The deserts of Africa faded away about the wind-carved black ruins of the mystery city, stretching ever outward toward the rounded rim of that utter desolation - where burning rock and sand fused with the blazing heavens. The city lay as dead and deserted as it had lain for countless centuries beneath the shifting sands of the Sahara before the storm of a week ago ripped its concealing shroud of sand away.
Allan Allan, giant young crusader from the damp green shores of far-off England, crawled to the uppermost pinnacle of the exposed ruins and stared hopelessly out over that lifeless sea of blistering sand waves. Alone he was, the last of his ten comrades lying somewhere out there in that arid wasteland. This city had been his last hope as he fought thirst and heat across the outer levels to its massive low walls. Now hope was dead.
Allan Allan tore the helmet from his blackened head and snarled defiantly up into the blazing thirsty sunlight. Sounds, mumbling and broken, issued from his cracked dry lips as he cursed Allah, Mohammed, and all the sons of the Prophet. Suddenly he was silent.
“Satanus!” he moaned as he saw grotesquely shaped monsters chiseled deep into the lower tower walls beside him. “Creatures of the Beast!”
Weird monsters with the legs of many-bodied serpents about their ovoid torsos stared from malignant multi-gemmed eyes down at this barbarian interloper. Strange monsters, winged and scaly, were depicted there, and among them Allan Allan beheld the brutish shapes of strange half-men bearing clubs. He saw creatures more terrible than the mind of man could have conceived; dragons, serpents, and spear-maned, ungainly lizard-things that could never have existed.
Shuddering he turned away and stumbled toward a low black doorway in the tower wall. Low it was, three feet in height and twice as wide. He dropped to his knees and crept inward, out of the terrible blast of the tropic sun. With night he would venture out once again.
And then his groping hand found the massive hollow circle of a metal ring, an armlet. He held it to the light, and as he did so, all the graven monsters on the walls seemed to rustle and whisper together in warning. Allan Allan’s fingers tightened and he swayed unsteadily to his knees. A squat-bodied thing of stone, man-tentacled and hideous, glared at him. Allan glared back at it.
“Afraid are you?” he muttered. “Afraid that I will take some of your hellish possessions away from this devil-haunted city of the dead?”
A ghastly chanting of warning, unholy voices seemed to blur discordantly in his ears. He shook the foul dust of the low-ceilinged rocky chamber from his tattered garments and crept back into the outer sunlight with his prize.
“I’ll take it!” he screeched, madness and helpless rage thinning his deep voice. “Treasure of demons and monsters....I challenge them all...Laugh, sneer, at me....I hear you....I, Allan Allan of England fear you not!”
His prize was a plain circlet of massive metal, deeply scored with the imprint of a score or more interlocking triangles. He slipped it over his sun-seared arm and instantly about him a soothing aura of coolness seemed to descend. The sound of gibbering demoniac voices died.
Allan’s fingers slipped over the rough surface of the broad bracelet until they came in contact with a tiny raised stud, set into the corner of one of the sunken triangles. Idly he twisted at the bit of metal.
An electric tingle of strange forces flooded his body. There came a haziness that swiftly solidified into a transparent, unyielding wall about him like the curving inner shell of some giant croc’s egg. Darkness flashed on about him - and sunlight - and darkness. Light and blackness alternated in swift flashes.
Slowly the strange shell or force that surrounded him drifted upward, high above the massive, squat black walls of that sand-burled prehistoric city of the Africa wastes, and as it rose, in those momentary flashes of daylight, Allan Allan saw a withered human body slumped against the gloomy tower wall. Even as he watched the body swiftly disintegrated into a heap of scattered dry bones and withered skin. Then the sand once again swallowed the dark, evil walls of the ancient metropolis.
Stunned, his senses dulled by the endless struggle and thirst of the preceding days, Allan Allan’s thoughts swept northward, to England and the green fields he was to never see again. He felt the shell lurch beneath him and go racing away, skimming close above the sand dunes, toward some unknown pagan hell.
His weary eyes closed, the toxins of exhaustion, of worn out muscles triumphant, and he slept.
* * * *
Later, much later, he awoke. Full realization of his predicament flooded sudden panic through his brain cells. He sat up, his feet braced against the opposite wall of the mysterious bubble of force. He looked down.
“The Channel!” he gasped. Knuckles cracked as his fists clenched. “England and home. The armlet of the ancients...it did this!”
The shell was flashing toward the great chalk cliffs of England, and with the surge of triumphant thought in his brain it increased its swift pace. He directed the shell toward some new goal, testing its response, and immediately, gracefully, it swung off in the new direction. Guided by Mental control was this mysterious chariot of the vanished ancient race, builders of mysterious, low-walled desert cities!
“Here,” said Allan Allan aloud, “Is where I played at battle with my brothers. And here, in the lake, I came near to drowning.
“But the castle, Allan Castle, it is....is gone!” he choked. “A village where it stood. Strangely constructed dwellings. Even the fields are changed.”
His Impalpable shell of nothingness hovered a hundred feet above the village green. Uncertainly he willed it to descend. It rested at last upon the grass and then he twisted the tiny inset stud back to its original setting.
The shifting shadows of night and day slowed and stopped at last in midday. Allan Allan felt the welcome pressure of turf beneath his feet and he drew in great gasps of the pure moist air. Then he was conscious of voices; of words idly pronounced and strange.
Dark-robed men gathered about three women, two of them snaggle-toothed ancients, gray of hair and mad-eyed. One of them cringed like a whipped cur and Allan Allan could see the bluish marks of bruises upon her pasty flesh. The other cackled and shrieked gleefully at her companion’s discomfiture.
The third woman was young, fair of hair and skin, and pretty. The dark-robed men and the assembled roughly-garbed villagers seemed to cluster close about her, a foul sort of hunger in their gaze. Now he could see that rough cords bound her wrists firmly together, cutting deep into the flesh. His hand dropped to the haft of his cross-hilted longsword.
The tattered robe was ripped from the girl’s fair body and the crowd seemed to sigh hungrily. Corse men’s hands examined her flesh and needles probed at her body. She screamed once.
Allan hesitated. A witch! Then her pain-filled gray eyes somehow found his and he read a mute, hopeless plea for aid in them. Here was no wanton of Satan’s fold his heart told him.
“Hold!” he roared and his great sword flashed in the sun.
Startled villagers fell back from this grim sun-blackened giant in his strange trappings of mail and leather. He strode to the girl’s side even as she slumped, unconscious, in his arms. He drew the cloak back about her soft body and faced the black-robed witch-hunters boldly.
Carrying her unconscious body he strode through their stunned ranks. Ten -eleven, steps he took before slender rapiers and pikes were raised against him. His sword hammered at their frail blades, sweeping them aside and smashing through cringing flesh and brittle bones.
Five of the black-robed men were down but now the villagers, armed with staves, axes and pitchforks, swarmed about him. His weary, heat sapped muscles were falling him. One mighty sweep of his sword cleared a narrow ring about him and then his fingers groped for the tiny metal stud. Shimmering walls built up about him and the girl, shutting out all others.
Momentarily, he glimpsed a blurring swarm of men leaping upon a mail-shirted warrior beyond the walls. And across the warrior’s arm hung the body of a golden haired maiden!
A memory of mouldering bones below him in the Africa desert came to Allan. The blending of day and night into light and blackness. In alternating flashes, was the swift passage to time, and...Every forward leap of his body in time left an exact duplicate of himself behind:
Or was he....the duplicate?
Already his other body and that of the girl must have become blackened ashes at some witch-burning. How many days must have passed he could only imagine, but now the green leaves of the trees where swiftly turning to brown, red and gold. Even as he watched, white snow blanketed the earth and the last leaves of autumn shook from the bare bleak arms of the trees.
He sent the time-cell gliding effortlessly upward away from the squalid stone-and-thatch huts of the village toward the depths of a great forest. There he could hide and rest, secure from any save poachers and gamekeepers.
And beneath him the snow was dwindling and dark patches of soil shoved through. Brooks and rivers were swollen and trees budded...
* * * *
“America!” cried fair-haired Jocelyn Moore, one-time accused witch in the forgotten English village. “Here, Allan, will we be safe from persecution. The witch-hunters will not seek us here.”
Allan smiled at her. She did not know that more than a century had passed since the transparent shell of force had left England far behind. The exact date he could not know, she had told him that she was first accused in 1642, but he believed that this was the year 1780.
Downward the ovoid of nothingness swooped until they hovered above the green fields of tobacco and grain in eastern Pennsylvania. Allan twisted the little button of metal backward, almost to his starting point, and the racing flood of day and night slowed. For perhaps five minutes did the daylight endure before night came again.
“See!” cried Jocelyn, “there is war here. The bodies of red-coated men lie mingled with the bodies of roughly-clad men. There must be a revolt against the King.”
Allan’s fingers sought the worn grip of his cross-handled sword and his eyes lighted eagerly. Perhaps here in this new savage world would he find comrades and battle against great odds, winning freedom from the decadent civilization of Europe.
A cluster of log-walled cottages, cabins, lay close by, and there they came to a halt. Allan snapped off the stud and the shell of force dissolved.
It was morning and homespun-clad men and women were coming from their rude homes. They spoke a strangely accented English as they clustered about this strange pair dropped, it seemed, from the very heavens. Blue Swedish eyes regarded them curiously - the mail-shirted warrior and the pale, black-robed girl.
“Come and eat,” invited a yellow-bearded ox of a man.
There were no questions as to their origin. The war had sent many peculiar strangers pushing westward away from the seaboard. They were taken to be such and given shelter. Jocelyn cooked the food for the yellow-haired Swede and his motherless brood of six, and Allan helped in the fields.
And when the winter came, Allan joined the army of Washington.
* * * *
The war was ended. Allan Allan bore the scars of many wounds on his great body and two fingers were gone from his right hand. For years had he battled the Hessian mercenaries of George, King of England, and he was now a citizen of a new nation.
Jocelyn had married blond-bearded Gustaf while he had been to war so there was now nothing to hold him beside the seacoast. Like a disease the urge to plumb the depths of the future came upon him.
“I will watch this new world grow,” he said. “Watch it spread across the wilderness and grow strong and arrogant...”
Slowly, he cruised above the dwindling forests and spreading fields of America. Westward, ever westward, the frontiers pushed. Several times he touched earth again to eat and sleep for a time but nowhere did he pause for long.
He saw spiderwebs of steel cross the country and strange boats with smoking chimneys in the harbors. He saw vast armies of men in blue swarming down from the north and brave man in gray push up from the south. Allan slowed his leisurely flight through time yet further until the embattled ranks of the two armies grew clear before him.
Allan sent the time shell shooting skyward... Brother slaying brother...Blue and gray...
Into the west he drifted, over Kansas and Missouri. Here he saw renegade guerillas of both North and South plundering and killing. Rage seethed hot within his mighty-muscled frame.
Down he plunged silently off the shell of force around his body he heard pitiful moans of terrified women and came upon four trembling captives, huddled beneath a single blanket beside the fire. Bruised and bloody they were from the ordeal they had endured.
For a moment a film of flaming redness blinded Allan Allan’s eyes and his blood rose savagely. The growl of a wild beast rumbled deep down in his chest as he drew his heavy sword.
Then, reason triumphed. He was alone and all but unarmed. From a stack of weapons and ammunition, carelessly stacked near the fire, he selected two rifles, powder cartridges, and several bags of bullets. Holding this plunder under his arms, he clicked the tiny stud rapidly on and off.
About him a vague looming mass of shapes was growing. No demons of Africa these, but clean-limbed fighting men, each bearing two rifles and ammunition, while at their sides swung cross-barred swords.
A score of giant handsome warriors - all Allan Allan.
They needed no instruction as to what they were to do. They knew. They swung about facing the sleeping guerillas and at that moment a guard, stationed outside the camp, saw them. He fired.
Two of the Allans returned his fire and the guard jolted backward, the cry of alarm dead on his lips. But the outlaws were warned. They all came boiling out of their battered tents and shelters of branches, pistols and knives in their grimy paws - only to go down beneath a withering blast of fire. The few who escaped bullets went down beneath a flashing wall of steel.
Seventeen Allan Allans faced one another there beside the fire. They looked at Allan, he of the bracelet, as their leader.
“While the weak and helpless are oppressed,” he cried, “it is our duty to protect and avenge them.”
Seventeen Allan swords flashed in the firelight and a cheer burst from their throats. This new crusade fired their imagination as that ancient plundering conquest had not.
“And now,” said their leader, “let us rid the camp of this human carrion and sleep.”
* * * *
Gutted villages, burned cabins, and death-emptied farmhouses dotted the Missouri countryside. Plundering, killing and raping, the bushwhackers ranged the country like cowardly ragged wolves. Union troops and the shrunken Confederate forces of General Price were powerless to combat or control their depredations.
Into this welter of blood-hungry Kansans, Missourians, Seseshs, and Feds -border ruffians and men without a loyalty - plunged the Allans. Quick justice they rendered as they rode the outlaw trails and the cowardly followers of Quantrell and his unsavory ilk trembled in their stolen boots at the name of Allan.
Always they were the same, a score of clear-eyed mighty men well-armed and superbly mounted. Half of them might fall in battle with the tattered guerillas, but the next day twenty of them rode the bloody outlaw trails. Like Immortal avenging gods, they patrolled the rutted forest roads and brushy trails....
* * * *
“Quantrell’s men raid Hamdon,” the little bald-pated man gasped through putty-colored lips, his eyes constantly watching the road down which he had just come.
“Come with us,” ordered Allan shortly, “perhaps this time we can come to grips with them.”
The Allans loosened their heavy swords and examined their spotless rifles and the loaded braces of Colt revolvers at their hips. Then they swung in behind their leader and galloped at a furious pace toward the nearby village of Hamdon.
The sounds of gunfire and of agonized screams came to their ears before they could see the village street. Then they topped a low hill overlooking the town and could see lazy curls of smoke drifting upward from a half-dozen mean dwellings. Black dots lay unmoving in the village street and horsemen rode between the houses as they went.
Two bewhiskered brutes dragged a struggling woman from a house by her plump legs. Her foot broke free and she landed a frantic kick in the groin of one of her captors. He worked out a long-bladed knife and plunged it into her body. His comrade laughed brutally and kicked her crimsoned bulk.
A Sharps spoke and the killer spun about with the bullet’s impact. A split second later his companion joined him in the dust of the road, a bullet-hole drilling his breast bone. Their blood mingled suddenly with that of the dying woman.
Then the Allans smashed into the ragged ranks of the killers as they ranged the dusty streets of Hamdon. Outnumbered they were four or five to one; yet the cowardly bushwhackers fell back before them, flinging aside their weapons as they tried to escape.
“Quantrell!” screeched the bald-headed little man, pointing.
Even as he spoke, a bullet smashed into his face and his bloody-masked corpse slid to the dust.
* * * *
Allan spurred his horse after the leader of the guerillas. Two mounted outlaws rode into his path and his cross-handled sword flicked out through their bodies in one mighty sweep. Then he was almost upon Quantrell.
A wizened, scrawny young guerilla, not over seventeen, rode beside the outlaw chief. Now he turned and lifted his revolver muzzle. His cold eyes glittered sneakily for an instant as he pressed the trigger and then Allan Allan felt a sledge smash against his skull as the gun roared.
Hours later it seemed he was conscious of light. The bloody dirt-fouled beard of a dead guerilla was beneath his throbbing, swollen skull and a dead eye glared into his own. He twisted his head and saw the bullet-riddled body of a dark-haired girl sprawled a few feet away. The crackle of a burning building sounded close by; he could feel the heat upon his back.
Then soft hands were upon his head and the voices of women echoed in his ears. Agony lanced through his brain as they lifted him.
“It is an Allan,” a gentle voice said, and his blurred vision caught a fleeting glimpse of a wan oval face above him. “I knew it when I saw that odd sword.”
Dimly, he remembered being carried along the dusty street and hearing the drowsy murmur of hushed voices as he was laid upon a mattress of straw. Then the coolness of water touched his throbbing skull and he opened his eyes again. The same oval face, framed now with curling chestnut hair, was close above them. He tried to speak and the girlish head shook negatively. A white finger crossed her lips in command for silence, and she smiled gently.
Thereafter for two weeks Allan Allan lay helpless with a bullet-hole in his right temple. George Thuston and his daughter, Mabel, cared for him tenderly while he raved of Allah, mysterious black cities, witches, warlocks and war. Then one day he awoke again, clear of mind, and asked for his comrades.
“Gone,” said Mabel softly, “toward the western coast of the United States. The Union Army is at last taking over control of Missouri. The guerillas of Parker, Anderson, and Younger are being smashed.”
“They left word for you to meet them in California. San Francisco, they said...it will be many weeks before you can travel though.”
Allan’s heart warmed toward the smiling brown-haired girl who anticipated his every need. Maybe he had reached an end to wandering. It would be so easy to love this lovely frontier girl. To rear broad-shouldered sons and sturdy daughters.
Life was simple and direct here in the Middlewest, none of the stifling petty customs and rules of the civilized East to harness a man. Great estates waited to be carved from virgin territory and the breadth of half a continent was yet to be conquered....
* * * *
Allan Allan found his great sword and belted his revolvers about his waist. His eyes dropped to the massive armlet of brassy metal and he smiled grimly.
Tonight he was to wed Mabel in the village church. After that, there would be no bird-like excursions into the future or from continent to continent. The old hunger to ride forward into the future was come upon him. His fingers touched the little stud.
“Why not?” he asked himself. “I can go forward but a half hour and for the last time enjoy the thrill of racing like a bird above the earth-bound mortals. Then I will lay aside the armlet forever.”
He stepped outside the house, and adjusted the stud to its lowest rate. The transparent walls grew about him. He sent the shell of force higher and higher into the air. Clouds fell below him and the air grew thin and cold. He rioted in the swift, silent ease of flight.
Then he remembered the sweet face of Mabel and the weather-beaten gray church where they were to be married. The shell drove earthward again, back to the squalid houses and the dusty streets of Hamdon. He switched off the mysterious force of the armlet for the last time and entered the house.
A giant rose from his seat on the bed. Allan thrust out his hand, glad to see one of his old comrades.
“Just back from the Coast?” he asked, and then realized that his guest could have hardly reached the Coast in the few weeks elapsed.
“No,” the other Allan said shortly. “You know where I come from.”
Allan gasped. Of course. When he took that last flight into the future another duplicate self was fashioned to replace him in time by the weird scientific magic of the armlet. And this Allan too loved Mabel.
“I’m fighting you,” announced the other, “and the best man marries her.”
Hours later Allan Allan ruefully examined his swollen face and decided that both eyes were blackened. A grin contracted his puffy features painfully. He was heading westward toward California and the rest of his clan.
The other Allan had won.
Nothing now held him back from further conquest of the future. He moved away from his horses, one saddled and the other two laden with packs, and he looked at the massive circlet of metal.
Then he was drifting above the horses and the sullen, broad-shouldered man squatted beside the campfire. This new Allan shook a vengeful fist at the unseen bulk of the time shell above him...
So it came that the warrior from the past came at last to rest in a beautiful little valley in Western New York State. There he rented a cottage, paying for it with old American money of pre-Civil War mintage.
It was 1940, a year when another word cataclysm was engulfing the civilized world. Daily he tramped the wooded hills and at night he read articles and studied dry scientific works borrowed from the nearby library. He had an insatiable appetite for new knowledge.
This is where I met him - at the library. We lived but a little ways apart and so I gave him a lift on his way home. I said something about the Revolutionary War and he corrected me. Before I knew it, he was telling me the story of his life.
At four o’clock the next morning I drove home, stuffed to the ears with stories of Palestine, the Crusades, and the Civil War. That was the first of many such excursions into the harsh and bloody past. I examined his armlet, four or five pounds of some mysterious metallic alloy, and gripped the hilt of his weighty Crusader’s sword.
There was something magnetic, dynamic, about him, not to be found in modern man....And something pathetic as well. He was a man out of place in the scheme of things. He was a crusader, a fighting man in search of worthy cause. Blood and weapons of lethal purpose he could understand, but the newer weapons of propaganda and pacificism meant nothing to him....
And one day he was gone. I saw him go, or rather the armlet upon his arm disappear - his duplicate self, of course, was left behind.
The fate of a small nation, attacked by a power-mad larger nation intent on world domination, was the reason for his departure. A proud people called to him, he said; doomed though the cause might be, he must go. He crushed my palm in his huge fingers and said goodbye.
And the next day his other body, duplicate Allan Allan, was gone. The cottage was empty. I tore a note from the door that I knew was meant for me.
“Can’t rust out here in America,” it said. “Joining the air force over the border for service abroad.”
Somewhere in Europe with the rain pelting down and the abrupt rocky slope dragging the life from men’s sinews, a thousand helmeted soldiers wearily advanced upon a lone, battered tank....
And from the cramped confines of the tank, in unwavering line, marched an endless column of giant men, automatic rifles in their hands, and heavy, cross-hilted swords at their sides....
A hundred - two hundred - on they marched, forward into battle!