Murray Leinster (Duke Classic SiFi) (7 page)

As Estelle looked down two tiny figures sauntered across the clearing
from the woods with a heavy animal slung between them. One of them
was using a gun as a walking-stick. Estelle saw the flash of the
sun on its polished metal barrel.

There were a number of Indians in the clearing, watching with
wide-open eyes the activities of the whites. Dozens of birch-bark
canoes dotted the Hudson, each with its load of fishermen,
industriously working for the white people. It had been hard to
overcome the fear in the Indians, and they still paid superstitious
reverence to the whites, but fair dealings, coupled with a constant
readiness to defend themselves, had enabled Arthur to institute a
system of trading for food that had so far proved satisfactory.

The whites had found spare electric-light bulbs valuable currency in
dealing with the redmen. Picture-wire, too, was highly prized. There
was not a picture left hanging in any of the offices. Metal
paper-knives bought huge quantities of provisions from the eager
Indian traders, and the story was current in the tower that Arthur
had received eight canoe-loads of corn and vegetables in exchange
for a broken-down typewriter. No one could guess what the savages
wanted with the typewriter, but they had carted it away triumphantly.

Estelle smiled tenderly to herself as she remembered how Arthur had
been the leading spirit in all the numberless enterprises in which
the castaways had been forced to engage. He would come to her in a
spare ten minutes, and tell her how everything was going. He seemed
curiously boylike in those moments.

Sometimes he would come straight from the fire-room—he insisted on
taking part in all the more arduous duties—having hastily cleaned
himself for her inspection, snatch a hurried kiss, and then go
off, laughing, to help chop down trees for the long fishing-raft.
He had told them how to make charcoal, had taken a leading part in
establishing and maintaining friendly relations with the Indians,
and was now down in the deepest sub-basement, working with a gang
of volunteers to try to put the building back where it belonged.

Estelle had said, after the collapse of the flooring in
the board-room, that she heard a sound like the rushing of
waters. Arthur, on examining the floor where the safe-deposit vault
stood, found it had risen an inch. On these facts he had built up
his theory. The building, like all modern sky-scrapers, rested on
concrete piles extending down to bedrock. In the center of one of
those piles there was a hollow tube originally intended to serve
as an artesian well. The flow had been insufficient and the well
had been stopped up.

Arthur, of course, as an engineer, had studied the construction of
the building with great care, and happened to remember that this
partly hollow pile was the one nearest the safe-deposit vault. The
collapse of the board-room floor had suggested that some change
had happened in the building itself, and that was found when he
saw that the deposit-vault had actually risen an inch.

He at once connected the rise in the flooring above the hollow
pile with the pipe in the pile. Estelle had heard liquid sounds.
Evidently water had been forced into the hollow artesian pipe under
an unthinkable pressure when the catastrophe occurred.

From the rumbling and the suddenness of the whole catastrophe
a volcanic or seismic disturbance was evident. The connection of
volcanic or seismic action with a flow of water suggested a geyser or
a hot spring of some sort, probably a spring which had broken through
its normal confines some time before, but whose pressure had been
sufficient to prevent the accident until the failure of its flow.

When the flow ceased the building sank rapidly. For the fact
that this "sinking" was in the fourth direction—the Fourth
Dimension—Arthur had no explanation. He simply knew that in some
mysterious way an outlet for the pressure had developed in that
fashion, and that the tower had followed the spring in its fall
through time.

The sole apparent change in the building had occurred above the
one hollow concrete pile, which seemed to indicate that if access
were to be had to the mysterious, and so far only assumed spring,
it must be through that pile. While the vault retained its abnormal
elevation, Arthur believed that there was still water at an immense
and incalculable pressure in the pipe. He dared not attempt to tap
the pipe until the pressure had abated.

At the end of a week he found the vault slowly settling back into
place. When its return to the normal was complete he dared begin
boring a hole to reach the hollow tube in the concrete pile.

As he suspected, he found water in the pile—water whose sulfurous
and mineral nature confirmed his belief that a geyser reaching deep
into the bosom of the earth, as well as far back in the realms of
time, was at the bottom of the extraordinary jaunt of the tower.

Geysers were still far from satisfactory things to explain. There
are many of their vagaries which we cannot understand at all.
We do know a few things which affect them, and one thing is that
"soaping" them will stimulate their flow in an extraordinary manner.

Arthur proposed to "soap" this mysterious geyser when the renewal
of its flow should lift the runaway sky-scraper back to the epoch
from which the failure of the flow had caused it to fall.

He made his preparations with great care. He confidently expected
his plan to work, and to see the sky-scraper once more towering
over mid-town New York as was its wont, but he did not allow the
fishermen and hunters to relax their efforts on that account. They
labored as before, while deep down in the sub-basement of the
colossal building Arthur and his volunteers toiled mightily.

They had to bore through the concrete pile until they reached the
hollow within it. Then, when the evidence gained from the water
in the pipe had confirmed his surmises, they had to prepare their
"charge" of soapy liquids by which the geyser was to be stirred to
renewed activity.

Great quantities of the soap used by the scrubwomen in scrubbing
down the floors was boiled with water until a sirupy mess was
evolved. Means had then to be provided by which this could be quickly
introduced into the hollow pile, the hole then closed, and then
braced to withstand a pressure unparalleled in hydraulic science.
Arthur believed that from the hollow pile the soapy liquid would
find its way to the geyser proper, where it would take effect in
stimulating the lessened flow to its former proportions. When that
took place he believed that the building would return as swiftly
and as surely as it had left them to normal, modern times.

The telephone rang in his office, and Estelle answered it. Arthur
was on the wire. A signal was being hung out for all the castaway
to return to the building from their several occupations. They were
about to soap the geyser.

Did Estelle want to come down and watch? She did! She stood in the
main hallway as the excited and hopeful people trooped in. When
the last was inside the doors were firmly closed. The few friendly
Indians outside stared perplexedly at the mysterious white strangers.

The whites, laughing excitedly, began to wave to the Indians. Their
leave-taking was premature.

Estelle took her way down into the cellar. Arthur was awaiting her
arrival. Van Deventer stood near, with the grinning, grimy members
of Arthur's volunteer work gang. The massive concrete pile stood
in the center of the cellar. A big steam-boiler was coupled to a
tiny pipe that led into the heart of the mass of concrete. Arthur
was going to force the soapy liquid into the hollow pile by steam.

At a signal steam began to hiss in the boiler. Live steam from
the fire-room forced the soapy sirup out of the boiler, through
the small iron pipe, into the hollow that led to the geyser far
underground. Six thousand gallons in all were forced into the
opening in a space of three minutes.

Arthur's grimy gang began to work with desperate haste. Quickly
they withdrew the iron pipe and inserted a long steel plug,
painfully beaten from a bar of solid metal. Then, girding the
colossal concrete pile, ring after ring of metal was slipped on,
to hold the plug in place.

The last of the safeguards was hardly fastened firmly when Estelle
listened intently.

"I hear a rumbling!" she said quietly.

Arthur reached forward and put his hand on the mass of concrete.

"It is quivering!" he reported as quietly. "I think we'll be on
our way in a very little while."

The group broke for the stairs, to watch the panorama as the runaway
sky-scraper made its way back through the thousands of years to
the times that had built it for a monument to modern commerce.

Arthur and Estelle went high up in the tower. From the window of
Arthur's office they looked eagerly, and felt the slight quiver as
the tower got under way. Estelle looked up at the sun, and saw it
mend its pace toward the west.

Night fell. The evening sounds became high-pitched and shrill,
then seemed to cease altogether.

In a very little while there was light again, and the sun was
speeding across the sky. It sank hastily, and returned almost
immediately,
via
the east. Its pace became a breakneck rush. Down
behind the hills and up in the east. Down in the west, up in the
east. Down and up— The flickering began. The race back toward modern
times had started.

Arthur and Estelle stood at the window and looked out as the sun
rushed more and more rapidly across the sky until it became but a
streak of light, shifting first to the right and then to the left
as the seasons passed in their turn.

With Arthur's arms about her shoulders, Estelle stared out across
the unbelievable landscape, while the nights and days, the winters
and summers, and the storms and calms of a thousand years swept
past them into the irrevocable past.

Presently Arthur drew her to him and kissed her. While he kissed
her, so swiftly did the days and years flee by, three generations
were born, grew and begot children, and died again!

Estelle, held fast in Arthur's arms, thought nothing of such trivial
things. She put her arms about his neck and kissed him, while the
years passed them unheeded.

Of course you know that the building landed safely, in the exact
hour, minute, and second from which it started, so that when the
frightened and excited people poured out of it to stand in Madison
Square and feel that the world was once more right side up, their
hilarious and incomprehensible conduct made such of the world as
was passing by think a contagious madness had broken out.

Days passed before the story of the two thousand was believed, but
at last it was accepted as truth, and eminent scientists studied
the matter exhaustively.

There has been one rather queer result of the journey of the
runaway sky-scraper. A certain Isidore Eckstein, a dealer in jewelry
novelties, whose office was in the tower when it disappeared into the
past, has entered suit in the courts of the United States against
all the holders of land on Manhattan Island. It seems that during
the two weeks in which the tower rested in the wilderness he traded
independently with one of the Indian chiefs, and in exchange for
two near-pearl necklaces, sixteen finger-rings, and one dollar in
money, received a title-deed to the entire island.—He claims that
his deed is a conveyance made previous to all other sales whatever.

Strictly speaking, he is undoubtedly right, as his deed was
signed before the discovery of America. The courts, however, are
deliberating the question with a great deal of perplexity.

Eckstein is quite confident that in the end his claim will be
allowed and he will be admitted as the sole owner of real-estate
on Manhattan Island, with all occupiers of buildings and territory
paying him ground rent at a rate he will fix himself. In the mean
time, though the foundations are being reinforced so the catastrophe
cannot occur again, his entire office is packed full of articles
suitable for trading with the Indians. If the tower makes another
trip back through time, Eckstein hopes to become a landholder of
some importance.

No less than eighty-seven books have been written by members of
the memorable two thousand in description of their trip to the
hinterland of time, but Arthur, who could write more intelligently
about the matter than any one else, is so extremely busy that
he cannot bother with such things. He has two very important
matters to look after. One is, of course, the reenforcement of the
foundations of the building so that a repetition of the catastrophe
cannot occur, and the other is to convince his wife—who is Estelle,
naturally—that she is the most adorable person in the universe. He
finds the latter task the more difficult, because she insists that
he
is the most adorable person—