Читать книгу The Central Intelligence: The Golden Amazon Saga, Book Seven - John Russell Fearn - Страница 8

CHAPTER THREE

BACK HOME SAFE AND SOUND

Abna refused to be disturbed. As was his custom after a supreme mental effort, he had become almost schoolboyish, glad to relax completely and throw all his troubles overboard.

“About Quorne,” Abna said, glancing at Viona. “I think we have a way of keeping tabs on him! In our journey from the subatomic wormhole we traveled in a straight line, constantly expanding as we moved until we assumed our pres­ent normal size. Since we did move in a straight line, Quorne must be some­where in the air about us, or at least the sub-atomic gateway to the universe in which he is existing will be.… Let me see now.”

“Can’t we forget Quorne for the moment and concentrate on our­selves?” the Amazon demanded.

“Knowing Quorne’s capabilities, I don’t think we can ever afford to forget him.” Abna took the high-frequency detector from his belt and pressed the release button. Then he smiled as the indicating needle swung and presently became steady, pointing horizontally at nothing in particular.

“Still on him!” Viona exclaimed­. “Over all that distance!”

“Distance is relative,” Abna told her. “Our own extreme smallness made the distance seem of staggering proportions. A moment, while I work out some mathematics. I can then tell from this detector exactly where Quorne is.”

That the two women were far more interested in their own fate than Quorne’s Abna knew full well, but he refused to be turned from his pur­pose. Regardless of the icy wind, he worked out his mathematics with the tiny portable computer in his belt, and then gave a smile.

He said: “The atom of argon, in which lies the wormhole gateway to the universe in which Quorne is stranded, is seventeen feet four inches away from us where the needle is now pointing. Our atmosphere is partly made up of argon, as we know, and that is the point from which we came. We can suck a sample of air into an ampule, which will contain that one argon atom we want—which contains the wormhole entrance to that other universe from which we came—and we can keep the air, and Quorne, sealed in the ampule for as long as we wish.”

“Yes, that’s true enough,” the Amazon agreed, impressed by the simple and yet mighty scientific fact Abna had stated.

From his belt Abna took an air ampule and then, with a spring rule carefully measured the distance of seventeen feet four inches from the detector, which he placed upon the ground. This done, he made some more calculations, then into the ampule he drew a specimen of air and sealed the top.

“Viona, watch that detector,” he instructed, and the girl obeyed. He then proceeded to walk in a circle round the instrument, the air ampule in his hand.

“The needle is pointing to you,” Viona told him. “Everywhere you go the needle goes too.”

“Which means success,” Abna smiled. “The needle is following the ampule, not me. Quorne is safely ‘imprisoned’, indirectly, within this tube. Apart from that one valuable argon molecule there are millions of others—but that is beside the point. We have Quorne all bottled up, and we’ll be fools in­deed if we ever let him out!”

With that Abna put the ampule carefully away in the protective slot in his belt, and then pondered and looked about him. Then Viona said: “You wouldn’t think me impudent, dad, if I made a suggestion to get us home, would you?”

Abna laughed. “My dear girl, if you’ve any bright ideas, then let us have them!”

“It’s a simple idea. Since we can’t go backwards in time—what’s wrong with going forward?”

“We could do it,” Abna assured her. “Just as easily as we came from the atomic space—”

“But it would be of no benefit,” the Amazon insisted. “The Earth and sun are dying even at this stage: to go forward would only make that fact more certain. We’d finally find the world crumbling into cosmic dust, the sun a dead star, and ourselves float­ing in space prior to our own inevi­table annihilation.”

“So I think,” Abna commented.

Viona said: “‘I seem to remember a theory was once propounded by a scientist famous in his day—Jeans I think his name was—that worlds have their own particular time orbit, independent of the great sea of time in which all the universe moves.”

“Meaning what?” the Amazon asked.

“Meaning that maybe when Earth has come to the end of her time orbit, she starts all over again from the beginning. Why not? That is the basis of the Cyclic Universe theory, namely that all universes die out and renew themselves from pent-up cosmic forces—just as the cycle of nature everlastingly repeats. Death in the fall and renewal in the spring. Since we can’t go backwards, we might as well try going forward and see if we don’t find ourselves at the start of the circular Earth time orbit again.”

“Having a definite logic,” the Amazon said, “I think we ought to try it.”

“Agreed,” Abna nodded. “Let us start. Traveling forward will not be nearly so difficult to integrate men­tally as that journey from Smallness. Stand here beside me, link your hands in mine, and I’ll see what I can do.”

So for the second time Abna once again threw every vestige of his immense intellectual power into the problem—and as before he and the two women gradually became disso­ciated from all consciousness of their bodies while their mental eyes remained wide open.

As though they were omnipotent observers, they saw Earth speed onwards in time until it was a dark and frigid world, caked in ice from pole to pole, the last rays of the fading sun casting back redly from it. And ere long, even these rays ceased as the sun became a burned-out star.

With the endless progression of time, even the dead star crumbled into a black hole, and there was nothing but the eternal cosmos and the blaze of stars and nebulae. Then, for the disem­bodied three, there came a brief sense of tremendous strain that quickly passed. All three of them knew that they had crossed the barrier at the end of the Earth time-circuit, had reached its absolute maximum, and that beyond it in the everlasting circle must lie the conditions known as ad­vancing time. They had come back to the beginning of the circle and were still going forward.

For a while nothing changed on the face of the cosmic deeps, then out of remoteness a swirling nebula swung into view moving with a stupendous velocity. Probably its apparent velocity was so tremendous because of the speed at which the mentally traveling three were hurtling. Whatever the exact factors involved, they were the witnesses of enormous concentrations of incandescent gases contracting in upon themselves, forming into distinct stellar systems.

Space was white and trembling, shivering with inconceivable radiations and forces as the several of these proto-stars collided in the cosmic maelstrom. One of the outflung flaming fragments was seen to coalesce into one stupendous dark island.… But it was now no longer dark. It flamed, coalesced, liquefied into blinding grandeur as its latent atomic powers were imploded by stupendous gravitational forces.

Perhaps ages passed, which the disembodied three could not calculate, but they saw the several ring-like filaments break away from the central core, whirl, and then condense into globes and slowly cool­ing worlds. They no longer needed to wonder if they had made the correct move. The proof of it lay there before them. They were even now speed­ing across the period of the Solar System’s birth, so inevitably they saw the planets cool off, give birth to moons in most cases, and follow the inevitable law of the time-circle there­after.

Abna changed his concentration somewhat so that the three found themselves apparently on Earth itself, and yet apart from it and untouched by the furies and storms of those very early days. They beheld tempest and hurricane, sunlight and calm. They swept through the kaleidoscope of hurtling ages, through the forests and swamps of primeval time, through the Glacial Epochs and Antediluvian ages.

Onward and onward to the first remote signs of civilization, and then the blur of the speeding centuries wherein man rose to a zenith and crumbled down again. Lost in an­tiquity became the epoch of the Egypt­ian dynasties and, instead, modern civilization was already growing. So through the ages of steam, of water, of the first flights, through the chaos and confusion of wars, beyond the Atomic age and the smashing of the sound barrier; still on to the age of the interplanetary travel, to the era of the Golden Amazon and her rule of the System.

And, suddenly, journeying ceased. The Amazon and Viona both realized at the same moment that they were standing on a high rise of ground to the north of modern London. Abna was near to them, smiling in triumph.

“You were right Viona,” he said. “The Time-circle is continuous, and here we are right back in the period from which our adventure into Smallness began.… It seems to me it is time we went home and considered the vastness of the thing we have accomplished.”