Zagat / Allam Long Road To Tomorrow

Book SIX in the "TOMORROW" Series
1. Auflage 2024
ISBN: 978-957-596-010-0
Verlag: Al-Mashreq eBookstore
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)

E-Book, Englisch, Band 6, 250 Seiten

Reihe: Tomorrow

Long Road to Tomorrow by Arthur Leo Zagat is a compelling journey through time and space that will captivate your imagination. When a groundbreaking experiment in time travel goes awry, a group of scientists finds themselves stranded in a future world vastly different from their own. As they navigate this strange new reality, they encounter futuristic dangers, unexpected allies, and a gripping mystery that could alter the course of history. With each step along the road to tomorrow, they must solve enigmatic puzzles and confront their deepest fears to find their way back home. Will they survive the trials of the future and return to their own time, or will they be lost in the unknown forever? Discover the thrilling adventure that awaits in this page-turner of speculative fiction.

Arthur Leo Zagat (1896-1949) was an American lawyer, prolific pulp fiction writer, and editor best known for his contributions to the horror, science fiction, and mystery genres. Born in New York City, Zagat served in World War I before pursuing a legal career. However, his passion for storytelling led him to writing, where he found success in the pulp magazine market of the 1920s and 1930s. Zagat authored hundreds of short stories and novellas, often collaborating with fellow writers like Nat Schachner. His most famous works include dystopian science fiction tales, eerie horror stories, and hard-boiled detective fiction. Zagat also contributed to serialized stories, such as the 'Doc Savage' adventures, and became a popular fixture in magazines like Weird Tales, Astounding Stories, and Argosy. His writing style is noted for its vivid, imaginative worlds and engaging plots. Zagat passed away in 1949, leaving behind a lasting legacy in the golden age of pulp fiction.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Zagat, Arthur Leo

Allam, Rafat

Leseproben

CHAPTER II. — THE BOSS AND THE BUNCH

THE blackness was a solid thing against Dikar's down-bent face. On Dikar's back was a terrible weight of dark earth, so that his straddled thighs, his thrust-down, aching arms, shook.

Dikar's chest heaved, desperately pulling in dank air out of the black space that was roofed by his back, walled by his arms, his thighs and the earth crushing against his sides.

"Dikar!" From the black space out of which Dikar's failing strength still held the earth came Marilee's cry. "Dikar. Where are you?"

"Here." Hard to talk as to breathe. "Right above you. You—all right?"

"All right, Dikar. My legs—I can't move my legs but—but I think that's because of the dirt on 'em. Oh Dikar!" A sob caught at her voice. "What are we goin' to do?"

"Do?" How long could he hold up this awful weight on his back hold it from crushing Marilee? "Get out of this." But how was he to get Marilee out of this living grave?

"It's movin', Dikar! The dirt's comin' in over me!"

"Just settlin', Marilee. I'm holdin' it."

"If I could only see you, Dikar. If I could only feel your arms around me, only once more."

Only once more! She knew he'd lied. "I'm holdin' it," he lied again, because he could not think what else to say. The earth was alive with movement, alive with its blind will to crush them. Dikar could hear the soft, dreadful rub of the earth as it moved in under him.

Where it moved, Marilee was talking, but not to Dikar. "Now I lay me down to sleep." She was saying the Now-I-Lay-Me the Old Ones taught the Bunch to say each night when Bedtime came. "I pray the Lord my soul to keep. An' if I die before I wake—"

"No," Dikar groaned into the dark. "No, Marilee. You're not goin'—to die." But the terrible weight of earth was growing, it was pressing the strength out of his arms and back.

"Quick, Dikar! It's comin' over my face." It was sliding in under his belly. "Quick! Before—"

Marilee's voice choked off. Dikar's arms let him down. Dikar's arms found Marilee's warm body. Earth, following down, crushed Dikar's body to Marilee's. Somehow his lips found hers.

All of a sudden the thunder was loud in Dikar's ears again, and he could breathe! "Dikar!" a near voice jabbered. "Dikar, man!" Dikar's head flung back and he blinked earth from his eyes as the voice cried, "Dikar, old fellah." There was light in Dikar's eyes again and upside down, in the light was a hollow- cheeked, earth-smudged face he knew.

The face of Walt, his friend.

"Thank God!" Walt gasped, his hands scraping earth away from around Dikar. "Thank God you're alive! When I saw the bank cave in on you—"

Dikar heaved up and was on his knees, and his tight-clenched arms brought Marilee up out of the red earth. She clung to him, and he could feel her quick breathing.

WALT was still jabbering, and now there were hurrays around them. Dikar saw that it was Franksmith hurraying, and Bessalton and pimply-faced Carlberger. And there were others of the Bunch here too, and they were all red with earth, their hands red and shapeless with earth.

"It fell on us, too," Franksmith burst out. "But not deep, and when we shoved up out, we saw Walt here diggin' with his hands so we came an' helped him."

Dikar wondered that he could hear them all so plain in spite of the thunder and then it came to him that the thunder was much less loud than it had been before. He looked up into the sky. There were no planes in it now.

"Bomb loads don't last forever," Walt answered Dikar's look, "and they'll have to fly so far back to get more that they'll hardly be able to return before nightfall. But the guns are still at it."

Bessalton and Alicekane took Marilee from Dikar's arms and started to clean the earth from her. "Walt!" Dikar went cold all over with a sudden thought. "Why're you here? Is Normanfenton—"

"The President's in a deep cave up ahead; I took him there." Walt's gray-blue uniform, from the stores they'd found at Wespoint, hung in rags about him. "What you said yesterday had me jittery." There was stiff hair on his face and the hair on his head was clotted.

He looked almost the way he'd looked when Dikar first found him, a starved Beast-man in the woods below the Mountain. "You were right, Dikar. The Asafrics laid a trap for us and we marched the army right into it."

"The army, Walt! All killed?"

"Many. Too many. But according to the reports I've been gathering, not nearly as many as we thought at first. Our men dispersed as soon as it began, found gullies like this one, caves, other shelter. Even those who could not find better cover than the woods were so scattered that each bomb or shell caught only two or three.

"We've lost only about six or seven hundred men. That still leaves us nearly five thousand effectives, but we can no longer count on surprising the Asafrics, so a frontal assault on those natural ramparts cannot possibly succeed."

Dikar didn't understand all Walt's words, but he knew what he meant. "Then we've given up. We're licked."

"Not quite." The back of Walt's hand scraped at the stiff hair on his chin. "There's still one slim chance. That's why Fenton sent me through that hell-fire to look for you."

"Why for me?"

"Because if anyone can make good that chance, it's you and your Bunch. Look!" Walt pointed up and up to where Dikar had seen the guns flash this morning. "You see that fold in the mountains, right there?"

"Yes." The flashes were still there, bright against the dark green of the high woods, and the thunder of the guns still rolled down from there. "Sure I do."

"That's Newfound Gap, the highest point on the highway that goes over these mountains. When the Smokies were made a National Park, the engineers built a wide, level place there where hundreds of cars could park while their passengers looked over the view.

"The Asafrics have emplaced their biggest guns there, monsters with a fifty-mile range, commanding not only all this valley, but the whole length of the highway up which we'd planned to steal tonight, to make our surprise attack."

"I know," Dikar broke in. "But now the Asafrics will be watchin' for us an' kill us all if we try it."

"Exactly. They have the range of every inch of it. On the other hand, if we can capture those guns we can still snatch victory from defeat. You see, Dikar, we could swing them around and shell the enemy out of the reaches between the Smokies and the Cumberland Plateau. That would make it possible for our Army of the Tennessee to break through, join up with us and clean up the rest of the enemy forces in the mountains."

"How're we goin' to capture those guns if we can't get up to 'em?"

"Look there to the left." Dikar's eyes went along the line of soaring, dark green peaks up from which drifted a blue-gray haze like smoke from hidden fires. "There. That's Clingman's Dome."

So high was the mountain Walt pointed to that, far above, a cloud blanked out its middle half and its top seemed a monstrous, impossible island floating in the sky.

"It rises a thousand feet above Newfound Gap," Walt was saying, "and there is another battery emplaced there, of automatic air-craft guns, like the archy you fired from the roof when we captured West Point. They're toys compared to the ones at the Gap, but they're placed just right to annihilate the crews of the big ones."

A chill prickle ran up and down Dikar's backbone, but he only said, very quiet, "All right, Walt. We'll go up there an'—"

"Wait!" Walt's voice was sharp. "Wait till I finish." Dikar had a queer feeling that his friend didn't want him to go up there with the Bunch. "General Fenton wants you to understand exactly what the job means."

"I don't care—"

"Listen, Dikar," Marilee's clear, sweet voice interrupted. "Listen to what Walt has to say." She was standing close to them, and the others of the Bunch were gathered around. The Boys' eyes were shining and eager but the Girls' eyes, watching Walt, were shadowed.

"A ridge, along which runs an automobile road, connects Newfound Gap, to the north-east of it, with Clingman's Dome. Its eastern slope, the one toward us, and the southern are comparatively gentle and easy to climb, and so are certainly carefully watched. The Dome's western side, however, is a steep cliff almost as unscalable as that around the base of your Mountain—"

"And you think they won't be watchin' that side. But they'd be crazy not to, if they know we're around."

"If they know our army is in the vicinity they'll certainly be on the alert. But suppose we pretend to withdraw? Suppose, now that the planes have left, we send numbers of men to expose themselves on roads visible from the mountain-tops, apparently fleeing from the valley—"

"The Asafrics will think there's lots more runnin' away, in the woods where they can't see 'em. An' they'll get a little careless—"

"Exactly. If the ruse should succeed it might barely be possible for a little band of men to reach the summit of Clingman's Dome unobserved under cover of the night.

"Might be, Dikar," Walt repeated. "But...