The time-raider

by Edmond Hamilton

"I do," Lantin quietly replied. "I am going to find that secret of time-traveling and go after Cannell."

I stared at him doubtfully. A day had passed since we had seen Cannell seized by the misty shape of horror he called the Raider, and now, in the same room in Lantin's apartment, we were discussing what we had seen. After the first hours of dazed terror following the seizure of Cannell, I had fallen to sleep on a couch in that room, and when I woke in late afternoon, the whole thing seemed only a tortured nightmare.

"It seems impossible," I told Lantin. "We saw Cannell taken, yes, and we saw—the Raider. But after all, we have no proof that he was taken into time. That thing, the Raider, may have merely thrown a veil of invisibility around itself, and thus vanished. A crazy idea, I admit, but not as wild as this one of time-traveling."

"You do not believe your own words, Wheeler," answered my friend. "You heard Cannell's story, and in your heart you believe it. I believe it utterly, for it is the only way of accounting for that three-year disappearance. You noticed that Cannell seemed no older, after those three years? And then, as further proof, came the thing he described to us, the Raider itself."

"We saw that," I admitted, "but all argument aside, Lantin, this idea of moving through time at will seems absurd. Of course, I've heard fantastic ideas on the subject, but how could anyone really tamper with time, the most unalterable and remorseless quantity in life?"

Lantin considered me before replying. "Such an achievement is beyond our present science," he conceded, "but it may be quite possible to the science of the future. You see my meaning? Remember, Wheeler, it is only within the last few years that our science has learned anything at all about time. Previously it was considered one of the last mysteries, never to be investigated or explained. But now, with the recent work of Einstein and Lorentz and Minkowski, we are beginning to learn something about this time. We have learned, for instance, that it is only another dimension of space itself, and that the four dimensions of any object are thus length, breadth, thickness, and duration.

"We know now that time is not fixed and unchangeable, but relative and varying, that the time of Venus is not the time of earth, and that the time of Sirius is different from either. And remember, all of this we have learned within the last few years.

"What, then, may not be learned in the next thousand years, the next ten thousand, the next million? Is it not reasonable to suggest that men will advance farther and farther in their knowledge concerning this elusive thing, time, until they finally will advance so far that they will be able to control time, to travel in it at will, and thus sweep back from their own day, back to our present age? Is it not possible that men can do this, in some century to come?"

"That men can do this?" I repeated. "Men, you say, but the thing we saw was no man, Lantin. That thing, the Raider, was very far from human."

"It is so," he admitted, "but that proves nothing. The Raider may be some thing of the far future, either a strange product of ages of change and evolution, or a visitor from another planet, racing through time and snatching up victims in every age and land. You remember that Cannell was seized at Angkor? And a thousand years ago, Angkor was a mighty city, and who knows but the Raider was speeding back to the days of Angkor's life and greatness, when it chanced on Cannell there? It is a strange business, Wheeler; but one thing I am certain of, and that is that the Raider does come from some time far in the future, and that it has taken Cannell back with it to that time."