CHAPTER XXIII

UNRECORDED HISTORY

To me, the rest of those sixty minutes were a vague, drab dream of things horrible to see. Awesome--but though the rocking, shattering Turber city went down while I watched, it all seemed dreamlike. My mind was on that torn heap of wreckage which had been Turber's Time-vehicle. Nanette's body lying somewhere there.

Alan seemed dazed. A man shoved him away and took his place. He sat huddled by Lea. I sat, numbly staring. Then someone said: "Two minutes! That's enough, Grantson! Get the girl and those ancients to insulate the projector. Hurry! We won't need it any more, but no use ruining it."

The world-power was about to come on again. We hastened to insulate our projecting mechanism. The light-beam died. But its work was through. All this end of the Turber-owned city was in ruins. The black waters of what had once been New York Bay were exposed. The islands and the causeways and all the structure there was strewn and tumbled and broken. All of what had been Staten Island was wrecked. Fires and explosions everywhere, and masses of lurid smoke mounting; and all the upper air pungent with the smell of chemicals.

The gas clouds hid the Staten Island hill, with its wrecked aero.

We swung back toward Manhattan as the world-power flashed on. Our sixty minutes were over.

Aftermath of the battle; I need not detail it. To Alan and me it was all unimportant. We kept Lea close with us. Gentle little creature! Why, I suppose her ethereal beauty could not be matched in all the world. But my mind went always to Nanette.

I recall how vaguely I gazed at the mirrors as they pictured the rout and final destruction of the Turberites. The hunt for the panic-stricken mobs ceased in a few hours; those still alive were allowed to escape. I recall sitting with triumphant city officials and hearing it all discussed. The Turberites would be banished to various other localities--scattered. I heard the triumph when searching parties in the ruins found the Turber Treasure Vaults. His tremendous wealth would go to enrich the city government; to rebuild the destroyed area.

Turber and all his leaders were dead. His Empire was broken; its menace met and conquered. There was official government praise and thanks for Lea, Alan and myself. Our interest in it all was apathetic. We had lost Nanette--we found that our greatest desire was to get away from this world which had taken her from us.

Alan and I did not go with the party of searchers who brought back the bodies from the wreckage around Turber's vehicle. Nanette was not found--but they told us there were many bodies not recognizable. We did not go to see them.

A day passed--then another--and on the third a message came which took Lea and Alan and me in shuddering trembling haste to where now workmen were cleaning away the wreckage of the shattered area.

Nanette!

Three workmen had seen it happen. They were working just now, close beside the mangled pile of metal which was Turber's vehicle. From the air a few feet above their heads--the empty air--a human form came hurtling. They saw it all in an instant materialize. A shadow--a ghost--but in a second, when it struck the ground almost at their feet, it was solid. A human form. A girl--lying broken and unconscious. But still alive!

We were taken to see her in the improvised morgue and hospital near the ruins. It was Nanette. We could see that. And we looked just once, and then they led us away.

She was still alive. Oh, I thanked God for this era of progress of 2445! Five hundred years ahead of my own lifetime these surgeons and physicians who for days were working over Nanette! They said she might live. Her broken body might be restored to a semblance of itself.

Our tower with San arrived. It waited, this time.

* * * * *

Then, at last, they said that Nanette surely would live. They took us one day to see her. She lay so swathed in bandages that not much more than her eyes were visible. We spoke to her, just for a moment; bending low, we could hear her murmuring answers. Then Lea held her close and crooned to her, and she went back to sleep.

Another week. We saw her again; propped up for a moment in bed to receive us. The bandages were gone now from her face and head and shoulders. She sat, staring into the direction of our voices.

My poor Nanette! Her face, shriveled and scarred! She raised what seemed a twisted arm to welcome us. She tried to smile. A travesty--a mockery. I recalled her gentle beauty, her sweet womanly dignity--that little smile, so sweet, that she used to have.

I leaned over her. "Nanette, darling!"

"Edward, you came--I didn't want them to let you come--"

I said: "Lea is here. Do you recognize her voice?" I bent over her as though with a great secret. "Nanette, she and Alan love each other. We're just waiting for you to get well--it won't be so long now. Then we're going home."

"No," she murmured. "They say it won't be long now. And they say--"

"San is here with the tower. But he stays always in it. That's why he hasn't been to see you."

Oh, I had phrased it wrongly! She shuddered.

"Edward--that time, you remember--when I said good-by over the aerial? I--I thought that it was--really good-by. You understand?" She was stammering.

"I don't understand, Nanette."

"I mean--I--I told you that I loved you. That was very wrong of me. I do not--I do not love you. I n-never did."

She could not see the rush of moisture that clouded my eyes. I gulped, but I managed a laugh.

"You can't get out of it that way. Of course you love me! I'll make you!"

But she held me off. "No."

From across the room the watching nurse said: "She should be kept quiet, Mr. Williams."

I relaxed and sat back. "We'll forget it, Nanette--not talk about it now, because--"

"Yes, forget it. They say, these surgeons--"

"Nanette, listen--we're rich! You didn't know that. The city government here has awarded us--the four of us--and some for San--some of the Turber gold. In 1945, Nanette, what we four have will be accounted at nearly a million dollars."

She was trying to speak, but I talked fast against it. "You've always wanted to live in the country, haven't you? So does Lea. We're going to buy--Alan and I are--two little homes--near each other, understand--out in the country somewhere in our world of 1945. Where there will be trees and flowers--and the beautiful sky over us."

"Edward, I'd rather you went away. You understand? It's wonderful of you--your plans and all that."

"Nanette, you're talking nonsense!"

"All right. Perhaps I am. They say my hair can be made to grow long again very quickly, Edward." Her voice was trying to be jocular. "That will help, won't it? And yesterday a surgeon was here from Great London. A specialist in plastic surgery--"

The nurse called: "Better go now, Mr. Williams. Not tire her."

* * * * *

There were more days of waiting.

We had long since heard, through Nanette's nurse, her brief account of those last moments in Turber's aero. She had been for a time alone in the control room with Bluntnose and Jonas. They were waiting for Turber. Jonas had fallen into a panic of fear; he sat huddled and chattering, dominated by the Indian who, with stolid indifference to the city tumbling around them, was waiting for the master.

Nanette had stood in the aero doorway. Her mind was groping with a plan. Bluntnose came and pulled her back. He stood in the doorway and shouted welcome to the arriving Turber and the woman Josefa.

Nanette knew that the control room was filled with a blinding glare of light reflected from our white beam so near at hand outside. She heard Jonas scream something about the glare; she could feel it--almost see it. And she could hear, outside the aero, a pandemonium of sound.

She knew every detail of the corridor and the control room. She ran past the huddled Jonas. In a moment Turber would enter, and the aero would flash away and escape. Nanette ran for the instrument table which held the controls. She knew it was close by a window; she knew that the window was open and that it was some six or eight feet above the ground.

Desperate plan! Just a chance to wreck the aero and still to save her own life. She had no knowledge of the controls' operation. She leaped for the table. Her fingers tore at the delicate wires--her clenched little fists smashed the fragile vacuum globes.

She felt the aero sway crazily; she felt it flash as she flung her body through the window. She fell into the black emptiness of insensibility--

The aero had lurched a few seconds into the future, and with every law of Nature transgressed by its derelict flight it had stopped and crashed into ruins.

Nanette's body, hurtling through the air, must have been just within the aero's influence. Inconceivable shock to her! A fall through Space of a few feet. But the impulse from the lurching Time-vehicle had thrown her--as she fell those few feet--into the third day forward.

But it was over now. She lived; these surgeons with their science were giving her back to me.

We waited through those hours; the operation was successful. Her face was--restored.

* * * * *

And so I find myself now with little more to record. We are back now in the world of 1945. We went with Lea while she took leave of her grandfather; and she left him to follow her destiny with Alan. But San would not come. He took us to our own Time-world and left us. He said, forever.

No one saw us as we slipped from the tower into Central Park that last time. A few days only since we had left. It was in the night; and no one was there to see the phantom tower as it came, paused solid for a moment, and then vanished.

Or if we were seen, what of it? No one would believe it; the newspapers would not bother to print it again.

The world here moves quietly along.

Not far from New York City--now in 1945, as I write--there are two little houses, twins upon a small farm. Alan Tremont and his wife live in one of them; and the other is Nanette's home and mine. No one around here is very interested in us. Nanette says that the neighbors sometimes speculate upon Mrs. Tremont's nationality. Some of the women have called her a Scandinavian; they say she looks like one--or talks like one, I forget which. But there is a Swedish woman in the village who is convinced that Lea Tremont is a fair-haired, blue-eyed native girl of the South Sea Islands. The Swedish woman has never been to the South Sea Islands, but she is convinced of it nevertheless.

Once--only last week--Nanette found Lea dancing in the shadowed moonlight of our apple orchard. Dancing for Alan. Her robe of blue fabric--her golden hair flying. Shadow girl! Her fairy figure weaving in and out of the shadows.

But you can't explain to the farmer's wife down the road that Mrs. Tremont is a shadow girl!

THE END