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Title: The Land where Time Stood Still
Date of first publication: 1936
Author: Arthur Leo Zagat (1896-1949)
Date first posted: June 12 2013
Date last updated: June 12 2013
Faded Page eBook #20130622

This eBook was produced by: Delphine Lettau, Mary Meehan
& the online Distributed Proofreaders Canada team at http://www.pgdpcanada.net




                    The LAND where TIME STOOD STILL

                         By ARTHUR LEO ZAGAT

     Prehistoric Hordes Prove a Lesser Danger, Compared with the
     Brain-Man of Future Eons!


                      Thrilling Wonder Stories

                           Vol. 8, No. 1,

                            August 1936




     Ronnie Statton, with 20th century courage, Battles the
     Science-Monsters of an Age Unborn!




CHAPTER I

_Into Nothingness_


It was, perhaps, the almost unbelievable antiquity of Silbury Hill that
oppressed Ronald Stratton with a queasy premonition of disaster. He
thought again of the old legend: that anyone entering the stone rings on
top of Silbury Hill between dusk and dawn vanished, leaving no trace.
The thought lingered.

The twilight silence, the low-lying layer of ground mist veiling his
footing, the chill of evening damp striking into his very bones,
combined to trouble the young American with sinister unreality.
Something of that feeling had been with him all during his journey
through England's South Country; had troubled him as he stood on
Salisbury Plain where, twenty years before, had drilled the father he
had never known, proud in the uniform of his ancestral land.

Tall and clean-limbed and lithe the American volunteer must have been
then, bronze-skinned and frank-eyed as his son now was who retraced in
a nostalgic memorial tour the route of his hero father's last voyage.
Silbury was part of that sentimental pilgrimage--

Ron Stratton suddenly stumbled, sprawling into a grass-hidden ditch. He
rolled, caught at whipping tendrils of a bush, pulled himself to his
feet. He took a step forward--into the wrenching, frantic instant of
sheer nothingness!

It was as if he had walked over the brink of a sheer precipice, save
that, though a bottomless abyss yawned fearfully beneath him, he oddly
knew no sensation of falling. The world, the universe had simply
vanished from beneath him.

His foot came down on solid ground. Stratton pulled in a gasping, choked
breath between his teeth. He'd never before experienced anything like
that moment of terrific giddiness, of deathlike vertigo. Queer. The
light seemed to have grown stronger. It filtered through the trees with
a reddish grow somehow eerie....

The trees! How had he come into this forest? There hadn't been any trees
at all, a moment ago! Was he dreaming?

Something scampered through the brush behind Stratton, and he whirled to
the sound. A brown beastlet popped into sight between two rugged boles,
a perfectly formed horse not knee-high to the man. Great, limpid eyes
were startled in the miniature head--and then the creature had spun
around and vanished.

       *       *       *       *       *

Ronald Stratton stared at the spot where it had been. He managed to get
himself moving, managed to get to where he could look down upon the
hoof-prints. The tracks were unmistakable. Three-toed, those were the
traces of an Eohippus, of that forgotten ancestor of the horse extinct
before man's first anthropoid progenitor learned to swing along arboreal
highways by four clutching paws and a prehensile tail.

Stratton's scalp made a tight cap for his skull. His hands were out in a
peculiar, thrusting gesture, as though he were trying to push away some
dreadful thing that was closing in upon him. What had happened to him?
Where was he?

A scream sliced the forest stillness, a woman's scream, high and shrill
and compact with terror. Stratton's head jerked up to it, to the swift
threshing of someone running through the thicket. Something white
flicked among the trees, took shape in the form of a running girl. Long
blond braids streamed behind her, and her face was as white as the white
robe fluttering about her slim form.

Her fear-dilated eyes saw him as she went past. "Help me, I prithee,"
she screamed; and her archaic appeal was blotted out by a horrid,
bestial roar blasting from leaf-veiled aisles whence she came, by the
thunder of a far heavier body pursuing her.

The underbrush tossed in the grip of a whirling tornado, parted to the
plunge of a huge, hairy creature who ran half-crouched and bellowing.

The American leaped for the monster, flailed frantic fists at a brutal,
leathery visage. His blows pounded against rock-hard bone, pitifully
ineffectual. Something struck him, catapulted him backward. For the
first time he saw clearly the thing he had attacked, and amazement
seared through him.

It--it wasn't a gorilla, despite the stiff black hair covering its
big-thewed haunches, despite its chinless, flat-nosed, beetling-browed
countenance. A ragged pelt was slung about its waist. It clutched
a wooden-handled, flint-headed axe in one spatulate-fingered hand;
and in its lurid, beady eyes there was a groping, grotesque sort of
intelligence not quite bestial. It was a man, a man from out the dawn
of time. A Neanderthal man, whose like had vanished from the earth
countless eons ago.

The ape-man's black, thick lips snarled back from yellow fangs. His
neckless throat pulsated, vented a nerve-shattering, insensate roar.
Threat was fierce in that horrid ululation, but underlying the menace
a singular note of inquiry seemed to signal a bewilderment in the
creature's small brain as great as Stratton's own. That was what had
checked its charge, what held it now, momentarily hesitant.

In that instant of reprieve Stratton heard the bush rustle behind him,
felt a twitch at his right hand. His fingers closed on something hard
that fitted into his palm.

"Mayhap this dagger will aid thee against the ogre," a whisper came to
him. "This blade, and my prayers."

       *       *       *       *       *

The aborigine's bellow blasted again. He sprang, catapulted down
upon Stratton, his flint axe arcing before him. The youth's frantic
side-spring saved his skull, but the Stone Age weapon hit his left
shoulder, numbing it. Stratton struck out blindly with the dagger, felt
its point strike flesh and sink sickeningly into it. Then the hairy body
of his antagonist bore him down. He thudded appallingly to the ground.

Harsh hands clamped his throat, cut off breath. His lungs labored,
tortured by lack of air. Blood roared in his ears, and his eyes bulged
from their sockets.

And suddenly air pulled in between Stratton's teeth as the strangling
hold on his throat relaxed. The insupportable mass crushing him was
abruptly flaccid, lifeless. Fiery stabs cut Stratton's chest as he
gasped in saving breaths. Instinctively he heaved off from himself the
anthropoid's limp mass.

"Marry! Thou hast slain him with a single thrust of the poniard!" The
girl's voice was thrilled, applauding. "See how his black blood doth
flow!"

His vision cleared. The girl stood above him, briar-tears gashing her
robe to reveal tantalizing glimpses of lissome curves. Her blue eyes
danced with excitement in a face small-featured, red-lipped, somehow
pagan in the upthrust of high cheekbones, in the blunt modeling of its
tiny chin. Even in that moment Stratton's heart skipped a beat at the
elfin beauty of that countenance.

"I wouldn't have had it to thrust if it wasn't for you," he grunted,
struggling erect. "You've got a lot of sand, young lady."

She looked puzzled. "Sand? Prithee, what meanest thou?"

"That's American slang for courage." Why was she talking in that
confoundedly queer lingo? Even if she was dressed up for a masquerade,
what had happened here should have shaken her out of it.

The girl shrugged. "Nay, but thy speech groweth ever more strange.
And thy garb, too, is passing queer." She gazed about her. Her pupils
widened with sudden fright. "What--what land is this, what forest?" she
cried out.

His own bemusement swept back on Stratton. "I--I don't know," he
faltered. "I was hoping you'd tell me that."

She stepped backward in awe. "By the Holy Rood, 'tis an enchantment some
sorcerer hath cast upon us! Look you. But a moment hence I hurried with
milady's message to her lover that Sir Aglavaine hath returned betimes
from Arthur's court. Seeking to hasten back so that I might bend knee at
vesper crisons, I dared cross the ancient mound that riseth betwixt the
castle and Avebury Town. As I attained its crest some strange malaise
o'ercame me; and then, and then--"

"Yes," Ron Stratton prompted. "What happened?"

"And then there were these trees about me and the fearsome face of yon
ogre peered at me from among them. I fled. He pursued. I came upon thee
and--and the rest thou knowest."

Stratton shook his head violently, as though to jar his brain into
functioning. "Wait a minute. What's all this you're saying about Sir
Aglavaine, Arthur's court, a castle? Are you kidding me?"

She looked at him dumbly, as though she did not understand. "Kidding?"

"All right. Skip it. I'm having trouble understanding you, too. What
year do you think this is?"

"What year?" She backed farther, warily, as though she were about to
dash away. "Forsooth, hath bemusement clouded thy accompt of time? 'Tis
five hundred and a score years since Our Lord was born in Bethlehem."

       *       *       *       *       *

Little chill prickles scampered along Stratton's spine. She believed it!
She believed that she was telling the truth. But--

His eyes slitted as his gaze left her, to shift from the corpse of the
Neanderthal man to the tracks of the Eohippus, and back to this girl,
who seemed to have stepped out of the pages of Malory's _Morte d'Arthur_.

If his memory of paleontology did not fail him, at least a million years
ranged between the tiny horse and himself. It was possible that the
animal and the beast-man were survivals, by some inconceivable quirk of
fate, from the misty ages in which they belonged. They couldn't tell
him. But _she_ could. She had. She told him that the present was to her
A. D. 520. To him it was 1936. That meant--What did it mean?

"Everything's mixed up here," he groaned. "Time's all mixed up. It's as
if the universe were the rim of a great wheel, whirling through Time. As
if, somehow, we have left that rim, shot inward along different spokes
whose outer ends are different years, far apart, and reached the wheel's
axis where all the year-spokes join. The center point of the hub, that
doesn't move at all through Time, because it _is_ the center. Where
there is no Time. Where the past and the present and the future are all
one. A land, in some weird other dimension, where Time stands still."




CHAPTER II

_Trapped by Flame_


The girl's lambent eyes flicked about, returned to him. "Marry," she
sighed. "An' it doth appear to have been of no avail."

Ronald Stratton started. "What was of no avail?"

"The spell thou hast essayed. See, the woods still cluster around us,
and Silbury Hill hath not reappeared."

In spite of his perturbation the youth grinned. "I don't blame you for
thinking it some incantation. It sounds pretty goofy to me. Looks like
we're going to be together for quite a while, so maybe we'd better get
acquainted. What's your name?"

"I am called Elaise." She dipped in a graceful courtesy. "Tirewoman I am
to Milady Melisante, spouse to Sir Aglavaine of Silbury Keep."

"I'm Ronald Stratton--Ronny to my friends."

"Ronny. It falleth trippingly from the tongue. Ronny."

"Sounds swell when _you_ say it. Strikes me we'd better try to find
some way out of here. I'm not hankering to spend the night in these
woods. Might be damned unhealthy, judging from what we've seen here
already."

"Whither thou goest I follow, Squire Ronny." She said it demurely, but
he could have sworn there was a glint of amusement in the blue eyes over
which her luxuriant lashes drooped. "Having saved my life from the ogre
it is forfeit to thee. All I have and am is thine to command."

"The hell you say!" Stratton muttered. "Come on then." Was the minx
laughing at him?

"Perchance thou mayst have need of this, Ronny," he heard her say behind
him. He threw a glance backward over his shoulder, saw her tugging the
dagger from the ape-man's breast. She got it out, started after him,
wiping the blood from its blade with a handful of leaves. He shuddered
at her callousness. Then he recalled the brawling, ribald, tempestuous
age from which she came. Handling a gory dagger then was no more than
cleaning a muddy tennis ball to the girl of now....

_Then--Now._ Those terms no longer had any meaning. The concepts of
a dead past, a living present, a future yet unborn--all were false,
utterly false. All Time exists simultaneously, in the same manner that
all space exists simultaneously. Minutes, hours, years, centuries are
merely measurements of location in terms of time; just as yards, miles,
light-years are measurements of location in terms of space.

Space-time, time-space--the terms of the mathematical physicists, their
theories that had seemed to Ronny Stratton's realistic mind so much
fairy-tale nonsense, had suddenly become breathing truths. If he had
only paid more attention to them, tried to understand them! Didn't
Einstein talk about ether-warps, about eddies in the flux of space and
time? Was there such an eddy on Silbury Hill, through which he had
slipped into some alien dimension?

Did the ancient Druids know it; was that why they had selected the spot
for their savage rituals? Had they erected those monstrous circles to
warn their charges from the very fate that had overtaken Elaise and
himself?

       *       *       *       *       *

"Ronny! Ronny!" The girl's cry recalled Stratton to awareness of his
surroundings. "What enchanted domain is this?"

They were at the edge of the forest, at the edge of the plateau it
covered. Ten feet from where they stood, the terrain dropped away in a
precipitous, headlong descent.

Sheer down for a thousand feet the high cliff fell, and far below a
great plain spread mile after mile to a vague and murky horizon, a
limitless expanse of tumbled, grotesque rock. Queerly angular, strangely
distorted, the tortured stone soared in needle-like spires toward the
lurid sky, or lay strewn in the fractured fragments of some gigantic
cataclysm; piled here in gigantic mounds, there flattened to jagged
fields.

Nowhere in that far-flung tumulus was there any sign of verdure, nowhere
the glint of water; the hint of human habitation.

But it was not alone the infinite desolation of that vast vista that
gave it the eerie, ominous cast of a nightmare landscape. Color ran riot
there. Violent greens warred with oranges virulent as the venom of the
cobra. Fiery scarlet streamed shrieking between the yellow of a finch's
breast and blue cold as Polar ice.

"Ronny!" Elaise had shrunk against him. Stratton was abruptly conscious
of the quivering warmth of her body against his, of the fragrance of her
hair in his nostrils. "See there. What manner of beings are those that
dwell in this outland of hell?"

His arm went around her, drawing her closer still, but his gaze followed
the gesture of her shaking hand. There was movement, just below. He saw
them....

Apparently they had come out of some cavern in the face of the very
cliff on whose brink he stood, and they were half walking, half
crawling, as though seeking to take advantage of every bit of shelter
the broken ground offered. Dwarfed though they were by the great
height, Stratton could yet sense in their poses an odd combination of
fear and aggressiveness. They were both hunter and hunted. They were
stalking some as yet unseen enemy, dreading him and yet determined to
attack him.

The American was by this time beyond astonishment, yet a chill prickle
crawled his spine as he gazed down on the curious file. Their leader was
a Roman centurion, the short skirt of his peplum swishing against swart
thighs, breast and back protected by burnished armor, small round shield
on one arm, stubby sword in the other.

He was followed by a squat, half-naked individual whose long blond hair
and yellow, walrus mustachios set him off as one of the Britons whom
Cæsar's legions conquered. Behind came a gigantic, steel-capped Viking
with strung draw-bow, then a hairy aborigine.... Had the eddy on Silbury
Hill plucked from out of the dead years one of each race of England's
long history to make up that small company? Jute, Pict, Saxon, they were
all there, bound together with their common trait of cruel savagery!

       *       *       *       *       *

The shadow of a cloud drifted across the great plain. The Roman saw it,
crouched suddenly low behind an emerald rock. The others dropped prone.
Stratton was aware of a whirring sound. A flash of light darted across
the field of his vision. The Briton--_vanished_!

Where he had lain was a small pit in the rock, its edges glowing red-hot!

The faint sound of a barked order came up to Stratton. The men he
watched sprang up, dashed helter-skelter for the shelter of the cliff
whence they came. Before they passed from sight two others had whiffed
into nothingness with the appalling spontaneity of the first. The
whirring was louder, seemed to beat all about the watchers on the cliff
with some indescribable threat.

Something was in the air, level with Stratton, an egg-shaped metallic
object suspended there without visible support. It flashed on him
that this was the source of the spark that he had seen smash three
humans into nothingness. Elaise whimpered, watching the wingless flyer
hover--and then it was darting straight toward them!

Terror fanged the youth. His muscles exploded to throw him backward into
the obscurity of the forest, carrying Elaise with him. His heel caught
on a gnarled root and he sprawled, the girl on top of him. The whirring
filled the forest with its menace. Stratton scrambled to his feet,
jerked the girl erect. Side by side the two ran through the thicket,
blindly, fear lending them wings, the fear of a terrible unknown from
which they must escape. They plunged into a clearing.

A tree flared into flame, ahead of them. "This way," Stratton grunted,
twisting to the right. Another forest giant was a column of fire,
barring their passage. Behind, a third flamed.

"Oh-h-h," Elaise gasped. "The fiend ringeth us around with the flame of
his breath. We are doomed."

They were surrounded by a roaring, torrid blaze. Heat beat in upon
them, unendurable heat of an oven. Tongues of flame lapped toward them
through the brush. They could not escape.

Stratton clutched the girl to him. "We're licked," he murmured. "We're
licked, honey, before we start."

Her heart beat against his chest, her arms were around his neck. "We
die, my Ronny," she cried. "But we die together."

"Together." What was there in the blue eyes, looking up into his that
quenched the despair surfing in his blood, that sent a thrill of ecstasy
through him? What did these red and luscious lips demand? "Together!"
Stratton's own lips found her avid mouth, clung. It was almost
pleasant--to die--like this.

"Curious," a dry, shrill voice squeaked. "Curious indeed."

       *       *       *       *       *

Charred, leafless trunks surrounded them, but the fire was gone. The
ovoid flying-machine rested in the clearing, and a man stood before
a black opening in its sleek side. "I must note the reaction," he
continued, "really, I must note it at once."

This must be a native, Stratton thought. Surely there was never anyone
on earth like him. His bulbous head, with fish-belly-white scalp utterly
hairless, accounted for a full half of his height. The rest--his
shrunken body, clothed in some tight, iridescent fabric of spun metal;
his spidery legs--seemed too fragile to support that great mass. Eyes
large as small saucers stared unblinkingly out from under a bulging,
immense forehead. His nostrils were gaping tunnels, his ears huge,
flapping appendages, but his mouth was a tiny, toothless orifice. He was
like some surrealist's caricature, like the spawn of some evil dream....

"No," the monstrosity squealed. "You are wrong. I am Flaton, an Earthman
like yourself. Some forty centuries of evolution make the differences
between us."

What the hell! The fellow had answered him. But he hadn't spoken!
Stratton was sure he hadn't spoken!

"You need not have," the response came. "I know what you are thinking as
well as you do yourself. Nor am I talking to you, in your sense of the
word. What you think you hear is the projection of my thoughts into your
brain. Evidently in your period, telepathy had not yet replaced oral
communication,--What was that period?"

"Nineteen thirty--" Stratton started to say. He did not need to finish.

"The twentieth century, in your reckoning!" The American felt a reaction
of pleased triumph from his interrogator! "What luck! Wait till Gershon
sees you. The fool insists the Fifth Glacier was down as far as the
Fiftieth parallel, and life there extinct, by the beginning of the
eighteenth. When I produce you he will have to admit that I was right
in setting the beginning of the last Ice-Age much later.... And this
other is a female." His unfathomable gaze shifted to Elaise, and he fell
silent.

No! Evidently his eerie method of communication was focused by the
direction in which he looked, for the girl was curtseying. "Five hundred
and a score years since Our Lord's birth, master," she quavered. "An it
please thee."

Another moment of silence, then she was speaking again. "I am night
Elaise, and this squire Ronny." It was like listening in on one side
of a telephone: conversation. She could not of course, understand that
she was not really hearing Flaton's questions. Stratton himself could
not actually comprehend how it was accomplished, though, child of the
Radio Age as he was, there was no magic in it for him. Were his thoughts
exposed to the man of the future, he wondered, while the fellow's eyes
were not on him? It might be important to know....

Looking carefully at the odd craft that had brought Flaton here, he
thought: "Maybe he's more developed than I, but he's weaker. Physical
development has been sacrificed to mental. I can break him in half with
my fist. I'm going to try it. _Now!_"

Nothing happened. In the youth's wrists a pulse throbbed. There was
limit, then, to Flaton's powers.

Elaise screamed. "No," she shrilled. "No! Thou canst not do that to me!
The Virgin Mary forfend--"

       *       *       *       *       *

Stratton whirled to her. She was rigid, statuesque with terror. Her
dilated eyes were fastened on Flaton's imperturbable countenance, but
the fellow hadn't touched her, hadn't approached her.

"What is it, Elaise? What's scared you?"

She was shuddering within the protecting circle of his arms. "Didst not
hear? Art thou once more bewitched?"

A cold chuckle within Stratton's skull was the echo of Flaton's cynical
amusement. "Mankind no longer is divided into male and female, so I
informed her that we should have to dissect her to confirm our records.
Her reaction is curious...."

"You devil!" Stratton shouted, and leaped for him. _Started_ to leap.
Abruptly he was without power to move, as his every nerve, his every
cell, was shredded by unutterable anguish. Through a dancing haze of
pain he saw a small, black cylinder in one of Flaton's tentacular hands,
saw a peculiar green nimbus haloing the end that was pointed at him.

"Fool," the future-man's thought battered at his understanding. "If
you were not the sole specimen of your era we have found here I should
have disintegrated you before you could pass over a tenth of the space
between us. You saw what happened to those on the plains below who were
stalking one of our geological parties. A slightly increased pressure
of my thumb and every molecule of your frame would be blasted into its
component atoms."

Agony twisted through Stratton, knotting his muscles, wrenching at his
sinews. "Stop it!" he moaned. "Stop it! I can't stand it!"

The green nimbus flicked out. The excruciating torture relaxed, though
his sinews still quivered with remembrance. "All this is a waste of
time," Flaton said. "Come, both of you. Get aboard my stratocar. Quick,
now."

Resistance was useless. Stratton turned his back to Flaton.

"We'll have to do what he says, Elaise. We can't fight him." He was
between the girl and their captor, shielding her from that omniscient
gaze of his. "Not now, anyway; but don't give up hope. I'll find a way
out. Don't think about that when he's watching you. Don't think about
anything except how helpless we are. We'll fool him yet."




CHAPTER III

_Lair of the Future-men_


Elaise was like a small, frightened kitten huddling in Ronny Stratton's
arms on the strange curved floor of Flaton's curious conveyance. That
floor was of no metal Stratton had ever seen. Darting with tremendous
speed through the air it had been silvery, but now he could see that it
shimmered with ever-changing striations embracing the whole spectrum in
their deep, variegated colors.

It was blood-warm to touch, too, and almost it seemed alive, vital with
some force yet undreamed of in the twentieth century. Had the people
of the future solved the obscure identity of energy with matter just
dawning on the scientists of his present? Was this fabric fashioned of
some element man and not God had created?

Flaton sprawled at ease in the bow of the sky-craft, his grotesque frame
cushioned on a billowing, smoky substance, cloudlike in appearance.
Although no machinery was anywhere visible, his pencil-like fingers
played along a serrated bank of tiny levers; and in a screen, placed
just where he could watch it with a minimum of effort, the weird
landscape of this weird space was blurred by projectile-like flight.
He was taking them to others like himself. Was their advent here also
accidental, or--

"No. We are an expedition sent to examine the specimens trapped here."
Stratton was once more startled by the pat answer to his thought. "We
are checking the fossil records of the rocks the Great Glacier left
behind." Flaton's back was toward him. But a mirror to his right, the
American saw now, brought to him a reflection of the prisoners. "History
will be an exact science when we return."

"_When we return!_" Return was possible, then! The thought sank deep
into Stratton's consciousness. If they could escape--Good Lord! He had
forgotten! He fought frantically to make his mind a blank, to bar from
it even the flicker of a plan that Flaton, with his uncanny powers,
might read and forestall.

"I'm a damn fool to think escape is possible," he forced to the surface
of his brain. "I'm as much in his power as the Neanderthal Man would be
in mine if I had him handcuffed and chained, with a machine-gun trained
on him. After all, Science must be served. Why should I object even to
death if it will advance the knowledge of his wonderful civilization?"

Had he struck the right chord? A wordless communication from Flaton
seemed to tell him so, although the future-man's gargoylesque visage
betrayed not the slightest expression. It was sexless, soulless--neither
cruel nor evil, but more sinister than both in its utter lack of
emotion. There was no pity in the man, no mercy.

"I am afraid," Elaise whimpered. "Oh, Ronny, I am dreadfully afraid.
Whither doth he take us?"

"Hush, honey," Stratton whispered, pressing her quivering body to him.
"There isn't any use in being afraid. We've got to take what comes, and
take it smilingly. We can't do anything to avoid it."

       *       *       *       *       *

In the television screen the rushing terrain below was slowing, was
becoming more distinct. Evidently they were reaching their destination
and the landing was absorbing all of the future-man's attention.

The varicolored rocks were taking on definite form. The stratocar was
hovering over a circular pit in the plain which held a building of some
sort.

They dipped lower still. Stratton could make out another grotesque
creature like Flaton, staring up at them. Then they were within the
rock-walled crater. It was that, he saw, rather than a pit.

So smoothly had the landing been accomplished it was not until Flaton
rose that Stratton realized the stratocar was no longer moving. A wave
of the future-man's tentacular arm and a hatchway opened in the vessel's
side, apparently of its own motion.

"Get out," the voiceless command came. "We have arrived."

The surface upon which they stepped out was level and glass-smooth, as
though the rock had been melted and poured into the cup of its stony
walls.... Ronald Stratton brought his eyes back to Flaton in time to
catch his thought, addressed to the man who had awaited him.

"Wait till Gershon sees this one, Talus. A man from the twentieth
century. How he will howl to discover his chronology errs by at least
two hundred years."

"I am troubled," Talus replied. "Gershon and Frotal have sent no
messages for three quarter-hours. Have you seen anything of them?"

Flaton was undisturbed. "They were being hunted by some barbarians near
the cliff they went to explore. I turned those back with a few blasts of
the disintegrator ray. Our colleagues are probably making discoveries so
interesting that they forgot your request for periodic signals."

"They should not. I don't understand...."

"Naturally. Being merely a representative of the World League's
Administration, you could not expect to understand how we scientists
react to the acquisition of new knowledge." Stratton sensed discord
here, a schism between the practical men of the Earth of the future
and the students. Forty thousand years, he mused, had not served to
reconcile that ancient conflict. "By the same token I am anxious to
begin the examination of my own finds. Beside the twentieth century
individual I have a female. Just think of that!"

Flaton flung around to Stratton and Elaise. "To the laboratory," he
repeated the thought, making of it a command. "At once!"

His leveled ray-gun drove them before him, across the frozen lava of the
stockade's floor, in through a high portal in the shimmering metal side
of the structure at its center.

A pale blue luminance lit the interior, and the space seemed filled with
a pounding, mechanical throbbing. Some sort of machine bulked before
Stratton. No part of the complicated device moved, yet somehow it seemed
instinct with the same sort of life as had animated the fabric of the
stratocar.

       *       *       *       *       *

The door of the laboratory was narrow. Stratton went through first. In a
larger chamber he glimpsed curious racks on which gleaming instruments
were ominously ranged, high panels studded by glowing lights, a maze of
tangled cables.

There was something terrifying about all this, some aura of the same
dispassionate cruelty he had felt, once, in the experiment room of a
naturalist friend whose skinned frogs and guinea-pigs had twitched to
the galvanic false-face of searching electrodes. They had been bundles
of gory flesh, like the scarlet horror on a table near a second door in
the farther wall. _But that was--that had been a man!_

"No," Elaise groaned, behind him. "No. I will not--" Her voice choked
off.

Stratton whirled. The girl was writhing in the grip of Flaton's macaber
weapon, her dear face twisted out of all semblance to humanity by the
torture Stratton himself had found unendurable.

The cylinder's green nimbus blinked out and he caught Flaton's grim
order. "Disrobe, or you shall feel the agony again. Strip off your garb,
female."

Flaton's great eyes flicked to Stratton, and the youth read his
appalling intention. Wrath lightninged through him, obliterating fear.
He left his feet in a long low dive, his arms flailing ahead of him in a
desperate stab at the future-man's spindly legs.

Because instinct, and not thought, inspired that mad attack, Flaton was
not warned of it in time to bring his weapon to bear on the berserk
youth. Stratton's shoulder crashed against the fellow's frail limbs.
They snapped at the impact, and Flaton went down under the mad charge.
Paper-thin bones crunched under his blow. Abruptly he realized he was
pummeling a squashed thing that did not move, a thing out of which all
life had expired.

"Ronny," Elaise was crying. "Here, Ronny. His wand of magic!"

Stratton pushed himself erect, shuddering now with revulsion from the
touch of that which had been the fruit of all mankind's long travail,
shaking still with the fury that had fired him to his unexpected
triumph. Elaise was thrusting at him the black cylinder of the
disintegrator ray. He snatched it from her, found the thumb-button that
would release its fearful energy.

Somewhere outside someone called: "Flaton! Come quickly. I need your
help. The barbarians attack us!"




CHAPTER IV

_The Siege of the Primitives_


"What now?" Stratton groaned, twisting to the door. The portal,
sliding open, revealed Talus, waving filamentary arms in a paroxysm of
apprehension.

"Hold it," the American said grimly. "As you are! If you move, I'll ray
you!"

"Flaton--dead--incredible! He has the ray-gun!" Talus' thoughts were a
jumble of astonishment at the pulped remnant of his companion, of terror
of the weapon Stratton held. "He will disintegrate me before I can draw
my own. Defeated--from within and without. I should not have come--."

"Damn right you shouldn't," Stratton interjected. This telepathy
business had its points, he thought. He knew he was master of the
situation now. "What's going on out there?"

"Our screen scans the plain for a half-mile around. I have seen them
approaching--the barbarians. They are converging on all sides. They will
destroy us."

"That's lovely! How about our getting away in the stratocar?"

"I do not know how to navigate it."

"That means we've got to fight them off. Can we?"

"One man on each side of the wall, with our weapons we should have been
impregnable. But you have killed Flaton--"

"Never mind that. I'll make a dicker with you. You take one side, I'll
take the other. You ought to be smart enough to see that we've got to
play fair with each other or we both lose out. How about it?"

"Done!"

Stratton couldn't distinguish any reservation in the man's mind. Not
just now. Afterwards he might change. "Are there any more of these
ray-guns around?"

"Another in the cabinet to the left. That one--"

"Elaise," Stratton threw over his shoulder. "There's a magic wand, as
you call it, in that closet on this side of me. Get it. You work it by
pushing that little thing on its side. You come out with us, stay in the
center of the blockade and don't take your eyes off this beauty. If you
hear him think anything even a little bit hostile to me or you, let him
have it. All the way down!" Then, to Talus, "You get that, don't you?"

"I understand." He was thoroughly cowed. "I shall give her no cause to
disintegrate me. But we must hurry, or they will be over the wall."

"Let's go!"

       *       *       *       *       *

There were steps in the sides of the stockade wall. Atop it was a runway
protected by a rampart. If there were only four of the future-men,
Stratton thought, they must have been here a long time to have
built this fortress. Then he saw that it was of the same glass-like
consistency as the floor within. He tested the ray on it.

Its button pushed halfway down, the green halo formed around its end,
but there was no visible effect on the fused rock. A little further. The
green deepened to a brilliant dazzle that extended in a tight beam to
the spot at which he aimed. The stone glowed red, then white. It melted,
ran in little streamlets down the slick sides of the little wall. That
was what they had done! They had _melted_ the solid stone to make their
lair.

"Gosh!" Stratton exclaimed. "Just think what full power would do to
a man!" Then he recalled that he had seen just that.... But he was
forgetting what he was here for.

He could just see over the rampart. The piebald space outside was
vacant. As far as his vision reached, nothing moved. Had Talus tricked
him?

A swift glance over his shoulder showed him the future-man across the
small space, peering intently over the barricade on his side. Elaise was
tense beside the stratocar, her gaze unwaveringly on their strange ally,
the ray-gun clutched in her small hand and focused on him. Admiration
surged up in Stratton. She might be untaught, superstitious, but there
was nothing lacking in her courage!

A tiny clink of metal against stone spun Stratton around. Had something
dodged behind that boulder, out there?

_Twanng!_ A harp-note sounded somewhere. Something zipped
through the air, thudded against the rock wall below him.
Again--_twanng!_--_zzzip_--_thud!_ This time it struck sparks from the
rampart-top a foot to Stratton's left, fell over onto the foot-way. It
was an arrow, flint-tipped. The American ducked below the shielding
stone, looked from the dart to the cylinder he held. Ages between these
two weapons--but that arrow also could kill, and without a target his
ray was useless.

His careless exposure of himself had given some marksman his range.
Stratton ran, crouching low, along the wall. Popped up for another look.
A shambling Dawn-man, pelt-girdled, dodged out from behind a rock, his
ferocious countenance more bestial than human. The fellow poised a
flint-tipped javelin for the throw. Stratton took snap aim, thumbed his
ray-gun's trigger. The dart-hurler whiffed into nothingness.

Revulsion twisted at the pit of the American's stomach, horror at the
thing he had done. This death he dealt was worse than death itself. The
most savage of warriors buried their dead and their enemy's dead, but he
was leaving nothing to bury.

A wail rose into the dimness, hollow and somehow eerie with its keening
of the dreadfully dead. A flaxen-haired youth, in leather jerkin and
forest-green breeches, was suddenly visible. His longbow was stretched
to the tip-point of a feathered arrow and his keen, eager eyes scanned
the wall for a mark. Stratton's arm jerked up--but he could not bring
himself to press the lethal button.

"Wait!" he yelled. "Wait!" There was in him some inchoate realization
that the bowman was far nearer kin to him than the callous man of the
future, that they two should be fighting shoulder to shoulder in a
common cause. "Wait! I--"

The twang of the loosed bowstring cut him short. His ray caught the
arrow in midair, sparked it into non-existence. The beam melted a
lurid, angry pit just in front of the archer, and the yellow-headed
Saxon sprang back to safe concealment.

       *       *       *       *       *

If he could only get them to listen, Ronald Stratton thought
desperately; if he could only get them to understand that he was not of
the people who had come there to capture them and torture them.

Metal clanged, out there, and abruptly another figure was striding
through the fantastic landscape of the Timeless Zone. A mailed knight,
helmeted and visored, he came on jauntily, secure in the gleaming armor
he could not deem other than invulnerable. His great, two-handed sword
flashed bloodily in the fading light.

"Hey, you," Stratton called. "Hold up. Listen a minute. I don't want to
kill you. Listen to me!"

The knight did not pause as he bellowed, "Ho, caitiff! Though thou art
craven, Sir Sanguinor yields thee no quarter. Defend thyself!"

"You damn fool!" Stratton snarled, exasperatedly. "I want to--" The
dazzle of Talus's weapon hissed past him. Out there, where the knight
had been, a pockmark in the plain glowed redly, a molten pockmark where
a gallant man-at-arms was dispersed into myriad scattered atoms.

"Ronny," Elaise screamed. "Ronny."

Stratton twisted to her. An ape-visaged aborigine, gigantic, was
bringing down a great, stone-headed mace to demolish the shrieking
girl. Stratton's flashing beam caught him, blasted him into extinction.
The American left the rampart in a great leap, thudded down beside the
cringing girl. A chorused jabbering of rage pulled his gaze to the
farther wall. Forms were surging over it. Ravening, beastlike forms.

The American knew now that the die was cast. No chance for a truce now,
for talk.

The future-man's ray swept clear the crowded wall. Swept it clear
of swarthy, runted Picts; of long-haired, long-bearded dwarfs of
the ancient moors; of all the surging, fierce apparitions of a
dreamlike past. But others, and still others, took their place: Roman
legionnaires, shaggy-bearded Druids, archers who might have fought with
Henry of Navarre at Poitiers, a longbowman in the forest green of Robin
Hood's gay band. Indomitably they came on, and the silent death of
Talus's fearful beam scythed them into oblivion.

A hurled spear ripped Stratton's thigh, sent agony searing through him.
An arrow sliced his scalp. Talus gave vent to a high, piercing scream.
A swift glance showed that his left arm was carried away. Grotesque,
incredible in the gathering darkness, he carried on.

"Nerve!" the American exclaimed. "By jingo, he's got nerve!" A thrill
ran through him, a tingling thrill of pride in the Race. All of these
weirdly assorted participants in the uncanny, nightmare struggle staged
in the dying luminance of an outer world were somehow ennobled by that
high quality of courage. Ape-man from the fens of the immemorial past,
Jute and Druid and knight, Roman and hook-nosed Norman seaman, girl of
the sixth century, man of the twentieth, man of the four hundredth--not
one of them craven. Above them all fluttered the pennant of bravery that
in all the ages must distinguish man from beast.

       *       *       *       *       *

Suddenly the battle was over. Suddenly there were no longer any more
attackers for the fearful ray to smite with its green oblivion. Ron
Stratton slumped wearily, exhausted, feeling the agony of his wounds.

"They're licked, Elaise," he gasped. "They're licked."

Not the least uncanny feature of the uncanny fight was that, now that it
was ended, so little remained to show that there had been a fight.

"All gone," Stratton groaned. "All--"

"You're wrong," Talus's message squealed in his brain. "There are still
others of them out there. I can sense their presence, though they are
too far off for me to make out their thoughts." The fellow swore softly.

"The devil!" Stratton pulled himself to the rampart again, peered out
once more into the tumulus whence the savage raid had come. Silence
brooded, gravelike, among the fantastic rocks. It was a dead world he
looked at, shrouded in a mournful dusk. A dead, unpeopled world. "I
don't see anyone."

"They are there, nevertheless," he heard. "Hidden to plot a new
attack--" That thought broke off; another took its place. "At last!
Gershon and Frotal--"

The thought blanked out. Talus had veiled it, but a whirring sound,
faint, out of the almost lightless sky, came to Stratton.

The two missing future-men were coming back!




CHAPTER V

_The Primitives Take the Crater_


Stratton saw suddenly a tremendous, reaching beam arc against the vault
of the maroon-shaded sky; saw a rock flick from its end to hurtle and
crash devastatingly against the stockade's façade.

This was a catapult, he realized, a Roman catapult, heavy artillery of
Cæsar's legions. Some military genius was directing the siege. But the
future-man was equal to the new threat. The catapult's huge throwing
beam flared suddenly into flame as the disintegrator ray struck it.

Above that pillar of fire, high above and miles distant, a glowing speck
showed against the deep maroon of the sky. The same electric shimmer
flowed in the skin of Flaton's stratocar. If only Stratton knew how to
fly that--

What good, while Frotal and Gershon were aloft to ride him down? Better
death at the hands of the barbarians than what _they_ would do to Elaise
and himself. Stratton's arm jerked up, brought to bear pointblank on
Talus's spidery form. He pressed the button halfway.

The future-man was rigid, quivering in the clutch of that dreadful
force.

"Take his wand, Elaise," Stratton yelled. "Quick."

No words sounded in his brain, telepathed from the future-man, but pain
and terror impacted there in a chaos of transferred anguish. The girl
sprang unhesitantly up the steps to the runway. Stratton flicked off his
beam for the instant she needed to snatch away Talus's ray-gun, flicked
it on again as Elaise turned questioningly toward him.

"Get into the thing in which we came here," was his next order, "and
watch the hole in the wall. If anyone starts to come through, ray him
down."

"Aye, Ronny, my love," she answered him. "I haste to do thy will."

"Now, you," Stratton addressed Talus, aloud. "Which way shall I move my
thumb, up or down? Will you do just as I say, or do I blot you out?"

There was acquiescence in the message that came to him, cringing,
tortured appeal. Stratton relaxed. "Come down and turn off the machine
in there that holds up the stratocar."

"But you'll kill them," the agonized protest reached him. "They will
fall."

"That's just what I've got in mind. Going to do what I say, or do I
start with you?"

Talus's actions replied for him. He was scrambling down the wall.
Stratton leaped down, kept right behind him. The future-man shambled
into the powerhouse. The American threw a quick glance up into the sky.
That ominous flier was nearer, much nearer. Shadowy forms were moving
out there on the plain. All the sinister forces of this sinister land
were closing in.

"Watch it, Elaise," he called and followed Talus into the building.
"Hurry up," he flung at the cowed creature. "Turn it off."

The whir of the approaching flier came to him, high and angry now, like
the irate whir of a worker bee whose hive is being attacked. Talus did
something--and the whir was gone.

Stratton faced about. Through the open door he could see the sky. A
star fell, leaving a long wake of electric flame behind It. The plain
spurted a fountain of sparks, green and red and golden. Then there was
only darkness out there....

       *       *       *       *       *

Only darkness and the long darting flares from Elaise's ray-guns as she
fought off the oncoming hordes. Killing, killing. God, how weary he was
of killing! Those poor fellows didn't know what it was all about. They
knew only that strange creatures had come here to capture and torture
and slay--and that they must fight to save themselves. Stratton jerked
around.

"Turn on the power again."

Talus obeyed, thinking, "It won't do any good. The scientists are gone.
No one, now, is left who knows how to fly the stratocar. The charges of
the ray-guns will soon be exhausted and then--the end."

"Oh, yeah?" Stratton gritted. "I've got an idea. Come on, let's get into
the flier and try it out."

"Ronny," Elaise screamed. "The wands hath lost their magic. We are lost."

"Coming, honey. Coming." He grabbed Talus by his one remaining arm,
fairly hauled him to the flying machine, threw him into it, leaped in
after him. He remembered the motions of Flaton's arms that had closed
and opened the hatchway. Clumsily he imitated them. Elation leaped up in
him as the hatch cover slid closed.

He twisted. Talus lay almost unconscious on the floor. Elaise stood
above the future-man, staring fearfully at the view-screen above the
control levers. Mirrored in it was the breached wall of the stockade;
through the gap, Stratton could see the dusk-shrouded figures crawling
in, always in. Till the last man was gone they would persist in their
attack, not intelligent enough to realize how hopeless it was.

"Talus," Stratton shouted. "You think you don't know how this thing
works, but you must have been in them often. You must have watched
the pilots manipulate them, and what you saw is deep down in your
subconscious. Don't think. Don't try to remember. Just try to picture
Flaton, for instance, at some moment he was taking off."

"I cannot," the fellow's despairing whimper came to him. "I cannot
remember."

"You've got to, man! _Try._ Try hard!"

Silence fell in the round-walled cubicle, a thick silence that seemed to
quiver with tension. Stratton stared at the future-man, concentrating
on his thoughts, on that storehouse of forgotten but never eradicated
brain-impressions the psychologists call subconscious memory.

No words came to him, but pictures seemed to form on his retina,
pictures like the hazy visions of a dream. They grew more definite in
outline. He saw Flaton resting on his grey cloud cushion. He saw the
view-screen in front of him. It was a porthole looking out on a platform
thronged with hundreds of creatures in the nightmarish shapes of the
world of the future. Silhouetted against a blue sky were towering
pinnacles of gleaming crystal, fairylike highways leaping from façade to
façade in a gossamer arabesque, clouds of ovoid stratocars....

The view-screen drifted upward and he saw the lever-banks. Thin,
boneless fingers reached out, pushed one down in its short slot. In the
view-screen the crowded platform shot down.

"I have it!" Stratton shouted, and leaped to the bow of the stratocar.
He glimpsed the real view-screen, glimpsed a steel-capped Viking rushing
in through it, a crowd of others behind him. His shaking hand found a
lever, pushed it down.

The uprush of the stratocar flung him down on Talus, crushing the
future-man as Stratton had crushed Flaton in his irate onslaught. But
the flier was rising. The crater was dwindling in the television screen,
was once more a pit in the plain's boundaryless surface.

Ronald Stratton struggled back to the control levers. "I've got to stop
this or we'll keep on going up forever." Talus was dead, could not
help him any longer. He pushed the tiny handle back into the central
point of its slot. The precipitate rise stopped; the stratocar hovered,
motionless in the air.

Stratton stared at the control board. He saw now that the switch lifting
the stratocar was the topmost of a vertical row of three, that to left
and right of the central lever there were two more.

"It looks simple enough," he muttered, "now that I've got a starting
point. Top--up. Bottom--down. Middle--forward. Left--left. Right--right.
Let's try it. I'll push down the middle one. Here goes!"

       *       *       *       *       *

The craft leaped forward. The problem was solved! He could fly the
stratocar. But where? Where in this terrible place was safety for him?
For Elaise?

"Look, Ronny!" the girl exclaimed. "It waxeth light again. The night
here is indeed very short."

The strange red glow that passed here for day was growing in the screen.
"It's just some kind of fluctuation of the light, sweetheart," Stratton
thought aloud. "You see, there could not really be any day or night here
because there isn't any Time."

Below, the eerily colored plain was visible once more, stretching
undisturbed to a featureless horizon. No. There, straight ahead,
something bulked against the lurid sky, a familiar, grateful green
margining its upper edge.

"How would you like to come home with me, Elaise?" Stratton whispered.
"Home to England?"

"Ronny!" She was wordless, but her arms around his neck, her kiss on his
cheek, was enough.

"All right," he said. "Here goes."

The stratocar came down in the clearing, where Flaton had captured
them. Stratton stepped out of it, helped Elaise to descend. They turned
shuddering away from the gruesome remnants of the last of the future-men.

"We came from that direction," Stratton said. "Maybe if we go back
there we'll find the eddy once again."

"Whither thou goest I will go," Elaise murmured. "I am thine, my knight,
soul and body ..."

"Not more than I'm yours, honey. Remember that when we get back to 1936.
Come on."

The underbrush rustled against their knees, the trees whispered
overhead. They passed the still body of the Neanderthal Man. Then--a
wall confronted them, a wall of hazy, swirling nothingness.

"Here goes! Together does it, Elaise. One--two--three!" His arm around
her warm waist, Ronald Stratton stepped into the haze.




CHAPTER VI

_Through the Eddy_


It was as if he had walked over the brink of an abyss, save that he did
not fall. He was standing on the gentle slope of Silbury Hill. A great
monolith loomed above him, black and gaunt against a dusk sky grey and
haunting with the death of day. Not a minute, not a second had elapsed
since he had taken the fateful step in the other direction.

"Look, Elaise," Ronald Stratton said. "Look down there. See the spire of
Avebury Church? We can find a minister there, to wed us."

She didn't answer. "Elaise!" he said sharply, turning to her. She wasn't
there beside him. She wasn't anywhere....

"Elaise!"

But she had walked into the eddy, close against him. She must have
walked into it. What had happened? Where was she, the girl he had found
in the Timeless Zone, who had fought so bravely by his side? The girl he
had learned to love, the blue-eyed, fair-haired girl from the days of
King Arthur?

From the days ... Abruptly he understood. He remembered his first
explanation of their strange adventure. "We've shot along the
year-spokes of that great wheel, each from our own time, and met here at
the center...." The reverse, too, was true. Returning, they had each
gone back along his own year-spoke, he to 1936, she to A. D. 520. Some
vibration of their cosmos, some esoteric, unknown quality, had provided
for that. They were fourteen centuries apart.

Ronald Stratton started slowly down the hill, descending toward the
valley whose moor was already dark with the gloom of night. Little stars
sprinkled it, lights in the homes of people like himself. Of people of
the twentieth century. Above them, the red and green winglights of an
airplane drifted across the dusk.

"I don't care how advanced your era is; if you haven't got love, I pity
you." He had said that to Flaton. "It's the greatest thing in life."

Stratton halted, turned back to the monumental double-ring the Druids
had built to warn their people of the terrible thing that lay within.
Abruptly he was running back to the high stone that marked the boundary
of the eddy. He stopped on its very edge.

"Elaise!" he cried into that dread maelstrom of haze. "Elaise!"

Mad! He would be mad to plunge back into it. She wouldn't be there, in
the forest. She was hastening down Silbury Hill, fourteen hundred years
ago, so as not to be late for evening prayers. She--

"Ronny!"

Her voice came out of the mists. He hadn't heard it, couldn't have heard
it, _across fourteen centuries_. He was mad!

"_Ronny!_"

"I'm coming, Elaise. Wait for me! I'm coming!"

       *       *       *       *       *

Above a forest of tall and ancient oaks a lurid sky bent its eerie dome.
A tiny horse, three-toed and knee-high to a full-grown man, peered
through the underbrush at the couple walking, hand in hand, into the
lowering, threatening future of the Land Where Time Stood Still. Hand in
hand, heart to heart, the man of the twentieth century and the maid of
the sixth went, together, into the Unknown.


[The end of _The Land where Time Stood Still_ by rthur Leo Zagat]