CHAPTER I -The "Vanishing Place"
Look at that plane! That fellow's crazy! Took off
with the wind behind him! He'll nose dive before he clears the clubhouse! He'll
crash into those trees along the edge of the golf course!"
Four destinies rocket through the strange
Time-Space of the Fourth Dimension in Tode's marvelous Atom-Smasher.
The group on the field at Westbury, Long Island,
held their breaths as they watched James Dent take off in the wildest, most
erratic flight that they had ever seen. Under lowering storm clouds, with the
wind roaring half a hurricane behind him, Dent spiraled upward as if
unconscious of the laws of Earthly gravity.
"I told you so! You ought to have stopped
him, even if it is his private plane! A feller's got no business trying to
break his neck! Look there! He's cleared those trees after all!"
James Dent had cleared them, and the clubhouse
too, and was already disappearing across the Hempstead Plains, looking like a
leaf whirling up in a winter storm. At a height of five hundred feet he sped
eastward.
"Didn't tell you where he was going?"
"Nope, acted like a crazy man. Something on
his mind sure. Wherever he's bound for, he'll never get there!"
But James Dent was already out of sight, and the
little group dispersed. And Dent, winging his way due east, over the oak
barrens of central Long Island, was conscious neither of the storm that howled
about him nor of the excitement that his rash take-off had occasioned.
The rain lashed him in the open cockpit, the
ground fog swirled about him, and, though it was still afternoon, there brooded
a somber twilight over the wastes. But in his mind Dent was already
anticipating his descent at the "Vanishing Place," as the natives
called it near Peconic Bay.
The "Vanishing Place" was so called
because of the terrible and inexplicable catastrophe that had occurred there
five years previously. In the two-century-old farmhouse, Miles Parrish, the
world's greatest authority on physical chemistry, had been conducting
investigations into the structure of the atom.
James Dent and Lucius Tode had been associated
with old Parrish in this work, which, carried to a successful issue, would
revolutionize the social organization of the world. The energy locked up in the
atom is so stupendous that, as Eddington indicated, a thimbleful of coal,
disintegrated, would carry the Mauretania from England to America and back
again. To unlock this energy would be to set man free from bondage, to restore
the pristine leisure and happiness of Eden.
And because the three men were playing with deadly
forces, of incalculable power, this deserted spot had been selected for the
carrying on of the investigations. The old farmhouse had been converted into a
laboratory. For days together the three had bent over their tubes and
laboratory apparatus, hardly eating or sleeping. And the day had come when
success had seemed almost within their grasp.
Dent had received six months' leave of absence
from his duties at Columbia University in order to prosecute the experiments.
As the weeks went by, and the blind track that the three were following opened
into a clear road, a sort of madness settled upon every one of them.
The Planck-Bohr quantum theory that the energy of
a body cannot vary continuously, but only by a certain finite amount, or exact
multiples of this amount, had been the key that unlocked the door. But always
it had been Lucius Tode who led the way. Tode was a graduate of the University
of Virginia, and accounted one of the most brilliant minds of his generation.
At thirty, he stood head and shoulders above his contemporaries.
Dark, handsome, fearless, with a will power that
nothing seemed able to subdue, he had taken the leadership away from old Miles
Parrish, who eagerly and without thought of his own reputation followed in his
assistant's footsteps.
There were the three men—and there was the girl,
Lucille Parrish, the child of Miles's old age. Seventeen, when the catastrophe
occurred, she had come out to the deserted spot sometimes of a Sunday from her
boarding school at Garden City.
And Tode had found time to make love to her when
he rushed her back to her school in his high-powered foreign car!
Jim Dent had known nothing of that until after the
catastrophe. Lucille had been afraid of him, afraid to open her mouth upon the
subject even to her father. And she had been fascinated too, as a young girl
may well be, when a fascinating man of thirty uses his arts to win her.
It was only by chance that Jim had failed to be
involved in the hideous catastrophe that had stamped the old farmhouse with the
name of "Vanishing Place" whenever the natives spoke of it.
"Two Killed in Laboratory Explosion!"
was the heading in the next morning's paper which gave Jim his first intimation
of the accident. He had been to Columbia overnight to look up a new publication
that contained an article on the hydrogen spectrum.
It was only a long paragraph, and the names of
Parrish and Tode meant nothing to the man who had written it. But Jim had taken
train to Hempstead, taxied to the flying fields, and essayed his first plane
ride to Peconic Bay, in the charge of a pilot.
A group of natives, three newspaper men and a
Suffolk County policeman were near the spot where the farmhouse had been—near
the spot, not on it.
For where the farmhouse had been was a great pool
of stagnant water, black as ink, covering an expanse of perhaps three-quarters
of an acre.
"No, sir, there was no explosion," said
the officer. "At least, none of these fellows heard anything. Just a—you
tell the Professor, Mr. Lumm."
"It was about half-past eight last night, Mr.
Dent," said Andrew Lumm, who kept the village store a mile away.
"Ground seemed to rock. Earthquake, I says to myself, holdin' on to the
door. But it wasn't no earthquake. Too gentle for that. Nothin' broke, not even
a plate. Then I says to Mrs. Lumm, 'They're gone, poor fellers, and I allus
knowed it would be that way. It's lucky young Mr. Dent went out last night on
the 7.15.'
"We hurried here, but there wasn't no sign of
the place, jest a hole on the ground with a sort of sticky mud in it. Water's
been fillin' in since then, but I guess it's reached its level now. They jest blowed
themselves to bits, Mr. Dent."
"Tell him about the vi'let light, Andy,"
put in one of the bystanders.
"Yeah, like a pillar of vi'let fire that
were, Mr. Dent. We seed it through the trees, but by the time we got here it
was 'most gone. Gosh, that throwed a scare into some of us!"
"It was Mr. Tode's soul a-burnin',"
squeaked Granpop Dawes. "I allus said that feller'd come to no good
end."
The group shook their heads and remained silent.
It was clear that, if they did not share Granpop Dawes's opinion, at least they
considered it not without the bounds of plausibility. Lucius Tode had created a
bad impression among the natives.
Jim Dent stooped and picked up something lying
imbedded in the mud at the edge of the black pool, and slipped it into his
pocket. He had been present at the inquest and had gone back to Columbia. That
had been five years before.
Professor McDowd, the palaeontologist, had
identified the object Jim had found as the milk molar of merychippus insignis,
the miocene representative of the modern horse. And that had made Jim Dent
think furiously.
The catastrophe must have been a gigantic one to
have flung up that fossil tooth from strata far beneath the level of the
earth's surface. More, there were even traces of archaean deposits around the
borders of the pool, whose depth, in the center, was ascertained to be 164
feet.
Black, silent, uninhabited, unstirred save by a
passing breeze, the pool had remained those five years past. The spot was
shunned as haunted or accursed by the superstitious country folks. Dense
underbrush had grown up around it.
Periodically, Jim had gone out to visit it. That
was how he had come to invest in a private plane. It was only an hour to the
flying-fields, and less than an hour from there to Peconic Bay. What he
expected to achieve he did not know. In the back of his mind was the belief
that some day he would light upon some clue that would tell something of the
unusual catastrophe.
And then that afternoon he had been shaken to the
depths when a message came to him in Lucille's voice over the telephone:
"I've heard from dad!"
Winging his way eastward through the storm, Jim
Dent was mentally reconstructing all that had led up to the present moment.
Lucille had finished her high school course and
gone into business life. Jim had found a position for her as secretary to a
small group of physicists, who were conducting private investigations, a
position for which her training well fitted her. She had done well. He had kept
in touch with her.
Six months before, their relations had altered.
They had realized that they were in love with each other. In the months that
followed they had discovered all sorts of things about each other that neither
had suspected, which might be summed up by saying that they had become all in
all to each other.
It was so amazing, this transformation of ordinary
friendship into radiant love, that they were still bewildered over it. They
were to be married at the end of the year.
It was then that Lucille had first told Jim about
Lucius's wooing, and her fear of the man. Apart from that, both had refrained,
by tacit agreement, from making reference to the past.
And then, that afternoon, there sounded Lucille's
voice over the telephone, "I've heard from dad!"
"From—your father? You're mistaken,
dear!"
"No, Jim, I'm not mistaken. He called me on
the 'phone two hours ago. I couldn't mistake his voice, and, besides, he called
me "Lucy," like he used to do. He told me to come at once to the
Vanishing Place, but not to tell a soul unless I wished to do him a great evil.
Then he rang off."
"Where are you now?" asked Jim.
"I'm 'phoning from Amityville. I took the
train immediately, but I was so frightened, and—and at last I decide I must
tell you. I didn't think dad would have minded my telling you. So I got out.
There's another train in a few minutes, and I shall go on to Hampton Bays and
walk the two miles to the Vanishing Place. I—I'll meet you there."
"Lucille, wait! Can't you meet me somewhere
else, and we'll go on together. I'll get my plane and—"
"Oh, I just can't wait, Jim! I'm in such
terror that I won't find dad when I get there. And he told me to tell nobody.
I—I'll meet you at the Vanishing Place, Jim."
And so great had been her agitation that with that
arrangement Jim had had to rest content. He had taken a taxi out to the flying
fields at once.
In half an hour he would know what had happened.
And he was obsessed by the terror that he would not find Lucille or anything
except the lonely pool.
That was why he opened the throttle and drove on
wildly through the scurrying wraiths of mist, pierced by the tops of trees that
at times rose dangerously near the spreading wings.
That gap in the trees was Lake Ronkokoma. Not far
now! Jim would know soon. But as he flew, vague fears that had beset his mind
since he had received Lucille's message began to crystallize into the single
fear of Tode. If Parrish was really alive—why not Tode too?
Beneath the polish and the surface comradeship,
Jim had always been conscious of some diablerie about the man, of some inner
life of which he knew nothing. Something unscrupulous and relentless, something
infinitely cruel—as when he had tested the Atom Smasher on a stray cur that had
run into the laboratory, not for experimentation, but in mere ruthless
savagery, converting the living beast instantly into a shapeless mass of flesh
and bone.
And Tode had known more about the Atom Smasher—as
they affectionately called the mechanism for releasing atomic energy—than old
Parrish and he together. Suppose Lucille's story were true! Suppose old Parrish
were actually alive, suppose Tode were responsible for some designed scheme
which would, in the end place Lucille in his power!
Wild thoughts and fears—but Jim would soon know.
And with throttle stretched to the limit he went roaring over the scrub oak
toward Peconic Bay.
It was beginning to grow dark, almost too dark for
landing. But now Jim could feel the tang of the salt wind upon his face. He
slowed down. The fog was as thick as ever, but the scrub oak had given place to
more open country. In a minute or two he ought to sight some landmark. Yes, he
had overshot his mark, for suddenly, through a gap in the mists, he saw the
line of breakers forming a white ridge upon the sand.
A mile southward! Jim knew where he was now, for
he knew every curve of that shore. He banked and turned. And then he saw
something that for an instant chilled his blood.
Not far away, and not far beneath him, a ghostly
violet haze was spreading through the fog, and the fog itself was coiling back
from it until it formed a dense white wall.
For a moment Jim's hand was paralysed upon the
stick. The next, his decision was made. He closed his throttle and went down in
a slow descent right toward the heart of that column of lavender smoke that
seemed to be springing straight up out of the ground. "A pillar of violet
fire!" It could not have been described better.
The plane dived through the dense wall of fog,
which for a moment shut out the violet fire completely. Then Jim was through,
and almost immediately beneath him lay the black and glassy surface of the
pool. Out of the very heart of it rose the fire, burning like some infernal
flame that consumed nothing, and between it and the fog was a space of almost
translucent air, extending to the borders of the pool.
Jim began to circle the pool to find a
landing-place. But as he looked down, the surface of the pool began to change
its aspect.
In place of the unruffled calm, it began to work
with some devil's yeast all around the central pillar of flame, until its
depths seemed to be churned up in frothy masses and the movement extended
almost to the circumference. Then the whole surface of the water began to tilt
and sway with a slow, shimmering, undulatory movement, as if it was a giant
roulette wheel in rotation.
And something was materializing out of the heart
of the violet flame itself.
It was a face—a human face, with bestial features,
distorted and enormously magnified through the substance in which it was. Such
a face as might look back upon an observer out of one of those distorting
mirrors at Coney Island, or some other place of popular amusement, but twisted
and enlarged beyond conception, so that it covered half the area of a city
block.
Curiously blurred, too, as if each atom of that
face was in isolated motion on its own account. And beneath the face appeared
the vague outlines of a hand, apparently manipulating some sort of infernal
mechanism.
And that face, enlarged as it was out of all
proportion, filled Jim's heart with greater horror than any face he had ever
known.
For it was the visage of Lucius Tode, and on those
huge and distorted features was something that looked like a diabolical smile.
Everything vanished. Jim was back in the
surrounding wall of fog. Instinctively he banked again. He strove to drive the
horror from his brain. He must circle, circle incessantly, in the hope of
finding Lucille. She must have already arrived. But if she had not fallen into
Tode's power, she would hear the roaring of the plane and manage to signal him.
He circled back into the clear space between the
white and the violet, and now he saw that the effect upon the pool was still
more pronounced. The waters were rising up in a rim all around, and yet not
overflowing. They were standing up like a bowl of clay upon the potter's wheel,
and down in the depths Jim could see the head and shoulders of Tode, much less
magnified, more natural in appearance, and less blurred. And Tode was looking
up at him and pointing that infernal mechanism at him—something that looked
like the tube of a telescope.
Suddenly the plane shivered and stood still. The
motor died abruptly. The stick went dead. And yet the plane did not fall. As if
upheld by the same repulsive force that drove back the white fog, it simply
hung suspended three hundred feet above the heart of the violet flame.
Then—there was no longer any plane. The stick had
melted in Jim's hand, the wings dissolved like wreaths of mist. The entire body
had disintegrated into nothingness. Jim sat suspended in the void, and felt
himself very slowly descending into the violet column.
Down into the vortex of that bubbling pool, which
rimmed him on all sides ... down into the central aperture out of which emerged
the leering face of Tode! And as he dropped Jim heard, thin, faint, and very
far away, the despairing cry of Lucille....
CHAPTER II - Old Friends—and
Foes
Jim must have lapsed into unconsciousness, for
when he opened his eyes there was a gap in his consciousness of the passage of
time, though none in his memory. He opened his eyes, and instantly he
remembered everything.
Only a brief interval could have elapsed, for it
was not quite dark. The fog and the violet flame had cleared away. Overhead a
few stars twinkled. Jim was lying on his side, half-buried in the black, slimy
mud of the dried up pool.
There was nothing but the smooth, shelving mud
basin, with the scrub oak surrounding it. Tode and the machine had vanished.
Jim pulled himself with an effort out of the
sucking mud, and, heavily clogged with it, began to make his way toward the margin.
Stumbling, struggling through the viscid ooze, he
shouted Lucille's name despairingly. But no answer came, and his cries only
made the utter silence all about him seem more fearsome.
Exhausted by his efforts, he gained the edge of
the pool at last, and stopped, trying to orientate himself. As he did so, he
saw a human face peering at him out of a clump of scrub oak.
It was the face of an aged man, with a long white
beard and rags of clothes that were festooned about him. Jim took a step toward
it, shouting a challenge. Next moment it had hurled itself out of its shelter
toward him, and two skeletonlike arms were twined about his shoulders, while
the fingers worked upward toward his throat.
The face was that of a madman, crazed by fear. And
Jim recognized it. It was the face of Professor Parrish.
Parrish, the trim, immaculate, clean-shaven,
urbane old man, whose lectures, imbued with wit and scholarship, had always
been the delight of his classes—Parrish reduced to this gibbering maniac! And
yet Parrish himself, returned to the site of their experiments after five
years!
So fierce was the old man's onset, so desperate
his clutch, that for a half-minute or more Jim was reduced to fighting for his
life. The clawing fingers, armed with long nails, furrowed Jim's throat, there
was a terrific strength in the body, wasted though it was almost to a skeleton.
But it was only for a half-minute that old
Parrish's endurance lasted. Suddenly the old man went limp and tottered
forward, dropped upon the ground. Jim bent over him.
"Parrish, you know me! I'm Jim Dent!" he
cried. "I came here to save you."
Parrish was muttering something. Jim caught the
words "Tode," and "God help Lucille!"
"Parrish, I'm Jim Dent!" Jim cried
again, and the old man, shuddering, opened his eyes and recognized him.
"Jim!" he muttered. "Jim Dent! Then
where is she? I got away from that devil, found farmhouse empty, got telephone
book, found her and 'phoned her. Told her to come. Save—Lucille!"
He fell back, his eyes closed. Jim crouched over
the unconscious old man. He was in a state of utter perplexity. He could not
quite gather what Parrish had been trying to tell him, and it was with
difficulty that he could focus his mind upon the situation, so great had been
the shock of finding his former chief in that condition.
What had become of his plane, and where was
Lucille? Jim was positive that he had heard her cry for help out of the vortex
in the water.
But there was no water, only the circle of black
mud extended in the starlight.
Again and again Jim shouted Lucille's name, and
his cries went echoing away through the scrub without result.
Jim looked down at the unconscious old man beside
him. He must get Parrish away, get him to Andy Lumm's. He bent over him again
and raised him in his arms.
Suddenly he heard two familiar sounds behind him,
two dull thumps that sounded less like explosions than echoes, long drawn out,
and receding into infinity. There was no other sound quite like them that he
had ever heard.
They were the snap of the electrical discharge as
the Atom Smasher began to operate, and why the snap had sounded like a heavy
body falling a long distance away, was not known.
Tode had said one day, with what Jim had taken for
sarcasm, that they represented the wave series of a single sound extended in
time to make four-dimensional action, but Jim had never considered the
explanation seriously.
That sound, bringing back all Jim's memories of
their experiments, brought him to his feet sharply. He swung around. The
surface of the pool was a bubbling, seething mass of mud and water. And over
its surface that faint violet haze was beginning to spread.
In the center where the light was thickest,
something like a gyroscope appeared to be revolving. Out of the gyroscope
something was beginning to project—that infernal tube of Lucius Tode. And Jim
knew that in the heart of the flame that enormous, distorted face of Lucius
Tode would again be visible.
The human nervous system can only endure a certain
amount of impact. The sight of that ghastly flame, already condensing into a
violet pillar, was more than Jim could stand. He dragged old Parrish to his
feet and started off with him into the thickest part of the undergrowth.
A fearful scream behind him stopped him at the
very edge of the scrub. He looked back, still supporting the half-conscious old
man in his arms. The violet flame was shooting up in a straight pillar, the
whole central portion of the pool was dry, and the waters were heaped up all
around it.
From the slightly elevated spot where Jim stood,
he could see Tode holding Lucille in his arms in the very heart of the fire,
which threw a pale, fluorescent light over their faces. Tode was wearing a
spotted skin, like that of a leopard, and Lucille was in the blue frock that
she had worn when Jim and she had dinner together two evenings before.
Jim dropped old Parrish, shouted in answer, and
dashed back like a madman down the slope into the solid wall of water.
He fought his way desperately through that wall,
which seemed of the consistency of soft rubber or treacle, as if some subtle
change had taken place in its molecular isomers. It adhered to him without
wetting him, and he plunged through it, hearing Lucille cry out again, and yet
again.
And now he was through, and once more struggling
over the viscid surface of the pond. Behind him he heard old Parrish
blundering, and screeching at the top of his voice, but he paid no attention to
him.
He could see Lucille more clearly, and the large,
hazy outlines of Tode's features were beginning to assume the proper
proportions. There was a diabolical leer upon Tode's face, unchanged during the
five years since Jim had seen him last, except that it had become more evil,
more powerful. The enormous and distorted face that Jim had seen had been simply
due to the presence of some refracting medium.
The pillar of violet light was thinning, spreading
out over the pool, but Jim could now see the scene more clearly than before,
even as he rushed onward.
The machine was inside what looked like a flat
boat, but more circular than a boat, and apparently was made of some metal
resembling aluminum. Either from the metal hull or from the mechanism inside it
there was emitted a pungent odor resembling chlorine.
The mechanism itself bore some resemblance to the
old Atom Smasher of five years before, but it appeared to be immensely more
complicated. Wheels of various sizes were set at every conceivable angle around
the central tube, from which the violet light was emanating, and all were
rotating and gyrating so fast that they looked like discs of light. The boat
itself was trembling, and this movement appeared to be communicated to the
boiling mud in the central part of the pool.
As Jim tried to leap down through the sucking mud
to snatch Lucille from Tode, the latter stopped, straightened himself, and
pointed a short tube at Jim's heart.
Jim felt as if an enormous, invisible force had
struck him in the chest. It was apparently the same repulsive force that had
driven back the waters. The shock was not a violent one. It did not throw him
off his feet. It merely pushed him slowly and irresistibly backward.
And the whole picture was beginning to fade.
Etched sharply in the violet light one moment, it now looked like a drawing
that had been covered with tissue paper.
The outlines were dissolving into a haze—or,
rather, each line seemed reproduced an infinite number of times, as the edge of
a vibrating saw shows an infinitude of edges. The violet fire was becoming
still more diffused. It hovered over the waters, a pale, flickering glow. And
simultaneously the walls of water began to break and come surging forward.
Jim saw Lucille stretching out her arms toward
him, and tried to struggle forward, but in vain. She cried out his name, and he
put all his strength into that desperate futile struggle to reach her. But he
was being borne backward by the invisible power in the tube. The rushing
torrent was surging about his knees; grew waist deep: in another moment Jim was
swimming for his life against the furious flood.
Suddenly, however, the tremendous pressure on his
chest was relaxed. Tode had turned the tube away from him. He was leaning
forward out of the boat and grasped old Parrish, who had been flung violently against
it by the dissolving waters.
The same flood carried Jim to the boat's side.
Here, however, the flood was only knee deep, owing to the repulsion still being
exercised by the violet light, which was glimmering feebly. Jim found his feet
and leaped into the craft. He grasped Lucille in his arms.
He turned to confront Tode, who had just dragged
old Parrish over the side. The three men confronted one another.
"Turn that tube on me, and I'll jump into
your damn machinery and bust it!" Jim shouted.
An ironical expression came on Tode's face. It was
clear that he still considered himself master of the situation. "At the
immediate moment, Dent, the lives of all of us depend upon your keeping
absolutely still," he answered. "Take my advice and sit down!"
Jim saw Lucille's face, ghastly in the faint
violet light that played about it. The girl had fainted. She was lying
unconscious, her feet against the circular metal plate that protected the
machinery, her head upon the rail that ran around the boat's upper edge. Tode,
without waiting for Jim's answer, stepped over the plate and took his seat at a
sort of instrument board with control levers and thumb screws that apparently
controlled the needles on four dials. He touched a button, and instantly the
violet light disappeared.
With its vanishing, the waves came surging
forward, and lapped violently against the hull, as if about to overwhelm the
vessel, which, however, seemed immovable. It simply rose higher in the water.
Jim understood the cause of this. Those gyroscopes
would retain the hull in the same position against anything but a mechanical
force strong enough to ruin it. He watched Tode as he sat at the instrument
board, which was illuminated by two tiny lights of what looked like
mercury-vapor. His face, handsome and cruel as ever, was tense as he
manipulated the thumb screws. Beside him lay Parrish, faintly whimpering. The
old man had evidently abandoned all hope of effecting his escape, or of
rescuing his daughter.
It was unbearable to have to sit there, knowing
that the three of them were absolutely at Tode's mercy, and yet there was
nothing else to do.
Tode looked up with a saturnine smile. "It's
a delicate operation to blur the present without shooting out a hundred years
or so in time," he said, "but my micrometer's pretty accurate, Dent.
Don't move, I caution you!" He smiled again. "Yes, Dent, time is
something like the fourth dimension of space, as we believed in the old days,
and I've proved it."
Jim saw Tode touch the screw that controlled the
fourth dial, and instantly it was borne in on him that each of the dials
controlled one spatial dimension. This fourth, then, was the time dimension!
Could it be true that Tode had solved the
practical problem of traveling in time, theoretically implied since the
discoveries of Einstein?
He had known in the old days that the Atom Smasher
might be adapted to this purpose, but neither Parrish nor he had dreamed of
turning aside from their endeavor to utilize it for the purpose of releasing
atomic energy.
Thump! Thump! The familiar old sound, rushing back
into memory after all those years, the release of the electrical discharge,
echoing through infinity! The scrub around the pool blurred and was gone. A
vast gray panorama extended itself on either side of them.
They were travelling—in space—and time too. Jim no
longer doubted. And, chilled with horror, he sat there, his arm about Lucille's
unconscious form.
CHAPTER III - Into the Infinite
How long he sat there he did not know. Minutes or
hours seemed all the same to him. Nothing but that gray monochrome, of neither
light nor darkness, that endless panorama of miles and years, blended together
into this chaos!
But suddenly there came a shout from Tode. The
blur ceased, the lights flickered. Again there sounded the two thumps of the
electrical discharge. The vibrating mechanism grew steady. Above them, out of
the grayness, a moon disclosed itself, then the pin-points of stars. All about
them was an immense, sandy waste.
"Know where we are, Dent?" came Tode's
chuckle.
Jim was not sufficiently master of himself to
attempt to answer.
"We are on what will be the Russian steppes
some fifty thousand years ahead of us in time," grinned Tode. "This
is an interlude between two ice ages. Observe how pleasantly warm the climate
is, for Russia. Unfortunately the receding glaciers carried off the top-soil,
which accounts for the barrenness of the district, but in another century this
country will be overgrown with ferns, and inhabited by the mastodon and wild
horse, and a few enterprising palaeolithic hunters, who will come in to track
them down and destroy them with their stone axes."
I think you're the same sort of damn liar you
always were, Tode," answered Jim—but without conviction. There was
something terrific about that desolation. Nothing within a thousand miles of
Long Island corresponded to it.
"You'll be convinced pretty quickly, when you
see my specimen," answered Tode. "I let him off here on the way to
the pool. He's not exactly presentable, and when I got the idea of picking up
Lucille and taking her back with me, I thought it best not to let her see him.
He didn't want to be let off. Was afraid I wouldn't pick him up again, and I'll
admit it was a matter of pretty careful reckoning. But this is the place,
almost to the yard.
"Yes, I've done some close reckoning, Dent,
but the cleverest part of the business was letting old Parrish think he'd got
away from me. I knew he'd telephone Lucille. You know, I always had the brains
of the outfit, Dent," he continued, with a smirk of self-satisfaction.
He looked out of the boat. "And here, if I'm
not mistaken, comes my specimen," he added.
Something was running across the steppes toward
them. It came nearer, took human form. It was human! A man—but such a man as
Jim had never seen before outside the covers of a book. And he recognised the
race immediately.
It was a Neanderthal man, one of the race that
co-existed with the highly developed Cro-Magnons some thirty thousand years
ago. Man and not ape, though the face was bestial, and there were huge ridges
above the eyebrows.
And if Jim had needed conviction, the sight of
this gibbering creature, now climbing into the boat and fawning upon Tode,
convinced him. For the Neanderthal man vanished from the scene long before the
beginning of recorded history.
For a few moments a deathly faintness overcame him
... his eyes closed, he felt unconsciousness rushing in upon him like a black
cloud.
"It's all right, Dent—don't look so
scared!" came Tode's mocking voice.
Jim opened his eyes, shook off that cloud of
darkness with an immense effort. The boat was throbbing violently as the wheels
gyrated, the violet light had become a pillar as thick as a man, and shot
straight up to a height of fifty feet, before it rolled away. Lucille was lying
where she had been, her eyes still staring up unseeing at the stars. Old
Parrish was whining and whimpering as he crouched in his place.
And at Tode's feet crouched the Neanderthal man,
repulsive, bestial, even though hardly formidable, and filling the last vacant
spot inside the boat. He was gibbering and mouthing as he fawned upon Tode and
pressed his hand to his hairy face. He continued to crouch and looked up at his
master with doglike eyes.
Repulsive, and yet man, not ape. Distinctly human,
perhaps a little lower than the Australian aborigine, the Neanderthal showed by
his reverence that the human faculty of worship existed in him.
"Meet Cain, one of my Drilgoes," said
Tode, with a grin. "A faithful servant. I left him here to wait for me on
the return journey. Cain's just my pet name for him because he subsists on the
fruits of the earth, don't you, Cain?"
The Drilgo grunted, and pressed Tode's hand to his
repulsive lips, which were fringed with a reddish beard. Suddenly Tode began to
laugh uproariously. "Feel anything wrong with your head, Dent?" he
asked.
Dent put up his hand and pulled away a quantity of
charred hair. His forehead began to itch, and, rubbing his finger across it, he
realized that his eyebrows were gone. Tode laughed still louder.
"You've kept your teeth by about two seconds'
grace, Dent, but I shouldn't be surprised if you needed dental attention
shortly," he said. "What a pity dentists won't be invented for
another forty or fifty thousand years."
"You're a devil!" cried Jim.
"You see, the human body is very resistant to
the Ray," Tode went on. "It almost seems as if there is an organizing
principle within it. Even the animal tissues are resistant, though not to the
same extent as the human ones. It takes about twenty seconds for the organized
human form to be disintegrated. But hair and beaks and claws, being superficial
matter, vanish almost as soon as the Ray is turned on them. Ten seconds more,
and you'd have been obliterated, Dent, just as your plane was.
"Yes, rub your head. Your hair will probably
grow again—if I decide to let you live. It rather depends upon what impression
you make upon Lucille as a bald-headed hero. After all, I didn't invite you to
accompany us. It's your own lookout."
Jim could find nothing to say to that. He was
discovering more and more that they were all helpless in Tode's hands.
"Sit back!" snarled Tode suddenly. He
gave the Drilgo a push that sent him sprawling into the bottom of the boat.
"Dent, your life depends upon your absolute acquiescence to my proposals.
I didn't like you particularly in the old days, any more than you liked me. I
thought you were a fool. On the other hand, I've no active reason to hate you,
at present. It may be that I can use you.
"Meanwhile we've got a longish journey before
us, ten thousand years more, multiplied by the fourth power of two thousand
miles. Seems simple? Well, I had to invent the mathematical process for it.
Reckon in the gravitational attraction of the planets, and you'll begin to get
an idea of the complexity of it. So, in vulgar parlance, we're not likely to
arrive till morning."
He glanced at Lucille, who was still lying
unconscious with Jim's arm about her. Then his eyes rose to meet Jim's, and a
sneering smile played about his lips. That smile was the acknowledgment of
their rivalry for the girl's affections. And it was more—it was a challenge.
Tode welcomed that rivalry because, Jim could see,
he meant to keep him alive under conditions of servitude, to demonstrate to
Lucille his superiority.
Tode turned his thumbscrews, and the two thuds
resounded. The violet column sank down, the boat vibrated, the level stretch of
land became a blur again. The moon and stars vanished. Once more the four were
off on that terrific journey.
At first they seemed to be traversing space that
was shot through by alternate light and darkness, so that at times Jim could
see the other occupants of the boat clearly, while at other times there was
only Tode visible at the instrument board, with the dark outlines of the
Drilgo, Cain, sprawled at his feet. But soon these streaks seemed to come
closer and closer together, until the duration of each was only a fraction of a
second. And closer, until light and darkness blended into a universal gray.
These, Jim knew, were the alternations of night and day.
They were traveling—incredible as it was—in time
as well as space, though whether backward or forward Jim could not know. From
the presence of the Neanderthal man, however, Jim was convinced that Tode was
taking them back more thousands of years, into the beginnings of humanity.
A fearful journey! A madder journey than Jim could
have conceived of, had he not been a participant in it. He was losing all sense
of reality. He was hardly convinced that he would not awaken in New York, to
discover that the whole episode had been a dream.
Was this Lucille, the girl he loved ... with whom
he had dined in New York only a day or two before ... this unconscious form,
stretched out on the deck of the weird ship that was rushing through eternity?
Or, rather, it was they who were rushing through space and time upon a
stationary ship! What was reality, and what was dream, then?
Tode called "Come over here, Dent! I want to
talk to you!"
Jim picked his way over the metal floor of the
round boat, came up to Tode, and sat down beside him above the sprawling form
of the Drilgo, Cain.
"You were a fool to come here, Dent."
Tode turned with a malicious smile from his seat at the instrument board.
"You didn't have to come. I take it that you are in love with Lucille, you
poor imbecile, and still cherish dreams of winning her. We'll take up that
matter in due course.
"Do you think I've been idle during these
five years of my exile? I've been too busy even to come back for the woman I
was in love with. And do you know what I've been doing during all this hellish
period? Charting courses, Dent! Mapping out all the planetary movements back
for uncounted ages—roughly, crudely, of course, but the best I was able to.
These are difficult seas to navigate, though they may not seem so. You
fool," he added savagely, "why didn't you come in with me in the old
days? I told you that the Atom Smasher could be used to travel through time,
and you mocked at me as a dreamer.
"I chose my hour. When everything was ready,
I set forth on the most desperate journey ever attempted by man. Talk of
Columbus!—he had nothing on me. I tell you, Dent, I've been back to the
Archaean Age, back to the time when nothing but crawling worms moved on the
face of the earth. And I've been forward to the time when an errant planet will
disrupt the earth into a shower of lava—and I nearly wrecked the boat. Dent.
"I've won, Dent! I've won! I've solved the
problem that gives man immortality! All the epochs that have existed since God
first formed the world are mine to play with! I have seen myself as a puling
infant, and as a greybeard. I have made myself immortal, because, with this
machine, I can set back the clock of time. I have found a land where I am
worshipped as a god."
Tode's eyes glittered with maniacal fires. He went
on in a voice of indescribable triumph:
"I'm a god there, Dent. Do you want to know
where that land is? It is Atlantis, sunk beneath the waves nine thousand years
before recorded history opened. It is Atlantis, from which the Cro-Magnons fled
in their ships, to land on the coasts of Spain and France, and become the
ancestors of modern man.
"In old Atlantis, still not wholly submerged,
I have made myself a god. I have mastered the savage Drilgoes whom the
Atlanteans oppressed. All the spoils of their ruined cities are at my disposal.
And I came back to get Lucille, whom I had never ceased to love. Together
Lucille and I will rule like god and goddess.
"Join me, Dent. I'm a god in Atlantis—a god,
I tell you. The lesser races fear me as a supernatural being. Only the city
remains uncaptured, but it is mine whenever I choose to take it. A god—a god—a
god!"
Jim saw now what he had not realized before, that
Tode was insane. It would, indeed, have been a miracle if he had been able to
retain his sanity under such circumstances as he had described. His voice rose
into a wild scream. Yes, Tode was mad—just such a madman as any of the old
Roman emperors, drunk with power, each in his turn the sole ruler of the world.
"The Earth is mine!" Tode screamed.
"Before the modern world was dreamed of, before the nations were created,
Atlantis was the sole power that held dominion over the scattered tribes of
mankind. And she is in my hand whenever I strike.
"Wealth incalculable, treasures such as man
has never since seen, marvels of scientific discovery, flying machines that
would make ours look foolish, paintings grander than have since been
executed—all these things exist in the proud city that will shortly be at my
command. And I have my Drilgoes, the inferior race, to serve me. They worship
me because they know I am a god. Join me, Dent, and taste the joys of being one
of the supreme rulers of the world."
In spite of his undoubted madness, there was such
power in Tode's voice that Jim could not help believe what he had said.
"Well," snarled Tode. "You hesitate
to give me your answer, Dent?"
"Lucille and I are engaged to be
married," answered Jim, and the words were drawn from his lips almost
against his will. "We love each other. I am not going to lie to you and
then betray you, Tode."
The expression on Tode's face was demoniacal. He
snatched up the deadly tube that contained the violet fire and turned it upon
Jim. Again Jim felt that repulsive force pushing him back. He gasped for
breath, and tensed his whole body in supreme resistance, while he tried to
grapple with Tode in vain.
But suddenly Tode dropped the tube, and a roar of
laughter broke from his lips.
"You fool!" he shouted. "I tell you
I am a god, the one god, supreme above all. Do you think to match your puny
will against my own? I tell you Lucille is mine. And for ever, Dent. Whenever
we two have reached old age, all that will be necessary for us to do will be to
turn this screw a hair's breadth back into the past, and we are both young
again. By holding this vessel steady in four-dimensional space, I can achieve
immortality."
"Yes, Tode," answered Jim, "but,
you see, that's the one thing that you haven't been able to work out yet."
The words seemed to come automatically from Jim's
lips. It was only after he had spoken them that he realized they were true. For
a moment Tode glared at him; then suddenly, with a shriek of insane rage, he
leaped from the instrument board and swung the ray tube with all his might.
Jim felt the blow descend with stunning force upon
his head. He reeled, flung out his arms, and toppled forward, unconscious....
CHAPTER IV - Escape
An intolerably bright light that seemed to sear
his eyeballs was the first thing of which Jim was conscious. Then he became
aware of his aching head, of a sense of utter lassitude, as if he had been
bruised all over in some machine that had caught him up and held him in its
grip for endless aeons.
At last, despite the pain in his eyes, he managed
to get his eyelids open. He tried to struggle to his feet, only to discover
that he was firmly bound with what appeared to be tough creepers, pliant as
ropes.
After the lapse of a few minutes, during which he
struggled with the receding waves of unconsciousness, he came to a realization
of his surroundings. That light that had so distressed him—though the effects
were now beginning to pass off—was a pillar of smoke and flame, shooting out of
the crater of a volcano about a mile away, across a valley.
He was lying in the entrance to a cave, pegged out
on his back, and bound by the tough creepers to the stakes driven into the
ground. Up to the mouth of the cave grew huge tree-ferns, cattails, cycads, and
such growths as existed in earlier ages in the warm, moist regions of the
world.
Beneath the level of the cave a heavy white fog
completely shrouded the valley, extending up to within a short distance of the
volcano opposite. But on the upper slopes of the volcano the sunlight played,
making its crater a sheen of glassy lava, intolerably bright.
Beyond the volcano Jim could see what looked like
an expanse of ocean.
He groaned, and at the sound a creature came
shambling forward, carrying what looked like a huge melon in either hand. Jim
recognized the Drilgo, Cain.
Chattering and mumbling, Cain placed one of the
fruits to Jim's mouth. It was a sort of bread-fruit, but he was too nauseated
to eat, and rejected it with disgust. Cain offered him the second fruit.
It was a hollow gourd, the interior filled with a
clear fluid. Jim drank greedily as the Drilgo put it to his lips. The contents
were like water, but slightly acid. Jim felt refreshed. He looked about him.
The Drilgo uttered a chattering call, and immediately
a host of the savages swarmed into the cave. Men—undoubtedly men, in spite of
the brow ridges and the receding foreheads, carrying long spears, consisting of
chipped and pointed heads of stone, with holes bored in them, through which
long bands of creepers passed, fastening them firmly to the shaft.
Chattering and gesticulating, the Drilgoes
surrounded Jim as he lay helpless on the ground. Their savage faces, their
rolling eyes, the threatening gestures that they made with their spears, convinced
Jim that his end was a foregone conclusion.
But suddenly a distant rumbling sound was heard,
increasing rapidly in volume. The floor of the cave vibrated; masses of rock
dropped from the walls. The light of the volcano across the valley was suddenly
obscured in an immense cloud of black smoke. The twilight within the cave was
succeeded by almost impenetrable darkness.
Shrieking in terror, the Drilgoes bolted, while
Jim lay straining at his ropes, expecting each moment to be crushed by the
masses of rock that were falling all about him.
Suddenly a soft whisper came to Jim through the
darkness: "Jim! Are you safe! Where are you? I can't see you! Speak to
me!"
It was Lucille's voice, and Jim called back, husky
and tremulous in the sheer joy that had succeeded his anticipation of instant
death.
Then he felt the girl kneeling at his side, and
heard her hacking at his bonds. A whole minute passed before the stone knife
was able to sever the last of the stout withes, however.
Then Jim was swaying on his feet, and Lucille's
arms were about him, and for a few moments their fears were forgotten in the
renewal of their love.
"I heard what that devil said to you last
night," the girl said. "He means to kill you with awful tortures. He
is away now, on some task or other, but he'll be back at any moment. We must
get away at once—we three. Dad's in another cave not far away, and his guards
bolted after the earthquake."
The earth was still rumbling, and the cavern still
vibrating, but it was clear that there was no time to lose. As soon as the
quake subsided the Drilgoes would return. Guided by Lucille, Jim groped his way
through the cavern. The girl called softly at intervals, and presently Jim
heard old Parrish's answering call. Then the old man's form appeared in
silhouette against the dark.
"I've got Jim," Lucille whispered.
"Are you ready, dad?"
"Yes, yes, I'm ready," chattered the old
man. "Now's our chance. I know a place where we can hide in the thick
forests, where the Ray of the Atlanteans cannot penetrate the mists. Let's go!
Let's go!"
Gripping hands, the three started back toward the
point where a faint patch of darkness showed out the entrance to the cavern.
They were nearing it when another and more violent shock flung them upon their
faces.
Huge masses of rock came hurtling down from the
roof and sides of the cavern, and again the three seemed to escape by a
miracle.
Suddenly a huge shaft of fire shot from the crater
opposite, evolving into an inverted cone that made the whole land dazzlingly
bright. It pierced the mists in the valley underneath, and by that light Jim
could see a great wave of lava streaming down the mountain sides, like soup
spilled out of a bowl.
A gush of black smoke followed, and the light went
out.
"Now!" gasped Parrish, and, clinging to
one another, the three darted out of the cavern's entrance. Another terrific
shock sent them stumbling and reeling and sprawling down the side of the
mountain. Jim heard old Parrish wailing, and, as the shock subsided, groped his
way to his side.
"You hurt?" he shouted.
"Lucille, Lucille," moaned the old man.
"She's dead! A big rock crushed her. I wish I was dead too."
Jim called Lucille's name frantically, and to his
immense relief heard her crying faintly out of the darkness. He rushed to her
side and held her in his arms.
"Where are you hit, darling?"
"I'm—all right," she panted. "I was
stunned for a moment. I—can—go on now."
But she went limp in Jim's arms, and Jim picked
her up and stood irresolute, until he heard Parrish shambling toward him over
the heaving ground.
"She's not hurt, I think, only fainted,"
said Jim. "Which way, Parrish? You lead us."
"Down the slope," panted Parrish.
"We'll be in the ferns in a minute. We can hide there for a while, till
she's able to walk. God help us all! And I was once Professor of Physical
Chemistry at Columbia!"
The outcry might have seemed comical under other
circumstances; as it was, Jim heartily re-echoed old Parrish's sentiments in
his heart.
The last shock was subsiding in faint earth
tremors. The two men plunged down into the heavy fog, which quickly covered
them, Jim carrying Lucille in his arms. He felt the ferny undergrowth all about
him, the thick boles of tree-ferns emerged out of the mist.
"We can stop here for a while," panted
Parrish. "Crouch down! They'll never find us in this fog, and in a few
minutes, when Lucille's better, we can go on."
You must tell me where we are and what our chances
are," said Jim, after again ascertaining that Lucille was unharmed.
"I'll tell you, Dent, as quick as I can. It's
the place where I've spent five years of hell as the slave of that devil, Tode.
I never dreamed, when we were working on the old Atom Smasher, that he had
adapted it to travel in the fourth dimension. He's taken us back twelve
thousand years or so to the island of Atlantis. History hasn't begun yet.
Atlantis is the only civilization in the world. The rest are Drilgoes, Neanderthal
men, wandering in the forests, and still in their stone age.
"It's true, Dent, what old Plato learned from
the Egyptian priests. Atlantis has been slowly sinking for thousands of years,
and all that's left now is the one great island that we're on. Nearly all the
Atlanteans, the Cro-Magnon men, have perished, except for a few who have
crossed in ships to the coasts of France and Spain. They'll be the founders of
modern Europe—Basques and Iberians, and Bretons and Welshmen. Our ancestors! It
makes my brain reel to think of it!"
"Go on! Go on!" said Jim.
"There's a great city on the island, known as
Atlantis too. As big as London or New York. With flying-machines and temples
and art galleries and big ships that they're building to carry them away when
the next subsidence comes. They know they're doomed, for every few days there's
an eruption now.
"Tode means to make himself master of
Atlantis, and transport it into another epoch by means of the Atom Smasher. But
he's never managed to enter. He's made himself a god in the eyes of the
Drilgoes, the savages who inhabit these forests. He's planning to lead them
against the city, and he's got an army of thousands from all parts of the
interior, who worship him as divine.
The Atlanteans are unwarlike. They've forgotten
how to fight in their thousands of years of peace. But they've got a Ray ten
times as strong as Tode's, that brings instant death to everything it touches.
It shrivels it up. It's a different principle. I don't understand it, but it's
this Ray that keeps the Drilgoes from capturing the city.
"Tode's got a laboratory inside the cave,
fitted up with apparatus that he brought from Chicago, the world capital of the
year 3000 A. D., after disintegrating the atoms and recombining them. But he
hasn't succeeded altogether. He hasn't learned everything. The future isn't
quite clear, like the past. There's a dark cloud moves across the spectral
lines and blurs them. I think it's the element of free will—or God!"
"I know," Jim answered. "He can't
hold that boat steady in four-dimensional space, as he pretends he can. If he
could, it would mean that man was wholly master of his destiny. He can't and he
never will.
"There's an unknown quantity comes in,
Parrish. It is God, and that's what's going to beat him in the end."
"I've not been as idle as Tode thinks,"
said Parrish, with a senile leer. "I know more about the Atom Smasher than
he dreams of. He thinks me just an old fool, the remnants of whose brains are
useful to him in his laboratory. That's why he's kept me alive so far. He'll
find out his mistake," he chuckled. "I have something Tode doesn't
dream of."
Suddenly Parrish's air of intense seriousness
vanished. He chuckled and fumbled in his rags. Jim felt a small object like a
lever pressed into his hand and then withdrawn.
"It's death, Dent," chuckled old
Parrish. "The concentrated essence of the destructive principle. It's a
lever I fitted into a concealed groove in the Atom Smasher unknown to Tode.
This lever has a universal joint and connects with a hidden chamber, and when
pulled will catapult the annihilated components of a small quantity of uranium
in any direction we desire. The release of the slumbering energy of this
uranium will produce an explosion of proportions beyond the wildest dreams of
engineers—perhaps, one great enough to throw the Earth out of its orbit!"
"Uranium!... Breaking up its
components!" gasped Jim. "You mean you can actually do that?"
"Yes!" chuckled Parrish. "I'm
keeping it for the day when Tode becomes a god. When he's steadied the boat in
time-space and halted the march of the past, and when he's got Lucille—then,
Dent, I shall so pull the lever that it will release the energy straight at
Tode—and destroy the Atom-Smasher, ourselves, and even, perhaps, the whole
Earth!"
And he burst into a peal of such wild laughter
that Jim realized the old man's wits were gone.
Was it true, that amazing story? It was difficult
to know, and yet anything seemed possible in this amazing world into which Jim
had suddenly been thrown.
The vast pall of smoke cast out by the volcano was
beginning to subside. Slowly a spectral light began to filter through the
valley. Through the fog Jim could see glimpses of the ferny undergrowth, the
giant tree-ferns and cycads that towered aloft. It was like a picture of the
earth when the mastodons, the grass-eaters and the meat-eaters disputed for its
supremacy.
Jim bent over Lucille. He saw her stir, he heard
her murmur his name. Suddenly she sat up, fixed her eyes on his, and shuddered.
"I'm all right, Jim. Let's go," she
said. "I can walk now."
She staggered to her feet. Jim put out his hand to
support her, but she shook her head. Jim touched old Parrish on the arm. He
started and uttered a wild screech; then seemed to come to himself and rose.
But that screech of his was re-echoed from the
mountainside above. Other voices took up the echoes. Lucille clutched at Jim in
a frenzy of fear.
"The Drilgoes!" she whispered.
"They're on our trail!"
Seizing old Parrish by the arm, Jim started to
drag him into the recesses of the fern forest. Suddenly the bestial face of a
Drilgo appeared.
A yell broke from the man's throat. The hairy arm
shot back. Jim saw the stone tip of the long spear poised overhead. He leaped
forward, delivering a blow in the man's midriff with all the strength of his
right arm.
The Drilgo grunted and doubled forward, the spear
falling from his hand. The heavy head of stone embedded itself in the soft
ground, so that the spear remained upright. As the man collapsed he yelled at
the top of his voice.
"This way! This way!" gibbered old
Parrish, suddenly alert.
But now the undergrowth all about them was alive
with Drilgoes. The three dodged and doubled like hunted hares. High overhead
something began to clack with a sound like that made by a woodpecker drilling a
tree, but infinitely louder.
And out of the void above came Tode's voice,
shouting commands to the Drilgoes in their own language.
Suddenly a column of fire shot up from the
volcano, infusing the white mists with a reddish glare. Overhead the three
could see Tode. He was flying with a pair of mechanical wings strapped to his
shoulders, not more than two hundred feet above them. With a shout of triumph
he swooped down. In his hand was a small cylinder, about the mouth of which a
phosphorescent violet light was beginning to play.
"I've got you, Dent," he screamed in
triumph, hovering above the three, while the wings drummed and vibrated till
they seemed the mere play of light and shadow about Tode's shoulders.
"Halt, or I'll blast your body and soul to hell! Halt, or I'll kill
her!"
The deadly tube was pointing steadily at Lucille's
body as Tode hovered ten feet overhead, perfectly still save for the whirring
wings. The three stopped dead, and Tode, with a shout of triumph, began calling
the Drilgoes, who swarmed forward out of the undergrowth.
Huge brown bodies, nude save for their skins of
jungle-cat or serpent, they emerged, quickly forming a ring about the three
prisoners. Tode fluttered to the ground.
"Fools, did you think you could escape that
way?" he asked. "As for you, Dent. I'm going to convince you of the
reality of four-dimensional space as you would not be convinced in the old
days. Do you know what I'm going to do with you? I'm going to strip the skin
from you with the ray, and take you into the anatomical room at Columbia
University and leave you there as an exhibit, Dent!"
Tode grinned like a madman. But Jim was looking
past him, at something that had suddenly appeared upon the far horizon.
It was a round disc of bluish white, a disc like
the moon, but slightly smaller, a disc that flickered as if it had an eyelid
that was being winked repeatedly. Simultaneously screams broke from the throats
of all the Drilgoes. They stampeded.
Tode whirled about and saw. With a curse he leaped
into the air and whirred away.
Out of that disc a slender, blue-white beam shot
suddenly, driving a pathway through the fog, and disclosing the dark depths of
the valley.
"The Eye! The Eye!" screeched Parrish.
"Down on the ground! Down! Down!"
He dropped, and Jim caught Lucille and flung
himself headlong with her. To and fro overhead, but only a few feet above them,
moved the searchlight. Shrieks broke from the Drilgoes' throats as they
scattered through the jungle.
Everywhere that ray moved, trees and undergrowth
simply disappeared. A bunch of Drilgoes, caught by it, were obliterated in an
instant. Great gaps were left through the undergrowth as the ray passed.
It faded as quickly as it had come, and instantly
old Parrish was on his feet, dragging at his daughter.
"Now! Now!" he babbled, heading along
one of the burned tracks through the undergrowth.
Jim seized Lucille and the two raced in the wake
of old Parrish. Behind them they could hear the Drilgoes shouting, but a dense,
impenetrable darkness was already beginning to settle down over the valley.
They lost the track and went crashing through the ferns, on and on until all
was silence about them.
Suddenly Parrish went down like a log. He lay
breathing heavily, completely exhausted. When Jim spoke to him a feeble
muttering was the only answer. Jim and Lucille dropped to the ground exhausted
beside him.
CHAPTER V - The Eye of Atlantis
For perhaps half an hour the three lay there,
hearing nothing. It seemed to be night, for the darkness was impenetrable, save
for the lurid flashes of fire from the volcano. Parrish, who was slowly
recovering his strength, was mumbling incessantly. It was with difficulty that
Jim recalled him to a realization of his surroundings.
"Where is the city of Atlantis?" he
asked him.
"Over there," mumbled Parrish.
"Behind the volcano. Why do you ask me?"
"I'm thinking of going there."
"Eh? Going there? You're mad. The Eye will
see you, the Eye that can see for a hundred miles. They'll turn the Ray on you.
Nothing is too small for the Eye. And they watch night and day."
"The Eye is off now."
"It's never off. The Eye is dark. It grows white
only when they are about to use the Ray. Perhaps the Eye is watching us
now."
"Nevertheless," said Jim, "I think
we would do well to try to enter the city. We can't live here in the jungle at
the mercy of these Drilgoes."
"It is impossible to enter. All strangers are
killed by the Atlanteans."
"Dad," interposed Lucille, "I think
we'd better do what Jim suggests. One of us must decide."
"My idea is that you take us to some place
where we can get a view of the city," said Jim. "Then we can make up
our minds what to do. We've got to get somewhere out of this jungle."
Parrish rose to his feet, mumbling. "If we go
round the base of the volcano we can see Atlantis," he said. "It's
always light there. In the daytime they drive away the fogs by some means
they've got, and at night they have an artificial sun. But we'll be killed,
we'll all be killed."
Mumbling and muttering, he began groping his way
through the undergrowth in the direction of the volcano, whose flashes were
again becoming more frequent, affording a means of directing their route.
Obscure rumblings were again beginning to shake the earth. For an hour the
three picked their way steadily upward through the ferns, until the ground
became more open.
They were approaching the base of the volcano,
whose side now towered above them, the upper part glassy with vitreous lava.
Suddenly Parrish, who was still leading, stopped
and began to tremble with fear. Stepping to his side, Jim heard the low
muttering of voices not far away.
Very cautiously he moved forward through the thin
fern scrub, until the glow of burning embers caught his sight. He stopped,
hearing the voices more distinctly, and again moved forward.
Three Drilgoes, huge, bestial men, and evidently
an outpost, were squatting around the ashes, devouring something with noisy
gusto.
Softly as Jim had moved, their acute ears had
caught the sound of his footsteps. They rose, still holding what they were
eating in their hands, and, grasping their stone spears, moved in three
separate ways toward the edge of the clearing.
The man nearest Jim uttered a guttural exclamation
and, after sniffing a moment, began to lope in his direction. Suddenly he
stopped short, petrified with astonishment and fear at the sight of a man who,
instinct told him, was neither Atlantean nor of his own kind.
Jim leaped, tackling him about the knees, and
brought him heavily to the ground. As the Drilgo fell, the spear clattered from
his hand, but from his snakeskin girdle he pulled a long, curved knife of
chipped obsidian, sharp as a razor.
Jim grasped the Drilgo's wrist, but in a moment he
saw that he was no match for the creature in strength. He drew back his right
arm and delivered a punch to the solar plexus with all his strength.
As the Drilgo's hand grew limp he snatched away
the knife. There was no helping what he did for the two others were close upon
him.
A thrust, a slashing blow, and the Drilgo was
weltering in his life-blood. A backward leap, and Jim evaded the flung spear by
a hair's breadth.
Knife in hand he leaped forward, and, dodging in
beneath the long shaft of the weapon, got in a slash that almost cut the
Drilgo's body in two.
The third Drilgo, seeing his two companions in
their death-throes, flung away his spear and fled with loud howls into the
jungle.
Jim stepped back. Lucille and her father were
already almost at his heels. "It's all right," he called. "Come
this way!" He led them through the ferny growth in such a manner that they
should not see the two dead bodies. Nevertheless, he felt that Lucille knew.
"Let's see what they were cooking," he
said.
But again he turned quickly. He could not know for
sure what flesh that was, roasting and scorching on the embers, and he had no
desire to know. It might have been monkey, but ... he turned away, and as he
did so, Parrish picked up several round objects that were lying a little
distance away.
"These are good to eat," he said.
"A sort of bread-fruit. I've lived on it for five years," he added
with a sort of grotesque pathos.
They munched the fruit as they proceeded up the
mountain, and found it satisfying. Parrish seemed more himself again, though he
still muttered at intervals. Lucille clung closely to Jim as they proceeded.
They were treading on lava now, vitreous, and
smooth as glass. It was impossible to proceed further in that direction. They
turned their steps around the base in the direction of the sea.
After another hour, during which their way was lit
by almost continuous lurid flashes from the crater, a patch of illumination,
apparently out at sea, began to become visible. A half hour more, and they were
rounding the volcano's base, and suddenly it burst upon them, a stupendous
spectacle that drew an exclamation of amazement from Jim's lips.
That low, flat background was the sea, the sound
of whose breakers was faintly audible. Between sea and land ran a narrow,
slender causeway, perhaps a mile in length. And beyond that, set on a small
island, was the most splendid city that Jim could have imagined.
Like New York—very like New York, with its mighty
towers, but more symmetrical, sloping upward from the sea toward a towering
rampart at the heart of it, crowned with huge domes and minarets and serpentine
ramps and mighty blocks of stone that must have sheltered as many occupants as
New York's highest skyscrapers.
The whole was snow-white, and gleamed softly in an
artificial light dispensed from an enormous artificial planet that seemed to
hover above the ramparts.
"God!" whispered Jim in awe as he gazed
at the great city.
"You cannot cross that causeway,"
whimpered old Parrish. "It's death to try. One sweep of the Ray will blot
out every living thing."
"Hush! Listen!" came from Lucille's
lips. "Something's moving down there!"
The distant murmur of voices, the indescribable
"feel" of the proximity of other human beings told Jim that they were
in imminent danger. He glanced about him. A little overhead was an outcrop of
enormous boulders, standing up like a little fortress above the smooth lava.
"Get behind there!" Jim whispered.
They turned and ran, slipping and stumbling up the
smooth slope. Reaching the boulders, they ensconced themselves hastily behind
them. Jim peered out through a crevice between two of the largest stones. The
sound of moving things became more audible.
Then, as a flash of flame shot from the crater
overhead, Jim saw a black human horde creeping like an array of ants around the
base of the mountain not far beneath.
Just like an army of warrior ants it seemed to
flow onward, in perfect order. And in the midst of it a faint violet light
began to be visible.
Parrish seized Jim's arm, shaking with terror.
"You know what that is, Dent?" he whimpered.
"It's Tode's Drilgoes, moving for a night
attack upon Atlantis," answered Jim. "And that thing in the middle is
the Atom Smasher."
It seemed hours before the last of the serried
ranks of Drilgoes had passed. By the light of a lurid flash from the volcano
Jim could see the column winding toward the causeway. Then all was shrouded in
impenetrable darkness, save for the snow-soft city upon the island.
"What are we going to do?" chattered old
Parrish. "I wish I was back in Tode's cave. He gave me food and let me
help with his work sometimes. I'll die here. We'll never get away. We'll never
get anywhere."
"We're safer here than anywhere else,"
answered Jim. "We'll have to stay till morning, or—God, look at
that!"
Out of the ramparts of the city the round,
blue-white disc of the Eye had suddenly disclosed itself. And simultaneously a
violet flare shot up above the moving hosts of the Drilgoes in the middle of
the causeway.
Out of the center of the Eye that blinding
searchlight streamed. And the pillar of violet fire rose up to counter it,
clove it in two, as a man cuts off the tentacle of a cuttlefish, and left it
groping helplessly above the heads of the Drilgoes.
To and fro wavered the blue-white beam, and like a
protective wall the violet column spread and extended, till the air was
interlaced with the play of the two colors. Streaks of white shot through
streaks of purple and black neutral clouds twirled, swirling in ghostlike
forms. It was a scene inconceivably beautiful, and it was impossible to realize
what must be happening out there.
Men must be dying, withering like stubble in the
blue-white flames, whenever they caught them. And yet, under that play of
colors, Jim could see the vast host crawling forward to the assault.
He held his breath. It was sublime and terrible,
and on the result of that conflict depended—what? What difference, when all
this was forgotten history, antedating the written records of the human race?
Then of a sudden the blue-white rays were seen to
win. They were beating down the violet light. Like living fingers they pierced
that protective wall, flinging it back, until only the tall central pillar
remained. And then for the first time the sound of combat became audible.
A groan of despair, of defeat, of hopelessness.
The black stream was recoiling, turning upon itself. In the vivid glare of the
white light it could be seen dissolving, breaking into a thousand pieces,
streaming back toward the land. And, as it broke, the blue-white light pursued,
eating its way and blasting all it met. Atlantis had triumphed.
Another sound was audible. From the city it came,
a whirring as of innumerable grasshoppers, increasing till it sounded once more
like the tapping of innumerable woodpeckers. Suddenly the night broke into
whirling balls of fire.
Lucille cried out. Jim leaped to his feet to see
more clearly.
"It's men with wings," he cried.
"Scores of them. They're hurling something at the Drilgoes!"
The clacking of the wing mechanism filled the air.
Now the fugitives from the Drilgo host were streaming along the base of the
mountain underneath, seeking the safety of the jungles, and over them, riding
them, harrying them, flew the Atlantean birdmen, hurling their fiery balls. And
where the balls fell, conflagrations of cold fire seemed to start and run like
mercury, and shrivel up everything they touched.
But the birdmen were not without casualties of
their own. Here and there one could be seen to drop, and then the massed
Drilgoes would turn savagely upon him with their stone-pointed spears. The
fight was coming very close now. The savage cries of the Drilgoes filled the
night.
A ball of fire broke hardly fifty yards away from
where the three were crouching. A birdman fluttered down like a wounded hawk
and lay a-sprawl just underneath the rampart of boulders. Jim surmounted them,
ran down the slope of the mountainside, and bent over the dying man. He was
hideously wounded by the thrust of a Drilgo spear—whether because the mechanism
had failed, or because he had swooped too low, Jim could not determine. As Jim
bent over him he looked up at him.
A youth in his teens, with the face and build of a
Greek warrior, a worthy ancestor of European man. Jim looked at him and
shuddered. "My grandfather four hundred generations removed," he
thought.
Seeing that this was no Drilgo, with eyes widened
by the anticipation of death, the Atlantean smiled, and died.
Jim detached the straps that held the wings to his
shoulders and examined them. They were multi-hinged, built of innumerable
layers of laminated wood, which seemed to have been subjected to some special
treatment. In the base of each, just where it fitted to the curve of the
shoulder-blade, a tiny light was burning.
Jim looped the straps about his arms and walked
back to the rampart. Old Parrish saw him and screamed. Lucille cried out.
"I'm going to try to get the Atom
Smasher," said Jim, pointing to the thin spire of violet flame that was
still visible in the center of the causeway. "It's our only chance. You
must stay here. If I live, I'll return. If I don't return—"
But he knew that he must return. Nothing could
kill him, because Lucille would be waiting for him behind that rampart of
stones upon the bare, vitreous mountainside.
"I'm going to get the Atom Smasher," Jim
repeated. "In these wings I'll be taken for Atlantean. I'll—bring it
back." He spoke with faltering conviction. And yet there was nothing else
to do. Everything depended upon his being able to bring back the Atom Smasher
and take Lucille and her father away.
"I think you're right, Jim," answered
Lucille. "We'll—wait here till you—come—back."
Her voice died away in a sob. Jim bent and kissed
her. Then he began examining the mechanism of the wings. It did not appear
difficult. A leather strap fastened around the body. Through this strap ran
cords operated by levers upon the breast, and there was a knob in a groove that
looked as if it controlled the starting of the mechanism.
"I'll be back," said Jim.
And suddenly the Eye appeared again, and with it
there sounded once more the whir of wings.
"Down!" shouted Jim.
He was too late. A score of birdmen shot out of
the dark and hovered over them. Next moment they had descended to the ground.
Lucille and Parrish were seized, and Jim, struggling furiously, quickly found
himself equally helpless in their grasp.
The accents of the Atlanteans as they spoke to one
another were soft and liquid, their faces were refined and gentle, but their
strength was that of athletes. Jim saw Lucille and Parrish lifted into the air;
next moment he himself was raised in the arms of one of the birdmen, who shot
upward like an arrow and headed a course back toward the city, carrying Jim as
if he had been as light as a child.
CHAPTER VI - Human Sacrifice
In a great open space, flanked by temples and
colonnades, the flight had come to rest. There, under the soft artificial light
that made the whole city as bright as day, Jim, Lucille, and her father were
set down before a sort of rostrum, on which were gathered the dignitaries of
the city.
Jim's hopes were rising fast, for between the
Atlanteans and the savage Drilgoes there was as much difference as between a
modern American and a blackfellow from the Australian bush. These men were
civilized to a degree that even modern America has not attained.
Nowhere was there a speck of dirt to be seen.
Vehicles moved soundlessly along the wide streets on either side of this
central meeting-place, and the whole city was roofed with glass, through which
could be seen the brilliant moon and stars—invisible from the mist-filled
valley without.
Soft garments of white wool clothed men and women
alike, fashioned something like togas, but cut short at the knee, leaving the
lower part of the leg bare and disclosing the sandaled feet. The hair was long
and flowed about the shoulders. But what struck Jim most forcibly was the look
of utter gentleness and benignity upon these faces.
"I guess we've fallen into pretty good hands
after all," he whispered to Parrish.
But one of the dignitaries upon the platform, an
elderly man with a face reminiscent of William Jennings Bryan in his inspired
moments, was leaning forward out of his curved chair and addressing the old
man, and, to Jim's astonishment, Parrish was answering.
But these were not the liquid accents of the
Atlanteans. The words resembled the barking of a dog, and across Jim's brain
there suddenly flashed the explanation. The dignitary was speaking in the
tongue of the Drilgoes, which Parrish, of course, would have learned in his
five years of captivity.
Suddenly Parrish turned to Jim. "He wants to
know where we come from," he said. "I've told him from a far country.
He thinks we're ambassadors from some of the parts of Europe that the
Atlanteans who sailed away some years ago landed at. It's no use trying to
explain—they don't seem to have succeeded in inventing an Atom Smasher for
themselves."
Jim nodded, and the colloquy went on and on, while
the Atlanteans listened with languid interest, their kind and smiling faces
seeming to exude benignity. At length the session seemed to have ended.
Parrish wore a wide grin. "Everything's
coming right, dear," he told Lucille. "The old chap says we are to be
the guests of the city either for a night or for a week. It's something to do
with the moon, and there seems to be a full moon to-night. Some quaint
superstition or other. And then I guess we'll have a chance to get away in the
Atom Smasher. I've learned something of the mechanism, and it won't be hard to
operate it. We've fallen into good hands."
A squad of four soldiers or policemen, with
shorter robes and what looked like truncheons in their hands, made signs to the
three to accompany them. Amid mutual bows, the city's guests filled into a
small court-way, closed at the further end, on which a number of Atlanteans
were standing.
While Jim was wondering what the next move was to
be, to his astonishment the whole courtyard began to rise slowly up the walls
of the tall buildings on either side.
"An elevator!" gasped Lucille. "Now
I do feel that everything is coming out all right, Jim, dear."
Jim did not question the psychology of this. He
pressed her hand tenderly. Already Tode and the past were becoming a bad dream.
"Did you say anything about the Atom Smasher,
Parrish?" he asked.
"No, I thought it better not to,"
replied the old scientist. "You see, they know it only as a force that
neutralizes the blue-white ray. Best not to let them know we're sailing for
home in it."
"I think that was wise," answered Jim,
and just then the rising court-way came to a stop level with the top story of
the great building at one side.
Smiling courteously, the guards invited the three
to precede them inside an enormous hall, supported on pillars of gleaming stone
resembling alabaster. In the center was a small, low table, triangular in
shape, with three of the low, curved chairs. The guards invited the three to be
seated.
Almost immediately smiling servitors brought in
fruits on platters of porcelain, dishes of cooked vegetables, somewhat like the
modern ones, but seasoned and flavored with delicious herbs. The staple dish
was something like an oval banana, but infinitely more succulent. The three
fell to and made a hearty meal, which was washed down with fine wines.
"We've certainly fallen into good
hands," said Jim. "All we've got to do is to lie low, and look
pleasant, and it won't be long before we get an opportunity to get hold of the
Atom Smasher."
The guards, seeing that they had finished their
meal, smilingly invited them to accompany them through a huge bronze door at
one end of the hall. It swung back, disclosing complete darkness.
Jim felt Lucille's hand upon his arm. The girl was
hesitating, and for a moment Jim hesitated too, half afraid of a fall into
emptiness. Then he heard the footsteps of the guards ahead, and went on.
It was eery, moving there with the sound of feet
in front of them, and, apart from that, utter silence. Then Lucille uttered a
little cry.
"Jim, do you feel something pushing
you?" she asked.
"There is something—" Jim swung around,
but some invisible force continued to propel him forward. He moved sidewise,
and the force gently corrected him. The sound of footsteps had ceased.
"What is it, Jim?" cried the girl.
"Help me! Something's got hold of me!"
Old Parrish was struggling close beside them. Jim
panted as he wrestled with the force, but his efforts were absolutely futile.
Slowly, as if slid on wires, he was propelled forward, until a cushion of air
seemed to block his further progress.
Dark as it was, and silent, Jim had the
consciousness of other human beings about him, of a vast, unseen multitude that
was watching him.
Suddenly the droning of a chant began to fill the
place, as if a priest were intoning hymns. As that chant rose and fell, voices
all about took up the echoing refrain. Jim tried to reach Lucille, but he could
move his arm only a few inches against that resilient force pressing in on all
sides of him.
Then, in an instant, a blinding, stabbing light
shot through his eyeballs. He heard Lucille scream, old Parrish yelp, and, with
eyelids screwed tight against the intolerable glare, fought once more
desperately and ineffectively to reach Lucille's side.
Slowly Jim managed to unscrew his eyes. He began
to realize that he was standing in what appeared to be an enormous
amphitheatre. But high up, upon a narrow tongue of flooring that ran like a
bridge from one end to the other, with Lucille on his right and Parrish on his
left. Nothing visible seemed to be restraining them, and yet they were as
securely held as if fastened with tight chains.
Jim's brain reeled as he looked down. Imagine a
bridge about half-way up an amphitheatre of a hundred stories, the ground
beneath packed with human beings no larger than ants, the whole of the vast
interior lined with them, tier above tier, faces and forms increasing from
pismire size below to the dimensions of the human form upon a level, and,
again, fading almost to pin-points at the summit of the vast building, where
the soft glow of the artificial light filtered through the glass of the roof.
He clutched at the air, felt the soft pressure of
the force that was restraining him, looked at Lucille, and saw her half-unconscious
with fear, leaning against it, leaning against that soft, resilient,
cushionlike, invisible substance; looked at Parrish, whom the shock had thrown
into a sort of semi-catalepsy—Parrish, mouthing and staring!
He looked forward to where the tongue of flooring
ended. Here, upon a stage, flanked with huge carven figures, a group was
gathered. At first he was unable to discern what was being enacted there, so
brilliant was the light that glared overhead.
It was the Eye, a round disc perhaps ten feet in
diameter, that all-seeing Eye of Atlantis that guarded the great city, but how
it worked Jim was totally unable to discover. He saw, however, that it was
blinking rapidly, the alternations being so swift that it was only just
possible to be conscious of them. Perhaps the Eye was opening and closing ten
times a second.
Jim strained his eyes to see what was taking place
on the stage at the end of the tongue on which he stood. What was it? What were
they doing there? And was that the captured Atom Smasher standing between what
looked like grinning idols? A group of captured Drilgoes near it?
A shrill scream from Lucille echoed through the
vast amphitheatre. Her eye had seen what Jim's had not yet seen—something that
had shocked her into complete unconsciousness.
A marble figure, she stood leaning against the
invisible force that kept her on her feet, and in those open, staring eyes was
a look of ineffable horror.
Jim could see clearly now, for the light from the
Eye was slowly diminishing in brilliancy, or else his own eyes were growing
more accustomed to it. Those carven figures, forming a semi-circle upon the
platform were figures of gods, squat, huge forms seeming to emerge out of the
blocks of rock from which they had been fashioned.
Hideous, gruesome carvings they were, resembling
some futuristic sculpture of to-day, for the artist who had fashioned them had
given hardly more than a hint of the finished representation. It was rather as
if the masses of rock that had been transported there had become vitalized,
foreshadowing the dim yet awful beings that were some day to emerge from them.
Only the arms were clearly sculptured, and each of
the half-dozen figures squatting upon its haunches in that semi-circle had four
of them. Arms that protruded so as to form an interlacing network, and the
fingers were long claws fashioned of some metal. Over the arms the shapeless
heads beat down with a leering look, and from each mouth protruded a curved
tongue.
A masterpiece of horror, that group, like the
great stone figures of the Aztecs, or some of the hideous Indian gods. Seen
under the glare of the Eye, they formed a background of horrible omen. In a
flash it dawned upon Jim that these hideous figures might be gods of bloody
sacrifice.
"That's why these people seem so
gentle," he heard himself saying. "It's the—the contrast."
He pulled himself together. Again he tried to move
towards Lucille, and again that invisible force restrained him.
Yes, it was the captured Atom Smasher upon the
platform, and those forms grouped in front of the dignitaries were captured
Drilgoes, a dozen or so of them. And the concealed priest was droning a chant
again. Every other sound was hushed, but from each square foot of the great
amphitheatre a pair of eyes was watching.
A myriad of eyes turned upon the platform! What
was going to happen next?
Suddenly the priest's voice died away, and
simultaneously the three dignitaries, who seemed to be officiating priests,
from their solemn gestures, stepped backward, passing beneath the protruding
arms of the idols. There sounded the deep whir of some mechanism somewhere, and
the same invisible force that had Jim and his two companions in its control
suddenly began to agitate the captive Drilgoes.
It was shuffling them! It was forcing them into
line, pushing here and pulling there, in spite of the Drilgoes' terrified
struggles. They writhed and twisted, groaning and clicking in abject terror as
they wrestled with that unseen power, and all in vain. Slowly the foremost of
the Drilgoes was propelled forward, inch by inch, until he stood immediately
beneath the interlacing arms.
And what happened next filled Jim with sick horror
and loathing. For of a sudden the arms began to move, the iron claws cut through
the air—a shriek of terror and anguish broke from the Drilgo's mouth ... and he
was no longer a man, but a clawed and pulped mass of human flesh!
"Aiah! Aiah! Aiah!" broke from the
throats of the assembled multitude.
The weaving arms had stopped. From behind them an
attendant was gathering up what had been the Drilgo in a basket. Then the
mechanism had begun again, and again that shrill cry of the spectators was
ringing in Jim's ears.
Louder still rose the shriek of old Parrish as he
understood. Jim put forth all his strength in a mad effort to break free. A
child would have had more chance in the grip of a giant. And each time the arms
of the gods revolved, the unseen force pushed Jim, Lucille, and Parrish nearer
the platform.
Now Jim understood. This horrible sacrifice was a
part of the religion of the Atlanteans, and he, Lucille, and Parrish, were
being reserved for the final spectacle.
And at the sight of Lucille beside him, stonily
unconscious, and yet standing, and moving like a mechanical doll, in little
forward jerks—at the sight of the girl, hardly six feet distant, and yet
utterly beyond the touch of his finger-tips, Jim went mad. He would not shout;
he closed his lips in pride of race, pride of that civilization that he had
left twelve thousand years ahead of him. Not like the shrieking Drilgoes on the
platform, howling as each of them in turn was forced into that maze of
revolving knives. But he fought as a madman fights. He hammered at the
resilient air, while the sweat ran down his face, he braced his feet upon the
wooden tongue, and sought to stay his forward progress. And all the while that
infernal force moved him steadily onward.
He was on the platform now. He was traveling the
same route that the Drilgoes had taken. The unseen force was shuffling him,
Lucille, and Parrish, pushing and pulling them. And, despite Jim's efforts, it
was Lucille who was first of the three ... and Jim second ... and old Parrish
third....
Jim heard Parrish's hoarse whisper behind him,
"Death! Death! The uranium!" He was fumbling at his breast, but the
significance of the words and gestures escaped him. He was staring ahead. Only
three living Drilgoes of the whole number of prisoners remained alive, and
suddenly it was borne in upon Jim that he knew the last of the three.
It was the Drilgo, Cain, who had been their
companion in the Atom Smasher—there, not a dozen feet distant. Cain, his
bestial face, with the ridged eyebrows and great jaws convulsed with terror and
dripping sweat. Cain, immediately in front of Lucille.
"God, let her not wake! Let her never
know!" Jim breathed. The agony would be but momentary. And there was
nothing a man could not endure if he must. He could even endure to see Lucille
become—what the Drilgoes had become. It would soon be over now.
The Eye was blinking overhead. The hideous stone
faces of the Atlantean gods looked down in leering mockery. Another of the
Drilgoes had gone the same route as the others. Cain was the second now,
Lucille the third victim, and he, Jim, would be the fourth.
Gritting his teeth, Jim saw the next Drilgo
propelled forward into the whirling knives. He saw the man fling up his arms,
as if to shield his head—and then he was a man no longer, and the horrible
knives revolved, and "Aiah! Aiah! Aiah!" cried the multitude.
Once more the mechanism whirred.... Once more the
arms revolved. A howl of terror broke from Cain's lips as he was propelled
onward....
Then suddenly the whirring stopped. The arms of
the stone gods, with their hooked, razorlike claws, to which clung particles of
flesh, were arrested in mid-air. Cain, unharmed, was leaning backward, his
features set in a mask of awful fear.
Simultaneously Jim knew that the force which had
held him in thrall was gone. He flung his arms out. He was free. He grasped
Lucille, held her tightly against his breast, stood there drawing great,
labored breaths, waiting—for what?
A film was creeping over his eyes, but he was
aware that the Eye had suddenly gone out. And out of the dark the priest was
chanting.
Then came a deep-drawn sigh from the spectators,
followed by a ringing shout. In place of the Eye the full moon appeared,
sailing overhead. And, holding off that deathly weakness, Jim understood. The
sacrifice had ended; a new month had begun....
CHAPTER VII - Back to Long
Island
Jim, seated beside Lucille, was listening to
Cain's gruntings and chucklings as he expounded the situation to old Parrish.
It was the day following the scene in the
amphitheatre. The four had been escorted back along the tongue of flooring into
a hall with walls of fretted stone and sumptuous colorings. The floor was
strewn with rich rugs woven of some vegetable fibre. There were divans and low
chairs. At brief intervals, servitors, always smiling, passed carrying trays
with wines and foods. And in the corridors were always glimpses of the guards.
"It was the rising of the full moon saved our
lives, Dent," Parrish explained. "It appears they have this sacrifice
at each of the moon's phases. The victims, captives or criminals, are eaten by
the priests. We've got a week's respite, Dent, and then—God help us."
Jim's arm tightened about Lucille, but the girl
turned and smiled into his face. There was no longer any fear there. And Jim
swore to himself that he would yet find some way of outwitting their devilish
captors.
"What the devil are we supposed to be,
criminals or what?" he asked her father. "Why do they smile at us all
the time in that confounded way?"
Parrish questioned the Drilgo, but apparently he
was unable to explain himself to him. "Maybe they think it an honor for
us, Dent," he answered, "or maybe it's their idea of etiquette.
Anyway, we four are to head the list when the moon's at the three-quarters.
God, if only we could reach the Atom Smasher, I'm certain I could find out how
it works!"
Jim had tried more than once to reach it. Through
the colonnades at the end of the hall he could see the mechanism standing on
the platform, always being inspected by half a dozen or so of the dignitaries
of Atlantis. But all his attempts to cross that tongue of flooring had been
vetoed by the guards.
They had presented their hands to him, palms
outward, and on the palms were fine steel points, about two inches long, set
into leather gauntlets. It had been impossible to try conclusions with them.
Two days went by. Once a group of dignitaries had
entered the hall and, with smiles and profuse bows, inspected the prisoners.
Then they had departed. And Jim had paced the floor, to and fro, thinking
desperately.
There was no sort of weapon with which to hazard
an attack. Jim knew that they were under the closest observation. He could only
wait and hope. And if all else failed, he meant to hurl himself, with Lucille
in his arms, off the tongue of floor into the depths below when their time
came.
On the third morning, after a troubled sleep
induced by very weariness, Jim was awakened by one of the guards, and started
up to see one of the bowing dignitaries before him, and Parrish and Lucille
sitting up among their rugs.
Bowing repeatedly, the smiling old man addressed
some words to Jim, and then turned to Parrish.
"He says he wants you to show him the way the
Atom Smasher works," said Parrish. "Now's our chance, Dent. He thinks
it's simply an apparatus for neutralizing the blue-white ray. Don't let him guess—"
"I won't let him guess," Jim answered.
"Tell him we'll go and show him—"
"I've told him, and he says only you are to
go. He's suspicious. Say something quickly, Dent."
"Tell him," said Jim, "that I must
have my two assistants and the lady. Tell him I may also need the help of some
of his people. It requires many men to operate the machine."
Parrish translated, speaking in the Drilgo tongue,
which was their only means of communication. The Atlantean considered. Then he
spoke again.
"He says that we three men may go, but
Lucille must be left behind," groaned Parrish.
"The answer is no," said Jim.
The old dignitary, who seemed somewhat
crestfallen, departed with an expressive gesture. Jim and Parrish looked at
each other.
"That's our end," groaned Parrish.
"No, he'll bite," answered Jim, with the
first grin that had appeared on his countenance since their arrival.
"Let's make our plans quickly. We must contrive to get Lucille inside the
machine, under the pretense of assisting with the mechanism. And Cain, of
course," he added, glancing at the goggly-eyed Drilgo. "You do your
best to locate the starting mechanism, Parrish, and signal me the moment you're
ready. We'll both leap in, and the four of us will sail—God, I don't care where
we sail to, so long as we get away from here! Into eternity, if need be. But I
hope it's Long Island!"
Back came the dignitary with two of the guards.
Smiling at Jim, he indicated by signs that the three others might accompany
him. The Atlanteans had bitten, as Jim had forecast.
The four proceeded along the hall and over the
tongue of flooring. This time the force that had previously controlled their
movements was not in action. At the farther end of the bridge they saw the
group of dignitaries gathered about the Atom Smasher, examining it curiously.
Over their heads the hooked arms of the hideous gods were raised. The Eye was
darkened, as if with a curtain, and through the glass roof, high overhead, the
sunlight streamed down upon the empty amphitheatre.
In spite of their smiles, the dignitaries of
Atlantis were very much on the alert, as their tense attitudes denoted. Two
more guards had appeared, and Jim saw that they were uncovering some apparatus
at the base of the Eye. They were swinging a camera-like object toward him, its
lens focused upon the Atom Smasher. It was not difficult to understand what was
in the minds of the Atlanteans. The dignitaries were uneasy and mistrustful,
and at the first suspicion of treachery they meant to loose the blue-white Ray
contained in the apparatus, and blow the Atom Smasher and the group about it to
destruction.
Jim intercepted a sign from Parrish, indicating
that he was to make pretense of assisting him. He bent over the machine,
Lucille beside him. Parrish was busily examining the wheels and levers. He was
adjusting the thumbscrews, moving the needles along the dials.
One of the Atlanteans spoke, and Cain translated
into "Drilgo" for Parrish's benefit. Parrish answered. Then, without
raising his head, the old man said quietly, "I've located the starting
lever, Dent. You and Lucille get inside quickly and pretend you're doing
something to the machinery."
They stepped over the bow of the boat and stood
beside Parrish, who continued examining the wheels. "We mustn't forget
Cain," whispered the girl to her father. "Oh, I hope he
understands!"
But there was no direct evidence that Cain did
understand, and Parrish dared not warn him in "Drilgo," for fear one
of the Atlanteans might understand the language. Cain was standing close beside
the boat. But he was not in the boat.
Again one of the Atlanteans shot a question at Parrish.
Parrish beckoned to Cain, and awaited the translation. He answered.
Each moment was growing tenser. It was impossible
that the Atlanteans could fail to understand what was being planned. The only
saving chance was that they did not realize the possibilities of escape that
the vessel offered. A full minute went by.
Suddenly Parrish raised his head. "I've got
it fixed, I think, Dent," he said. "I'm going to count. When I reach
'three,' seize Cain and pull him aboard."
Jim nodded. The uneasiness was increasing. The
guards at the camera-like object were each holding some sort of mechanical
accessory in their hands. It looked like a small sphere of glass, and it
connected with the apparatus by means of a hollow tube of fibre. Jim guessed
that in an instant the Ray could be made to dart out of the lens. It would be
quick work—as nearly as possible instantaneous work.
"Ready, Dent?" asked Parrish in an even
voice. In this crisis the old man had become astonishingly calm. He seemed the
calmest of the lot. "One!"
Jim beckoned to Cain, who came toward him, his
eyes goggling in inquiry.
"Two!"
Jim reached out and took Cain by the arm. There
was a sharp question from the Atlantean who had spoken before.
"Three!"
With all his force Jim yanked Cain over the edge
of the boat. The Drilgo stumbled and fell headlong with a howl of terror. But
headlong—inside.
What happened was practically instantaneous. A
sudden whir of the mechanism, a violet glow from the funnel, the smell of
chlorine—a flash of blinding blue-white light. The Atlantean guards had fired—a
quarter-second too late!
The thump, thump of the electrical discharge died
away. The four were in the boat, whirling away through space. Cain was rising
to his knees, a woe-begone expression on his face. And there was a clean cut,
with charred, black edges along one side of the boat, showing how near the
Atlanteans had come to success.
The relief, after the hideous suspense of the past
days, was almost too much for the three white people. "We're free, we're
going back home!" cried Jim exultantly, as he caught Lucille in his arms.
And she surrendered her lips to his, while the tears streamed down her checks.
Old Parrish, at the instrument board, looked up, smiling and chuckling. Even
Cain, understanding that they were not to be hacked to bits with knives,
gurgled and grinned all over his black face.
"How long will it take us to get back?"
Jim asked Parrish after a while.
"I—I'm not quite sure, my boy," the old
man replied. "You see—I haven't quite familiarized myself with the machine
as yet."
"But we'll get back all right?" asked
Jim.
"Well, we—we're headed in the right
direction," answered Parrish. "You see, my boy, it's rather an
intricate table of logarithmic calculations that that scoundrel has pasted on
this board. The great danger appears to be that of coming within the orbit of
the giant planet Jupiter. Of course, I'm trying to keep within the orbit of the
Earth, but there is a danger of being deflected onto Pallas, Ceres, or one of
the smaller asteroids, and finding ourselves upon a rock in space."
Jim and Lucille looked at Parrish in
consternation. "But you don't have to leave the Earth, do you?" Jim
asked.
"Unfortunately, it's pretty hard sticking to
the Earth, my lad," said Parrish. "You see, Earth has moved a good
many million miles through space since the time of Atlantis."
But both Jim and Lucille noticed that Parrish was
already speaking of Atlantis as if it was in the past. They drew a hopeful
augury from that. And then there was nothing to do but resign themselves to
that universal greyness—and to hope.
They noticed that Cain seemed to be watching
Parrish's movements with unusual interest. The Neanderthal man seemed
fascinated by the play of the dials, the whir of the wheels and gyroscopes.
"Are you setting a course, dad?" asked
Lucille presently. "I mean, do you know just where we are?"
"To tell you the truth, my dear,"
answered her father, "I don't. I'm relying on some markings that Tode made
on the chart—certain combinations of figures. God only knows where they'll take
us to. But I'm hoping that by following them we shall find ourselves back on
Long Island in the year 1930.
"No, that rascal could hardly have written
down those figures to no purpose. They seem to me to comprise a course, both
going and returning. But the calculations are very intricate, especially in the
time dimension. I've nearly reached the last row now. Then, we shall have
arrived, or—we sha'n't."
Jim and Lucille sat down again. There was nothing
that they could do. But somehow their hopes of reaching Long Island in the year
of grace 1930 had grown exceedingly slim. Everything depended upon whether or
not Tode had meant those figures to represent the course back to the starting
point or not.
A desperate hope—that was all that remained to
them. They watched Parrish as his eyes wandered along the rows of figures,
while his fingers moved the micrometer screws. And then he looked up.
"We're reaching the end of our course,"
he said. "We're going to land somewhere. God knows where it will be. We
must hope—that's all that's left us."
His hands dropped from the dials. He pressed a
lever. The blur of nights and days began to slow. A column of vivid violet
light shot from the funnel.
"Grip tight!" shouted Parrish.
Thump, thump! The Atom Smasher was vibrating
violently. A jar threw Jim against Lucille. It was coming to a standstill.
Trees appeared. Jim uttered a shout. He stepped across to Parrish and wrung his
hand. He put his arms about Lucille and kissed her.
They were back at the Vanishing Place, and all
their sufferings seemed to be of the past....
CHAPTER VIII - A Fruitless
Journey
Why don't you stop the boat, Parrish?"
"I'm trying to, lad!"
The Atom Smasher was still vibrating, even more
violently than before. A column of violet light was pouring from her funnel.
The pool, the mud, the walls of heaped up water were discernible, but all
quivering and reproduced, line after line, to infinity. It was like looking
into the rear-view mirror of a car that is vibrating rapidly. It was like one
of those Cubist paintings of a woman descending the stairs, where one had to
puzzle out which is the woman and which is the stairs.
A dreadful thought shot through Jim's mind. He
remembered what he had said to Tode: "You can't hold the boat still in
four-dimensional space."
This was not quite the same. By stopping the
infernal mechanism, one re-entered three-dimensional space, and landed.
Certainly the Atom Smasher could land. They were not like the motorcyclist who
got on a machine for the first time, and rode to the admiration of all who saw
him, except that he couldn't find out how to stop.
Yet there was Parrish still fumbling with the
controls, and the boat was still vibrating at a terrific rate of speed. It is
impossible to dream of leaping out, for there was no solidity, no continuity in
the scenery outside.
It was not like attempting to leap from a moving
train, for instance. In that case one knows that there is solid earth beneath,
however hard one lands. Here everything was distorted, a sort of mirror
reflection. And Jim noticed a strange thing that had never occurred to him
before. Everything was reversed, as in a mirror picture. That clump of trees, for
instance, which should have been on the right, was on the left.
Parrish looked up. "There's some means of
stopping her, of course," he said. "There must be a lever—but I don't
know where to look for it in all this mess." He pointed to the revolving
wheels. No, it might be a matter of days of experimenting in order to discover
the elusive switch.
"It may be a combination of switches,"
said Parrish. "I don't know what we're going to do."
"Suppose I jumped and chanced it," Jim
suggested.
Lucille caught his arm with a little cry. Parrish
shook his head.
"That devil—Listen: there was a Drilgo he
disliked. He threw him out of the boat just before she landed at the cave.
Everything was in plain sight, plainer than things are here. But he was never
seen again. For God's sake, lad, sit still. I'll try—"
Hours later Parrish was still trying. And
gradually Jim and Lucille had ceased to hope.
Side by side they had sat, watching that
glimmering scene about them. Sometimes everything receded into a blur, across
which sunlight and shadow, and then moonlight raced, at others the surroundings
were so clear that it almost seemed as if, by steadying the boat, they could
leap ashore. And once there happened something that sent a thrill of cold fear
through both of them.
For where the pool had been there appeared
suddenly a hut—and Tode, standing in the doorway, looking about him, a
malicious sneer curving his lips.
Jim leaped to his feet, and old Parrish, who had
seen Tode too, sprang up in wild excitement.
"Sit down, lad," he shouted. "It's
nothing. I—I turned the micrometer screw a trifle hard. I got us back to five
years ago, when we were living here with Tode. That's just a picture—out of the
past, Jim!"
Jim understood, but he sank down again with cold sweat
bathing his forehead. The terrific powers of the Atom Smasher were unveiling
themselves more and more each moment. Jim felt Lucille's hand on his arm. He
looked into her face.
"Jim, darling, what's going to happen to us
if dad can't find how to work the machine?"
"I don't know, dear. I've thought that we
might all jump out and chance it. If we held each other tight, we'd probably
land in the same place—"
Old Parrish stood up. "I can't work it,
Jim," he said. "Tode's got us beat. There's only one thing for us to
do. You can guess what it is."
"I think I can," said Jim, glancing
askance at Lucille. Yes, he knew, but he lacked the heart to tell her. "If
we were all to jump out, tied together—don't you think we might land—somewhere
near where we want to land?" he asked.
"Jim, do you realize what each vibration of
this boat means?" asked Parrish. "There's a table on the
instrument-board. It's a wave length of four thousand miles in space and
nineteen years in time."
"You mean we're moving to London or San
Francisco and back—"
"Further than that, every infinite fraction
of a second," answered Parrish. "No, Jim, we—we wouldn't land. So we
must just go back to where we came from, and—"
He had been speaking in a low voice, calculated
not to reach Lucille's ears. The girl had been leaning back, her eyes closed,
as if half asleep. Now she rose and stepped up to her father and lover.
"You can tell me the truth," she said. "I'm not afraid."
"We've got to go back, Lucille,"
answered her father. "It's our only chance. By following the course in
reverse we can expect to make Atlantis again—"
"Back to that horrible place?"
"No, my dear. The chart will lead us,
obviously, back to the cave where Tode has his headquarters. We must try to
surprise him, and force him to bring us back to Long Island."
"And then?" asked Lucille.
Parrish shrugged his shoulders. "We'll face
that problem when we come to it," he answered.
"But how do you expect to be able to land at
the other end any more than this?" asked Jim. "Suppose the machine
continues to vibrate instead of coming to a standstill?"
"I think," said Parrish, "that
we'll be able to strike a bargain with Tode. Obviously he will be willing to
bring the machine to a standstill in order to parley with us. We'll make
terms—the best we can. After all, he can't afford to remain marooned on the
isle of Atlantis without the Atom Smasher."
"I hate the idea of bargaining with that
wretch," said Lucille.
"So do we all, dear," answered Jim.
"But there's nothing else that we can do. It's just a matter of give and
take. And I'd be glad to consent to any terms that would bring us three safe
back to earth, with all this business behind us."
"I'll start back, then," said Parrish,
turning back to the instrument board.
And, to the familiar thump, thump of the
electrical discharge, the Atom Smasher took up its backward journey once more.
A
long time
passed. With her head resting against Jim's breast, Lucille rested. Jim bent
over her, trying to discover whether she was asleep or not. Her eyes were
closed, her breathing so soft that she hardly seemed alive. An infinite pity
for the girl filled Jim's heart, and, mingled with it, the intense
determination to overcome the madman who had subjected her to these perils. He
glanced across at Parrish, fingering his screws. Old Parrish looked up and
nodded. There was a new determination in the old man's face that made him a
different person from the crazed old man whom Jim had encountered at the
Vanishing Place.
"We can beat him, Parrish!" Jim called,
and Parrish looked back and nodded again. "We're nearly back to the top of
the column," he answered.
Not long afterward Parrish looked up once more.
"Stand by, Jim!" he called. "And be ready. Tode will be aware of
our approach by means of the sensitive instruments he keeps in his laboratory.
But don't harm him. We want him aboard, and we want him badly. He won't be able
to play any more tricks with us. I've learned too much about the Atom
Smasher."
He pressed a lever, and the greyness dissolved
into its component parts of light and darkness. A jar. Thump, thump! The violet
light! Lucille looked up, raised herself, uttered a low cry and caught at Jim's
arm, trembling.
They had run their course truly. The Atom Smasher
was vibrating outside the entrance to Tode's cave. And that was Tode, standing
there, watching them, that devilish grin of his accentuated to the utmost. A
blurred figure that appeared and vanished, and a surrounding crowd of
Drilgoes—how many it was impossible to guess, for they looked like a crowd of
apes in motion.
Suddenly Tode disappeared, and a moment later
Lucille uttered a terrified cry as his voice spoke in her ear:
"I thought you'd be back. I knew you'd got
away from Atlantis when my recorder showed the waves of electrical energy
proceeding from the city. You were clever, Dent, but you see, you had to come
back to me to get my help."
"Don't be afraid, dear," said Jim,
trying to soothe the girl. "That's a wireless receiving apparatus."
He pointed to a sort of cabinet enclosed among the rotating wheels, and then it
was evident that Tode's voice was proceeding from it.
Tode's figure appeared again, dancing through a
haze of lines and patches. He was holding something in his hand which Jim made
out to be the mouthpiece of a microphone. The voice inside the Atom Smasher
spoke again:
"Turn all the micrometer screws until the
needles register zero, Parrish. Then turn Dial D to point 3, Dial C to 5, Dial
B to 1, and Dial A to 2. I'll repeat.... Now press the starting lever, Parrish,
and you'll find yourself on firm ground again."
A few moments later the Atom Smasher was pouring
out an immense column of the violet light, and slowly the vibration ceased. The
blurred forms of Tode, of the Drilgoes grew clear. They had arrived.
Tode stepped over the rail. "And now, my
friends, we'll have a talk," he said.
"No tricks, Tode," Jim warned him,
"You've probably got a number of deviltries up your sleeve—"
"One or two, Dent," grinned Tode.
"We're willing to negotiate."
"Of course you are. You see, I hold the
trumps, Dent. Those dial deflections, which are inevitable in the construction
of any piece of mechanism, are not the same for Earth in 1920. Don't think you
can use the same figures to land with. You must remember that there has been a
precession of the equinoxes since the time of Atlantis, with a consequent shift
in the earth's axis. No, Dent, I've got you very much where I want you. But I'm
willing to discuss terms with you. First of all, let's get rid of this useless
cargo. I don't believe in overburdening a ship," he grinned.
He picked up Cain bodily and heaved the astonished
Drilgo over the side before he knew what was happening to him. Cain picked
himself up and rubbed his sides, whimpering mournfully. The Drilgoes crowded
closer, their faces agape with astonishment. Tode spoke a command sharply, and
they scattered.
Before we come to terms, Dent, I'll give you a
piece of news that may interest you," said Tode. "Much has happened
during the time you've been away. Ambassadors have been out to see me from
Atlantis. With the aid of a Drilgo interpreter, they conveyed to me that they
had been greatly impressed by the disappearance of the Atom Smasher. They have
nothing like it, of course, and they think I'm a Number One magician.
"The upshot is, they want me to accept the
supreme rule of the city, and use my arts to restore the lost territory that
has sunk beneath the waves. They swore on an image of their god, Cruk, that
they were sincere. I told them that I'd sent the Atom Smasher away on a
journey, but that it would be back shortly, and that I'd then give them their
answer.
"Now, Dent"—Tode's face took on that
look of fanaticism that Jim had seen on it before—"I'm going to repeat the
proposition I made to you before. Join me. I'll make you my chief subordinate,
and I'll load you and Parrish down with honors. Everything that a human being
can desire shall be yours. And in a year or two, when we're tired of being
gods, we'll take the Atom Smasher back to Earth and destroy it, and with our
wealth we'll become the supreme rulers of Earth too. I need you, Dent. You
don't realize how lonely life can be when one is worshiped as a god. As for
Lucille, there are a thousand maidens more beautiful than she is, in Atlantis.
Come, Dent, your answer! Your last chance, Dent! Don't throw it away!"
He read the answer before Jim could speak it. Jim
saw Tode's face flicker, and hurled himself upon him. Lucille screamed. The two
men wrestled together in the narrow confines of the circular boat. Jim struck
Tode a blow that sent him reeling against the rail. Then he felt himself seized
from behind. A giant Drilgo had him in his arms. He lifted him over the side
and flung him to the earth. In an instant the chattering Drilgoes were crowding
down upon him.
Struggling madly, Jim saw Tode fell old Parrish
with a blow, push back Lucille as she sprang at him, and quickly press the
starting lever. The column of violet fire faded, there came the whir of the
mechanism—the Atom Smasher vanished....
CHAPTER IX - The Blinded Eye
Jim fought with all his strength; he managed to
shake off his assailants and regain his feet. Then one of the Drilgoes poised
his stone-tipped spear, ready to hurl it through his body.
But the spear never left the Drilgo's hand in
Jim's direction. Like a great black ape, Cain leaped upon the fellow and bore
him to the ground, his feet twined around his shoulders, his hands gripping his
throat. Not until the Drilgo had been reduced to a heaving, half-strangled hulk
did Cain leave him.
Then Cain, bending until his stomach almost
touched the ground, came worming toward Jim, making signs of obeisance.
What had happened that Jim had won the Drilgo's
faith? Why did Cain now look upon him, apparently, as his master? It was
impossible to gauge the processes of the black man's mind, and at the moment
Jim was in no mood to wonder. The stunning disaster that had overtaken him
monopolized his thoughts.
Lucille and Parrish were once more in Tode's
power. That was the dominating fact. The only gleam of comfort in the situation
was that Tode had given him the clue to his movements.
Beyond a doubt Tode had taken his captives into
Atlantis with him. It was impossible to disbelieve Tode's statement that he had
been offered the supreme power in the city. Tode's egotism would have compelled
him to blurt out that fact. Besides, Tode had certainly not gone back to earth.
Jim must force his way into Atlantis. He would
find and rescue the two prisoners or die there.
He turned away from the groveling Cain and the
chattering Drilgoes, who, inspired by Cain's example, now seemed animated by
the same instinct to obey him, and went into the cave. But at the entrance he
turned for a moment and looked back.
It was night. The valley was swathed in mists, the
volcano opposite was spouting a shaft of lurid fire. On the water was a path of
moonlight, where the clouds had been dispersed by the Atlanteans. Jim took in
the scene, he raised one arm and shook his fist. Then, without a word, he
passed inside.
There was a soft light in the cave, streaming out
from an inner chamber, access to which was through a narrow orifice in the
rock. Jim passed through, and found himself in Tode's laboratory.
He was astonished at its completeness, still more
so at the existence of numerous pieces of apparatus whose purpose it was
difficult to understand. There was a radio transmitter and receiver, but
improved out of all recognition from those in use in the prosaic year 1930.
Three or four tiny dynamos, little more than toys in appearance, were
generating as much voltage, from the indicators, as a modern power station. And
overhead was a dial, with two series of figures in black and red, and two
needles, both of which were swinging briskly, indicating that there was an
intense electrical disturbance in the vicinity.
The Atom Smasher! Jim took heart. Tode could not
be far away! He looked about him, subconsciously trying to discover some
implement that would prove of service to him, but there was nothing that he
could see, not even one of the ray tubes. He looked about uneasily.
Then his eyes fell upon something so singularly
out of place that it looked, for the moment, like some pre-historic weapon. It
was the last thing Jim would have expected to find there—nothing more nor less
than a sporting rifle!
Deer shooting had been one of Tode's pastimes in
the old days, and more than one fat buck had been surreptitiously shot for the
benefit of the larder at the Vanishing Place. There was something almost
pathetic in the sight of that rifle and the fifty cartridges in their cardboard
carton. Perhaps Tode had pictured himself shooting big game in Atlantis at some
period or other. It was a human weakness that for an instant lessened Jim's
hate and horror of the man. It brought him to a saner view of the situation.
Jim had been on the point of losing his powers of reason. The sight of the
rifle restored them.
He turned sharply as he heard a sound in the
entrance. Cain was coming toward him, with many genuflexions, and much stomach
wriggling. He stopped, straightened himself. There was a look of singular
intelligence on the Drilgo's face.
He began chattering, pointing in the direction of
Atlantis. Jim could make nothing of what he was trying to convey.
"Yes, they're there," he said bitterly,
"but I don't see how that's going to help me."
"Oh my poor Lucille!" said Cain
unexpectedly.
The words were like a parrot's speech, the
intonation so remarkable a copy of old Parrish's that Jim was flabbergasted.
Nevertheless it was evident that Cain knew he was referring to Lucille.
With a strange, slinking motion he crossed the
laboratory and bent beneath a huge slab of stone, resting on two great hewn
rocks. He emerged, holding in his arms two curious contrivances. He laid them
at Jim's feet.
Jim stared at them, and suddenly understood what
they were. They were two pairs of wings, of the kind the Atlanteans had used
when they made their aerial sortie against the Drilgoes.
Cain picked up one pair and began adjusting it
about his body. He made fluttering movements with his arms.
"You mean that you've learned how to fly, you
black imp of Satan?" shouted Jim.
And Cain, as if understanding, nodded and beamed
all over his black face.
With that Jim's idea was born. If the Drilgoes
would follow him, he would lead them against Atlantis. And, before the assault
began, he would fly to the great Eye that guarded it, and blind it.
He thought afterward that it was like a
supernatural revelation, this scheme, that leaped full-fledged into his brain.
And Cain had developed extraordinary executive ability. Outside the cave,
through rifts in the swirls of fog, Jim could see innumerable Drilgoes massing
in the valley, as if they understood Jim's purpose. From Cain's gesticulations,
and the number of times he rubbed his stomach, it was evident that he counted
upon sacking Atlantis and was imagining innumerable meals of fat captives.
Each flash of lurid light from the volcano
disclosed further masses of Drilgoes, armed with their stone spears, apparently
assembling for the attack. Whether Tode had summoned them before the Atlanteans
offered him the rulership of the city, or whether Jim's own plan had been
communicated to them by some telepathic process, it was impossible to guess,
but there was not the least doubt but that they were prepared to follow him.
Cain nudged Jim and began strapping the other pair
of wings about his body. Jim saw that the energy was supplied by two tiny,
lights burning in the base, cold fire, stored energy whose strength he did not
guess. For, when Cain took him by the hand, and motioned to him to slide the
knob in the groove, he was hurled skyward like a rocket.
There followed a delirious hour. Tossing and
tumbling like a pigeon in a gale, Jim by degrees acquired mastery over the
apparatus. At the end of the hour he could fly almost as well as Cain, who,
like a black guardian angel kept beside him, reaching out a hand when he
overbalanced, and pulling him out of aerial side-slips.
Suddenly Cain motioned toward the volcano, and
started toward it in a rocketlike swoop. Jim understood. The Drilgoes were
ready for the attack upon Atlantis.
Jim dropped to earth, ran back into the cave, and
picked up the rifle and the carton of ammunition. He filled the magazine, and,
with the rifle on his arm, rose into the air again. Cain was circling back,
uttering weird cries of distress at finding his master absent.
"It's all right, Cain," said Jim.
"I'm here."
Side by side they flew steadily toward the base of
the great cone, which was pouring out a fan-shaped stream of fire. Rumblings
shook the earth; it was evident that another upheaval was in course of
preparation. The long column of the Drilgoes could be seen, extending around
the flank of the mountain.
Then of a sudden the Eye opened. And across the
causeway came the blue-white Ray, carrying death and destruction.
The Drilgoes, who had learned wisdom, remained
concealed out of the Ray's path, and escaped, but a great dinosaur, fifty or
sixty feet in length, startled by the light, came blundering out of the ferns,
uttered a bellow, and melted into an amorphous mass. Birds dropped from their
roosting places with a sound like that of falling hail. Black paths were cloven
through the midst of the jungle.
Rifle in hand, Jim soared into the air, and shot
forward, high above the causeway toward the glowing Eye.
He had noticed that the blue-white ray appeared in
cycles of about two minutes, and had made his plans accordingly. Two minutes in
which to accomplish his task, or take the chance of a hideous death. Some
thirty seconds carried him right into the glowing heart of the winking Eye: he
hovered and raised his rifle.
Underneath him the breakers thundered: round the
Eye a myriad sea-birds fluttered, dashing themselves against it, falling into
the waves. Huge and high the great city towered into the skies, lit by its soft
incandescence. Jim could see the throngs in the streets, the traffic. But what
was happening in the other side of the Eye?
Suddenly he saw the moon in her third quarter
sailing through the skies, and a hideous fear overcame him. Suppose Tode had
met with treachery; suppose that this very night Lucille were doomed to be
sacrificed to the terrible god Cruk!
Suppose that even at that moment her tender flesh
were being sacrificed by the awful hooks!
He drew a bead upon the Eye and fired—and missed.
The bullet went wide. But even if it struck, what guarantee had he that it
would shatter the glass, or whatever substance it was that covered the orb?
He lost position, and knew that the two-minute
interval was drawing to a close. He soared and fired again. The Eye still
glowed.
Then of a sudden a blinding ray shot forth from
it, so dazzling that it seemed to sear Jim's eyeballs. The interval was ended.
It shot beneath him, but no more than a few feet,
and turning his eyes shoreward, Jim saw it sweep along the causeway and tear a
black path through the forest. Frantically he soared, and circled around the
temple.
The ray went out. Two minutes more. And now the
temporary panic had passed; Jim's nerves grew steady as a rock. He eased the
controls and floated in toward the glowing orb. Sea-mews, screaming, dashed
themselves against it and fell, wounded and broken, into the breaking seas below.
They fluttered past Jim's face, one impacted against his chest with a thud that
rocked him where he hovered.
But Jim knew that he could not fail. At a distance
of fifty feet he drew a bead upon the centre of the Eye and pressed the
trigger.
And instantly the light went out....
CHAPTER X - The Fight in the
Dark
He dropped down softly to the causeway. Within the
city he heard a sound such as he had never heard before, as if some ancient
prophecy of doom had been fulfilled, a wailing "Aiah! Aiah! Aiah!"
that was caught up from throat to throat and rose upon the wind in a clamor
wild and mournful as that of the sea-birds around the broken Eye. It was the
death-keening of proud Atlantis, Queen of the Atlantic for fifty thousand
years. She was dying in darkness.
For, with the blinding of the Eye, all the soft
lights within the city had gone out. Dense, utter, impenetrable darkness
reigned, and even the gibbous moon, floating overhead, seemed to give no light.
Jim dropped to the causeway and began running in
the direction of the city. But, feeling the drag of his wings, he unbuckled the
strap and flung them away. He might need them, but his one thought was to get
to Lucille, if she were still alive. And he felt that each moment lost might
mean that he would be too late.
Through the blackness he raced forward, hearing
that sobbing ululation within the walls. But behind him he heard another sound,
and shuddered at it, all his hopes suddenly reversed. For that sound was the
shouting of the Drilgoes as they rushed forward to conquest. And now it seemed
a monstrous thing that proud Atlantis should be at the mercy of these hordes.
He had let loose destruction upon the world. But it was to save Lucille.
That was his consolation. Yet he hardly checked
the racing thoughts within his mind even for a moment, to meditate on what he
had done. Those thoughts were all of Lucille. He must get to her before the
Drilgoes entered. And he ran faster, panting, gasping, till of a sudden the
portals loomed before him, and he saw a crowd of frenzied Atlanteans struggling
to pass through, and a file of soldiers struggling to keep them back.
He could distinguish nothing more than the
confused struggle. He hurled himself into the midst of the crowd and swept it
back. He was within the walls now, and struggling to pass through the mob of
people that was swarming like homeless bees.
He fought them with flailing fists, he clove a
pathway through them, until he found himself in a great shadowy space that he
recognized as the central assembly of the city. More by instinct than design he
hit upon the narrow court that was the elevator. But the court was filled with
another mob of struggling people, and in the darkness there was no possibility
of discovering the secret of raising it.
He blundered about, raging, forcing a path now
here, now there. He ran into blind alleys, into small threading streets about
the court, which led him back into the central place of assembly. It was like a
nightmare, that blind search under the pale three-quarter moon and the black,
star-blotched sky.
Suddenly Jim found himself wedged by the pressure
of the crowd into a sort of recess leading off the elevator court. So strong
was the pressure here that he was unable to move an inch. Wedged bolt upright,
he could only wait and let the frenzied mob stream past him. And louder above
the sound of wailing came the roars of the Drilgoes swarming along the
causeway.
Suddenly something gave behind him—a door, as it
seemed, broken off its hinges by the mob pressure. Jim was hurled backward, and
fell heavily down a flight of stone stairs, bringing up against a stone
balustrade. He got up, unconscious of his bruises, ran to the top of the
flight, and saw the dim square of palest twilight where the door had been.
But over him he could faintly see the stairs and
the balustrade, winding away to what seemed immeasurable height. That stairway
must lead to the top of the building, and thence there should be some access to
the amphitheatre. Jim turned toward it.
Suddenly a tremendous uproar filled the streets,
yells, the clicking grunts of the Drilgoes, the screams of the panic-stricken
populace. The invaders had arrived, and they were sweeping all before them. No
chance of recognition in that darkness. Lucille! Shouting her name, Jim began
to ascend the stairs in leaps of three at a time.
But long before he reached the top he was
ascending one by one, with straining limbs and laboring breath. Red slaughter
down below, a very inferno of sound; above, that shadowy stairway, still
extending almost to the heavens. Step after step, flight beyond flight!
Jim's lungs were bursting, and his heart hammering
as if it would break his chest. One flight more! One more! Another! Suddenly he
realized that his task was ended. In place of the stairs stood a vast hall, and
beyond that another hall, dim in the faint light that filtered through the
glass above.
Jim thought he remembered where he was. Beyond
that next hall there should be the tongue of flooring, crossing the
amphitheatre and joining the platform of the idols. But he stopped suddenly as
he emerged, not upon the tongue, but upon still another stairway.
He had gone astray, and out of his bursting lungs
a cry of rage and despair went up. For a moment he stood still. What use to
proceed further?
And then, amazingly, there came what might have
been a sign from heaven. Down through a small, square opening overhead, no
larger than a ventilator, it came ... a glimmer of violet flame!
And Jim hurled himself like a madman against the
stairs, and surmounted them with two bounds. There were no more. Instead, Jim
found himself looking down into the amphitheatre.
The thick walls had cut off all sound from his
ears, save a confused murmur, but now a hideous uproar assailed them. The whole
floor of the amphitheatre was a mass of moving shadows, of slayers and slain.
The Drilgoes had broken in and trapped the multitudes
that had taken refuge there. Their fearful stone-tipped spears thrust in and
out, to the accompaniment of their savage howls and the screams of the dying.
Never has such a shadow-play been seen, perhaps,
as that below, where death stalked in dense darkness, and the slayer did not
even see his victim. Only the thrust of spears, the soft, yielding flesh that
they encountered, the scream, the wrench of stone from tissue, and the blended
howl of triumph and scream of despair.
Yet only for a moment did Jim turn his eyes upon
that sight. For he knew where he was now. He had emerged upon the other side of
the amphitheatre, upon the platform where he had seen the priests and
dignitaries gathered when he was led forward to be sacrificed.
There, in the rear, were the hideous, shadowy
gods, looming up out of the darkness, their outstretched arms interlaced. And
there upon the platform was the Atom Smasher, a little thread of violet light
seeping out of the central tube.
Beside it stood a group of figures, impossible to
distinguish in the darkness, but of a sudden Lucille's scream rang out above
the din below.
With three leaps Jim was at her side. He saw the
girl, Tode, and Parrish, struggling in the grasp of a dozen priests. They were
dragging them toward the idols, and Jim understood what that scene portended.
In despair at the irruption of the Drilgoes, the
priests were seeking to propitiate their gods by sacrificing the three
strangers whom they held responsible for all their woes.
Jim caught Lucille in his arms, shouting her name.
She knew him, turned toward him. Then one of the priests, armed with a great
stone-headed club—for no metal is permitted within the precincts of the god
Cruk—struck at him furiously.
Jim leaped aside, letting the club descend harmlessly
upon the floor. He shot out his right with all his strength behind it, catching
the priest upon the jaw, and the man crumpled.
Whirling the club around his head, he fought back
the fanatics, all the while shouting to Tode to start the Atom Smasher. In such
a moment he only remembered that Tode was a white man, and of his own
generation.
He struck down three of the priests; then he was
seized around the knees from behind, and fell heavily. The club was wrenched
from his hand. In another moment Jim found himself helpless in the grasp of the
Atlanteans.
As he stopped struggling for a moment, to gather
his strength for a supreme effort, he heard a whir overhead, and saw the arms
of the stone gods begin their horrible revolution. The priests had started the
machinery. And high above the din below rang out the wild chant of the high
priest.
Jim saw him now, a figure poised upon a platform
behind the arms, his own arms raised heavenward.
"Aiah! Aiah! Aiah!"
Jim was being dragged forward, with Lucille beside
him, old Parrish following, still making a futile struggle for life, while
pitiful screeches issued from his mouth.
Jim saw the revolving arms descend within a foot
of his head. One more fight—one more, the last.
Suddenly, with loud yells, a band of Drilgoes
leaped forward from the head of the stairs and rushed upon the struggling
priests and victims. And, dark as it was, Jim recognized their leader—Cain.
And Cain knew Lucille. As the priests rallied for
a desperate resistance, Cain hurled his great body through the air, landing
squarely upon the shoulders of the priest nearest the revolving arms, and
knocking him flat.
Then the arms caught priest and Drilgo, and the
steel hooks dug deep into their flesh. A screech of terror, a howl that
reverberated through the amphitheatre, and nothing remained of either but a
heap of macerated flesh.
But in that instant Jim had fought free again. He
caught Lucille and dragged her back toward the Atom Smasher.
Tode had already broken from his captors and was
working at it frantically.
"Hold on!" screeched old Parrish.
"Hold on!"
They had a moment's leeway. The Drilgoes had
driven the priests back into the hooks. With awful shrieks the fanatics were
yielding up their lives, in the place of their selected victims.
But more Drilgoes were pouring up the stairs. A
moment's leeway, and no more, before the savage band would impale the four upon
their stone-pointed spears. There was not the slightest chance that they would be
able to make their identity known.
"For God's sake hurry!" Jim yelled in
Tode's ear.
The wheels were revolving, a stream of violet
light, leaping out of the central tunnel, cast a lurid illumination upon the
scene.
But it was too late. A score of Drilgoes, with
leveled spears, were rushing on the four.
"Hold tight!" screeched Parrish. He
thrust his arm into his breast, and pulled out a little lever. Jim recognized
it and remembered. It was the instrument of universal death—the uranium release
of untold forces of cataclysmic depredation.
"Take that!" screamed the old man,
inserting the lever into the secret groove in the Atom Smasher and jerking it
in the direction of the priests.
CHAPTER XI - Tode's Last Gamble
A roar that seemed to rend the heavens followed.
Roar upon roar, as the infinite momentum of the disintegrating uranium struck
obstacle after obstacle. The Drilgoes vanished, the amphitheatre melted away,
walls and roof.... Overhead were the moon and stars.
And proud Atlantis was sinking into the depths of
the sea.... Not as a ship sinks, but piecemeal, her walls and towers crumbling
and toppling as a child's sand-castle crumbles under the attack of the lapping
waves. Down they crashed, carrying their freight of black, clinging, human
ants, while from the sea's depths a wave, a mile high, rose and battered the
fragments to destruction. From the crater of the volcano a huge wave of fire
fanned forward, and where fire and water met a cloud of steam rose up.
A boiling chaos in which water and earth and fire
were blended, spread over land and sea. And then suddenly it was ended. Where
the last island of the Atlantean continent had been, only the ocean was to be
seen, placid beneath the stars.
The Atom Smasher was vibrating at tremendous
speed. Jim, with one arm round Lucille, faced Tode at the instrument board.
Near by sat Parrish, watching him too.
"That took a whole year," said Tode.
"That pretty little scene of destruction we've just witnessed. The good old
Atom Smasher has been doing some lively stunts, or we'd have been engulfed too.
We're not likely to see anything so pretty in history again, unless we go to
watch the destruction of Herculaneum and Pompeii by lava from Vesuvius. But
that would be quite tame in comparison with this."
Tode's jeering tone grated on Jim's ears
immeasurably.
"I don't think any of us are craving any more
experiments, Tode," he said, trying to keep his voice steady.
"Suppose you take us back to Peconic Bay. We'll dump the Atom Smasher into
the pond, and try to forget that we've had anything except a bad
nightmare."
"Don't trust him, Jim," whispered
Lucille.
Tode heard. "Thank you," he answered,
scowling. "But seriously, Dent, we can't go back with nothing to show for
all our trouble. Those fools tried to betray me, and then the Eye went out.
Perhaps I have you to thank for that performance? However, the sensible thing
is to let bygones be bygones. But we must make a little excursion. How about
picking up a little treasure from the hoards of Solomon or Genghis Khan? A few
pounds of precious stones would make a world of difference in our social status
when we reach Long Island."
Jim felt a cold fury permeating him. Tode saw his
grim look and laughed malignantly.
"Well, Dent, I'm ready to be frank with
you," he said. "The game's still in my hands. I want Lucille. I'm
willing to take you and Parrish back, provided you agree she shall be mine.
I'll have to trust you, but I shall have means of evening up if you play crooked."
"Why don't you ask my girl herself?"
piped old Parrish.
"He needn't trouble. He knows the
answer!" cried Lucille scornfully.
"There's your answer," said Jim.
"Now, what's the alternative?"
"The alternative is, that I have already set
the dial to eternity, Dent," grinned Tode. "Eternity in the fifth
dimension. Didn't know I'd worked that out, did you? A pleasant little
surprise. No, don't try to move. My hand is on the lever. I have only to press
it, and we're there."
Jim stood stock still in horror. Tode's voice rang
true. He believed Tode had the power he claimed.
"Yes, the fifth dimension, and
eternity," said Tode, "where time and space reel into
functionlessness. Don't ask me what it's like there. I've never been there. But
my impression of it is that it's a fairly good representation of the place
popularly known as hell.
"You fool, Dent," Tode's voice rang out
with vicious, snarling emphasis, "I gave you your chance to come in with
me. Together we'd have made ourselves masters of Atlantis and brought back her
plunder to our Twentieth Century world. You refused because of a girl—a girl,
Dent, who loved me long before you came upon the scene."
"That's a lie, Lucius," answered Lucille
steadily. "And you can do your worst. There's one factor you haven't
reckoned in your calculations, and that's called God."
"The dark blur on the spectral lines,"
old Parrish muttered.
Tode laughed uproariously. "Come, make your
choice, Dent," he mocked. "It's merely to press this lever. You'll
find yourself—well, we won't go into that. I don't know where you'll find
yourself. You'll disappear. So shall I. But I'm desperate. I must have Lucille.
Choose!" His voice rang out in maniac tones. "Choose, all of
you!"
"Lucille has answered you," Jim
retorted.
"And how about you, old man?" called
Tode to Parrish.
Parrish leased forward, making a swift movement
with his hand. "Go to your own hell, you dev—"
A blinding light, a frantic oscillation of the
Atom Smasher, a sense of death, awful and indescribable—and stark
unconsciousness rushed over Jim. His last thought was that Lucille's arms were
about him, and that he was holding her. Nothing mattered, therefore, even
though they two were plunged into that awful nothingness of the fifth
dimension, where neither space nor time recognizably exists. Love could exist
there.
CHAPTER XII - Solid Earth
He's coming around, Lucille. Thank God for
it!"
Jim opened his eyes. For a few moments he looked
about him without understanding. Then the outlines of a room etched themselves
against the clouded background. And in the foreground Lucille's face. The girl
was bending over Jim, one hand soothing his forehead.
"Where am I?" Jim muttered.
"Back on earth, Jim, the good old earth,
never again to leave it," answered Lucille, with a catch in her voice.
With an effort she composed herself. "You mustn't talk," she said.
"But what place is this?"
"It's Andy Lumm's house. Now rest, and I'll
explain everything later."
But the first explanation came from Andy Lumm.
"Well, Mr. Dent, my wife and me sure were glad to be on the spot when you
and Miss Parrish got bogged on the edge of the Black Pool," he said.
"Mean, treacherous place it is. Thar was a cow got mired thar last month,
up to her belly. If us hadn't found her, and dragged her out with ropes, she'd
have gone clear under. Granpop Dawes says thar's underground springs around the
edge, and that it runs straight down to hell, though that seems sorter
far-fetched to me.
"Yessir, and if I hadn't heard WNYC giving
Miss Parrish on the list of missing persons, and as having been seen near here,
I reckon I'd never have found you. Made me and my wife uneasy, that did.
'Andy,' she says. 'I got an inkling you oughter go to the Vanishing Place and
see if she ain't there.' And there I found you two, mired to the waist, and Mr.
Parrish dancing around and fretting, and his clothes burned to cinders.
"It sure seems strange to me, to think Mr.
Parrish got away safe after that explosion five years ago, and of his wandering
around with loss of memory, till you found him, and brung him back here to
restore it, but thar's strange things in the world—yes, sir, thar surely
is!"
In the happiness of being back on Earth once more,
Jim was content to let further explanations go. The return of Parrish had been
duly chronicled in the newspapers, and had provoked a mild interest, but
fortunately the public mind was so occupied at the moment with the trial of a
night club hostess that, after the first rush of newspaper men, the three were
left alone.
Day after day, in the brilliant autumn weather,
Jim and Lucille would roam the tinted woods, recharging themselves with the
feel of Earth, until the memory of those dread experiences grew dim.
"Well, Jim, I reckon I'd better tell you and
get it over," said old Parrish one morning—Parrish, quite his old, jaunty
self again. "Tode had got the dials pointing to the fifth
dimension—eternity, he called it, though actually I believe it's nothing more than
annihilation, a grand smash. Well, he pressed that lever. But something had
gone wrong.
"You remember how poor Cain seemed to take
great interest in the Atom Smasher. There's no way of telling what had been
going on in that brain of his, but it looks to me like he'd known that that
lever meant death. It was sealed up in wax, and Tode had got it free on the way
out of Atlantis.
"Well—this it what I made out from examining
the thing afterward. Cain had been monkeying with the lever. He'd pried loose
one of the wires that hooked to the transformer, and short-circuited it, not
knowing, of course, just what he was doing. The result was that when Tode
pressed that lever, instead of blowing the whole contraption to pieces, he got
a couple of billion volts of electricity through his body, combined with a
larger amperage than has ever been imagined. It burned him to a few grease
spots. He simply—vanished. You don't remember what you did at the moment,
boy?"
"I don't seem to remember anything,"
said Jim.
"Well, your response was an automatic one.
You jumped him. Luckily you were too late, for Tode vanished like that!"
Old Parrish snapped his fingers. "But you must have got into the field of
magnetic force—any way, you were almost electrocuted. Lucille and I thought you
were dead for hours.
"We laid you down and set a course for home.
I used those dial numberings Tode had given me. He'd said they wouldn't work,
but he'd lied. They did work. They brought us back to the Vanishing Place.
"We carried you out, and then I saw your
eyelid twitch. We worked over you with artificial respiration till it looked as
if there was a chance for you. Then I shut off the power and let the waters
rush in over the Atom Smasher, and swam ashore. And there it lies at the bottom
of the pool, and may it lie there till the Judgment Day."
Tode was a genius," said Jim, "but he
never understood that character counts for more than genius."
"Let's think no more about him," said
Lucille. She had come up to them, and the two looked at each other and smiled.
Love is self-centred; other things it forgets very quickly.
"To-morrow we go back to New York," said
Jim. "You think you're able to face the world and take up life
again?"
"I think so, Jim," said Lucille.
"You're not remembering him after all?"
"No, Jim. I was thinking of poor Cain. He
died for me."
"But that was twelve thousand years ago, my
dear, and to-day's to-day," said Jim. "And to-morrow a new life
begins for you and me."
He drew her closer to him. No, he would never
quite forget, but that was twelve thousand years ago ... and to-morrow was his
wedding day.
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