“3004,” she repeated. “That’s nearly a thousand years. It can’t be true! It just can’t!”
“I’m afraid it is,” Clem said, his voice quiet as he saw her distress. “We can’t even begin to understand the situation or try to help you until we hear your side of the story. Who are you? What happened in this cavern?”
“I’m Lucy Denby and—” Slowly the girl unfolded the story. The men listened in grim silence, looking at each other when it was over.
“I wish I could have had a few moments with that Bryce Fairfield,” Buck murmured, clenching his fists. “I’d have hit him so hard they’d have had to scrape him from the wall.”
“A thousand years!” Lucy repeated again. “I just don’t understand it! What am I to do? Do you realize what has really happened to me?”
“You felt nothing during this enormous lapse of time?” Clem asked thoughtfully.
“Nothing whatever. Except that I seem to remember I felt a passing wave of dizziness when Bryce threw in the switches. Even then I hardly realized what he had done. I couldn’t see anything clearly through the bubble wall. Then, in what seemed a matter of seconds — certainly no longer — you appeared. So now,” Lucy finished hopelessly, “I’m utterly alone. My husband long since dead, and my baby too, assuming that he ever grew up.”
“Unfortunately,” Clem said, “we can’t put back the clock. All we can do is offer you the hospitality of this day and age.” He rubbed his jaw and then gave an uneasy glance. “At least, I hope we can offer you our hospitality,” he amended. “You see, things have changed a lot whilst you have been a prisoner. Today everybody is tabulated and indexed, and you’re a sort of odd girl out. If your lack of an index-card is discovered you may be executed.”
“Executed!” Lucy stared in horrified amazement.
“Anybody without an index-card, without even a proven line of descent, is deemed outcast by the Government Council or else the Master himself, and promptly eliminated. In at way spying and sabotage is crushed. We shall have to be extremely careful how we handle things. What makes it doubly difficult is the fact that a new war is threatening.”
“There is still threat of war?” Lucy asked hopelessly. “There was a similar state of affairs when in my own time, various countries were at loggerheads with each other—”
“Long forgotten,” Clem interrupted. “Today the trouble is between hemispheres. This is the West against the East: something to do with planetary concessions. But it’s war just the same, and that being so, your position is awkward.”
“Surely I will be allowed to explain the situation? Or you can?”
“Not on the basis of what I know so far,” Clem answered, sighing. “I don’t even begin to understand the genius of Bryce Fairfield. I’ll have to work out exactly what he did and then submit my findings to the Master. Once he is satisfied — and there is no guarantee that he will be — you will get city status and become one of us. But in the meantime—”
“There’s my wife,” Buck Cardew interrupted. “She was to have Worker Ten to assist her in house duties. I could arrange it so that Worker Ten is bought off and Mrs. Denby here takes her place. It’s been done before and could be done again. How about it?”
“Risky, but maybe worth it,” Clem answered. “We’ll do that; then I can keep in touch with you,” he added, looking at Lucy. “For the moment you had better stay here with us and then come along home after dark. We’ll look after you — and you’ll have an awful lot to see,” he finished. “‘Things have changed enormously since your day.”
“I can imagine,” Lucy said, and gave her first faint smile.
At about this time, in the wilderness of the city’s huge powerhouse, Chief Engineer Collins studied the peculiarity with cold blue eyes. For the first time in his thirty years’ supervision of this master power station something was wrong. The smooth night-and-day rhythm of the giant engines, which fed a city sprawling over nearly every part of what had once been the British Isles, fostered and tended by complicated robots, was being interrupted. There was a very slight flaw in the uptake of power. Perhaps it was only carbon dust. It had happened once before, twenty years earlier.
Collins summoned testing-robots. They came up with their many instruments and gathered about him, obeying all the commands he planted in their reasoning brainpans. With mathematical exactitude, far keener than even his excellent reasoning, they traced the flaw and handed out the report.
“Intermission fault of one ten-thousandth of a second,” Collins mused. “Bad! Definitely bad!”
Turning, he slammed in switches and was immediately connected with the slave powerhouses in other parts of the city.
“What’s your power report?” he questioned.
It was given him immediately. There was nothing wrong there, but there was here, and what was more it was becoming worse. The sweetly-humming giant had taken on a definite lobbing sound, like the thud of a flat tire on a smooth road.
Struck with the unbelievable thought that there might be a flaw in the metal, Collins turned to the gigantic balance wheel, which formed the basis of the master-engine. He had just reached it when something happened.
A pear-shaped swelling appeared suddenly on the edge of the mighty wheel, only visible as a mist with the wheel’s rotation. It grew at phenomenal speed — and then exploded! Flung by centrifugal force, mighty pieces of metal flashed to all parts of the powerhouse. One struck Collins clean on the forehead and dropped him dead where he stood. The robots looked on impartially, their guiding genius lying mangled on the floor.
Immediately the other engines ceased to work as an automatic contact breaker clamped down on the entire area. The alarms rang. The emergency bulb went up on the desk of the chief powerhouse controller at City Center.
Breakdown, for the first time in thirty years! It was incredible.
CHAPTER THREE: BRIDGE OF DEATH
Clem Bradley, Buck, and Lucy Denby, were in Clem’s little autobus doing two hundred miles an hour down the traffic-way bridge to City Center when the power failed. All of a sudden the vast, long line of light and steel that had held the girl in thrall went into total darkness.
“What the hell—!”
Clem let out a gasp of amazement, then his hands quickly tightened on the switches. Never in his experience had he come up against a sudden blackout like this. It was utterly unheard of. He slammed on the emergency brake, but either he slammed too hard or the steel was faulty, for the pedal snapped clean off under the pressure.
He was too astounded, too desperately busy, to exclaim about it. Like a madman he tried to cut down the power of the engine as the autobus raced onwards into the unrelieved darkness, the bridge girders, faintly visible against the sky, whipping past at dizzying speed.
“Hey, stop this thing!” Buck Cardew yelled. “There may be something ahead, and if there is, at this speed, it’ll be the finish. Where’s your search-lamp?”
“Switch it on for me,” Clem panted. “I’ve all I can handle!”
Throughout this hair-raising performance Lucy sat in frozen alarm, the wind rushing past her face as Buck fumbled on the control panel. Then suddenly the blinding cold-light brilliance split the darkness ahead.
“Look!” Lucy cried hoarsely.
But Clem had already seen it — the unbelievable — a vast fissure glowing mysteriously across the traffic-way itself. The bridge was breaking in two! There could be no other explanation. And below there was a drop of a quarter-of-a-mile into the brimming waters of a river.