Читать книгу Lost in Time - Arthur Leo Zagat - Страница 3

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Something hard thrust into his back.

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

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

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

A hand passed over his body.

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

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

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

“Nothing. I—”

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

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

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

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

“I am an American.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Amazement showed in her mobile features.

“You do not know me!” she exclaimed, wonderingly. “And you say you are an American?”

“I left San Francisco six weeks ago. Have you become famous since then?”

She shook her head, still bewildered. Dunning continued.

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

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

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

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

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