Over the River and Through the Woods

  The editor stared.

  Men in the city room whirled around from their desks and wondered what it was all about.

  “I have returned,” said Jimmy and the editor emitted a strangled yelp that knifed through the silence in the room.

  The reporter walked into the room, dragging his companion after him.

  “Tone down your voice,” he said, “or you’ll frighten my friend. He has seen enough in the last hour to unnerve him for a lifetime.”

  “Who the hell you got there?” roared Hart.

  “This gentleman,” said Jimmy, “is Chief Hiawatha. I can’t pronounce his name, so I call him Hiawatha. He lived somewhere around here three, four thousand years ago.”

  “This isn’t a masquerade,” snapped the editor. “This is a newspaper office.”

  “Sure and I work here and I’m bringing you a story that will knock your hat off.”

  “You don’t mean to tell me you’re bringing in the story I sent you out to get two weeks ago?” Hart purred, and his purr had an edge on it. “You don’t mean to tell me you’re back already with that story.”

  “The very same story,” agreed Jimmy.

  “Too bad,” said the editor, “but the game’s over. It was over two hours ago. Earth won by a big score. I suppose you were too drunk to find that out.”

  “Nothing to drink where I come from,” Jimmy told him.

  “How you must have hated it,” said Hart.

  “Now listen,” said Jimmy, “do you want to get the inside story on this Earth team or don’t you? I got it. And it’s a big story. No wonder Earth won. Do you know that those Earth players were picked from the best football players Earth has produced during the last 1800 years? Why, Mars didn’t have a chance!”

  “OF COURSE, they didn’t have a chance,” growled Hart. “Folsworth explained all that in his story. They were licked before they started. Psychology. What’s this yap about the pick of Earth teams for the past 1800 years?”

  “Give me five minutes,” pleaded Jimmy, “and if you aren’t yelling yourself hoarse at the end of that time, I’ll admit you’re a good editor.”

  “All right,” snapped the editor, “sit down and loosen up. And you better be good or I’ll fire you right out on your ear.”

  “Now, Hiawatha,” said Jimmy, addressing his companion, “you sit right down in this chair. It won’t hurt you. It’s a thing you rest yourself in.”

  The Indian merely stared at him.

  “He don’t understand me very good yet,” explained Jimmy, “but he thinks I’m a god of some sort and he does the best he can.”

  Hart snorted in disgust.

  “Don’t snort,” cautioned the reporter. “The poor misguided savage probably thinks you’re a god, too.”

  “Get going,” snarled Hart.

  Jimmy seated himself on the edge of the desk. The Indian drew himself up to his full height and folded his arms across his chest. The newsmen in the room had left their desks and were crowding about.

  “You see before you,” said Jimmy, “a wild Indian, one of the aborigines of this continent. He lived here before the white men ever set foot on this land. I brought him along to show you I got the right dope.”

  “What’s all this got to do with the game?” persisted the editor.

  “Plenty. Now you listen. You don’t believe in Time travel. Neither did I until just a few days ago. There are thousands like you. Ships bridging the millions of miles of space between planets are commonplace now. Transmutation of metal is a matter of fact. Yet less than 1500 years ago people believed these things were impossible. Still, you—in this advanced age which has proven the impossible to be possible time and time again—scout the theory of Time travel along a fourth dimension. You even doubt that Time is a fourth dimension, or that there is such a thing possible as a fourth dimension.

  “Now, just keep your shirt on!

  “Nobody believes in Time travel. Let’s state that as a fact. Nobody but a few fool scientists who should be turning their time and effort toward something else. Something that will spell profit, or speed up production, or make the people happier, or send space liners shooting along faster so that the Earth-Mars run can be made in just a few less minutes.

  “And let me tell you that one of those fool scientists succeeded and he built a Time-tunnel. I don’t know what he calls it, but that describes it pretty well. I stumbled onto this thing and from what the coach told me, and what the players told, and from what the Indians tried to tell me, and from my own observations, I’ve got the thing all doped out. Don’t ask me how the scientist made the tunnel. I don’t have the least idea. I probably wouldn’t understand if I met the man who made it face to face and he told me how he did it.

  “Here’s how the Earth team beat the Martians. The coach knew he didn’t have a chance. He knew that he was in for another licking. The Earth is degenerating. Its men are getting soft. They don’t measure up to the Martians. The coach looked back at the Earth players of former years and he wished he could get a few of them.”

  “So,” said the editor, “I suppose he got this Time-tunnel of yours and went back and handpicked them.”

  “THAT’S EXACTLY what he did,” declared Jimmy. “He went over the records and he picked out the men he wanted. Then he sent his scouts back in Time and contracted them to play. He collected the whole bunch as near as I can make it out, and then he established a Time-tunnel leading from his office into the past about 3,000 years and took the whole gang back there. He constructed a playing field there, and he drilled men who had been dead for hundreds of years in a wilderness which existed hundreds of years before they were born. The men who played out in the Great Bowl at Guja Tant today were men who had played football before the first spaceship took to the void. Some of them have been dead for over a thousand years.

  “That’s what the squabble on the Control Board was about. That’s what held up the game—while the Board tried to dig up something that would bar these men out of Time. But they couldn’t, for the only rules of eligibility are that a man must be of unmixed Earth blood for the past ten generations and must be a football player on some college or university. And every one of those men were just that.”

  Hart’s eyes were stony and the reporter, looking at them, knew what to expect.

  “So you would like to sit down at your old desk and write that story,” he said.

  “Why not?” snarled Jimmy, ready for a battle.

  “And you would like me to put it on the front page, with big green headlines, and put out an extra edition and make a big name for the Rocket,” Hart went on.

  Jimmy said nothing. He knew nothing he could say would help.

  “And you would like to make a damn fool out of me and a joke out of the Rocket and set in motion an athletic investigation that would have Earth and Mars on their ears for the next couple of years.”

  The reporter turned to the Indian.

  “Hiawatha,” he said, “the big square-head doesn’t believe us. He ought to be back burning witches at the stake. He thinks we just thought this one up.”

  The Indian remained unmoved.

  “Will you get the hell out of here,” snapped Hart, “and take your friend along.”

  IV.

  THE SOFT, but insistent whirring of the night phone beside his bed brought the editor of the Rocket out of a sound sleep. He did not take kindly to night calls and when he saw the face of one of his reporters in the visaglass he growled savagely.

  “What are you waking me up for?” he asked. “You say there are fires out in the Great Bowl—Say, do you have to call me out of bed every time a fire breaks out? Do you want me to run down there and get the story—? You want to know should we shoot out an extra in the morning? Say, do we put out extras every time somebody builds a bonfire, even if it is in the Great Bowl? Probably just some drunks celebrating the victory while they’re waiting for the football special to come in.”

  He listened as words tumbled out of the p
hone.

  Jimmy leaned against the tree. So that, then, was the mysterious team the coach wouldn’t name. He began to understand why. They didn’t exist—yet!

  “What’s that,” he shouted. “Indians?…Holding a war dance! How many of them?…You say they are coming out of the administration building?…More coming all the time, eh!”

  Hart was out of bed now.

  “Listen, Bob, are you certain they are Indians?…Bill says they are, huh? Would Bill know an Indian if he saw one?…He wasn’t around this afternoon when Jim was in, was he? He didn’t see that freak Jim hauled in, did he?…If he’s playing a joke, I’ll crack his neck.

  “Listen, Bob, you get hold of Jim…Yes, I know he’s fired, but he’ll be glad to come back again. Maybe there’s something to that yarn of his. Call all the speakies and gambling joints in town. Get him if you have to arrest him. I’m coming down right away.”

  Hart hauled on his clothes, grabbed a cloak and hurried to his garage, where his small service plane was stored.

  A few minutes later he stamped into the Rocket editorial rooms.

  Bob was there.

  “Find Jim?” asked Hart.

  “Sure, I found him.”

  “What dump is he holed up in?”

  “He isn’t in any dump. He’s out at the Bowl with the Indians. He’s got hold of a half barrel of bocca someplace and those savages are getting ripe to tear up the place. How the Martians drink that bocca is beyond me. Imagine an Indian, who has never tasted alcohol, pouring it down his throat!”

  “But what did Jim say—”

  “Bill got hold of him, but he won’t do a thing for us. Said you insulted him.”

  “I can imagine what he said,” grated Hart. “You get Bill in here as fast as you can. Have him write a story about the Indians out at the Bowl. Call some of the other boys. Send one of them to wait for the football special and nail the coach as soon as it lands. Better have a bunch of the boys there and get interviews from the Earth players. The life story of each one of them. Shoot the works. Photographers, too. Pictures—I want hundreds of them. Find out who’s been monkeying around with Time traveling and put them on the spot. Call somebody on the Control Board. See what they have to say. Get hold of the Martian coach. I’m going out to the Bowl and drag Jim back here.”

  The door banged behind him and Bob grabbed for the phone.

  A HUGE CROWD had gathered at the Bowl. In the center of the amphitheatre, on the carefully kept and tended gridiron sod, a huge bonfire blazed. Hart saw that one of the goal posts had been torn down to feed it and that piles of broken boxes were on the ground beside the fire. About the blaze leaped barbaric figures, chanting—figures snatched out of the legendry of the country’s beginnings, etched against the leaping flames of the bonfire.

  A murmur rose from the crowd. Hart glanced behind him.

  Streaming into the Bowl came a squad of police, mounted on motor-bikes. As the squad entered the Bowl they turned on the shrill blasting of the police sirens and charged full down upon the dancing figures around the fire.

  Pandemonium reigned. The crowd that had gathered to watch the Indian dance scented new excitement and attempted to out-scream the sirens.

  The dance halted and Hart saw the Indians draw together for a single instant, then break and run, not away from the police, but straight toward them. One savage lifted his arm. There was a glint of polished stone in the firelight as he threw the war-axe. The weapon described an arc, descended upon the head of a mounted policeman. Policeman and bike went over in a flurry of arms, legs and spinning wheels.

  Above the din rose the terrible cry of the war whoop.

  Hart saw a white man leaping ahead of the Indians, shouting at them. It was Jimmy Russell. Mad with bocca, probably.

  “Jimmy,” shrieked Hart. “Come back here, Jimmy. You fool, come back.”

  But Jimmy didn’t hear. He was shouting at the Indians, urging them to follow him, straight through the charging police line, toward the administration building.

  They followed him.

  It was all over in a moment.

  The Indians and the police met, the police swerving their machines to avoid running down the men they had been sent out to awe into submission. Then the Indians were in the clear and running swiftly after the white man who was their friend. Before the police squad could turn their charging bikes, the red-men had reached the administration building, disappeared within it.

  Behind them ran Hart, his cloak whipping in the wind.

  “Jimmy,” he shrieked. “Jimmy, damn you, come back here. Everything’s all right. I’ll raise your salary.”

  He stumbled and fell, and as he fell the police roared past him, headed for the door through which the Indians and Jimmy had disappeared.

  Hart picked himself up and stumbled on. He was met at the door of the building by a police lieutenant who knew him.

  “Can’t understand it,” he shouted. “There isn’t a sign of them. They disappeared.”

  “They’re in the tunnel,” shouted Hart. “They’ve gone back 3,000 years.”

  The editor pushed the lieutenant to one side. But as he set foot in the building there was a dull thud, like a far-away explosion.

  When he reached the coach’s office he found it in ruins. The door had burst outward. The steel plates were buckled as if by a tremendous force. The furniture was upset and twisted.

  Something had happened.

  Hart was right. Something had happened to the Time-tunnel. It had been wiped out of existence.

  ALEXIS ANDROVITCH spoke with a queer quirk in his voice, a half-stuttering guttural.

  “But how was I to know that a foolish newspaper reporter would go down the Time-tunnel?” he demanded. “How was I to know something would happen? What do I care for newspapers? What do I care for football games? I’ll tell you. I care nothing for them. I care only for science. I do not even want to use this Time traveling personally. It would be nice to see the future, oh, yes, that would be nice—but I haven’t the time. I have more work to do. I have solved Time travel. Now I care no more about it. Pouf! It is something done and finished. Now I move on. I lose interest in the possible. It is always the impossible that challenges me. I do not rest until I eliminate the impossible.”

  Arthur Hart thumped the desk.

  “But if you did not care about football, why did you help out Coach Snelling? Why turn over the facilities of a great discovery to an athletic coach?”

  Androvitch leaned over the desk and leered at the editor.

  “So you would like to know that? You would ask me that question. Well, I will tell you. Gentlemen came to me, not the coach, but other gentlemen. A gentleman by the name of Danny Carsten and others. Yes, the gangsters. Danny Carsten was killed later, but I do not care about that. I care for nothing but science.”

  “Did you know who these men were when they came to you?” asked Hart.

  “Certainly I knew. They told me who they were. They were very businesslike about it. They said they had heard about me working on Time travel and they asked when I thought I would have it finished. I told them I already had solved the problem and then they spread money on the table—much money, more than I had ever seen before. So I said to them: ‘Gentlemen, what can I do for you?’ and they told me. They were frank about it. They said they wanted to win much money by betting on the game. They said they wanted me to help them get a team which would win the game. So I agreed.”

  Hart leaped to his feet.

  “Great galloping Jupiter,” he yelled. “Snelling mixed up with gangsters!”

  Androvitch shook his head.

  “Snelling did not know he was dealing with gangsters. Others went to him and talked to him about using the Time travel method. Others he thought were his friends.”

  “But, man,” said Hart, “you aren’t going to tell all this when you are called before the athletic Board of Control? There’ll be an investigation that will go through the whole thing with a fine tooth
comb and you’ll knock Coach Snelling out of the football picture if you open your mouth about gangsters being mixed up in this.”

  THE SCIENTIST shook his head. “Why should I care one way or the other. Human fortunes mean little. Progress of the race is the only thing worth while. I have nothing to hide. I sold the use of my discovery for money I needed to embark upon other researches. Why should I lie? If I tell the truth, maybe they will let me leave as soon as my story is told. I can’t waste time at investigations. I have work to do, important work.”

  “Have it your way,” said Hart, “but the thing I came here for was to see you about Jimmy Russell. Is there any way I can reach him? Do you know what happened?”

  “Something happened to the Time-control machine which was in Coach Snelling’s office. It operated at all times to keep the tunnel open. It required a lot of power and we had it hooked on a high-voltage circuit. I would guess that one of the Indians, becoming frightened in the office, probably even in a drunken stupor, blundered into the machine. He more than likely tipped it over and short-circuited it. I understand fragments of human body were found in the office. Just why the tunnel or the machine should have exploded, I don’t know. Electricity—just plain old electricity—was the key to the whole discovery. But probably I had set up some other type of force—let’s call it a Time-force if you want to be melodramatic about it—and this force might have been responsible. There’s still a lot to learn. And a lot of times a man accomplishes results which he does not suspect.”

  “But what about Jimmy?”

  “I’m pretty busy right now,” replied Androvitch. “I couldn’t possibly do anything for a few days—”

  “Is there anyone else who could do the work?” asked Hart.

  Androvitch shook his head. “No other person,” he said. “I do not confide in others. Once a Time-tunnel has been established, it is easy to operate the machine—that is, projecting the Time element further away from the present or bringing it closer to the present. The football players who have been brought here to play the game were in the present time over six months. But they will be returned to their own time at approximately the same hour they left it. That merely calls for a proper adjustment of the machine controlling the tunnel back into Time. But setting up a tunnel is something only I can do. It requires considerable technique, I assure you.”