THE THREE FACES OF TIME

Originally published in 1969.

PRELUDE

It came sweeping down from high in the sky, huge and flat and triangular, and looking not unlike a wedge of wild geese winging their way southward.

Autumn sportsmen far below, bobbing about in rubber boats on the salt estuaries that fringed the coastline, thought for a moment that the painted ducks they had been intent on bagging were about to be replaced by a rarer prize, as they heard a faint, honking noise as it swept across the marshes at an elevation of two hundred feet.

Rifles came up, and here and there, where the ground was firm, hunting dogs bounded forward in keen anticipation. A few went plunging into the silt of the marshes, or swam between bullrushes to the crackle of premature rifle fire.

But the flying wedge kept on and on, ignoring the plastic decoys scattered across the shining water and catching the sunlight in blinding flashes.

And suddenly the sun emerged from behind a cloud and shone full on it, altering its three-cornered shape and revealing it for what it was—an enormous, silvery circular disk, moving with great speed across the sky.

CHAPTER ONE

“George, something is moving around in the garden,” Helen Wentworth said, tugging at her husband’s arm and awakening him from a pleasant sleep of fifteen minutes duration. “It’s making a thrashing sound. It can’t be a skunk. When I opened the window and looked out, all of the shrubery was moving, from the front porch to Mrs. Jackson’s washlines.”

Wentworth opened his eyes and looked at her. Her hair wabs in curlers, and she had smeared cold cream on her face, which shone in the moonlight that was streaming into the room from the window which she had just thrown open.

She was trembling a little and he reached out quickly and drew her close to him. Somehow she had never seemed quite so beautiful.

He started kissing her hair and lips and eyes, but she took firm hold of his wrists and forced him to release her.

“George, I’m frightened,” she said. “Perhaps I shouldn’t be, but if there’s a man out there…”

“Now, now, take it easy,” Wentworth said, raising himself on one elbow. “You know how often bears come down from the mountain and nose around, looking for something to nibble on. Or it could be a deer…or just a gust of wind stirring the shrubbery.”

“There’s not a breath of air stirring,” Helen Wentworth said, positively. “It would have to be a man, or a terribly big animal. When was the last time we saw a bear? Three years ago, wasn’t it? And it was just a cub.”

“There are plenty of grown bears around,” Wentworth said. “If it will make you feel any better, I’ll go down to the garden and have a look. Where did you hang my dressing gown?”

“It’s in the hall closet. But please, darling…I don’t want you to go outside. If it’s a man and he sees you…”

“He’ll probably disappear fast,” Wentworth said, reassuringly. “There’s nothing a burglar fears more than a property owner with a gun. I have the right to shoot to kill and burglars are seldom that suicidal.”

“But you haven’t a gun. You’ve never wanted to have one about the house. And if he’s armed you’ll be taking a terrible risk. I won’t let you do it.”

“I’m not afraid, darling,” Wentworth said. “And that counts in my favor. I’ll make him think I have a gun. Just stay right where you are, and don’t worry.”

Before his wife could protest further, Wentworth was out of the room and striding down the hall to the clothes closet. He snatched his dressing gown, shrugged into it, and descended the stairs to the living room, making a gun-shaped bulge in the garment with his tightly clenched fists. He crossed quickly to the kitchen and slipped quietly out into the garden, letting the screen door swing shut behind him, but taking care to leave it unlatched.

There was not much light, the moon was veiled by fleecy clouds. He could just make out the outlines of the hedge which separated Mrs. Jackson’s cottage from his own, and the vast, forested bulk of Thunder Mountain looming up in the near distance.

He cursed himself for not having thought to bring along a flashlight. It would have made a more realistic simulated pistol than the bulge made by his fist in his dressing gown; and he could have used it to send spirals of light boring into the shrubbery and keep a dangerous intruder at bay by half-blinding him. If the intruder were a bear, a flashlight would have been invaluable.

He stood very still for a moment, listening, straining his ears to catch the slightest stir of movement. The foliage did not appear to be in motion. There were no rustling sounds at all—the wind that had been blowing all afternoon had died down before nightfall and the air now seemed almost stagnant.

After a moment, he did hear the small sounds of the night—the chirp of a solitary cricket, the faint scurrying to and fro of some small animal, probably a rodent, and the murmur of the narrow, winding brook that passed under a wooden footbridge eighty feet to the right of his property.

He remained just outside the kitchen door for two minutes, then began to advance cautiously into the garden. He moved in the direction of the hedge beyond which Mrs. Jackson customarily hung out her wash on weekdays. The wash was an eyesore which he had always tried not to resent, for Mrs. Jackson was pathetically gnarled and aged, and the soul of kindness.

He stopped only once, when a twig was crushed by his heel and crackled like a tiny pistol shot. Small animals seldom make loud cracklings and he realized that it would have been a dead giveaway if an intruder had remained unaware of his presence up to that moment.

When nothing happened, he continued on until he was two-thirds of the way to the hedge.

It happened then, the thing that he had been dreading. Something huge and dark and swift-moving arose directly in his path and leapt straight toward him, gripping him by the shoulder and hurling him backwards.

He was hurled completely off-balance—he crashed to the ground, his arms flailing the empty air, unable to do more than cushion the violence of the fall by twisting sharply sideways an instant before the impact sent agonizing pain lancing through him.

So jarring was the impact that he might have fractured his spine if he had landed flat on his back, for the ground there was stone-hard. He was convinced for a moment that he was seriously injured. The pain increased and spread before it lessened, and when he tried to rise he felt numb all over.

He managed to raise himself slightly. But before he could overcome the dizziness that had come upon him, strong relentless hands gripped him by the elbows and dragged him to his feet.

It was more than dizziness, for he could see nothing clearly. It was as if his vision had undergone a distortion, as if his pupils had been widened by the violence of the fall and had remained dilated.

Despite his helplessness, he cried out in anger and jerked his shoulders about in a frantic effort to free himself. But the steel-firm fingers of the intruder who had dragged him to his feet continued to tighten, biting so cruelly into his flesh that he was forced to allow himself to be propelled forward through the darkness toward the hedge. Twice he stumbled and almost fell again, and once his right knee gave way, causing him to lurch so violently that the intruder came to an abrupt halt and he gained a momentary respite.

He gradually became aware that there was more than one intruder. Hovering a short distance from the hedge were five tall figures with features that were vaguely hawk-like. They held themselves very straight and they kept coming closer to him and then darting away again, with swift gliding movements, as if they were skating on a sheet of ice.

Their bodies glistened, and he could not shake off the feeling that they were either covered with scales or clothed in some material of shining texture that would have glowed, more brightly in the daylight then it did at night.

Distant objects stood out clearly and he could see the row of tall pines at the base of Thunder Mountain that he had transformed, in a fantasy of his childhood, into mysterious sentinels from another planet, perpetually standing guard. The fact that so remote a memory had crept into his mind at that particular moment struck a chill to his heart, for it seemed to have a significance that went beyond the present.

There was an opening in the hedge and beyond it the smooth grass of Mrs. Jackson’s backyard. The intruder propelled Wentworth forward through the hedge and across the lawn until he was staggering along at the edge of a road that spiraled upwards toward Thunder Mountain. Mrs. Jackson’s house was the last village dwelling before the forested slopes of the mountain spread a veil of unbroken greenery over the landscape.

If Mrs. Jackson had been peering out of an upstairs window at that moment she would have seen Wentworth moving out into the middle of the road with five tall, hawk-featured figures in his wake who seemed more to glide than to walk, and another accompanying him with a firm grip on his arms, which he was relentlessly twisting. She would have seen Wentworth’s stumbling figure shrink into the distance until it dimmed and vanished.

Helen Wentworth, having waited ten minutes for her husband to come back into the house and ascend the stairs, decided that she could endure the suspense no longer. She had remained by a rear window, staring down into the garden, and she had seen him move out from the kitchen door and start to cross the garden. But then the clouds which obscured the moon had shifted a little and the faint glow which had enabled her to see as far as the hedge had vanished.

Her heart had come into her throat then, for it was pure torture to try to imagine what might be taking place in the darkness. She was almost positive that he had not been attacked by a bear or a human prowler, or he would have cried out and there would have been the sounds of a scuffle. But still…what could be keeping him so long?

Her first impulse was to go downstairs and out into the garden, disregarding the fact that he would not have liked that at all. He loved her far too much to forgive her for placing her own life in jeopardy…until a violent scene made forgiveness possible.

Scene or not, she would do it, of course, in about five more minutes. But there was something she could do first that would take her mind off an uncertainty that was becoming unbearable.

The children. They were safely tucked in for the night and were probably asleep by this time. But when a household was in danger, it was best to make sure.

A moment later she was moving swiftly down the upper hallway to the children’s bedroom-playroom, with its bright picture walls and scattered toys. She thought of her husband’s recklessness in pursuing a prowler, unarmed as he was and she found herself wishing that when her son grew to be a man he would not take after his father in that respect.

As for Susan, it was very hard to tell how a child of six will feel about the value of caution and restraint when, after growing up to be beautiful, she finds herself in a parked car on a moonlit night, seated beside a man as handsome as her father but much younger. But Susan was, after all, the daughter of a very sensible woman, and as the twig is bent…

It was toward her son that her eyes darted first, when she opened the children’s door and saw that the light had not been turned off for the night. He was sitting up very straight in bed, talking to his sister with an angry edge to his voice.

“How stupid can you get?” he was saying. “You’d have to be an awful dope to believe—”

He broke off abruptly the instant he saw his mother standing just inside the doorway with a disapproving scowl on her face.

“Bobby!” Helen Wentworth said, more upset than she would have been if she had not been half out of her mind with worry. “I’m not going to tell you again that if you sit up half the night talking, you’re going to be very sorry when you ask me for a dollar to buy some stamps for your collection.”

If strain could kill she was quite sure that she would be lying on the floor in a crumpled heap instead of making a ridiculous attempt to discipline her son for something he had done a hundred times in the past. She was sure that he would sense she was not her usual self and would take full advantage of the fact.

“If Susan wasn’t so stupid,” Bobby Wentworth said. “I’d have gone right to sleep. I can’t help it if she doesn’t understand what I’m talking about.”

“What were you talking about?” Helen heard herself asking.

“Batman,” Susan said, from the twin bed on the opposite side of the room, her blonde curls bobbing up and down. She was blinking, but not from lack of sleep, and Helen remembered that she had intended to put a smaller bulb in the ceiling lamp, but had completely forgotten.

“She thinks that Batman is a real person,” Bobby said. “I told her Batman is an actor and that he goes home from the TV studio and has dinner with his family, just like Daddy. She thinks she knows everything. She’s stupid.”

“You’ve no right to call your sister stupid…or any one. Your father will be angry about that.”

“Bobby’s a scary cat!” Susan said. “If Daddy got mad he’d run and hide. Scary cat! Scary cat! When Daddy gets mad, Bobby is just a scary cat!”

“Dad always knows what he’s talking about,” Bobby said. “Susan doesn’t.”

“I don’t want to hear another word,” Helen said. “You should know better than to quarrel about something so silly.”

It was the wrong thing to say and she knew it. Wise parents were under an obligation to give children every right to engage in discussions which might seem silly to an adult, but were important to them. But the minutes were going by fast, and she had been straining her ears to catch some sound from downstairs that would dispel her steadily mounting dread which was verging on acute alarm. Why couldn’t the kitchen door slam and a footstep sound inside the house?

Helen Wentworth stood very still, her heart skipping a beat. The thought was a double-bladed one, more alarming than otherwise. If a footstep sounded, how could she be sure that it wasn’t someone who had committed an act of brutal violence in the garden and was coming for her and the children with a gun in his hand?

Her own safety seemed scarcely to matter. But if a burglar entered the house now it would have to mean… She refused to dwell on the appalling picture her imagination had conjured up.

She forced herself to speak calmly as her hand went toward the light switch to plunge the room in total darkness.

“I’m turning off the light,” she said. “I’ll come back in a few minutes, and if you’re not asleep—”

She broke off abruptly, startled by a sound that echoed through the silent house more loudly than a footstep would have done. It was a familiar enough sound. But there are times when the loud, continuous ringing of a telephone can be as unnerving as a distant cry in the night.

“The phone’s ringing, Mommy,” Susan said. “You’d better answer it.”

“I intend to,” Helen heard herself saying, still struggling to remain calm. “But remember what I told you. You’re to stop talking and go to sleep. I don’t want to hear another sound coming from this room.”

A moment later she was returning down the long hall to the bedroom her husband had left long ago—surely a full century had swept past by now—to expose himself to a risk she had pleaded with him not to take.

CHAPTER TWO

The telephone had rung twenty times, or more and she found herself hoping it would stop before she could get to it. Answering it made little sense, for it was likely to be a neighbor calling about some trivial matter—Mrs. Jackson perhaps or Sally Crafton at the other end of the lane. Mrs. Jackson was a real night owl, and when she had some recent item of local gossip to discuss, it was hard for her to restrain her impatience, even when a glance at the clock should have given her pause.

But ignoring a persistently ringing phone is always difficult and great tension and strain increase that difficulty. When she reached her room she darted to the bedside table and uncradled the receiver, her hand trembling a little, feeling herself to be under a compulsion she was powerless to resist.

“Yes?” she said. “Who is this, please?”

There was a brief droning sound, followed by what sounded like a faint click. Then a voice came over the wire in reply—a voice that gave her so great a shock that she gasped and the receiver slipped from her hand and went clattering to the floor.

The same voice continued to come from it, sounding genuinely alarmed. “Darling, I heard something fall. Are you all right? Can you hear me? Is there something wrong with the phone?”

Helen picked up the receiver and spoke into it, trying desperately to keep her voice from rising to an hysterical pitch but not quite succeeding. “I…I just dropped the phone,” she said. “George, you gave me a terrible scare. Where are you? What has happened? Are you all right?”

“I’m right next door, in Mrs. Jackson’s house,” George Wentworth said. His voice sounded as strained as her own and it was hoarse, as if the dampness of the garden had brought back the slight touch of laryngitis which had been troubling him for a fortnight.

Before she could do more than gasp he went on quickly: “Listen to me, darling. Listen carefully. I want you to come right over here and bring the children. Don’t light a match, don’t let them out of your sight for a moment. There’s a dangerous gas seepage right under the house. It’s just a seepage now, but at any moment it will be a great burst of gas flooding the house. There’s something wrong with the main gas line and pressure is building up. The gas company has construction blueprints—they can pinpoint the exact location where the pipeline is going to burst.”

“George, I don’t understand!” Helen was clasping the receiver so tightly that her fingers had gone numb. “How did you find out about it? You couldn’t possibly—”

“The sheriff phoned Mrs. Jackson a few minutes ago. He tried our phone first, but no one answered. I guess you didn’t hear it ring—or maybe he got the wrong number. Mrs. Jackson was coming over to warn us when she saw me moving about in the garden and called down to me.”

“But why didn’t you come right back and tell me. Why are you phoning from next door?”

“There simply isn’t time. This way, don’t you see, there’ll be less confusion, less trouble with the children. Just get them over here as quickly as you can. I don’t want to lose you…and Bobby and Susan.”

“But if I don’t light a match?”

“You’ll be overcome by the gas in two or three minutes—before you can get out of the house. Please do as I say. There’s not a moment to lose. I love you, darling.”

The instant she hung up, a wave of incredulity swept over her. Nothing that she had been told made sense. Why would a man desperately concerned about the safety of his wife and children rush into a neighbor’s house instead of his own and phone from there? Wouldn’t it have been more natural for him to have run to her side, bundled the children up and carried them in his arms as far from the house as he could get before it was shaken by an explosion? And how could the gas company, blueprints or not, determine with absolute accuracy just when and where such a disaster was about to take place? A gas main bursting from pressure. Did that ever happen? Perhaps it did, but it was certainly not one of the everyday hazards of rural life. Gas leakages were common enough, but the instant, lethal flooding of an entire house with fumes from a shattered basement pipeline—

She caught herself up abruptly. No matter how incredible it sounded, the most dangerous thing she could have done would have been to ignore so urgent a warning. It was a plea as well, a desperate plea, by a man she’d have loved and trusted even if she hadn’t been married to him for ten years.

And the children…if just her own life had been at stake she might have decided that something was terribly wrong and phoned the sheriff to find out if he was a little confused as to just what the gas company had told him. But there was no time for that now, no time at all. She must hurry…hurry.

She was afraid that it might be difficult to get the children out of the house fast, for Bobby could be stubborn and resort to delaying tactics when he was confronted with something new and startling that called for an explanation. And Susan would follow his lead.

There would be time only for the briefest of explanations and as she left the bedroom and started down the hall, a chill foreboding came upon her. How terrible it would be if the house became flooded with gas before she could get them calmed down and convinced of the danger that they would be cooperative.

It was not as difficult as she had feared it might be. Bobby protested for a moment, but when she took him by the shoulder and shook him vigorously the fright in her eyes seemed to communicate to him.

“You’re going just as you are, in your pajamas.” she told him. “Right this minute. We’re not taking anything with us.”

It was Susan who displayed defiance, snatching up her favorite calico doll as her mother herded them toward the door and waited for them to pass into the hallway ahead of her. Then they were hurrying down the hall, with Susan stumbling a little, because the doll was almost as big as she was. Helen snatched it from her when they reached the bottom of the stairs and tossed it into a far corner of the living room.

“I’ll buy you a new one!” she said, with maternal harshness. “If the house explodes, it would be better for a doll to burn up than you and Bobby.”

“I don’t want Sally to burn up, Mama!” Susan cried.

She started across the living room to pick up the doll. Helen grabbed her firmly by the wrist and fairly dragged her into the kitchen to the screen door that was banging a little now in a wind that had just arisen.

“All she ever thinks about is herself,” Bobby said as they passed out into the cool night. “Every time you tell her that, Mom, she thinks it’s funny. I bet if the house caught fire—”

Although it was one time when Bobby deserved praise, Helen Wentworth’s relief at finding herself in the garden with the children at her side was so overwhelming that she said the first thing that came into her mind.

“You both think it’s funny,” she complained. “You’re no better than Susan. I don’t know why I was ever cursed with such stubborn, self-centered children.”

Bobby seemed to realize that the best reply to an unjust accusation was a stony silence, for he waited until they were at the back door of Mrs. Jackson’s cottage and she was tugging at the knob in an impatient effort to get it open before he spoke again.

“It’s not locked,” he said. “If you push on it hard you can get it open. You just have to reach in and twist the catch around. Mrs. Jackson always leaves it like that.”

Helen pushed on the door and it opened an inch or two, just as her son had predicted. But she quickly found that her hand was too large to go completely through the opening.

“All right, Bobby, you try,” she said, stepping back. “Why have all the lights been turned off? I don’t understand it.”

“You said Dad expected us to be right over,” Bobby said. “You told me—”

“Never mind what I told you. If you can’t get the door open I’ll pound on it until he comes down and lets us in. Why does he have to put me through such an ordeal?”

For some unaccountable reason, her feeling of relief had totally vanished. Not only was she becoming almost as alarmed as she had been when the phone had dropped from her hand a few minutes earlier, but there was something about the completely dark-silent house that chilled her. Probably it wasn’t as dark as it seemed, she told herself quickly. If there was a light in one of the front room upstairs she couldn’t have seen it from where she was standing.

A tiny fraction of her alarm was dispelled when Bobby said: “I got the door open, Mom.”

“All right, don’t just stand there. Go in, and turn on the light in the kitchen. It’s just to the left of the stove.”

It was a crazy thing to say, because both of the children had been in Mrs. Jackson’s house more often than she had, and knew where everything was, including the cookie jar.

She followed Bobby into the kitchen without waiting for him to switch on the light, holding Susan tightly by the hand. She heard Bobby moving about close to the stove, but the light didn’t come on.

“The bulb doesn’t light,” Bobby said. “It must be burned out.”

Why she hadn’t pounded on the door and shouted was something she couldn’t explain. Seemingly, deep in her nature, there were gentile impulses which even chill apprehension could not instantly overcome. She was the kind of woman who seldom raised her voice, even to her husband during a marital dispute. But she raised it now, in anger and alarm, and it went echoing through the silent house.

“George, we’re here! In the kitchen! Where are you? It’s so dark we can’t see a thing!”

Silence. Upstairs and down not the slightest sound came to her ears.

She knew that Bobby could seldom remain silent for long and was not surprised when his seven-year-old voice came out of the darkness close to where she was standing, still keeping a tight grip on Susan’s hand.

It was much shriller than her voice had been, and it echoed vibrantly through the house.

“Dad, the light bulb doesn’t work! But you don’t have to come down. I can find the stairs in the dark!”

“Oh, you can, can you? And what will we find at the top of the stairs?” It seemed to her that she was virtually screaming the words. But she knew as well that her lips hadn’t moved, and that it was an inward screaming which Bobby couldn’t possibly have heard.

It happened so suddenly that for an instant she could not believe that it had become impossible for her to move. Not only her lips, but her entire body seemed suddenly to have congealed, to have become frozen solid, as if an icy blast of wind had swept over her and stopped her blood from circulating, the very air she had been breathing from moving in and out of her lungs.

She felt Susan’s small hand slip from her clasp and knew her own hand had turned cold. She could feel the coldness, the numbness, creeping up her arms and spreading across her shoulders.

She found, after a moment, that she could still breathe and open and close her hands. But so great a weight of inertia rested upon her that if Susan had gone spinning into the darkness in a circle of blinding light she could not have cried out in stricken protest or moved a foot from where she was standing.

A circle of blinding light! The room was still in darkness. But for the barest instant a vision of Susan vanishing in just that way had flashed across her mind—a vision so totally inexplicable that it terrified her even more than the paralysis.

Her terror increased when she saw that the darkness on the opposite side of the kitchen was disappearing and a circle of radiance was actually forming in the half-light a few feet from the stove. It was faint at first, but it grew swiftly brighter, dazzling her eyes and pulsing with many swiftly changing colors—blue, green, purple, yellow, red.

It grew so bright that she was afraid that it would endanger her sight. But she continued to stare at it, determined not to shut her eyes, even for a moment. She knew that she would die inwardly if the light swirled down over Susan and she vanished as swiftly as she had done in the terrifying vision which had preceded the coming of the light. But she did not want it to happen while her eyes were closed.

As she continued to stare, the light became less dazzling. She was later to realize that what she had seen in the vision was a wild distortion, brought about by her fear that she would lose Susan if sane reality was shattered in a terrifying way. Having seen the light before it appeared, in a flash that seemed clairvoyant, she had anticipated the worst.

She was later to realize all that and more. But now, when the light became less bright and the changing colors coalesced into a steady, intense, but almost hueless glow she experienced only relief—a relief so overwhelming that even Bobby’s frightened voice coming out of the edge of the darkness failed to bridge the gap between the way she felt, and a fear that should not have been thrust aside, even for an instant.

“Dad’s not here! If he was somewhere upstairs he’d come down and save us. I can’t move, Mom!”

Susan hadn’t cried out at all. But suddenly her small hand was clutching frantically at her mother’s skirt and she was sobbing the only way a child of six can, with a wrenching intensity.

Nothing could have brought Helen more quickly back to reality. Her fears returned and she drew Susan closer to her, whispering words of reassurance.

“It’s all right, darling. Nothing bad is going to happen. Some things are real all the time, but other things are only real for a short time and they don’t stay real.”

The fact that she could move her arms had surprised her. Was the paralysis wearing off? She tried to take a short step forward but her legs remained frozen.

She drew Susan even closer, burying her head in the loose folds of the light fall jacket she had snatched up before taking the children from a house that was in danger of going up in flames to a house where something terrifying had come out of the unknown to make their security just as uncertain. But she was determined not to give way to panic.

“Just stay where you are, Bobby!” she pleaded. “Your father may still be in the house. I don’t know why we can’t move or where that light is coming from. But if we let ourselves become frightened—”

“Dad’s not here!” Bobby’s voice rose in shrill protest. I know he’s not here. If he was he’d have come right downstairs when I shouted.”

She said nothing in reply, because what her son had said would have been difficult to refute. In fact, she was by now convinced that he was right.

She was stroking Susan’s hair and whispering to her again in an effort to quiet her when the light changed for the second time, taking on more depth and clarity, and she saw that Bobby had been mistaken.

Not only was her husband in Mrs. Jackson’s cottage, he was right there in the kitchen staring out at them from the depths of the glow with a look in his face that made her cry out in stricken disbelief.

“Helen,” came in a halting voice. “Listen…listen to me.

Never had she imagined that anyone could look quite so haggard-eyed and tormented or display in his gaze, his gestures, the very way he held himself, so desperate a need for compassionate understanding. She would have been moved to tears by a stranger speaking to her, with the same hopeless appeal in his eyes, the same wild insistence that he needed, a passage back to life and hope.

A word, a handclasp, a look which communicated thoughts too deeply rooted in compassion to be spoken aloud might have sufficed—if the man had not been her husband. But him she longed to shield with an outflowing of love that would heal what she hardly dared to dwell upon—some wound that had left him broken, if not completely crushed in spirit, though his body had been spared.

She could not be certain that he had not been wounded in body as well as in mind, for he was firmly clasping his right shoulder and his lips twitched several times, as if he were in great physical pain.

She forgot for a moment that he could not possibly be physically present in the room, that it could only be a visual projection, with no more substance than an image on a TV screen, and that the tormented eyes that returned her stare were somewhere else, perhaps a great many miles away. She forgot, too, the fear which had come upon her when the circle of radiance had first appeared in the room. It had seemed terrifying and mysterious beyond belief, but she suddenly found herself thinking of it as a miraculously bestowed means of communication between her husband and herself.

Her first impulse was to ask him where he was and what had happened. But there was something more important that she had to know first. Could he see her as clearly as she could see him? The circle of radiance must be quite different from a TV screen, because it had materialized out of the darkness, and he had spoken directly to her, with his eyes on her face. She was sure that he could see her, but how clearly? Was every movement that she made visible to him? And could he hear her as well? And the children—could he see them, could he see every part of the kitchen? Was the circle of radiance a marvelous two-way communicating device that brought him actually in the house with them, if only in a mechanical sense?

She clung to the possibility with a feverish kind of desperation. It would be a comfort, a joy even, despite the torment which looked out of his eyes—a torment which she shared—to know they were together, even though he would be powerless to defend her physically against whatever it was that had taken him away from her.

Then, out of the darkness a boy’s voice cried out: “Dad!”—One word, followed by silence. She thought of the terror and confusion being endured by her children.

“Yes, son—it’s all right,” George Wentworth said. “You’ll be able to move about again in a moment—and so will your mother and sister. I’m proud of you, son—more proud than I can say. You’re a brave boy and you’re going to continue being brave, right?”

“You bet I will, Dad,” Bobby said.” I mean…I’ll try.”

“That’s great. But I want you to help your mother take care of Susan. She’s too young to watch every step she takes. The light doesn’t seem to quite reach you, Bobby. But in a moment you’ll be walking around again and the stiffness will go out of your legs. I want to talk to your mother now. There’s nothing I’m going to tell her I wouldn’t want you to hear. That’s why—being brave is so important. You’ll have to be very brave.”

Helen could restrain herself no longer. “George, don’t torment me like this!” she said, her voice filled with agony. “Whatever it is you’ve got to tell me—”

“Oh, darling, darling, that’s not what I want to say. Something terrible must have happened or you wouldn’t look so…so…”

Wentworth’s lips twitched and he shut his eyes as if the kitchen reminded him of something he would have liked to blot from his mind. “I look,” he went on slowly, “like a man who is lost at sea with nightmares for companions.”

“Where are you, darling? What happened? Please tell me. Don’t drive the nails in any deeper. I love you. That’s all that matters.”

“Yes, darling, yes,” he said. His voice sounded flat, drained of all emotion. Suddenly he smiled. It was a small, crooked smile, a smile that didn’t come off well at all, but she knew exactly how much the effort had cost him.

She tried to speak calmly. “Darling, reality as we’ve always known it has been pushed back or aside in some unheard of way and something else has rushed in and taken its place—something that I know nothing about. You don’t have to convince me of anything. Will that make explaining easier for you?”

“Yes,” he said, “I think it will.”

A strand of dark hair had fallen down over his forehead and she had a sudden, almost uncontrollable impulse to put it back in place in a tender, half-caressing way, as she had so often done in the past. Then she remembered that a light-projected image could only be changed at its point of origin and the impulse died.

“I’ve seen and heard too much in the past thirty minutes that the best minds—the best scientific minds—could never hope to explain, to doubt anything you may have to tell me. Please don’t keep anything back—I’m glad you spoke to Bobby as you did. He’s not too young to know how important courage can be.

For a moment, her words seemed to kindle a warmth in her husband’s eyes. Then the look of torment came back and when he spoke his voice sounded despairingly flat again, drained of all emotion.

“I have lost all track of time,” he said. “I do not know whether I walked out into the garden a half hour…or two hours ago.”

“But you must have known when you phoned me,” Helen said.

“No, even then I was confused, uncertain as to the time. And nothing that I said was true. But they told me what to say.”

“They? There was more than one man in the garden then. They—took you away? In a car, George?”

“No, they forced me to walk. Along the road and up Thunder Mountain. But I do not think they are men.”

“You do not think—”

He shook his head, a look of desperate appeal coming into his eyes. “You said that you wouldn’t doubt me, that you’d seen enough to convince you that something strange and terrible must have taken place. Well…it has, Helen, it has. Something strange…and very terrible.”

“Go on, darling,” she urged, when she saw that he was having difficulty in keeping his voice steady. “I won’t interrupt you again. But what you said…it’s so shocking…”

“They may be human. I just don’t know. They keep faces covered with…a kind of hood They are about my height and their bodies are sturdily built, and not in the least malformed. In the brief time I’ve been with them, I’ve found out that there are a great many things they can do which no scientific technologist could possibly duplicate. And they can get inside my mind, and influence my thinking without making me feel I have lost all control over my thoughts. They have succeeded in convincing me that what they want me to do is reasonable, that it makes a great deal of sense.”

Helen could restrain herself no longer. “But if they can influence your thinking they may have convinced you of something that isn’t true. How can you be sure—”

Before she could complete the thought Wentworth shook his head, as if anticipating what she had been about to say. “It’s not an hypnotic compulsion—or anything of that nature. I’m still free to make my own decisions. I know—I’m sure. I could have refused to phone and plead with you to bring the children over here. But they made it unmistakably plain that if I didn’t make that call they would go right into the house and bring you here by force. It wasn’t really necessary for me to phone, but it made it a little easier for them. They are becoming impatient. They don’t intend to remain on the mountain much longer.”

“But why did they want us to come here?” Helen asked, shaken by something in his expression that struck a chill to her heart.

“So I could talk to you,” Wentworth said, his voice a little steadier now. She had the feeling that he was trying desperately to strike a balance between what had to be said, and words that would carry a small measure of reassurance. “I could not have communicated with you as I am doing now in our cottage, because this light transmission circuit is very complex and they set it up here to enable them to use this cottage as—well, I guess you could call it a base of operations. Mrs. Jackson is in her room in a drug-induced sleep.”

He paused an instant. “I don’t know just why they are interested in us. We’ll be told, I think. But that’s no as important right now as the great danger we’ll be in if we disobey them. They’re conducting a very terrible night raid on our unsuspecting village. Ten or twelve of them are still in the village, making contact with men, women and children they would prefer not to subdue by violence. They were compelled to use physical force against me, because I walked out into the garden and surprised them when they were just setting up this light circuit, and if I’d broken away from them and summoned help they might have been in trouble.

“Not really in trouble because I don’t think they would have any difficulty in destroying the entire village. But they don’t seem to want to resort to large-scale violence. They’ve told me just enough to convince me of that. Individual violence they are also determined to avoid, unless they are given no choice, and are forced to make use of it.”

“But why, George?” Helen heard herself asking. “If they are as powerful as you say—”

“They don’t want to inflict an emotional trauma on any of the people they are interested in…a trauma that might have difficulty in overcoming when they take us…”

He hesitated, and for a moment, as the silence between them lengthened, a many-taloned fear took shape in Helen’s mind, and when she tried to speak her throat muscles tightened up and she could only stare at him, her hand pressed to her throat.

His words, when the silence ended, seemed to bear no direct relation to what he had said before. “There is something they want you to see,” he said. “It is very strange…but I think they regret they were forced to take me to the mountain against my will. I struggled at first, and they had to resort to considerable physical violence. But they were less relentless than they might have been and I’m not seriously injured. A strained shoulder is nothing. The hurt would only go deep and destroy me if something happened to you and the children.”

“Thank God you’re not… I was afraid…”

“No, I’ll be all right,” he went on reassuringly. “But there’s something I think you should know before I see you again. The way we feel is important to them. They don’t want us to resent and hate them. It would interfere with whatever it is that makes them take an interest in us. I think, strange as it may seem, that they had two reasons for not going into our cottage and removing you and the children by force. My phone call made it a little easier for them, as I’ve said. But I think they knew I’d be grateful as well, would feel less angry and resentful if they allowed me to talk to you as I am doing now, and you could see what I’m going to show you.”

“You said…they wanted me to see it,” Helen heard herself saying. “What is it, George? Something they gave you?”

“It’s a light-image transmission,” George Wentworth said. “I can project it myself. They’ve shown me how to manipulate the beam, just as I’ve been doing. It’s complex in a quite simple way—unbelievably so, much simpler than a short-wave transmitter. You merely—but there’s no need for me to describe how it works. Bobby could project his image just as easily as I’ve been projecting mine.”

Again there appeared on George Wentworth’s lips the twisted, small smile that had cost him such an effort a few minutes earlier. “An image in full color that you can talk and move about at will inside a circle of light—an image that’s unlike anything you’ll ever see on TV, because it’s completely three-dimensional and can pass through the walls of a house or a pine forest with no clicking transmitter at the sending end or radio tubes to bring it right into the room with you. But it must operate on some principle that’s mechanical, for it’s difficult to set up, and can’t be installed without specialized equipment, even though a child of five could use it with a few simple instructions. There’s a luminous globe and a metal pointer with a notch in it that opens up the two-way transmission.”

George Wentworth’s smile seemed to grow even more forced before it vanished. “To single it out is misleading. It is just one of the many astounding things they can do that seem to do violence to the laws of physics. I’ve seen a few of them, just in the short while I’ve been with them. They can burn down a tree from a distance, make it shrivel into gray ash with no visible flame.

“They can bring a bird in flight down like a leaden weight plummeting to earth from high in the sky, with a tiny tube that’s totally soundless. They can make the waters of Thunder Mountain Lake boil for two or three hundred feet in all directions with another tube that’s not much larger. You know how placid those waters are. We’ve gone canoeing on the lake often enough.

“They can talk to one another at a distance of three hundred feet with midget-sized walkie-talkie—a shining, one-inch disk which they insert in their ears, under the hood. They can uproot a tree with a kind of blowgun that makes a whirring sound and shoots darts that explode on contact.

“What they can do with their minds alone is almost as incredible. But it takes a little more time. Right now they’re keeping you from moving, as they could have kept me from moving in the garden if grappling with me in a physical way had not seemed a simpler, quicker and more silent way of preventing me from struggling.

“No instrument of science, no matter how powerful it may be, or strange, or miraculous can be any more effective than bodily strength in situations where instant action is of the utmost importance. It is actually the most dependable of silencers. But the use of that violence they now seem to regret.”

“Why are you telling me all this, George?”

“To make you understand that to resist them, to fight against them, would be useless. We must do as they say, or we will not be alive to tell ourselves that death is the most terrible of human disasters. And it is, darling—make no mistake about that. Just to remain alive, to draw breath means that all hope need not be abandoned. Men and women have died inwardly just to stay alive and have found themselves reborn again.”

“Reborn as slaves? No—that would be worse than dying,” Helen heard herself protesting.

“To be reborn free and whole again—to get back the great gift of life,” George Wentworth said. “There is always that possibility, always that hope to cling to. We must not relinquish it.”

“Do they know what you are saying to me now?”

“I’m sure they do. But it does not matter. They want me to feel that I am still independent—a free agent. Otherwise I would not be of interest to them.”

“But are you free, George? Could you resist them if you wanted to, if you were willing to risk—”

“I don’t know. I can’t be sure,” he said, cutting her short. “I only know that my uncertainly as to just how free I am to do something that would force them to resort to violence, is known to them and they want me to talk to you as I am doing now, with no attempt to mislead or deceive you in any way. They want you to talk to me just as freely, even to doubt some of the things I’ve told you. You cannot make a wise decision if your doubts remain unresolved, if you keep them concealed. Now I’m going to show you what they want you to see. It may help you to understand just how dangerous any kind of resistance would be.”

The light had begun to flicker and dim a little, but it suddenly brightened again, as if he was having difficulty in altering the circle of radiance to bring another image into view.

It flashed across Helen’s mind—was the thought solely her own?—that the difficulty was an emotional one. If another image appeared he would have to vanish, and she would be alone again, alone with the children in a house that would become as alien to normal experience as it had seemed before he had appeared in the midst of the glow. Oh, it had remained alien enough to make even the darkness seem alive, as if some invisible monster that had been spawned by it was breathing slowly in and out. But just her husband’s presence alone…

“I love you, darling,” George Wentworth said, as if aware of her thoughts. “Keep remembering that, hold on to it very tightly. We’ll all be together again when they leave the mountain. Before daybreak—they have told me that much. I don’t know where they are taking us, or how long we’ll be gone. But others have been released after a short while, have been returned safely to their homes. They’ve had some incredible stories to tell—stories I’ve refused to take seriously. But now I am sure that most of them were true. The incredible can and does happen. When my image vanishes I will not return…but you and Bobby and Susan will have more than light-projected image to turn to for support when you join me on the mountain.”

The circle of radiance began to flicker again, and Wentworth’s image became less distinct. He seemed to be moving slowly backwards into the glow as his image dimmed.

“Dad, don’t go!” Bobby called out. “I’m scared. I can’t move, and if you’re not here…”

“I was never really here, Bobby,” Wentworth said, with a catch in his voice. “If you saw a Western sheriff on TV with a gun in his hand and a badge pinned to his shirt you wouldn’t feel quite so alone and unprotected if a burglar came in through the window and grabbed hold of you. I know. That’s what you’re trying to tell me. But that’s plain silly, Bobby and you’re old enough to understand exactly what I’m talking about.”

“Dad, I can’t help it. If you’re not here—”

“I’m not a sheriff, Bobby and I haven’t got a shining badge or anything of the sort. But I love you very much and sometimes just an ordinary man can do more to protect his family when they’re in great danger than a Western sheriff who is real and not an image on a screen. But if he’s an image himself his hands are tied. I’ll be more than an image, Bobby, when I see you again. Just remember that, and keep your powder dry.”

“I don’t want Daddy to go,” Susan said, tugging at her mother’s hand. “Tell him, Mommy. He’ll stay if you tell him to.”

“No, you’re wrong, Susan,” Helen said, looking at the circle of light with a sinking sensation that was making her feel as if all the breath was being squeezed from her lungs. “He has to go but we’ll see him again soon. That’s right, isn’t it George? You know you don’t have to spare me. But you could be trying to spare the children. Don’t darling, it’s not necessary. Bobby can be very brave—”

“You bet he can,” Wentworth said, his voice still audible but his image so faint now that she had to strain to make it out in the depths of the glow. “He knows I’ve told him the truth, and nothing but the truth. And so do you, darling. What they want you to see is very beautiful. If they can build…well, you’ll see. Something else as well, that’s like nothing you’ve ever known before. An emanation of power, a kind of invincibility that makes itself felt. You can’t hope to struggle against that kind of invincibility. Don’t try. Accept it for what it is—a warning. There is no other way.”

Wentworth’s image vanished and a dull, continuous flickering replaced the steady glow. Gradually the circle of radiance became brighter again, growing almost blinding for a moment, precisely as it had done before Wentworth’s image had come into view.

Suddenly the flickering was gone and another image came into view, huge and shining, and only a little smaller in circumference than the circle itself.

Behind it there towered pine trees on a mountain slope that Helen instantly recognized, for she had often climbed to that height on Thunder Mountain and stood staring down over a sea of greenery at the bright waters of the lake at its base.

The slope was less than a hundred feet from the summit and there was a wide, plateau-like ledge of rock at that point jutting out from it, where she had often stopped to rest before continuing on to the top.

But now she wasn’t ascending the mountain on foot. She was staring at the ledge in a dark and silent house, with a far greater constriction in her chest than when she had been out of breath from climbing, and the strain of the steep ascent had made her temples swell to bursting. Now it was shock alone, a sudden, inexplicable kind of fright, that made it impossible for her to wrench her gaze from the enormous, circular disk that rested on the ledge with the moonlight shining full upon it.

It was hard to understand what there was about it that made her want to shut her eyes and blot it from her sight although she was powerless to do so for it was very beautiful. The moonlight brought into sharp relief the silvery-gleaming projections that encircled its entire circumference at evenly spaced intervals. They looked, at first glance, like fragile, delicately fashioned metal flowers. But as she continued to stare at them she saw that they were small, unfolded wings which were decorative, for they were too small to be functional. It was as if some silversmith of great artistic skill had designed them to symbolize the relationship between a flying object in swift, soaring flight and a flock of birds winging their way into the sky.

An Unidentified Flying Object! At no time since the circle of radiance had formed in the darkness had the thought been entirely absent from her mind. She could hardly have failed to associate a mystery that had been constantly in the newspapers and about which many books had been written with a shattering, first-hand experience of the same general nature.

She had suspected the truth the instant her husband had revealed how relentlessly he had been set upon in the garden by hooded figures who had caused him to vanish and reappear through some miracle of technology beyond the scope of modern science. She had, in fact, been nine-tenths sure that the hooded figures could only have come from a UFO.

But she had kept the appalling thought to herself, had refused to increase her husband’s torment by letting him know that she shared a fear that must have rested upon him like a leaden weight, crushing him to the earth.

If he had been taken captive and she had not yet joined him, how could he be sure he would ever see her and the children again? No matter what the hooded figures had told him there could have been no certainty in his mind.

It would have been so easy for them to change their minds, angered perhaps by her resistance, and take him away from her forever.

She had not wanted that to happen and had remained silent solely to spare him, had kept telling herself that she could be mistaken, that what she was almost sure of might not be true at all.

But now she was absolutely sure. The circular shape that rested on a ledge high up on Thunder Mountain could still take him from her, and she must hurry, hurry to make sure that she did not anger the hooded figures. Better to live enslaved than never to see again the father of her children, whom she loved more than he would ever know, because she was not a demonstrative woman.

She knew now why the sight of the UFO—she had stopped thinking of it as anything else—had filled her with such overwhelming dread.

There was another reason as well. “You will feel,” he had said, “an emanation of power, an invincibility that’s like nothing you’ve ever known before.”

She was aware of that now, as she had been aware of it the instant the mountain slope had come into view. But now there was something about the shining disk that brought two lines from Blake into her mind, two lines that had chilled her from childhood, because they had always seemed to her the strangest, most frightening lines in the whole of English poetry.

What immortal hand or eye,

Framed thy fearful symmetry?

Blake had never seen an UFO and it had been a tiger “burning bright in the forests of the night” that had made him address that question to the unknown. But the symmetry of the shining disk was just as fearful, just as difficult to explain. Only a race that had fathomed the twin mysteries of time and space and could exercise immense power, immense dominance over the forces of nature could create that strange complex on the mountain top.

CHAPTER THREE

The light began slowly to brighten, making every rock and tree and barren patch of soil on the mountain slope stand out with a startling clarity. But the brightness was less blinding than it had been when the circle of radiance had first formed in the room. It seemed to be more diffuse and wide-spreading, for it dispelled the darkness where it had previously remained dense.

For the first time Bobby came clearly into view and the kitchen stove, the refrigerator, and the long row of copper utensils hanging on the wall directly above the stove became brightly illuminated.

For an instant the stiff, completely motionless figure of Helen Wentworth’s son, emerging so swiftly from the darkness into the light, caused her to stop staring at the mountain slope and look directly at him.

Bobby’s face was a frozen mask of horror. For a moment she thought that the enormous shining disk that rested on the slope had widened Bobby’s eyes and that he was staring at it very much as she had done, unable to tear his gaze from a sight that, to a small boy, could well have seemed so new to his experience that his fright had soared to undreamed of heights.

Then she realized that he wasn’t staring at the circle of radiance at all. He was staring at something the light was slowly bringing into view on the far side of the stove.

The instant Helen saw what that something was, she screamed, feeling a weakness in her legs that would have toppled her to the floor if the paralysis had not kept them rigid.

There is a degree of rigidity that even paralysis cannot produce, a rigidity that has only to be seen to be recognized instantly as the stigmata of death. Mrs. Jackson had not slumped completely to the floor in the terrible moment when death had overtaken her, but had remained in an almost kneeling position, her hands turned palms outward as if warding off whatever it was that her eyes had looked upon before she had ceased to draw breath.

Her eyes were wide open and glassily staring, her bloodless lips snagged by her teeth. Her thinning white hair looked like an ill-made wig that failed to cover more than the back of her aging scalp, which gleamed in the spreading glow in a wholly hideous way. Her feet were bent sharply inward, the toes almost touching, making her whole body seem more twisted and bent than it would have been otherwise and giving her a grotesquely gnome-like look.

It has been said that fright alone can kill and Helen had never doubted it. In view of Mrs. Jackson’s age such a possibility, she knew, could not be ruled out. But whether it had been fright or one of the hooded shapes from the great circular disk that rested on the slope, bending above her and laying more violent hands on her than had been laid on her husband in the garden, she had no way of knowing. She only knew that she found herself hoping that it had been more than fright, because physical violence could sometimes be withheld, but from a sight that could kill there was no escape.

The paralysis that had been keeping her arms and legs constricted was gone, she could move about freely. But there was nothing that could lesson the horror which she now shared with Bobby. As the paralysis vanished, a convulsive trembling shook her entire body, threatening to send her staggering forward toward the dead woman.

Her legs had become so unsteady that she could no longer depend on them to support her. The trembling made it impossible for her to shift her weight quickly enough to maintain her balance.

It was the shock of seeing the circle of radiance dim and vanish, plunging the kitchen in total darkness again, that saved her. It caused her to stiffen abruptly, and lurch backward instead of forward, and the wall at her back came rushing toward her to keep her from falling.

In another moment she was leaning against the wall for support, and pleading with her son not to become too frightened.

“Mrs. Jackson was very old, Bobby,” she said. “And her heart just…well, gave out. That often happens with people her age. Sometimes just a little too much excitement…”

She stopped abruptly, straining her ears to catch a possible repetition of a faint sound that had seemed to come from somewhere upstairs. It had been too faint to be called a clattering. It was as if the wind had caused a windowpane to rattle two or three times in some distant part of the house.

It could only have been the wind, she told herself. But then the sound came again, much louder, and she realized it could easily have been made by footsteps crossing the floor of an upstairs room with a distinct clattering.

It almost immediately ceased to come to her ears muffled by distance. First it was directly overhead and then in the middle of the house and then descending a creaking flight of stairs to the ground floor. It descended so swiftly that before it stopped echoing through the darkened house it was right in the kitchen with them, making the floorboards creak loudly.

Helen Wentworth stood very still and spoke as calmly as she could. “Bobby! Susan! We must go with them. That is what your father wants us to do, and unless we do exactly as they say we will never see him again. Remember, my darlings, how much we both love you. You must try to be brave.”

CHAPTER FOUR

The four children were missing again. There were ninety-seven children in the orphanage, but to Joyce Drake the Trilling twins and Dorothy and Richard Thacker were never just four of the children. She thought of them as a group, apart from the other youngsters, even though they were not always together when they got into mischief or disappeared.

Sometimes they would vanish for as long as three days, and the sheriff would have to conduct a search for them. They were so accident-prone that it was incredible that they hadn’t given the orphanage a bad name.

She’d given up try to make a list of the terrible things they did to themselves and to others, such as mistaking Mr. Wilcock’s prize-winning orchids for tiger lilies and plucking them up by the roots, upsetting a hayloft that could have smothered them if they hadn’t clawed their way out fast, and falling off the wharf at Gleason’s Point into the ebb tide silt, and climbing back looking more like mudhens than children spotlessly dressed for a Sunday picnic.

Most children did things like that at times, of course. But every day in the week the Four Children put on a kind of ritual performance in the juvenile misbehavior department.

In a way, it could be contagious, and there were times when Joyce Drake actually found herself envying their ability to shrug off all social responsibility and wishing that she could…well, lean forward, as she was doing now, and tell the gaunt, stern-faced woman sitting opposite her in the sunny administration office to go plumb to the devil.

“It’s your fault, Joyce,” Miss Grayson was saying. “You just don’t exert enough discipline.” She not only accented the last word, but drew it out until it sounded like the swish of a whiplash uncoiling.

Miss Grayson paused for a moment, as if to make sure that what she was about to say would be as cutting as possible. “I sometimes wonder,” she went on relentlessly, “why you took this position in the first place. Unruly children require rigorous discipline and you favor ‘permissiveness.’

“Oh, I know. You’re going to tell me I’d change my mind about the methods we employ here if I read John Dewey. But I don’t intend to read a single line of John Dewey. All I have to do is look around me and see what your theories are doing to young people today. Long hair, student riots, all kinds of outlandish costumes…”

“The children here are hardly old enough to be categorized in that way,” Joyce Drake heard herself protesting, not as assertively as she could have wished.

“They will be, in a few years,” Miss Grayson assured her, with an icy intonation. “Can you imagine what our children will be like in 1980?”

“It would be foolish to try,” Joyce said. “If they grow up determined not to accept ready-made ideas even though they’ve been disciplined not to ask questions about anything, they’ll be far wiser than we are. I’m sure of that, if I’m sure of nothing else.”

“I see. You’d rather have children brought up on ideas that do nothing but get them into trouble. What those delightful brats did last week adds five years to my life every time I dwell on it. And now they’ve strayed off into the woods again. I’m afraid to think how close it may bring me to an enforced retirement. You’d like that, wouldn’t you?—To see all the years I’ve spent—”

Before she could continue the door opened and Sheriff Traubel came into the office. He crossed to where the women were sitting, his heavy tread making the geraniums by the window quake a little.

His tread was heavy and there was a weariness in the way he carried himself which conveyed a impression of ponderousness, as if he were dragging a massive ball and chain across the floor with him.

“Well…they’ve been seen, at least,” he said, without preamble. “About an hour ago, heading for Burnett’s Cove.”

He paused for an instant to stare with undisguised admiration at the younger woman, whose attractiveness he clearly found beguiling, despite the fact that he was a married man with six children. Then his gaze passed to the sternly disapproving countenance of Miss Grayson and his big, rough-hewn face hardened.

“This is the fourth time I’ve had to go searching for those problem kids,” he complained. “Twice I brought them back with only a few scratches, and it wasn’t so bad the third time. I could have gotten myself killed crawling on my hands and knees into an abandoned mine shaft that caved in a few years ago on two levels. But that’s all part of a sheriff’s job, and I’m not complaining. Only—”

“Only what?” Miss Grayson asked, with a look that confirmed what Joyce had always suspected—that Miss Grayson had no great liking for Sheriff Traubel.

“This time I’m seriously worried,” the sheriff said. “We’ve searched the woods for close to an hour without finding a trace of them. And there are a lot of quicksand bogs in the vicinity of the cove that could swallow up four small youngsters mighty fast.”

Miss Grayson swallowed hard and Joyce could see that the sheriff’s bluntness had shocked her. It shocked Joyce less because she admired honesty, and the sheriff just happened to be one of those bluff, plain-spoken men who preferred the truth to evasiveness.

“You mean you’ve given up the search?” Miss Grayson asked, “after only one hour?”

“Naturally not,” Sheriff Traubel said. “There are a half-dozen men combing the woods right now, looking into every nook and cranny. But I had to come back to town to put through an urgent phone call and I just thought that you’d like a report on our progress so far.”

“Lack of progress, you mean. But since you’ve given up all hope it was your duty, I suppose, to tell me.”

“I didn’t say I’d given up all hope, Miss Grayson,” the sheriff protested.

“Of course he didn’t,” Joyce said quickly, feeling it was her duty to come to the sheriff’s defense. “His concern is natural enough, under the circumstances. I’ve explored every foot of the woods on both sides of the cove and there are a number of quicksand bogs—”

“Of course, of course,” Miss Grayson said. “We’re very grateful, Mr. Traubel. You’re going back now, I suppose, and rejoin the searchers.”

“Until we find them,” the sheriff said. “And I’ve a feeling they will be found.”

As soon as the door had closed behind him Miss Grayson said: “How could anyone be so crude? He should have kept what he feared to himself. There’s a harsh streak of cruelty in him.”

“I don’t think so,” Joyce said. “He just speaks his mind, the way I wish more people would do.”

When she left the administration office she could barely control her trembling, and she hoped Miss Grayson wouldn’t think of something additional to say, and summon her back before she could reach the end of the corridor. She hurried, scarcely daring to breathe, not quite sure what she would do or say if Miss Grayson’s harsh voice were to bring her to an abrupt halt.

But it didn’t happen and after a moment she was her natural self again, recovering from the assault Miss Grayson usually made on her personality.

She was almost sure she knew now where the children had gone. “Our secret place,” they’d called it. Three or four times she’d overheard them talking about it, in end-of-the-corridor whisperings. She’d kept the knowledge to herself because she hadn’t wanted them to accuse her of eavesdropping. She was, after all, the only adult friend they had and if their faith in her was shattered their mischief-making might get completely out of hand. Not that it hadn’t already, but still…

She had reached the end of the corridor and was only a few feet from her own tiny office when her gaze traveled, quite by accident, to the red-lighted emergency exit through which she was duty-bound to guide her small charges as swiftly as possible, whenever a fire drill brought them flocking about her.

For a moment the red glare seemed to her an evil omen that bore so close a relationship to the disappearance of the children that it struck a chill to her heart. Their disappearance had certainly created an emergency, and there might well be no exit through which she could safely guide them, for the peril that could surround four small children alone in the woods was quite different from that of an orphanage in flames.

She forced herself to remember that the Four Children had given her many such bad moments in the past and she had always managed to keep panic at arm’s length.

She stood very still directly opposite the red-lighted emergency exit, telling herself that she had done the right thing so far.

The moment the sheriff had mentioned Burnett’s cave she had been on the verge of telling him about the “secret place” but had quickly decided there was nothing to be gained by interfering with a search that was still going on. If the Four Children had gone to the “secret place” they would be in no immediate danger and bringing them safely back to the orphanage would not require the assistance of a half-dozen weary men with surly tempers and mud-spattered boots.

It was primarily her responsibility, as Miss Grayson would have been quick to point out. While the “secret place” was in the general direction of the cove it was on solid ground a considerable distance from the quicksand bogs, and the children had been warned repeatedly not too venture too far into the woods. Perhaps the warning had fallen on deaf ears. But if it had…well, the sheriff and his men could be depended upon to keep right on searching.

Her confidence wavered for an instant, but she forced herself to remain calm. There was a better than even chance that the Four children were, at that very moment, sitting inside a hollow oak tree with a hole so enormous that a woodland playhouse built of logs could not have protected them in a more exciting way from wind and rain and the mysterious voices of the forest.

She had passed the tree many times in her lunch-hour wanderings—she was an enthusiastic bird watcher—but the instant she’d overheard the Four Children whispering together she’d known that the “secret place” and the tree were identical, for no other tree could have called forth such praise.

Now, seeing the tree again in her mind’s eyes, towering and immense, she reproached herself bitterly for not having thought of it sooner. But the news of the childrens’ disappearance had disoriented her, and it was only the sheriff’s report that they had been seen heading for the cove that recalled the oak tree to her mind. There had been at least a dozen more dangerous places to consider first and her oversight, while unfortunate, did not really call for self-condemnation. She was sure that if she hurried and found that the children had avoided the bogs and were playing house beneath the giant oak’s swaying branches, her relief would be so overwhelming that the oversight would not seem worth recalling.

She discarded the thought of returning to her tiny office for the scarf which she usually wore in the woods and descended the emergency fire exit so swiftly that she had to pause an instant at the base of the stairs to regain her breath.

A moment later she was crossing the lawn to the edge of the woods causing her red-bronze hair blowing in the wind that was causing the dandelions between the trees and the brick-walled orphanage to sway and waltz about like inch-high ballerinas.

The trees at the edge of the wood were in motion too, and a squirrel the same color as the red-walled building went scampering away into the forest gloom as her hurrying footsteps set up a crackling sound. Never before had she seen so many dry and withered leaves on the forest floor so early in the autumn, but she refused to regard that as an ill-omen.

The trees might be losing their leaves prematurely in an unusually chill October. But the Four Children were full of spring sap and vigor, no matter how much of a problem they might pose for Miss Grayson and the sheriff. She, alone, understood them and always would. At seven and nine and twelve children had every right to be adventuresome, particularly when they were orphans. And if they became more than merely adventuresome now and then, sympathy and understanding could make it easier for them to stay out of trouble and abide by some of the rules.

There were three winding footpaths between the trees, all leading toward the cove. But Joyce chose the one which zigzagged the most, because the gardener had cleared it of the dense masses of vegetation which made the other two almost impassable in the summer and early fall.

For five minutes she moved swiftly through the forest gloom, pausing only once to remove a pebble from her shoe. Finally she saw in the distance the gleaming, bright waters of the cove and off to the right a clearing between the trees which was close to the giant oak tree.

She continued along the path until she was standing at the edge of the clearing. On the far side the trees stood in an almost unbroken row with their branches swaying in the breeze, forming a solid wall of greenery that extended for thirty feet in both directions. But the wall was broken at one place by a lightning-blasted tree that had crashed to the forest floor, leaving a narrow gap filled with a pale green glimmering.

Joyce drew a deep breath, knowing that the giant oak stood alone just beyond the glimmering, where the sunlight was flooding down with unusual brilliance and that a few more steps would bring its hollow, moss-covered trunk into view.

Should she call out first, to find out if the children were there? Might it not be better to know immediately, to get the suspense over with before crossing the clearing to make sure? Wasn’t it always wiser to seek the truth as quickly as possible and then, if the truth was shattering, to face up to it with grim fortitude?

Abruptly she cupped her hands and called out: “Children, it’s me—Miss Drake! We’ve been searching everywhere for you!”

The words went echoing through the forest and died away into silence.

Joyce’s heart did a flip-flop, then seemed to sink down through her body like a leaden weight, leaving her drained and despairing and with no heartbeat at all for a moment. Surely if the children had been sitting inside the tree or anywhere near it they would have heard her.

The sobbing began so quietly at first that Joyce mistook it for a flurry of wind stirring the branches on the opposite side of the clearing. But all at once it became louder, turning into what was unmistakably the anguished wailing of a small child.

Joyce raced swiftly across the clearing and between the narrow gap in the foliage on the far side and her hair caught on a low-hanging bough, and she had to stop to untangle it.

For an instant her hands seemed clumsy. But just knowing that she had guessed right about the Four Children’s whereabouts had lifted a great burden from her mind and it took her only a few seconds to conquer her agitation, free her hair and continue breathlessly on.

Six-year-old Betty Anne Thacker was standing alone at the base of the giant oak, digging her knuckles into her eyes. The instant she saw Joyce she came running toward her with a despairing cry.

Her face was wet with tears, her small mouth was quivering, and there was a look of fright in her eyes so intense it seemed almost unnatural in a child. A crumpled calico doll lay at the base of the tree, completely dwarfed by its immensity. But Betty Anne herself seemed almost as dwarfed, for she was unusually small for her age and the downstreaming sunlight cascaded about her as she ran making her look wraithlike.

Without saying a word, she buried her face in the heavily starched folds of Joyce’s white supervisor’s uniform, and continued to sob wildly, her small shoulders rising and falling.

For a moment Joyce remained silent, gently stroking the child’s hair and looking apprehensively toward the tree, too shaken to ask what had become of the other children. There was no sign of them anywhere and it was unlikely that they were playing house inside the tree when such a commotion was taking place outside.

A small commotion perhaps, just the clinging of a badly frightened child to an almost equally frightened woman. But the very young could usually be depended upon to know what was going on in their immediate vicinity, whether it was a tree-uprooting tornado, or just some strange, small animal peering out of the forest gloom with an incessant chattering.

“There, there,” Joyce suddenly heard herself saying. “Everything is going to be all right now, because I’m here with you. Tell me, darling. Where are the twins and your brother? You all came here to play house, didn’t you?”

Betty Anne stopped crying so abruptly that Joyce was taken a little aback, until she remembered how natural it was for a small, emotionally distraught child to pay instant attention to an urgent adult question.

“We didn’t do anything bad,” Betty Anne said, raising her tear-stained face from Joyce’s stiffly starched uniform. “Richard said it wasn’t stealing.”

“I’m sure it wasn’t,” Joyce said soothingly.” You took something with you. Is that what you’re trying to tell me?”

“Two camp stools,” Betty Anne said, from the gym. We were going to bring them back. Really and truly we were.”

“Of course you were. You just wanted to fix the tree up like a playhouse. What else did you take?”

It was a totally unimportant question. But Joyce knew that to get the truth out of so young a child she would have to be psychologically adroit and manipulative.

Betty Anne was clearly weighed down by guilt, and that seemed to be preventing her from answering the only question that was important. There was no doubt in Joyce’s mind that the whereabouts of the other three children was tied in with that guilt in some way. She knew that a few sympathetic leading questions were effective in dissolving guilt in a child and open the floodgates wide on more vital information.

“Richard took some forks and spoons,” Betty Anne was saying, with a sobbing catch in her voice. “And I took some cups and saucers. I wanted a picture to hang on the wall, but Richard said he was scared you’d be very angry if we took a picture.”

“Miss Grayson would have punished you severely if she found a picture missing,” Joyce said. “But I wouldn’t have been angry, darling—not if you really intended to return everything as soon as you got tired of playing house. You’d have gotten tired of it before long, Betty Anne. It’s very lonely out here in the woods. If you’d come to me and told me what you were planning to do—You call this the ‘secret place,’ don’t you?”

“We didn’t want anybody to know about it,” Betty Anne said. “How did you find out, Miss Drake?”

“Darling, listen to me,” Joyce said, drawing Betty Anne closer. “We just haven’t time to talk about that right now. There’s something I’ve got to know and only you can tell me. Where are the twins and your brother?”

“Two big bad men came and there was nobody around to shoot them,” Betty Anne said. “Richard told Sally and Jane to run as fast as they could. But the bad men ran after them and caught them. They hit Richard to make him stop crying. He was only crying because he didn’t want them to take Sally and Jane away. Sally and Jane were scared, but Richard wasn’t, Miss Drake. He was just mad. But he had to go with them, too.”

Hard as it was for a child of six to describe a brutal kidnapping, Betty Anne had done very well. But it was the look in her eyes that gave her childish prattle so ominous an implication that Joyce was struck speechless.

CHAPTER FIVE

A coldness was creeping over her now. Although there were more questions clamoring to be answered, she wondered how she could draw out Betty Anne without causing the child to burst into tears again. Her brother’s abduction and being left alone in the woods seemed to be causing her far more anguish than the terrible danger all three of the children were in.

It was natural enough for so young a child to draw no distinction between an immediate disaster that concerned only herself and a threat to another’s safety that was too far in the future to seem real to her. But that did no make Joyce’s task less difficult.

“The big men, Betty Anne,” she asked, “what were they like? Did they look like hoboes? You know what a hobo is, don’t you? A hobo…a tramp?”

Betty Anne nodded, and Joyce could see that, despite her tearfulness, she was trying to be as helpful as possible.

“They wore something over their heads, and I couldn’t see their faces. Their clothes were all shiny.”

Into Joyce’s mind there flashed a picture of two unshaven derelicts in shabby clothes, shiny from long wear, with burlap sacks drawn over their heads—sacks with cut-out holes, through which they could see just how terrified the children were and how much force they would have to use to make off with them.

But somehow it didn’t seem exactly the right picture. There was something wrong with it, for a frightened child would hardly have noticed or stressed the fact that their clothes were shiny.

Shiny?… Shining? Could Betty Anne mean that the kidnapers had been brightly, even dazzlingly attired? Deer hunters, perhaps, wearing day-glo hats and day-glo jackets, to make themselves as conspicuous as possible while moving through the woods? But why would deer hunters want to kidnap three small children? And even if their hats had been lowered, would lowered hat look like something drawn completely over their heads?

“What made you say their clothes were all shiny?” Joyce asked.

Betty Anne’s reply demolished what, at best, had been an unlikely conjecture.

“Because they were.” Her tears had started to flow again, but she managed to continue. “They looked like the knight in the Christmas play who woke up Snow White.”

Joyce shut her eyes for an instant, trying to visualize the Disney knight figure who had played a prominent role in the Christmas play which the orphanage had put on to brighten the lives of children whose days were, for the most part, tragically cheerless.

The knight had worn a breastplate and his papier-mâché clothes had borne so close a resemblance to chain-mail that the children hadn’t doubted for a moment that he had come riding straight out of a fairyland castle to awaken Snow White. The autumn trees in the background had been starkly bare—amazingly realistic stage props—and there had been artificial snow flurries.

To Joyce, the forest clearing in which she was standing, facing a badly frightened child, seemed suddenly just as bleak and threatening.

The two men who had kidnapped the children were no shining knights, regardless of what kind of clothes they had been wearing. And there was no reassurance in the thought that they had probably been wearing fantastic masquerade costumes to conceal their identities and make it more difficult for the sheriff to pick up their trail.

She could picture the two men carrying the children to some remote cabin in the woods, discarding the costumes and writing a carefully penned ransom note to—Joyce shook her head, realizing she was letting her imagination get out of hand. What could kidnapers hope to gain by writing a ransom note to a county orphanage?

The county would not pay a cent to get the children back, even if the rules could sometimes be stretched a little in an emergency. Public funds could not be used to ransom kidnapped children, no matter how desperate their plight might be. Funds to uphold the law, yes—funds to see that no stone was left unturned to bring the kidnapers to justice. But only wealthy parents were in a position to rescue their children from the basest of criminals.

What could it mean? Why would two men dressed like a character in a children’s Christmas play carry off Betty Anne’s brother, and the Trilling twins and leave her alone, crying her heart out in the woods?

“Where were you, Betty Anne, when all this happened?”

“I was hiding,” Betty Anne said, between sobs.

“Where, darling?”

“In the tree.”

“And your brother and the twins were outside, is that it?”

“They went to look for some acorns,” Betty Anne said. “We were playing acorns for keeps, and I won all the big green ones. The big green ones are hard to find. You only find a lot of them in the spring.”

It made sense, of course. There was nothing very unusual about a big, hollow oak, and the two men had apparently been in too much of a hurry to make off with the other children to realize that it was being used as a playhouse.

“Why didn’t the two bad men look inside the tree?” Joyce asked, to make sure that her surmise had not gone wide of the mark.

“I kept my head down,” Betty Anne said. “But I looked out just once and saw them.”

It confirmed what Joyce had always known—that the Four Children were both courageous and highly intelligent, despite their bent for mischief-making. Betty Anne’s brother could so easily have lost his head, and cried out in a futile effort to warn her. Then Betty Anne would have vanished also, and only the stolen dishes and camp stools would have been a pathetic memento of the lost children and secret place that had become the children’s second home.

There would have been nothing to indicate from where the children were abducted. Were it not for the quick thinking of the children, Betty Anne, too, would have vanished, and her description of the men “in shining clothes” would have been lost.

Despite the child’s small size and the fright that was still making her tremble, Joyce was sure that more information could be pried out of her.

For a moment Joyce was tom by indecision. Should she take Betty Anne directly to the sheriff, and let him do the questioning? It was wise, surely, to take advantage of the facilities of the agencies of the law.

But there was a disadvantage in calling in the police, particularly when a small child was the key witness to a crime. Most small children instinctively mistrust policemen and Betty Anne might not talk freely to the representative of the law.

Betty Anne had been very cooperative so far. Might it not be better to try to find out where the kidnapers had gone and follow a trail that might still lead somewhere? A warm trail was better than a cold one, and if she let another hour go by…

She took firm hold of Betty Anne’s shoulders and shook her gently. “Stop crying, Betty Anne,” she said in firm tones. “The men won’t come back. You’re much too old to carry on this way.”

Joyce knew nothing could have been further from the truth. Betty Anne had witnessed something that would have terrified most adults and left them shaken for hours. But she knew an appeal to Betty Anne’s pride would be the best way to calm her and get her cooperation.

Joyce turned and pointed toward the cove, giving Betty Anne a slight nudge as she did so. “When the big men left, Betty Anne, where did they go? Was it in that direction?”

Betty Anne shook her head.

“Over there, then?” Joyce asked, pointing in the opposite direction.

Without replying Betty Anne turned and pointed to the northeast, where the vegetation thinned a little, and Joyce could see from where she was standing, the beginning of another trail.

It was a wide trail and Joyce knew it well, for she had followed it several times in her bird-watching explorations.

It led to a wide stretch of marshland more firm than the soggy ground immediately surrounding the cove, with its many dangerous quicksand bogs. The two marshlands converged where the forest thinned and became a dismal tidal wasteland for many miles, but there was a mile-long stretch of comparatively firm ground and a few cabins scattered about between the trees.

Had the kidnapers taken the children to one of those cabins? It seemed unlikely, but it might not be too late to find out. Joyce gripped Betty Anne firmly by the hand and started off in the direction of the marsh.

They had not advanced more than sixty feet along the winding footpath when they felt the first strong tug of a rising wind. Trees on both sides of the path were in violent motion as the wind came in gusts of steadily increasing violence. The trunks seemed also to be swaying, as if they were in danger of being uprooted by a wind of hurricane force.

In another instant, Joyce felt herself being lifted up, with Betty Anne still clinging to her hand. Betty Anne had become to scream with fright. Joyce tightened her grip on the child’s hand. Her only hope was that the wind would set them down again before they went crashing into a tree and were knocked senseless.

A great roar had begun to fill the forest, as if the wind was converging on the trees from all directions, ripping and tearing at them amidst a vortex of seething violence.

And suddenly Joyce and Betty Anne were high above the trees, spinning about in a wind that was carrying them toward the marsh with a swiftness that made it almost impossible for them to breathe, but was less violent than the winds that were causing many of the trees below them to topple to the ground now, with crash after deafening crash.

Their journey was of short duration. The roar beneath them subsided, became a dwindling echo, as faint as an elfin drum. They continued to spin about high in the air until the marsh came into view and they saw beneath them, dazzling in its brightness, an immense, circular object at least a hundred feet in diameter. In another moment they were descending toward it.

CHAPTER SIX

At first the men and women imprisoned in the metal-walled compartment had been strangers to one another—and to themselves. When a familiar way of life has been torn up by the roots there is often a brief loss of identity, an inability to function as an independent individual in a world in which everyday reality has lost much of its meaning. Thoughts arise which are chilling—thoughts which seem alien to normal experience and are separated, by no more than a hair’s breadth—from madness, with all of its shrieking terrors.

To the imprisoned men and women, habits that had been cultivated from childhood, ways of thinking and feeling that had been taken for granted could no longer provide support. And yet, in a strange way, the peril which they all shared made them draw closer together, unconsciously at first and then with a growing awareness of how desperately important it was to become united in their resistance to a coldly merciless foe.

It was the kind of battle which could not be won if each captive, trapped by a feeling of total isolation, attempted to wage it unaided. A companionship based on mutual trust had to be swiftly established, and more and more the need to achieve such a meeting of minds began to dominate all of their thinking.

It was not easy to achieve, for the captive men and women differed widely in age, social background and emotional and imaginative sensitivity. But once it had been accomplished, they were amazed to discover how quickly a companionship arising from a shared danger could deepen into a firm and unshakable friendship.

Joyce Drake and a young man she had never set eyes on before she had been escorted with the Four Children into the compartment, had been the first to be drawn to each other.

Joseph Wilmont was a garage mechanic and a high school dropout who had spent the last seven years of his uneventful life in California, making it possible for the owners of old-model cars to get a little more mileage out of their sadly battered purchases.

His specialty was cars, but Joyce soon discovered that he was an all-around mechanical genius and that he was quite remarkable in other respects. Despite his lack of formal education he had read, from the age of fourteen, every book of major importance in the realm of mathematical physics he could borrow, beg or steal.

He was almost as much interested in biochemistry, comparative anthropology, and ethnology and had given a great deal of thought to the precise role which genetics played in relation to environment in the overall pattern of human behavior.

He was a little weak on fiction. But he knew enough about educational psychology to discuss some of the new trends with Joyce in a most enlightening way. In fact, there were moments when she would have given way to despair, were it not for his ironic humor. (He had almost succeeded in convincing her that the M.A. she had worked so hard to secure could severely handicap an orphanage supervisor.)

She stood with him now, and the bright overhead light brought his boyish features into sharp relief. It glinted on his gold-rimmed glasses and the tousled brown hair which did not seem quite suitable to his voice and manner. He seemed much older than his years, more thoughtful and mature than most boys of twenty-two. Even when he was engaging in banter to relieve the tormenting strain and uncertainty which he shared with her and which she could see in his eyes, there was nothing callow about him.

His maturity she liked—she needed that now. She would have welcomed at her side the presence of a man of forty or forty-five with the quiet inner strength that went with early middle-age, if such a man was neither a coward nor a fool. But Joseph Wilmont was a very good stand-in for that kind of security and something had happened that was making her feel she would not have exchanged him for anyone else, even if he had been as immature inwardly as his boyish resilience seemed occasionally to suggest.

Her wrist watch told her that it was just two days and seven hours since she had fallen in love for the first time in her life—completely, madly, desperately in love with a boy who was two years younger than herself. And that was just part of the miracle. She could tell by the way his eyes lighted up whenever their hands touched or he looked directly at her that it wasn’t—couldn’t have been—a one-way madness.

What made it even more of a miracle was the fact that she wasn’t pretty. She had become firmly convinced of that, despite the fact that a few men had thought otherwise before she’d majored in educational psychology at a woman’s college and turned into a tight-lipped potential spinster at twenty-four.

Now they were observing together the fourteen adults and eight children who shared their captivity. The children were all on their feet, moving about so rapidly that they seemed more numerous than they actually were.

They ranged in years from five or six to twelve—children who should not be where they were, exposed to a horror that was shattering enough for an adult to endure, and might well leave their young minds permanently scarred, even if the ordeal was of short duration.

She refused to allow herself to dwell on the possibility that the children might be white-haired before the ordeal ended—might not be returned safely to their homes this side of eternity.

Yet, strangely enough, they did not appear to be genuinely frightened. They were darting about in a lively way, their activity accompanied by occasional outbursts of merriment, and they seemed no different from children strenuously engaged on a city street in a game of tag, leapfrog, or hide-and-seek.

For a moment, Joyce’s eyes followed the Four Children for whom she had sacrificed her liberty, in a rescue attempt that had failed. Her feeling toward them had not changed. They were still her children—her own special charges.

In this metal-walled compartment, a child at play could very easily stumble and be hurt. It happened often enough to cause parents and other guardians of the young some concern. But the compartment provided the Four Children with very little scope for mischief-making, and Joyce was pleased to see them mingling with the others without difficulty.

The small boy, and the girl who appeared to be no older than Betty Anne, belonging to the tormented-looking man and woman who sat in a shadowed corner of the compartment with their lips tightly compressed, seemed a little more serious-minded than their seven playmates. But their lack of childish exuberance probably meant, Joyce told herself, that the grim concern of their parents had communicated itself to them.

As if aware of her thoughts, Wilmont said: “Wentworth and his wife are very much in love.” And half to himself, he added, “Does it make it easier or harder, I wonder?”

“Does what make what easier or harder, Joe? Are you asking yourself whether this awful situation we’re in is made more bearable for the Wentworth’s because they love each other?” He nodded silently, as she continued. “They say, ‘To the dying, speak of the glories of life.’ In other words, if life has been sweet, it is easier to die. If life has been barren and unfulfilled, then we go out struggling and saying, ‘But I never really lived at all.’”

“Yes, I know what you mean,” he broke in eagerly. “There are two things involved here. First, our situation is so full of uncertainty, and in the mind of everyone here, except, thank God, the children, is the thought that we may be facing death…facing death without the small consolation of knowing how we will die. But the thought of facing death is less painful to the Wentworth’s because their lives have been filled with their love for each other and their children. And the second thought I had is that any conflict or problem that is faced by an individual is lessened when that person has a deep and loving relationship with someone. ‘Love is an armor that softens every blow.’… You know, I’ve never talked to anyone this way before.” He smiled, embarrassed by his own fervor.

Joyce tenderly took his hand. A repressed and conventional person, who would never ordinarily take a baby step in the direction of an attractive man, she found herself propelled by the intimacy and feeling of warmth created by his heartfelt words, and by the incredible pressure of the strange dilemma that faced them all—propelled to speak and act in a manner completely new to her. “We don’t have time for games or maneuvering. I am going to be completely honest with you; take it as you will. I can’t analyze it or justify it, and I refuse to apologize for it…but…I love you. I have been a lonely person. I have never had for any other man the emotions that I have for you.”

He enfolded her hands in his, and his face told her better than words that she was not being rejected, that he welcomed and responded to her feelings. “Oh, my dear wonderful girl, I can’t explain it, either. Maybe it is the circumstances, but I don’t care about the reason. I haven’t been exactly lonely…there have been several women in my life…”

She laid two fingers on his lips, aware of the tumultuous pounding of her heart. “I don’t care about that. I don’t want to know about it. All I care about, all I want to know, is that we’re together in this. I’m glad I’ve been lonely up to now; I’m glad my loneliness didn’t push me into taking someone I didn’t really want.”

“We don’t have to worry about loneliness now—or ever again,” he said, the instant she removed her fingers from her lips.

“For as long as eternity is,” Joyce said, nodding. “But when we die, eternity may cease to exist for us. Or don’t you believe that?”

“I’m not sure,” he said. “But right at the moment, it doesn’t seem important.”

“Please kiss me.” Joyce said.

“Here, in front of all these less fortunate people?”

“The Wentworth’s will understand—and so may some of the others.”

He took her quickly into his arms and for a full minute his lips remained on hers.

When he released her she turned quickly, her eyes sweeping the compartment. The blood was pounding in her temples and she knew her face was flushed.

She was sure that everyone in the compartment had been watching them. She wondered if their lovemaking was looked upon as a selfish intrusion when people were doing their best to meet a shared danger with courage and calm dignity.

She did not see reproach or indignation in any of the eyes that were still trained on her and the children had gone right on playing. Seemingly she had been forgiven.

Wilmont seemed to be unconcerned about the reactions of their comrades in disaster. He was staring intently at a panel which had glided shut a moment before.

“You know, darling, we’ve seen that panel open and close at least fifty times on a gloved hand with a tray of food. But I’ve never before noticed—”

He paused an instant to give her arm a squeeze before bending lower to bring the bottom of the panel on a level with his eyes.

“I hadn’t noticed before that it isn’t just a perfectly smooth strip of metal grooved into the wall. It glides open and shut smoothly enough, without making a sound, and it looks as though it’s electronically operated. But it may operate on some principle that has nothing to do with electronics.”

“What makes you say that?” Joyce asked, her interest immediately aroused.

“See those tiny, stippled dots? They’re arranged in a curious pattern and are so tiny you’d need a magnifying glass to bring them up to pinhead size. They would be invisible at twelve or fifteen inches.”

Joyce lowered her head until their cheeks were almost touching. “Yes,” she said, after a pause. “I can see them now. What do you think they mean?”

“Nothing, perhaps,” Wilmont said. “But then again—”

He straightened abruptly and stared around the compartment, a speculative look in his eyes.

“I can use a pair of glasses to magnify the dots,” he said. “See if you can collect two or three pairs. I haven’t your persuasiveness.”

“I’ll try,” Joyce said. “But if I wore glasses, I wouldn’t want to take them off, even for a moment. This is not the right time or place to go stumbling about half-blind.”

“Try to make them realize how important it is,” Wilmont said. “I’ll have to keep my glasses on, and I’d like to try at least three pairs. I’ll need a strong glass, but not one that is image-distorting. A strong reading lens would be better than a prescription lens. See what you can do.”

Joyce crossed the compartment, miraculously escaping a collision with the children and approached the seated adults. Four of them were wearing glasses and she talked briefly to each in turn. Moments later she was back at Wilmot’s side.

“Here are three pairs,” she said. “Mr. Tomlinson’s don’t magnify at all, or so he claims. I let him keep them on his stubby nose because he reminds me so much of an Alice-in-Wonderland rabbit.”

“Perhaps we’ll have luck, with that kind of rabbit watching us,” he said, returning her smile. “We’ll see.”

He squatted again, and he’d a lens of each pair in turn, an inch above the dots and then moved further from the panel to increase the magnification until the dots blurred.

The first pair had evidently been prescribed to correct a bad case of astigmatism and while the magnification was pronounced, the dots looked like micro-organisms whirling about on a slide. The second pair magnified the dots about four times, but it also distorted them. The dots looked like microscopic tadpoles. But the third lens he tried was just right. The magnification, when he held it about seven inches above the panel, made the dots seem almost as large as peas.

“The poor devil must be almost blind,” he said, “to need glasses this strong.” But Joyce had the feeling that he was saying that to mask his excitement over something that had nothing to do with the glasses or their owner.

He stared at the dots for two minutes, with an expression of intense concentration. “The pattern,” he said at last, “it’s damned unusual, to say the least. It looks almost like the combination of a safe.”

“But that’s crazy,” Joyce said. “If the panel is operated on a combination-lock principle, the dial would be on the outside, wouldn’t it?”

“It isn’t a dial pattern exactly,” Wilmont said, “although it does suggest that. As for its being on the outside… I don’t know. It may be on both sides. Perhaps they want to guard against locking themselves in by accident. They seem to be very thorough about everything they do.”

“Twenty dots, arranged in an unusual way,” Joyce said. “I hope you don’t seriously think you can get that panel open just by staring at them.”

He turned and looked at her. “It’s unbelievable,” he said. “That’s precisely what I was thinking. Whatever put that idea into your head?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “It just came to me.”

“But you didn’t take it seriously,” he said. “I do.”

“I was just speaking sarcastically, of course. You mean you really think—”

“I don’t know what to think. The same thought occurred to us both. Just suppose—I know it’s wild, but the whole thing is wild—just suppose that panel operates…well, telepathically, by thought impulses, or ESP or whatever you want to call it. Perhaps those dots are laden with a kind of thought-impulse energy—a static or stored up energy—that can be released if you stare at them in just the right way.”

“It may be very different from a photo electric eye mechanism which can open a door when you approach, and close it again after you. And that stored-up, thought-impulse potential may be so strong that it communicated itself to us just now, made us both obscurely aware—gave us a hint—that the panel can be opened by the power of thought alone.”

“But what would you have to do? Just continue to stare at the dots?”

“Perhaps…with intense concentration. Or it may require more than simple concentration. The way the dots are arranged may be important. Why do they suggest the dial combination of a safe, when there’s nothing actually dial-like about the pattern? A dial of a safe has to be manipulated, either by someone who knows the combination or who has the skill of an experienced safe cracker. Perhaps, instead of being an agile-fingered safe cracker, I’ll have to be an agile-minded one.”

Wilmont paused an instant, then went on thoughtfully: “When you stare at an object that’s complicated in structure or just at some unusual design—stare steadily for several minutes and let your vision become a little hazy—have you ever noticed how many incredibly fantastic shapes the object or design can assume? A flower can turn into a human figure, with well-defined arms and legs and a smiling face. Or a figured bookend can become a living-room, filled with brightly dressed men and women moving languidly about.

“The blurring of your vision conveys an illusion of motion as well. I’ve often wondered if that charge is wholly illusionary. It may be that there is an actual rearrangement in the structural details of the object you are staring at in that almost hypnotic way. The power of thought alone can perhaps manipulate the dial-combination of a very unusual kind of safe and make the portals of the unknown open wide.

“And you think you could do that now—with this panel? The change would have to be more than visual to make the panel glide open.”

“It may well be more than visual, if those dots are charged with the kind of thought potential I mentioned. At least, I can try.”

She started to reply, but he silenced her with a look. She knew that he was following a train of thought an interruption could derail.

She remained silent as he lowered his eyes again to the lenses which he was holding a few inches above the dots.

She studied his face in profile as his lips tightened and he raised the glasses a little higher, to achieve the best magnification before they blurred. The overhead light slanting down over his features gave him a monkish look. Perhaps there was some obscure relationship between that kind of light and deep meditation.

Some kind of inner illumination was taking place in Wilmot’s mind; his fingers tightened on the lenses and his lips began to move silently.

Then he was whispering, in a voice so low she had to strain to catch the words.

“The dots…are changing. They are shifting about. A new pattern. Hard to believe. It seemed so…but yes, yes, I think I was right.”

It happened more swiftly than either of them could have anticipated. The panel began to move—slowly at first and then so rapidly they found themselves staring at a metal wall four or five feet distant from them. The panel had completely vanished.

The opening was about two feet wide, and beyond it there was a pale blue glimmering. The wall stood out clearly in the glow, but they could not see the ceiling that must have arched above it from where they were standing. They knew only that they were staring at what appeared to be a passageway of some kind.

They had been herded into the compartment through another, much wider panel, after passing through a passageway of similar width and it had seemed most likely that the passageways outnumbered the compartments, as they did in most seagoing ships. Though they had been cast adrift on unknown seas in a craft that had never sailed the oceans of Earth, nevertheless, space to move freely about was a vital necessity for navigators, human or otherwise.

It was that thought which seemed to weight most heavily on Wilmot’s mind, for he remained silent when Joyce gripped his arm and cried out. The incredible miracle that had taken place, the accuracy of his wild surmise—surely it could not have been more dramatically confirmed—seemed suddenly to concern him less than a fear which Joyce had shared, but had momentarily forgotten.

“Will this do us any good at all?” he exclaimed, his voice tight with strain. “They’ll be everywhere, moving constantly about. On an ocean liner if a passenger does anything to endanger the safety of the ship he’ll get a tap on the shoulder in half a minute. The watchfulness here must be just as close. If we’re lucky, we may be able to stay out of sight long enough to do a little exploring. But the chances are against it.”

“The risk is worth taking,” Joyce said quickly. “Knowing more about them is of vital importance. We don’t even know if they’re human, closely as they seem to resemble us. They could be scaly monsters. I’m sure they don’t wear hoods when they’re not in our presence.”

“All right,” Wilmont said. “I’ll see what I can find out. I’ll get a good look at them before they drag me back here—if they do. They may not want me to tell the others what I learn about them.”

Joyce paled and drew in her breath sharply. “You mean you think they might—”

“Silence me, yes. But they could do that in a great many ways.”

“No, say it,” Joyce said. “They might kill you.”

“All right, they might. That’s part of the risk. But you said it was worth taking. Have you changed your mind?”

“You don’t have to ask me that. I’ve changed it and it’s going to remain changed. You’re staying right here.”

“Listen to me,” he said, taking firm hold of her arm. “There’s one thing you can do that makes sense and it has to be done right now. Go over and talk to anyone who may get the idea I’d prefer not to go alone. That includes you, darling.”

“I won’t let you go alone,” Joyce said. “I hope you realize that, because if you don’t I’ll follow you anyway. You can’t make the panel glide shut again, because all of the dots are out of sight. They may know how to do it, but I don’t think you can. If I thought—”

She broke off abruptly, to stare in concern across the compartment. “Everyone saw the panel open,” she said. “I’ll have to be even more persuasive than I was when I got you the glasses, or we’ll be followed the instant we leave. Frightened people are funny that way. The children will have to be sternly controlled. I think we can depend on the Wentworths and a few of the others.”

“I know we can. They’re getting up, so it will have to be quick. Hurry, darling—please. I don’t want the children swarming all over me.”

“I’ll be right back,” Joyce said, turning. “If you slip out while I’m talking to them I’ll be all alone when I follow you. Remember that.”

Wentworth and his wife were half-way to where she had been standing when they saw she was agitated and came to an abrupt halt.

“He got the panel open, didn’t he?” Wentworth said, his gaunt, attractive face filled with concern. “I saw it glide open. If it wasn’t for my children—”

“He’s staying right here,” his wife said, echoing Joyce’s words of an instant before. Women in love she thought, having identical thoughts when a man’s recklessness gets out of hand.

“That’s what I wanted to talk to you about,” Joyce said quickly. “Joseph got the panel open. He feels he has earned the right to ask you not to risk your lives by leaving the compartment before he gets back. If five or six of us went with him the danger would be much greater. And the children must be watched. I’m going with him because we’ve just ourselves to consider. My four children aren’t… I mean, I’m not…”

“I understand,” Helen Wentworth said. “You’re not exactly a mother and that makes a difference. Don’t worry. We’ll look after them. And we’ll keep the panel open if Richard has to block it with his body. He has a lot of strength and he seldom loses an argument.”

“Tell Wilmont I’m in his corner all the way,” Wentworth said. “He’s the right man to undertake something that requires a cool head and the kind of confidence in a dangerous situation that always seems to diminish a little when you’re over thirty, no matter how much mature experiences rushes in to take up the slack. It’s more than just courage—”

“I’ll return the glasses,” Helen Wentworth said, cutting him short, her eyes on the metallic gleaming in Joyce’s hand.

“Oh, yes…of course,” Joyce said. She’d almost forgotten about the glasses.

She found herself hoping, a little wildly, that she wouldn’t forget anything else of importance before she returned to Wilmont.

He was looking at her now in an impatient, almost pleading way. The children had stopped playing and everyone in the compartment was converging on the Wentworths, as if they resented the fact that they were keeping her from continuing on and talking to each of them in turn.

She was relieved when Helen Wentworth said: “You’d better go now. The longer that panel remains open the less time you’ll have to move freely about outside. They are sure to discover that you’ve left the compartment within the next ten or fifteen minutes. They must keep a close check.”

“Helen’s right,” Wentworth said. “You’ll have to face up to the fact that they’ll probably discover what happened before you can return. You’ll be trapped outside. But if Wilmont is willing to accept that as almost inevitable—”

“We’re both willing,” Joyce said.

“All right, go now,” Helen Wentworth urged again. “We’ll take care of everything. There’s a remote chance that you can get back. The panel will still be open if they don’t find out.”

Joyce turned, ignoring the jostling of adults and children pressing close and returned across the compartment to Wilmot’s side.

“The Wentworths will see that no one follows us,” she told him. “But we’d better hurry.”

“That’s good,” he said. “I’ll go first.”

CHAPTER SEVEN

The walls of the passageway into which they emerged had the same bright metallic sheen as the walls of the compartment. It was long and straight and very narrow, and the low lamp-studded ceiling which arched above it had a tunnel-like look. The floor mirrored the radiance in weaving splotches which swirled up about them as they moved over its polished surface, until they seemed to be wading through small lakes of fire as they passed from darkness into light and then into darkness again.

“Stay close to me,” Wilmont cautioned, his face set in tight lines. “We must guard against becoming separated, even by a few feet. Distances can widen fast when something looms up in front and you lose your head and start backing away from it. If we get separated call out, shout as loud as you can.”

Their footsteps did not set up an echoing clatter as they had feared they might, but made only a slight swishing sound. Apparently great care had been taken to make the passageway soundproof.

Once they halted, straining their ears to catch what had seemed to be the sound of someone moving about at a distance—a faint shuffling noise. It had seemed to come from the far end of the passageway, but when it was not repeated, they continued on in silence.

And presently they were no longer in the passageway, but immersed in a sudden brightness, and directly ahead of them there towered a vertical transparency at least sixty feet in height.

The enormous window was as transparent as glass. But ii resembled more a vertical sheet of running water, and if it had been in a horizontal position it would have had almost the look of a swift-flowing brook, so sparkling bright that every pebble, and waterplant and darting minnow beneath the racing water would have stood out with a startling clarity.

But it wasn’t the sandy bottom of a brook that Wilmont and the woman at his side saw as they stared out at a sight that made them draw close together and look at each other in shunned disbelief.

A vast gray plain stretched out beyond the window to a long line of snow-capped mountains, darkly silhouetted against a sun-reddened sky. Across the plain, through the haze of a smoky sunset which made distant objects a little vague, ten or twelve strange-looking vehicles were moving. Most of them were quite distant, but two were so close to the window that they could see every spoke in wheels that guttered as they revolved. The wheels gave the vehicles the look of Victorian-age bicycles dominated by an enormous wheel with a much smaller one behind it.

But when they looked more closely at the strange vehicles, they could see that they bore only a superficial resemblance to bicycles, Victorian or otherwise. They were covered with a projecting hood of shining metal which looked not unlike the carapace of a beetle and so completely concealed the riders that even their legs were invisible. What force propelled the wheels was not evident.

For a moment the strange vehicles remained visible and then, quite suddenly, they dimmed and vanished. Instantly there came into view two other vehicles, if vehicles they could be called, facing each other in what appeared to be the center of the plain. It was impossible to determine their exact size, but they were at least fifty times as large as the bicycle-shaped vehicles and their dull gray bulk completely blotted out the swollen red disk of the sun, which had changed its position in the sky. It did not appear to be the same sunset, however, for it was not so smoky and cast deeper and sharper shadows at the base of the mountains, where the light was dwindling fast.

The two vehicles were bristling with what appeared to be armaments of incredible size—great tubes that rotated as they moved cumbersomely about and glistened with an iridescent sheen, and tapering objects that looked like gigantic ballistic missiles held aloft by segmented metal arms terminating in claw-like metal hands.

They were quite clearly not pleasure vehicles, designed to provide swift, short-distance transportation for their invisible occupants. With their enormous size and the formidable-looking gadgetry which projected from them, they bore resemblance to military tanks.

Both vehicles seemed to be simultaneously convulsed by the violence that ensued. Long sheets of sweeping flame came from the glistening tubes, lighting up the desert for miles, and sand spurted skyward in pulsing jets, as if a dozen oil wells had come uncapped before the first blinding flash of light could be succeeded by a second and a third.

Instinctively, Wilmont clapped his hands to his ears and looked away, sure for an instant that a glare so incandescent would be followed by a deafening blast. Then the fact that he had heard no sound at all up to that moment made him realize that no sound could penetrate the transparent barrier through which he was staring, and he dropped his hands to his side.

Near the mountains, two mushroom-shaped clouds began to arise. Since there were no human habitations on the plain that could have been destroyed by the blasts, Wilmont was sure they were looking at a battle of two heavily armored desert fortresses engaged in a thermonuclear artillery duel.

There could be no other possible interpretation of what was taking place. But what stunned him the most was the realization that some of the blasts were going wild and that could only mean that the armaments were so formidable that the engagement had gotten out of control and the only way one of the fortresses could hope to survive was to unleash all of its weaponry in an all-out attack, surpassing in destructiveness the most massive of aerial bombing missions, with no saturation point decided on.

Three more mushroom-shaped clouds arose, much closer to the two moving fortresses, and with each blast they seemed to change shape and spiral more furiously skyward. As the battle continued to rage, a jagged fissure appeared in the plain and widened. Finally a direct hit appeared to have been scored. One of the fortresses had stopped moving. A steady incandescence spread outward until enveloped the second fortress.

There was no doubt in Wilmot’s mind that the blasted wreckage that would be strewn across the plain when the incandescence vanished would point up the sheer insanity of such a double attack with thermonuclear weapons. But they were mercifully spared that sight by the sudden appearance of clouds in the sky that had not been there an instant before and a sun that was just rising far to the east.

An incredible change had taken place. The entire desert was now covered with high cactus growths and scattered about between the grotesque-looking vegetation, were small stone structures that bore a striking resemblance to Eskimo igloos. There were at least a hundred such structures fairly close to the window, and perhaps a thousand others grouped unevenly across the plain, and running along the base of the mountains in three parallel and unbroken rows.

There could be no doubt that they were human dwellings, for men and women were moving around in front of them clad in dun-colored pelts, and leopard skins. There were fires burning close to many of the dwellings. Women and children huddled around the high-leaping flames, or carried large metal pots from the fire to the dwellings and stopped, now and then, to talk to the men.

Some of the men were sprawled out in the sun, and others were busily working at stripping the flesh from antelope-like animals hanging suspended from T-shaped poles. Their long sharp knifes glittered in the dawn light.

Joyce spoke then, for the first time since she had come to a halt before the window. Wilmont too, had been stunned by the swift and frightening changes that had taken place on the plain.

“What can it mean?” she breathed, tightening her grip on his arm. “We can’t be…on another planet. Those men and women resemble us too closely. And everything keeps changing. Days must have passed since—”

“Not days, Joyce,” Wilmont heard himself replying. “Years, certainly—centuries, perhaps—must have passed since those armored tanks were destroyed by atomic weapons that couldn’t have existed until considerably later than the Apollo mission. We possess no weapons so complex and only the mushroom-shaped clouds were familiar. And what we are seeing now appears to be aftermath of an age of continuous thermonuclear warfare.”

“Right here on Earth, you mean?”

“It’s something we’ve always thought of as more or less inevitable, isn’t it? We’re looking at it, I think. People living in primitive stone dwellings, clad in the skins of animals. The new barbarians.”

“But if it’s true, we must be traveling through time, into the future. We can’t possibly be on some unknown planet or a UFO base on the moon—or Venus or Mars.”

“I’m sure it’s true. How can we doubt it now? How can we possibly doubt it? If we were on Mars or Venus, or the planet of another star, that scene out there wouldn’t keep constantly changing, all apart from the fact that parallel evolution—if it exists at all—could never have led to the appearance, on another world, of human beings identical with ourselves. Humanoid creatures, with big brains and a primate aspect perhaps, but never Man as we know him.”

“But I can’t believe—”

Before Joyce could go on another change took place on the plain. The low stone dwellings vanished and larger dwellings appeared, with sloping roofs and windows with gleaming panes that caught and mirrored the sunlight. There were gardens in front of the dwellings and winding roads leading up to them and on the roads, men and women, no longer clothed in animal skins but wearing tunic-like garments of woven cloth were walking singly and in pairs. A few rode small gray animals that might have been donkeys, for they had a peculiar dwarfish look. But there were no vehicles of any kind and no mechanical contrivances, although to manufacture window glass hinted at the recovery of a little of the past’s technological knowledge, and the development of advanced tools.

“But this is madness!” Joyce exclaimed, shielding her eyes to shut out the fierce glare of the sun, which was directly overhead now. It burned through the pane through which they were staring until they feared that it might at any moment catch fire, curl up in smoke and disappear. If the window was moving swiftly through time, it was impossible to know how much of that terrible, swift change would leave it unaltered, for its molecular construction could hardly have resembled that of an ordinary pane of glass and as probably unimaginably strange. Tiny bubbles seemed constantly to form and dissolve on its shining surface in a way that was vaguely alarming.

But then Wilmont remembered that the—yes, he would think and say it now—time-machine was equally strange in its ability to break the time barrier, and a little of his alarm left him. He was able to answer the unspoken question in Joyce’s eyes without her suspecting how unnerved he had become.

“We know now, don’t we? I think it’s important that we should know, and keep it constantly in mind. The UFOs which have caused so much consternation are actually time-machines. It is not inconceivable that they should travel in space as well, and have followed planes and that the many ‘sightings’ have been confirmed. To think of them as spaceships from another planet was a natural enough mistake. It could scarcely have been avoided, since they are circular and closely resemble flying saucers spinning through the sky.

“And don’t you see—a machine that can travel in time, into the future or into the past, would have to be a flying vehicle as well, or it would risk destruction every time it arrived at a particular locality in time, whether in the future or in the past.

“There would be so many changes, Joyce—most of them topographical. Mountain ranges rise and fall, inland lakes appear in the midst of a desert, shorelines shift with the passing of the centuries. Suppose they pinpointed a certain area that was important to them—an area in the past or in the future they wished to explore. What would happen if they came out at the bottom of a lake or even—well, encountered a tall building instead of a level stretch of land. A machine that can travel in space as well as in time can avoid such accidents very easily.”

“Even if I understood all that,” Joyce said, “how can we actually be looking at something that won’t take place until long after we’re dead and buried. How can you travel into a future that doesn’t exist yet? How can they come from a future that will never exist for us?”

“It exists for us now,” Wilmont said, “in a very real way.”

“In a very strange way. How fast is the time-machine traveling? So fast that some ages vanish in a few seconds, while others remain unchanged for several minutes? Nothing has changed out there for almost five minutes now. It just doesn’t make sense. We saw those two tanks—if they were tanks—engage in a battle that must have lasted four or five minutes, just as if the time-machines were standing still. Then we saw the survivors of an age of atomic warfare that could very easily have lasted for centuries. There must have been, at the very least, a time gap of fifty or a hundred years. But we didn’t see the skipped interval at all.”

“It does make sense, Joyce—if you think about it. Do trains or automobiles always travel at the same speed? There may be slow-downs and speed-ups, and we’ve had a glimpse of the future that a brief slow-down allows us to see. As for the gaps—the machine may travel so fast at times that centuries sweep past with only a faint blurring for a second or two.”

It seemed incredible to Wilmont that he could talk so calmly when the events were so tremendous, so totally beyond the scope of what the human mind might conceive. So little was known about the nature of ultimate reality and the complex and unsuspected relationship that might exist between past, present and future time in some higher dimension of space.

Joyce’s ability to accept all this somewhat calmly amazed him too. She seemed to have controlled the emotions that had made her incapable of speech and to have accepted as an inescapable reality the changes that were taking place on the plain.

It was as though nothing beyond the window was real. It was a frail raft to cling to in a stormy sea, where every wave was of hurricane force, and could crash down in a solid, three-dimensional way. Between wisdom and folly there could be no middle ground. To walk into a rose garden and see, amidst the flowers, the grinning face of a monstrous dwarf, might give one the feeling that the dwarf was unreal. But it would be both foolish and dangerous not to consider the possibility of it being a dwarf—accepting the idea that a sight so nightmarish could mean only that total madness had possessed the beholder’s mind.

Suddenly, the view beyond the window changed again. A thin haze now overhung the plain, and through it there towered tall, breathtakingly beautiful buildings of intricate design. Some of them were pylon-shaped, and others had wide, pagoda-like roofs and great pillars at their base, and still others were surmounted by enormous domes that glowed through the thin mist, their colors constantly changing from blue to red to gold and back to blue again.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Wilmont stared intently at each pagoda-like roof and dome, observing the pace of the changing colors. The possibility that the time-machine had come to a full stop, he dismissed as unlikely; for he saw that the tall buildings were changing in many ways, almost imperceptibly at first and then with a rapidity that left him in no doubt that the machine was not maintaining a constant speed. Although the age through which it was traveling had not been left behind with a sudden blurring and a leap forward of many centuries.

Some of the buildings became taller, shorter or wider, as if some new construction work had substantially reshaped them. And once or twice he could detect through the haze, aerial traceries that might well have been networks of scaffolding, with tiny human figures moving about high in the air as agilely as spiders repairing their webs in the teeth of a gale.

And suddenly beyond the window, there was blowing the fiercest of gales, and all of the tall buildings were gone. A sand twister was moving across the plain toward the distant mountains, leveling everything in its path. But in its path there were only tall cactus growths again and numerous small animals scurrying for the safety of a wind-lashed ledge of rock protruding from the sand like the prow of a sunken ship or the skeleton of some gigantic, prehistoric beast that had been exposed to view by a millennium-long wearing away of the plain.

The plain had not looked so desolate before, for now all evidence that it had once been the home of an advanced people and had provided rich soil for cultivation, had totally disappeared. Even the mountains seemed eroded by age, less sharp in their outlines, more completely at the mercy of the elements.

The storm that was now raging seemed to increase in violence as they watched, and for a moment Wilmont was almost sure that he could hear the torrential screaming of the wind as it lashed against the window.

But that had to be a deception, of course, or he would have heard sounds a thousand times louder in the ages through which the machine had taken them.

Had the long human journey come to an end? Had another atomic age and perhaps even a third or a fourth come and gone, leaving the Earth a sterile waste no longer capable of supporting life?

Almost instantly he realized that the plain could have undergone no such destructive change, for it was not pitted and scarred with craters and the soil did not have the glassy or blackened look that repeated thermonuclear holocausts would have left in their wake. And all life had certainly not vanished, for the small mammals that were fleeing from the fury of the storm were very much alive, but seemed to be fatter than the wild hares, weasels, and ground hogs that he had known as a boy in the bleak stretches of desert surrounding his home.

There were no birds in wind-buffeted flight above the plain. The absence of buzzards, the most common of desert birds, could be accounted for by the absence of man. He could not explain the chilling somber thought that flashed across his mind. Vultures had surely not waited for the coming of man to breed and multiply and go searching for food in the waste places of earth, even though man provided them with an unexpected bounty.

“I’ve a feeling that each time the machine slows down a long leap ahead follows,” he heard Joyce say close to his ear, her voice tremulous with strain. “The city we just saw must have taken generations to build. And there’s not a trace of it left. How long does it take stone ruins to crumble into dust? You’d think there would be a few stone or metal fragments scattered about—some slight indication at least that a city as large as New York or London once occupied that empty stretch of desert.”

“I know,” Wilmont said, nodding. “It’s a wasteland, all right. But we’ve seen the same kind of vegetation before. It may not mean too much—only that the ruins have been buried deep in the shifting sands by a great many other storms as furious as that one.”

“But we’ve never seen a sandstorm like that. I haven’t, and I was born in Kansas, and know how destructive tornados can be. Couldn’t it also mean that we’re so far in the future now that even the climate has changed?”

Suddenly Wilmont felt her tense. Their shoulders were touching and he could feel her shoulders jerk and stiffen as her hand went out to point at the change that was taking place on the plain.

“There was a dimming for an instant,” she exclaimed. “And now… I think we’re passing into another age. It could be just a shift in the weather. But a blizzard would have to last for weeks to pile up all that ice and snow.”

The sand twisters had vanished and a whiteness had come into view, blanketing the entire plain and covering the mountains from base to summit, so that their snowy crests no longer stood out in sharp contrast to the gray granite slopes that had cast long shadows on the plain.

The slopes now seemed to blend with the plains in a completely shadowless way. Every craggy surface feature was buried deep in snow and ice, and reflected back the sunlight with a brightness that was almost blinding.

It was Wilmont who voiced the thought that was in both of their minds.

“There are no glaciers, but the landscape in a temperate zone might look just about like that if a new ice age was just starting. It could be merely a seasonal change, as you say—a heavy winter snowstorm. But there is nothing to suggest that the climate is as harsh as when we saw the first dwellings and people moving about with bare arms and shoulders.”

“There’s nothing moving about out there now,” Joyce said. “The desolation frightens me more than anything we’ve seen. How severe would a new glacial age have to be to destroy every vestige of life on earth? In a few million years the sun will begin to grow cooler. Could we have traveled that far into the future?”

“I don’t think so,” Wilmont said. “Man survived the glacial age that began far back in the Pleistocene Age when the mammoth and the mastodon were heading toward extinction. If he could live through a thermonuclear holocaust to become a builder of cities again he must have developed a genius for survival by this time.”

Joyce drew in her breath sharply and spoke a few words that Wilmont could not catch, for her voice did not rise above a whisper. He stood transfixed before the window, and there seemed to be a slight humming in his ears, as if the shock of what was taking place on the frozen waste, where no human form had appeared, had brought a quick rush of blood to his temples.

Six towering metal robots appeared. Each was well over fifty feet in height and had similar, light-projecting apertures in the middle of their conical heads which cast a pale violent radiance over the snow as they moved back and forth in front of a huge, boxlike object. The giants carried what appeared to be enormous, mechanically operated shovels, which they used to clear away the snow and ice on all four sides of the metal box.

Presently a wide area of dark, denuded soil stretched from the box to a barrier of piled up snow which completely encircled it.

As soon as the six metal figures had completed their task they returned across the plain toward the glacier. They vanished behind it and for a long moment there was an absolute stillness on the plain. Then, all over the metal box, small, window-like openings appeared, and what could only have been a gliding entrance panel opened—it did not swing outward like a door—and four men clad in heavy fur garments walked out upon the plain. They were quickly joined by three women and a child.

The snow seemed suddenly to pile up in vast mounds, both near the window and at the base of the distant mountains and something that bore a striking resemblance to a high-walled, deeply creviced glacier came into view in the middle distance and began to move across the plain with a snail-like slowness. Then, abruptly, it ceased to move.

It was stationary when they saw the first of the metal giants. It strode out from behind the towering barrier of snow and ice and set something down on the plain that looked like a square metal box a third as large as itself. The metal giant’s body consisted of a cylindrical shaft of coppery sheen and it had segmented arms and legs that glittered in the sunlight. Its head tapered and a pale violet light streamed out over the plain from what may or may not have been eyes, set quite far apart in the conical head. Its enormous metal face was otherwise featureless, and if it had not been so humanoid in aspect it would have been impossible to think of it as anything but a mechanical contrivance that had been built to perform a specific task in the frozen waste beyond the capacity of the men who had built it.

That it was such a contrivance—a robot shape that moved with mechanical precision but appeared to be limited in its movements—Joyce was the first to realize. It took Wilmont only a moment longer to reject as an absurdity a possibility that would have been a threat to his sanity—that the earth had been invaded by a race of metallically gleaming monsters, vaguely man-like in aspect, from another planet and that man himself had, in all probability, been annihilated.

“Gigantic robots!” Joyce gasped, wonderstruck. “They must have been robots. But why would they be used in that way? To carry a metal house into a frozen waste—”

“It may seem strange to us,” Wilmont said quickly. “We’ve never had the remotest idea, actually, of what the future would be like. You can dismiss all of the speculations in books of imaginative fiction. They mean nothing—they are wild guesses, at best. This is the reality and it seems strange, unbelievable only because we’ve no previous yardstick to measure it by.”

“But it seems—well, such a complex and elaborate way to transport a house with human beings inside to a frozen waste.”

“Only to us. Look at it this way. Man will build many gigantic and complex machines in the far future. It would be contingent upon his survival, of course, but we now know that he has survived—thermonuclear warfare, another glacial age—everything. And such mechanisms can take many forms.

“Some of them would be more likely than not to be humanoid in appearance, because the human body is highly functional. The advantages of a functional simplicity alone could have dictated that choice of form, all apart from the fact that there may be something deep-seated in human nature that makes us take a perverse kind of pleasure in creating complex machines that look manlike. We’ve done that already. Think of Univex and some of the other big-brain computers.”

“But robots so gigantic—to accomplish what? Look! Those eight people haven’t moved. They’re just standing there, blinking in the sunlight. They look bewildered, dazed. The glare must be half-blinding them. Why would they want to live on a frozen plain, cut off from all human companionship?”

“I can think of a dozen reasons,” Wilmont said. “That house may be…well, a weather station, set down in a frozen waste to collect meteorological information. Exploration and research would be of vital importance to a highly civilized race with a survival problem to contend with. The robots could hardly have come from a great distance, so there must be a large operational base somewhere in the vicinity. Or possibly those eight people are daring pioneers, determined to find out just how much man can endure in an environment like that. If they can make a go of it there may be hundreds of such dwellings on the plain before there’s another change.”

“One is coming! The house is gone!” There was a stricken look in Joyce’s eyes now, and Wilmont could see just how close to the breaking point she was.

“Darling, how is it going to end? Where are they taking us? Just the fact that we’re traveling into the future is frightening enough. But not to have the remotest idea how it is going to end—”

She broke off abruptly and Wilmont, too, was struck speechless by the change that had taken place on the plain. The ice and snow had vanished. The whole of the plain was covered with enormous flowering growths that surpassed in luxuriance the vegetation of a tropical rain forest. And now there were birds in abundance, with flaming plumage. Some were larger than flamingoes and others as tiny as humming birds, as they flashed past the window or were impaled for an instant against it by a mild flurry of wind.

Another change had taken place at the end of the metal-walled tunnel behind them. But they heard no sound and the thought of turning to make sure that they were still alone, as they had done several times previously, came to their minds, so totally absorbed were they in the view beyond the window. They remained unaware of the two tall, cloaked figures that had emerged from the tunnel until they were gripped by the elbows from behind and dragged relentlessly backwards.

Joyce cried out and began furiously to struggle. But Wilmont was quick to realize that to resist would have been worse than useless and would only have increased their peril.

There could be no escape from a prison cell if the slaying of a guard started alarm bells ringing, and the outer walls could not be scaled, and they were trapped in a prison that was traveling into the future, its outer walls moving through time.

Before they were turned about and propelled forward toward the tunnel there was a moment when the danger blotted every other thought from his mind and he heard himself frantically whispering: “They don’t have to kill us, Joyce! They’d have nothing to gain by it. But if you keep on struggling, they may hurt you badly. Stop trying to escape. You must.”

A moment later they were stumbling back through the long tunnel, forced to keep moving by fingers that had not relaxed their grip and felt like steel bands biting into their flesh.

Suddenly a voice seemed to be whispering, deep in Joyce’s mind. “Silence…when you are asked what you saw. You are different from the others—as you will discover when this long journey is over. You can be very helpful to us, because your mind is more receptive, more open. Clairvoyance in your era is rare. There have been only a few men and women from your age with minds so receptive. Tell your companion—warn him. He must remain silent too, or we will be forced to take stern measures. It is too early yet, too dangerous, for the others to know.”

The voice paused an instant, then went on more reassuringly. “The journey is almost over. There is no need for you to rejoin your companions before we arrive at our destination. There is a smaller compartment where you will be provided with every necessary convenience.”

CHAPTER NINE

The long hours of uncertainty, torment and strain had receded for a moment. No longer traveling through time, they were standing in shadows, with the great, silvery disk looming up behind them. The other men and women were watching the children, with what appeared to be a shared, if momentary, relaxation of tension.

“It’s incredible,” Joyce said. “Why do you suppose the journey ended here—I mean, in a place that looks exactly like a children’s playground, except that the toys are unbelievably strange-looking.”

“There must be children’s playgrounds in the far future,” Wilmont said. “There will always be children, I should think. It’s a wide open space as well. That may be why they chose it. The machine would have been wrecked if it had come out in that forest right up ahead.”

The children had been quick to recover from their fright and take an interest in their new surroundings.

They raced excitedly back and forth, completely ignoring their parents. They ascended and descended metal ladders that spiraled upwards into a blue eye. Before they reached the top dizziness prevented them from climbing higher. But they had fun seeing how high they could climb without becoming dizzy.

The boys were the noisiest and took delight in tossing back and forth huge crystal balls as light as a feather that made a tinkling musical sound. But a few of them, more scientifically inclined, kept picking up and examining more complicated-looking toys that bore an unmistakable resemblance to instruments of science.

The girls found little metal stick figures to play with. They appeared to be unbreakable, and had four stubby limbs, and fuzzy, metallically gleaming hair spun out as thin as salt water taffy.

Susan Wentworth was the only little girl who seemed to prefer male company, staying close to her brother’s side as she followed him from shining wonder to shining wonder, her eyes saucer-round.

“Where do you think we are?” she asked, as her brother bent to examine a small, glowing cube that had changed color when he touched it. It had been red, but suddenly it became a deep purple and glowed twice as brightly.

“Why don’t you ask Mom and Dad,” Bobby Wentworth said. “I bet they know.”

“No, they don’t, Bobby,” Susan said. “They’re as scared as I am.”

“You always were a’ fraid cat,” her brother said.

He had just made an astounding discovery. The tube changed color when he thought real hard about what color he wanted it to be. It became blue, green, yellow, and finally the dark brown color of his hair.

“Do you want to try something?” Bobby asked.

“I don’t know,” Susan said. “I’m worried about Mom. I’ve never seen her look so scared.”

“We’re having fun, aren’t we?” Bobby said. “If Mom and Dad didn’t want us to have fun they’d stop us. They always do.”

“They will, don’t worry,” Susan said. “What is it you want me to try?”

“This looks just like a building block,” Bobby said, tapping the cube with his chubby forefinger. “When you want it to be blue or yellow or green you just think about it, real hard, and it happens. You don’t have to say anything.”

“I’m not blind,” Susan said. “It was red and now it’s brown.”

“All right. It turned the same color as my hair. See if you can make it turn the same color as your hair.”

Susan shut her eyes and thought very hard. The cube glowed more brightly again and the brown color vanished. It took on a shimmering sheen, as golden as a field of summer wheat, or daffodils dancing in the sunlight on a country lane.

“Well, you did it!” Bobby exclaimed, clapping his hands. “If it’s really a building block…just think what a whole house made of blocks like that would look like.”

Suddenly the cube rose up and struck Bobby a glancing blow on the forehead. He cried out, but more in shock than in pain, and looked toward where the cube had clattered to the ground a short distance away.

“I guess it didn’t like the color of your hair,” Bobby said, frowning and rubbing his forehead. “But it had to do what it was told.”

Susan said nothing in reply. She had turned and was looking toward her parents and suddenly she was tugging at her brother’s arm.

“The very tall men are being mean again. They’re taking Mom and Dad away. We’ll be left here alone.”

“No, we won’t,” Bobby said. “We’ll have to go with them, too. They’re making everyone go with them.”

A few minutes later a procession of adults and children was winding its way through the forest gloom. Joyce recognized many of the trees, shrubs and clinging vines and the forest clearings were just as familiar to her. There were scrub oaks, birches and willow trees, with here and there a stately pine or a small one so symmetrical that it would have made a perfect Christmas tree.

The procession halted from time to time, at the command of the tall, cloaked figure in the lead. Almost ghostlike he seemed as he swung about with his arm upraised, shouting out an unintelligible order. His white and flowing garments were faintly stirred by the breeze that was making the treetops sway, and his movements were strangely abrupt and mechanical. He appeared not so much to walk as to glide, as if he were skating on a sheet of ice instead of progressing over a forest floor that was strewn with small stones and fallen branches.

Often, the children and adults in his wake had great difficulty in keeping up with him. But there was something so frightening about the eight cloaked figures who were spaced at intervals along the entire length of the procession that they almost, ran at times, risking bad falls and ignoring the prickly thorns that tore at their clothes and the nettles with stinging hairs that lashed across their faces.

The cloaked figures carried no weapons. But from them there emanated something far more threatening—a firmness of will that was ominous in its implications. It was a firmness both steel-hard and intangible, a firmness that would brook no disobedience. The cloaked figures did not need to resort to threats of physical violence. They had appointed themselves guardians of the march and it was impossible to ignore or question their authority. It flowed from them in a relentless way. Every man, woman, and child in the swiftly advancing, double column was aware of what would happen to them if they held back or tried to break away and run frantically off in another direction.

They would be struck down instantly, with a terrible kind of mind-numbing paralysis. No one doubted it, no one had the slightest urge to put it to the test. Perhaps the guardians of the procession were not evil, perhaps they merely wished to make sure they would be obeyed because obedience was a necessity. But to Joyce, and the others their dominance was—or seemed for the moment—unassailable.

What it was based on Joyce had no way of knowing. Superior wisdom or knowledge, perhaps, the powers conferred by some undreamed of advance in technological civilization. Or it could have been simply an instinctive or inborn trait in a race that had passed, almost from the beginning of its slow ascent of the evolutionary ladder, brains superior to man’s.

Joyce was hurrying through the woods with one of the older children. Wilmont tugged at her elbow as the child—an eleven-year-old—fell behind and guided the footsteps of a small frightened girl. The Four Children had also fallen behind. A swift glance backward assured her that they were keeping close together and were not in any difficulty.

“Watch the ground in front of you!” Wilmont said concernedly. “A path that cuts through the underbrush as sharply as this can be dangerous.”

For the barest instant, Joyce paused to stare at him with a stricken look in her eyes. “Dangerous? For us—or for the children? Two of them are just past the toddling stage.”

“They’ll be helped along,” Wilmont said. “The Children seldom fall heavily, anyway. They’re too light and agile. It’s you I’m concerned about. One bad fall and they’ll show you no mercy.”

“What makes you so sure?” Joyce breathed. She hoped that Wilmont would ignore the question. She knew what his answer would be.

He let a minute go by before he drew close to her again, his hand tightening on her arm. “There’s something inhuman about them,” he said. “I can sense it. It’s hands off…if we don’t stumble. But if we do, they’ll drag us to our feet and force us to go on.”

“Yes, I know,” Joyce said quietly. “Broken legs won’t save us. I don’t think they’re actually brutal. But they know we’ve been under a terrible strain and if we give way to panic they’ll lose all control over us. That’s why they’re using fear as a weapon.”

She paused an instant, but Wilmont said nothing. His lips were set in tight lines and he was nodding. It came then, in a wild rush of words. “They’re attacking us with their minds, Joseph. You know that, don’t you? There’s a weapon just as powerful as fear we could use against them—the kind of resistance men and women can offer when they’re desperate and have nothing to lose by rebelling. But it’s hard to revolt, when you have to watch every step you take and have no time to think clearly. That’s why they’re keeping us moving so swiftly.”

“There’s no doubt of that,” Wilmont said. “But it’s a controlled kind of attack they’re waging. They want to keep us demoralized, I think. But if the fear becomes too great, we’ll lose all of our capacity for self-preservation. They know that. They’ve gotten inside our minds and are using a great deal of restraint and shrewdness.”

“They’re not inside my mind completely,” Joyce said. She was almost breathless from hurrying, and had to swerve abruptly to avoid colliding with a decaying log, half-embedded in the earth, which had loomed directly in her path. “It’s just a vague uneasiness—and the feeling that I can share some of their thoughts, can know how they feel about us, to some extent, if I make a tremendous effort. It comes and goes in flashes, and, of course, it frightens me. Vague as that mental communication is, it is strong enough to make me realize we’d be in the deadliest kind of danger if we disobeyed them.”

“But you’re still largely your own master?” Wilmont asked, his voice tight with strain.

Joyce nodded. “I think so. In fact, I’m sure of it. I could still disobey them, but it would be a mad thing to do.”

“I feel the same way,” Wilmont said quickly. “Mad…self-destructive. Until we know more about them we’ll have to stay in line. But please, darling—don’t get careless. Remember how disastrous a bad fall would be.”

Joyce had no intention of ignoring Wilmot’s concerned plea. But a boy of ten succumbed to fright and came running toward her, seeking the protection of the nearest adult, and she reached out to reassure him with a firm pat on the shoulder. Instantly he grabbed hold of her arm, nearly causing her to sprawl headlong over a gigantic, purple-domed mushroom.

Wilmont cried out in alarm. But Joyce managed to smile and continue on with a reassuring look at the lad, who had the good sense to let go of her arm and stride on ahead of her with all of his courage recaptured.

The ranks did not remain completely even, but continued to break and reform and occasionally the adults joined hands and walked three or four abreast. The children, too, supported one another, as they marched resolutely along. Surprisingly, a few of them did not seem in the least terrified. There was a look of adventurous expectancy in their eyes, and when the tall, shrouded guardians of the procession drew closer to them they did not shrink back in terror.

No one, however, whistled or hummed in brave defiance as prisoners so often do. Too heavy a burden of fear and uncertainty rested upon them.

Before long, the trees became more widely spaced and the underbrush less dense, so that it ceased to encroach on the trail. There was no need to leap over fallen branches or brush aside the dangling vines that had several times brought the entire column to a halt.

There was something white in the distance that had a sun-gilded look. It was faintly visible between the trees and the thinning foliage, but whether it was a high stone wall, a fence, or a complete building, Joyce could not determine.

After several minutes, the vegetation thinned out and she could see it clearly whenever the wind came in gusts and left wide gaps in the foliage. It was a structure of towering proportions, standing out in sharp silhouette against the sky. It was entirely surrounded for several miles by a slightly elevated expanse of open countryside covered with gorse-like, russet-colored vegetation and broken, here and there, by clusters of small buildings that looked like circular beehives. There were a few small ponds—pools of still, dark water scattered over a wide area.

Wilmont had moved closer to her, his expression strained. There was something chilling and forbidding about a building of such size—a building that appeared to be windowless—arising starkly from a desolate stretch of forest-encircled countryside.

“I don’t think we’ll be traveling much further,” Wilmont said. “The chances are we’re heading straight for that big square building. A tall man couldn’t move around without stooping inside the smaller ones.”

Joyce could not repress a shudder. “Do you know what it looks like?” she asked, meeting Wilmot’s gaze unflinchingly.

“A prison,” Wilmont said.

Joyce could see by his expression that he was immediately sorry he hadn’t remained silent. To spare him further self-recrimination she said quickly: “It may not be a prison, Joseph. There are buildings just as massive and dismal looking in New York and Chicago and Los Angeles—buildings that make you feel that all the people inside are prisoners—shut away from the light. Many hospitals have the same look, and law courts and—”

“Mental institutions,” Wilmont said, without giving her time to finish. “All right—it could be any one of those institutions. Suppose we go over them again. A hospital where men and women taken captive by the navigators of a UFO are nursed slowly back to health, while they’re kept under constant guard. A mental institution where minds shattered by the experience we’ve undergone are patched together again—perhaps in a way we wouldn’t like or appreciate. Or a court of law where we must stand trial for the blackest of all crimes—being born human instead of monster-like. Or even—”

“Stop it, Joseph! You’re accomplishing nothing by anticipating the worst. We’ll find out exactly where they are taking us as soon as we’re out of the woods and can judge for ourselves what kind of building that is.”

“‘Out of the woods’ hits it pretty squarely on the head,” Wilmont said. “Do you honestly believe we ever will be…out of the woods?”

“I don’t know. I don’t want to think about it. Not right now. You warned me against stumbling and if you keep on talking that way I’ll have the worst kind of fall.”

“I’m sorry,” Wilmont said, quickly. “I’m the worst kind of fool, I guess. I’ll try to keep my thoughts to myself.”

“That’s just it, Joseph. They are not all our thoughts. I don’t think you’d have talked that way if you hadn’t—”

Joyce stopped, her hand darting to her throat. Her heart had begun a furious pounding and as she swayed in alarm a coldness started creeping up her spine. Higher and higher it crept until the base of her neck felt as if it had become encased in ice.

Then, slowly and insidiously, splinters of ice seemed to enter her brain. Her steps faltered, slowed and came to a halt. She saw Wilmont moving past her and realized, with a feeling of utter helplessness, that she had not cried out to warn him not to leave her side. Another man passed her, followed by two women and a child.

“Joseph, don’t leave me! Stop! Come back!” The words echoed in her brain. But her throat muscles remained frozen and she could not move her tongue.

The splinters of ice were inflicting great anguish. Deeper and deeper they seemed to go into her brain, draining away all of its warmth as they dissolved and became a flowing coldness that penetrated every recess of her consciousness.

She could still think and feel, but all of her thoughts had turned cold, terribly cold and remote from the sunlight that was still filtering down between the trees and the voices of the children that seemed now to come from another world.

Then, abruptly, the visions came. A vast corridor, blue-lit, hushed, tomb-silent one moment and echoing the next with voices that were quite different from the voices of children, took shape in the depths of her mind. First she saw it from a distance, as if she were standing apart from it but near enough to be enveloped in its steady glow.

CHAPTER TEN

She looked at her hands. They were faintly luminous, and ribbons of blue light cascaded over the strange, tunic-like dress she was wearing. Then, gradually, the inner vision shifted, looming larger and nearer and all at once she was inside the long, blue-lit corridor, moving silently along it.

She halted midway, and, looking up, saw on the high wall of shining metal that ascended into shadows near her, a glittering assemblage of intricate mechanical devices. Serrated metal disks revolved as slowly as the hour hand of a clock when the eye does not remain steadily riveted upon it. Several luminous crystal globes filled with colored fluids, suspended from the wall in brackets. There was a large metal plate stippled with dots that looked like a graph upon which measurements could be recorded; and fifteen or twenty interlocking metal tubes coated over with a thin film of hoar frost.

It was then that she heard the voices again, loudly and clearly this time, with each syllable falling on her eyes with a chillingly somber rhythm. The language was English but she had the feeling that it was not native to them, although they had mastered it with remarkable skill.

“You must try to listen calmly,” a voice said. “What you are seeing now in a clairvoyant vision you will experience again in the near future, and not only as an unfolding sequence of mental images. You will be physically present where you now seem to be standing, accompanied by a guide. So powerful are the thoughts that flow from our minds to yours that you feel that your presence here is a physical one. But you have merely paused for a moment in your walk through the forest. Your body is still on that forest path, and you will walk on again when the vision dims and vanishes. But first you must listen carefully to what we are about to tell you.”

There was a moment of silence and then another voice said: “Your clairvoyant endowments are unusual, more acute than we have found in any of your companions on this journey—a journey which you did not willingly undertake. We regret that we were compelled to use force. But—and this you will come to understand—we had no choice. There is a matter of vital importance to us that must be explored and the knowledge that we desperately need was peculiar to the middle years of the twentieth century. John Mollison Bramwell lived in your age. He was born at the turn of the century and died in 1972. Do you recognize the name?”

“No—no, I do not!” Joyce heard herself saying.

The first voice came again, tinged now with an impatience verging on rancor. “That is very strange. I was afraid that we might be making a mistake. We took it for granted that you would be able to help us to determine precisely what it was that made the men and women of your age think and feel as Bramwell did, since no man of more sublime wisdom has ever walked the earth. There is a difference, of course, between the sun and the planets that encircle it. The planets merely mirror the sun’s splendor, but they, too, are light bearers. John Bramwell was the sun, and the men and women of his age must, of necessity, have shared his wisdom, if only by becoming a multitude of light-mirroring satellites. They would differ greatly in brilliance, of course, but still—”

The first voice interrupted impatiently. “It is not surprising that she does not remember. John Bramwell’s name must have been on her lips as often as it is on ours. But we are dealing with a mind block here, clearly the result of an experience that has made her not want to remember. When you feel yourself to be threatened, you instinctively guard your most precious possession, fearing that it will be snatched from you. She does not want to lose the memory of Bramwell, does not want to share it with us, because it has become to her a source of protection. So she has hidden it deep in her mind and will not admit, even to herself, that it is his wisdom that continues to support her.”

The first voice was addressing the one that had spoken at great length and in a stern tone of authority, Joyce was sure that the interchange had been intended for her ears.

She was still quaking inwardly and the splinters of ice that had entered her mind had not ceased to torment her. They were still melting, dissolving, draining all of the warmth from her brain and making her obscurely aware that her body had become inert and almost lifeless. But she had not entirely lost the ability to reason logically, to weigh the meaning of what she was being told and she refused to believe that all of it—or could—true.

John Bramwell? The name was totally unknown to her. How could she have failed to remember it if it had been of historical significance at any time in the present or recent past? The second voice had compared Bramwell’s splendor to that of the sun. He must have been some kind of legendary figure in his own lifetime. There were East Indian gurus who were extravagantly praised by their followers. But they were, for the most part, not unknown in the Western World and Bramwell was certainly not an East Indian or a Tibetan name.

Suddenly, her thoughts seemed no longer completely her own and a new kind of fear swept over her. Were they probing her mind while they talked, seeking answers that were buried so deeply in her consciousness that she, herself, would not have been able to set their doubts at rest?

She was sure that they mistrusted her and were beginning to regret that they had revealed a secret which they had kept hidden from all of her companions.

No one else in the procession that was still moving through the woods had been singled out as she had been. She was sure of that, and the thought made her want to turn and run along the corridor and escape this terrible mind-imprisonment—escape back to her body before it was too late. Might not her body be turning cold even now, mindless and helpless and alone? Surely the procession had by now reached the end of the forest trail, and Wilmont would be turning back in search of her. What would he do if he found her standing rigid and mindlessly staring in the depths of the woods? Rub her wrists and slap her face, try desperately to bring recognition back into her eyes, life to her frozen limbs?

The first voice spoke again, and the words cut across her mind like a whiplash, so stern and commanding were they in tone, so vibrant with harsh displeasure.

“Your body is safe,” the voice said. “Only a little time has passed, and no harm will come to it if you stop wasting time, as you are doing, by asking yourself unnecessary questions. Look steadily at the wall. I am going to show you John Bramwell as he was when the men and women of your age sealed him away from the light which he himself created—a light of wisdom, strength and power which shone so brightly in your age that the long sleep into which he has passed has failed to extinguish it.

“Someday he will awaken. That light has grown brighter with every passing millennium and we know now how great he must have been to have conquered death forever.

“The frozen sleep into which he passed at the moment of his entombment has lasted for tens of thousands of years. And records, imperishably entombed with him, give precise instructions for his revival.

“We have conquered time. We have traveled back through time to your age and beyond, but death we have never conquered. You surpass us in wisdom because of what John Bramwell accomplished. The light of his creative genius made the middle years of the twentieth century the most glorious years that the world has ever known. Surely you are aware of that? Surely you have not forgotten?”

Joyce had a sudden, almost uncontrollable impulse to cry out. “I was telling you the truth. I never heard of John Bramwell. You say he died in 1972. Yesterday, for us, it was 1968. If you’ve traveled back through time, as you say, you should know that. And the age you praise so highly was a dreadful age in many ways. And we were not so wise—are not so wise. Oh, no. We could not prevent wars and famine, and human wretchedness…what makes you think it was so glorious an age?”

“John Bramwell,” the second voice said, and she knew then that none of her thoughts could be kept hidden. “He was the first man to achieve human immortality. If he could do that he must have been wise beyond our understanding. And his splendor must have shone on every man, woman and child in your age—it had to be a glorious age.”

The truth dawned on Joyce then, impinging on her consciousness with the force of a physical blow.

“They worship Bramwell. They have made an idol, a fetish symbol out of him. They are in some respects blindly superstitious, children of unreason despite what they have accomplished scientifically. It’s unbelievable. I never would have thought—”

“What you think is of no importance,” the first voice said. “It might have been…a brief moment ago. But now we are beginning to realize that we must have been mistaken about you. Bramwell was like a first magnitude star, burning in the depths of the night sky. If you do not admire that kind of brightness what hope is there for you?”

“Her clairvoyant gifts may have deceived us, and we may have told her more than it was wise to reveal to a woman of the twentieth century at this stage of our explorations,” the second voice said. “We told her that she would look upon Bramwell, unchanged by time’s tyranny, and that may have been the opposite of wise. But I still prefer to believe otherwise. If she looks upon Death’s Conqueror, as he must have appeared when he walked the earth millenniums ago, the memory block may dissolve. She may remember then, and drop to her knees in adoration.”

“Yes…she may remember,” the first voice agreed.

For a moment there was no sound at all in the corridor. Then the first voice spoke to Joyce directly, less harshly this time. “Stare steadily at the wall. It will become completely transparent if your desire to see what it protects and conceals is strong enough. It is an effort that we cannot help you with. But if you wish to return to your body before it collapses, creating a danger you would be wise to avoid, you will not doubt your ability to see beyond the wall. Your clairvoyant gifts are unusual, as you have discovered without our help. Use them now. Try, try, with all the strength of your mind.”

Joyce stared steadily at the wall. A voice seemed to whisper, deep in her mind. “If you fail to do as they wish, you will surely die. It has come to that. You have given them no choice. They are not infallible. They can make mistakes—just as we can. And they feel they have made a mistake in revealing so much to a woman from the past who does not even know who John Bramwell was.”

She had no way of knowing how rapidly time was passing—or how slowly. Her mind seemed for a moment remote from time, existing in a world that had never known the ticking of a clock.

Suddenly the wall before her began to grow transparent. It turned slightly luminous, and a human face came slowly into view. It was that of a man of early middle age, darkly bearded, with extremely handsome features. Strands of moist, jet-black hair clung to his high brow and strayed down over his cheeks, which were of yellowish cast. His eyes were closed, as if in sleep and there was a serenity, an immense calmness in the set of his lips and the granite-firm contours of his jaw.

There was no strain in his expression at all, no hint that nightmare visions might be passing through his mind in the long, deep sleep that had given his face the look of a corpse.

Then Joyce began to hear it. A rustling and a whispering, remote and yet, in some strange way, startlingly near. It became louder and Joyce thought for an instant that a wind was blowing through the vault. Then she felt something sharp and prickly clinging to her face and raised her hand to brush it away.

She could see her hand clearly as she raised it, as firm-fleshed as it had been before a feeling of lightness had come upon her and she had seemed to be standing in the vault with no bodily sensations at all.

Swaying above her now were the wind-stirred branches of trees and the vault had totally vanished and she was lying flat on her back in the forest gloom and a voice seemed to be saying: “I rescued you just in time. I have often wondered why it must always be a Krull who must undertake such a rescue. Unfortunately, there are times when the Telens give us no choice.”

CHAPTER ELEVEN

The overhanging bough grazed her face again and burrs and nettles clung tenaciously to her clothes as she struggled to a sitting position and stared about her.

At first she saw nothing but the wind-stirred leaves and a shaft of sunlight boring down from high overhead, and shedding a radiance on the gently swaying foliage. Then from the filigree pattern of shifting light and shadow directly in front of her, there emerged a figure so grotesque in aspect—so misshapen and stooped-shouldered and dwarflike that she thought for an instant that one of the gnarled tree-trunks had come to life and was moving toward her amidst the sun-dappled foliage.

The figure halted a few feet from where she was crouching and stared at her in silence for a moment, its small eyes trained so steadily upon her that she recoiled in fright. She dragged herself backwards over the forest floor, not so much to avoid close physical contact with the small malformed shape, as to escape the powerful, almost overpowering emanation of something indefinable that seemed to come from it. There was something—yes, ghoulish in the intensity of its stare. It had a small flat nose and high cheekbones and there was a skull-like boniness in the configuration of its features that chilled her to the core of her being.

“You…you spoke to me in perfect English,” she heard herself muttering, almost pleadingly, feeling that it was necessary to establish some kind of contact with the creature that would prevent him from becoming enraged by her swift recoil.

The ghoul shape withdrew his gaze from her face and moved to a moss-covered boulder and sat down. There was no trace of anger or resentment in his eyes.

“It is wholly an illusion,” he said. “But I suppose there is no way you could have found out the truth for yourselves. I seem to be talking to you now in your own language, in words familiar to you. But it is not really so. Thoughts arise in our minds which are sometimes penetrating and profound, and other times thoughts as childish as those which the men and women of your age so often entertained. And I agree with you that it was not a very wise or discerning age. And you—well, you clothe those thoughts in language drawn solely from your own experience. To you, the Telens seem very solemn, serious-minded, scientifically advanced. So when their thoughts impinge on your mind they seem to be speaking to you in the kind of language a precise and pompous twentieth century scientist would use.”

The ghoul shape threw back his head and laughed. Great bursts of merriment came from him.

“Oh, how mistaken you are! The Telens are in some respects—perhaps in most respects—savage children—superstitious, mentally unbalanced. Could you not have sensed that from the first?”

“Look here. Listen to me carefully. Try to understand. Vast ages have passed over the earth since you were born and acquired the wisdom and knowledge peculiar to your age. And that wide waste of years has brought undreamed of changes.

“Did it never occur to you that the human race might split up into many warring factions, become divergent, and, in part, wildly grotesque or half-insane?

“Did it never occur to you that perhaps a third of the human race would become absolute buffoons? Remember, these are my thoughts—not my words. You are a brilliant and discerning individual and you can clothe my thoughts in words that closely parallel what I am thinking, but are inexact in a strict sense. But they are exact enough to have a great deal of meaning for you and that is all that really matters.

“Continue to listen, please. You will know a great deal about the Telens and my own race when I am through.”

Joyce stared at the huge, misshapen jaw and small, beady eyes of the ghoul shape and a wild incredulity swept over her. Could so monstrous a caricature of twentieth century man possess infinitely more sensitivity than the Telens, with their straight carriage and outwardly robust aspect? Yes…yes, she told herself. There could be no doubt of it. In a way that warmed her heart and made her want to embrace the grotesque figure who sat facing her, the ghoul shape spoke her language.

He was capable of merriment and laughter, he did not appear to take himself too seriously and yet there seemed to be in him a high seriousness, a great depth of human understanding.

“It was easy enough for the men and women of your age to have a stereotyped idea of what the far future would be like,” the ghoul shape went on quickly. “Your scientific knowledge was very limited and rigid and you were trained from childhood to curb your imagination whenever it took a turn which the so-called best minds of your age regarded as dangerously speculative.”

“You foolishly imagined, for instance, that mankind would follow a single line of development. You visualized the men of the far future as enormous-browed, with receding chins and almost infantile features. It never occurred to you that the evolutionary pattern can change in dozens of ways and that man’s outward appearance has very little to do with his intelligence.”

“There have been many, many changes, enormous ones, and not in man’s physical aspect alone. The greatest changes of all have occurred in the realm of power distribution.”

“Power distribution?” Joyce heard herself asking.

“Yes, power distribution of a grossly unequal nature. The enormous piling up of the materials which support physical dominance in one direction and their almost total depletion in another.

“You see, for thousands of years the Telens were the lucky ones. Their intelligence helped them to acquire dominance and they were courageous as well and great risk-takers. Their scientific achievements verged on the miraculous.”

“That’s not hard to believe,” Joyce said. “The discovery and perfection of time travel alone—”

“Yes, they invented time travel. But then something happened to them. They began rapidly to lose their intellectual brilliance, without ceasing to be robust physically or forfeiting their supremacy in the realm of power distribution.

“A great many of them became totally unbalanced, and others superstitious, semi-mad cult worshippers. That is not at all unusual, you know. The terrible strain of maintaining a technological civilization that is so complex and demanding that it provides no opportunity for relaxation, often leads to that kind of breakdown. It can take place in so short a period as four or five generations.

“There are still a few completely sane, highly intelligent Telens. But they are so few in number that they can exercise no control over the thirty or forty million Telens who have turned the ice-encased, still living body of John Bramwell into a symbol of strength and power. John Bramwell has become a cult idol or cult hero. The man who conquered death, who achieved the kind of immortality the Telens felt that they themselves might have possessed if their minds had not succumbed to the virus of semi-madness.”

“There are moments, you see, when a mind unbalanced, a mind that has regressed to a more primitive level of consciousness, becomes aware of what has been lost. That awareness can be pure torment, an agony surpassing anything the sane mind can envision. It is commonly believed that distortions of thinking and feeling can enable a mind over burdened with strain, a mind that can no longer cope with the complexities of civilization, to escape from reality. And that is true—up to a point. But the escape is seldom total, and there are moments when every mind so afflicted knows how great and terrible a price has been paid for a security that is wholly illusionary.”

The ghoul shape paused for an instant, as if to assure himself of Joyce’s understanding. When he saw that she was responding, he went on quickly: “A mind so afflicted has momentary glimpses of a vanished glory, a glory that it feels it must recapture or the sanctuary it has created for itself will be exposed for what it is—an iron-walled prison.

“What I am saying would not apply, of course, to the Telens who have regressed so far that they have become raving lunatics. But, as with the remaining sane Telens, they are few in number. The great majority of Telens are borderline cases. I have compared them to savage children, and even to buffoons, and that, in a sense, is precisely what they have become. But they are savage children with tattered remnants of a high intelligence, and a vanished glory flapping about them. They are not incapable of intelligent planning. The shrewd, if erratic, application of technological knowledge to problems of great and immediate urgency has enabled them to travel back through time with a definite purpose in mind and to carry that purpose out with a fair measure of success.”

“They are helped, of course, by the sane Telens who can no longer control them, but have no desire to relinquish their share of the tremendous power which the Telens have possessed for thousands of years and have not, as yet, been forced to relinquish.”

“I can understand why they should regard Bramwell with superstitious awe and worship him as a cult hero,” Joyce heard herself saying. “He must loom through the mists of time as a symbol of the splendor which once enabled them to feel that they, too, might be capable of achieving as much as he had, that the gift of immortality was almost within their grasp and that if they had not regressed, as you say, death itself might have been conquered forever. But why should they travel back to the middle years of the twentieth century and take me captive? The others, too—some of them children. What could they hope to gain by it? I had never even heard of Bramwell.”

“Ah, yes,” the ghoul shape said. “Few of the others knew who Bramwell was, and there have been many captives. That would have seemed strange to them if they had not been under a half-insane compulsion. They want to believe that Bramwell was known to every man, woman and child in the years immediately preceding his entombment and have shut their eyes to the historical record. They have discovered a great deal about the twentieth century. But when one of the captives denies having so much as heard of Bramwell they think he is being secretive and stubborn—or has some kind of mind block.”

Joyce hesitated, for the question she wanted most to ask had become of vital importance to her and she was afraid that the ghoul shape could not answer it. But there was nothing to be gained by putting it off and she suddenly found herself asking: “Who was Bramwell? Do you know?”

The ghoul shape nodded. “He was one of the first of the frozen-sleep experimenters, and left detailed instructions for the preservation and revival of his still living body. The instructions are encased in a metal cylinder inside the vault where he was placed before his heart stopped beating.”

“Yes…that explains it!” Joyce exclaimed. “In our age there were several such frozen-sleep experiments. But few people could have named the scientists who were engaged in a project that did not attract anything like the interest it should have aroused. Or perhaps…it aroused too much interest. It both chilled and fascinated people, and they were a little afraid to face all of its implications. To go to sleep and wake up thousands of years in the future! The conquest of death on so bold and fearful a level made even the most imaginative viewers shrink a little when it was presented to them for the first time on television.

“Human nature is like that. It prefers to approach the possible conquest of death obliquely, in slow stages. It seems to dread a little—to draw back at first—from the scientific miracles it is secretly eager to believe in and embrace. Heart transplants were viewed in much the same way. But the surgeons who performed them were better known, perhaps because the success of the experiments could be determined without waiting for ten or fifty or a hundred thousand years to pass.”

“The Telens know that there must have been quite a few frozen-sleep experiments,” the ghoul shape said. “But they have succeeded in blotting the implications of that from their minds. Don’t you see? Only Bramwell has achieved a near-approach to immortality by surviving into our age. To become a cult idol, Bramwell had to remain, in their eyes, unique and almost godlike in his attributes. They never tire of comparing him to the Sun.”

“To the Sun! Of course. During the first few moments of that clairvoyant vision, they kept insisting that his splendor shone on every man, woman and child in our age.”

“Well, that answers your first question,” the ghoul shape said. “They took you captive, held you in bondage, accused you of disappointing them, even heaped harsh abuse upon you because they envied you.”

“Envied me? I don’t see—”

“It is really quite easy to explain. They are convinced that the men and women and even the children of your age must possess some special knowledge, some gift of healing that would dispel all of the dark shadows that have closed in about their minds and make them whole again. They are convinced that you share enough of Bramwell’s shining wisdom to enable them to regain what they have lost in their regression to a more primitive level of consciousness.

“To them, you hold in your hands a key which could open the portals wide on a lost wisdom, a vanished splendor. It is a wisdom and splendor which they have lost and desperately want to regain.”

“You cannot really help them, of course, but they do not know that. They want to become as you are—or as they think you are. But they envy you as well, and that, you see, is the other side of the coin. Envy and a desire to imitate the unattainable always lead to anger and resentment. They feel that you are deliberately withholding your shining gifts of wisdom and strength from them. And they are determined to break down your resistance, to shatter the pride which they feel is keeping you from helping them.”

The ghoul shape shifted his position on the boulder, as if his limbs had become cramped from remaining too long in one position. “What they hope to accomplish by taking more and more of the men and women of your age captive and keeping them under constant observation, would make very little sense to a sane mind. But, as I have said, their thinking is emotionally distorted, and far from sane.

“They are trying to find out as much as they possibly can about you, to determine—to use an idiomatic expression peculiar to your age—precisely what makes you tick. They are under the illusion that they are conducting a rigorously scientific experiment to find out if you can be persuaded to share your wisdom with them. They have made the mistake of thinking that just the right kind of psychological pressure will break down all of your resistance. Your age had a term for that, too, a highly descriptive one—‘Brainwashing.’

“Brainwashing would, of course, defeat everything they are hoping to accomplish, for if you were forced to think exactly as they do you could not possibly help them. But an unbalanced mind is seldom capable of reasoning consistently enough to avoid the most glaring of contradictions.

“Bramwell’s apparent achievement of immortality has become a superstitious obsession with them. In that respect, they are wholly primitive, have regressed to the tribal god stage of culture. To them Bramwell’s still living body is surrounded by a kind of halo. Now do you understand?”

“I think I do, yes,” Joyce answered. “But why did you rescue me. You said that you had rescued me, didn’t you?”

“You were in great danger, that’s why,” the Krull said. “Your mind had been under their control for a dangerously long time. They don’t really care if the men and women they keep under constant observation are irreparably harmed. I did not like what I saw and heard.”

“You mean…you knew? You were there?”

“Just by accident. Sometimes we take an interest in what they do. I was there in the same way that you were—in a clairvoyant vision. My physical body was right here in the forest but I overheard everything they said to you, and that you said to them.”

“You mean—you can actually spy on them in that way?”

“If you want to call it that. There are many things that I haven’t time to explain to you now. You see, we can control them to a certain extent, with our minds alone. I am keeping them from suspecting that you are no longer in the vault in a non-physical way. It is an effort—a great strain, in fact—but I can do it for a short while. It should enable me to attempt something the Krulls should have done long ago. If I am successful it will be possible for you to leave this age and return to the twentieth century.”

Joyce almost stopped breathing. “But why do you want to help us? I must know. Unless I know it would be difficult for me to believe you.”

“You mean…it would be difficult for you to trust me. I think you know that you can. As for my reasons—we are so different from you in some respects that I could never hope to make you understand why it has become necessary for us to take such a risk. We cannot hope to succeed, however, unless you are prepared to trust me completely and do exactly as I say.”

“What must I do?” Joyce heard herself asking, stunned by what the ghoul shape had said, not quite daring to believe him, but feeling that if she let her doubts overwhelm her there would be no hope left at all.

“Bramwell must be awakened from his long, frozen sleep,” the ghoul-shape said. “Only the children can do it.”

“Only…the children?”

“Yes, does that seem strange to you? It is strange, but it is also true. The Telens cannot get inside the minds of the children and influence their thinking as they would like to do. They have never stopped trying, and that is why they have taken so many children captive. But children have minds of their own, weaker in some respects than the minds of adults, but stronger in other respects.

“Children have many hidden thoughts—dark, mysterious, secretive. They know how to keep many of their thoughts hidden from adults. They will fight to protect their secrets, with all the strength of their minds. There are secrets that can never be pried from a child. Their thoughts are simple in a complicated way, and the Telens cannot fathom what children may be thinking when they are fleeing down the wind—yes, I think that describes what I have in mind—in their private, well-guarded inner worlds.

“I told you that I could control the minds of the Telens but only up to a point, and only for a brief time. And if an adult went into the vault and set the mechanism in motion which would awaken Bramwell the Telens would know. The instant the hand of an adult touched that mechanism they would know, because such an intrusion, such a desecration, would be so terrible a shock to them that I would lose all of my ability to influence their minds. I would be powerless to prevent a temporary mind block from being completely shattered. They would know and you would all be destroyed.”

“You still haven’t told me what I must do.”

“Your companions are only a short distance away, in a round stone building on the far shore of a small lake. You can see the glimmer of the water from here, if you look past that large, lightning-blasted tree. You will have no difficulty in joining them. It is unguarded now—I have made sure of that—and they could all escape, if they knew how somnolent the Telens have become. But it is fortunate that they do not know, for the children will need adult assistance when they are brought to the vault.

“But remember—no adult must touch the mechanism itself. The children will set it in motion. I will be there to see that the children are told exactly what they must do before they enter the vault. All of your companions must accompany you when you return with them to the vault. I will guide you back. It is only a short distance from here.”

“But I was never actually there. You mean that this time—”

“You will be physically present, of course. And so will the children and all of the adults. I must leave you now, for there are a few precautions that I must take immediately. But when you start out for the vault, you will discover that you know exactly how to get there. I will be guiding you every step of the way.”

“I hope I will be believed when I tell my companions what you’ve just told me,” Joyce said. “If I should have difficulty in convincing them…”

“I’m sure you won’t. I’ll help with that, too. You must not allow any doubts to enter your mind.”

The Krull turned then, and Joyce stood motionless for a moment, watching his small, hunched form disappearing between the trees.

CHAPTER TWELVE

It was Bobby who had climbed the highest. He’d ascended, hand over hand, the ladder-like indentations on the walls of the vault and was balancing himself right underneath the complex dial that controlled the freezing mechanism.

Suddenly Bobby’s hand went out and began to turn the massive dial. Slowly at first, because he possessed only an average child’s strength and then more rapidly as the revolving mechanism itself seemed to gain momentum.

He looked down at the Four Children, who had made no attempt to ascend in his wake and called out to them.

“You said you’d let me try first,” he said. “All right—it’s turning. Something is going to happen in a minute. That’s what my Dad said. You’d better not stand right under it. Why don’t you climb up here with me and then we can all get up on that shelf and watch.”

He reached down as he spoke and helped Susan up until she was crouching beside him at the base of the dial and then the Four Children started up.

The dial kept right on turning, faster and faster. It made six complete revolutions before the Four Children joined Bobby and Susan. Bobby was no longer turning it. The dial was moving by itself now, around and around and making a faint, droning sound.

The six children all climbed up on the projecting ledge of metal that jutted out from the wall of the vault on the right hand side of the spinning dial.

As they crouched there, they could clearly see the crystal-encased face of the frozen man who had slept for so long a time. Bobby was no longer able to remain silent while they waited for the dial to stop turning.

“My Dad says he’s been like that for thousands and thousands of years,” he said as if aware that there were emotions he was duty-bound to share. “How do you think he’ll feel when he wakes up?”

When no reply was forthcoming he added: “I know how I’d feel. Scared.”

The dial was revolving so rapidly now that it had turned into a gray blur. Suddenly the markings on it became distinct again and it slowed and stopped.

Instantly the frozen, crystal-encased face began to move. The mouth moved first, the lips pushing in and out and then there was a flickering of the sleeper’s eyelids.

“Look, Bobby!” Susan cried. “He’s waking up.”

It was true, of course. The eyes of the frozen sleeper suddenly opened wide and he was looking straight at Bobby and Susan and the Four Children.

Betty Anne was sitting right beside Susan, and the two tiny tots suddenly grabbed hold of each other, as if they were afraid the older children would become too frightened to stay on the ledge and would leave them without support. One of the twins stood up straight and gave a little cry. But none of the others made a sound until a section of the wall directly beneath them began to move. A wide panel that had been so smoothly grooved into the wall that there had been no line of demarcation separating it from the shining expanse of metal surrounding it, glided open, and a white human arm, glistening with moisture, shot out of the aperture. The arm groped waveringly about in the overhead light, as if searching about for some solid object to grasp, and then a leg appeared.

Bobby and the staring Thacker boy cried out simultaneously, and the Trilling twins flattened themselves against the metal wall at their backs, as if seeking to get as far away as possible from what was taking place directly below them.

Into the vault there emerged a swaying figure still weighed down with a clinging film of ice. The ice was melting rapidly, permitting the figure to emerge almost naked into the light.

Its movements were slow and cumbersome, but it was its face that held the children’s gaze. It was a wildly staring countenance, the lips slack, the eyes darting to right and left in what appeared to be an extremity of fright.

There was silence for a moment, save for the quickened breathing of the children on the ledge. Then the vault was filled with shouts and hurrying feet.

Wilmont was the first to reach the swaying figure, his face tight with strain. As he seized firm hold of one cold arm, Wentworth grasped the other. Bobby started to climb down from the ledge, but his father waved him back.

“Stay right where you are, Bobby, until we get him out of here. Then you can follow us.”

“All right, Dad!”

“All of you—stay where you are,” Wilmont said. “Everything’s fine. You’ve helped more than you’ll ever know.”

Three other men had entered the vault and they remained standing guard at the entrance until Wilmont and Wentworth passed between them with their swaying charge. His feet dragged and the look of dazed horror had not left his eyes.

“We’ll be outside in a moment,” Wilmont said reassuringly.

“There’s not a sound from below,” one of the men at the entrance said. “But you’d better hurry.”

“We will,” Wilmont assured him. “See that the children follow us one at a time. Keep them from making noise.”

Despite the urgent need for haste, both Wilmont and Wentworth were considerate and gentle with the man from their own age whose conquest of time had verged on the miraculous. They guided him forward with no more than the reassuring firmness of concerned attendants helping a patient to walk from his bed to a hospital elevator.

In a moment they were descending the short flight of stairs that spiraled downward to the metal-walled passageway on the ground floor of the building through which the children had passed a few minutes previously. Then they were in the passageway and moving with their charge toward the open doorway at the end of it.

There was a glimmer of sunlight just beyond the doorway which dispelled somewhat the tomblike gloom. But their expressions remained somber until they were standing in a flood of downstreaming sunlight directly in front of the massive, black stone building, facing a wide stretch of heavily forested countryside.

There was a reassuring stillness everywhere.

Wilmont was the first to break the silence. “It helps considerably to know we’ll have support as soon as we reach the forest. But we must not forget how dangerous over-confidence can be. We’re just at the start of a trail that may not end for us this side of eternity.”

“You don’t have to remind me,” Wentworth said. “The children could delay us. I hope—”

Before he could go on, Bobby emerged from the building, followed by the other children. Behind them loomed the three men who had been guarding the entrance.

“Here I am, Dad,” Bobby said, moving quickly to his father’s side. “Does he know where he is? Does he know we’re his friends? He looks funny—”

The man who had conquered time turned slowly and looked straight at Bobby. “Who is this little boy?” he asked. “Why did he say that? Do I know…where I am? Yes…I think I do. I am… I have awakened…”

Wilmont tightened his grip on the trembling man’s cold arm. All of the ice had melted now, but there were a few tiny frost crystals still clinging to his beard, their sparkling brightness contrasting eerily with the dull, parchment-yellow skin that was stretched so tightly over his cheekbones that a mummy could scarcely have looked more in need of restoration. There was one difference, however. A mummy could not be restored to life. But the sun and air and human voices were dispelling for John Bramwell, slowly but surely, the mists of a sleep a thousand times longer than a mummy had ever known.

“Yes, you have awakened,” Wentworth said quickly. “But you mustn’t try to remember too much too fast. There is nothing strange about us. We know who you are, and we are your friends, as my young son has just said.”

“Do you really know?” John Bramwell asked, a look of desperate appeal in his eyes. “Or did you just stumble on a strange, rusting clutter of machinery and—watch what you thought was a frozen corpse open its eyes and look at you? Do you know how many years, how many centuries have passed since I closed my eyes and could hear for a moment distant voices speaking my name and then nothing at all? Or are you confused, bewildered, with no knowledge or understanding of what was done to keep me alive all this time?”

Before either Wentworth or Wilmont could reply the look of horror that had vanished for an instant from his eyes returned and he went on quickly: “But how could I expect you to understand? I have awakened in an age that must be remote from the twentieth century—a thousand years in the future, five thousand. I do not know. The great experiment—”

He stopped, his eyes sweeping the forested landscape that stretched out in front of him. “It is all so strange.” His voice had become a hoarse whisper and they had to strain to catch his words. “I thought I would see no trees, that every forest would have been leveled by now. And you—you speak in English and you have used no new words, no words that should have made it almost a different language by now. Even your clothes—”

“This age is as strange to us as it seems to you,” Wentworth said. “It would be best if we told you the truth now, even though we are in great danger. The loss of a few minutes might be less to our disadvantage than your inability to trust us, as you must do if we are to save ourselves.”

“It has been longer than you think,” Wilmont said. “A half million years perhaps.”

A sudden anger flamed in Bramwell’s eyes. “I have been restored to life, no matter how brief the time. How can you make light of an achievement so tremendous?”

“We are not making light of it,” Wilmont said. “I have told you the simple truth. You have not slept for just a thousand years—or ten thousand years. This age is so remote from ours that changes we would have thought impossible have taken place, and have become accepted as commonplaces in a civilization that has reached undreamed of heights. That civilization is disintegrating now, but even in its decline its achievements surpass our understanding.”

“We have been brought here against our will,” Wentworth said. “Listen carefully, try to understand. They’ve built a machine that can travel back and forth in time. Twentieth century science enabled you to survive into this age. But the science of a half million years in the future has enabled them to conduct us on the same journey, by a different route. The two journeys have brought us together in a way they could not have foreseen. If you will think of us as your friends, we may still be able to save you—and ourselves. They worship you as a god.”

“But surely this is madness!” Bramwell’s voice shook, and he made a futile effort to free himself. “Let go of me and do not torment me with such talk. Nothing you say makes sense. Let me find my own way out of this nightmare. Surely you owe me that much. I have risked so much—”

“We are wasting precious time,” Wilmont said. “I’m afraid we have made a mistake. You will have to do as we say, John Bramwell. You give us no choice.”

“You…you know who I am then?”

“Wait,” Wentworth said, laying a restraining hand on Wilmot’s arm. “Let me talk to him. The time will not have been wasted if we can make him understand. If he struggles and refuses to believe us, we’ll have much greater obstacles to overcome. Give me just five more minutes.”

“Each of those minutes could cost us our lives,” Wilmont said. “But you are right, of course. We need his help even more than he needs ours.”

“I will listen,” Bramwell said. “But do not threaten me again. I do not take kindly to threats.”

Wentworth glanced behind him and saw that the children were standing very still, having seemingly grasped the significance of what they had overheard. It surprised him that they could have remained quiet for so long. Then he saw that the two men who stood in the doorway were holding the two six-year-olds by the hand, and looking sternly at the Trilling twins. Bobby’s silence did not surprise him, and the Thacker boy seemed almost Bobby’s equal in his ability to exercise restraint.

Reassured, he began talking to Bramwell, quietly and earnestly, and Bramwell heard him out in silence.

For a moment, when he had finished, it was impossible to tell how much Bramwell believed of what he had said. But he was not kept long in doubt.

Bramwell drew himself up and said, very firmly, “You can stop treating me as if I were a very ill man, barely able to stand. I had difficulty in walking at first, but now my strength has returned. I have to believe you. Otherwise I think I would go completely mad. A half million years. It could just as easily be a million years, since, as you say, you’ve no sure way of checking on it. Time travel! How utterly inconceivable that seemed, even to science fiction writers who made so much of it. We thought it would be ten times as difficult to achieve as breaking the genetic code. It seemed inconceivable, in fact, that the past and the future could exist as three-dimensional realities anywhere in space or time, despite the fact that the physicists refused to rule it out as a remote possibility in a relativistic universe. We thought that only the present could be real in a totally physical sense. How mistaken can you be?”

“We’ll be making a greater mistake if we doubt it now,” Wilmont said, “Or lose another minute. We have only two weapons. One of them is you. The other is the guidance we have received from one of the Krulls, who is risking his own life to help us, as you’ve just been told. But both of those weapons may be frail reeds—against the destructive forces they could unleash if the thought-barrier we’ve erected against them breaks down. Their inability to infiltrate the minds of the children may be of no further use to us. The children enabled us to do what we could not have done ourselves, for no adult could have turned the dial that controlled the freezing mechanism. But now—”

“As soon as we’re in the forest we’ll all be together again and the Krull will go right on guiding us,” Wilmont said, his voice harsh with impatience. “We’d better get started. The worst mistake we could make would be to belabor the possibilities of disaster.”

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

They were all together again, the children no longer as carefree as they had seemed when age upon age had gone rushing past in the long journey through time. They were not playing games now, as they had done in the steel-walled compartment which had concealed from their view the wonders which only Wilmont and Joyce Drake had gazed upon. They looked serious and alert, as if they had become aware, as children can, that when adults have a great responsibility to bear, fun-making must be ruled out.

In the forest gloom only the Krull seemed able to move about as if he were performing some simple daily task that did not alarm him in the least.

What strange creatures they were, Joyce found herself thinking, as she moved at Wilmot’s side at the end of the long procession of men, women and children who were winding their way with extreme caution between the tall pines and century-old oaks. How could the Krulls, she wondered, remain so completely above the battle which everyone else, since the very beginning of man’s life on earth, had been compelled to wage just to stay alive?

They were sensitive and imaginative, they appeared to feel deeply, and yet the thought of death and destruction seemed not to trouble them at all. They held very lightly joys which they could hardly have failed to value highly, for every aspect of human experience delighted them.

Might it not be possible that in the Krulls human nature had been transformed into something truly splendid? To enjoy life to the full as an individual but to complain not at all when it became necessary to pass the torch to other hands—was not that the hallmark of a kind of greatness?

They appeared to be both self-centered and completely selfless, and there was something about them so paradoxical, a combination of human attributes that filled Joyce with awe.

Perhaps only in a civilization that was dying, a culture pattern that was on the wane, could such an embodiment of the human spirit at its best and most courageous free itself from the shackles of the past, and truly soar.

To her amazement, Wilmot’s thoughts had apparently almost paralleled her own, for he turned to her suddenly with a look of grim satisfaction in his eyes. “Trusting Kaljac completely was the wisest thing we could have done,” he said. “In some strange way, the Krulls have thrust aside all fear and possess an inner strength that they seem determined to keep a closely guarded secret. I’ve a feeling Kaljac doesn’t want us to know just how strong the Krulls are. In an emergency, I believe they could overcome a threat to their survival without experiencing an instant of uncertainty or self-doubt.”

“I think I know what you mean,” Joyce said, nodding. “Bramwell has conquered death as no other man has ever succeeded in doing, but now he has become vulnerable again. No matter how courageous he may be, he does not want to die. But the Krulls are without fear. They have managed somehow to erase the sharp line which we draw between living and dying. They think of human existence as a kind of—well, a kind of flowing. If you live you live and if you die you die, and the flowing never stops.”

The vegetation was beginning to thin out a little. The huge oaks stood further apart, their branches seldom interlocking and there were glimmers of sunlight between the masses of swaying foliage.

Wentworth and his wife were at the head of the procession and Kaljac had been walking at their side, his grotesque body slightly hunched. He had turned back only once and had fallen a short distance behind to make sure that the other men and women and the surprisingly quiet children had not gotten out of line. But now he abruptly stopped walking and stared back toward the very end of the line, curious to see if Wilmont and Joyce had been encountering any difficulty in keeping up with the others.

Just why he should have been particularly concerned about them wasn’t revealed until he was at their side, a look of uncertainty in his deep-set, gray eyes.

“It is very strange,” he said. “I am unsure that we are not being followed. Perhaps in your minds the barrier is weakening a little and I became obscurely aware of it. You must remember that, as I’ve told you, we must be prepared for a sudden breakthrough. It could occur at any moment. Have you heard any unusual sounds behind you? They will try to move as silently as possible. But a crackling of the underbrush, a faint sound, would be enough to convince me that the uneasiness I experienced a moment ago should be taken seriously.”

“We heard nothing,” Wilmont said. “If they attack us, how can we hope to defend ourselves without weapons? Won’t we be completely at their mercy again?”

“You have a living weapon—Bramwell,” the Krull said. “I’ve told you that before.”

“And I told Bramwell that,” Wilmont said. “But I had difficulty in making myself believe it.”

“You must guard against doubting it,” the Krull said. “You must not permit yourself to forget, for an instant, that I am here also. If I were not here even Bramwell might not be able to save you. But there are many things about the Krulls that you know nothing about. We are an affectionate and brotherly people. I like all of you, I have allowed myself to be very foolish and now there is nothing that can be done about it. You may pity me a little, if you wish. I think I should like that.”

“Anyone with so shining a gift for friendship is in no need of pity,” Joyce said. “In our age we should have looked upon you as far above us in every respect. The love for one’s fellows you speak of was not unknown to us, but we were reserved and suspicious. Why have you singled us out? I mean—there is nothing special about us.”

“You do not understand,” the Krull said. “You are human and so am I. You are in trouble and I am not—or was not until now. If I did not share your torment by taking a part of it upon myself, I would no longer be able to go on thinking of myself as human. And when you share such a burden with someone you find yourself warming to them.”

Before Wilmont could say anything in reply, the Krull turned and went hurrying back to the head of the advancing column. Bramwell swung about and stopped walking for an instant as the small, grotesque figure darted past him, shaking his head in evident concern.

“Apparently when Bramwell saw a Krull for the first time it gave him as much of a shock as his awakening did,” Wilmont said. “What Kaljac just told us was very strange.”

“Why?” Joyce asked, the tension under which she was laboring making her voice rise almost angrily. “I don’t see anything strange about it. Perhaps emotions which are rudimentary in all of us have become highly developed in Krulls.”

“But it’s as if there was something in his nature which makes him feel like a condemned man. He doesn’t have to help us. I mean—he’s under no actual compulsion to do so. It just isn’t human to feel that you have to expose yourself to the deadliest kind of danger for total strangers from another age. Instant friendship. You drop it into a cup of boiling water and it dissolves in a few seconds, and you’ve got a strong brew that you may not want to drink at all. It doesn’t make sense to me.”

“It does to me,” Joyce said, her anger very real now. “Of course the Krulls are different from us—tremendously different. What do we really know about human motivation? No two people ever think or feel exactly alike. And in a half million years human nature could hardly have remained unchanged. The Krulls have changed so much physically that it’s hard for us to think of them as completely human. Why shouldn’t they have changed emotionally as well? They may actually be more human than we are—if by ‘human’ you mean all of the attributes which set us apart from the lower animals.”

“You may be right about the changes,” Wilmont conceded. “There is no scientific evidence that supports the contention that human nature cannot change, that it remains basically the same no matter how greatly human beings may differ in a superficial way. I’ve always believed that human nature is as plastic as the physical changes which take place throughout the whole of nature and lead to the evolutionary development of new species of plants and animals.

“A new and different kind of man would naturally not share all of our so-called human motivations. The kind of instant friendship—you can call it empathy if you wish—which Kaljac has just displayed could be, as you say, the result of a half million years of evolutionary development. It may have become so deeply grooved into his nature that he cannot fight against it, even though surrendering to it would threaten his own survival.”

“I think I showed remarkably good judgment when I fell in love with you,” Joyce said, all of the anger gone from her voice. “You are willing to argue against yourself when you feel you may have been mistaken.”

“We’ll know soon enough exactly how mistaken I may have been,” Wilmont said, looking up at the patch of open sky which had come into view between the thinning canopy of leaves. They had emerged from under foliage so dense that the sunlight had filtered down with a few fitful gleams of brightness. “The most serious mistake we could make—”

He broke off abruptly, and came to a sudden halt, his hand going out to fasten on Joyce’s wrist.

“Stand still—listen!” he said, his voice tight with concern. “We are being followed. Kaljac said they would move silently. But he was right about the snapping of twigs in the underbrush. If they’re very close and there are ten or fifteen of them that crackling sound will come again.”

“Yes, I heard it,” Joyce said. “But it could have been made by some small animal.”

Wilmont shook his head. “I doubt it,” he said. “Listen!”

The forest confirmed his surmise. There arose a pattering noise, as of raindrops descending, and the forest came to life. There was a rustling that could have been made by a wind stirring the foliage at their backs—if the day had not been windless—and something that sounded like a bird call choked off by fright. It was followed by a wild fluttering, and a large blackbird came into view and flew from a low wall of foliage to the topmost branch of the nearest tree.

When they heard the crackling again, very loud and near, all of their fears were confirmed. They were being pursued. The pursuers were apparently sure of victory and had abandoned all caution, forfeiting the advantage which they might have gained by staging a surprise attack.

Although the Krull could not have heard the commotion in the underbrush as quickly as Wilmont and Joyce, he responded with surprising swiftness the instant he became aware that all was not well. He left Wentworth’s side and darted back along the column, planting himself directly in front of Bramwell.

Kaljac was making urgent gestures with his stubby arms when the underbrush at the end of the column shook for a dozen feet in both directions, and a tall Telen emerged into the open. He carried no weapons, but he was quickly followed by ten or twelve Telens who were equipped with gleaming metal instruments which they kept steadily trained on the halted column.

Wilmont and Joyce were blocked by the tall, unarmed Telen; they could not plunge into the underbrush without colliding with him, and they were prevented from fleeing in the opposite direction by a woman and a child who had succumbed to utter terror, and were running straight toward them.

In a moment the long line was completely broken. The children broke away from their parents, ignoring warning shouts and a pursuit that was quickly abandoned. They scattered in all directions, a few seeking the false security of the tall trees near the head of the column. They ducked behind the enormous boles and peered out in hide-and-seek fashion, but the terror in their faces showed that their futile attempt to conceal themselves was not a game to them.

Most of the adults lost their heads and made no attempt to regroup and take up defensive positions with their backs to the trees. Wentworth and his wife did not attempt to flee, but froze where they had been standing. Their two children had joined them and the entire family seemed more in command of themselves than any of the others, though Helen Wentworth was trembling violently. Her small daughter was clutching frantically at her skirts as if, like the older children, she had become fully aware by now that the Telens had only one thought in mind—to take away their liberty and shut them up again in a big metal room with no windows. Only Bramwell appeared to be completely calm and resolute as he turned to face the steadily advancing Telens, and walked toward them arms upraised.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

There was no longer any doubt in Bramwell’s mind that he might well be walking to his death. The years seemed to fall away as he walked, and he was a young man again, with the bright lights of a great city shining in his eyes and all of its night sounds roaring in his ears.

New York was a half million years in the past and yet only the thinnest of dividing lines seemed now to separate that past from a present that was totally alien to him.

If he had slept for ten million years and awakened on some distant planet in an unknown region of space, no stranger creature than a Krull could have pleaded with him to come to the assistance of men and women like himself to whom he owed nothing, beyond the bond which he shared with them.

It was a bond not easily broken, for what he had in common with them was no more—and no less—than everything that had given his life meaning on a tiny island in the vast ocean of time.

They were of his own time and place, helplessly adrift now on that ocean in the frailest of lifeboats. No—the lifeboat had gone down and they were castaways on another island and if he failed to rescue them they would have to abandon all hope.

A hundred doubts assailed him as he advanced to meet the Telens, and for a moment the strange thought-exchange, that he had been told by the Krull would take the place of spoken words, gave him so much concern that he found it hard to concentrate on what the Krull had told him to say.

How could speech be silent and yet leap from mind to mind in ringing syllables? How could a voice that arose in the mind impinge not at all on human ears and yet be heard as distinctly as a voice raised in a shout?

The Krull had assured him that there was no need for him to utter a spoken word—that even to move his lips would be a mistake, since it would mislead and confuse them. Only in his mind must the voice be heard, by himself first, as if he were speaking his thoughts aloud and then by the Telens. And when they answered him he must be prepared to carry the conversation forward in the same voiceless way, syllable by unspoken syllable, and without doubting for a moment that he was making himself heard.

The tall, unarmed Telen, who was clearly the leader of the advancing group, was within twenty feet of Bramwell now and there was something about his expression and the way he held himself that gave him the look of a man approaching a sacred shrine who might, at any moment, drop to his knees.

Suddenly the silence was shattered by what sounded to Bramwell like the voice of a man with as fluent a command of English as he himself possessed. But the lips of the speaker did not move at all, and he knew that the silence which had been shattered had been solely a thought projection, for the voices of the forest had not been stilled. There were frightened whisperings and the crackling of twigs everywhere and yet the voice of the Telen seemed to come from some other plane of existence where the silence had been absolute.

“The men and women of your own age were about to betray you,” the voice said. “If they took you back to the twentieth century everything that you hoped to accomplish would crumble and be lost. We need your help to preserve a greatness which they cannot understand. In their selfish and petty minds that greatness has become a threat to their own survival, and they can think of nothing else. They have closed their minds to us, attempted to deceive and mislead us. We are closer to you than they are, for John Bramwell and the Telens share the same shining vision—the vision of a wisdom so profound, a purpose so unyielding, that the entire universe of stars will be transformed by what we shall accomplish.”

There was silence again for an instant and then the voice went on: “You have conquered death and we can travel back and forth in time. But that is just a beginning. For a brief moment we have allowed ourselves to doubt our own greatness, to falter and draw back from the tasks which must be undertaken if we are to remain as daring as you were when you hid your great glory from men who had no knowledge of what the future would be like. We thought that your great wisdom would be shared by others—even in your age. But we were mistaken. We know that now. We know how great you are, but they do not. We have waited so long…”

Bramwell made an effort to follow the Krull’s advice. It proved less difficult than he had feared. His voice seemed to ring out in the silence, although his lips remained un-moving.

“You must not think me harsh—or lacking in understanding. But you are mistaken. I possess no more wisdom than a great many men and women of the twentieth century and considerably less wisdom than the many gifted scientists, philosophers, artists and skilled craftsman that made it a not unworthy age. We did our best, with the tools we had. We had thinkers and dreamers and poets who knew that there would someday be a better, more creative world. We did our best, do you understand?”

“But what you say is madness!” came in quick reply. “There is no need for you to find excuses for a blindness so universal that not one of the men, women and children we have removed from your age seems to have been aware of how great you were. How can you expect us to believe that you shared that blindness and concealed the whole of the truth from yourself?”

“I concealed nothing from myself,” Bramwell said.

“Wait, wait,” came the reply. “It is just possible that you did not know. The truly great are always humble, can be blind to their own greatness. Tell me that it was so. Surely you must realize now that it was so. You have put death forever behind you, you have accomplished what even we would have thought impossible—”

“No,” Bramwell said. “I have not put death forever behind me. I could die now, if a small splinter of steel pierced my chest. And I would not awaken again.”

“That is not true,” the Telen said, his voice so fiercely challenging that it seemed to echo like a pistol shot through the aisles of the forest. A pistol shot could also have put an end to his life, Bramwell thought—long ago in another world that suddenly seemed to sweep close to him again. He could almost hear again the roar of city traffic, and the winking lights of tall buildings and hear a familiar voice whispering close to his ear as he tossed about on a bed of pain: “Darling, you will live again when I am dust. A way will be found to cure you. They will know so much more about cancer than we do…”

“Even now,” Bramwell said, “I carry the seeds of death in my body, and I am not sure that you have found a way to destroy them. In our age there was a disease—”

“We are familiar with all the diseases which were common in your age,” the Telen said. “And it is true that some of them remain unconquered. But for thousands of years we have known that you would awaken restored to health in body and mind. I was taught as a child what I have since come to believe as a man. You will never die.”

“Why do you say that? I have told you that I am as mortal as you are. My death has only been postponed. I will not be alive fifty years from now.”

“You will be alive when the sun cools and the earth is a dead world spinning through space. It is an unfathomable mystery. But we would have known if it were not true. Your great wisdom has enabled you to conquer death forever.”

Bramwell knew then that what the Krull had told him about the Telens was true. They were totally mad.

It was the most dangerous kind of madness, for it contradicted everything that the Telens must have known about him. The frozen sleep that had prolonged his life had been well within the scope of twentieth century science and yet they were determined to believe that a mysterious kind of wisdom—a wisdom little different from the tribal magic of a witch doctor—had made him immortal. Human wisdom alone, knowledge alone, hardly supernatural attributes, could not have given a man godlike qualities and miraculous powers of survival.

The Telen facing Bramwell must have contained his rage and frustration with the thought that a man who had slept for a half million years would be too bewildered on awakening to grasp the full truth about himself, immediately.

Bramwell suddenly decided that he had already said more than the Krull would have thought wise, that silence might be his best protection. But the Telen would not permit him to remain silent.

“You have awakened with the memory of a past that you cannot—must not—return to,” the Telen said, and Bramwell did not like the look that was creeping into his eyes. “The past is gone, it has dropped away from you, and you can never return to it now. Surely you must know that.”

Bramwell and the Telen looked at each other. Despite the awe which the Telen had displayed when he had first drawn near to Bramwell the two men became suddenly engaged in a contest of wills. Bramwell could feel the Telen’s rage beating in tumultuous waves against his brain.

It would not have been so frightening if Bramwell had not known that the rage of a madman could be quite different from the fury of a sane man. It could spring from uncertainty alone, a dark suspicion that a delusion that must not be questioned was about to be attacked and all of its hollowness exposed.

The Telen turned abruptly and walked to where the nearest of his armed companions was standing. He spoke to him briefly, swung about again and gestured toward Bramwell, jabbing at the air with his forefinger.

The shining instrument in the second Telen’s clasp began slowly to vibrate. The instrument had three gleaming prongs attached to it, and it was trained on Bramwell.

The voice of the Telen leader came again, like the crack of a whip drawn swiftly back and just as swiftly uncoiling.

“For a hundred generations only the wretched Krulls have doubted a truth that has been proclaimed, again and again, by the wisest of our ancestors. Again and again your mind has been probed while you slept, the exact hour of your awakening determined. You will see for yourself that we cannot possibly have been deceived. You have put death forever behind you. This weapon, powerful as it is, will not harm you.”

The shining metal instrument trained on Bramwell made a low humming noise. The sound increased in volume until it drowned out all of the forest murmurs and the frightened voices of the children. The adults who stood in widely scattered groups between the trees were all looking in the same direction now, clearly sharing the children’s alarm. But no sound came from them, and not one of them attempted to move.

Only Bramwell moved, taking a quick step backward. It was an instinctive recoil from the death that he knew was about to come flaming out of the instrument—a futile recoil, because if he had turned and fled he could not have hoped to save himself.

His lips moved then, for the first time and an articulated cry came from them. Until that moment only the inward silence had been broken when he had communicated with the Telen from a subliminal plane of existence.

It was a stricken cry, loud and clear, a desperate appeal for understanding. “No, no…you must not use that weapon! I have told you the truth. I will die instantly.”

Neither the Telen leader nor his armed companion…they were standing side by side now…seemed to have heard him. They were both looking at the vibrating instrument, with the intensity of minds deranged and dominated by a single, relentless compulsion—to preserve a delusion that nothing must be allowed to shatter.

Bramwell took another slow step backward, the stricken look that had come into his eyes deepening, aging his features. His face, pinched with horror and despair, resembled that of a very old man tottering on the brink of the grave.

The instrument in the second Telen’s clasp was vibrating violently; he tightened his grip on it, and hunched his shoulders, as if he feared it would leap from his hands. And suddenly there darted from it a thin, almost threadlike filament of flame.

The filament crossed the short distance which separated Bramwell and the two Telens and flickered for a moment over Bramwell from his head to the soles of his feet. And all at once it was no longer a filament but a sheet of flame that billowed out as it brightened and swiftly soared to a height of twenty feet.

In the midst of the flame, Bramwell remained visible for an instant, thrashing about with his limbs agonizingly contorted, the long row of trees at his back looming up behind him like the walls of a burning house.

Then the flame swallowed him up, and continued to brighten, until it seemed less like a flame than a pulsing blob of radiance that had fallen from the sky and was filling the dark forest aisle with so dazzling a glare that it seemed for a moment to outshine the noonday sun.

Then, abruptly the glare vanished and where Bramwell had been standing there was now only a smouldering pile of fallen leaves and a few blackened twigs. Of Bramwell himself there remained no trace.

One of the smaller children screamed and a woman standing close to him darted quickly to his side and drew him protectively into her arms, as if fearful that the terrible act of destruction might at any moment be repeated.

The Telens who had emerged from the underbrush were carrying the same kind of weapons. There was an instant and overwhelming surrender to panic; no one remained still. Five of the adults broke for the cover of the trees, as most of the children had done when the Telens had first appeared, and threw themselves fiat on the ground or staggered waveringly about as if they had been struck blind.

The smell of burning still hung in the air, but the Telens were not looking in the direction of the smouldering leaves, nor at the terrified men, women and children.

They were looking at the Telen leader, who had fallen to his knees and was beating furiously at his temples with his fists.

One Telen and then another began to sway and wild, despairing wails arose in the forest gloom.

The wailing continued for a minute and then it stopped as abruptly as it had arisen. A change seemed to come over the Telens and one by one they straightened and stood very still, their eyes still on the kneeling figure of their leader.

One of the shining weapons began to vibrate. It was as if an understanding had passed between them with the briefest of exchanged glances—an agreement that only one weapon would be needed.

A filament of flame came from the vibrating instrument of destruction, the humming grew very loud. The flame was the same as the one that had played for an instant over Bramwell’s body before he had been blotted from view by a burst of consuming fire. It was directed downward and the end of it zigzagged across the fallen leaves like a luminous worm before it whipped across the shoulders of the kneeling Telen and moved back and forth across his back.

For an instant the Telen leader seemed unaware that he was about to pay with his life for a mistake that had driven the others to despair and enraged them beyond endurance. It was only when the filament widened and became a raging column of flame that his shoulders jerked convulsively and an agonized scream was torn from his lips by the searing heat that was burning the flesh from his bones.

Bramwell’s thrashing body had disintegrated invisibly, concealed by the swollen flames. But the Telen’s body remained for a longer time obscurely discernible in the midst of the glow. It shriveled and darkened and turned skeletal, the flames licking at the hollow eye sockets of what was no longer a human face, but a deaths head turning slowly about. Then a blinding brightness turned the flames into a stationary blob of radiance, filling the forest aisle with a dazzling glare again and making every tree and shrub seem to glow with its own light. The dark tangle of underbrush from which the Telens had emerged looked as if it were tipped with fire.

The glare vanished as abruptly as if a giant hand had closed about it, and reduced it to a few flickering glimmers of flame. Then it was entirely gone, and another smouldering pile of fallen leaves concealed the incinerated Telen’s ashes and what may have been a few blackened fragments of bone.

One by one the Telens dropped their weapons, as if they were reminders of the madness that had led to a double act of violence and destroyed forever what they had thought indestructible—the torch of eternal life held high by a godlike figure from another age.

It was not from the haphazard discoveries of man that their belief in Bramwell had grown, but from the myths and legends that only a mad mind deluded with thoughts of a vanished greatness could have originated and sustained. Now the glory was gone, the bedrock of their belief forever splintered into inglorious fragments.

One by one their weapons crashed to the forest floor and they fled from the sight of them, and from the men and women who had almost succeeded in taking Bramwell from them. They plunged into the underbrush, their tall bodies seemed as grotesquely bent as broken reeds at the edge of some dismal, time-forsaken lake.

For a moment there was only the sound of the underbrush breaking under their feet and then their despairing wails began again and sustained until they dwindled to far-off echoes of sound.

Wilmont could hear all around him again the voices of the forest, the scurrying of small animals from thicket to thicket in the sunless gloom, the hum of numberless insects, the sudden fluttering and wild cry of a nesting bird, alarmed for the safety of its young. But most of all he was aware of his own harsh breathing and the tumultuous beating of his heart.

His gaze was on the two mounds of smoking leaves. Joyce was tugging at his arm, but he could not throw off the feeling that he was completely alone, caught up in some wild distortion of reality that had carried him across oceans and continents to a world where impossible hurricanes raged and the sky was a sheet of flame.

Then the face of that strange, wholly terrifying world changed and he was in a much smaller world that seemed for a moment like a gigantic goldfish bowl and he was looking out at Joyce’s white face pressed to the glass.

At last the forest came sweeping back and he saw everyone moving about like puppets on a lighted stage, pointing and staring with their limbs attached to strings.

Finally the strings turned into downstreaming rays of sunlight and the men, women and children came back into focus and he heard Joyce pleading, close to his ear.

“We must follow Krajan now. We must do exactly as he says. Darling, try to remember that Bramwell has been spared all further torment. Try…you must. He is gone, yes. But he could not have lived much longer. In this age, cancer is unknown, and the cure that was undoubtedly discovered has been forgotten.

Wilmont nodded and was about to reply when he saw the Krull coming toward him. The children had come out from behind the trees and the men and women he had thought of as puppets were moving about more purposefully now, despite their paleness and the look of horror in their eyes.

The Krull seemed completely composed and moved with miraculous ease, casting only the briefest of glances at the two smouldering mounds of leaves as he skirted them on his way to Wilmot’s side.

“The time machine is completely unguarded,” he said, as he stood close to Wilmont, his breathing distinctly audible. “They have never made the slightest attempt to surround the machines with guards or protective devices of any kind. Why should they take such precautions when the Krulls, to the best of their knowledge, have never displayed the slightest interest in time-travel? How little they know…or suspect. I am depending on you to help me keep the children from delaying us. They could so easily do so…”

“We will see that they do not get out of control,” Joyce promised, with a tremulous smile.

“It should not be difficult.”

“Well…”

“She has had considerable experience with children,” Wilmont said.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

They were traveling back through time. It seemed incredible and yet it was happening—it was happening to all of the men, women and children who had been removed from the middle years of the twentieth century and imprisoned in a metal-walled compartment from which only Wilmont and Joyce had escaped—to look out through a wide, shining window at the future sweeping past.

And now that future was reversing itself, the years were falling away and beyond the wide pane the past was coming into view again.

They were alone again in the great observation compartment, with only the Krull at their side.

And the Krull was talking, talking, and everything that he said made a glorious kind of sense.

“Time has three faces,” the Krull was saying. “The hoary face of the past, the always dangerous, uncertain face of the present and the face of a future that may be either the most beautiful face in the world, or dark, cruel, and ugly.”

Suddenly the Krull’s arm swept out, seeming almost to embrace the window, as if it held a secret and an importance for him which only a Krull could understand.

“The navigational instruments have been set,” he said, “to return you safely to your age. But I shall not accompany you. In a short while now, I shall be getting off.”

Before Joyce or Wilmont could reply he continued quickly, his eyes crinkling a little, as if the stunned look that they both trained on him had not been unexpected and it amused him to find his expectations confirmed.

“You see, there was an age when the Krulls exercised a tremendous influence when they were respected for their learning, their wit and their imaginative sensitivity. That influence was powerful enough to have prevented the Telens from gaining an ascendancy such as you have seen. But it was not used wisely—we neglected too many golden opportunities. That is why I am returning to that age to lay the groundwork for—I guess you would call it a new start. I have been selected for that task and it is one that I shall take pride in undertaking.”

Wilmot’s reply was further delayed by the sudden arrival of Wentworth, his wife and two children by the window.

“Krajan is getting off!” Bobby Wentworth said. “Has he told you yet? He told me this morning.”

“No,” Joyce said, her eyes crinkling. “Your children are the real heroes and have every right to be told first. Isn’t that so, Krajan.”

“Well…” The Krull looked embarrassed. “I just thought…”

“That children are good at keeping secrets,” Wilmont said, nodding. “We understand, and there is no need for you to apologize. All success, my friend, in the great tasks ahead.”

“We’ll all drink to that,” Wentworth said.