The Second Time Travel Megapack: 23 Modern and Classic Stories Read online

  “Nice work, my dear d’Artagnan,” he called out. “Now if you will take charge of the gun in the plane, we will all leave as soon as I get the motors started.”

  The motors started without any trouble, and as soon as they were warmed up sufficiently Clive signaled to the remainder of the crew on the ground, who clambered aboard, and the plane roared down the field and off the ground amid a few desultory shots from the attackers.

  * * * *

  In less than an hour they were flying over Amiens, and Clive circled low to land near the cavern, but once again Richelieu had him checkmated for there was a large company of guards stationed at the entrance to the cavern. They had built up a crude fortification, and were prepared to withstand any abortive attempt by a ground force to penetrate the entrance. Seeing this, Clive gunned his motors and climbed once again to a safe altitude.

  “There’s only one way to get past that guard,” he said. “I’ll have to get hold of one of the tanks.”

  “Monsieur Athos has four tanks in his command, and he is campaigning near Lille, not far north of here,” said d’Artagnan.

  “Good,” said Clive. “I will get in touch with him.” He switched on his radio, and almost immediately he heard his call signal come through the headphones, it was Athos’ voice he heard.

  “Come in, my dear Athos. Where are you?” he asked.

  “We are on the road just north of Amiens, and we can see your flying machine circling above the city,” came Athos’ voice through the receiver. “We have already heard of your flight from Paris. Can we be of any assistance to you?”

  “Providence must have sent you, my friend, as I was just about to search for you,” said Clive. “Stop by that field ahead of you, it looks like a good spot for a landing.”

  The tanks were lumbering up to the field about the same time that Clive brought his plane to a landing. The occupants of this strange array of vehicles dismounted for mutual greetings.

  “How goes the campaign, Monsieur Athos?” asked Clive.

  “I have found the northern provinces in very good order, Monsieur Clive, and I am at present returning to Paris,” replied the musketeer.

  “Do you intend taking the tanks into Paris with you?” asked Clive.

  “Yes, Messieurs Porthos and Aramis were to meet me in Paris, and if no more word of uprisings came we were to return to Calais and dispose of the equipment as we had planned,” Athos replied.

  “Well you must change your plans, my dear Athos, if you do not want to see France embroiled in a war with all Europe, for the cardinal is waiting to seize these tanks as soon as they enter Paris,” Clive cautioned. “You must warn the others also, so that they will not be caught in His Eminence’s trap.”

  “And what about you, Monsieur, you are fleeing when you have it in your power to make others flee?” asked Athos.

  “Let’s not say ‘fleeing,’” said Clive, “but rather ‘leaving by choice’. I fear that no matter how good my intentions, as long as I am here I will always be a menace to France. Perhaps when this mess has been forgotten I shall return for a visit, but for the present I will borrow one of your tanks, and take my leave.”

  “And her Majesty, the queen, Monsieur, will you not bring her back to us?” the musketeer asked anxiously. Clive felt his face flush to the ears. He would have preferred no mention of this matter, but after all, this was an important problem as the queen was dear to the hearts of the musketeers.

  “I shall certainly bring her back, my dear Athos, if she wishes to return. For this reason you must keep one radio set, and when I return I will send you a message, and you can come and get her.” This seemed to satisfy the musketeers, for they had little doubt that the queen would want to return.

  “If I am successful in gaining the entrance to the cavern, destroy my plane, and then come and get the tank, and destroy it,” Clive continued as he climbed into one of the machines. “Farewell, my dear friends, I shall treasure every memory I have of you, and shall look forward to a future visit with you.” With the farewells of the musketeers still ringing in his ears, Clive maneuvered the tank toward the cavern.

  With the tank it was an easy matter to destroy the fortifications at the entrance to the cavern, and to scatter the defenders. Clive ran the tank right into the cavern’s portal to prevent attack from the rear. He quickly shed his clothes and plunged into the stream of-water. He had proceeded to where the water was deep enough to start swimming, when a tremendous explosion rocked the cavern. Pieces of rock splashed in the water nearby, but fortunately none hit him. Looking back, Clive could no longer see any light, the entrance to the cavern had been completely sealed.

  “Well that’s that,” thought Clive. Unconsciously a great weight had been lifted from his mind—there was no longer anything he could do for France, and Anne was less than an hour away.

  THROUGH TIME AND SPACE WITH FERDINAND FEGHOOT: 110, by Grendel Briarton

  When Ferdinand Feghoot went back to 1908 to delay the fall of the Chinese Empire (he ruled as the Emperor Fei Hu, 357-329 B.C.), his effors were frustrated by the Empress Dowager, old Tzu Hsi, who refused all advice. He, however, loyally acceded to every one of her wishes.

  Finally, she revealed her plans to him. “The Foreign Devils plotting my downfall,” she screamed, “shall never succeed! I have formed a corps of one thousand brave women warriors, tall, strong, handsome girls from the North, armed with our traditional jingals. They shall terrify the Barbarians!”

  Jingals were huge, obsolete muzzle-loaders firing inch-and-a-half balls, but Feghoot was too wise to argue.

  “My women must have stirring music to parade to,” she went on. “Choose it! Teach my military musicians to play it!”

  Feghoot promptly went to work, and three weeks later the parade took place outside the Forbidden City. Every foreign ambassador was invited.

  Feghoot himselv, pleading ear trouble, did not attend, but immediately afterwards he was summoned before the ecstatic ruler.

  “Did we prevail, oh Daughter of Heaven?” he asked.

  “There mere sight of my women and the terror inspired by your music threw the Foreign Devils into utter dismay!” she replied. “Some gaped or cried out. Others clapped their hands to their ears. What do you call that wonderful music?”

  “It is called Jingal Belles,” said Ferdinand Feghoot.

  LOST IN TIME, by Arthur Leo Zagat

  CHAPTER I

  THE STRATOCAR

  Jim Dunning gasped in the surge of terrific heat. A vast roaring deafened him. He leaped to the lashed wheel of the Ulysses. In a single motion he loosed the fastenings and threw all the power of his knotted muscles into a desperate twirling of the polished spokes. The deck slanted. The yawl shot about in a foaming half circle and fled like some live, terrified thing from the whirling, topless column of fire that had leaped out of the sea.

  Dunning stared, over his shoulder, across the lurid waters that a moment before had been a glassy plain, silvery under the moon of a windless Pacific night. The crimson pillar soared stupendously, the speed of its whirling whipping the ocean into long, blurred spirals of fire.

  The tremendous blare of sound leaped suddenly higher in pitch, became a shriek. Something sprang into view at the base of the fiery column, something huge and black and round. On the moment the sea heaved and climbed heavenward till the flame was lashing from within a huge liquid crater. The dark wall of water expanded. A towering wave rushed toward Dunning with incredible speed.

  Dunning crouched over the wheel as if to add the naked force of his will to the frantic putt-putt of the Ulysses’ motor. The little vessel darted away like a thoroughbred under the lash. But the towering wave caught up with her, loomed appallingly above her. A briny avalanche crashed down on the doomed craft.

  Jim Dunning fought for his life in a seething welter of waters. A h
atch-cover, torn from its hinges, thudded against him. With a last, instinctive effort he hauled himself across the cleated plank, clung to it desperately as consciousness left him.

  A reckless bet with some of his club members had sent Jim Dunning out from ’Frisco, six weeks before, on his disastrous attempt to cross the Pacific, single-handed, in a thirty-foot, auxiliary-engined yawl. And now in the graying dawn, his still shape floated on the tiny raft amidst a mass of wreckage. About him the vast circle of the horizon enclosed a waste of heaving waters, vacant of any life. Only a light breeze ruffled the sea’s surface, calm again after the sudden disturbance of the night.

  Eventually his eyes opened. Hopelessly, he raised his head. A curious object that looked like a large spherical buoy, floating half submerged, met his gaze. But what was a buoy doing here, a thousand miles from the nearest land, in water a half mile deep?

  Dunning kicked off his shoes and swam strongly through the cool brine. The great ball hung above him as he floated, its exterior glass-smooth. He swam slowly around it, searching for some projection that would enable him to get to its summit. Inches above the water a threadlike crack showed. It made a rectangle three feet wide by five. Was it an entrance to the interior of the ball whose floating showed it to be hollow? There was no handle, no means of opening it.

  Dunning trod water and with the flat of his hand he pushed against the unyielding sector, inward, then side-ward, with no result. In sudden exasperation he drove his fist against the polished surface and yelled: “Open, damn you, open up and let a fellow in!”

  Amazingly, the metal moved! Dunning stared as the curved panel jogged inward for an inch, then slid smoothly aside.

  “It’s like the Arabian Nights,” he muttered. “I yelled ‘open sesame’ and it opened.” A prickle along his spine did deference to the uncanny happening. Then, oddly enough, he chuckled.

  “That’s it! An electric robot. Nothing to be scared of.”

  Only a week before Dunning’s departure Tom Barton had demonstrated to him this latest ingenuity of the electrical wizards. It was installed in Barton’s garage, a phono-electric cell so adjusted that at the coded honking of a horn it would set a motor in motion to open the doors. Barton had picked up the idea at the airport; where the same device turned on the floodlights in response to a siren signal from an approaching airplane.

  “If honking horns and howling sirens can open doors, why not the human voice? Well, let’s take a look at the Forty Thieves.”

  Gripping the opening’s lower edge Dunning leaped out of the water and through the aperture. He was in a confined chamber, its walls and ceiling the vaulted curve of the sphere itself.

  Sprawled across the flat floor was a girl, unmoving. Dunning caught his breath at the white beauty framed by long black hair that cascaded along her slim length.

  “No!” he groaned. “She can’t be dead!”

  Dunning bent over the girl and lifted one limp hand, feeling for a pulse. There was a slow throb. A long whistle of relief escaped him. She was breathing, shallowly but steadily, and her dark lashes quivered a bit where they lay softly against the curve of her pale cheeks.

  There was a couch just beyond the girl. He lifted her to it, laid her down. Gently he straightened her robe of some unfamiliar, shimmering material—and whirled to some inimical presence glimpsed from the corner of his eye.

  He crouched, his spine tingling with ancestral fear, his brawny arms half curved, his great fists clenched. But the man did not stir. Seated at a desk-like object just beyond the opening, he stared straight before him. It was his uncanny rigidity, the fish-white pallor of his face, that were so menacing. He was dead.

  Dunning moved cautiously across the floor toward the seated corpse. It toppled as he reached it, thumped soggily to the floor.

  The acrid odor of burned flesh stung Dunning’s nostrils. There was a huge cavity in the cadaver’s chest, its gaping surface blackened and charred by some searing flame!

  Dunning swung his back to the wall, and his glance darted about the room.

  The dead man and the unconscious girl were the only other occupants of the hemisphere. Had someone killed the man, struck the girl down, and escaped? But how had he managed it? There was no room for an attacker between the body and the contrivance before which it had been seated.

  That strange object was of some unfamiliar, iridescent metal. It had somewhat the size and contour of an old-fashioned roll-top desk, minus the side wings. Across the center of the erect portion, where the pigeonholes should be, stretched a long panel of what appeared to be milky-white glass, divided into two portions by a vertical metal strip. Above and below, tangent to the edge of the long panel at the ends of the metal strip, were two round plates of the same clouded glass. In spaces to left and right of these disks were arrayed a number of dial-faces; gauges or indicators of some kind.

  On a waist-high, flat ledge were little colored levers, projecting through slitted grooves. From the forward edge of this a metal flap dipped down some four inches. Through this metal flap a hole gaped, its curled edges melted smooth by a flame, by the flame that had killed the man at his feet!

  Something hard thrust into his back.

  “Don’t move! Twitch a muscle and you die!”

  Dunning froze rigid at the crisp command. That voice from behind, vibrant with threat, was yet unmistakably feminine.

  Dunning obeyed. A vague strangeness in the words bothered him. They were oddly accented. The low-timbred, contralto voice was speaking English, but an English queerly changed, glorified in sound, lambent with indefinable majesty.

  A hand passed over his body.

  “You seem to be unarmed now—turn around, slowly.”

  The girl was standing a yard away, pointing a black tube steadily at him. Her lips were scarlet against the dead white of her skin. Her eyes were dilated. Rage—and fear—stared forth from their grey depths.

  “What have you done to Ran? Why have you killed him?”

  “Nothing. I—”

  “You lie!” she blazed at him. “You lie! You’re one of Marnota’s helots—sent to murder me! But how did he dare—open assassination? There is still law in the land—in spite of him.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about, sister,” Dunning drawled. “My yawl was wrecked last night. When I came to, I saw your—this thing, whatever it is, and swam to it. The hatchway opened, you were on the floor, dead to the world. I lifted you to the couch, looked around, and found—this. I know less than you do how Ran was killed:”

  A flicker of doubt crossed the girl’s face. There was an almost imperceptible relaxation of her tenseness.

  “Your voice is so strange, you speak so queerly. Where do you come from? What are you?”

  “I am an American.”

  Suspicion flared again, and hate. Dunning waited what seemed ages for a flash from the cylinder of death.

  “But—somehow—you don’t seem a murderer,” she said. “You have not the brutish appearance of Marnota’s mercenaries. There is something strange here, something I don’t understand.” The tube wavered, dropped a bit.

  Dunning saw his chance. His hand flicked out, closed on the uncanny weapon; wrenched it away. The girl gasped. She was white, congealed flame.

  “Go ahead,” she whispered defiantly. “Finish your task. Press the button and kill me.”

  “I haven’t any desire to kill you, or to harm you,” Dunning chuckled. “I only want to know what this is all about. I’m Jim Dunning. What’s your name?”

  “I am Thalma, Thalma of the house of Adams,” she proclaimed proudly.

  “Sorry, Miss Adams. The name means nothing to me.”

  Amazement showed in her mobile features.

  “You do not know me!” she exclaimed, wonderingly. “And you say you are an American?”
>
  “I left San Francisco six weeks ago. Have you become famous since then?”

  She shook her head, still bewildered. Dunning continued.

  “Up to then I’m sure I knew what was going on. I read the papers. New York had just won the World Series. Franklin Roosevelt was President of the United States—”

  A startled exclamation came from Thalma. Her weapon dropped from a hand flung up as if to ward off a blow.

  “Roosevelt—President! Why—that’s ancient history. What year was that?”

  “What year? This year, of course, 1937.”

  “Nineteen-thirty-seven! What are you talking about? This is 2312 A.D.”

  CHAPTER II

  NO WAY BACK

  Jim Dunning was staggered. Twenty-three, twelve! She was cra—No, she wasn’t. There was no madness in her wide eyes, only dawning comprehension—and fathomless terror.

  “Marnota!” Thalma said fiercely. “What has he done to me?”

  “What—” Dunning forced past the constriction in his own throat. “What do you mean?”

  “He—Marnota—somehow he’s thrown me back in time. Four hundred years back in time!”

  The statement thudded against his ears, and, incredible as it was, he knew it for truth. There was something about the girl, about this queer sphere and its contents, about the very clothing of the girl and her murdered companion, that convinced him, against all reason.

  “What shall I do?” Thalma’s whimper was the frightened cry of a small child, alone with the dark and with blind, overwhelming fear.

  Dunning took two steps to her side. His arm went around her shoulder, protectingly.

  “You just trust your Uncle Jim! Everything’s going to be all right, sure as God made little apples. Just sit down over here, and powder your nose, or whatever they do in your time. Then you can tell me all about it.” They moved toward the couch.