The Time Trap. John Russell Fearn
“The obvious move is to drive back the way we came. We’ll inevitably come to our starting point. Have we enough juice?”
“Just about, sir, but I must warn you that the effort is unlikely to meet with success. If, as I think, we have slipped into hyper-space, the chances against our passing straight out of it again are millions-to-one against. I could explain why, but it would take considerable time.”
“Drive back,” Harley ordered. “Only thing for it.”
Dawlish shrugged and held the car doors open for the party to re-enter. Then he settled at the wheel, started up the engine, reversed the car, and began to speed down the empty road in the direction whence they had come.
Everybody was quiet, completely sobered. It was only as moment followed moment that they realized just how awful was the position. They had come into nowhere out of the normal everyday world and had not even glimpsed the point where they had crossed from the one state to the other. All of them being more or less ruled by their knowledge of the everyday, they were quite sanguine that the drive back would restore them to the point where the signpost stood near the church clock.
So Dawlish drove on and on, the miles flicking by on the trip-mileometer, and the road stretched between the endless fields. Endlessly, with never a break. And, as the trip continued with its six troubled passengers, the sky began to lighten considerably and the stars paled. Nick found himself looking for a moon, but could not see one.
“Dawn coming, or moon rising,” he told Dawlish, finally.
Dawlish glanced at the dash-clock. “One-fifteen, sir, so it isn’t dawn—unless Time here is very different. It’s moonlight we can see, but not the moon itself.”
“Why not? There isn’t a cloud in the sky.”
“We do not see the moon, sir, for the same reason that we can’t see shadows. In four dimensions light-waves do not obey the accustomed laws.”
“But we can see the stars—I think.”
“True, but do they look like stars, sir? No! They are like bars, their bases tapering off into nothing. Even their light is not as we are accustomed to seeing it.”
Nick gave it up. He became moodily silent, like the others, watching anxiously for some sign of the road ending. None came, and after nearly an hour of swift travel the engine suddenly started missing, coughed, and finally died. Slowly the car came to a standstill and Dawlish put on the handbrake. “Petrol’s finished,” he announced.
Nick followed a line of thought and switched on the car radio. Rather to his surprise it presently began to operate, giving forth a dance band into the utter silence and milky glow of this weird land.
“Well,” Nick said brightly, “we can’t be so far off trail!”
“On the contrary, sir,” Dawlish sighed. “One might receive radio quite clearly when millions of miles away in space, but it would not solve the problem of reaching the spot from which the radio program emanated!”
Nobody argued about this because nobody understood it. The dance band continued for a while, then the announcer spoke. “That concludes our dance music for tonight, and the time is now just upon midnight. We bid you all—”
The voice died away, and all the twiddling of knobs that Nick gave the set failed to restore it to life.
“That announcer’s crazy!” Betty Danvers exclaimed. “It’s long past midnight—twenty past two, in fact. For the love of heaven, what sort of a nightmare have we landed in?”
“If my guess is right,” Dawlish said, thinking, “daylight should come eventually, and then we may be able to assess the position more easily. Until then I think we ought to try and sleep. The air is warm, we have plenty of rugs, and I took the liberty of preparing the picnic basket, sir, in case you decided on extra traveling.”
“Extra traveling is right!” Nick commented dismally.
“Sleep?” Bernice repeated. “Under these frightful conditions I couldn’t sleep a wink! Don’t be so ridiculous, Dawlish!”
“I’m sorry, miss, but are the conditions so awful? We have peace all around us. Frankly, and with the greatest respect, I might say that I find things here more restful than in the ordinary way.”
That awkward silence came back again. It appeared that, quite unobtrusively, Dawlish was taking things into his own hands—perhaps because he knew far more about the situation than anybody else.
Nick cleared his throat. “I think Dawlish has the right idea. Come on, girls, take the back seat, cover yourselves with the rugs, and do what you can to snooze. We men will take the front.”
There were plenty of grumbles—but he was finally obeyed.
* * * *
When Nick awoke again it was daylight and Dawlish’s lean, immobile face was stooping over him. He was holding a plastic cup in which tea was steaming.
“Good morning, sir. Somewhat incongruously, I am afraid, I have here your morning cup of tea.”
“Thanks.”
Nick took it, hoping for the moment that he would find himself in bed at home with the satin curtains drawn back. But no! He was still in the car with a cloudless sky overhead and a considerable amount of heat beating down upon him from an invisible sun. It was the weirdest awakening he had ever known. Then he remembered the others and looked about him.
The girls were still in the back of the car, nibbling at the picnic sandwiches and balancing cups on their knees. They looked pasty, disheveled, and thoroughly miserable—even Betty Danvers, who usually managed to keep a bright smile under all circumstances.
Some distance away from the car, contemplating the landscape as he slowly turned on his heel, was Harley Brand. Now and again he scratched his head, then shrugged to himself.
“How’s life, girls?” Nick asked, absently watching Dawlish busy with the small picnic oil cooker.
“Rotten!” Bernice declared with finality.
Nick drank his tea and surveyed. He could hardly have contemplated a more dreary panorama. Everywhere, save in the direction he took to be the east, were the endless fields of dry, brownish-green grass, flat as a billiard table, Nowhere a hill or mountain. To the east, though, there was a curious gray blur that could have been a distant ocean. Otherwise, not a bird, not a movement, not a flower.
“I think, sir,” Dawlish said, when the “breakfast” was about over, “that we should hold a conference. I’ll ask Mr. Brand to join us.”
Harley came over immediately and leaned on the edge of the car morosely, waiting for somebody to say something. Nobody did, except Dawlish.
“I think,” he said, “that we can take it as an accepted fact that we have strayed into some space contiguous to our own. A fourth dimension does exist, but up to now it has only been in the realms of mathematics. But it is also a fact that other spaces and planes exist alongside our own, and now and again there is an overlap. As the ocean plunges its waves forwards and then retracts them, carrying with it driftwood which is borne out on the ebb, so other dimensions occasionally overlap our own and, by chance, somebody or something is perhaps picked up and drawn away on that ebbing, dimensional tide. Space within space, angles within angles, is the top and bottom of the Universe.”
“Marvelous, for a chauffeur!” Nick declared, grinning.
“I still think we’re on a circular road!” Harley insisted.
“That you can forget completely, sir,” Dawlish told him. “The missing shadows, and absence of visible sun and moon in a cloudless sky is sufficient evidence of the fact that we are, at this moment, in a different space from our own. Light has undergone a change, so probably has time itself—as witness the announcer last night telling us it was just on midnight when we knew it was twenty past two.”
“But