“I know,” said Sparks bitterly. “I guess I’m nuts, all right. But that’s what come through.”
He marched away with his head hanging, escorted by a sailor. A little speck of smoke appeared dead ahead.
It became swiftly larger. With the combined speed of the two vessels, in a quarter of an hour the other ship was visible. In half an hour it could be made out clearly. It was long and low and painful black, but the first incredible thing was that it was a paddle steamer, with two sets of paddles instead of one, and the after set revolving more swiftly than the forward.
The skipper of the City of Baltimore looked more closely through high glasses and nearly dropped them in stark amazement. The flag flying on the other ship was black and white only. A beam wind blew it out swiftly. A white death’s head, with two crossed bones below it the traditional flag of piracy!
Signal flags fluttered up in the rigging of the other ship. The skipper of the City of Baltimore gazed at them, stunned.
“Gibberish!” he muttered. “It don’t make sense! They aren’t international code. Not the same flags at all!”
Then a gun spoke. A monstrous puff of black powder smoke billowed over the other ship’s bow. A heavy shot crashed into the forepart of the City of Baltimore: An instant later it exploded.
“I’m crazy, too!” said the skipper dazedly.
A second shot. A third and fourth. The black steamer sheered off and started to pound the City of Baltimore in a businesslike fashion. Half the bridge went overside. The forward cargo hatch blew up with a cloud of smoke from an explosion underneath.
Then the skipper came to. He roared orders. The big ship heeled as it came around. It plunged forward at vastly more than its normal cruising speed The guns on the other ship doubled and redoubled their rate of fire. Then the black ship tried to dodge. But it had not time.
The City of Baltimore rammed it. But at the very last moment the skipper felt certain of his own insanity. It was too late to save the other ship then. The City of Baltimore cut it in two.
XII
The pale gray light of dawn filtered down through an incredible thickness of foliage. It was a subdued, a feeble twilight when it reached the earth where a tiny camp fire burned. That fire gave off thick smoke from water-soaked wood. Hunter tended it, clad in ill-assorted remnants of a gray uniform.
Harris worked patiently at a rifle, trying to understand exactly how it worked. It was unlike any rifle with which he was familiar. The bolt action was not really a bolt action at all, and he’d noticed that there was no rifling in the barrel. He was trying to understand how the long bullet was made to revolve. Harris, too, had substituted Confederate gray for the loin cloth flung him for sole covering when with the others he was thrust into the slave pen of the Roman villa. Minott sat with his head in his hands, staring at the opposite side of the stream. On his face was all bitterness.
Blake listened. Maida Haynes sat and looked at him. Lucy Blair darted furtive, somehow wistful, glances at Minott. Presently she moved to sit beside him. She asked him an anxious question. The other two girls sat by the fire. Bertha Ketterling was slouched back against a tree-fern trunk. Her head had fallen back. She snored. With the exception of Blake, all of them were barefoot.
Blake came back to the fire. He nodded across the little stream. “We seem to have come to the edge of a time fault,” he observed. “This side of the stream is definitely Carboniferous-period vegetation. The other side isn’t as primitive, but it isn’t of our time, anyhow. Professor Minott!”
Minott lifted his head. “Well?” he demanded bitterly.
“We need some information,” said Blake. “We’ve been here for hours, and there’s been no further change in time paths that we’ve noticed. Is, it likely that the scrambling of time and space is ended, sir? If it has, and the time paths stay jumbled, we’ll never find our world intact, of course, but we can hunt for colonies, perhaps even cities of our own kind of people.”
“If we do,” said Minott bitterly, “how far will we get? We’re practically unarmed. We can’t ....”
Blake pointed to the salvaged rifles. “Harris is working on the arms problem now,” he said dryly. “Besides, the girls didn’t take the revolvers from their saddlebags. We’ve still two revolvers for each man and an extra pair. Those Romans thought the saddlebags were decorations, perhaps, or they intended to examine the saddles as a whole. We’ll make out. What I want to know is, has the time-scrambling process stopped?”
Lucy Blair said something in a low tone. But Minott glanced at Maida Haynes, She was regarding Blake worshipfully.
Minott’s eyes burned. He scowled in surpassing bitterness. “It probably hasn’t,” he said harshly. I expect it to keep up for probably two weeks or more of—of duration. I use that term to mean time elapsed in all the time paths simultaneously. We can’t help thinking of time as passing on our particular time path only. Yes. I expect disturbances to continue for two weeks or more, if everything in time and space is not annihilated.”
Blake sat down.
Insensibly Maida Haynes moved closer to him. “Could you explain, sir? We can only wait here. As nearly as I can tell from the topography, there’s a village across this little stream in our time. It ought to be in sight if our time path ever turns up in view, here.”
Minott unconsciously reassumed some of his former authoritative manner. Their capture and scornful dismissal to the status of slaves had shaken all his self-confidence. Before, he had felt himself not only a member of a superior race, but a superior member of that race. In being enslaved he had been both degraded and scorned. His vanity was still gnawed at by that memory, and his self-confidence shattered by the fact that he had been able to kill only two utterly brutalized slaves, without in the least contributing to his own freedom. Now, for the first time, his voice took on a semblance of its old ring.
“We know that gravity warps space,” he said precisely. “From observation we have been able to discover the amount of warping produced by a given mass. We can calculate the mass necessary to warp space so that it will close in completely, making a closed universe, which is unreachable and undetectable in any of the dimensions we know, for example, that if two gigantic star masses of a certain combined mass were rush together, at the instant of their collision there would not be a great cataclysm. They would simply vanish. But they would not cease to exist. They would merely cease to exist in our space and time, They would have created a space and time of their own.”
Harris said apologetically, “Like crawling in a hole and pulling the hole in after you. I read something like that in a Sunday supplement once, sir.”
Minott nodded. He went on in a near approach to a classroom manner. “Now, imagine that two such universes have been formed. They are both invisible from the space and time in which they were formed. Each exists in its own space and time, just as our universe. does. But each must also exist in a certain, well, hyper-space, because if closed spaces are separated, there must be some sort of something in between them, else they would be together.”
“Really,” said Blake, “you’re talking about something we can infer, but ordinarily can’t possibly learn anything about by observation.”
“Just so.” Minott nodded. “Still, if our space is closed, we must assume that there are other closed spaces. And don’t forget that other closed spaces would be as real—are as real—as our closed space is.”