TWICE IN TIME

CHAPTER XIV Almost—

Now, if ever, I can offer proof that this is not fiction. If it were, and I were the hero, I would have tried to slaughter Guaracco there in the camp before sacked Volterra, despite his triumphant exhibition of the mammoth alum-crystal, despite his ready explanations, despite the pistol he kept ready in his hand. That would have been the honorable, the courageous, the dramatic course.

But it happens that the story is true, and that I was, and am of human clay. For two years, Guaracco had alternately intimidated and cajoled me, with judicious applications of hypnotic influence. My ultimate emotion was only one of hopeful relief. If this be shameful, make the most of it.

We left the camp together, almost like friends, with some peasant attendants and a two-wheeled cart to carry the piece of alum. We did not go directly to Florence, but sought a rather rough road that took us around and then to Guaracco's house. There we placed the alum, with infinite care and numerous helping hands, in the cellar workshop.

Guaracco assuredly knew more about grinding lenses than I did. Probably it was one more Twentieth-Century science he had developed from his hypnotic interviews with my subconscious self. Too, the alum was a larger and softer piece of raw material than the fragments of glass I had worked with. In one day he roughed it into shape, and in two more, with the help of the swordsmith, he made of it a perfect double-convex lens. This, two feet in diameter, was a gray-gleaming discus that dealt weirdly with light.

At length the time came for the machine to be assembled. We took our place in the same upstairs chamber from which, in that Twentieth Century which would now reclaim me, I had vanished; the same where my friend Astley waited, at my direction, prepared for my return.

I helped to bolt the rods into a framework, and lifted into place Guaracco's battery, a massive but adequate thing inside a bronze case worked over in strange bas-reliefs.

I think that case came from the Orient. It was to do the work I had done with many smaller batteries in my first reflector. Into sockets fitted his electric light globes, most cunningly wrought—again by Guaracco, in secret.

"They are not the best," he said. "I understand," and he smiled wispily, as always when he referred to his findings through hypnosis, "that an element called vanadium is the best for the filaments inside."

"It is more than the best—it is necessary," I pronounced. That much stuck in my mind.

He shook his head. "I have used manganese. That, I have come to believe"—and again his wispy smile— "is almost as good. Obtainable, too, as vanadium is not." He cocked his lustrous eyes upward. "Did you not once predict, my dear adopted Cousin, that a Genoese friend of the Vespucci family—Colombo— would discover a new world in the west?"

"I did."

"And is not vanadium to be mined in those latitudes?… Just so. But not elsewhere. We must make this substance serve."

He studied the camera apparatus, slipped the lens of alum into place and secured it with clamps. Then he set the time gauge.

"May first, nineteen thirty-nine," he said aloud. "And so much allowance for the coming change in calendar which you predict. It was on May first, nineteen thirty-nine that your friend was to bring in a carcass from which your structure would be reap-proximated, eh?" He straightened up from his tinkering. "Now, Leo, do you wish to say good-by to Lisa?" * * *

I had not forgotten her; rather I had fought against thinking too much of this sweet, restrained girl whom I refused as a gift from Guaracco, but to whom my heart turned in spite of all. His speaking her name wakened certain resolutions I had made. I left the room immediately.

She was lingering in the upper hall just outside the door, dressed in a girdled gown of blue, and a bonnetlike headdress. Her dark eyes gleamed like stars—they were filled with tears.

"Lisa!" I called her, in a voice I could not keep steady. "Lisa, child, I have come to say—to say—"

"Farewell?" she tried to finish for me, and her face dropped down into hands. I could not but catch her in my arms, and kiss her wet cheeks.

"Don't cry," I begged her. "Don't, my dear. Listen, while I swear to come back, to hurry back—"

"We shall not meet again," Lisa sobbed.

"I will come back," I insisted. "Since this second machine remains here, it will take us eventually into the age from whence I came, and then—"

"Us," she repeated, trying to understand.

"I will rescue you from this century, and this fantastic world and chain of sorrows," I promised.

Guaracco cleared his throat. We looked up, and moved apart, for his head was thrusting itself around the edge of the door.

"Lisa," he said, "I leave certain preparations in your hands. At this time tomorrow, bring_; into the room with the machine a slaughtered calf—"

Turning from the girl, as Guaracco continued to talk, I hurried into the room and closed the door behind me. I saw that the power of the machine was turned on, the light gleaming blue-gray through the lens, the misty screen sprung up in the framework. Once passed, it was 1939 beyond… .

And then I saw that Guaracco was removing the last of his clothes.

"What does this mean?" I demanded of him.

He confronted me, a naked figure of baskety leanness.

"I have decided to make the journey through time instead of you."

"But I—" The words broke on my astonished lips.

"No arguments," said Guaracco. "It is too late." And he sprang into the midst of the framework, and through the veil of fog.

For a moment I saw him beyond in the room, as fragile as a man of soap-bubbles, less than a ghost. I gazed, waiting for him to fade away completely. But his substance thickened again, took back its color. I saw the pink of his skin, the red of his beard, the gleam of his abashed eyes. He staggered on the floor, as on the deck of a ship. He was still in his own age. The reflector was a failure.

I laughed triumphantly and almost jauntily, and half sprang at him. But he slumped down on a chair, still naked. So much gloom had fallen around and upon him that part of my anger left me. My clenched fists relaxed, my denouncement stuck in my throat. He had tried to trick me, to shove himself into my own age at my expense—but it had not worked. I only paraphrased Robert Burns.

"The best-laid plans of mice and men," I taunted, "go oft astray." * * *

He looked up and stared at me for a full minute—yes, at least sixty seconds—before making any reply.

"I can understand your feelings," he muttered then, as humbly as a child caught in a jam closet. "Once more, I thought, I had tricked my way ahead of you. But I reap the reward of my sinful vanity."

I was amazed. This was nothing like Guaracco. "Do not tell me," I jeered, "that you repent."

His hand wrung the point of his beard. "Is it not permitted the proudest and foulest wrongdoer to say that he has done ill?" His head bowed almost upon his bare, scrawny knees. "Leo, let me make my poor excuses. My heart was full of zeal for what I should behold and learn, five centuries in the future. It would be to me what heaven is to the true churchman. And now, without even a glimpse—"

At last he rose. He held out a trembling hand. He seemed suddenly grown old and frail.

"Do not laugh or reproach. I have been deceitful, but let me make amends. We shall be true scientists and philosophers together. Will you not forgive, and take me as your friend?"

I could not exult over so patently broken an adversary, and his manner of earnest humility disarmed me. I took his hand. At once he straightened up, and his voice and bearing captured some of the old sprightliness.

"That is better, Cousin Leo—for we are kinsmen in taste and direction, at least. What wonders shall we not wreak together! The world will hear of us!"

As he spoke, a commotion and the sound of an excited voice came from below us. I, being dressed, ran down in place of Guaracco.

Sandro Botticelli stood facing Lisa. He was mud-spattered and panting, as from swift riding, and his plump, pleasant face full of grave concern.

"Leo," he said at once, "I risk my career, perhaps my life, in warning you. Fly, and at once!"

"At once?" I echoed, scowling in amazement. "Why?"

He gestured excitedly. "Do not bandy words, man," he scolded me. "Begone, I say! Lorenzo has signed a writ for your arrest. You are a doomed man."

My mouth fell open, it seemed to me, a good twelve inches.

"It is because of what happened at Volterra," Botticelli plunged on. "That town was sacked because of you. Lorenzo wanted alum, for your flying machine."

"Aye, and I got alum—"

"But you did not make a flying machine with it. Criticism has flamed up over the treatment of the Volterrans, and Lorenzo needs a scapegoat. When Guaracco informed him that you had used it deceitfully, for another purpose—"

"Guaracco!" I roared.

I saw his plan now, to usurp my place at the time reflector, leaving me to imprisonment, perhaps death, on a trumped-up charge. I took a step toward the stairs, for I wanted that scoundrel's blood.

But Botticelli came hurrying after me, and caught my arm.

"I hear galloping hoofs, Leo! The officers are coming. Run, I tell you! Run!"

At that moment the door burst open and two officers rushed in.