Time Travel Omnibus, page 135
“The Oriental scientists discovered atomic disintegration six months before the West, and plunged into war with atomic bombs and all the terrible engines developed in a hundred years. They almost won at the first plunge, sweeping down to the line of the Rhine and the Danube, laying waste Australia and all North America west of the Rockies. Then the West rallied and held its lines on land and in the air, while scientists on either side worked desperately to discover more deadly and better controlled forms of the horror of disintegration now common to both parties.
“For twenty years, hopelessly, the struggle raged, the Americans now pushing the Chinese back into the sea, the Russians and Indians retaliating by seizing all but the tip of Africa; and the people suffered. They died by tens of millions in the armies, died in ever greater numbers from explosions and poison gas and disease germs in the factories at home.
“Toward the last, when both sides had settled down to a stalemate policy of mere raids and devastation, they even began to starve in the big cities, and class warfare broke out against the rich and the farmers. Those last five years, when the whole world seemed about to go under, the birth rate dropped almost to zero, and the world’s population had fallen to a quarter of its pre-war level before the conflict and its after effects were over. Russia, France, and central Europe were almost wholly depopulated. In a last sortie with newly developed ray disintegrators, an American air fleet manned by women and fifteen-year old boys simply blew Japan off the face of the globe—there’s only a shoal there now.
“It was then, when it seemed just possible that at huge cost the Oriental peoples might be annihilated, that the war-weariness and reborn conscience of the West refused to permit such sacrifice or such slaughter. The West offered peace, and the East though with a new weapon of its own in preparation, as gladly accepted it. At Honolulu in 2050, without conditions, without victory, was signed the peace that has endured until today—and shall, we hope, forever.
“The next fifty years were the dark ages of modern times; a struggle, at times seemingly hopeless, to reclaim the world from devastation and ruin, to restore agriculture and civilization before the remnant of mankind starved or returned to the brute. It was a hard, painful time, and yet it proved to be the foundation of our world today. In the time of their misery, the peoples of the earth called upon the God they had forgotten, and He was there to answer their prayer. Joined together by a common loss, a common struggle, and a common hope, they forged ahead in a new unity toward the ideal world we think we are approaching.
“We have learned much from the history and the precepts of those days. We have learned that, if civilization is to endure and advance, the world must consciously strive to make itself just and beautiful and happy, as well as prosperous. We have learned that the key to science is not its acquisition but its use—the principles of all our devices were known in the last century, and turned to destruction. We have learned not to be too proud, thinking how near we once came to the edge. In the heart of each of us is still something of that spirit which brought the world up out of its danger, literally the Spirit of God moving over the face of the earth.”
An Astounding Discovery
THE next day—Monday, he subconsciously persisted in calling it, although he knew it to be Friday in this year—Storrs was left to his own devices all the morning. Rodgers, of course, was at the Museum, and Anne remembered she had to fly down to Los Angeles to keep an engagement. Not trusting himself to find his way in the new San Francisco, Ted kept within the apartment, spending most of his time in the library.
He had counted on looking through the books on Rodger’s shelves, but to his consternation he found himself incapable of reading them. Their language, when he puzzled it out, was the same as that spoken, or practically his own—since the English tongue, stabilized by printing, had been almost entirely unchanged by centuries. But the phonetic spelling and symbols that had been developed made the sounds as hard to get at as in, say, shorthand, and Storrs had not the pertinacity to go through more than a sentence here and there.
Other books on the shelves were Spanish, that most phonetic of modern tongues, in close to its present-day spelling; but Ted knew only enough of the language to recognize it. A third bookcase contained volumes whose sounds were pure gibberish, but which he judged from the illustrations and ornaments must be Chinese in the standard phonetic spelling. It occurred to him as very likely that after the destruction Anne had described these three were the peoples who had survived in sufficient preponderance (the Spanish in South America) to make their tongues as nearly a universal language as the world could hope to achieve.
Turning from the useless books, Ted decided to risk injuring the machine by experimenting with the radio in one corner of the room. It had, he found, single dial tuning, and he let the various compensators alone. Jacked into the set was a sort of mask containing light-weight earphones with goggles over the eyes. Remembering a vague something of modern experiments in television, he put the thing on, and turned the dial slowly in the dark.
The first station he reached was audible only, a talk of some sort in sing-song Chinese. The next one he caught, not by music, which he might have missed altogether, but by a rainbow flash before his eyes as he turned the dial past. He went back more carefully, and music and scene became clearer, though the latter remained for a while badly blurred. He finally discovered that the goggles were adjustable for focus, and as he turned them the picture came out, startingly clear in its colors, and even more startingly solid.
The bright-costumed dancers that whirled about the ballroom were as real and close as if he had been standing among them. It seemed as if he could touch one couple as they spun, and he almost toppled over the receiver in his involuntary attempt to do so. The music, too, was dimensional—the two phones, apparently, being fed by different currents—so that he could judge to Which side of him were the various instruments of the unseen orchestra.
The thing was a marvelous toy, and growing more expert in its manipulation, he turned for hours from scene to scene, from a glimpse of the black sea-bottom with a self-luminous monster swimming straight at him, to the Opera at Calcutta, where the traditional costumes and the familiar, melancholy strains of La Boheme brought him a pang that had in it a sort of homesickness. At length, however, the weight of the eyepieces became a strain, and it was rather disconcerting to keep turning his head and have the view remain the same. He. turned the machine off. He was really glad when, just as he had finished a dinner ordered up on his host’s account, Rodgers appeared to inform him that he was wanted by the Committee on Motion in Time.
E met the Committee. There were five members: two white-haired men who looked like brothers; an ample German Frau; a young fellow of Ted’s own age, with a wild shock of hair; a withered old Chinese woman, fingering constantly a bit of jade. They had already heard the outline of Teds story, and seemed, in the main, convinced of his honesty. However, there were a few test questions for him—fine details from their ancient archives, as the early transoceanic flights and baseball standings, and a long list of prices. He answered correctly such a great proportion of these, and so frankly confessed his ignorance of the rest, that their remaining doubts were stilled. At once they poured out the flood of their own queries:
“Young man, now that you can speak in confidence, tell us what were your methods.”
“Was the prime agency physical or psychological?”
“Do you think you could do it again?”—this from the artistic-looking youngster.
What were your sensations as you passed through two centuries?”
Storrs answered them one by one, feeling just a little ashamed that his real accomplishment was so far below their anticipations. He had had no methods, and his leap into space, wholly involuntary, had probably taken place through external and physical means. His only reason for thinking the process might be reversed was that it had already taken place the one way. He had felt no sensations whatever, his shift in time being unnoticed and, if one could so use the word, instantaneous.
“Then you did not simply speed up the normal flow of time, as we have been hoping to do.” The Frau’s pronouncement mirrored the general disappointment.
For perhaps fifteen minutes the five pondered the problem, while Ted shifted restlessly in his chair, and Rodgers was absorbed in his own speculations. There was not even the ticking of a clock to disturb the silence, for the radioactive machines worked noiselessly. At last the Chinese matriarch, who had hitherto remained silent, spoke:
“Would you mind telling us again just what year it was before you made the jump?”
“Nineteen hundred and thirty-three,” Ted supplied her.
She almost shouted, “Two hundred and fifty-six years! Don’t you see, the Nn of my helical theory. Two hundred and fifty-six, four to the fourth.”[*]
CHAPTER IV
The Last Evening
ALL five began talking at once, arguing, articulating wildly, scribbling mazes of formulae on the table cover. Ted could only catch a word here and there. The rest, when English at all, was, in vocabulary and thought, simply over his head. At last they seemed agreed, and the old man who acted as chairman turned to Ted.
“Mr. Storrs, you have performed a great service to our investigations. Your experience has proved, in confirmation of Madame Ng’s hypothesis, that our time stream is curved helically in some higher dimension. In your case, a still further distortion brought two points of the coil into contact, and a sort of short circuit threw you into the higher curve. The verification of the helical theory is beyond reasonable doubt.”
He paused, and cleared his throat.
“Now, as to yourself. You may, if you wish, remain in our era. The Committee will be glad to take care of you, and for a while, at least, the History people would pay high for your services in settling some of their problems about your period. On the other hand, we would be more than glad to make the attempt, harmless if it fails and very likely to succeed, to send you back to your own times.
“We have an electrical space-distorting coil whose side thrust perpendicular to the time-stream we have tried hitherto to suppress, but which we shall now emphasize. If you stand at the same spot and the same time of day as your first jump, this will have a good chance of throwing you back to your own curve of the stream.
“In case you wish to avail yourself of this opportunity, the sooner you decide to do so the better—both because the two curves must be separated rapidly, and in view of the fact that adjustment of your mind to our time would make the jump progressively harder. We can have the machine fixed up by tomorrow noon, and perhaps you had better make up your mind by then. Either way you decide, you have our thanks for what you have already done.”
The company rose together, and Storrs took the signal to leave. Outside the door was a group of newspaper reporters, who tried to persuade him to don his old clothes, which he had sacrificed for more congruous attire, for a photograph. This much of civilization had not changed in centuries. Ted got rid of them at last with a brief statement, referring them to the Committee for technical details. Then, in company with the still more irritated Rodgers, he set out for home again.
When they arrived, Anne had got back already, and had dinner coming up for them. She was silent during the meal, while they told her of the day’s developments—Ted of the conclusions of the Committee and its projected experiment, Rodgers of the “find” of an early twenty-first century library opened up by a farming company’s power plow in the Middle West. The sun still shone when they were through, and Anne, excusing them to her father, threw Ted a cloak and pulled on some wraps herself.
“If you don’t mind, I’ve one of my favorite views to show you.”
They drove to one of the tallest downtown buildings, parking in the huge space that underlay all of it. An elevator shot them up to the small, flat roof, and they climbed the tower that stretched still farther above. At its top, with their feet braced against a battlemented edge, they could sit secure and gaze out over the city.
In the west, the sun was sinking beneath a growing pile of clouds. Up where they sat, its light still made day, but down in the streets the shadows were creeping in. Gray, growing ever darker, they climbed the sides of the building with clutching fingers. In the increasing gloom, the great pyramids bulked larger than ever, black and a little terrible. Now only a few of their high tops were afire. Now the sun had set, and the Cathedral spire alone shone a faint rose in the afterglow. The night rushed in.
WITH its coming, as at a common signal, the lights of the city flashed forth. In windows, along streets and causeways, projected from the single headlights of the little cars (there were no electric signs), they were not glaring, but of the soft silver Storrs had noted before, looking a little bluish in the distance. As the darkness became complete, they were all that could be seen: gleaming, insubstantial, lovely. The bridges—the little ones across the streets, the great spans thrown over the Bay and the Golden Gate—hung from their cables that were loops of light, like things out of another world. It was like a fairy city, a city built of gossamer and dreams. Overhead, the stars were coming out, and against them glowed, here and there, the firefly lights of airships as they passed.
Beside Ted, with her chin resting on her knees, Anne had remained silent. Now she spoke, reading his mind:
“You’re going back, then?”
“Yes. It may be foolish of me, but somehow—”
“I know. You could get along very nicely here. Work is not too hard, and very interesting, while we have things that the millionaires of your day could not possess. Some of us—would like you to stay. And yet it would seem to you, as it must seem now, a sort of unreal dream. That is one absolute thing about time, in spite of their theories. I could never be satisfied in the future or the past.”
The fog was rolling in in a great wave, white and soft and cool and still. Now one, then another of the bridges over the water was shrouded in it and disappeared. The city itself was blotted out, only leaving the vapor faintly luminous. When, over the faint glitter of lights that was Oakland, the moon rose, its rays fell upon a white, billowing sea that had covered San Francisco. Here and there, as where the two of them were sitting, a black peak rose above the high-piled fog. The rest was a dazzling, solid barrier, that left them isolated, for the moment, from the world. Then a cold wind from the sea blew in, whirling ghostly mist-tendrils in the air. They rose and turned to go.
The morrow passed like a flash. One minute, so it seemed to Storrs, Anne was mockingly reading to him the morning paper, with his full-colored picture on the front, and beneath it the headlines, “UNWILLING VISITOR ARRIVES FROM 1933; May Try Return Trip.” The next, he had placed himself, as well as he could guess, upon the spot where he had made his entry into this world, and the members of the Committee, with their assistants, were assembling around him a complicated arrangement of coils and plates.
It made him feel, he says, and he smiled a little then to think of it, like the filament of a vacuum tube. There was rather a crowd outside, with motion picture photographers and a radio televisor to catch the scene as he disappeared into nothingness. Anne was there, too, and her father, she in her uniform ready to pilot the “Polar Special” at one. As the preparations drew on endlessly, Storrs became nervous. He even thought of giving up the venture, only to be dissuaded, strangely, by the consideration that it would disappoint these people.
At last they were ready. All but two of the indicator lights on a many-dialed control board were glowing brightly. Storrs felt a little giddy, and judged that the preliminary circuits must be getting in their effect.
“If you’ll time us please, sir, by your watch, to get it exact—” The assistant was almost apologetic.
Ted pulled out his timepiece—just two minutes before noon. Through the wires and metal tubing, Anne stretched her hand. He squeezed it hard. One minute left. The plates on the outside began to glow, not from heat, but electrically, with a strange coldness that gripped him paralyzingly.
He looked down at his watch, following the second hand around just as he had done before his other time jump. It seemed endlessly slow. Thirty—forty-five—fifty-five—fifty-six—seven—eight—
“There.” He said it quite calmly. In his ears was a whirring that changed to the toot of a ferry-boat whistle as he went sprawling to the pavement. He rose and found himself grasping an arm, a prosaic 20th century arm. He had returned!
“Pardon me,” he automatically importuned the man who had collided with him—an Italian in rough clothes, apparently some sort of dock worker. But the man only hurried around the corner.
It was not until Storrs got back to his room, having decided to excuse himself later for failing our appointment, and found two of us waiting for him in considerable agitation, that he discovered that this was Tuesday, and he had, most likely, appeared to the Italian out of thin air—that there is an absolute time which will not be cheated out of so much as three days. His watch, which he had held in his hand, was apparently uninjured by the fall, but nevertheless had stopped dead at twelve exact.
A jeweller took the thing apart without finding anything wrong, and when he put it back together just as it was before it ran again. Ever since, however, it has kept execrable time, and stops on the least provocation. The double disturbance in its native element of time must somehow have paralyzed it.
Such is the story of the vision of Ted Storrs. If it had been anyone else, I should have been inclined to doubt the narrative, in spite of its realistic semblance and detail. But give Ted a thousand years, and he could never invent half the tale, especially the way he has given it to us, bit by bit, in answer to our questions. Besides, how else explain what happened to his watch.
