Chapter VI: Part 6

A ragged, squint-eyed little man crept under the legs of those battling us, and jabbed at me with a javelin. In the confusion of battle we had shifted in position until I was now next to the low wall that kept us from the abyss. Now, as the javelin stabbed up at me, I stooped swiftly beside the low barrier, and with a flashing stroke across his neck, finished my squint-eyed opponent. But as I started to rise again, a great figure loomed above me, a giant black who swung up above his head a heavy, horn-hafted ax. He was standing on the low wall itself, balancing himself for a crashing down-stroke of the ax, which I could not resist.

He uttered a fierce cry, whirled the ax about over his head, and swung it down toward me, but as his arm started that downward motion there was a sharp crack from the stair above, and he toppled down into the abyss. In the very nick of time, Lantin's shot had saved me.

But on came the hordes, pushing us up and up by sheer weight of numbers, until it seemed madness that five men should thus stand against thousands. Around and around the up-spiraling stair they forced us, so that sometimes we fought on one side of the shaft and sometimes on another. Now and then, sated with fighting, they would draw back for a few moments, and this gave us precious intervals of rest, but always they came on again, always they pushed us up. Man after man of them hurtled down to death in the pit, for as the hordes came on they threw their own dead and dying over the rail into the abyss, so that the stair might be unencumbered.

We were very near to the temple floor by now, and I was bleeding from a dozen flesh-wounds, nor were the rest of us in better case. Ixtil had a great cut in one cheek, and Fabrius had been wounded in the leg by a thrown spear. D'Alord, too, was a bloody figure, and had ceased to jeer at his adversaries, fighting now in grim silence. Alone among us, Denham remained virtually unscathed, and he fought on unchanged. His slender, needlelike rapier flashed here and there with wonderful speed and precision, always stabbing at the exact right spot, with the exact force needed. And he still smiled scornfully as his blade dealt death.

A half-dozen times Lantin's pistol had saved one of us from death, barking out a grim message when we were pressed too close. But now we were becoming ever more weary, were being pressed ever more swiftly up by fresh opponents, with the weight of the hordes behind them. All down the great spiral, clear to the floor of the pit, the stair was crowded with the hordes, pressing us ever upward, their own weight and numbers hampering with deadly effect those who were nearest us, and who were pushed forward with no chance for choosing their thrusts.

At last we reached the stair's end, and stood on the black ring of flooring around the abyss. When we could no longer hold them from emerging onto that flooring, we suddenly turned and ran toward the other spiral stair which circled the interior of the cylindrical temple, winding from balcony to balcony up to the building's roof.

And there our fight began anew, for when the hordes emerged into the temple they did not stream outside into the city, as I had hoped, but continued to press us up toward the roof, where were the flying-platforms that would carry them to the rich loot of mighty Kom. They could have had freedom, but it was not enough. They were thirsty for the riches awaiting them at Kom. So not a man of them left the temple, all combining to force us up the narrow stair that spiraled up the temple's interior, a replica of the one in the shaft, though much smaller, and the only road to the building's roof.

They were pressing us closely, now, and we could hardly keep to our feet. Then, a hundred feet from the ceiling of the great building, a shout of triumph went up from the hordes, for D'Alord went down, stunned by a blow on the head from a great mace. Fabrius rushed forward to drag him back, and was himself struck down by a blow from the same club. It seemed that our fight was over, then and there, when there came a sharp rattle of shots from behind and some six or seven of our opponents went down, felled by the last shots of Lantin's pistol.

Involuntarily the mob fell back for a few steps, and we seized the opportunity to drag D'Alord and the Roman to their feet. Fabrius was unhurt and D'Alord had only been stunned, quickly reviving. And now, as the mob below hung for a moment hesitant, not knowing how many more shots Lantin had at his disposal, two men sprang out of their number and faced us.

One was a lithe, brown-skinned Malay, who waved a gleaming kris aloft and called to the rest to resume the attack. But the other it was who held my gaze, a blond giant with long, waving hair, who shouted fiercely and waved a battle-ax aloft, calling to his companions to follow him to the attack.

It was Cannell!

Cannell, for whom we had come across the centuries! Cannell, whom we had seen seized by the Raider and taken, whom we had searched for in vain in the city of the pit. There was a great, half-healed wound on his temple, and his eyes were alight with blood-lust, so that I could see that he knew us not.

I was brushed aside, and someone sped by me from above. It was Lantin, and before we could stop him he had passed us and had raced down the intervening steps toward Cannell, his face alight at seeing the friend we had come through time to rescue.

"Cannell!" he cried, rushing toward him with hands outstretched. We looked in that instant to see him slain, but no blow was struck, the mob seeming paralyzed by astonishment. I saw Lantin reach out to Cannell, saw the blood-lust leave him; his eyes cleared as he looked at Lantin, the past coming back to him over his time in the bloody pit.

He dropped his ax and took a step toward Lantin, his face alight with recognition. Then we uttered a helpless groan, for the Malay, who stood at the low rail behind Lantin, had recovered from his surprize and now swept up his curved blade over Lantin's head.

I shouted, and started down toward Lantin, but knew myself too late to ward off that blow. Cannell looked, saw the upflung, menacing blade, and uttered a great shout. He had no weapon in his hand, but with one great bound he leapt up toward the Malay, gripped him in his arms, and then the two swayed, toppled, fell, hurtled down into the abyss, twisting and turning, locked in a death-grip, down through the temple's interior, down into the darkness of the vast shaft below, down to the pit-floor far beneath.

I was down to Lantin now, grasped him and dragged him back, and before the massed hordes recovered from their astonishment, he was behind us. They turned now, saw, and howled their rage, racing up toward our waiting swords.

A torrent of raging swords, they pushed us up until we stood at the stair's end. Behind us was a high, vaulted room, and at its other side the stair continued, leading still up. We turned, ran across that room, the triumphant horde behind us, and when we reached the stair at the room's other side, turned again and faced them.

Up through a half-dozen such rooms they forced us, through dim, great halls with patterns of fire on their walls, with unguessed, looming mysteries lurking in their shadows, vaguely glimpsed by me as we ran through them. The lair of the Raider, those dim halls, I knew. And, at last, the narrow stair from one of them emerged onto the roof itself, and we stood at the point where that stair opened onto the great, flat roof, barring the way of the hordes in our final stand.

Behind us, on the great expanse of the roof, were low-walled, oval platforms of metal, great of size, stacked one upon another. Enough flying-platforms, I knew, to carry all the hordes below us down to the loot of Kom. And the foremost of our opponents saw them also, and yelled with savage triumph.

If we had fought fiercely before, we battled like supermen now, in a last spurt of energy. Our swords clicked and flashed like swift shuttles, weaving strands of death from enemy to enemy, as we used all the mad strength of despair to hold back the hordes for a last moment.

"_Mordieu!_" shouted D'Alord. "This is the end, comrades!"

I turned to answer him, then halted. From above, from the sun-flooded air of early morning, had sounded a long, rising shriek of wind, a piercing whistle of a rising gale. A fierce burst of wind struck us, and cold, ice-cold, flooded through my heart. There was a thundering of wind-sounds above, another buffeting gust of cold air, and then appeared abruptly, a hundred feet above us, the Raider!

"God!" muttered Lantin, behind me. The blades of our enemies and ourselves had ceased to clash, and with a common impulse we gazed up. The Raider's swirling mists contracted suddenly, his three orbs of green changed to purple, and he drifted gently, tauntingly, down toward us.

* * * * *

A howl of triumph went up from the hordes on the stair. Away down and around the spiraling stairway it went, down all their packed masses, down into the shaft to the pit itself, all taking up and passing on that savage, exultant shout.

For we had lost. Kethra had lost. The Raider had somehow eluded him, in time, and had come back to destroy us and to loose his hordes on the flying-platforms, to send them down to Kom in a rain of death, while Kethra vainly searched time for the Raider. We had lost.

Slowly, slowly, the Raider came down toward us, while the hordes below us watched with delighted expectancy. Spinning, twisting, it sank down until it hung a scant twenty feet above us, and we waited, helpless, for the destroying flashes from the central orbs.

Suddenly D'Alord stepped forward, and uttering a yell of defiance, he picked a sword from the floor, whirled it around his head and sent it hurtling spear-wise up toward the Raider.

It fell back, missed by yards. And now the gray, shapeless mass of the Raider spun and laced with inconceivable rapidity, while down upon us darted flash on flash of purple, destroying fire, from the central orbs.

The flashes fell short! Between us and the Raider was hanging a veil of transparent black, a tenuous black net that was suspended in midair above us, and against which the purple flashes splashed and stopped. I turned swiftly, and a little behind and above me was hovering the air-boat of Kethra. It moved toward us, and we stepped on it. And in that same instant, there appeared in the air all around us, above and around the temple and the Raider, score on score of the air-boats, crowded with the men of Kom.

From them darted a hundred black nets like the one that hung before us. The black veils closed upon the Raider, contracted, and while he spun and changed and twisted with mad speed, the veils contracted still until they were a black ball five feet across, in which he was prisoned. Then, from Kethra's air-boat and from all around us, there darted flash on flash of orange flame, which struck the black ball, burned fiercely for a moment, and then vanished. In the air there drifted only a shining mist, and then that too was swept away!

Now, from all the hovering air-boats came the thrumming of the sound-rays, directed at the temple and the city, from all the scores of cars that hung above that city. The ground beneath pitched, heaved up torturedly, and then the city collapsed, sank down with a thundering, ear-splitting roar into the great pit that lay beneath, the earth over the cavern being shattered by the disintegrating vibrations of the sound-rays.

All the city, with the great temple below us, crashed down, and vanished in a mighty cloud of dust. The dust hung, cleared, disappeared. And beneath lay nothing but a great depression in the earth, a vast, raw bowl in the earth's surface, with here and there a white fragment showing in the brown earth. Under that huge sunken bowl, I well knew, lay the city of the cylinders, with its Kanlars and soulless slaves, and under it, too, lay the city of the pit, and the people of the pit, the thousands of fierce warriors who had pressed us up the stair so savagely, seeking to carry destruction and death down to a peaceful city.

Standing there on Kethra's car, we surveyed the scene in silence. And there was silence all around us, for from all the massed cars came no word or shout, the men on them gazing down into the torn depression below as though loth to believe that their victory was won at last, the evil menace of the Raider crushed forever. So we looked, there in the hushed silence.

In the east, the sun was rising higher ... higher....

_CHAPTER 18_

EIGHT MINUTES!

It was hours later, toward the end of the hot, brilliant afternoon, that we parted at last from Kethra and his men. On the green earth around that brown pit where once had stood the city of cylinders, the Khlun air-boats were resting, ready for their long flight homeward across the ice. Our own time-car lay behind us, for in that tense moment before the city had collapsed under the sound-rays' vibrations, a hovering air-boat had spied our car in the little glade where we had left it, and had managed to raise it from the ground before the crash. And now, with our four friends, we stood beside it, bidding Kethra farewell.

We had heard from him the story, as amazing as our own, of what had befallen his forces when they pursued the Raider into the future, how they had chased him almost to the world's end, indeed, pursuing him into time so far that the sun grew old and small, and the world a world of death and twilight; of how they had forced the Raider to desert the Kanlar cars it held, which they had destroyed; and of how it had eluded them in time and come racing back to confront us on the temple's roof. He told, too, of how the messenger sent through time by Lantin and me had finally found him and brought him back in the nick of time to destroy Raider, hordes and city.

Kethra, and all his men, had pressed us to return with them to Kom, but we refused. An intolerable nostalgia, a longing for our own time, filled us, and our four friends were as eager to return to their own centuries as we were. And so, standing with them beside our time-car, we bade our friends of Kom farewell.

"You do wisely, men of the past," said Kethra. "It is not good that a man should leave his own time and venture into others. The secret of time-traveling is an evil secret. And when our fleet has returned to Kom, every car in it will be stripped of the time-wave apparatus, and all those time-wave mechanisms will be destroyed by us. For now that our end has been accomplished, and the Raider destroyed, none of us will ever again venture into past or future."

"You speak truth," said Lantin, sadly; "for though we came on through the ages ourselves, we could not save our friend. And when we have returned our four friends here to their own ages, and reached ours again, we too will destroy this car. And the secret of time-traveling will remain with us, a secret."

We each grasped Kethra's hand, waved farewell to the hundreds in the air-boats on the ground around us, and then entered our own car. With our four friends, its interior was crowded, but there was enough room for Lantin to manipulate the controls, and so the car rose swiftly, circled for a moment above the air-boats on the ground, then fled swiftly toward the southwest.

Behind us the green, warm land of the Kanlars faded to a speck against the ice, and as we sped on, we moved through time also, passing swiftly into the past.

* * * * *

Three hours later we hung above a vast highland country, having penetrated into the past to the year 1520, four hundred years before our own time. And below us hung the white city of Tenochtitlan, metropolis of the Aztec people.

We slanted down toward it, through the darkness, for we had come to it at night. Toward the city's edge was the glimmer of a broad lake, and from great pyramids flashed burning fires of crimson. In its dark streets was a stir of movement, and up to us came the roar of a fierce battle, with cries of wounded, and twang of bows, and here and there the roar of an arquebus or cannon.

Ixtil leaned toward the window, gazed down with tense interest. "It is my people," he said, turning to us, "my city, my time."

And so, swooping down upon the city through the concealing darkness, we halted the car on a flat, white roof, and Ixtil stepped out. He turned, and with more emotion than I had ever yet seen upon his fierce face, bade us farewell.

D'Alord, Denham, Fabrius, each wrung his hand silently, and then the Aztec turned to me. He drew the saw-edged sword from his belt, and handed it to me, hilt-foremost.

"Take it," he told me. "I can give you nothing else, and it may remind you of our fight on the stair, comrade, when you have reached your own time."

I took the weapon, stammered my thanks, and he inclined his head gravely, then turned and sped from the roof, down through the building to the battle in the street below, racing toward it with fierce haste.

D'Alord broke the silence that followed. "What a fighter!" he exclaimed. "And now he is gone. Well, on, friends!"

So we rose again from the roof, above the body-choked streets, where we knew the conquistadors of Cortez strove with the city's people. The car rose high, and then raced east with the power opened to the last notch.

In the hours that followed, as we rocketed over the gray Atlantic at a speed of nearly ten miles a minute, we were again speeding into the past, back still farther, so that when the green, leg-shaped peninsula of Italy lay beneath us, we had gone back to the First Century of the Christian era, as nearly as possible to the year which Fabrius claimed as his own.

We left him there, on a bare, grassy hilltop outside the city of Rome. Before parting, he too unbuckled his heavy shortsword and handed it to me. "Ixtil gave you his sword," he said, "and when it is your car that has brought me back to my own world, I can do no less." He stepped back and said simply, "_Vale!_" and then we had sped on into time and left him.

We turned, now, in time, sped on to the first year of the Seventeenth Century, and in space fled north till we hung over southern France. And with D'Alord guiding our course from the window, exclaiming at every familiar landmark on the ground below, we came finally to the little village where he desired to be left.

"'Twas there I was stationed when the Raider seized me, curse him!" he told us; "so set me down outside it."

Again the car came down to the ground, in a field beyond the village, just at sunrise. D'Alord opened the car's door, then hesitated.

"_Sacré!_" he exclaimed. "When I was in the pit I was afire to get back to my own time, but now I half wish that we could have stayed together, comrades. But Kethra was right. Every man to his own time."

He drew and regarded his long, heavy sword. "It's for you, comrade," he told me. "Like Ixtil and Fabrius, it's all I can give you. Though I don't think you'll need it to make you remember our fight on the stair, eh?" His laugh rang out. "_Dieu_, what a fight was that!"

He grasped the hands of Denham and of Lantin and me, and with forced gayety slapped us on the back, then sprang quickly out of the car, and stood beside it. I closed the door, and our car rose swiftly above the field. And looking down, I saw the receding figure of D'Alord, still standing where we had left him, waving his hat toward us in a final gesture of farewell, the wind of dawn blowing through his hair.

And so we left him, and raising the car high above the earth, sped back again across the broad Atlantic. And too, we came on farther into time until when we came into view of the New Jersey coasts, we had come on into time a space of almost two hundred years, for the dials registered the fact that our car had reached the year 1777, when Denham had been seized by the Raider.

We had offered to land him in England, but he had refused. "I'm a soldier," he told us, "and it would be desertion. Let me down at Philadelphia, or near it." So the car planed down through the darkness to a field beyond Camden, and there came to rest in deep snow, for we had stopped our time-progress in the dead of winter, and at night.

Denham stepped out of the car, and we followed him. There was no moon, but the stars above were brilliant, the sheen of their light reflected from the glistening, silent fields around us. It was bitterly cold, and we shivered, standing there.

"And so the last of us part," said Denham. "Curse me if I like it, either. Think of it, Wheeler: Ixtil and Fabrius and D'Alord are already dead and dust, have been for centuries."

"They're not, Denham," I said. "They're only separated from us by time, as well as space. At least we have learned one thing, that time is largely a delusion, after all, and that the men of one age are not much different from those of another."

"It's so," he said. "And I never had better friends than Ixtil and D'Alord and Fabrius, and Lantin and you. We've seen some things together, since we met in the city of cylinders, Wheeler. Well, we shan't meet again. And so--good-bye."

He shook my hand, and Lantin's, and then, like the other three, drew and handed to me his slender rapier.

"You have four swords now, Wheeler. And each from a different time. It may be that they'll remind you of all we went through together, in the city of cylinders and in the pit below it. I am only sorry that we could not find your friend Cannell in time to save him. But it was fate."

"It was fate," Lantin repeated, "and he died nobly. So, in a measure, I am content."

Lantin and I stepped back into our car, now. Outside, as we rose above the ground, Denham called to us again.

"Good-bye, Wheeler! Good-bye, Lantin!"

I answered, waving to him at the car's window, and thus we left him, a dark, dwindling figure against the starlit fields of snow. We raced north, now, and sped on toward our own time, back to the year, the month, the day, when we had started. We swept down upon pinnacled Manhattan, through the warm darkness of the summer night, and after hovering for a time above the perplexing maze of buildings, sank gently down upon the roof from which we had started.

The car stopped, and we stepped out on the roof, looking around us strangely. The scene was the same as when we had left, the panorama of the city's lights around us, the brilliant stars above, and the stabbing search-lights of the anchored battleship.

Lantin stepped across the roof into his apartment. He snapped on the lights, then called to me. When I entered the room and stood beside him, he pointed mutely toward a clock above the fireplace. I looked, and a strange feeling swept over me.

We had made our momentous start from the roof at 10 o'clock exactly, when we had first ventured into time. And now it was but eight minutes past 10, but eight minutes later in that same night.

Eight minutes!

We had gone on into the future fifteen thousand years, had lain for days imprisoned, in the city of the cylinders and the city of the pit. We had met our friends of the pit, had planned and executed our daring escape, had fled madly to our car, pursued by the guards, and had then flashed south across countless leagues of ice. We had stayed for days at Kom, amid the wonders of Kom, had raced back north with the great fleet of Kethra, had met and battled the Kanlars, and had held the ravening thousands of the pit in check upon the great stair, with our friends. We had seen the Raider destroyed, had sped back in time to hang above the wonder-city of the Aztecs, while Aztec and Spaniard battled in the streets below us. Had sped across the world to Rome, in the days of its imperial glory, back through time to Seventeenth Century France, and so on to our own land, to stop once and part with the last of our friends and then speed down to the very roof from which we had made our start. From the far past to the far future, we had ranged through time, from the Rome of the Cæsars to the mighty city of the Khluns.

Eight minutes!

_EPILOGUE_

So our great adventure ended, and so this record of it comes to a close. We destroyed the time-car, and burned all of our written records of the experiments connected with it. For never again, through the knowledge that we gathered, shall men venture into time.

Yet because we felt that some part of what we had learned belonged to the world of science, Lantin and I, in this history and in our two technical works, have striven to record part of what we saw and did. Reading, men will not be able to build time-cars for themselves, but they may gain suggestions and do work that will make better our own life, our own world.

Lantin and I live quietly enough, now, sharing a small Long Island cottage. Yet for all our work at the Foundation, and our contacts with our friends there, I do not think that either of us takes much interest in the world around us, or in our fellow-men. I think that the day's best hours, for each of us, are those of evening, when we can sit quietly together, recalling to mind the things we saw and did in that far time which the world will not see for fifteen thousand years to come.

We speak often of that strange being of alien terror which we called the Raider. Speak, too, of the Kanlars and their city of cylinders, of the barbaric city of the pit, and the Babel-like hordes that filled it, of Kom and the men of Kom. And sometimes, gazing musingly into our fireplace in the length of the winter evenings, Lantin will speak of Cannell, whom we crossed a hundred centuries to rescue, and who plunged down to a voluntary death to save his friend.

Always, though, sooner or later, there comes a halt to our speech and we look up with a common impulse to a spot where a sheaf of four swords is fastened to the wall. Four strange weapons, from four different ages.

One is a thick shortsword of bronze, its edges scarred and dented. Another is a saw-toothed weapon, the like of which you may see in more than one museum, but which I saw flashing in deadly action. The third blade is a long one, a silver fleur-de-lys inlaid upon its heavy hilt. And the last is a slender, flexible rapier, which took toll of half a hundred lives in our last mad battle.

Where are they now, our four friends, who stood with us on the great stair when six men held back thousands, who planned and fought and bled with us until together we brought about the destruction of the Kanlars and the Raider? Shall we ever see them again?

I do not know. But one thing I do know, that was known even to the supreme wisdom of Kethra and the men of Kom. And that is that there is a power above man's, a wisdom above his, secrets that will never be his. So if, on the other side of death, there lies a timeless world, we'll yet foregather there with our four friends, strike hands in friendship once again, and range that world together, as once we ranged through time.

THE END