen!” said Brett savagely. “There’s something you’ve got to do as soon as you get back. You want to get out of this building, of course. You may have trouble explaining how you got into it.” He looked them over, and they were too nerve-racked to be moved by anything but terror of the eternal now. “But,” went on Brett, “though Cable’s device can’t bring you back out of normal time, because centuries will have elapsed here before you finish drawing a breath, this machine could. Therefore, as soon as you’re back, smash it! Stamp on it! Batter it flat! Wreck it! Don’t neglect to do what I tell you.”

They babbled desperate promises, and they were in such awful terror of return that they probably would obey his orders.

Then Brett pressed the button of the switch.

CHAPTER V

A Score is Paid

Dead silence ensued. After the babbling, it was as abrupt as a blow. The motley group was frozen in the midst of gestures and sobs and nerve-racked grimaces. They had been returned to a normal time-rate, and they could not be drawn back to this time-rate by Cable’s present instrument. Brett had an instant’s weary amusement over the thought that they would never admire any other scientist. The red-haired girl, Ruth, would be so hysterical in her aversion to even the memory of this experience that it was unlikely that she would ever write any news account of it. But there were still important details to be wound up.

“Cable’s still loose,” said Brett bitterly. “He must have thought that you and I went off to hide somewhere and use the machine I’d repaired. He thinks we’re back in normal time ourselves. So he avenged himself on the people who’d seen him defeated, and he’ll try to get even with the world for his own despair. Perhaps he is hunting for us. If he thinks of bringing radium or uranium to this time-rate it would wreck the world.”

“What are you going to do?” asked Laura.

“Find him!” said Brett, more savagely still. “I’m going to take you to the office where we were being introduced when all this began. I’m going to see you back in normal time, and then I’ll hunt up Cable. If I ever find him, I’ll come back to normal time. If I don’t find him, I hate to think what it’ll mean.”

He shrugged.

“Do you suppose he could be at that little workshop?” Laura asked.

“We’ll see first,” said Brett; “I picked up a letterhead on the workbench. Maybe it’s the address.”

It was. They went through the gray mist and the dreadful city. They located the doorway, two steps up, climbed stairs, and found the door which would open, and the bars which could convert the workshop into a prison. There Brett made a light and bitterly regarded what he found. He pointed to the scrapings of rubber insulation and to bits of clipped-off wire.

“There’s proof that I’m a fool,” he said savagely. “He knew I’d solved the problem of returning things to normal time. He heard me tell you so. So when we got away and he failed to kill us, he looked at the scraps where I’d worked. Oh, how dumb I was! He found bits of wire and insulation. He knew I’d added a flexible control to his nullifier, and it could only have been to restore the switch to its original place in the design! So he’s tried it in his turn!”

A savage fury filled Brett. It was like a furious remorse, because if Cable could return to normal time, now, he could make more nullifiers and enter a new ghostly world at any time to commit inconceivable crimes with impunity. In the last analysis this would be Brett’s fault, because he had first devised the mass-nullifying apparatus.

Brett groaned. Then Laura caught his arm.

“Harry! What’s that?”

There was a sound in the dead city outside; an actual sound in the clamorous stillness. It was a humming sound, faint at first.

“Good grief!” said Brett. “A car!” He listened incredulously. “That’s it! He figures we’re back in normal time. Now he can go back when he pleases! So he’s punished everybody who saw him licked, and—you see? He’ll load up a car with loot and drive it somewhere out of New York,-most likely. He’ll return to normal time a hundred—two hundred miles away! I’ve got to get him now! You’re all right! Go to your uncle’s office and throw that switch.”

Brett threw the last word’s over his shoulder as he plunged out of the workshop in which first he, and then Cable by studying the evidence of the work he’d done, had solved the problem of leaving the world where time stood still. He raced through the gray mist, dodging the ghostly motionless figures which were people.

The noise of the car grew louder, died down, and grew louder still. Brett knew, of course, the logical place for Cable to go. To the place where he had left his victims, because they had gathered riches for themselves. It would be literally the one place where he could add most of his loot with the least trouble. And of course, to a man with the maniacal vanity of Cable, there would be the added attraction of proving to them their own exceeding stupidity and his wisdom.

* * * *

Brett halted short of his destination, his jaws taut and the revolver from the tugboat out and ready in his hand. He waited grimly. The car stopped. He heard Cable get out, invisible in the mist. He heard the car-door slam. Habit is so strong that, although believing himself the only living person at large on an entire planet in the Eternal-now time, Cable had closed the car-door behind him. He marched into the building. Brett saw the dim, yellowish glow of his flashlight. Savagely Brett moved forward.

To cut off Cable’s escape, Brett went first to the car. He opened the door and fumbled for the ignition-key. It was gone. Habit had made Cable take it, before getting out of the car. Brett used his own flash to make sure. Yes, the key was gone. But the back was loaded with loot—and there was a nullifier on the front seat! Cable had been using it to gather his loot, but here and here alone he would not need it.

Brett took the nullifier away from the car. He knotted its field-cable over his shoulder. Then he heard a sound from inside the building. He could picture it in detail—Cable stunned, to see candlelight flooding the foyer once more when he had left his victims in the gray twilight alone, Cable creeping cautiously to see where his prisoners had been left to go mad in hopelessness, to find the ropes strewn on the floor and the men and women in unmistakable stasis, in iron-hard immobility, returned to normal time-rate, and then Cable frenziedly trying to work the nullifier he could see so plainly with its field-cable encircling the group. He could not stir it, of course. Brett heard him cry out in his rage. He almost bellowed. Brett heard him curse horribly.

Then, an instant later, he came running and raging out of the street door. It is most likely that he meant to get his own nullifier from the car, to fetch back his victims one by one and wreak upon them an insane vengeance for outwitting him. The point at which vanity merges into insanity is hard to find. The only offense anyone had committed against Cable was the discovery that he was a fool, but that offense had driven him to maniacal cruelty!

“Hold it!” snapped Brett coldly, from the mist. “Put up your hands!”

Cable gasped. Then he roared in crazy wrath. The gray mist was split by gun-flashes. An automatic pistol roared itself empty. Cable swerved in his running and rushed toward Brett’s voice. Brett fired. Cable stopped short. He had come to have an implicit belief that only he possessed weapons. Brett fired again, though not to wound.

“You’re going to drop that gun,” said Brett harshly, “and put up your hands!”

Cable screamed with impotent rage. It was unearthly to hear such a cry from human lips. It echoed and reechoed from all the tall towers hidden in the twilight. Then Cable turned and plunged for the car. Brett fired yet again. Glass tinkled from a car-window.

“I only need an excuse to kill you,” raged Brett. “Stop!”

The car-starter whirred. The motor caught. Cable must have moved like an uncannily precise automaton in the midst of all his passion, to have put in the key and turned it without fumbling. Gears clashed. The car roared into motion. Brett ran toward it. It rolled away.

He emptied his revolver after it, but it vanished in the mist. It turned a corner. He heard its brakes squeal, and then it roared on, and turned again. He heard its sound go away and away, headed north on one of the wide north-and-south avenues. Even a man in a passion of outraged vanity and terror could thread the motionless traffic. The car turned west. If It reached the Hudson Drive, it could go on for hundreds of miles, and pursuit would be useless and discovery impossible. And if Cable did not miss the nullifier from beside him—and with all the interior of the car a shadowless gray luminosity he was not likely to—he might go on and on until his gasoline went low and he needed more. Then he would seek out a tank-truck, or another car from which he could siphon fuel. In either case he would need, the mass-nullifier to make the gasoline a liquid. And then he would discover that he had no nullifier.

Brett felt sick. But then he heard Laura calling desperately in the gray silence. “Harry! Harry!”

He moved toward her.

“I’m all right,” he said unsteadily. “You heard the shots?”

“Did he shoot you?”

“No, but he’s dead,” Brett lied quickly. “Don’t come here.”

He went quickly toward the sound of her voice. She appeared in the mist. She clung to him.

“I was afraid you’d been killed,” she sobbed.

Brett kissed her and firmly led her away.

“We’re going to your uncle’s office,” he said evenly. “We’ll turn the switches of our two nullifiers there.”

Then he stopped suddenly. He slipped Cable’s nullifier from his shoulder and put it on the ground. He crushed it under his heel. He stamped it into uselessness, into a merely cryptic mass of battered metal. Then he fumbled at the next corner and dropped it into a street-drainage opening. It was in accelerated time, and if it should ever be found in normal time it would be after thousands of millions of years of its own time-rate’s rusting. It would be merely a lump of oxide, which no one would think of examining.

He led the way on again. He was haunted by the knowledge of what was bound to happen somewhere a hundred or two hundred miles away, in this time-rate. Cable would discover that his nullifier was gone. He would have a car, almost out of gasoline, and probably millions of dollars in money and gems. But he would have no food or water, and there would not be one drop of water or one morsel of food anywhere on earth that he could use.

He might find his way into towns, and into groceries and fruit-markets, and feel food and drink beneath his fingers. He might cast a light upon it and look at it. But he could not stir it. He might try hopelessly to walk back to New York, because there might be crumbs remaining where he had left his victims to die. But he would never make it. Somewhere, sometime, stumbling through a gray mist, he would fall from weakness and not be able to rise again… And—well—in normal time someone might notice a little heap of dust and a few fragments of rotted bone, but it would not be conspicuous. Nobody would notice a hopelessly oxidized watch or other trinket, so far gone in rust as not to be recognizable…

Brett hoped Laura hadn’t heard the car in flight. If she ever mentioned it, he would try to persuade her that she was mistaken. Because there was absolutely nothing that could be done now. Nothing whatever.

“I pick your uncle’s office to go back to normal time in, because we’ll make less fuss turning up there than anywhere else,” he said, in an attempt at a conversational tone. “When Cable’s friends turn up, in a state of nervous collapse, in somebody’s drawing-room, it is going to make talk. But what we want is to get quietly down to the City Hall and get married.”

She stopped, and he kissed her.

“And then, I’ve something to do. I’ve a new line to work out on those mass-nullifiers.”

“No!” she said fearfully. “Once we’re back in normal time, you mustn’t ever touch one again.”

“This will be different,” he told her. “While I was laid up on the tug, I figured out a way to regulate the amount of mass one would take out of a substance. I think I can put a thing in any time-rate I want. And radium or uranium would be deadly at a time-rate approaching infinity, like ours, but if we could choose a half-period of five hundred years, or one hundred, why, that would be power! Atomic power! There’d be no reason to worry about the exhaustion of coal and oil, then.”

She stopped again. Again he kissed her.

“And I’d like to make some money,” he told her humbly, “because I want to give you things. Also I think I ought to pay for the damage Cable did with the nullifiers I invented. That will run into pretty big sums. And I’d like to put up a monument to him. Poor devil! He threw away his life trying to be a great man. But if he’s responsible for my solving the problem of atomic power, why not a monument to him?”