The Shadow Girl by Ray Cummings

We finished the meal. Turber rose. "Come into the control room. We can see better from there."

There was only Bluntnose in the control room. He sat at his instruments and dials. His face was inscrutable as he looked up and saw Nanette and me.

"We will sit here," said Turber. "Here, Nanette -- by me."

He pushed me away with silent vehemence. I sat down by a window. The door to the corridor which ran the length of the aero was behind me. I saw the woman Josefa out there; she was staring after us, but in a moment she moved away.

Turber spoke to his Indian. "You have been pausing, Bluntnose?"

"Yes. " The Indian spoke with a low guttural intonation. "Yes. Saw nothing where could stop."

"No," said Turber. "Well, we'll go forward now. " He turned to me. "We had hoped, along here in these primitive ages there might be some great reptile lying dead. One with tusks. " He grinned. "In civilized times, ivory is very valuable."

He sat beside Nanette. "I'm not sure that we shall stop, child. Except in 1664. I am impatient to get back home with you. We will have a wonderful life, Nanette -- riches and power. Master and mistress of all the world. Wolf Turber -- master of the world. You'll be proud of me."

I could not catch her answer. I could see her involuntarily shrinking away from his caress.

I sat alert with roving thoughts. Nanette and I would have to escape; but how? If the aero paused in one of these primitive ages, could I snatch Nanette and leap out? Unthinkable! But in 1664? If we paused there for a night, I would make my play then. Nanette and I, to live out our lives together in little Dutch-English New York.

There was nothing I could do now, and presently I was engrossed, listening to Turber's voice, and regarding the vast scene spread before us through these windows. The control room was in the bow-peak of the aero. Banks of windows on both sides gave nearly an unobstructed view.

Tremendous cosmorama! We were still poised motionless about two hundred feet in the air. My mind went to my own Time-world. New York City of 1945. Beneath me here would be the New York Central Railroad tracks; Riverside Drive; the Hudson. Grant's Tomb, just a short distance to the north. And behind me, the spread of New York's streets and solid buildings.

This same Space, how different now! Turber was saying to Nanette: "We are about one billion years, B. C. That's a long time in the past, isn't it? But we are traveling forward very fast."

I gazed out upon a landscape gray and misty; blurred, unreal as a shimmering ghost. The colors of nature were blended into gray; melting phantoms -- the changes of a century encompassed within an instant of my consciousness. It created a pseudo-movement; a blurred, changing outline.

An unreality, a ghostly aspect upon all the scene. Yet I was the speeding phantom; and these things at which I stared were the realities.

A vast area of gray land and water lay spread around us. The water lashed and tumbled; swirls of mist and steam rose from it. The land lay with a gray look of movement. A naked land. No vegetation here yet. No soil. A land perhaps almost viscous, congealed from the lashing ocean. It spread like a great gray plain; the mists and vapors rose from the land-crust as from the sea. Mists and swirling masses of steam, surging up into the orange-gray of the sky. Condensing, dissipating, forming the atmosphere.

I fancied as we plunged through these early centuries that vast storms were here. Vast cataclysms of nature. Torrential deluges of hot rain pouring down from the clouds that these mists were forming. Dire winds that plucked and tore at the sea; earthquakes that rocked and tumbled this land and swept this sea with tidal waves gigantic.

Life here? This was the Beginning. There was a shore line quite near us. It wavered and blurred as the centuries altered it. A reach of shallow water where the waves rolled up against the bleak land-rocks. Life was beginning there. In the shallows of the sea I could envisage the microscopic protoplasms, like algae that form the green scum on a pond, lying here in the shallows. Restless, irritable organisms! Desiring food to eat. Urged by the primitive spark of life to eat and grow and multiply.

Unending sweep of changing land and sea and these living things within it! A million years swept into the Past in a moment. An unfamiliar scene here now. A different sweep of land -- a different reach of sea. A land rising to the west as though a great serrated mountain chain had heaved up in those whirling centuries. Gray, shadowy mountains -- bleak ghosts of rocky peaks. Dark valleys dank with heavy vapors; a coastal plain against which the sea was beating.

I could fancy that on the lower steppes of this more solid crust vegetation now was taking hold. We were passing too fast for any details. There were fleeting glimpses of what might have been vegetation. A forest -- springing from nothing, existing and vanishing while I blinked. But I could seem to see a forest, springing into lush life from the heated soil; growing to a jungle; whirled away in a cataclysm that tore and ripped all this land and water. Or a forest that grew, lived and decayed; enriched the soil with other, different giants of trees to live after it.