Adventure stories; Science fiction; Time travel -- Fiction
And so we left him, and raising the car high above the earth, sped back
again across the broad Atlantic. And too, we came on farther into time
until when we came into view of the New Jersey coasts, we had come on
into time a space of almost two hundred years, for the dials registered
the fact that our car had reached the year 1777, when Denham had been
seized by the Raider.
We had offered to land him in England, but he had refused. "I'm a
soldier," he told us, "and it would be desertion. Let me down at
Philadelphia, or near it." So the car planed down through the darkness
to a field beyond Camden, and there came to rest in deep snow, for we
had stopped our time-progress in the dead of winter, and at night.
Denham stepped out of the car, and we followed him. There was no moon,
but the stars above were brilliant, the sheen of their light reflected
from the glistening, silent fields around us. It was bitterly cold, and
we shivered, standing there.
"And so the last of us part," said Denham. "Curse me if I like it,
either. 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. Well, we
shan't meet again. And so--good-bye."
He shook my hand, and Lantin's, and then, like the other three, drew
and handed to me his slender rapier.
"You have four swords now, Wheeler. And each from a different time.
It may be that they'll remind you of all we went through together, in
the city of cylinders and in the pit below it. I am only sorry that
we could not find your friend Cannell in time to save him. But it was
fate."
"It was fate," Lantin repeated, "and he died nobly. So, in a measure, I
am content."
Lantin and I stepped back into our car, now. Outside, as we rose above
the ground, Denham called to us again.
"Good-bye, Wheeler! Good-bye, Lantin!"
I answered, waving to him at the car's window, and thus we left him,
a dark, dwindling figure against the starlit fields of snow. We raced
north, now, and sped on toward our own time, back to the year, the
month, the day, when we had started. We swept down upon pinnacled
Manhattan, through the warm darkness of the summer night, and after
hovering for a time above the perplexing maze of buildings, sank gently
down upon the roof from which we had started.
The car stopped, and we stepped out on the roof, looking around us
strangely. The scene was the same as when we had left, the panorama
of the city's lights around us, the brilliant stars above, and the
stabbing search-lights of the anchored battleship.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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