The Cave of Time Read online

  You are awakened by a fresh breeze blowing toward you. You dizzily get to your feet, pick up the egg, and hurry toward the fresh air—outdoors again in Snake Canyon! Everything is as you remember it and in a few hours you are walking up to the ranch, where your uncle says he is surprised you got back so quickly!

  When you tell what has happened to you, no one at the ranch believes it, though they are fascinated by your enormous egg.

  “Maybe we’ll believe that egg is real—and believe your story—if it will hatch a monster,” your uncle says, “or if you break it open to show us what’s inside.”

  Break the egg open

  Keep it in your closet until you have a chance to get scientific advice

  With your aunt and uncle and some ranch hands standing by, you very gently tap the egg with an axe, hoping it will split open without fragmenting.

  “Wait a minute!” Uncle Howard cries out. “I’m ready to believe you, but I think we better get a naturalist down from the University to see this first.”

  You are relieved that your uncle feels this way, because it seems like a terrible responsibility—cracking open an egg like that and possibly killing a rare monster before it is born.

  Uncle Howard calls the naturalist, a famous professor of paleontology, who agrees to come down the following Saturday. You place the egg in a large bowl in the middle of the dining room table.

  The next day is Friday, and that evening the whole family goes out to the movies. When you return, you find the house has been broken into and the egg is missing.

  Neither you, your aunt and uncle, nor any of the ranch hands, nor the police are ever able to find the egg. Most people you tell your story to just smile and say, “Sure.” But Uncle Howard, even though he is a skeptical man, tells you he knows you were telling the truth.

  The End

  The idea that the Loch Ness monster goes into the Cave of Time for a hundred years or so before returning seems preposterous. And, even if it does, it seems very doubtful you could dive down deep enough to find the underwater entrance. So you resign yourself to making a living fishing the waters of Loch Ness.

  You find it a tolerable, though not very interesting, life. You particularly like rowing out in your skiff in the early morning mists and watching the pale, red sun struggling to shine through the haze. That’s what you are doing one day when you feel a tremendous thump under your boat, the stem is heaved high into the air, and you are hurled over the bow and into the jaws of the monster.

  Some of your friends find the wreckage of your boat later in the day and, throughout the village, people say to each other—“The monster has returned again.”

  The End

  After hearing of the forbidding world you’ve witnessed at your end of the Cave of Time, Louisa is agreeable to your helping her try to find the way_ back to her entrance.

  “Tell me about the world outside your entrance to the Cave of Time. Is it in America? What year is it there?” you ask, as the two of you walk along.

  “The year 2022, of course,” she replies.

  “You mean people are still wearing blue jeans then?” you ask.

  “They’ve come back into style lately,” she laughs.

  “You must have some new inventions that we did not have in my time. Tell me about your most modem things.”

  “I think the best things are the bicycle trails. Since 1997 they’ve allowed no new roads to be built—only bike trials—and now there are as many miles of bike trails as there are of roads for cars.

  “So you can really bike all over the country?” you ask.

  “Sure—and not alongside buses and trucks and crazy drivers, but through forests and across plains and deserts and along rivers and streams. I sometimes feel like biking forever that way, and there are hostels for bikers where you can sleep in comfort for almost nothing. Most of the cost is paid for by taxes on gasoline.”

  Suddenly you feel the ground giving way beneath your feet. You and Louisa are falling. The two of you land at the base of a steep bluff, shaken but unharmed, alongside a road. You wonder what year you have arrived in. Then, nearby, you see a billboard that says, “CADILLAC—the Car of the Year, every Year!”

  “What’s a Cadillac?” Louisa asks.

  The End

  You’d rather spend the rest of your life searching for an entrance to the Cave of Time than settle for the placid life of a fishing village. So you bid your new friends farewell and set out over the countryside, headed south for London. Your goal is to find a ship to take you to America, though you know America hasn’t been discovered yet, for somehow you must find your way back to Red Creek Canyon and the Cave of Time.

  A few hours later, as you are walking on a road along the edge of the forest, some burly men ride out from behind a clump of trees.

  “We’ve got you,” one shouts. “You’re the one who escaped from the tower, aren’t you?” They force you upon a horse and ride at top speed toward the castle.

  “The penalty for escaping from the tower is hanging,” one of them tells you.

  You find out he is right.

  The End

  You have no wish to risk sinking with the Titanic, so you climb back down the ladder into the hold of the ship—hoping that somehow you will find your way back to the cave. In your haste, you lose your grip and fall. You reach out, but too late. You land so hard you are knocked out. When you awaken, you are in one of the passageways of the cave.

  Explore the passageway

  Check out the outer entrance to the cave again

  “Since you can’t find your way to your own time,” you say, “perhaps we can find my time.” You lead her back a short distabce, until you come to an unusually wide tunnel. You stop, and Louisa looks at you inquiringly. “Let’s try this one,” you say.

  After traveling almost an hour, the two of you smile with joy to ee light ahead, and you soon come out of the tunnel and stand on reddish sandy ground, surveying a saucer-shaped terrain. The air is as fresh and clear as on a crisp, fall day. You guess that you may be in the crater of an extinct volicano. Suddenly, there is a thundering roar behind you. Louisa and you run from a landslide that buries the tunnel leading back to the Cave of Time.

  “I wonder what year it is?” Louisa asks, after the two of you have collected your wits.

  For the first time you look up at the sun. It is four times as large as the sun you knew, though not as bright. It is almost directly overhead, yet its color is a rusty red.

  “I don’t know the answer,” you reply, “but from what I’ve read about astronomy, I would guess it’s the year 2,000—plus about four billion years.

  The End

  You go up to the base of the wall where the people are working. When they see you, they imagine you are a spy from some unknown tribe. Some guards capture you and force you to sit on a pile of rocks while they talk about you.

  After a while they point to one of the ladders. Two other people force you to start handing up rocks. You realize that you have been conscripted to work building a wall twenty feet high, twelve feet wide, and 1,400 miles long. You calculate it will take about ten billion rocks to build the wall. You wonder how many of them you will lift before you can escape—if you ever do.

  The End

  Much as you would like to see the inside of the alien ship, you have n
o desire to be whisked off into space. You step back to what you hope is a safe distance and watch what happens. In a moment the portal closes, and almost instantly the ship rises, silently, straight up. Within a few minutes it is lost from view. You walk over to look more closely at the primitive looking people sleeping on the pallet. They begin to stir and stretch and rub their eyes as if waking from a long sleep.

  Stay and try to make friends with the primitive people

  Return to the hill and try to find your way back to the Cave of Time

  You run up the hill and out of sight before any of the primitive people awaken. You must find an entrance to the Cave of Time. You search in the high rocky ground for some opening. Hours go by; dusk is fast approaching. Just as you are about to give up hope, you spy the entrance to a cave under a rock ledge. You eagerly step inside and have only a moment’s awareness that it is the den of a saber-toothed tiger.

  The End

  The people look around curiously. They hardly seem to notice your presence. One by one they get up and walk around. One of them drinks from the stream. They make grunting and clicking noises, but do not seem to be actually talking among themselves. The largest of the group picks up a stick from the ground and begins prying up the roots of plants along the edge of the stream. He bites at each one. Finally he smiles and passes the root around to the others. One woman claps her hands. The others begin to find sticks. One of the men hands you a piece of root. You bite at it. It tastes like a dirty carrot. The women smile at you. You are accepted in the group.

  The next morning you wake up in the soft mossy bank in Snake Cavern, a few dozen yards from the entrance to the cave, wondering how much of what has been happening to you has been a dream and how much has been reality. But you have no desire to go into the Cave of Time again.

  The End

  You walk on and on, hoping the passageway will lead you to your own time. You soon come to a tunnel that leads into a dark, musty room resembling the cellar of a large house. There are a great many people huddled in groups, sitting on blankets in complete darkness save for the light of a few flickering candles. You hear the dismal wail of a siren. Near the center of the room an old-fashioned radio sits on the table playing a mixture of classical music and static. Then the sirens stop, the ground shakes, and you hear a tremendous explosion nearby, then another further away, then another so close that a wall and half the ceiling come crashing down in a pile of rubble, blocking the tunnel. You and the others scramble to the opposite side of the room, coughing and gasping in the dust-filled air.

  You are about to begin a new life. The year is 1940; the place, London.

  The End

  You have no desire to be involved in building the Great Wall of China, or, for that matter, to be taken to another planet by aliens. You walk back into the crevasse, hoping to find a tunnel that might lead to another time. You walk along the bottom of the crevasse and reach an opening on the other side of the ridge, where you half expect to see the rolling countryside, the stream and the space ship that were there before.

  Instead, the crevasse leads to the ocean! Like a bad dream, where the scene suddenly changes into something entirely different, you find that the hills have become waves, which surround you so that the rock you are standing on is only a reef protruding a few yards above the wind-swept seas. And there seems to be no escape, because, for all you can tell, you are standing on the only land in the world.

  The End

  You walk back through the cavern, wondering if the entrance will still be blocked by ice. This time, though, you are greeted by a warm breeze. Sunlight is shining on the ground near the entrance, and you walk outside.

  Squinting your eyes in the bright light, you see a world totally different from the one you know. You are on a hillside. For miles and miles you can see grassy plains speckled with lakes. Nearby is a forest of towering ferns, swaying in the wind. The world before you seems strangely quiet, except for the faint rumbling of distant thunder. Suddenly, the thunder seems much closer—and louder. The thundering sound is moving through the ferns. You run up the hill looking for a place to hide. A huge shadow passes on the ground. Above you, soaring through the air, is a creature larger than any bird you have seen.

  Now it is clear what has been happening. The cave is a crack in the universe—a place outside space-time. Once inside its tunnels you could find yourself at any place, at any time. If you enter again you might be sent to a place from which you could never escape. Yet that is your only hope of returning to your own place and time.

  Go back into the cave

  Remain outside

  Inside the cave again, you feel depressed and confused. Your eyes do not seem to be getting used to the dim light. You cannot find any passageways leading to other times. You feel increasingly drowsy. Soon you fall asleep on the cold clay floor of the cave.

  Sometime later you awaken. The cave is pitch dark, but the bright light at the opening tells you the sun is shining brightly outside. You walk out into the daylight and, to your surprise and delight, you see Snake Canyon, the trail, the grove of pine trees nearby—everything just as it was when you entered the cave. Even the sun is in the same place, just about to pass behind the rim of the canyon. Somehow you have returned to your own time—or more precisely, the time it was before you fell asleep in the cave.

  You rub your eyes and start down the path back to the Red Creek Ranch with a story to tell that no one will believe, but that you will never forget.

  The End

  Reasoning that you can always find your way back into the cave when you want to, you decide to explore the world in which you have found yourself.

  You make your way along a rock ledge overlooking the plains and lakes, taking care to keep your bearings so you can find your way back to the cave.

  By now you are getting very hungry. You know that you are in the age of reptiles—at least 100 million years ago—and that mammals may not yet have appeared on earth. There will be no rabbits or deer to hunt, though the lakes may contain fish. You wonder how dinosaur eggs taste.

  You follow a wide path through the fern trees. When you round the first bend, you find yourself face to face with the horrible Triceratops, a great gray monster almost hidden behind its shields and horns. It looks at you curiously with dull brown eyes. You turn, run, and crash into a tree trunk—one that wasn’t there before!

  The bark feels like leather. You look up to see how high it is—into the jaws of Tyrannosaurus Rex.

  The End

  You continue a long distance until you come to the next tunnel. From there it is only a short distance until you reach the surface. An amazing sight meets your eyes.

  As far as you can see, the land looks like a beautiful park, with soft, feathery grass and towering trees. Here and there are clusters of multicolored, dome-shaped buildings, connected by ramps, terraces and walkways. Some people dressed in simple khaki pants and shirts and tan sneakers walk up to you. They do not understand your language, nor you theirs. They look much like the people of your time except that they are unusually trim, muscular, and healthy looking, and they are a good deal smaller than your own people.

  They take you inside a dome-shaped building and show you electronic equipment that looks like a computer. You notice a typewriter, so you sit at it and type a message.

  The computer prints out a reply. It apparently has access to memory ban
ks containing your language. You soon discover you are living in the year 3742.

  Through computer instruction you are able to learn the language, which you find is similar to English, so you are soon able to communicate with your hosts.

  They are not at all surprised to hear that you arrived through the Cave of Time.

  “You are not the first,” the head of the household tells you, “but we have visitors from other times only once in a great while. When someone comes, we are always glad to learn about life in another era, because here we have achieved a sort of paradise—we do not work, and the world is at peace. It is a perfect society. That is why primitive epochs, such as yours, interest us so much.”

  Stay in “the perfect society”

  Try to return to the Cave of Time

  You climb up the steps between the last car and the caboose just as the train begins to start up again. When you open the door to the car, you are surprised to see soldiers in blue uniforms holding old-fashioned rifles. They advance upon you. One of them strides past you to see if anyone else followed you.

  “How did you know this was the President’s car?” the first soldier asks you.