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elapt1c
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ElapticAI-512

Dataset card Data Studio Files
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149M
Can I explain my feelings to you? I doubt it. All I can think of is to
say that I felt like a very tiny fly on a wall, watching helplessly,
wingless, unable to escape, as a gigantic flyswatter smashed down at
frightful speed upon me. The Saturn was a huge craft, yes, but it was
a speck of dry dust compared to the colossal sphere toward which it
plunged.
At this velocity there could be but one result to a collision. Death,
swift, crushing, horrible, for all of us. A moment, I thought, of
incredible pain. A torrent of madness beating at the eardrums, the
fires of hell flaming before the eyes then oblivion.
Nearer came the planet. I could see now that it was as mad and wild as
the unspawned negative universe in which it floated. No life. No thin
film of atmosphere to blue the sharp definition of its raw terrain. A
weird, dead world in a universe that could not be.
I was aware of Donovan at my side, breathing hard. I glanced across the
room at Lancelot Biggs. His eyes were strained, the muscles of his jaw
white. His lips were half parted. Perhaps it was imagination, but I
thought I caught the whisper of a name.
"Diane!"
And then a stranger thing happened. There came a sudden, tender little
cry from Helen MacDowell. A flurry of movement. And then she was
across the room, was in the arms of Hank Cleaver! And she didn't seem
to care that her words carried to all of us.
"You've failed, Hank! But I don't care. I don't care. It's too late to
pretend now that I hate you. For I don't. I love you, Hank...."
Then everything happened at once. My eyes leaped back from the
Helen-Hank tableau to the visiplate, as abruptly there came a crashing
explosion from the bowels of the ship. I saw the planet before us now
within it seemed but inches! There was a high, tortured screaming in
my ears. The grind of motors, the pounding of massive drums, a scream
ripping from the throat of Hallowell, a muffled curse from Cap Hanson
Then a horrible, wrenching shock. I felt my body lifting, floating,
hurtling across the floor! Something fell sprawling upon me, glass
splintered, a dozen voices cried out at once.
And everything was black, and there was a dead and sickly pressure
across my body
from the center of which came a muffled voice. The voice of Bert
Donovan.
"Well, I'll be triple and everlastingly damned to a fare-you-well!"
I kicked, and he wriggled. I kicked again and he moved.
I said, "If you'll get off my head, you damned fool, maybe I can see
what's going on!"
He got up. And so did I. All about the control room, men were picking
themselves up, lifting their voices in astonishment, staring at a
visiplate from which had disappeared that gigantic, threatening orb.
A visiplate in which was now depicted sweet, jet depths of darkness,
pin-pricked with glowing points of light!
Cap Hanson's voice was a paean of joy.
"We're home again! Home in our own universe! By God in our own solar
system! For there's Io, the pretty little devil!"
Helen was crying, "Then you didn't fail, Hank! It worked! We're saved!"
And Biggs, only sane man in a roomful of delight-maddened lunatics, was
ambling to the audio, face wreathed in a seraphic grin.
"Garrity?" he called down to the chief engineer. "Take a look out
the viewpanes if you want to holler with joy. And then set course
for home! And, oh, yes, Garrity set men to work immediately on the
repairing of the temporal deflector."
So that was that. We took time off to recuperate. Some hours later we
were standing in the Saturn before a large, cylindrical, glass-walled
machine, Lancelot Biggs' "time-travel" gadget which had absorbed us up
here into the future. That is most of us were still standing here in
the Saturn.
Professor Hallowell had already been projected back to our time. So
had Travis Tomkins, Midland's observatory expert, his arms loaded with
books from the ship's library describing the great inventions of, as on
the Saturn, the last two centuries or, to us of 1940, the inventions
of the next two hundred years.
"Which books," commented Lancelot Biggs wryly, "will do Tomkins a lot
of good I don't think! They won't arrive with him, you know because
in his time they weren't even written! I hope both those fellows will
return to their original places on Earth. Rather amazing, wouldn't
it be," he chuckled, "if something went wrong with the machine and
Hallowell appeared suddenly on the campus of Midland University with
some gadget from the future his future which fell into his pocket