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Title: Trapped in Eternity
Date of first publication: 1936
Author: Ray Cummings (1887?-1957)
Date first posted: July 19, 2013
Date last updated: July 19, 2013
Faded Page eBook #20130734

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




                      TRAPPED in ETERNITY

    A Strange Time Machine Merges Past, Present and Future into One!

                        By RAY CUMMINGS

    _Author of "Brigands of the Moon," "Around the Universe," etc._


                    THRILLING WONDER STORIES

               _The Magazine of Prophetic Fiction_

                         VOL. 8, No. 3

                         DECEMBER, 1936




I met the surgeon's gaze as he replaced the bandages on Dora's eyes.

"I'll talk to you outside, Mr. Blair," he said.

Dora's hands groped for me as I stooped over her reclining chair, her
sensitive fingers--all her seventeen years of life the eyes of her
blindness--caressed my face.

"I'll be back in a moment, Dora," I said. "You just lie quiet."

The surgeon faced me on the veranda outside the living room of Dora's
little bungalow here in the Westchester suburbs of New York City.

"She will never see," the surgeon said. "The operation failed."

Poor little Dora. She had hoped that the science of surgery would dispel
her eternal darkness.

"All right, Doctor," I said quietly. "I'll tell her."

Dora and I sat that evening in the little moonlit garden beside the
house. She had removed the bandage. Slim, blond girl, having a queerly
ethereal beauty as though her blindness had set her apart from this
world. Blue eyes pale, seeming always questing.

My name is Alan Blair. Details of me are unimportant, save that I was
twenty-four, that August, 1936. I had met Dora Kean the year before. Her
aged father, a retired professor, was her only close relative. He had
died suddenly, leaving her alone, with this little bungalow and a small
annuity. Dora and I were engaged now; to be married within a few months.

We sat, that momentous night of August 30th, 1936, with the moonlight
filtering through the trees and the world a vision of beauty around us.
Dora had been brave over her disappointment. She was smiling gently now.
Her hands brushed my face; her smile was quizzical. "You're very
handsome, Alan. I'm a lucky girl."

I laughed. "Maybe you are, and maybe not."

Then suddenly I was gripping her, and she heard my startled gasp.

"What is it, Alan?"

"Something--over there near the house. Good Lord--"

Incredible thing. I stared. In the shadows of the garden between us and
the little stucco bungalow, a shape was shimmering. Wraithlike outlines,
where a moment before there had been nothing.

The ghostly outlines of a cage. A cubical thing ten feet high, fifteen
feet square, set upon the ground like a lion cage painted luminous,
shimmering so that for the first second or two it could have been
conjured by my own startled fancy.

Then I heard a vague electrical whine. And then the materialized cage
was no longer shimmering. Reality! Dark lattice of bars. Small windows
of a luminous transparency. A solid door. It had an interior light. The
door slid sideward with a rasping click. The light silhouetted a figure
peering out. A man. Then he stepped from the doorway.

He was hardly more than twenty feet away from us--a man as tall as
myself, with a bullet head of closely clipped black hair. Queer figure
indeed. Wide-shouldered fellow in a leather garment queerly shaped.

"Do not be afraid," he said, in an English queerly intoned. He took a
few steps toward us; and as we leaped to our feet he stopped, and stood
smiling.

"I am Sah Groat," he began. "I live here." He gestured with a thick
powerful arm at our little moonlit garden. "This is my home. I have come
back to visit you."

       *       *       *       *       *

Amazing visitor! He sat presently, cross-legged on the ground beside us
while we gaped at him and listened to his amazing words. Visitor from
the future! Our garden--the living room of his home, six hundred years
from now! This cage his vehicle with which, at will, he was traveling
back and forth through the centuries!

We sat, feeling like untutored savages, while he tried to make us
understand the mysteries of this science which to him was so
comprehensible.

"Between the four planes of Space--length, breadth, thickness and time,"
he said, "there is no essential distinction. Science, ever since the
days of your Albert Einstein, has recognized that Time is a property of
Space. A house has length, breadth and thickness. _And duration._
Without duration, it would have no real existence."

Space-time. The blending out of which the Universe is built. And then he
tried to show us how the future and the Past, co-exist with what we call
the Present; the same Space-dimensions, but with the Time-dimension
altered.

"I don't think I can conceive that," I said.

"No," he agreed, "because your whole conception of Time is illogical.
For instance: Suppose, with your human intelligence, you were a tree,
rooted here in this garden. Suppose that the normal order of things was
that New York City would come slowly toward you and pass before you.
Time normally does that for us. But you, if you were that tree, could
you conceive going across Space and reaching New York City? Could you
believe that New York City exists there now? We humans can imagine
moving through Space--because we have always done it. But the tree would
say, 'New York City _will be_ here. It will exist.' The future! You
understand? The tree would never realize the present, unperceived
existence of New York City, and the possibility of swiftly going there
by altering one's Space-dimensions!

"The same is true with Time. It has a normal change of dimension, so
that if we do nothing to alter that dimension, we are like the tree. We
think that nothing exists until Time brings it before us!"

Amazing thing, but I seemed to be grasping it. "You mean," I said, "you
are able to cause an abnormal change in the Time-dimension?"

"Yes." He smiled. "We define it, altering substance by altering the rate
and character of the motion that constitutes the electrical vortex we
call the proton."

"That," I said, "I most positively do not understand."

"Because," he retorted, "you are not aware of what all substance really
is. Matter--with its dimensions of Space-time--it is molecules, composed
of atoms. But what is an atom? A ring of electrons--which are particles
of negative, disembodied electricity, revolving at very high speeds
around a central nucleus of positive electricity, which we call a
proton. But of what substance--what character--is the proton? Why even
in nineteen-twenty-three, or perhaps before that, the theory was
established that the proton merely is a vortex. A whirlpool. An
electrical whirlpool in Space! That robs Matter of the last vestige of
substance! A thing built merely of movement!

"Everything is electrical--or akin to it. The character of everything
depends upon Matter's inherent vibratory motion. Thus, to alter the
Time-dimension, we alter the rate and character of that vibration--that
basic vortex--the proton."

He gestured to his time-vehicle. "I can give you only fundamentals--the
machine itself is not abstruse, merely mechanically intricate. Every
particle of Matter in that vehicle--and my own body when I am in it--is
electrical in its basic nature. The mechanism circulates a current
through every particle of that Matter. An electronic current. It causes
the inherent vibratory movements of the protons of Matter to change
their character. The matter changes its state. It acquires a different
Time-factor. A different Time-dimension. A series of different
dimensions, I should say--so that the progressive changes constitute a
traveling through Time. Like the tree, uprooted, changing its position
in Space."

       *       *       *       *       *

Time traveling! And here, in this same space that now held Dora's little
bungalow and garden, Sah Groat's home existed in the year 2536. He was a
research physicist. Suddenly I envisaged all the immensity of things and
events of what we call the Past, Present and Future, that crowded our
little garden! The moonlight fell upon our strange visitor as he sat
cross-legged on the ground. Strange man from the future. I guessed that
he might be thirty years old. Or perhaps far older. His facial skin was
drawn tightly over high cheek-bones. It was a queerly luminous skin.
Weird.

A different sort of human? I found myself suddenly shuddering, as though
here, gazing at him, I was trying to fathom the unknown. Something about
him--weird, indefinable--and frightening. His gestures were queer--all
his movements abnormal to the aspect of any man I had ever seen before;
and frightening, because I could not define their abnormality.

Absurd thoughts! I tried to dispel them. Then suddenly I realized that
he was queerly staring at Dora as she sat tense, with her sightless eyes
questing the sound of his voice.

"Your mate?" he said abruptly.

"We are going to be married soon," I answered.

Still his gaze clung to her. I stared at his eyes. They were strangely
brooding. The eyes of one who has seen too much. Or was there something
lacking in this weird man's eyes? Something that should be there, but
was not?

"She is very strangely beautiful," he said quietly.

Did Dora have some intuition? I saw her smile abruptly fade, and over
her sensitive face came a vague expression of revulsion and fear.

"I have never seen a woman's beauty like hers," Groat added. "Her eyes
see nothing. You should have that fixed."

I told him how we had tried. Still his look never left Dora's face. And
suddenly he said, as though abruptly he had made a decision.

"My surgeon could fix that--in a few minutes. A pre-natal optical
defect--not a disease. A little mechanism of lens and nerves to be
repaired." He shrugged his high wide shoulders, with a queer jerking
gesture. "I will take you to my surgeon."

It made my heart leap. A surgeon of six hundred years from now, with all
the skill and knowledge that the centuries had brought!

Dora gasped, "Why--oh, if you only could."

"How--how long will it take?" I murmured.

"The trip? How long? That means nothing. I can make it take what seems a
few minutes of your consciousness."

A few minutes--to get to this super-surgeon! An excitement struck at me
so that I lost all caution.

Groat was gesturing again. "My surgeon lives just down that little
hill--he will come at once if I send for him."

       *       *       *       *       *

I led Dora over the threshold of the little cage--a rectangular metal
room glowing with soft violet light; a few strangely fashioned metal
chairs; an instrument table of fragile-looking tubes, dials, levers and
coils.

"Do not be afraid," Groat said softly. "Sit here by this bull's-eye--"

He seemed reluctant to tear his luminous brooding gaze from Dora. Then
he sat at the instrument table. I saw a long row of time-dials marking
the centuries, the years, months and days. In the silence the small
lever clicked as he shoved it. There was a low hum. The dark bars of the
cage abruptly glowed luminous--a pallid glow that suffused all the cage,
bathed us in its electric light.

I felt my senses reel as we swept off into Time. But within an instant
my senses steadied. The pallid light in the cage was soft but so
strangely intense that I could fancy it was penetrating every atom of my
body, every tiny cell within me vibrating from its touch. It connected
the mesh of the cage bars so that we seemed in a luminous room of
translucent walls.

But the one bull's-eye beside us remained transparent. Amazing sight! I
saw the moon and all the stars swinging from the zenith to the horizon.
The sun of Tomorrow rose and plunged in a swift arc; the day was gone.

Accelerated motion. Night and day now were so swiftly succeeding each
other that they blended into a luminous grey monochrome of twilight.
Then in another moment the four seasons themselves were blended. Silent,
dead-looking monochrome landscape, queerly lacking in detail so that as
I gazed at any one spot only grey blurred blankness seemed there.

"Oh Alan--tell me about it! You forget that I cannot see."

I tried to describe it.

"What a pity--a girl so beautiful," I heard Groat say, "always in
darkness. You will see presently, my dear."

The indicators of the Time-dials were all in motion ... 1956 ...
1970 ... 2000 ... A new century....

Again I gazed out through the bull's-eye. The same blurred landscape of
luminous grey. No! There was movement now! Things through the years
changing, the sum of their tiny daily movements now becoming visible. I
gazed to the south; with a slow crawling movement of blurred grey
detail, I could see the rising oncoming city. Towering giants of
buildings were blurred against the monochrome of sky. Silently the
monstrous grey city engulfed us. We were indoors.

2100 A.D. ... 2200 ...

New centuries ... progress.... For a breath that might have been a
hundred years it seemed that we were in some huge amphitheatre, with a
vast domed roof high above us. Then the roof was leprous. A catastrophe
of nature? An earthquake, or some great storm? Or the ravages of war?
Then the roof was gone. Walls again were rising.

2400 A.D. ... I found Groat standing gazing at Dora. "We will be there in
a moment. I have set the automatic controls. Come Dora--"

He extended his powerful long-fingered hand toward her; but a sudden
impulse made me move between them.

"Thanks," I said. "I'll guide her."

2500 ... 2520 ... 2530 ... Then I could count the years.... Then the
months of 2536. And then days of the summer.

       *       *       *       *       *

Outside one of the other bull's eyes a soft steady violet light was
visible--the interior of a room in which now our cage was standing. I
could see a blurred, nearby wall. The cage was wafting slowly upward a
foot or so to take a slightly new position in Space.

Then the automatic controls snapped off. The cage bars went dark. Faint
distant sound was audible.

Groat slid the door open. "Come Dora, my child--my home--we are here."

I held her arm to guide her as we stepped over the vehicle's threshold
into the world of 2536.

It was a long grey apartment, with a vaulted roof from which a soft
light was streaming. A heavy piled grey carpet was on the floor; the
walls were grey-draped, windowless. Luxurious padded metal furniture
stood about. Mechanisms of daily life routine were on a wall instrument
panel.

"The place where I was born," Groat said softly. "You like it?"

Our little garden! Crowded bit of Space, with only Time to hold separate
its myriad aspects! And Groat added as I seated Dora in a chair:

"You--my visitors from the barbaric past--" He was smiling so that his
thin lips bared his shining white teeth. "I will get the surgeon--Dora
must see my home. See--me--"

He made an aerial connection. On a luminous screen the image of a face
appeared. A man of ruddy complexion with a shining bald pate. His
shoulders disclosed that he was robed in immaculate white.

"Doctor Freane? We need you," Groat said.

"Oh--you, Xax VI?"

"Yes--Sah Groat--you know me. The Master bids you come--an eye
operation--at once--"

Presently a low tinkling bell sounded. The surgeon and two white-robed
women entered. They went instantly about their work with Dora--lenses
and lights to examine her eyes--surgical instruments. They hardly spoke.
But they stared at the time cage, and at me and Dora--to them queer
barbaric people of history.

The surgeon, hardly interrupting his work, said abruptly:

"Groat--your Master should not use that cage. You have stopped in the
twentieth century--these people are from there, by the look of them."

"Yes," Groat agreed.

"But it is forbidden," the surgeon said. "Your permit is for exploratory
time traveling, but never to stop in another Time-world."

"I am returning these visitors," Groat said. "It will not occur again."

"Make your Master understand it, Groat. It is not like Jason XI--himself
so great a scientist--to transgress his permit."

I stood tense, holding Dora's trembling hand as I watched the operation.
Painless, swift and sure. A minute? Five minutes? Then suddenly, as all
the apparatus was whisked away, the surgeon plunged the room almost into
darkness.

"Now child, open your eyes." His voice was gentle.

       *       *       *       *       *

Dora's eyelids fluttered up. The light! She gasped. Her blue-eyed gaze
swung toward the sound of my tense, excited breathing.

"Why--why Alan--I see you! Alan dear--"

Civilization marching upward. Progress. Always progress.

For that moment I held the tearful Dora, both of us flooded with
thankfulness. The nurses quietly had departed. The surgeon stood beside
us. Groat had momentarily gone into the time cage.

And suddenly in the grey restful hush of the dim apartment there came a
groan! A low scraping thump! A man groaning in mortal agony!

We stood transfixed. From a dark nearby recess a figure appeared,
crawling, hitching itself forward on the padded floor. A man of middle
age. Dying. One of his arms and shoulder seemed partly burned away by a
searing flash.

He gasped faintly, "You Freane? Help! I am--"

The surgeon swung. I heard him murmur, "By my God--you, Jason--"

"I am--finished--you can't--" His agonized face dropped against the
floor. He was dead.

In the silence, Dora gave a low scream of horror as she shuddered
against me. Then a violet flash hissed. For just an instant Freane, the
surgeon, seemed to stand tottering, leprous with part of his body burned
away. Then he fell.

A second or two. I had no time to move. I saw, in the doorway of the
cage, that Groat was standing with a luminous cylinder in his hand. The
skin of his face was wrinkled into a snarl that bared his white teeth.

"Stand still--" he rasped.

Around us, from his cylinder, the hissing violet light sprang circular,
so that we stood barred. Then Groat snapped off his weapon. The light
vanished. Some of the room drapes were burning.

"If you try to trick me--both of you will die," Groat said softly. "You
Alan--lead her here--" Then he laughed with a wild sudden triumph. "I
forgot. She can see now. A woman complete. Come, you two--"

He stood beside the doorway, watching with alert weapon. I saw that from
head to foot he was trembling; his voice was a low, purring growl; his
eyes, luminous with triumph, seemed to dart fire at us.

"We are going," he said. "Get inside."

A madman! For just an instant I hesitated. Then I drew Dora over the
threshold. Behind us Groat came in. The door clicked. And like a
pouncing animal Groat leaped for the controls. The cage flooded with
luminosity, surged with electrical hum.

The shock of starting was far greater than before. Then as our senses
steadied, I found that Dora had dropped into a chair and that I was
standing beside her. From the instrument table came Groat's voice: "We
travel fast this time. Do not move--I can kill you with a movement of my
finger--"

I glanced out through the bull's-eye. Already the walls of the draped
apartment were gone; the cage was outdoors with blurred grey terraces of
the giant city looming everywhere into the sky around us. And Dora with
her new-found sight, was gazing; so amazed, awed, confused that her
senses seemed numbed.

Then I got my wits. I turned slowly to regard Groat. He sat facing us,
sprawled tense at the instrument table, one of his hands on the
controls, the other gripping his weapon.

"The trip back won't take long?" I said.

His grin bared his teeth. "Back? We are going forward. A real voyage
now--" He glanced at his instruments. "4152. You see, we are making
speed."

I stared at him, numbed, helpless, wordless. And then I murmured,
"Forward? But why, Groat?"

       *       *       *       *       *

He said, with a mounting wild triumph, "I do not like my Time-world. Nor
yours. We are going forward--very far. Where we can be alone!
Dora--complete woman now. And I--Sah Groat--complete man. We will pick
ourselves a time in this same Space--to be alone--to start a new race.
Jason said it can't be done--it's against all laws of nature. But I'll
show him--I'll outsmart Time!"

I sat numbed, shuddering. Was he wholly demented, or a rational fiend?
He added. "A new race--from one mated pair. It can be made biologically
possible. And you Alan--our servant. You will be useful with your
health and strength in so many ways. Do not talk to me now. I am busy--I
must select our home."

He still was alert with his weapon. I did not dare move. Strange little
Dora. In the sudden emergency now, her confusion was vanishing. As
though with the passing of her blindness, here was a new Dora. And
suddenly she whispered:

"Alan--if we could get that weapon--"

But how? His fingers never left it. My own confusion was passing. I was
tense, alert, watchful--but I tried not to show it.

"Look outside!" Groat said. "The real changes are beginning."

We swept past the year 10,000....

Amazing grey, shifting panorama outside our little window. I could see
now over a vast distance. The Titanic city was spread everywhere. The
old familiar outlines of the enduring hills were changed now. Altered by
the mechanisms of man. Beacon lights sometimes flashed for what might be
a hundred years. Was this the summit of man's achievement? For a breath,
the melting structures were replaced by others of their kind. Mankind
resting on the summit. Then I saw a section of the vast intricate
structures melt down, crumbling from some catastrophe. And edifices,
smaller, rose up.

Our forward Time-sweep was so swift now that I could see only the broad
fundamental changes. Triumphant city neglected. Then at last it broke up
and dropped into ruin and desolation.

50,000 A.D. Then 100,000.... Innumerable smaller cities had appeared and
vanished. Always smaller. More transitory.... Struggling little hamlets
whose life span was so brief to my sight that they came and went like
flickering shadows.... I saw the blurred changes of great storms.
Gigantic cataclysms of nature.... Pitiful remnants of mankind, still
struggling here.

200,000 years ... 500,000.... Ice had come and gone.... Then the grey of
a temperate, perhaps habitable climate.... Human beings still here?...
Probably. But their futile, pitiful efforts were so briefly enduring
that I could not see them....

Suddenly Dora and I became aware of Groat's voice. "Why--I--I've gone
too far. We do not want to live in so wretched a place as this. I will
turn back." He still held his weapon. His gaze still eagerly consumed
Dora's beauty. I felt her tense beside me. But he did not touch the
controls. He seemed thinking only of Dora's beauty. And he added
abruptly:

"Come here, Dora--you sit here by me. We must pick our future home."

She stood up. "I'll make a chance for you!" she whispered swiftly.

       *       *       *       *       *

Amazing little Dora. Smilingly she sat beside him, with his burning gaze
upon her face and his hand like a claw gripping her shoulder. With a
sudden startled amazement her glance went to the window. The end of the
world! It was a great, soundless, blurred chaos. The Earth was gone!
Numbed, I stared, as Dora was staring. Around us now there was only an
illimitable grey void with the blurred streaks of stars. Soon perhaps,
it would be empty of everything.

Eternity.... We were trapped here. Trapped in eternal, soundless
emptiness.... Eternity, stretching on and on--into the infinitude of
Forever....

Groat seemed engrossed only with Dora. Madman, plunging us on into the
endless void.... I saw presently that as he gazed with his smoldering
eyes upon her beauty, his hand laid his weapon momentarily on the table.
I tensed. And Dora's hand, moving to touch him as though with a caress,
dropped suddenly down and swept the weapon to the floor.

With a rasping scream Groat was on his feet, meeting my leap. The impact
of my body knocked him backward. He fell, with his head and shoulder
striking against a chair.... Gruesome fall! He lay twitching, his mouth
gaping, eyes wildly rolling, and a low, rasping, grinding pant issuing
from his lips. Then the light went out of his eyes.

I stood gripping Dora. "Dead," I murmured. "We're safe now. I can work
the controls. I saw how he did it."

"Yes. Safe now--Alan--"

The body of Groat lay still. I stepped over him. I moved the control
levers, slowly through the different intensities of Time-change. And
then presently we were heading back.

"Alan--dear God--"

At Dora's terrified clutch I swung from the instruments. Groat again was
twitching. His body rolled across the room. His head dangled on his
broken neck. His skull had split open.

What was this? A human brain, enmeshed with tiny wires! In the brief
struggle I had torn away his shirt. Imbedded in the flesh of his chest
was the circular disc of a fuse-box!

Damnable thing in human form! Parts of a man, body and brain, pieced
together in the laboratory by the skill of science! A thing that should
have been under the will-control of a Master. With a flash of
realization I recalled the surgeon's words. He had mentioned the Master!
The scientist, Jason XI, who undoubtedly had invented the time cage. And
created this thing which was a man in everything but the lack of soul.
That indeed, was what I had sensed missing in its eyes! This damnable
thing, running amok, stealing the cage, roaming aimlessly through the
centuries--attracted by Dora.

In that moment as we stared, the deranged human body lurched waveringly
upon its feet. The legs were buckling. It fell against the door. The
pressure slid open the door. For a moment the staggering body toppled on
the brink. Then it was gone, swallowed by the silent grey void of
Eternity.


[The end of _Trapped in Eternity_ by Ray Cummings]