Time Travel Omnibus, page 133
Secretan Jones could not make it out at all. He supposed he must have put the papers where they were found and then forgotten all about it, and he was uneasy, feeling afraid that he was on the brink of a nervous breakdown. Then there were difficulties about his books, as to which he was very precise, every book having its own place. One morning he wanted to consult the Missale de Arbuthnott, a big red quarto, which lived at the end of a bottom shelf near the window. It was not there. The unfortunate man went up to his bedroom, and felt the bed all over and looked under his shirts in the chest of drawers, and searched all the room in vain. However, determined to get what he wanted, he went to the Reading Room, verified his reference, and returned to Canonbury: and there was the red quarto in its place. Now here, it seemed certain, there was no room for loss of memory; and Secretan Jones began to suspect his servants of playing tricks with his possessions, and tried to find a reason for their imbecility or villainy—he did not know what to call it. But it would not do at all. Papers and books disappeared and reappeared, or now and then vanished without return. One afternoon, struggling, as he told me, against a growing sense of confusion and bewilderment, he had with considerable difficulty filled two quarto sheets of ruled paper with a number of extracts necessary to the subject he had in hand. When this was done, he felt his bewilderment thickening like a cloud about him: “It was, physically and mentally, as if the objects in the room became indistinct, were presented in a shimmering mist or darkness.” He felt afraid, and rose, and went out into the garden. The two sheets of paper he had left on his table were lying on the path by the garden door.
I remember he stopped dead at this point. To tell the truth, I was thinking that all these instances were rather matter for the ear of a mental specialist than for my hearing. There was evidence enough of a bad nervous breakdown, and, it seemed to me, of delusions. I wondered whether it was my duty to advise the man to go to the best doctor he knew, and without delay. Then Secretan Jones began again:
“I won’t tell you any more of these absurdities. I know they are drivel, pantomime tricks and traps, children’s conjuring; contemptible, all of it.
“But it made me afraid. I felt like a man walking in the dark, beset with uncertain sounds and faint echoes of his footsteps that seem to come from a vast depth, till he begins to fear that he is treading by the edge of some awful precipice. There was something unknown about me; and I was holding on hard to what I knew, and wondering whether I should be sustained.
“One afternoon I was in a very miserable and distracted state. I could not attend to my work. I went out into the garden, and walked up and down trying to calm myself. I opened the garden door and looked into the narrow passage which runs at the end of all the gardens on this side of the square. There was nobody there—except three children playing some game or other. They were queer, stunted little creatures, and I turned back into the garden and walked into the study. I had just sat down, and had turned to my work hoping to find relief in it, when Mrs. Sedger, my servant, came into the room and cried out, in an excited sort of way, that she was glad to see me back again.
“I made up some story. I don’t know whether she believes it. I suppose she thinks I have been mixed up in something disreputable.”
“And what had happened?”
“I haven’t the remotest notion.”
We sat looking at each other for some time.
“I suppose what happened was just this,” I said at last. “Your nervous system had been in a very bad way for some time. It broke down utterly; you lost your memory, your sense of identity—everything. You may have spent the six weeks in addressing envelopes in the City Road.”
He turned to one of the books on the table and opened it. Between the leaves there were the dimmed red and white petals of some flower that looked like an anemone.
“I picked this flower,” he said, “as I was walking down the path that afternoon. It was the first of its kind to be in bloom—very early. It was still in my hand when I walked back into this room, six weeks later, as everybody declares. But it was quite fresh.”
There was nothing to be said. I kept silent for five minutes, I suppose, before I asked him whether his mind was an utter blank as to the six weeks during which no known person had set eyes on him; whether he had no sort of recollection, however vague.
“At first, nothing at all. I could not believe that more than a few seconds came between my opening the garden door and shutting it. Then in a day or two there was a vague impression that I had been somewhere where everything was absolutely right. I can’t say more than that. No fairyland joys, or bowers of bliss, or anything of that kind; no sense of anything strange or unaccustomed. But there was no care there at all. Est enim magnum chaos.”
But that means “For there is a great void,” or “A great gulf.”
We never spoke of the matter again. Two months later he told me that his nerves had been troubling him, and that he was going to spend a month or six weeks at a farm near Llanthony, in the Black Mountains, a few miles from his old home. In three weeks I got a letter, addressed in Secretan Jones’s hand. Inside was a slip of paper on which he had written the words:
Est enim magnum chaos.
The day on which the letter was posted he had gone out in wild autumn weather, late one afternoon, and had never come back. No trace of him has ever been found.
A FLIGHT INTO TIME
Robert H. Wilson
TIME is but a stream says the modern scientist, and if we could get out of the stream for a moment, we could project ourselves into another part of it and therefore actually travel in time.
Or, as Einstein said, space is curved; and since time and space are sister and brother, it may well be that time itself is curved, perhaps into some higher dimension. In that case also time traveling should be possible if the proper apparatus can be developed.
No doubt the traveler into the future will see and experience things beyond all imagining. But what of his own feelings about them? Suppose he were to find himself in a veritable Utopia. Would he wish to stay on and enjoy it? Would he find himself at home with people of that new day and age? Might it not happen that among his own race, even among his own descendants, he will find himself a stranger, and that he will have such an overpowering homesickness for the dirty, drab, and muddled atmosphere of the 1930’s that he would feel he must go bark? Mr. Wilson answers some of these questions in this intensely realistic and exciting story.
I SUPPOSE it had to be Storrs—or another impractical artist like him. If the thing had happened to Edison, or Millikan, or any of a half dozen others, think what we might have learned! Even if it had been one of the rest of our crowd standing on that street corner . . . But it was Fate, giving with one hand and taking back with the other, that vouchsafed to Ted Storrs the “Vision”. We have to piece it together as best we can from what he noticed and remembered.
He was standing at the foot of Market Street, where the gold-topped Ferry Building is silhouetted against San Francisco Bay and the Oakland shore.
Around him was the press and rush of the noon crowd, the clatter of street cars and the whistles of policemen directing traffic. It was the twenty-ninth of September, 1933—that much is sure, for we were going over to Berkeley that afternoon to see the first football game of the season—and the hour, according to Ted, was exactly noon. Waiting for the rest of us to show up, he had stopped to set his watch by the Ferry Building clock. Just twelve, it was, the two hands straight together, and as Ted matched his watch with them, he let the second hand touch sixty before snapping in the stem.
“May I bother you for the time?” came a voice, “I’ve let my watch get hours slow.”
“Certainly,” Ted obliged without half thinking, holding out his own timepiece at the end of its chain.
The inquirer was an oldish man, with white hair and beard calling to Ted’s mind a Confederate General. His shirt collar was open and without a tie, and his ensemble was a variety of heavy silk loose fitting garments, resembling, Ted thought humorously, pajamas. And his watch, on which Ted’s attention had unconsciously focused—a watch strangely wafer-thin—was marked unmistakably with ten hours and a hundred minutes.
It was that, together with the silence suddenly striking his ears as few noises could have done, that caused Ted to look around.
What he saw made him gasp. Almost directly above his head hung a mammoth suspension bridge stretching far out to the east and across the Bay. Behind him, a Market Street five times as wide as before was dwarfed into a narrow canyon by pyramidal skyscrapers stunning in the mass of their bases, dizzying in their pointed heights. Along the street, along airy causeways swung between the buildings, sped myriad vehicles that in the distance were but hastening dots. Through the air, and swooping down now and then under one of the bridges, wingless, torpedo-shaped, silvery vessels were sailing. And all in such perfect silence that you could hear the breeze sweeping in off the bay.
The glorious white and silver of the buildings, with their window crystal and roof-garden green; the gigantic, unearthly beauty of the picture, held Storrs for a moment. His art is by no means altogether an excuse from working. Then his mind recovered from the first paralyzing impression, and he turned back to the man with the strange watch.
“Would you mind telling me,” he began, “just where and”—for the thing, incredible as it was, had begun to dawn upon him—“and when I am?”
The man, who had started to walk away without ever really looking at Storrs, was nonplussed. “If you want to know the street—?”
“Hang the street! Is this San Francisco?”
“Yes, certainly.”
“Then what year is it?”
“Why, eighty—, twenty-one eighty nine.”
“You mean—? And your clothes aren’t right.”
THEY stood staring at each other.
“I mean that five minutes ago, by my watch, I was standing on this same corner in the year 1933, and now you tell me it’s two hundred and fifty years later. The thing’s nonsense.”
“Not at all. Time motion is a theoretical possibility, though the chance of its working is far less than that of your being an impostor. Let’s see.” He pulled on a pair of glasses. “Your clothes seem to fit the date. Your watch is a museum piece—the mechanical type went out a century ago. Still, you might have got hold of one.”
This view of the impossibility was too much for Ted. “Look here, if you think I’m lying, what about this?” He pulled out the day’s newspaper from his pocket, and shoved it in the old fellow’s face.
As the man looked at the fresh ink and fingered the texture of the paper, be seemed more convinced, and a pocketful of “ancient” coins and bills completed his conversion. “We’ll have just one more test, and then I’ll believe you. But I never really thought it could happen, certainly not in front of me.” Then, growing conscious of an omission, “My name is Rodgers. I’m sorry to have treated you the way I did, but the thing shocked me too.”
Walking still a little dazed, Storrs followed Rodgers down the elevated sidewalk on which they had been standing. They rounded the corner and entered a small, brilliantly sunlit office. In spite of the attractive appearance of the place, it was a police station, with a sergeant at the desk in white uniform and gold braid who took Ted’s fingerprints, then motioned him to a bench and watched him sternly while Rodgers and a higher officer carried the sheet into an inner room.
Ted’s thoughts, such as he can remember them, were highly confused. Once away from the actual sight of this new San Francisco, his disbelief in the reality of his experience increased. He must at least be dreaming, and he tried several times to pull himself awake. He played a little with the idea that he was mad. Then as time dragged on, the very prosaic reality of the station-house showed how far from fantasy was his plight.
He spent at least five minutes in the effort to shift his position unobtrusively so as to gain a reflection of himself in the curtained glass inner door, and thus settle the feeling growing upon him that after such a long time his hair was bleached white and his face shrunken beyond recognizability. He was almost ready to risk a reprimand and walk over, when the door opened, giving him a fleeting but perfectly normal image of himself—Rodgers stepped out.
“It’s all right now, Mr. Storrs.” He had a slightly chastened look from his communications with the higher powers. “But you see, we had to be suspicious. There’s rather a big prize out for the first man to achieve motion in time, and a number of fakers have appeared. However, we just got a check on your fingerprints, and they aren’t those of anyone on earth fifty years ago or born since. Though you’ll probably be ruled out of the money because your experience was involuntary, the Committee will want to see you as soon as it can assemble. Meanwhile, I am deputized to make you their guest and mine.”
He took Storrs by the arm, and led him out into the bright street again. So it was time. Somehow, he had got into the year—what was it? 2189. Ted had less difficulty in believing it than more workaday people, and he followed willingly enough into the rest of his strange adventure.
The walk gave him a chance to get his bearings further. Diverting his mind from the maddening problem of how his transfer in time had been accomplished, he began to pay more attention to his surroundings. The buildings, huge even to his first glance at a distance, became positively monstrous at close range. The base of one would cover a whole block, and the upward-glancing eye could not take in all at once a single vast front. Only from far off could he comprehend their roughly pyramidal shape, with continual broad set-backs.
But especially in the less strictly business district, the green of roof-gardens on all these flat surfaces called to mind far more the Hanging Gardens of Babylon than Egypt’s dead piles. And although the general plan of each building was the same, there were subtle differences—number and depth of set-backs, straight angle or varying curves of upward slope—that saved the effect from monotony. Instead the whole city, Ted declares, had an indefinable, multi-dimensional symmetry that was strangely beautiful, giving the effect of an elaborately planned design.
A Magic City
THE route Rodgers took led, for its first part, along the broad sidewalk, level with the show windows of the buildings. It was a dozen feet above the street level proper, and constituted a first, though comparatively narrow, setback. Continuing in its same width, it passed in bridges between every two blocks, leading foot passengers directly and safely above the traffic. The vehicles, most of them, were a sort of glorification of the “cut-downs” of present-day college boys: small, low-slung, with a sort of rakish beauty. Though they swept down Market Street twelve abreast, there was no odor of exhaust from them in the air. They moved in almost total silence: even from the bridges directly over them, all Ted could hear was a faint hum of their many motors, and a slight swishing of tires.
Then, as Storrs and his conductor turned to their left, a huge escalator carried them up to a new level. Just above a vehicular way, a somewhat narrower path, and wide-leaping bridges, made a road for them more than halfway up the buildings’ sides. The sky was visible now in its whole spherical shape, and the wind swept along, whistling in the wires of the guide rails. Here pedestrians were fewer, and perhaps this very fact drew Ted’s conscious attention to them, just as here and there they began to slow down from brisk walking to notice him in his antique attire.
In spite of the wind, the direct sun was warm, and clothes could be as scanty as taste prescribed. Among the men, the pajamas similar to those of Rodgers were decidedly predominant, although there were sometimes a sort of riding-breeches in military-looking uniforms. Coats, if present at all, were of a light blazer type, or of loose flannel again. By the unbreakable tradition of a thousand years, women still wore skirts. But they were far above the knee—cloaks being worn for protection if needed—and above the top of light buskins touching the calf of the leg, stockings were unknown. Some women’s hair was bobbed, others’ long and put up; that of a few, caught back, fell down to their shoulders. Ted does not remember seeing a single hat on either sex. Both women and men wore bright colors, and yet in the large it was a note of soft, creamy white that predominated.
All this last part of the way, Rodgers seemed abstracted, absorbed in his own interrupted thoughts, and almost forgetting his guest. Even when they had turned off to one of the buildings, and left the setback garden for his apartment, he was silent. Ted tried to seem as preoccupied, examining the room intently, but his inspection was only forced and he remembers practically nothing. Furnishings are very much alike in all periods, except to their amateurs. Aside from a passing interest in the silent clock, apparently run by chemical or radioactive means like Rogers’ watch, there was only one thing that claimed his attention.
This was a picture on the mantel above the electric fireplace with its resistance coils: a nude, and apparently a photograph, though in color and with a three-dimensional quality more to be expected in hand work. The subject, a girl with straight body and soft, short brown hair, was really beautiful, and made doubly so by the treatment. In profile with one arm outstretched, she stood against a billowing rose-colored mist where faint silver arabesques seemed almost to move, and which brought out in strong contrast the coral and white of her skin. The blending of real and fantastic, of the solid and the tenuous, was perfect. The thing was a work of art, and Ted, who ordinarily scorns photographs, had to share his enthusiasm.
“A marvelous picture, there,” he declared, as his host came up beside him.
