IX
Something large and dark and clumsy lumbered cumbersomely into the space between Grady’s statue and the post-office building. The arc lights showed it clearly, and it was not anything which should be wandering in the streets of Atlanta, Georgia, at any hour of the day or night. A taxicab chauffeur saw it and nearly tore off a wheel in turning around to get away. A policeman saw it, and turned very pale as he grabbed at his beat telephone to report it. But there had been too many queer things happening this day for him to suspect his own sanity, and the Journal had printed too much news from elsewhere for him to disbelieve his own eyes.
The thing was monstrous, reptilian, loathesome. It was eighty feet long, of which at least fifty, was head and tail and the rest flabby-fleshed body. It may have weighed twenty-five or thirty tons, but its head was not much larger than that of a large horse. That tiny head swung about stupidly. The thing was bewildered. It put down a colossal foot, and water gushed up from a broken water main beneath the pavement. The thing did not notice. It moved vaguely, exhaling a dank and musty odor.
The clang of police emergency cars and the scream of fire engine sirens filled the air. An ambulance flashed into view—and was struck by a balancing sweep of the mighty tail. The ambulance careened and crashed.
The thing uttered a plaintive cry, ignoring the damage its tail had caused. The sound was like that of a bleat, a thousand times multiplied. It peered ceaselessly around, seeming to feel trapped by the tall buildings about it, but it was too stupid to retrace its steps for escape. Somebody screamed in the distance as police cars and fire engines reached the spot where the first thing swayed and peered and moved in quest of escape.
Two other things, smaller than the first, came lumbering after it. Like it, they had monstrous bodies and disproportionately tiny heads. One of them blundered stupidly into a hook-and-ladder truck. Truck and beast went down, and the beast bleated like the first.
Then some fool began to shoot. Other fools joined in. Steel-jacketed bullets poured into the mountains of reptilian flesh. Police sub-machine guns raked the monsters. Those guns were held by men of great daring, who could not help noting the utter stupidity of the things out of the great swamp which had appeared where Inman Park used to be.
The bullets stung. They hurt. The three beasts bleated and tried bewilderedly and very clumsily to escape. The largest tried to climb a five-story building, and brought it down in sheer wreckage.
Before the last of them was dead, or rather, before it ceased to move its great limbs, because the tail moved jerkily for a long time and its heart was still beating spasmodically when loaded on a city dump cart next day, before the last of them was dead they had made sheer chaos of three blocks of business buildings in the heart of Atlanta, had killed seventeen men, and the best testimony is that they made not one attempt to fight. Their whole and only thought was to escape. The destruction they wrought and the deaths they caused were due to their clumsiness and stupidity.
X
The leading horses floundered horribly. They sank to their fetlocks in something soft and very spongy. Bertha Ketterling squawked in terror as her mount’s motion changed.
Blake said crisply in the blackness, “It feels like plowed ground. Better use the light again, Professor Minott.”
The sky behind them glowed redly. The forest fire still trailed them. For miles of front, now, it shot up sparks and flame and a harsh red glare which illumined the clouds of its own smoke.
The flashlight stabbed at the earth. The ground was plowed. It was softened by the hands of men. Minott kept the light on as little gasps of thankfulness arose.
Then he said sardonically, “Do you know what this crop is? It’s lentils. Are lentils grown in Virginia? Perhaps! We’ll see what sort of men these may happen to be.”
He swung to follow the line of the furrows.
Tom Hunter said miserably: “If that’s plowed ground, it’s a damn shallow furrow. A one-horse plowed throw up more dirt than that.”
A light glowed palely in the distance. Every person in the party saw it at the same instant. As if by instinct, the head of every horse swerved for it.
“We’ll want to be careful,” said Blake quietly. “These may be Chinese, too.”
The light was all of a mile distant. They moved over the plowed ground cautiously.
Suddenly the hoofs of Lucy Blair’s horse rang on stone. The noise was startlingly loud. Other horses, following hers, clattered thunderously. Minott flashed down the light again. Dressed stone. Cut stone. A roadway built of dressed-stone blocks, some six or eight feet wide. Then one of the horses shivered and snorted. It pranced agitatedly, edging away from something on the road. Minott swept the flashlight beam along the narrow way.
“The only race,” he said dryly, “that ever built roads like this was the Romans. They made their military roads like this. But they didn’t discover America that we know of.”
The beam touched something dark. It came back and steadied. One of the girls uttered a stilled exclamation. The beam showed dead men. One was a man with a shield and sword and a helmet such as the soldiers of ancient Rome are pictured as having worn. He was dead. Half his head had been blown off. Lying on top of him there was a man in a curious gray uniform. He had died of a sword wound.
The beam searched around. More bodies. Many Roman-accoutered figures. Four or five men in what looked remarkably like the uniform that might be worn by soldiers of the Confederate Army—if a Confederate Army could be supposed to exist.
“There’s been fighting,” said Blake composedly. “I guess somebody from the Confederacy—that time path, say—started to explore what must have seemed a damned strange happening. And these Romans—if they are Romans—jumped them.”
Something came shambling through the darkness. Minott threw the flash beam upon it. It was human, yes. But it was three parts naked, and it was chained, and it had been beaten horribly, and there were great sores upon its body from other beatings. It was bony and emaciated. The insensate ferocity of sheer despair marked it. It was brutalized by its sufferings until it was just human, barely human, and nothing more.
It squinted at the light, too dull of comprehension to be afraid.
Then Minott spoke, and at his words it groveled in the dirt. Minott spoke harshly, in half-forgotten Latin, and, the groveling figure mumbled words which had been barbarous Latin to begin with, and through its bruised lips were still further mutilated.
“It’s a slave,” said Minott coldly. “Strange men—Confederates, I suppose—came from the north today. They fought and killed some of the guards at this estate. This slave denies it, but I imagine he was heading north in hopes of escaping to them. When you think of it, I suppose we’re not the only explorers to be caught out of our own time path by some shift or another.”
He growled at the slave and rode on, still headed for the distant light. “What—what are you going to do?” asked Maida faintly.
“Go on to the villa yonder and ask questions,” said Minott dryly. “If Confederates hold it, we’ll be well received. If they don’t, we’ll still manage to earn a welcome. I intend to camp along a time fault and cross over whenever a time shift brings a Norse settlement in sight. Consquently, I want exact news of places where they’ve been seen, if such news is to be had.”
Maida Haynes pressed close to Blake. He put a reassuring hand on her arm as the horses trudged on over the soft ground. The firelight behind them grew brighter. Occasional resinous, coniferous trees flared upward and threw fugitive red glows upon the riding figures. But gradually the glare grew steadier and Stronger. The white walls of a rambling stucco house became visible—outbuildings—barns. A monstrous structure which looked startlingly like a barracks.