Professional Documents
Culture Documents
https://manualpost.com/download/bomag-machinery-bw120sl-5-service-manual/
By Ray Cummings
e learned they were chasing the larger cage. They were not
hostile to Larry and presently made friends with him. They
were Princess Tina and a young scientist named Harl, both of
the world of 2930. The two cages had come from 2930. The larger
one had been stolen by an insubordinate Robot named Migul—a
pseudo-human mechanism running amuck.
Again Tugh, the cripple, was mentioned. In 2930 he was a
prominent scientist! But Harl and Tina mistrusted him. Tugh and Harl
had invented the Time-traveling cages. It was a strange Time-world,
that 2930, which now was described to Larry. It was an era in which
all work was done by mechanisms—fantastic Robots, all but human!
And they were now upon the verge of revolt against their human
masters! Migul was one of them. It had stolen one of the cages,
gone to 1777 and abducted Mary Atwood; and now, with her and
me in its power, was headed back for 1777 upon some strange
mission. Was it acting for the cripple Tugh? It seemed so. Tina and
Harl, with Larry, chased our cage and stopped in a night of the
summer of 1777.
Simultaneously, from the house on Patton Place, in June of 1935,
Robots began appearing. A hundred of them, or a thousand, no one
knew. With swords and flashing red and violet light-beams they
spread over the city in the never-to-be-forgotten Massacre of New
York! It was the beginning of the vengeance Tugh had threatened!
Nothing could stop the monstrous mechanical men. For three days
and nights New York City was in chaos. The red beams were frigid.
They brought a mid-summer snowstorm! Then the violet beams
turned the weather suddenly hot. A crazy wild storm swept the
wrecked city. Torrential hot rain poured down. Then, one dawn, the
beams vanished; the Robots retreated into the house on Patton
Place and disappeared; and New York was left a horror of death and
desolation.
The vengeance of Tugh against the New York City of 1935 was
complete.
CHAPTER VIII
heir voices were audible. "Leave the steeds with Jake. Egad,
we've made enough noise already."
"Here, Jake, you scoundrel. Stay safely here with the mounts."
"Come on, Tony. You and I will circle. We have him, this time. By the
King's garter, what a fool he is to come into New York at such a
time!"
"He wants to see his daughter, I venture."
"Right, Tony. And have you seen her? As saucy a little minx as there
it in the Colonies. I was quartered here last month. I do not blame
the major for wanting to come."
"Here, take my bridle, Jake. Tie them to the fence."
There was a swift confusion of voices; laughter. "If you should hear
a pistol shot, Jake, ride quickly back and tell My Lord there was a
fracas and you did not dare remain."
"I only hope he is garbed in the rebel white and blue—eh, Tony?
Then he will yield like an officer and a gentleman; which he is, rebel
or no."
They were moving away to surround the house. Two were left.
"Come on, Tony. We will pound the front knocker in the name of the
King. A feather in our cap when we ride him down to the Bowling
Green and present him to My Lord...."
The voices faded.
Larry gripped the girl beside him. "They are British soldiers going to
capture Major Atwood! What can we—"
he two ghosts with dead white faces stood peering. Then the
man moved forward. His dead, strange voice called:
"Drop that paper!"
My Lord Howe's red-coated officers dropped the parchment and fled.
And later, when Atwood's body was taken away to be given burial as
befitted an enemy officer and a gentleman, that missive from Mary
Atwood had disappeared. It was never found.
Tony Green and his fellows said nothing of this latter incident. One
cannot with grace explain being routed by a ghost. Not an officer of
His Majesty's army!
Unrecorded history! A supernatural incident of the year 1777!
Undoubtedly in the past ages there have been many such affairs:
some never recorded, others interwoven in written history and called
supernatural.
Yet why must they be that? There was nothing supernatural in the
events of that night in Major Atwood's garden.
Is this perchance an explanation of why the pages of history are so
thronged with tales of ghosts? There must, indeed, be many future
ages down the corridors of Time where the genius of man will invent
devices to fling him back into his past. And the impressions upon the
past which he makes are called supernatural.
Whether this be so or not, it was so in the case of these two Time-
traveling vehicles from 2930. Larry and I think that the world of
1935 is just now shaking off the shackles of superstition, and coming
to realize that what is called the supernatural is only the Unknown.
Who can say, up to 1935, how many Time-traveling humans have
come briefly back? Is this, perchance, what we call the phenomena
of the supernatural?
arry and Tina—anything but ghosts, very much alive and very
much perturbed—were standing back of that tree. They saw the
British officers reading the scrap of paper. They could hear only
the words, "Mary," and "from Mistress Atwood."
"A message!" Larry whispered. "She and George must have found a
chance to write it, and dropped it here while the Robot murdered
Major Atwood!"
Larry and Tina vehemently wanted to read the note. Tina whispered:
"If we show ourselves, they will be frightened and run. It is nearly
always so where Harl and I have become visible in earlier Times."
"Yes. I'll try it."
Larry stepped from the tree, and shouted, "Drop that paper!"
And a moment later, with Mary's torn little note scribbled on a scrap
of paper thrust in his pocket, Larry ran with Tina from the Atwood
garden. Unseen they scurried back through the field. Under a distant
tree they stopped and read the note.
"2930!" Larry exclaimed. "The Robot is taking them back to your
world, Tina!"
"Then we will go there. Let us get back to Harl, now."
But when they reached the place where they had left the cage, it
was not there! The corner of the field behind the clump of
shadowing trees was empty.
"Harl! Harl!" Larry called impulsively. And then he laughed grimly.
What nonsense to try and call into the past or the future to their
vanished vehicle!
"Why—why, Tina—" he said in final realization.
They stared at each other, pale as ghosts in the moonlight.
"Tina, he's gone. And we are left here!"
They were marooned in the year 1777!
CHAPTER IX
ary Atwood and I lay on the metal grid floor of the largest
Time-cage. The giant mechanism which had captured us sat
at the instrument table. Outside the bars of the cage was a
dim vista of shadowy movement. The cage-room was humming, and
glowing like a wraith; things seemed imponderable, unsubstantial.
But as my head steadied from the shock of the vehicle's start into
Time, my viewpoint shifted. This barred room, the metal figure of
the Robot, Mary Atwood, myself—we were the substance. We were
real, solid. I touched Mary and her arm which had seemed intangible
as a ghost now looked and felt solid.
The effects of the dull-red chilling ray were also wearing off. I was
unharmed. I raised myself on one elbow.
"You're all right, Mary?" I asked.
"Yes."
The Robot seemed not to be noticing us. I murmured, "He—it—that
thing sitting there—is that the one which captured you and brought
you to 1935?"
"Yes. Quiet! It will hear us."
It did hear us. It turned its head. In the pale light of the cage
interior, I had a closer view now of its face. It was a metal mask,
welded to a gruesome semblance of a man—a great broad face, with
high, angular cheeks. On the high forehead, the corrugations were
rigid as though it were permanently frowning. The nose was
squarely solid, the mouth an orifice behind which there were no
teeth but, it seemed, a series of tiny lateral wires.
stared; and the face for a moment stared back at me. The eyes
were deep metal sockets with a round lens in each of them,
behind which, it seemed, there was a dull-red light. The gaze,
touching me, seemed to bring a physical chill. The ears were like
tiny megaphones with a grid of thin wires strung across them.
The neck was set with ball and socket as though the huge head
were upon a universal joint. There were lateral depressions in the
neck within which wire strands slid like muscles. I saw similar wire
cables stretched at other points on the mailed body, and in the arms
and legs. They were the network of its muscles!
The top of the head was fashioned into a square cap as though this
were the emblem of the thing's vocation. A similar device was
moulded into its convex chest plate. And under the chest emblem
was a row of tiny buttons, a dozen or more. I stared at them,
fascinated. Were they controls? Some seemed higher, more
protruding, than others. Had they been set into some combination to
give this monster its orders? Had some human master set these
controls?
And I saw what seemed a closed door in the side of the huge metal
body. A door which could be opened to make adjustments of the
mechanisms within? What strange mechanisms were in there? I
stared at the broad, corrugated forehead. What was in that head?
Mechanisms? What mechanisms could make this thing think? Were
thoughts lurking in that metal skull?
From the head abruptly came a voice—a deep, hollow, queerly
toneless voice, utterly, unmistakably mechanical. Yet it was
sufficiently life-like to be the recreated, mechanically reproduced
voice of a human. The thing was speaking to me! A machine was
speaking its thoughts!
Gruesome! The iron lips were unmoving. There were no muscles to
give expression to the face: the lens eyes stared inscrutably
unblinking.