The 22nd Golden Age of Science Fiction Read online

  The Idaho, and all her crew, had passed through a space-time fault into an antediluvian world!

  CHAPTER III

  The Return of the Dove

  There were dozens of the great bird-lizards flapping about the ship. Either they thought it was an enemy, to be attacked and destroyed, or they thought it was something to eat. In either event, it was to be attacked. They were attacking it. They would circle it, flap heavily to a point above, then launch themselves into a glide, fanged mouth open, screaming shrilly.

  The anti-aircraft gunners knocked the beasts out of the air with ease.

  On the bridge a group of tense officers watched the slaughter without being greatly interested in it. They knew that the guns of the Idaho were proof against any creature of earth, sky, or water, in this world. They were not afraid of the beasts of this strange time into which they had been thrust.

  The scouting plane was still out, searching the waste of water for land.

  The officers of the Idaho were all thinking the same thing. Captain Higgins put their thoughts into words.

  “Mr. Michaelson,” the captain said slowly. “I can’t argue with you. I am forced to believe that somehow we have been forced back in time. However I am charged with the responsibility for this ship. Back where we came from, the Idaho is needed. I want to get her back where she belongs. How can we accomplish this?”

  The scientist hesitated. He did not want to say what he had to say. He shook his head. “I question whether or not we can accomplish it,” he said at last.

  “But we have to return!” Higgins protested.

  “I know,” Michaelson said sympathetically. “The problem is how!”

  “You mean there is no way to return?”

  The scientist shrugged. “If there is, I do not know of it.”

  “But can’t you make any suggestion? After all, this is your field. You’re a scientist.”

  “This is my field but even I know little or nothing about it. Almost nothing is known about the true nature of the space-time continuum. Only recently have we even guessed that such things as space-time faults existed. We were hurled through this particular fault by accident, the result of an unfortunate combination of circumstances. Whether we can duplicate that accident, and whether it would return us to our own time—I just don’t know. Nobody knows.”

  The officers of the Idaho received this information with no sign of pleasure. Craig felt sorry for them. After all, some of them had wives, all of them had friends back in the United States. Or was it forward in the United States, in the America that was to be? It was hard to remember that Columbus had not as yet sailed westward, would not sail westward for—how many hundreds of thousands of years?

  All human history would have to unroll before there was an America. If the theory of continental drift was correct, there might not even be an American continent, it might still be joined to Europe. Babylon and Nineveh, Karnak and Thebes, Rome and London—there were no such cities in the world, would not be for—

  * * * *

  The men on this ship were probably the only human beings alive on earth! Men had not yet become human, or maybe hadn’t. The Neanderthal Man, the Cro-Magnons, maybe the Java Man, the Piltdown Man, had not yet appeared on the planet!

  “As I understand it,” an officer said, “we were sailing directly across a space-time fault when the explosion of the bombs sent us through the fault? Is that correct?”

  “That is correct,” Michaelson answered.

  “Then why don’t we locate this fault and set off some explosions of our own?” the officer suggested. “Is there any chance that we might return—home—that way?”

  “I don’t know,” the scientist frankly answered. “Maybe it would work, maybe it won’t. We can certainly try it, and if it fails, nothing is lost. Meanwhile I will go over my data and see if I can find some way of accomplishing what we desire.”

  Michaelson went below. The Idaho was brought around. Immediately a worried officer posed another problem.

  “How are we going to find that fault?” he asked. “We can’t see it. We can’t feel it. How are we going to know when we have reached the right place?”

  “We’ll search the whole area,” Higgins said. “We haven’t moved far and locating the fault ought not to be too difficult. For that matter, we are probably still in it.”

  The officers moved quickly and efficiently to put his orders into execution. The plan was to put the ship in the same position she had occupied when the bombs struck, then use the small boats to plant explosive charges in the water around the battle wagon, charges which could be electrically exploded from the ship. Captain Higgins moved to where Craig was standing. He took off his cap and wiped perspiration from his forehead.

  “What do you make of this?” he asked.

  Craig shrugged. “I pass,” he said.

  “But—one minute we were part of a task force and Jap bombers were having a go at us. The next minute—” Higgins looked helpless. “Damn it, Craig,” he exploded, “things like that can’t happen!”

  “They aren’t supposed to happen,” the big man grimly answered. “We just saw one of them happen.”

  “But—” Higgins protested, “surely we would have known about these space-time faults, if they existed. Other ships would have fallen into them.”

  “Maybe other ships have fallen into them,” Craig suggested. “In the last war the Cyclops vanished without a trace. There have been other ships, dozens of them, that have disappeared. And, for that matter, how is the commander of your task force going to handle the disappearance of the Idaho?”

  “I don’t know,” Higgins muttered.

  “He is going to have to report the loss of the battleship. What will he say?”

  “What can he say?”

  “He’ll search the area, for survivors and wreckage. When he finds neither the only conclusion he can reach will be that the Idaho was instantaneously sunk with the loss of all hands. Remember we were under attack at the time. Remember that intense blue light that flared around the horizon? To the men in the other ships that light may have looked like an explosion of the magazines of the Idaho. The admiral commanding your task force may report that a bomb seemingly passed down the smoke stack of the Idaho and the resulting explosion touched off the powder magazine.”

  * * * *

  Craig paused and in growing perplexity watched what Higgins was doing. The captain was vigorously kicking the steel wall of the bridge. He was pounding his right foot against it as if he was trying to kick it down. There was a look of pain on his face. Craig watched for a second, then grinned.

  “Does it hurt?” he said.

  “Yes!”

  “Then it must be real,” the big man suggested.

  Higgins left off kicking the wall. Craig knew why he had been kicking it—to assure himself that the wall was really there. Higgins was a man in a nightmare but instead of pinching himself to see if he was awake, he kicked the wall.

  “Damn it!” the captain muttered. “Why did this have to happen to us?”

  “Destiny,” Craig mused. “Fate. How did the steamer I was on happen to get bombed? How did I happen to be in the life-boat that wasn’t machine-gunned? How did we happen to get picked up? The only answer is fate.”

  “That’s a darned poor answer,” Higgins said.

  “It’s the only answer,” Craig replied. “Your dove is coming back.”

  “What? Have you gone wacky on me?” the startled captain answered.

  Craig pointed to the sea. Barely visible on the horizon was a tiny dot.

  “Oh, the plane,” the captain said, watching the dot. It was moving swiftly toward them.

  Craig watched it, a frown on his face. “I thought you sent out only one plane,” he said.

  “That’s right. I did send one.”

  “We
ll,” Craig said slowly, “unless my eyes have gone bad, three planes are coming back.”

  “What?—But that’s impossible?” Higgins snatched a pair of glasses, swiftly focused them on the plane. It was still only a dot in the sky. Two smaller dots were following swiftly behind it.

  “Maybe a couple of those lizard-birds are chasing it?” Craig hazarded.

  “Nonsense!” the captain retorted. “It can fly rings around those things. Those lizards are too slow to keep up with it. But there is something following it.”

  Higgins kept the glasses to his eyes, straining to see the approaching dots.

  “If those things are planes,” he muttered, and there was a note of exultation in his voice, “then Michaelson, and his talk of space-time faults, is nuts.”

  What Higgins meant was, that if the two dots were planes, then what had happened to the Idaho had been an illusion of some kind. Planes could exist only in a modern world. They were one of mankind’s most recent inventions.

  The stubby-winged scouting plane from the ship was easily visible now. It was driving hell for leather for the Idaho. Craig watched it with growing apprehension.

  “That pilot is running away from something,” he said.

  “Impossible!” Higgins snapped.

  The plane swept nearer. It was flying at a low altitude. The two dots were hard on its heels. They were overtaking it. And—they were no longer dots.

  “Planes!” Higgins shouted.

  * * * *

  Craig kept silent. They were planes all right, but—He saw something lance out from one of them. The scouting plane leaped upward in a screaming climb. Something reached toward it again, touched it. It began to lose altitude. It was still coming toward the Idaho but it was on a long slant.

  “It’s being attacked!” Higgins shouted, pain in his voice.

  Over the Idaho the call to battle stations rolled. Again the mighty vessel surged to the tempo of men going into action.

  The scouting plane was dropping lower and lower. It hit the water. One of the pursuing ships dived down at it.

  The anti-aircraft batteries let go. For the second time the Idaho was defending herself. Thunder rolled across the waters.

  The attacking plane was within point-blank range. Mushrooms of black smoke puffed into existence around it, knocked it around in the air, caught it with a direct hit.

  A gigantic explosion sounded.

  A ball of smoke burst where the plane had been. Fragments floated outward, slid downward to the sea. There was not enough of the plane left for identification.

  The second plane lifted upward. For the first time Craig got a good look at it. His first impression, illogical as that was, was that it was a Jap ship. When it lifted up he got a good look at it. It wasn’t a Jap plane. No marks of the rising sun were visible on its body.

  Craig saw then that it wasn’t a plane at all. It had stubby, sloping wings, but the wings were apparently more for the purpose of stabilizing flight than for the lift they might impart. It looked like a flying wedge.

  He could not tell how it was propelled. If it had a motor, he could not see it.

  It was fast, faster than greased lightning.

  Apparently its pilot had not noticed the battleship until the barrage of anti-aircraft fire had destroyed the first plane. Not until then did he even know the Idaho existed. Like a bird that had been suddenly startled by the appearance of a hawk, the plane leaped into the air. Shells were still bursting around it. It went up so fast it left the barrage completely behind. Its climb was almost vertical. It rose to about twenty thousand feet, leveled off. Twice it circled the battleship, ignoring the shell bursts, that tried to keep up with it.

  Then it turned in the direction from which it had come. It was out of sight in seconds.

  There was silence on the bridge of the Idaho.

  “Holy cats!” Craig heard an officer mutter. “Somebody is crazy as hell. We don’t have planes that will fly like that and I know damned good and well they didn’t have them a hundred thousand years ago!”

  Was Michaelson wrong? Was he talking through his hat when he said the Idaho had been precipitated through a time fault into the remote past? He had said they might be a hundred thousand years in the past, or a million years—he didn’t know which. The appearance of the lizard-birds, the great winged dragons of mythology, had seemed to prove that the scientist was correct.

  Did these two mysterious planes, of strange shape and design and with the ability to fly at such blinding speed, prove that he was wrong?

  Was it possible—the thought stunned Craig—that they had been precipitated into the future?

  The winged dragons belonged to the past. The planes, theoretically at least, belonged to the future.

  “Something is crazy!” Captain Higgins said. “Go get that scientist,” he spoke to one of his aides. “I want to talk to him.”

  * * * *

  Michaelson came to the bridge and listened quietly to what Higgins had to say. His grave face registered no emotion but his eyes were grim.

  “I can definitely tell you two things,” he said at last. “One of them is that we are not in what could be called the future.”

  “But those two planes were better than anything we have invented!” Captain Higgins insisted. “The airplane was not invented until 1907. This has to be the future.”

  “Men invented airplanes in 1907,” Michaelson said. Ever so slightly he emphasized the word “men.”

  Higgins stared at him. Slowly, as he realized the implication of what the scientist had said, his face began to change. “What are you driving at?” he said, his voice a whisper.

  Michaelson spread his hands in a helpless gesture. “The Wright brothers invented the lighter-than-air ship early in the twentieth century,” he said. “They were the first men to fly a plane, the first men of our race. But how do we know what happened on earth a million years ago, and I can definitely tell you that we are at least a million years in the past? The history that we know fairly well does not cover a span of more than five thousand years. How can we be certain what happened or did not happen on earth millions of years ago?”

  The scientist spoke quietly, his voice almost a whisper. “We are before the time of the airplane. Yet we find airplanes? What do you think that might mean?”

  “I—” Higgins faltered, his mind flinching away from facing the unknown gulfs of time. He forced his mind to heel. “It means there are people here in this time,” he said huskily. “People, or something, who know how to make planes.”

  Michaelson nodded. “That would be my conclusion,” he said.

  “But that is impossible,” Higgins flared. “If there had been civilizations in the past, we would have a record of them. I mean, we would have found their cities, even if the people had disappeared. We would have found traces of their factories, of their buildings—”

  “Would we?” Michaelson asked.

  “Certainly. Don’t you agree with me?”

  “Not necessarily,” the scientist said. “You are forgetting one important fact—the size of a million years. A million years from now will anyone be able to find New York? Chicago? London? The steel mills of Pittsburgh? I think not. In that length of time, the action of the rain, the frost, and the sun will have completely destroyed every sign that these places once existed. Besides, the continents we now know may have sunk and new ones appeared. How could we locate the ruin of Pittsburgh if the city were at the bottom of the Atlantic? A million years ago there may have been huge cities on earth. Man is not necessarily the first race ever to appear on the planet.”

  Craig, listening, recognized the logic in what Michaelson had said. There might have been other races on earth! The vanity of men blinded them to that fact, when they thought about it at all. They wanted to believe they were the most important, and the only effort of creation, tha
t the Earth had come into being expressly for their benefit. Nature might have other plans.

  Michaelson had suggested a logical solution for the dilemma of airplanes and flying dragons existing in the same world.

  Craig saw the officers glancing uneasily in the direction from which the planes had come. Off yonder somewhere below the horizon was something. They were worried about it. Against the beasts of this time, the Idaho was all-powerful. But how would the Idaho stack up against the something that lay below the horizon? Or would the ship be able to escape back through the time fault before the threat of the mysterious planes became greater?

  Out around the ship, small boats were planting charges of explosive. One boat was dashing out to the wrecked scouting plane to rescue the pilot.

  “We have to see if we can get away from here, at once,” Higgins said. “We have to set off those explosives and see if they will force us back through the time fault.”

  They had to get away from this world. There was danger here. Planes that flew as fast as the one that had gone streaking off across the sky represented danger.

  Higgins ordered the planting of the explosives to proceed at the double-quick.

  “I said I could definitely tell you two things,” Michaelson spoke again. “One of them was that we are in the past, millions of years in the past.” He spoke slowly, his eyes on the busy boats around the ship. “Are you not interested in the second of the two things I said I could tell you?”

  “Yes,” said Higgins. “What is it?”

  The scientist sighed. “It is that we will never be able to return to our own time!”

  “What? But—we are planting mines. If the explosion of the Jap bombs sent us through the time fault, maybe a second explosion will send us back through it.”

  Michaelson shook his head. “I have investigated the mathematics of it,” he said. “It is impossible. You might as well call in your boats and save your explosives. The fact is, we are marooned in this time, forever!”

  Marooned in time, forever! The words rang like bells of doom. Marooned forever. No chance of escape. No hope for escape.