Chapter 3: Into the Infinite

How long he sat there he did not know. Minutes or hours seemed all the same to him. Nothing but that gray monochrome, of neither light nor darkness, that endless panorama of miles and years, blended together into this chaos!

But suddenly there came a shout from Tode. The blur ceased, the lights flickered. Again there sounded the two thumps of the electrical discharge. The vibrating mechanism grew steady. Above them, out of the grayness, a moon disclosed itself, then the pin-points of stars. All about them was an immense, sandy waste.

“Know where we are, Dent?” came Tode’s chuckle.

Jim was not sufficiently master of himself to attempt to answer.

“We are on what will be the Russian steppes some fifty thousand years ahead of us in time,” grinned Tode. “This is an interlude between two ice ages. Observe how pleasantly warm the climate is, for Russia. Unfortunately the receding glaciers carried off the top-soil, which accounts for the barrenness of the district, but in another century this country will be overgrown with ferns, and inhabited by the mastodon and wild horse, and a few enterprising palaeolithic hunters, who will come in to track them down and destroy them with their stone axes.”

“I think you’re the same sort of damn liar you always were, Tode,” answered Jim--but without conviction. There was something terrific about that desolation. Nothing within a thousand miles of Long Island corresponded to it.

“You’ll be convinced pretty quickly, when you see my specimen,” answered Tode. “I let him off here on the way to the pool. He’s not exactly presentable, and when I got the idea of picking up Lucille and taking her back with me, I thought it best not to let her see him. He didn’t want to be let off. Was afraid I wouldn’t pick him up again, and I’ll admit it was a matter of pretty careful reckoning. But this is the place, almost to the yard.

“Yes, I’ve done some close reckoning, Dent, but the cleverest part of the business was letting old Parrish think he’d got away from me. I knew he’d telephone Lucille. You know, I always had the brains of the outfit, Dent,” he continued, with a smirk of self-satisfaction.

He looked out of the boat. “And here, if I’m not mistaken, comes my specimen,” he added.

Something was running across the steppes toward them. It came nearer, took human form. It was human! A man--but such a man as Jim had never seen before outside the covers of a book. And he recognised the race immediately.

It was a Neanderthal man, one of the race that co-existed with the highly developed Cro-Magnons some thirty thousand years ago. Man and not ape, though the face was bestial, and there were huge ridges above the eyebrows.

And if Jim had needed conviction, the sight of this gibbering creature, now climbing into the boat and fawning upon Tode, convinced him. For the Neanderthal man vanished from the scene long before the beginning of recorded history.

For a few moments a deathly faintness overcame him ... his eyes closed, he felt unconsciousness rushing in upon him like a black cloud.

“It’s all right, Dent--don’t look so scared!” came Tode’s mocking voice.

Jim opened his eyes, shook off that cloud of darkness with an immense effort. The boat was throbbing violently as the wheels gyrated, the violet light had become a pillar as thick as a man, and shot straight up to a height of fifty feet, before it rolled away. Lucille was lying where she had been, her eyes still staring up unseeing at the stars. Old Parrish was whining and whimpering as he crouched in his place.

And at Tode’s feet crouched the Neanderthal man, repulsive, bestial, even though hardly formidable, and filling the last vacant spot inside the boat. He was gibbering and mouthing as he fawned upon Tode and pressed his hand to his hairy face. He continued to crouch and looked up at his master with doglike eyes.

Repulsive, and yet man, not ape. Distinctly human, perhaps a little lower than the Australian aborigine, the Neanderthal showed by his reverence that the human faculty of worship existed in him.

“Meet Cain, one of my Drilgoes,” said Tode, with a grin. “A faithful servant. I left him here to wait for me on the return journey. Cain’s just my pet name for him because he subsists on the fruits of the earth, don’t you, Cain?”

The Drilgo grunted, and pressed Tode’s hand to his repulsive lips, which were fringed with a reddish beard. Suddenly Tode began to laugh uproariously. “Feel anything wrong with your head, Dent?” he asked.

Dent put up his hand and pulled away a quantity of charred hair. His forehead began to itch, and, rubbing his finger across it, he realized that his eyebrows were gone. Tode laughed still louder.

“You’ve kept your teeth by about two seconds’ grace, Dent, but I shouldn’t be surprised if you needed dental attention shortly,” he said. “What a pity dentists won’t be invented for another forty or fifty thousand years.”

“You’re a devil!” cried Jim.

“You see, the human body is very resistant to the Ray,” Tode went on. “It almost seems as if there is an organizing principle within it. Even the animal tissues are resistant, though not to the same extent as the human ones. It takes about twenty seconds for the organized human form to be disintegrated. But hair and beaks and claws, being superficial matter, vanish almost as soon as the Ray is turned on them. Ten seconds more, and you’d have been obliterated, Dent, just as your plane was.

“Yes, rub your head. Your hair will probably grow again--if I decide to let you live. It rather depends upon what impression you make upon Lucille as a bald-headed hero. After all, I didn’t invite you to accompany us. It’s your own lookout.”

Jim could find nothing to say to that. He was discovering more and more that they were all helpless in Tode’s hands.

“Sit back!” snarled Tode suddenly. He gave the Drilgo a push that sent him sprawling into the bottom of the boat. “Dent, your life depends upon your absolute acquiescence to my proposals. I didn’t like you particularly in the old days, any more than you liked me. I thought you were a fool. On the other hand, I’ve no active reason to hate you, at present. It may be that I can use you.

“Meanwhile we’ve got a longish journey before us, ten thousand years more, multiplied by the fourth power of two thousand miles. Seems simple? Well, I had to invent the mathematical process for it. Reckon in the gravitational attraction of the planets, and you’ll begin to get an idea of the complexity of it. So, in vulgar parlance, we’re not likely to arrive till morning.”

He glanced at Lucille, who was still lying unconscious with Jim’s arm about her. Then his eyes rose to meet Jim’s, and a sneering smile played about his lips. That smile was the acknowledgment of their rivalry for the girl’s affections. And it was more--it was a challenge.

Tode welcomed that rivalry because, Jim could see, he meant to keep him alive under conditions of servitude, to demonstrate to Lucille his superiority.

Tode turned his thumbscrews, and the two thuds resounded. The violet column sank down, the boat vibrated, the level stretch of land became a blur again. The moon and stars vanished. Once more the four were off on that terrific journey.