Page:Amazing Stories Volume 15 Number 12.djvu/67

Rh Long, low dark shape now.

Lightless. Soundless. No! There was the faint sound of a frightened girl's voice; then another, checked by a low gutteral command. And the sound suddenly, of a metal door grinding open. An oval doorway yawned in the ship's side; the figures of men came out.

Three A.M. A distant church spire in the city behind us boomed the hour, floating here on the heavy night-air. Abruptly figures were around us in the woods; arriving men. A man carying the limp form of a girl. From the ship a tiny beam of white light struck on them. Tork! I recognized him. But more than that Blake and I both recognized the unconscious, inert girl. So great a horror swept me that for a second the weird scene blurred before me.

The girl was Doris!

LAKE and I leaped to our feet together. Neither of us were armed. We did not think of that. There was nothing save the horror of Doris being carried into the doorway of the weird ghost-ship. I recall that I shouted wildly, and that Blake seized a rock which he flung in futile frenzy as we ran forward.

But suddenly we stopped. Blake stumbled, fell and lay twitching, jerking as though he were bound by invisible ropes to the ground. A second later the thing hit me. A force; it seemed to jump from the ground into my feet—or from me, flowing down into the ground. My feet struck. I swayed forward, then back. With all my strength I lifted one foot, but it snapped back to the ground. Rooted there. A chuckling laugh came through the darkness. A voice said in queer, clipped English:

"Not to kill them. The master says bring them. The time-ship leaves in one minute. There is no other stop until the end of the voyage."

Weird figures engulfed Blake and me. For a moment we fought widly. I saw Blake being carried bodily as he struggled. Then something was crushing on my head. My senses faded, with just enough consciousness left so that I was aware of being hoisted into the dark doorway. It slid closed with a soft grind of metal. Then there was a faint throbbing hum—and a shock hurled into all my body so that what little consciousness I had left was flung from me.

My senses must have come back within a few seconds. I was aware throbbing hum—and a shock hurled [sic] window near me. Then it faded into night again. The daylight and night of Tomorrow!

I was being carried through Time!

had been carried forward, into the round turret room at the bow of the ship. The humming had faded now to a faint throb. With full returning consciousness I found myself lying on the floor grid.

The figures of men were here in a flat, dead-gray luminescence—a roughly clad, bearded fellow who squatted near me, smoking a weird-looking pipe, with a small cylinder weapon on his lap; and a group across the circular room, playing some sort of game with a board between them. Incongruous figures, their dress suggesting the past of New York City, and its future.

Their murmured voices sounded with fragments of English, yet so different of wording and intonation that some could barely understand the others. Comrades they were, but they seemed