Читать книгу The Exile of Time - Raymond King Cummings - Страница 5

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“Sane?” said Dr. Alten. “Of course she’s sane.” He stood gazing down at Mary Atwood. He was a tall, slim fellow, this unorthodox young alienist, with dark hair turning slightly gray at the temples and a neat black mustache that made him look older than he was. Dr. Alten at this time, in spite of his eminence, had not yet turned forty.

“She’s sane,” he reiterated. “Though from what you tell me, it’s a wonder that she is.” He smiled gently at the girl. “If you don’t mind, my dear, tell us just what happened to you, as calmly as you can.”

She sat in Dr. Alten’s living room. The yellow light gleamed on her white satin dress, on her white shoulders, her beautiful face with its little round black beauty patch, and the curls of the white wig dangling to her neck. From beneath the billowing, flounced skirt the two satin points of her slippers showed.

A beauty of the year 1777! I gazed at her with quickened pulse. It seemed that I was dreaming, that as I sat before her in my tweed business suit with its tubular trousers I was the anachronism! This should have been candle-light illumining us; I should have been a powdered and bewigged gallant, in gorgeous satin and frilled shirt to match her dress.

Alten fumbled in the pockets of his dressing gown for cigarettes. “Go ahead, Miss Mary. You are among friends. I promise we will try and understand.”

She smiled. “Yes. I—I believe you.” Her voice was low. She sat staring at the floor, choosing her words carefully.

“I was at home tonight,” she began. “Tonight after dinner. I have no relatives except my father. He is General Washington’s aide. We live—our home is north of the city. I was alone, except for the servants.

“Father sent word tonight that he was coming to see me. The messenger got through the British lines, but the red-coats are everywhere. They were quartered in our house. For months I have been little more than a servant to a dozen of My Lord Howe’s officers. They are gentlemen, though: I have no complaint. Then they left, and father, knowing it, wanted to come to see me.

“He should not have tried it. Our house is watched. He promised me he would not wear the British red.” She shuddered. “Anything but that—to have him executed as a spy. He would not risk that, but wear merely a long black cloak.

“He was to come about ten o’clock. But at midnight there was no sign of him. The servants were asleep. I sat alone, and every pounding hoof-beat on the road matched my heart.

“Then I went into the garden. There was a dim moon in and out of the clouds. It was hot, like tonight. I mean, why it was tonight. It’s so strange—”

In the silence of Alten’s living room we could hear the hurried ticking of his little mantel clock, and from the street outside came the roar of a passing elevated train and the honk of a taxi. This was New York of 1935. But to me the crowding ghosts of the past were here. In fancy I saw the white pillars of the moonlit Atwood home. A garden with a dirt road beside it. Red-coated British soldiers passing . . . And to the south the little city of New York extending northward from crooked Maiden Lane and the Bowling Green. . . .

“Go on, Mistress Mary.”

“I sat on a bench in the garden. And suddenly before me there was a white ghost. A shape. A wraith of something which a moment before had not been there. I sat too frightened to move. I could not call out. I tried to, but the sound would not come.

“The shape was like a mist, a little ball of cloud in the center of the garden lawn. Then in a second or two it was solid—a thing like a shining cage, with crisscrossing white bars. It was a metal cage like a room. I thought that the thing was a phantom or that I was asleep and dreaming. But it was real.”

Alten interrupted. “How big was it?”

“As large as this room, perhaps larger. But it was square, and about twice as high as a man.”

A cage, then, some twenty feet square and twelve feet high.

She went on: “The cage door opened. I think I was standing, then, and I tried to run but could not. The—the thing came from the door of the cage and walked toward me. It was about ten feet tall. It looked—oh, it looked like a man!”

She buried her face in her hands. Again the room was silent. Larry was seated, staring at her; all of us were breathless.

“Like a man?” Alten prompted gently.

“Yes, like a man.” She raised her white face.

“Like a man. A thing with legs, a body, a great round head and swaying arms. A jointed man of metal! You surely must know all about them.”

“A robot!” Larry muttered.

“You have them here, I suppose. Like that rumbling carriage without horses, this jointed iron man came walking toward me. And it spoke! A most horrible hollow voice—but it seemed almost human. And what it said I do not know, for I fainted. I remember falling as it came walking toward me, with stiff-jointed legs.

“When I came to my senses I was in the cage. Everything was humming and glowing. There was a glow outside the bars like a moonlit mist. The iron monster was sitting at a table, with peculiar things—mechanical things—”

“The controls of the cage-mechanisms,” said Alten. “How long were you in the cage?”

“I don’t know. Time seemed to stop. Everything was silent except the humming noises. They were everywhere. I guess I was only half conscious. The monster sat motionless. In front of him were big round clock faces with whirling hands. Oh, I suppose you don’t find this strange, but to me—!”

“Could you see anything outside the cage?” Alten persisted.

“No. Just a fog. But it was crawling and shifting. Yes!—I remember now—I could not see anything out there, but I had the thought, the feeling, that there were tremendous things to see! The monster spoke again and told me to be careful, that we were going to stop. Its iron hands pulled at levers. Then the humming grew fainter, died away, and I felt a shock.

“I thought I had fainted again. I could just remember being pulled through the cage door. The monster left me on the ground. It said, ‘Lie there, for I will return very soon.’

“The cage vanished. I saw a great cliff of stone near me. It had yellow-lighted openings, high up in the air. And big stone fences hemmed me in. Then I realized I was in an open space between a lot of stone houses. One towered like a cliff, or the side of a pyramid—”

“The back yard of that house on Patton Place!” Larry exclaimed. He looked at me. “Has it any back yard, George?”

“How should I know?”

“Go on,” Alten was prompting.

“That is nearly all. I found a doorway leading to a dark room. I crawled through it toward a glow of light. I passed through another room. I thought I was in a nightmare, and that this was my home. I remembered that the cage had not moved. It had hardly lurched. It just vibrated.

“But this was not my home. The rooms were small and dark. Then I peered through a window on a strange stone street. And saw these strange-looking young men. And that is all—all I can tell you.”

She had evidently held herself calm by a desperate effort. She broke down now, sobbing without restraint.

The portals of this mystery had swung wide to receive us. The tumbling events which menaced all our world of 1935 were upon us now.

Alten said, “You have a right to be overwrought, Mistress Mary Atwood. But this thing is as strange to us as it is to you. I called that iron monster a robot. But it does not belong to our age. If it does I have never seen one such as you describe. And traveling through Time—”

He smiled down at her. “That is not a commonplace everyday occurrence to us, I assure you. The difference is that in this world of ours we can understand these things as being scientific. And so they have not the terror of the supernatural.”

Mary was calmer now. She returned his smile. “I realize that, or at least I am trying to realize it.”

I touched her arm. “You are very wonderful—”

Alten brushed me away. “Let’s try and reduce it to rationality. The cage was—is, I should say, since of course it still exists—that cage is a Time-traveling vehicle. It is traveling back and forth though Time, operated by a robot. Call it that. A pseudo-human creation fashioned of metal in the guise of a man.”

Even Alten had to force himself to speak calmly, as he gazed from one to the other of us. “It came, no doubt from some future age, where half-human mechanisms are common, and Time-traveling is known. That cage probably does not travel in space, but only in Time. In the future—somewhere—the Space of that house on Patton Place may be the laboratory of a famous scientist. And in the past—in the year 1777—that same Space was the garden of Mistress Atwood’s home. So much is obvious. But why—”

“Why,” Larry burst out, “did that iron monster stop in 1777 and abduct this girl?”

“And why,” I intercepted, “did it stop here in 1935?” I gazed at Mary. “And it told you it would return?”

“Yes.”

Alten was pondering. “There must be some connection, of course. . . . Mistress Mary, had you never seen this cage before?”

“No.”

“Nor anything like it? Was anything like that known to your Time?”

“No. Oh, I cannot truly say that. Some people believe in phantoms, omens and witchcraft. There was in Salem, in the Massachusetts Colony, not so many years ago—”

“I don’t mean that. I mean Time-traveling.”

“There were soothsayers and fortune-tellers, and necromancers with crystals to gaze into the future.”

“We still have them,” Alten smiled. “You see, we don’t know much more than you do about this thing.”

I said, “Did you have any enemy? Anyone who wished you harm?”

She thought a moment. “No—yes, there was one.” She shuddered at the memory. “A man—a cripple—a horribly repulsive man of about one score and ten years. He lives down near the Battery.” She paused.

“Tell us about him,” Larry urged.

She nodded. “But what could he have to do with this? He is horribly deformed. Thin, bent legs, a body like a cask and a bulging forehead with goggling eyes. My Lord Howe’s officers say he is very intelligent and very learned. Loyal to the King, too. There was a munitions plot in the Bermudas, and this cripple and Lord Howe were concerned in it. But Father likes the fellow and says that in reality he wishes our case well. He is rich.

“But you don’t want to hear all this. He—he made love to me, and I repulsed him. There was a scene with Father, and Father had our lackeys throw him out. That was a year ago. He cursed horribly. He vowed then that some day he—he would have me, and get revenge on Father. But he has kept away. I have not seen him for a twelve-month.”

We were silent. I chanced to glance at Alten, and a strange look was on his face.

He said abruptly, “What is this cripple’s name, Mistress Mary?”

“Tugh. He is known to all the city as Tugh. Just that. I never heard any Christian name.”

Alten rose sharply to his feet. “A cripple named Tugh?”

“Yes,” she affirmed wonderingly. “Does it mean anything to you?”

Alten swung on me. “What is the number of that house on Patton Place? Did you happen to notice?”

I had, and wondering I told him.

“Just a minute,” he said. “I want to use the phone.”

He came back to us shortly, his face very solemn. “That house on Patton Place is owned by a man named Tugh! I just called a reporter I know, who remembers a certain case. He confirmed what I thought. Mistress Mary, did this Tugh in your Time ever consult doctors, trying to have his crippled body made whole?”

“Why, of course he did. I have heard that many times. But his crippled, deformed body cannot be cured.”

Alten checked Larry and me when we would have broken in with astonished questions.

“Don’t ask me what it means, but I think that this cripple—this Tugh—has lived both in 1777 and 1935, and is traveling between them in this Time-traveling cage. And perhaps he is the human master of that robot.”

Alten made a vehement gesture. “But we’d better not theorize. It’s too fantastic. Here is the story of Tugh in our Time. He came to me some three years ago—in 1932, I think. He offered any price if I could cure his crippled body. All the New York medical fraternity knew him. He seemed sane, but obsessed with the idea that he must have a body like other men. Like Faust, who, as an old man, paid the price of his soul to become youthful, he wanted to have the body of a young man.

“This fellow Tugh lived alone in that house on Patton Place. He was all you say of him, Mistress Mary. Hideously repulsive. A sinister personality. About thirty years old.

“And, in 1932, he got mixed up with a girl who had a somewhat dubious reputation herself. She evidently thought she could get money out of Tugh. Whatever it was, there was a big uproar. The girl had him arrested, saying that he had assaulted her. The police had quite a time with the cripple.”

Larry and I remembered a few of the details of it now, though neither of us had been in New York at the time.

Alten went on. “Tugh fought with the police. Went berserk. I imagine they handled him pretty roughly. In the Magistrate’s Court he made another scene, and fought with the court attendants. With ungovernable rage he screamed vituperatives, and was carried kicking, biting and snarling from the court-room. He threatened some wild weird revenge upon all of the city officials—even upon the city itself.”

“Nice sort of chap,” Larry commented.

But Alten did not smile. “The Magistrate could only hold him for contempt of Court. The girl had absolutely no evidence to support her accusation of assault. Tugh was finally dismissed. A week later he murdered the girl.

“The details are unimportant, but he did it. The police had him trapped in his house—this same one on Patton Place—but when they burst in to take him, he had inexplicably vanished. He was never heard from again.”

Alten continued to regard us with grim, solemn face. “Never heard from—until tonight. And now we hear of him. How he vanished, with the police guarding every exit to that house—well, it’s obvious, isn’t it? He went into another Time-world. Back to 1777, doubtless.”

Mary Atwood gave a little cry. “I had forgotten that I must warn you. Tugh told me once, before Father and I quarreled with him, that he had a mysterious power. He was a most wonderful man, he said. And there was a world in the future—he mentioned 1934 or 1935—which he hated. A great city whose people had wronged him, and he was going to bring death to them. Death to them all! I did not heed him. I thought he was demented, raving. . . .”

Alten was pacing the floor. “What are we to do—tell the authorities? Take Mistress Mary Atwood to Police Headquarters and inform them that she has come from the year 1777? And that, if we are not careful, there will be an attack upon New York?”

“No!” I burst out. I could fancy how we would be received at Police Headquarters if we did that!

“No,” echoed Alten. “I have no intention of doing it. I’m not so foolish as that.” He stopped before Mary. “What do you want to do? You’re obviously an exceptionally intelligent, level-headed girl. Heaven knows you need to be.”

“I—I want to get back home,” she stammered.

A pang shot through me as she said it. A hundred and fifty years to separate us!

“That mechanism said it would return!”

“Exactly,” agreed Alten. “Shall we chance it? Try it? There’s nothing else I can think of to do. I have a revolver and two hunting rifles.”

“Just what do you mean?” I demanded.

“I mean, we’ll take my car and go to Tugh’s house on Patton Place. Right now! Three of us, armed, ought to be able to overcome a robot! Then we’ll seize the Time-traveling cage. Perhaps we can operate it. If not, with it in our possession we’ll at least have something to show the authorities. There’ll be no ridicule then!”

Within a quarter of an hour, armed and with a long overcoat and a scarf to hide Mary Atwood’s beauty, we took Alten’s car and drove to Patton Place.