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.