The time-raider

by Edmond Hamilton

Fabrius laughed shortly, and D'Alord replied for him. "Ha, friend," he said to me, "you are new here, and do not know these men. They are evil, I tell you. They boast always of what they will do when they are loosed on Kom, for they know that soon they are to be thus loosed. Some subtle poison from the Raider's self has entered into them, I think. They are like tigers waiting to be freed upon a helpless prey."

"It is so," said Lantin, "for short a time as I have been here, I have found that this is so. There is no hope from the hordes here in the pit, for they will follow the Raider to a man."

There was a silence after that. Suddenly Denham spoke. "I think it would be possible for some of us, at least, to get out of the pit here," he said, "for I have a plan that would effect that much. But what then? Do you suppose it would be possible to get up to the roof of the temple and steal one of the flying-platforms you speak of? Or steal one of the Kanlars' air-boats? If we could do that, we could fly south over the ice-fields and warn the cities there of their peril, get their aid and come back and crush the Raider and these damned Kanlars."

For the first time, the Aztec spoke, shaking his head. "It can not be done," he said, speaking in precise, queerly clipped English. "I was to the roof of the temple once, and know. The only way to get to that roof is by the narrow stairway that spirals up the inside of the temple. And that stairway leads directly through the lair of the Raider!"

"But what can we do, then?" asked the Englishman. "It would be folly to try to steal one of the Kanlars' air-boats, for they always rise from and alight on the roofs of buildings, and we could never get to them unobserved."

Lantin broke into the silence that ensued. "But suppose there was an air-boat hidden back in the hills, outside the city," he said; "that would make things easier, wouldn't it?"

When they assented, he went on quickly, "Wheeler and I have such a machine hidden," he said, "and it was on it that we came here from our own time."

They looked up eagerly, incredulously. "Do you mean that you came into this age from your own time on a machine?" asked Denham. "That you came yourselves, and were not brought here by the Raider, like all the rest of us?"

Lantin nodded affirmation, and then went on to describe briefly the seizure of Cannell, our pursuit through time, and our subsequent capture outside the city by the guards. They listened, fascinated, and when he had finished, D'Alord asked, with something of awe in his voice, "And you made this machine yourselves? You found the secret of the Raider's time-traveling?"

"It is so," Lantin told them; "we made the time-car and then came after Cannell."