Tickets to Paradise

It all started at Bandar Shahpur. You see, I'm a railroad construction man. Our job was finished, and the whole outfit was waiting at Bandar Shahpur, which is on the inlet Khor Musa of the Persian Gulf, for a boat to take us back to America.

And there, out of nowhere, this Dr. Champ Chadwick showed up. He seemed to be starving for a little good old U.S.A. palaver, and I guess that's why we struck up an acquaintance.

"I've been doing a little digging over in Iraq," he said offhand. "But things quieted down there. So now I'm bound for the desert and mountains to the north of here. This railroad has opened things up. It's difficult to get an expedition financed, you know, and transportation is sometimes the chief item."

I began to catch on that he was one of those guys who dig up ruins and things, and read a country's whole past from what they find. Then he went on to tell that he'd been sent out by a university in Pennsylvania, but that this present trip was just a sudden idea of his own.

And as he talked I began to like Dr. Chadwick. He was a serious-faced, rawboned little guy—not half my size—with steady eyes, a firm chin, and black hair plastered down slick on his head. By and by he got around to mention that he was looking for a strong-backed man to take along with him.

"I intend to strike out from Qum, the holy city," he said. "I'll try to get hold of a motor-truck there—and one of these desert men to drive it. They're rotten drivers though," he added, "and next to a dead loss on a trip like this." Then he sighed. "But I'm getting used to 'em."

"What do you expect to find up there?" I asked.

"The usual thing," he answered, as if that ought to explain everything. "This country is full of ruins. It's so old, in fact, that sometimes I think that everything that can happen has already happened here, at one time or another. Take Qum, for instance. A few years back there were twenty thousand ruined and deserted buildings still standing. These walled towns are like coral islands, surrounded and upheld by the dust and decay of their own past. But I'm looking for something farther back—much farther back."

He paused, then suddenly his eyes brightened. "There's one thing, though. I may have a try at finding the Ice Stone."

"The Ice Stone?" I echoed. "And what's that?"

"Perhaps just a legend. It isn't likely you would ever have heard of it. It's supposed to be a black stone, a huge, square block, set in the side of a mountain. If a man touches it, his hand sinks in, and he can get loose only by amputating. The queer part is, there seems to be some basis for the legend. All down through Iran's history there are disconnected references. The thing keeps cropping up. Vague reports from wandering tribes, with one or more cripples, minus an arm or leg, to verify the yarn. So, I may take a shot at locating the Ice Stone."

Queer stories like that are quite common in Iran. Ordinarily I'd have laughed and forgotten it. But as I say, I'd taken a sort of liking to this serious-faced little Dr. Champ Chadwick. And when you like a man you're bound to think twice before discrediting what he believes in.

"So you'll be taking a ride over this crazy railroad," I remarked thoughtfully, somewhat later.

He nodded. "What makes you call it crazy?"

Well, I told him. Of course he already knew quite a lot about Iran's new railroad—the many-million dollar toy of the "Brother of the Moon and Stars," as the fancy-tongued Iranians like to call their shah. This road writhes and twists and climbs through eight hundred miles of queer, mountainous country—a country of mud and rocks and salt-swamps—and carefully avoids all the important towns. You see, the "King of Kings"—another pet name for Shah Pahlavi—is afraid some of his neighbors might get control of the road and use it against him. These same neighbors sneeringly refer to it as the road that leads from "nowhere to nowhere."

Perhaps they aren't far wrong. But this road was the reason for my meeting up with Dr. Champ Chadwick.

The last spike, a gold one, had just been hammered into its tie by the "Most Lofty of Living Men" himself. That put our outfit out of a job temporarily. You see, I'd been working for McKardin-Malroy, an American contracting company, to whom the Shah had let out part of the constructional works on his railroad.

So, in the end, I of course took the job this Chadwick had sort of dangled under my nose. The pay wasn't anything worth mentioning; but, as I found out later, he himself was supplying the cash for this trip out of his own pocket. He didn't have much, and so expenses had to be cut to the limit.

Things moved fast after that. I'd always had an idea that such trips were planned carefully, months in advance, detail by detail. But this Doc Champ, as I got to calling him, didn't seem to plan anything—he just acted.

The next day Doc and I rode back over that crazy railroad I'd helped build—a road that winds through a maze of tunnels, one a grotesque spiral affair, over high bridges and gorge viaducts. We passed through Dizful, famed city of rats; Sultanabad, city of rugs; and on to the holy city of Qum.

Two days later, with Doc's whole scant outfit stored in the truck he'd managed to purchase, we were grinding out through squalid towns of ancient, one-story huts toward the salt swamp of Kavir and the lonely stretch of mountains to the north.

"Notice the way the dew lies there on the grass?" he said to me one morning, just as the sun was rising and we were breaking camp. "We slept right over the foundation walls of what was once part of an ancient city."

I squinted at where he was pointing, and, sure enough, I could see the grass was all marked out in big squares—showing up only in the way the dew sparkled, or didn't sparkle, in the slanting sunlight.

"Difference in heat and moisture conductivity," explained Doc. "Those walls are probably only a little way beneath the surface."

"You want to dig here?" I asked him.

He shook his head. Since that time when he told me about the Ice Stone, he'd never mentioned it again. But I had noticed him squinting at all the mountains we passed, and sometimes I'd see a queer expression on his face, like a man who catches himself doing something that hasn't got good sense back of it.

In fact, by the end of the week, I had about decided that he didn't have any better idea as to why we'd come out here than I did.

I think it was on the seventh day that we came upon a queer-looking country—isolated masses of rock, like big blocks, sticking up out of the ground. Beyond these was a range of low mountains, or big hills, whichever way you look at it.

"We'll camp here for a day," said Doc. "How's the water?"

"About gone," I told him.

"Good," he nodded. "We'll run the truck up to the foot of those big hills and find some."

I headed that old bus for a sort of fold in the hills ahead, and when the ground began to get pretty rough we stopped and went on afoot, each carrying a couple of empty water buckets. It wasn't long before we found a shallow stream.

"There may be a spring farther up," said Doc.

He started splashing along the creek bed, for it was bordered by dense thickets of "jangal"—birch and box—through which you could scarcely squeeze.

I followed him. Pretty soon I smelled smoke.

"Hey, Doc!" I called, "something's burning."

He stopped and turned around. There was a queer look in his eyes, almost like he wasn't all there—dopey.

"Yes," he said, not seeming surprised at all. Then he pointed ahead. "Smoke—I saw it some time back."

He started on again. The whole thing wasn't natural. For almost a week we had seen no living human being. And now, smoke—a wood fire, as I could tell by the scent—seemed to mean that we were getting near where someone lived. And yet, Doc hadn't thought it worth mentioning!

Well, I followed him on for a hundred yards. Then we turned a bend in the creek. The jangal opened up, and there, under the spread of a huge plane-tree, was the fire.

It was a small fire. Over it, roasting to a turn, were three dangling fowls; and near by stood a strange human figure—a man.

He beckoned to us. And as we approached he stood with folded arms, facing us.

"I am Rog Tanlu," he said in stiff but absolutely correct English. "I called you, and you came."

Doc Champ, ahead of me, straightened with a start. It was almost as though he had just realized the queerness of all this.

"Good Lord!" I heard him gasp softly.

Then we both stood there, staring at that chap who called himself Rog Tanlu. He was dressed in a glove-fitting garment that appeared to be made of fawn-colored silk—which was odd enough. But the man himself looked still stranger. He was no Iranian—no Kurd, Kashgais nor Bakhtiaris. I could have sworn to that.

He was very light skinned—lighter than any Persian—with a kind of pallor, although not an unhealthy look, as though he'd spent all his life indoors.

"Do not be alarmed," he said, smiling at us, and with a friendly look in his light blue eyes. "I can well understand your surprise at finding me here. But I shall explain everything. Meanwhile, I have prepared food, thinking you might be hungry. Will you join me?"

He started dishing out those broiled fowls—black partridges, or "durraj," I judged them to be—with the air of a man enjoying his first outdoor picnic and getting a big kick out of it.

"Here, Dr. Chadwick," he said, handing Doc one of those birds on a big leaf for a dish. "And here's one for you, Mr. Lavin."

Well, I took that broiled fowl and looked for a place to sit down. You see my name is Lavin, Curt Lavin, but how he'd found it out was a puzzler. I looked at Doc Champ. He was staring at this Rog Tanlu as if seeing a ghost, or a man from Mars.

That kind of knocked me out. I put a lot of dependence on Doc's knowledge of human tribes and such. But evidently he couldn't tag on our host any more than I could.

I started to sit down on a flat rock near the fire. And then I saw something standing on that rock—a thing like a tubular flashlight, eight inches tall, with a globe of silvered glass at the upper end.

"You are wondering at the way I speak your language," I heard this Rog Tanlu saying to Doc Champ. "I have been learning it during the last few days, but as yet am very lacking in fluency."

"You—you've been learning English?" Doc Champ kind of gulped.

Rog Tanlu waved the bird-leg he was nibbling on.

"With the audio-visiscope," he explained.

He reached over and did something to that flashlight thing on the rock near me. Right away it started talking—like a radio. But I knew it wasn't a radio. The speaker was someone cussing the King of Kings' order forbidding veils for Iranian women. And then I saw that what I had thought was a reflection in that silvered globe was moving. It wasn't a reflection; it was a robed, turbaned mullah, and he went on telling someone how unjust it was for a mullah to have to carry a license.

"Television," I heard Doc Champ mutter.

I'll say it was, with a bang! And yet, not just that either. For you may depend on it that no station was sending out such stuff.

Rog Tanlu shut the thing off, and the silver of that globe became dead black. I started eating. There was nothing but coarse salt to go along with the bird—the kind you can scrape off rocks near those mud-salt swamps—but the meat tasted okay. The others sat down and we finished the three birds in no time.

"How'd you bag 'em?" I asked Rog Tanlu, for I hadn't seen anything of a gun, and black pheasants aren't easy to knock over with a stone.

Rog Tanlu smiled and wiped his hands on that knit-silk outfit he was wearing. All the time during that meal he'd been smiling, squinting up at the sky and breathing deep—for all the world as though he'd never been on an outdoor party before.

"With this," he said, in answer to my question, picking up something from the rock near where he was sitting—something that looked like a black fountain-pen—for there didn't seem to be any pockets in his clothing. Again he squinted up at the sky.

Just then a buzzard came flying along slowlike, pretty high over our heads. Rog Tanlu pointed that pen affair up at the bird. A thin little ray of light flashed up—another and another. They wavered around for a second, getting centered. And suddenly that buzzard started tumbling out of the sky and crashed into the bushes near us.

Doc Champ and I looked dumbly at each other. And then we stared at Rog Tanlu. Grinning like a magician who has just pulled a fancy trick, he held that ray-gun out for us to look at.

"What did you mean when you said you had called us?" asked Doc Champ, in that quiet way of his.

"I had to get in communication with someone in this Age—someone who could understand," said Rog Tanlu. "I chose you" (he was, of course, speaking to Doc Champ) "because of your training and comprehension of the Past. So I called you with the psycho-coil on the audio-visiscope, by which means mental suggestions may be conveyed."

Doc Champ swallowed hard. "What country are you from?"

"Iralnard," said Rog Tanlu. "A nation which does not exist on earth today, but which was contemporary with the beginning of the last Ice Age. At that time my people occupied this very land. I am, as you might say, a refugee from the Ice Age—the first to come through. But I believe that others will follow. A number of my people. This possible migration cannot help but result in discord with the present holders of the land, unless some friendly agreement can be established. So I called you."

By this time I was up to my ears. I grabbed Doc Champ's arm.

"Doc," I groaned, "are we awake? Is this guy joking? Or what's the answer?"

Doc pushed me away.

"I shall make everything clear," said Rog Tanlu.

"Let's get this straight," insisted Doc Champ. "You say you are a refugee from the Ice Age? But that was some five hundred thousand years ago. And you are in possession of at least two instruments of advanced science. It doesn't match up."

"It is quite necessary that you believe me." Rog Tanlu wasn't smiling now, but was speaking very seriously. "Perhaps you realize that it is a trait of the human mind to look upon the Past as uncultured. Such an attitude is greatly in error."

"You traveled here through Time?" asked Doc.

"Not exactly," said Rog Tanlu. "Time, as you know, is merely the illusion experienced by creatures endowed with memory living in a universe of random energy distribution. Time is movement, the rearrangement of matter—dependent upon the degree of entropy. I found it impossible to travel in Time. That's why I constructed the Ice Stone."

"The Ice Stone!" There was a kind of awe in Doc's voice. "You built the Ice Stone?"

Rog Tanlu nodded. "Of course I didn't call it that. But I happened to overhear a conversation between you two, with the audio-visiscope, some days ago, and thereby learned the name you have for it. A very appropriate name! I also learned that neither of you had ever seen it. So now, if you will accompany me, I will take you to my laboratory—or rather to what still remains of my laboratory—and show you the Ice Stone. That should simplify things, and may help us to solve the problem of this impending migration—a problem which was forced on me due to certain interference, as I will later explain."

He picked up that flashlight thing and started off up the creek bank.

Doc Champ shot a glance at me as he wiped beads of perspiration from his face with his old felt hat. The shiny black locks plastered down on his head glinted as he stepped into the sunshine.

"Come along," he said to me. "We'll see this through."

We followed Rog Tanlu. Presently he turned off the bank of the creek, and the path he chose got rocky and wild as hell. I began to understand why it was that so few people had ever run across the Ice Stone by accident.

"Doc," I whispered, "what do you make of this guy? Did you ever hear such a crazy yarn?"

"You forget," muttered Doc, "that we saw some things, too."

I knew what he meant. You couldn't get around that buzzard tumbling out of the sky, nor the mullah's image and voice in that silver globe.

Rog Tanlu was walking a few yards ahead of us. Suddenly I saw a queer-looking object hanging in one of those scraggly trees that were having a hard time trying to grow there among the rocks. It looked like a heavy blanket or garment, the same fawn-color as Rog Tanlu's outfit.

He stopped just opposite the tree where the thing was hanging from a low branch.

"After emerging from the Ice Stone," he explained, "I had to discard my outer clothing. The sudden climatic change was almost shocking." Then he pointed upward and to the left along a broad ledge that seemed to zigzag down the rough face of a cliff, a hundred yards away.

I guess Doc Champ had already caught sight of the Ice Stone. But I hadn't; and now with my first glimpse of it, the thing did look exactly like ice. It was like a huge, square block, set flush with the face of the cliff, and with that ledge forming a pathway up to it.

"Queer," I heard Doc Champ muttering. "All the legends pertaining to the Ice Stone mention its black appearance. That stone doesn't look black—it looks transparent."

"Its color has recently changed," explained Rog Tanlu. "It isn't a stone, or any material substance. It is a peculiar kind of space—space with the third dimension, thickness in this instance, so twisted and curved as to allow the fourth dimension to emerge from nothingness into a certain hypostatic realness. Light has needed a long time to penetrate through it, and for that reason the cube has only recently assumed an apparent transparency. Now, if you will follow me, I will lead you to my laboratory."

He continued on around a shoulder of the cliff, so that we lost sight of the Ice Stone. Gigantic boulders all but blocked the way. However, our strange guide seemed to know where he was going and how to get there.

"All these rocks didn't used to be here," he said musingly. "They are evidently glacier débris carried down since—well, since my time. Ah! Here we are."

He wormed his way through a narrow crevice. Doc and I followed. We soon entered what at one time in the past must have been the wide mouth of an underground cavern.

For a moment we stood there, breathing the cold, moist air and staring into the darkness.

Suddenly a light flashed. I saw that Rog Tanlu was using that fountain-pen thing like a flashlight, but now it was sending out a blue-white radiance instead of those thin, death-dealing flashes.

"This was my laboratory," he said, holding the light at arm's length above his head. "There were big sliding doors that closed the place up tight and kept out the ice and the cold. I had some rather unique scientific apparatus here, but now it's all mouldering dust."

His voice sounded flat, there with the weight of rocks around us, and sad somehow.

The floor of the cavern slanted stiffly upward. As we advanced, the air around us kept getting colder and colder. It was like a gale from the poles blowing in our faces.

"We'll soon be directly behind the Ice Stone," said Rog Tanlu.

A light began to appear ahead. I could see more of that cavern—even the rock-ribbed ceiling high overhead. I can't express just what I was thinking at that moment, but I saw Doc Champ kick at a mound of something underfoot. The mound crumbled; Doc stooped and picked up a round object, like a disk of rusted metal, and looked at it with a kind of stark wonder. Then he threw it away and we followed Rog Tanlu.

The light grew brighter, became a huge square of blustery, blue-white chaos. We were standing as if just within the maws of a Gargantuan doorway—an open doorway through which we could look out over a scene of inexpressible dreariness.

You've seen pictures of the Antarctic? Titanic masses and pinnacles of ice, frozen white barrens, a land without feeling or soul? It was like that.

"We are looking through the Ice Stone." Rog Tanlu's voice was all but snatched away by that glacial blast swishing in our faces. "I set it up like a door—a door leading from my laboratory to the outside. The light you see, and the wind, has taken half a million years to get through."

Doc Champ was tugging at the collar of his coat, and my own teeth were chattering. Rog Tanlu motioned us to one side, out of that freezing blast.

"You see what we were up against?" he smiled. "Our space explorations had killed the hope that some other planet in the system might offer a suitable refuge where humans could live under anything like natural conditions.

"Moreover, there were social troubles. Politicians, philosophers and sociologists all combined to control science. A scientist had to get a special permit before he could conduct any new line of inquiry.

"So I built this laboratory—ten miles from the vitro-domed city of Iralnard—partly to escape governmental interference and partly to keep from being spied upon by Darlu Marc, another experimentalist and personal enemy of mine. I worked here alone, except for one laboratory assistant—Eyoaoc Eiioiei, as I called him. And here we created the Ice Stone.

"As I have already explained, it is no material thing—merely a cube of specialized space, foreshortened, warped and curved to attain a specific result. Its action is very simple. It slows up a beam of light exactly as does a lens, but to an incomparably greater degree. And being composed of nothing tangible, it acts on any moving thing—particle, atom or electron—exactly as it does on light photons.

"Thus a man can walk through the Ice Stone without sensing any change. Yet every function of his being is retarded, including mental processes. And when he emerges from the other side, approximately half a million years have elapsed. But once having touched it, say with his hand, he must not try to withdraw, for his hand will then be within a separate and distinct macrocosm, uninfluenced by anything outside, and he must follow on through.

"My intentions were, of course, to provide an avenue of escape from the Ice Age we were entering, for I knew it wouldn't last indefinitely. But I needed some sort of proof as to what conditions would be like in half a million years before I could offer the Ice Stone as a possible refuge. With Eyoaoc Eiioiei's help I managed to obtain several chemically depicted approximations of the nearby landscape as it would be likely to appear after the Ice Age.

"These were very beautiful—or thus they seem to me—for you must remember that in my time no one had ever seen trees or grass or flowers growing naturally in the open.

"We had just completed all this when, as we were working one day here in the laboratory, my assistant sensed a snooper-ray on us. I myself am not sensitive to an audio-visiscope emanation—sometimes called the 'snooper-ray'—but Eyoaoc Eiioiei sensed it, and he warned me.

"However, the warning came too late. Darlu Marc, my enemy, was the spy. Within a few hours I was thrown in prison. Eyoaoc Eiioiei escaped. He was almost immune to the outside cold.

"Darlu Marc had inveigled himself in with certain politicians and, as a reward for reporting my misconduct, he received charge of my laboratory. But I knew that the Ice Stone was safe, being practically indestructible.

"Shortly thereafter, word came to me in prison that a company had been formed under Marc—a company that was selling tickets to the poorer class of Iralnard City, entitling the holder to emigrate through the Ice Stone. Their slogan was 'Tickets to Paradise.'

"Naturally, this injustice made me desperate. I swore that I'd be the first to pass through. In the meantime Eyoaoc Eiioiei had managed to enter Iralnard City, disguised. He was very attached to me. He helped me escape, helped me reach the laboratory. However, at the last moment, we became separated. To avoid recapture I was forced to pass through the Ice Stone alone.

"Now, my friends, you know why I am here."

Doc was beating his arms to keep from freezing.

"If I understand you," he puffed, "that thing"—pointing toward the Ice Stone—"affords a short-cut into the future, by a kind of suspended animation. And once there, you can't go back."

"Quite correct." Rog Tanlu seemed pleased. "If I were to pass through it again, in either direction, I would not return to the Ice Age but would take another jump into the future."

It sounded simple, as he told it, even to me, and Doc nodded.

"What seems queer," he observed, "is about this cold and wind. I understand it's blowing from the outside cliff into the Ice Stone—from way back in the Ice Age—and is only now emerging here. In that case the cube must have swallowed a tremendous amount of air—and energy!"

"You grasp the idea," said Rog Tanlu, with quiet satisfaction. "But you must not judge the capacity of the Ice Stone by its external dimensions. They are quite deceptive. I assure you that its ramifications in the fourth dimension would enable it to absorb a total of all telluric energies, and still have room to spare.... Come, my friends, I had not realized that you were suffering from the cold! Let us return to the balmy open. I find your climate—inexpressible!"

Well, I wasn't sorry to hear this proposal. And judging by the way Doc Champ was frostily puffing and rubbing his ears, I guess he wasn't, either.

We soon got down to where the wind didn't hit so strong, and Doc started asking questions.

When would the refugees start coming? Would Darlu Marc—Rog Tanlu's enemy—be among the first?

"He may never come," said Rog Tanlu bitterly. "His purpose is to bleed the people, sell them passage to this paradise. That would enable him to live in comparative security and comfort back in Iralnard City for the remainder of his lifetime."

I could see by the way he spoke that those half-million years separating him from this guy Marc were pretty galling on Rog Tanlu.

We were moving slowly down toward that all-but-closed entrance, and now and then he would flash his light to show the way.

"Here's a strange thought," said Doc Champ suddenly, as he stumbled along at my elbow. "Why can't we go up on that ledge and look through the Ice Stone from that direction? We ought to be able to see right into your laboratory, as it was a short time after you left, and find out what's going on."

Rog Tanlu chuckled. "Of course," he agreed eagerly. "That's right where we're bound now. I've been hanging around there for nine days—watching. But so far—"

A funny sound cut in on him—a sound coming from somewhere ahead. It was like a voice—a metallic voice—thin and clear.

"Rog Tanlu ... Rog Tanlu ... Rog Tan-lu...."

Then I saw something move, there in the shadows, and goose-pimples sprang out on me. For as the light glinted on that thing, I saw it wasn't human.

"Eyoaoc Eiioiei!" cried Rog Tanlu. "He's come through—he has followed me!"

"Eyoaoc Eiioiei!" cried Rog Tanlu, "He's come through. He has followed me!"

Did you ever see a dog frisk around someone he likes, someone he's been separated from for a long time? Then picture the dog as no dog at all, but a madhouse thing prancing on two jointed-metal legs, as thick as stovepipes, its eyes glinting ruby-red when they catch the light—

But the part that made cold shivers run up my back was the thing's head—a round globe from which those ruby eyes sparkled. That head wasn't attached in any visible manner to its short, squat body, but seemed to float, six inches above its shoulders, as if poised there by some magnetic force.

All the while the thing was capering around Rog Tanlu, it was jabbering at him in some outlandish tongue, and he was jabbering back at it.

Doc Champ and I stood there staring.

But by and by I heard Doc's voice.

"A robot," he said, speaking softly and in kind of an awed tone. "So his laboratory assistant is a robot."

"No wonder it was immune to the cold," I gulped, swallowing hard.

Presently Rog Tanlu swung around toward us and commenced to talk so we could understand.

"Serious news," he bit out. "Darlu Marc has delayed the emigration. But he is sending a party of his vassals to wipe me out. He thinks I possess means to destroy the Ice Stone—thinks I'd do it out of sheer spite. He's wrong of course, in both instances. But the idea is hindering the sale of tickets. Eyoaoc Eiioiei learned of Marc's intentions. He managed at last to reach the Ice Stone, and bring me warning. He emerged on the cliff side while we were in here. But an armed band of Marc's vassals are right on his heels!"

I couldn't tear my gaze from that thing he called Eyoaoc Eiioiei. It had stopped frisking around him and was now blinking its ruby-red eyes at Doc Champ and me; and, I swear, I believe that damned thing was just as amazed and curious as I was.

"Do you mean," asked Doc, "that these killers are outside now?"

"I do not know," answered Rog Tanlu. "If so, they will soon find the entrance to my laboratory, since they are familiar with the terrain."

"Then we better sneak out of here," I suggested, not liking the idea of being bottled up, there in that hole.

"My friends," said Rog Tanlu, "I regret having drawn you into this. Leave now; you may be able to escape undetected. But I shall await them here, in this cavern which is very familiar to me."

Doc Champ shook his head. I knew he wouldn't fall in with that plan.

"We're both armed," he told Rog Tanlu, slapping the automatic that sagged in his pocket. "We'll hang around awhile."

I guess I like this quality in Doc. Maybe it was partly the reason why I took to him.

Well, I backed up the little guy ... but I thought he was wrong. That fight—if there was going to be a fight—wasn't ours. And I couldn't just see men with pistols getting very far against those fountain-pen affairs, like Rog Tanlu had. And then, there was that Eyoaoc Eiioiei.... The whole thing was a little beyond my depths. I thought Doc was wrong to mix up in something we didn't know a cussed thing about—and I still think so!

Rog Tanlu had switched off his light. We stood there in the dark listening. But we didn't hear a sound.

I groped around and touched Doc's arm.

"Doc," I whispered, "let's slip down to the entrance and find out what's going on."

Although my words shouldn't have carried six feet, that robot thing must have heard me—and, stranger still, must have understood.

For immediately I heard a subdued, metallic jabbering, then Rog Tanlu's voice speaking urgently to Doc and me.

"That would be very unwise. Eyoaoc Eiioiei suggests that it would be better for us three to withdraw farther from the entrance. He will remain here and act as guard. Moreover, I can easily learn, with the audio-visiscope, what is taking place outside—just as soon as I have a moment of leisure. Come, my friends."

Well, we faced around and started back. And I could hear that nightmare thing he called Eyoaoc Eiioiei moving on down toward the rock-choked entrance—its steps surprisingly soundless, considering its clumsy appearance.

However, the entire arrangement didn't seem right to me, especially letting that thing plan our line of action as if it was one of us and, well, alive.

But that robot-thing could certainly think, and fight, as I was shortly to learn!

Doc Champ and I groped along after Rog Tanlu. He seemed to know right where he was going, and after a hundred feet or so he stopped.

It was not quite dark here—just enough light for us to see, in a vague sort of fashion, that he was bending over a low, flat block of stone, a stone suggesting that it had once served as the foundation for some huge machine. I realized that he was setting up that flashlight contraption with the black bulb at one end.

And suddenly that bulb began to glow softly.

"Now," said Rog Tanlu, "we'll see what's going on."

The three of us bent over the thing. What looked like reflections in it were shifting around and around, and abruptly the steep face of a cliff swung into view. We could see the Ice Stone as it appeared from the outside, and the ledge running up to it.

We saw no one near the Ice Stone. But suddenly, under Rog Tanlu's swift adjustment, the image shifted and enlarged—like a movie close-up—magnifying a certain portion of that ledge.

And there, in a heap like cast-off cocoons, were some half-dozen of those heavy, fawn-colored garments, identical with the one we had seen hanging in the tree.

"So-o-o," Rog Tanlu breathed tensely, "Eyoaoc Eiioiei was right! They have come! They must be—"

A startled shout cut off his words. It was followed by a blinding flash of light. Then hell suddenly broke loose down below us....

In that cavern-darkness the blast of light was, in itself, almost stunning; and following it were other blasts of equal intensity. Vision was a torturing thing. It was like those brief but vivid glimpses presented by lightning during a summer storm at night.

But with hurting eyes I managed to discern a group of figures jamming the entrance-way to the cavern, with Eyoaoc Eiioiei's weird shape looming between us and them.

"Down!" shouted Rog Tanlu to Doc and me. "Down, behind the rock!"

In a dim, bewildered way I realized that those flashes of light were from weapons in the hands of invaders—weapons trained on Eyoaoc Eiioiei. But we, also, were directly in line.

Doc Champ didn't seem to hear Rog Tanlu's order. He was staring down at that weird sight—staring at Eyoaoc Eiioiei. And for a moment I, too, ignored the warning. For that grotesque thing was fighting—fighting in a way that was an astonishing sight to witness.

Thin, dazzling, rapierlike beams were flashing up at him and past him. But Eyoaoc Eiioiei was avoiding those hissing shafts with a skill not human—a dancing, cavorting nightmare thing, silhouetted against and enmeshed by those lethal streaks of fire; and I saw that now and then from his metal hand flashed a return blast of radiance. He was standing between his master and his master's assassins, and such wild courage and savagery brought into my throat a choked feeling of admiration.

A hissing white shaft flashed within a foot of my head, bringing me to my senses. I made a grab at Doc Champ, intending to drag him down to safety. Then I realized that he was already lying flat behind that ancient block of rock.

Rog Tanlu was on his knees. He had jerked that fountain-pen affair into action. Again and again I saw its belching bar of whiteness blast down toward the entrance. This man from the Past, despite his thin, pale face and affable manner, was also a fighter!

And strangely, watching him and that wildly cavorting shadow that was Eyoaoc Eiioiei, I forgot all about the automatic in my pocket. For somehow this fantastic meeting of forces seemed remotely withdrawn from the affairs of Doc Champ and myself—although heaven knows we were mixed up in it at that moment close enough!

I do not know for how long that flaming barrage lasted—perhaps only a moment or so, although it seemed longer. But suddenly it was over. Darkness and silence blotted down on us there in the cavern.

"Doc!" I gasped.

He didn't answer. But I heard someone moaning softly.

I groped around in the darkness. Then my hand touched him. He didn't move, and somehow it needed only that touch to tell me the truth.

"Rog Tanlu," I called hoarsely. "Rog Tanlu—!"

"Here," came a voice, followed by a moan.

The temporary blindness caused by those recent blasts of light was leaving my eyes. I began to see dimly.

I crawled over to where Rog Tanlu was lying.

"They accomplished their purpose," he muttered. "I—I'm—"

"Where are you hurt?" I asked, my hands running over his shoulder and arm. That glove-fitting silk garment over his right arm and part of his chest felt strangely altered, brittle, charred.

"The healing ray," he muttered. "The orlex ray—only that could help me ... and I know that you do not have it."

A sound, the clump of heavy metal feet, caused me suddenly to jerk erect. My eyes tried to pierce the darkness.

A grotesque form was emerging from the gloom—Eyoaoc Eiioiei.

I drew back as that metal thing bent over Rog Tanlu.

There followed a moment of excited voice-sounds, and once or twice Rog Tanlu answered, faintly, words I could not understand.

Suddenly, reaching down, the thing picked him up in its jointed metal arms and started to carry him on up the passageway.

For a moment I stood there, saddened and appalled by this grim turn of fate. Then I began running up the slope after them. But so swiftly did that metal thing stride on before me that the blast of glacial air from the Ice Stone was hissing in my ears before I overtook them.

"Rog Tanlu!" I cried. "Where—?"

"The healing ray," his voice came back to me. "You do not have it ... my good friend.... But somewhere ... in the Future ... it will be rediscovered. Eyoaoc Eiioiei will take me ... on into the Future ... through the Ice Stone ... again and again if necessary ... until we find it—"

His voice ceased. For Eyoaoc Eiioiei had not paused, but had continued on straight into that frigid blast.

I caught a last vague glimpse of that nightmare shape disappearing into the Ice Stone.

There is but little more to tell. Those assassins from the Past were all dead, as I discovered when I left the cavern—Rog Tanlu's laboratory.

I buried what was left of little rawboned Doctor Champ in the sand at the foot of that cliff below the Ice Stone.

Then I headed back in the truck for Qum, the Holy City. Three days later the fuel ran out. I do not know what plans Doc had made for replenishing it, but whatever they were he hadn't put me wise. So I left the truck there at the edge of a mud-salt swamp and went on afoot.

Two weeks later, more dead than alive, I arrived at Qum and tried to give warning.

It may seem queer, but until that moment I had not worried over the chance of my word being doubted. Moreover, the one substantiating exhibit I had thought to bring along—that fawn-colored silk garment of Rog Tanlu's—I had been forced to abandon along with the truck.

I soon realized that if I persisted in trying to tell the truth, one of two things would happen: I would either be locked up as a nut, or, if I managed to convince certain Iranian officials, then the "Most Lofty of Living Men"—the Shah—might possibly send a few airplanes out there to bomb the Ice Stone "out of existence," as they lightly and humorously suggested.

I doubt that this could be done. If the Ice Stone were dislodged from its setting, there in the mountain-cliff where it was installed by its maker—Rog Tanlu—who knows what world-catastrophe might not result?

So at last I gave up.

At Bandar Shahpur I caught a boat for home.

But I am now dickering with a certain Pennsylvania university. They are interested in the disappearance of Dr. Champ Chadwick, and I've offered to act as guide if they will send a party of scientists out to investigate the Ice Stone. Perhaps something may come of it—before it is too late.

But then I get to thinking of how Eyoaoc Eiioiei is carrying his wounded master on and on into the Future in search of a "healing ray!"