Edmond Hamilton

“ Again a ringing note cut through the chanting, and as if in obedience the Raider rose, floated up toward the vast hall's roof, whence it had come. It disappeared there, the purple light burned for a moment and vanished, and the chanting finally ceased.
The bulbs glowed out, at once, and light filled the place. The crowds in the balconies began to leave, streaming down the narrow staircase toward the floor. Before they reached it, however, guards had reached and fettered the five men the Raider had left on the pit's edge, and they now brought them over and shackled them also to Denham and me. ”

“ I, too, was listening, and over the crash of air-boats and the humming sound-rays a sound came to my ears that beat in them like the drums of doom.
A little whisper of wind, a whisper that grew swiftly louder, that shrieked, that roared, that bellowed. Up from beneath came a gust of wind of such force that our car heeled around under it, and with it came a piercing whistling to our ears, an eery chorus of wind-shrieks that changed to a thundering gale. Then, a hundred feet below us, there flashed into being—the Raider! ”

“ Fabrius was unhurt and D'Alord had only been stunned, quickly reviving. And now, as the mob below hung for a moment hesitant, not knowing how many more shots Lantin had at his disposal, two men sprang out of their number and faced us.
One was a lithe, brown-skinned Malay, who waved a gleaming kris aloft and called to the rest to resume the attack. But the other it was who held my gaze, a blond giant with long, waving hair, who shouted fiercely and waved a battle-ax aloft, calling to his companions to follow him to the attack. ”

“ A deep moat surrounds the city, and out over it leads a great causeway, built of huge blocks of stone, a wide, level highway that leads through the jungle for a short distance to the supreme glory of the place, Angkor Wat, the gigantic temple. Unlike the palace and city, the temple has not fallen into ruins but remains nearly the same as it must have been when the city was living and splendid. It towers up to a tremendous height, its dark, frowning walls looming far above the green jungle around it. ”

“ Behind us, on the great expanse of the roof, were low-walled, oval platforms of metal, great of size, stacked one upon another. Enough flying-platforms, I knew, to carry all the hordes below us down to the loot of Kom. And the foremost of our opponents saw them also, and yelled with savage triumph.
If we had fought fiercely before, we battled like supermen now, in a last spurt of energy. Our swords clicked and flashed like swift shuttles, weaving strands of death from enemy to enemy, as we used all the mad strength of despair to hold back the hordes for a last moment. ”

“ For a moment, the world was filled with crashing sounds, as the two oncoming fleets met, their air-boats crashing here and there into air-boats of the opposing fleet. Then the battle resolved itself with sudden decision into myriad individual combats.
Stretching far away into the night, all around us, lay the two fleets, inextricably mixed and mingled with each other, and incapable of acting in two single units. Flashes of blue lightning burned from the air-boats of the Kanlars, and car after car of the Khluns was going down to death on the ice two miles below. ”

“ Lantin objected. "Where was it taking you?"
Cannell's face darkened. "I believe that it comes from the far future," he said slowly. "Who can say what manner of creatures will inhabit earth a million years from now? And it may be that this thing, a being of some future age, has discovered a way to travel through time and now sweeps back at will, snatching up luckless humans in every age. The purpose of these raids, who can say? Maybe for victims or slaves or food even. It is all a mystery, even to myself. ”

“ For in it were men of every race and land and time, men of the far past and men of my own time, all seized and brought here by the Raider to mix and mingle in one vast, variegated throng. Even that first glance showed me that there must be thousands, tens of thousands of men prisoned in this gigantic under-city, and it showed me, too, that even as among the guards and slaves above, there were no women. All were comparatively young men, few being over middle age, and nearly all had the appearance of warriors. ”

“ And as the years went by, the scientists of Kom came to more and more wisdom. They found ways to strengthen their own bodies, so that they lived for great stretches of time, as we do yet. They sent their explorers out to other planets, they cast their vision out to the farthest stars. They learned to create life, and they learned to conquer death, almost. The flight of the soul from the body they could not control, for there is a wisdom above man's, but the body itself they could retain as moving and lifelike as in life itself, though soulless. ”

“ At the same time, glancing up, I saw the moon racing across the sky above with incredible speed, bounding across the zenith like a shooting star and sinking down in the west. Hardly had it disappeared when there was an up-gush of gray light from the eastern horizon, and then the sun leapt up, red and flaming, and hurtled across the sky with even greater speed. I caught a glimpse of Angkor beneath, bathed in tropical sunlight. ”

“ Now, from all the hovering air-boats came the thrumming of the sound-rays, directed at the temple and the city, from all the scores of cars that hung above that city. The ground beneath pitched, heaved up torturedly, and then the city collapsed, sank down with a thundering, ear-splitting roar into the great pit that lay beneath, the earth over the cavern being shattered by the disintegrating vibrations of the sound-rays. ”

“ I remembered Denham's words concerning the signaling of the guards, and wondered if that was the cause of the little light. In a minute it vanished, but as we raced on up around the great spiral, a faint sound came down to us from far above, a grating clash of metal that we could barely hear.
"The temple floor!" I cried to Lantin. "They've swung it aside! They've uncovered the shaft of the stairway!"
He did not answer, out of breath from the toilsome climb. Before many more minutes had passed, we had progressed half-way from the floor of the cavern to its roof, up the stair. ”

“ And so, standing with them beside our time-car, we bade our friends of Kom farewell.
"You do wisely, men of the past," said Kethra. "It is not good that a man should leave his own time and venture into others. The secret of time-traveling is an evil secret. And when our fleet has returned to Kom, every car in it will be stripped of the time-wave apparatus, and all those time-wave mechanisms will be destroyed by us. For now that our end has been accomplished, and the Raider destroyed, none of us will ever again venture into past or future." ”

“ They are just living, walking bodies, whom the Kanlars are able to control and to force to work their will in all things. Dead-alive, and slaves to the Kanlars!"
I shuddered deeply, for the idea was soul-sickening. Yet I knew now that Denham spoke truth, for I remembered how from my cell in the city above I had seen Talerri, garbed as a slave, Talerri, whom I had killed myself. It was an invention that would have aroused pride in the fiends of lowest hell, thus to raise dead men back to life and use them as servants. ”

“ Blue flashes leapt again from the seven, and two more of the air-boats of Kom cometed down in bursts of fire, but now, as the seven dipped again under the air-boats of the Khluns, the thrumming, high-pitched sound increased sharply in intensity, and I saw five of the seven Kanlar cars literally break up into small pieces and fall, tumbling down toward the ice-fields below them in a shower of men and small pieces of metal. It was the power of sound, which causes a steam-whistle to shake a house to its foundations, a thousand times amplified by the apparatus devised by the men of Kom. ”

“ Without such a shield, we would be living in a city as bleak and cold as the plains that surround it."
"So we crashed into an invisible field of force," I said, and shook my head. "Well, it seemed solid enough when we hit it."
"The most powerful force in the world could not crash through it," said Kethra, "and it is fortunate that you were not going at high speed or you would have been annihilated. As it was, we found you both lying unconscious in your car, up on the force-shield, and as we can neutralize it at will, at given spots, we were able to bring you down to the city." ”

“ I raised the blade in my hand. I had been a skilful fencer in my days at the university, but had not handled a foil for years. Yet the long, slender rapier was much like a foil itself, and as I twirled it in my grasp, some little confidence came to me. I glanced back momentarily, and saw Denham smiling encouragingly at me. And now the Italian advanced toward me, the same hateful smile passing over his face as he saw me raise the rapier to meet him.
At the first clash of our blades, I knew myself facing a master of swordsmanship, one who was doubtless in constant practise. ”

“ We destroyed the time-car, and burned all of our written records of the experiments connected with it. For never again, through the knowledge that we gathered, shall men venture into time.
Yet because we felt that some part of what we had learned belonged to the world of science, Lantin and I, in this history and in our two technical works, have striven to record part of what we saw and did. Reading, men will not be able to build time-cars for themselves, but they may gain suggestions and do work that will make better our own life, our own world. ”

“ A half-dozen times Lantin's pistol had saved one of us from death, barking out a grim message when we were pressed too close. But now we were becoming ever more weary, were being pressed ever more swiftly up by fresh opponents, with the weight of the hordes behind them. All down the great spiral, clear to the floor of the pit, the stair was crowded with the hordes, pressing us ever upward, their own weight and numbers hampering with deadly effect those who were nearest us, and who were pushed forward with no chance for choosing their thrusts. ”

“ While we hung high above it, the gleaming, solid flood rolled on until it had obscured the last speck of land on the southern horizon, so that as far as we could see stretched nothing but the glistening fields of ice. The air in the car had become suddenly bitter cold, and as frost and rime began to congeal on the windows, I hastened over to the heating apparatus and switched it on. The glasses cleared soon, and we sped on into the future, but the white expanse below us seemed changeless. ”

“ A white-robed, sallow man thrust at me with a long spear, over his body, but the sword of the Roman flashed down and cut the head from the spear, then flashed again and the man went down. A dozen blades glinted off my armor and helmet, and I thrust out savagely and blindly, felt the blade pierce through flesh and blood, once, twice. And now, shaken by our first fierce resistance, the mob fell back a little, while we stood panting, surveying the scene of that first clash.
At our feet lay a dozen or more men, dead or dying. ”

“ Think of it, Wheeler: Ixtil and Fabrius and D'Alord are already dead and dust, have been for centuries."
"They're not, Denham," I said. "They're only separated from us by time, as well as space. At least we have learned one thing, that time is largely a delusion, after all, and that the men of one age are not much different from those of another."
"It's so," he said. "And I never had better friends than Ixtil and D'Alord and Fabrius, and Lantin and you. We've seen some things together, since we met in the city of cylinders, Wheeler. ”

“ Fabrius laughed shortly, and D'Alord replied for him. "Ha, friend," he said to me, "you are new here, and do not know these men. They are evil, I tell you. They boast always of what they will do when they are loosed on Kom, for they know that soon they are to be thus loosed. Some subtle poison from the Raider's self has entered into them, I think. They are like tigers waiting to be freed upon a helpless prey."
"It is so," said Lantin, "for short a time as I have been here, I have found that this is so. There is no hope from the hordes here in the pit, for they will follow the Raider to a man." ”

“ Flashing down on a long slant, I pointed the car's steel prow toward the center of the line of cars, and this time we plowed across two of them in our resistless, ramming swoop.
As we sped away into the darkness, I heard other crashes behind me, and when I again turned the car, it was to see the last of the Kanlar air-boats carrying those glowing circles go tumbling down to destruction. For below us the Khluns had seen and guessed the meaning of our attack, and had sped up to finish off those who had escaped us. ”

“ Lantin spoke, excitedly. "You see its purpose, Wheeler? It has been built here as a dam to hold back the glacier, to stem the tides of ice. But how built? To think that men can do things like that!"
I saw now that Lantin spoke aright, and that it was to dam the engulfing, southward-flowing ice that the wall had been built. And I was struck with awe at the achievement. What were the great Chinese wall and Martian canals, to this? Here in the far future, fifteen thousand years ahead of our own time, we were seeing another step in the conquest of nature by man. ”

“ And sometimes, gazing musingly into our fireplace in the length of the winter evenings, Lantin will speak of Cannell, whom we crossed a hundred centuries to rescue, and who plunged down to a voluntary death to save his friend.
Always, though, sooner or later, there comes a halt to our speech and we look up with a common impulse to a spot where a sheaf of four swords is fastened to the wall. Four strange weapons, from four different ages.
One is a thick shortsword of bronze, its edges scarred and dented. ”

“ But now, with the knowledge the brain-reader gleaned from you while you were unconscious, all the people in Kom know the peril that hangs over them, know that the Raider and the Kanlars have gathered thousands of fierce warriors from all ages, and that they plan to sweep down and loot our city and kill its people. ”