CHAPTER X

PLANNING THE ESCAPE

We finished the meal. Turber rose. "Come into the control room. We can see better from there."

There was only Bluntnose in the control room. He sat at his instruments and dials. His face was inscrutable as he looked up and saw Nanette and me.

"We will sit here," said Turber. "Here, Nanette--by me."

He pushed me away with silent vehemence. I sat down by a window. The door to the corridor which ran the length of the aero was behind me. I saw the woman Josefa out there; she was staring after us, but in a moment she moved away.

Turber spoke to his Indian. "You have been pausing, Bluntnose?"

"Yes." The Indian spoke with a low guttural intonation. "Yes. Saw nothing where could stop."

"No," said Turber. "Well, we'll go forward now." He turned to me. "We had hoped, along here in these primitive ages there might be some great reptile lying dead. One with tusks." He grinned. "In civilized times, ivory is very valuable."

He sat beside Nanette. "I'm not sure that we shall stop, child. Except in 1664. I am impatient to get back home with you. We will have a wonderful life, Nanette--riches and power. Master and mistress of all the world. Wolf Turber--master of the world. You'll be proud of me."

I could not catch her answer. I could see her involuntarily shrinking away from his caress.

I sat alert with roving thoughts. Nanette and I would have to escape; but how? If the aero paused in one of these primitive ages, could I snatch Nanette and leap out? Unthinkable! But in 1664? If we paused there for a night, I would make my play then. Nanette and I, to live out our lives together in little Dutch-English New York.

There was nothing I could do now, and presently I was engrossed, listening to Turber's voice, and regarding the vast scene spread before us through these windows. The control room was in the bow-peak of the aero. Banks of windows on both sides gave nearly an unobstructed view.

Tremendous cosmorama! We were still poised motionless about two hundred feet in the air. My mind went to my own Time-world. New York City of 1945. Beneath me here would be the New York Central Railroad tracks; Riverside Drive; the Hudson. Grant's Tomb, just a short distance to the north. And behind me, the spread of New York's streets and solid buildings.

This same Space, how different now! Turber was saying to Nanette: "We are about one billion years, B.C. That's a long time in the past, isn't it? But we are traveling forward very fast."

I gazed out upon a landscape gray and misty; blurred, unreal as a shimmering ghost. The colors of nature were blended into gray; melting phantoms--the changes of a century encompassed within an instant of my consciousness. It created a pseudo-movement; a blurred, changing outline.

An unreality, a ghostly aspect upon all the scene. Yet I was the speeding phantom; and these things at which I stared were the realities.

A vast area of gray land and water lay spread around us. The water lashed and tumbled; swirls of mist and steam rose from it. The land lay with a gray look of movement. A naked land. No vegetation here yet. No soil. A land perhaps almost viscous, congealed from the lashing ocean. It spread like a great gray plain; the mists and vapors rose from the land-crust as from the sea. Mists and swirling masses of steam, surging up into the orange-gray of the sky. Condensing, dissipating, forming the atmosphere.

I fancied as we plunged through these early centuries that vast storms were here. Vast cataclysms of nature. Torrential deluges of hot rain pouring down from the clouds that these mists were forming. Dire winds that plucked and tore at the sea; earthquakes that rocked and tumbled this land and swept this sea with tidal waves gigantic.

* * * * *

Life here? This was the Beginning. There was a shore line quite near us. It wavered and blurred as the centuries altered it. A reach of shallow water where the waves rolled up against the bleak land-rocks. Life was beginning there. In the shallows of the sea I could envisage the microscopic protoplasms, like algae that form the green scum on a pond, lying here in the shallows. Restless, irritable organisms! Desiring food to eat. Urged by the primitive spark of life to eat and grow and multiply.

Unending sweep of changing land and sea and these living things within it! A million years swept into the Past in a moment. An unfamiliar scene here now. A different sweep of land--a different reach of sea. A land rising to the west as though a great serrated mountain chain had heaved up in those whirling centuries. Gray, shadowy mountains--bleak ghosts of rocky peaks. Dark valleys dank with heavy vapors; a coastal plain against which the sea was beating.

I could fancy that on the lower steppes of this more solid crust vegetation now was taking hold. We were passing too fast for any details. There were fleeting glimpses of what might have been vegetation. A forest--springing from nothing, existing and vanishing while I blinked. But I could seem to see a forest, springing into lush life from the heated soil; growing to a jungle; whirled away in a cataclysm that tore and ripped all this land and water. Or a forest that grew, lived and decayed; enriched the soil with other, different giants of trees to live after it.

We were going forward too fast for such tiny details. But the great changes were obvious.

Again, beyond what I actually saw, my fancy roamed. From the shore-water protoplasms, the restless living things had ventured now. The ocean was peopled. Great swimming reptiles had been here and were here now. Nature's first efforts--from the microscopic protoplasms to these great monsters of the sea! Millions of years developing toward size only. The ages of life gigantic! We were sweeping through them now.

Amphibians were living now. I can conceive the first such sea creature with its restless urge for experimentation--the urge within it, forcing it to try for something better--I can imagine it coming from the deeps into the shallow water of the shore. Venturing further; rearing its great head up from the water into the air. Trying again; lunging--dragging its great length up to the land. Feeling the sunlight.

The ages of the giants! Huge, heavy-armored things--armored so that the battle for existence might be won and life go on. Tremendous swimming, walking and flying reptiles, peopling the sea, the land and the air. Evolving through one-celled to many-celled organisms; to sea-squirts and sluggish giant sea-worms; and, millions of years still farther, to the vertebrates, and then the giant mammals. Nature struggling for size in the individual. The ages of the giants!

As restless as the changing life was the changing environment. I saw the mountains rise and drop; and the sea surge in and back again; an instant when for ten thousand centuries there must have been great heat here--and then a sweep of ice.

Throughout it all, life struggled, adapting itself, patiently trying new forms; driven away from here by hostile nature--but coming back again. Struggling.

* * * * *

An hour or two must have passed as I sat there engrossed. Turber had been talking steadily to Nanette.

I heard him say:

"We are entering now the last million years before the Time of Christ."

1,000,000 B.C.! Out of the thousand such intervals, only one was left!

There had been no attempt by Turber to stop our flight in any of these centuries. I wondered why he had made this trip.

He had said to Nanette: "I have really done this to show it to you." But I doubted that. He had told me, with a grin, that he might stop for an ivory tusk of some prehistoric monster. But I did not believe it; especially since he had made no effort to stop.

I got the answer now; his real reason. The fellow Jonas came into the control room. He stood by Turber. They talked for a moment, softly, but I could hear them.

"You think, Jonas, that we have shaken off that cursed Time-vision?"

"Yes, I think so."

"Lentz would do his best to fool them."

This meant nothing to me. Had Alan been here, how well he would have understood it!

"Yes. But Lea and San are persistent. You should have laid plans, master, to capture that tower."

Turber smiled wryly. "I suppose so. But I've been busy, Jonas. If Lentz had any sense he would have wrecked the tower for me."

"And left himself stranded? You expect too much, Master. Lentz wants to join us."

I could only partially understand. But it was clear that Turber wanted to shake off pursuit. He was planning to stop in 1664. He wanted no interference there.

If I had known that presently Alan would be speeding there in the tower to help me!

There was just a moment when Nanette and I were left alone. Turber went out of the room with Jonas. Bluntnose, the Indian, sat at his dials. But he was some distance away and his back was toward us.

I moved to Nanette. I touched her. I whispered:

"Nanette."

"Edward?"

"We're alone. Only the Indian--his back is turned."

"Edward, be careful of yourself." Her dear hand clung to me. "Careful!"

"Nanette, listen--we're going to stop in the year 1664. It will be night, Turber said. We'll be here all night."

"Yes. I heard him. But, Edward--"

"I'm going to try to get us out of here then. I can't tell you how--I don't know. But I'll watch a chance for us."

A step sounded behind us. My heart leaped. I half rose from my seat. The woman Josefa was bending over us. At my movement she hissed:

"Hush, you fool! Stop that!" Her glance went to the Indian in the distant forward part of the cabin. "He'll hear you. _Dios!_ Sit quiet."

"What do you want?"

"I tell you. Only a moment I have--Turber will be back."

"What? What do you want to tell me?"

"This. When we stop--night in the forest, you understand? I will watch for a way to help you. It will be dark--I can get you out, you and this girl." She paused breathlessly, then blazed. "Take her! Never let Turber see her again!"

I could gladly agree to that. I whispered vehemently: "Yes, of course. That's what I want. How will--"

"Later I find a way. _Madre di Dios_, he--"

She saw Turber down the corridor. She murmured swiftly: "You be ready."

She turned and was gone. In the corridor I saw her pass Turber. He seized her and kissed her; and this time she submitted.

* * * * *

Turber joined us. "Ah, so you are entertaining my little Nanette?" I moved away at his command. He sat down. "We are only half a million years before the Time of Christ now."

500,000 B.C.! A new land was here now. A shadowy, rolling area of forests. Fertile jungles. Miasmic. Primeval tangles of rank vegetation. Land reptiles were here. We could not see them--not even the shadows of them. The great life-span of one of them, had it lain motionless beneath us, would have been too swift and brief a shadow for our sight. But I knew that they were here. Giant things. Dinosaurs and monster birds. Land vertebrates.

And the mammals were here now as well. The end of ancient life was come. The end of the great reptiles was at hand. Nature had made an error, and was busy now in rectifying it. The giants, handicapped by their huge size, unwieldy bulk and dull-witted brains, were sorely pressed in the great struggle for existence. Creatures smaller were evolving; creatures more agile of body; more quick-witted of brain. They fought their environment better. They lived; they thrived.

Another few minutes while we sat at the cabin windows. The giant reptiles went down into defeat. The archaic mammals flourished and rose into the higher mammals. The lemurs were here. And then the anthropoids. Apes of pseudo-human form skulking in these lush jungles.

The stage was set for man.

I saw all life here driven away into defeat with a glacial sweep of ice coming down. It enveloped the aero for an instant. We must have been within it--glaciers over us with our phantom vehicle speeding through them.

The ice age passed. The land and the sea sprang once more into shadowy form. The gray phantom jungles were here again. The living things, driven elsewhere, came back. The giant mammals like all the giants were losing the battle. The smaller creatures were surviving. The ice came again, and passed. And again. Vast climate changes. Was the axis of the earth altering in its inclination? I think so.

The ice ages passed. The apelike man had been roaming Java for nearly half a million years now. Roaming, and spreading.

Two hundred thousand years and, a little less apelike, the Heidelberg man was wandering throughout Europe--and Asia perhaps. The Piltdown men flourished and fell and left their record in England and Europe. I wondered if here in this Space of New York City there could have been men like apes in those ages. We did not stop; there is no one to say.

The glaciers withdrew. The Neanderthal race gave way to higher forms. The Cro-Magnons struggled with their primitive thinking.

Reason had come. Man--true mankind--was upon the earth at last. His earth!

He held it now, rising against environment and against all the efforts of the beast to hold him down!

The Indian at the dials said abruptly: "25,000 B.C."

"Ah," said Turber, "the age of civilization, little Nanette. We are entering it now. It starts here--and when it reaches its peak, I will be master of it. Ruling the world--with you."

His fingers touched her hair. Enigmatic, unfathomable scoundrel! I sat, ignored by him, tensely regarding him. And I could have sworn that he was wholly sincere. His fingers gently stroked her hair.

"Ruling the world, Nanette. I have selected its greatest Time--the peak of civilization. I will be Master of it, and you its Mistress. A wonderful destiny for you, child."

He waited, and she murmured awkwardly: "Why--yes--"

He frowned a little. "You do not love me yet. Oh, Nanette, don't you understand? It is your love I want. Not you without your love."

"Yes," she said. "I understand."

A pang went through me. An impressive scoundrel this! He went on earnestly:

"I think there will be a great battle, Nanette. But we will win. We will conquer Great New York of 2445. And you'll live out your life five hundred years in the future of that world in which you and I were born."

He turned to the window. "This is a backward Space, Nanette. Elsewhere on the earth man now in these eras before Christ is leaving the impress of his struggle. But not here. It's all still empty--no evidence of civilized man. But its outlines are familiar. Why, if you could see it, Nanette, you'd recognize it now. The ocean is to the east of us. The shores; the islands. This is Manhattan Island beneath us. Slower, Bluntnose! Remember, we stop at that appointed night of 1664. Go slower! We want no shock to harm my little Nanette."

His voice went on.

* * * * *

We passed through the centuries with constantly decreasing speed, and entered the Christian era. Then to 1000 A.D. The Mongols had come from the Eastern world, come here and lived, cut off upon this backward continent. Without contact, they remained backward. Primitive savages. They were here now--the American Indian with his wigwams set in the forests of these wooded slopes; his signal fires rising above the trees; his bark canoes floating on these sheltered waters. But his impress upon Nature was too slight for us to see.

Men, risen higher in civilization's scale, were in Europe now. Thinking. Wondering. Soon they would be here, adventuring.

1500 A.D. Columbus had come into the west now. Seeking his passage to China he had come, and returned disappointed in his quest. We passed 1550. And 1600. 1609 A.D. was gone by in a moment. Henry Hudson had been here now! The Half Moon had come sailing up this placid river. A flash, those days, so brief to us that we saw nothing. But with my mind's eye, I saw it. Quaint little ship, adventuring here. Passing our island; navigating the river up beyond where Albany was to be; seeking the passage to China, running aground up there in the narrowing river and deciding with complete correctness that here was no easy way to China; and turning back and departing, disappointed.

Turber was saying: "Ah, here is man--at last--"

The standard of civilized man! Something enduring of man's handiwork was visible off there through one of the windows. Shadows--tiny blurs--of what might have been houses were materializing on the marshes of the Jersey lowlands; a settlement. It persisted, and grew. And now, another--here on our island near at hand.

To the south--the lower tip of Manhattan Island--the outlines of a fort had appeared; it endured; a fort with a stockade. In a breath, like tiny chickens clustering about the mother hen, little buildings were appearing. All within the stockade at first.

* * * * *

The Dutch were here! New Amsterdam existed here, now! The humble, struggling beginning of the great city. But it persisted. It grew. Tiny shadows of houses flowed into shadowy being as we stared. All were down at the lower end of the island--and the savages roamed up here.

The years went by. The hardy Dutchmen were thriving. On all the distant shores we could see the small settlements appearing. All over the busy scene the Dutch were imprinting evidence of their hardihood. The peppery Peter Stuyvesant was stamping his wooden leg about here now. I could imagine him upon his brash forays into enemy country. Warring upon the savages; and upon greater game. Voyaging with trenchant belligerence to attack the Swedes of the Delaware.

We were nearly at our destination. The aero was going very slowly. Soon there was almost color in the scene. Soundless flashes of what seemed alternate light and darkness.

Turber stood up. "Just sit quiet, Nanette! Hold the arms of your chair; don't be frightened."

He went over and stood by Bluntnose. "The exact night--don't mistake it."

"No."

There was a long period of daylight. Long? It may have been a second or two.

Then darkness. Then light again. My heart was pounding. Outside in the corridor I saw the woman Josefa standing against the wall.

Darkness outside again. The cabin reeled. It lurched. The humming vibration was gone. I heard Turber's voice: "Good enough! Not much after sunset."

We hung in the air; poised over the river.

A quiet starlight night. Early evening. The aero's horizontal propellers were whirling; I could hear their throb. We sank gently to the ground, with the depths of the forest about us and the starlit river near by.