New York (N.Y.) -- Fiction; Science fiction; Time travel -- Fiction
We had long since heard, through Nanette's nurse, her brief account
of those last moments in Turber's aero. She had been for a time alone
in the control room with Bluntnose and Jonas. They were waiting for
Turber. Jonas had fallen into a panic of fear; he sat huddled and
chattering, dominated by the Indian who, with stolid indifference to
the city tumbling around them, was waiting for the master.
Nanette had stood in the aero doorway. Her mind was groping with a
plan. Bluntnose came and pulled her back. He stood in the doorway and
shouted welcome to the arriving Turber and the woman Josefa.
Nanette knew that the control room was filled with a blinding glare of
light reflected from our white beam so near at hand outside. She heard
Jonas scream something about the glare; she could feel it--almost see
it. And she could hear, outside the aero, a pandemonium of sound.
She knew every detail of the corridor and the control room. She ran
past the huddled Jonas. In a moment Turber would enter, and the aero
would flash away and escape. Nanette ran for the instrument table which
held the controls. She knew it was close by a window; she knew that the
window was open and that it was some six or eight feet above the ground.
Desperate plan! Just a chance to wreck the aero and still to save her
own life. She had no knowledge of the controls' operation. She leaped
for the table. Her fingers tore at the delicate wires--her clenched
little fists smashed the fragile vacuum globes.
She felt the aero sway crazily; she felt it flash as she flung her body
through the window. She fell into the black emptiness of insensibility--
The aero had lurched a few seconds into the future, and with every
law of Nature transgressed by its derelict flight it had stopped and
crashed into ruins.
Nanette's body, hurtling through the air, must have been just within
the aero's influence. Inconceivable shock to her! A fall through Space
of a few feet. But the impulse from the lurching Time-vehicle had
thrown her--as she fell those few feet--into the third day forward.
But it was over now. She lived; these surgeons with their science were
giving her back to me.
We waited through those hours; the operation was successful. Her face
was--restored.
* * * * *
And so I find myself now with little more to record. We are back now
in the world of 1945. We went with Lea while she took leave of her
grandfather; and she left him to follow her destiny with Alan. But San
would not come. He took us to our own Time-world and left us. He said,
forever.
No one saw us as we slipped from the tower into Central Park that last
time. A few days only since we had left. It was in the night; and no
one was there to see the phantom tower as it came, paused solid for a
moment, and then vanished.
Or if we were seen, what of it? No one would believe it; the newspapers
would not bother to print it again.
The world here moves quietly along.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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