Time Travel Omnibus, page 119
“What about Winston’s confession?” asked Rogers suddenly.
“Detective-Captain Sturtevant can explain that to a court when Mr. Winston brings suit against him for false arrest and brutal treatment,” replied Carnes.
“A very interesting case, Carnes,” remarked the doctor a few hours later. “It was an enjoyable interlude in the routine of most of the cases on which you consult me, but our play time is over. We’ll have to get after that counterfeiting case tomorrow.”
AN ADVENTURE IN TIME
Francis Flagg
EVER since the publication of “The Time Oscillator” by Henry F. Kirkham in SCIENCE WONDER STORIES, there has been a great controversy among our readers as to the possibility of time flying and the conditions under which it may be done.
The present author, the author of “The Land of the Bipos,” gives us in this effort a marvelous time-traveling story.
A characteristic of our modern generation is its intense interest in the future. What will our civilisation be in 100, 500 or 1,000 years hence? How will some of our most pressing problems be settled? Mr. Flagg answers some of these questions with great clarity and with a picturesqueness which is peculiarly his own.
One might say that time-traveling stories fully serve their purpose by giving us a perspective on our own civilization and very often lending a new viewpoint on conditions that we have come to accept as inevitable.
There is little question but that the future will see an increasingly greater part of our work being done by mechanisms of one kind or another, and whether these mechanisms are the Mechanicals as pictured by Mr. Flagg or some other form of mechanism, they will undoubtedly relieve man of much of the drudgery that is prevalent even in our twentieth century life.
NOTHING is impossible. I want that fact to sink into your minds. A thing may not have come within the sphere of your own activities; it may even lie beyond the scope of your imaginations. You may never have personally encountered anything above the commonplace, the ordinary. But you can’t deny the possibility of the incredible, or the improbable, befalling someone else. Please bear this in mind when I tell you of my own startling experience.”
So spoke Bayers, Professor of Physics. He was a blond viking of a man in his early thirties, big, powerful, an eccentric in his habits, a fool—or a genius. None of us liked him very much. We thought him too absurd, too egotistical.
He broke too easily through the stereotyped and the conventional in his methods of teaching. On the basis of the known, the demonstrable, he built up superstructures of theories that, to say the least, were wild and far-fetched. He allowed the thread of his discourses to wander into mathematical mazes.
To most of us his reasoning was absurd. For example, it was his settled conviction that one could travel in time.
“You do it for an hour when you walk two or three miles,” he often said. “Why can’t you do it for a hundred years? All you have to perfect is the medium.” The phrase became a joke with us: To perfect the medium.
Ellis, teacher of English literature, often engaged him in heated arguments.
“What time are you going to travel in?” Ellis would say, jeering. “Our time, or the time it takes to travel in time?”
“What do you mean?”
“Why, you know that Dunn, in his Experiment With Time, shows the fallacy of the reasoning of H.G. Wells in The Time Machine. If you travel a few thousand years into the future, a certain time must be used for the journey.”
“But Dunn is mistaken,” said Bayers.
“in thinking that this time to travel in time is a time separate from or above our own. If I walk a mile in twenty minutes, and then run it in six, has that shortened the length of a mile? Or conversely, if in a six-minute run, I equal a twenty-minute walk, has that set a six-minute time above a twenty-minute one? The idea is preposterous!”
“I suppose Dunn knew what he was writing about.”
“Dunn! Dunn! Dunn was mainly concerned in setting down some hocus-pocus about dreams. Listen to reason, man! If I measure off five miles, and then cover only one of them, that one mile isn’t something above the five miles, it is only a fraction of a given instance. If I set off a thousand hours, and travel it in one, that one hour is only a fraction of the thousand hours. It is not a time above it, or below it—it is just the same time. The whole mistake made by Dunn lies in not clearly understanding that there is no basic difference between time and space. A fiction writer makes this very plain in a fantastic story of his, The Machine Man of Ardathia, which I would advise you to get and read.”
“Thank you,” was Ellis’ retort, “I don’t read cheap, science fiction magazines.”
I GIVE the above conversation as an example of the many heated ones which took place in the lounging-room of the Faculty Club. Bayers didn’t visit it oftener than once or twice a month, but when he did he always held the floor. And we didn’t like it. We didn’t like him. You can’t care for a man who will call you an Ignoramus, a stupid dolt, on the least provocation—or on none at all. But when he entered the lounging-room of the Faculty Club that night, three weeks ago, we stared at him in amazement. Undoubtedly it was Bayers, but he looked different. There was a subtle something wrong about the man. His clothes fitted oddly, as if they were too loose at the shoulders and too tight at the hips. We all knew that he had claimed several weeks’ absence from the classroom because of sickness, but as he had done that before, and for various reasons, none of us had believed him really ill. Now we felt remorseful. We crowded around him.
“Bayers,” exclaimed Ellis. “What’s the matter, old man?”
It was then, standing in his accustomed place to one side of the big fireplace, his hands buried in his coat pockets, that Bayers uttered the words with which this chronicle opens. His voice was the same old arrogant voice, though noticeably shriller, and his haggard sun-browned face wore a look of triumph as he told the astounding story, which, to the best of my ability, I have given below.
* * * *
I have traveled in time (said Bayers). No, you needn’t look at me like that. I’m not crazy, nor am I sick and running a fever. There’s nothing at all the matter with me—at least, not in the way you imagine. Do me the favor, if you will, to listen without interruption. “As you all know, I have always been intensely interested in the phenomenon of time and its relation to space. To my own satisfaction, at least, I had evolved a mathematical system which reduced one to the other in such fashion as to give me great hopes of being able ultimately to construct a machine that could travel into the past and the future. The plan of such a machine was taking shape in my mind, and I had already fashioned certain parts of it, when, one summer’s day two years ago, in the course of a walk along the road about a half mile from my house, I witnessed a sight that filled me with amazement.
That portion of, the road, as you know, is quite lonely in the late afternoon. The houses stand far back in their own grounds and are hidden from the casual gaze by tall hedges and the foliage of trees. A Parsons aero-sedan was parked in the driveway of one of those places opposite me, hut the plane was empty and not a person was in sight. I had just come abreast of this parked plane when a flash of intense light shone for a moment into my eyes and half-blinded me.
At first I thought it was a ray of sunlight glinting from the metal or the glass parts of the plane, but this idea was quickly dismissed, for the plane lay where the sun could not reach it. Quite involuntarily I had come to a pause, and was rubbing my eyes to restore their normal vision, when I observed a peculiar thing about two yards in front of me, the height of my shoulders from the ground, spinning in the air like a top. When I first saw it, it was a blur, and I could see through and beyond it, much as one does in looking through the spokes of a rapidly whirling wheel.
But when the spinning motion slowed, the thing became opaque, solid, and finally fell to the ground with a distinct thud. I then saw that it was a machine, a strange contrivance, possibly two feet in circumference, though as a matter of fact it was neither round nor square. Needless to say, I picked the thing up (it weighed about fifteen pounds) and carried it home with me. I was greatly excited. Examination in the privacy of my laboratory verified the suspicion that had entered my mind in the first moment of its appearance; the strange contrivance was the model of a time machine!
Editha
YES, a time machine. What I had believed possible lay before me in concrete form. Why such a thing had come to me, who had always believed in time traveling, is a thing I cannot explain. It belongs to a mathematics of probability higher than any we know of.
Perhaps my own work on a time machine prior to this incident was just a sort of pre-vision, or “future memory” that so many psychologists now believe in. In other words, while working on my time machine, I may really have been existing on two time planes simultaneously. The parts I had already fashioned were here; and also those parts which I had been able to conceive of mathematically, but the construction of which had baffled me. There was the great central wheel, the principle that turned it, not outwardly, but in on itself. There was the magnetic battery kept constantly charged by the momentum of the wheel. And lastly there was the balance. . . . But why continue! Suffice it to say, that everything I had ever dreamed of was incorporated in the body of that model.
You may imagine with what interest I inspected it, to what almost painful scrutiny I subjected its most minute details. Though in my own mind I was assured that the machine came from the future—since no person or persons of the past would have possessed the knowledge of mechanics and mathematics necessary for such an invention—there was no date, no legend, no message of any kind to indicate the period of its construction. But in the small chamber designed for whoever would like to journey in the time machine, I discovered the photograph of a beautiful girl. Only the face was shown, with a portion of the neck.
The features appeared to be set in bas-relief on a substance similar to that used in our tintype pictures of almost a century ago, giving the face, which was tinted in natural colors, a startlingly lifelike effect.
Yet when I ran my finger over the surface of the photo, I found it absolutely smooth, the apparent bas-relief being an optical illusion cunningly contrived. I have called the face of this girl beautiful, but that is a weak term to use. As a matter of fact, the look of her was vital, arresting—and it exercised on me a strange fascination. It is absurd to say that I fell in love with a photograph of a woman I had never seen; but it is only truthful to state that the thought came to me with overwhelming force, that here was the picture of a woman I could love.
The head was well shaped, the forehead low but broad, the eyes widely spaced. The eyes were sea-green, the kind that often become vividly blue under the stress of emotion. And as for the mouth, the nose. . . . Suffice it to say, I was enchanted! The ashen hair cropped close to the head, boy-fashion, the hue of the skin, swarthily brown, were piquantly attractive to me. Recollect that I am still a young man, ardent by temperament, responsive to female beauty even though I have a reputation for shunning the society of women. Consider the strange, the exciting, circumstances under which the picture came into my possession. Then you will make allowances for the fact that I wove impossible romances in my mind, that I began to dream. . . . Under this picture was engraved a single name which I deciphered to mean-Editha.
BUT my unexpected find did not make me forget the time machine. Rather it added to the energy with which I threw myself into the task of duplicating the model in my possession. Naturally, I dared not experiment with it, else it might slip away from my hands into an era remote from myself. Again, I had to handle it with care, to note with microscopic thoroughness the relationship of its various parts, lest I smash something irreplaceable, or be unable to put together again what I had taken apart.
But I will not bother you with the irksome details. It is enough to say that I finally reproduced a model of the machine, complete in every respect, and that it functioned. After that it only remained to build a time machine on a scale large enough to carry myself. Two months ago the contrivance was finished. I asked for sick leave and prepared for my unique journey, giving my housekeeper to understand that I was going away to the country for a complete rest, and that during my absence neither she nor anyone else was to enter my workrooms.
I made ready for the journey with some care. Clad in a stout hunting-suit, and armed with an automatic, I seated myself in the chamber of the machine and advanced the starting lever. Do not think that I was altogether easy in my mind at that moment. For the truth is that I hesitated for some time. None better than myself knew the danger that lay in undertaking such a trip. But eagerness to test the Invention personally, to prove that my theories were sound, finally overcame whatever timidity I had. It was my intention to essay but a short flight at first, say a thousand years into the future, but naturally I had no means of knowing how fast the machine would travel in time.
Here I want to say that Wells’ description of. what a traveler would see from a time machine in motion is incorrect. Also the great flctionist makes no attempt to protect his time traveler from the action of friction. That is because he has no conception of what it is that ages the organism.
In my machine all contingencies were provided for. It had been impossible to reproduce the transparent metal with which the walls of the chamber of the strange model had been constructed, so in its place I utilized a flexible glass of the strongest and most modern manufacture; thick yet clear, capable of turning, with a quarter of an inch of its thickness, the bullet from a high-powered rifle. Through this glass I viewed no such thing as a succession of nights and days. No blur of rooms, buildings, cities and civilizations rose and fell. The speed was too colossal. When I had started my journey I was conscious only of a sickening swoop, a moment of utter disintegration. Beyond that I experienced—I saw—nothing. Fortunately, the lever was set on the face of a graduated dial, the dial being separated into two zones by a straight line. At the head of this line, the end furthest from me, was the numeral nought. When the lever rested on this, the machine was at rest; pulling it back to its greatest capacity in the left zone would start it hurtling into the future, while pushing it over into the right zone would send it into the past. Under the dial, and controlling the lever, was a mechanism which, after a certain number of revolutions of a clock-like wheel, would release the lever and let it fly back to neutral. It was well for me that this arrangement existed, otherwise I might be traveling yet.
In the Thicket
UNDERSTAND, I was already traveling; I was already experiencing that sickening feeling of disintegration. Then the mechanism released the lever and I stopped. I stopped, I say; and for a breathless moment the machine and I hung poised in space. Fool that I was, I had started my flight from the second floor of my house. Sometime during the years between my start and arrival, the house had naturally been torn down, removed, leaving a wooded spot where the building had once stood. So the machine and I plunged earthward. But the branches of trees broke the force of our fall and we came to rest in the midst of a dense thicket. I was badly shaken, of course, but protected from any serious injury by the walls of the chamber. Nor was the machine damaged. Constructed as it had been, with the more delicate part of its mechanism housed in an all-metal body, it had crashed to earth without suffering any particular harm. I went over it thoroughly to make certain of this, and with an axe from the tool-box cut the branches and underbrush away from around and under it, until it rested more or less firmly on the level. Then, and not till then, did I pause to realize the uniqueness of my position.
At that moment I did not doubt that I stood in the future. I had started with four walls of a room around me, but the walls, the room, had disappeared. I had expected them to, of course, and yet in spite of my expectations, I was amazed and startled. Deep in my subconscious mind had lurked a mistrust of the actual working of the larger machine, a doubt about the amazing deductions of my own reasoning. At any rate, in that moment I was as much astounded at my sudden whiff through time as any of you gentlemen might have been. Only after a few dazed minutes could the truth come home to me—the incredible truth—that what the great mass of humanity had never even dreamed of, I had done. After a while, after I had appeased an unaccountable hunger with some cheese and crackers, and had drunk a thermos-bottle of coffee, I forced my way with some difficulty through the shrubbery, and so came into the open. I might remark that by the position of the sun, the hour was about noon.
The thicket from which I emerged appeared to be an isolated cluster of woods set in the midst of a rolling, parklike countryside such as you may see today, but with no houses in evidence. Congratulating myself that the machine was well concealed, and marking the spot as carefully as I could, I walked ahead, wondering, as indeed one might well wonder, what sort of people I could expect to meet. In about five minutes I reached a place where a long line of tall trees ceased, and from which it was possible to see the whole of the East Bay territory spread below. But the familiar city views were no longer there. Berkeley and Oakland had vanished. The Key Route Mole which used to run its long slender length far out into the Bay was gone. Gone too, were the Campanile Tower, the towering brick and stone of the Tribune Building, the trireme-like ferry boats plying the waters between the East Bay cities and the metropolis by the Golden Gate.
CHAPTER II
A Meeting
CHANGE, change! I had expected, of course, to see changes, but not this drastic sweeping away of everything familiar. The completeness of time’s erasure stunned me. So might an inhabitant of prehistoric America feel if he could return and view the cities of our day, standing where his own rude shelters had once stood. For all I knew I might be that prehistoric person. For I was looking down on a marvelous city—yet one so different from that to which I was accustomed that it filled me with amazement. The buildings, so far as I could see them, were of gleaming white stone with flat roofs, set each one in the midst of green squares and clumps of waving trees. There was no attempt to be mathematical in the arrangement of them. They lay in a sort of picturesque confusion delightful to behold. No chimneys or ugly projections marred the artistic simplicity of their lines.
