Astounding Stories, June, 1931 Part 30

Presently it materialized! Mary and I were helpless. We stood watching Tugh, as he crouched on the floor of our cage near its opened doorway.

A ray cylinder was in his hand, with a wire running to a battery in the cage corner. He had forced Mary and me to stand at the window where Harl would see us and be lured to approach.

From Harl's cage, five hundred feet across the blackened forest glade of that day of 762, Harl came cautiously forward. Abruptly Tugh fired.

His cylinder shot a horizontal beam of intense actinic light. It struck Harl full, and he fell.

Swiftly his body decomposed; and soon in the sunlight of the glade lay a sagging heap of black and white garments enveloping the skeleton of what a moment before had been a man!

CHAPTER XIV

A Very Human Princess

That night in 1777 near the home of the murdered Major Atwood brought to Larry the most strangely helpless feeling he had ever experienced.

He crouched with Tina beneath a tree in a corner of the field, gazing with horror at the little moonlit s.p.a.ce by the fence where their Time-traveling vehicle should have been but now was gone.

Marooned in 1777! Larry had not realized how desolately remote this Revolutionary New York was from the great future city in which he had lived. The same s.p.a.ce; but what a gulf between him and 1935! What a barrier of Time, impa.s.sable without the s.h.i.+ning cage!

They crouched, whispering. "But why would he have gone, Tina?"

"I don't know. Harl is very careful; so something or someone must have pa.s.sed along here, and he left, rather than cause a disturbance. He will return, of course."

"I hope so," whispered Larry fervently. "We are marooned here, Tina!

Heavens, it would be the end of us!"

"We must wait. He will return."

They huddled in the shadow of the tree. Behind them there was a continued commotion at the Atwood home, and presently the mounted British officers came thudding past on the road, riding for headquarters at the Bowling Green to report the strange Atwood murder.

The night wore on. Would Harl return? If not to-night, then probably to-morrow, or to-morrow night. In spite of his endeavor to stop correctly, he could so easily miss this night, these particular hours.

Harl had met his death, as I have described. We never knew exactly what he did, of course, after leaving that night of 1777. It seems probable, however, that some pa.s.ser-by startled him into flas.h.i.+ng away into Time. Then he must have seen with his instrument evidence of the other cage pa.s.sing, and impulsively followed it--to his death in the burned forest of the year 762.

Larry and Tina waited. The dawn presently began paling the stars; and still Harl did not come. The little s.p.a.ce by the fence corner was empty.

"It will soon be daylight," Larry whispered. "We can't stay here: we'll be discovered."

They were anachronisms in this world; misfits; futuristic beings who dared not show themselves.

Larry touched his companion--the slight little creature who was a Princess in her far-distant future age. But to Larry now she was just a girl.

"Frightened, Tina?"

"A little."

He laughed softly. "It would be fearful to be marooned here permanently, wouldn't it? You don't think Harl would desert us?

Purposely, I mean?"

"No, of course not."

"Then we'll expect him to-morrow night. He wouldn't stop in the daylight, I guess."

"I don't think so. He would reason that I would not expect him."

"Then we must find shelter, and food, and be here to-morrow night. It seems long to us, Tina, but in the cage it's just an instant--just a trifle different setting of the controls."

She smiled her pale, stern smile. "You have learned quickly, Larry.

That is true."

A sudden emotion swept him. His hand found hers; and her fingers answered the pressure of his own. Here in this remote Time-world they felt abruptly drawn together.

He murmured, "Tina, you are--" But he never finished.

The cage was coming! They stood tense, watching the fence corner where, in the flat dawn light, the familiar misty shadow was gathering. Harl was returning to them.

The cage flashed silently into being. They stood peering, ready to run to it. The door slid aside.

But it was not Harl who came out. It was Tugh, the cripple. He stood in the doorway, a thick-set, barrel-chested figure of a man in a wide leather jacket, a broad black belt and short flaring leather pantaloons.

"Tugh!" exclaimed Tina.

The cripple advanced. "Princess, is it you?" He was very wary. His gaze shot at Larry and back to Tina. "And who is this?"

A hideously repulsive fellow, Larry thought this Tugh. He saw his shriveled, bent legs, crooked hips, and wide thick shoulders set askew--a goblin, in a leather jerkin. His head was overlarge, with a bulging white forehead and a mane of scraggly black hair shot with grey. But Larry could not miss the intellectuality marking his heavy-jowled face; the keenness of his dark-eyed gaze.

These were instant impressions. Tina had drawn Larry forward. "Where is Harl?" she demanded imperiously. "How have you come to have the cage, Tugh?"

"Princess, I have much to tell," he answered, and his gaze roved the field. "But it is dangerous here; I am glad I have found you. Harl sent me to this night, but I struck it late. Come, Tina--and your strange-looking friend."

It impressed Larry then, and many times afterward, that Tugh's gaze at him was mistrustful, wary.

"Come, Larry," said Tina. And again she demanded of Tugh, "I ask you, where is Harl?"

"At home. Safe at home, Princess." He gestured toward Major Atwood's house, which now in the growing daylight showed more plainly under its shrouding trees. "That s.p.a.ce off there holds our other cage as you know, Tina. You and Harl were pursuing that other cage?"

"Yes," she agreed.

They had stopped at the doorway, where Tugh stood slightly inside.

Larry whispered:

"What does this mean, Tina?"

Tugh said, "Migul, the mechanism, is running wild in the other cage.