Page:Amazing Stories Volume 15 Number 12.djvu/77

Rh her eyes—opened them, closed them again—and then was blinking, staring with wordless wonderment. Strange trick of fate that after a lifetime of darkness her first vision should bring so weird, fantastic a sight as this beyond our window—the motley little street in the red-bronze twilight with the prismatic rainbow of the distant projector bathing it.

"And what is this?" Tork stood behind us. He saw Doris; he understood. For that second, so great a wrath was upon him that his contorted face seemed suddenly inhuman. There was a little hiss from his belt—a tiny darting point of light.

Quite visibly it floated across the room, struck young Allaire in the face; point of light which suddenly expanded to be a puff of blackness. Allaire stood wavering. His face was a ghastly, puckered black mask, with empty eye-sockets and goggling mouth.

Then he fell. Tork, with a burst of laughter, strode from the room. We bent over the dying Allaire. His groping hands found Doris, clung to her.

"I am very glad," he murmured. "You see—in my own world I was condemned to death—disgraced. I—tried an operation on the daughter of our ruler—hopeless but I tried it—and failed. I am glad I could—help you—"

His breath suddenly stopped; he was gone.

We sat presently—Blake, Doris and I—at our little meal. The woman Rhadana did not join us. At the doorway, she stood somberly staring. The last meal for Blake and me. And for Doris—what? We had no chance to plan, even if planning anything could be more than futile, fatuous hope.

The swaggering giant Greggson came in and sat close to us, watching us with his grinning, leering gaze. He said little; but I noticed that his gaze often strayed to the watching, voluptuous Rhadana. Was Greggson too, planning something for tonight?

Tork's New Era! This new civilization where he thought that he could rule supreme! The irony of it struck at me. There is nowhere in the Universe—no time-world from the Beginning to the End—where man could go and avoid the passions of greed, love, hate, jealousy, because he brings them with him. Tork's Empire was hardly yet set up, and in this single room of this one little house all of us sat pondering, brooding with different motives—smouldering passions waiting the spark of opportunity to flare them into violence and bloodshed.

"All right, we start now," Greggson said suddenly. “You two men—I will take you."

OR an hour past there had been the commotion of preparations outside. The red-bronze twilight was long—Earth had slowed its rotation as it sank nearer and nearer the dying Sun. There was still faint daylight in the west, engulfed by the glare of the village lights as Greggson, despite our protests, pushed Blake and me from the house. Other men leaped on us; shoved us along the weird, busy little street until beyond its end, we were flung to the top of a little dais, where we crouched with a red light bathing us.

At first, in the crimson glare, I could see nothing. There was just the vast murmur of blended sounds—voices, the tramp of feet, the faint hissing throb of the lectronic lights. Then my eyes grew accustomed to the radiance.

To one side, on a long platform, the lines of the several hundred girls were ranged. Indescribable collection of young females from a score of time-worlds. They were all still dressed in the garments in which they had been