Time Travel Omnibus, page 168
Our friend was completely disgusted. “We came here to eat,” he said. “Let’s get it over with.” And with the words he picked up the menu which had been lying in front of him all this time. Frick looked at me.
“I’m not hungry,” he said. “Are you?”
I wasn’t. I shook my head.
“Shall we two go, then?”
I hesitated. I was not overanxious to accompany, alone, a madman on a mission of murder. But I caught Miles’ eye, and like the noble he is, he said he’d come too. Frick smiled softly.
III.
TEN MINUTES later we had made the short flight along the north shore to Glen Cove, where Frick has his estate, and were escorted by him into a small, bare room on the second floor of the laboratory building which adjoins his beautiful home.
While we stood there wondering, Frick went into an adjoining room and returned with two chairs, and then, in two more trips, with a third chair and a tray on which rested a large thermos bottle and a tea service for three. The chairs he arranged facing each other in an intimate group, and the tray he set on the floor by the chair he was to take himself.
“First I have to tell a rather long story,” he explained. “The house would be more comfortable, but this room will be more convenient.”
Frick was now a changed man. His levity of before was gone; tense, serious lines appeared on his rugged face; his great head lowered with the struggle to arrange thoughts that were difficult, and perhaps painful, to him. When he spoke, it was softly, in a voice likewise changed.
My dictograph was still turned on.
“Charles, Miles,” Frick began, “forgive me for my conduct back in the Gardens. I had so much on my mind, and you were so smugly skeptical, that the inclination to overpower you with what I know was irresistible. I had not expected to make any of these revelations to you. I offered to on impulse; but do not fear, I shall not regret it. I think—I see now that I have been carrying a very heavy load.
“What I have to say would fill a large book, but I will make it as short as I can. You will not believe me. at first, but please be patient, for proof will eventually be forthcoming. Every single thing I said to you is true, even to the murder I must commit——”
He paused, and seemed to relax, as if tired. Unknown black shadows closed over my heart. Miles watched him closely, quite motionless. We waited. Frick rubbed the flat of his hand slowly over his eyes and forehead, then let it drop.
“No,” he said at length, “I have never been conceited. I don’t think so. But there was a time when I was very proud of my intelligence. I worked; I accomplished things that seemed to be important; I felt myself a leader in the rush of events. Work was enough, I thought; brain was the prime tool of life; and with my brain I dared try anything. Anything! I dared try to assemble the equation of a device that would enable me to peer into the future! And when I thought I had it, I started the construction of that device! I never finished it, and I never shall, now; but the attempt brought Pearl to me.
“Yes,” he added, as if necessary that he convince himself, “I am certain that had I not attempted that, Pearl would not have come. Back through the ages she had somehow felt me out—don’t ask me how, for I don’t know—and through me chose to enter for a brief space this, our time.
“I was as surprised as you would have been. I was working in this very room, though then it was twice as large and fairly cluttered with clumsy apparatus I have since had removed. I had been working feverishly for months; I was unshaven, red-eyed and dirty—and there, suddenly, she was. Over there, beyond that door at which I’m pointing. She was in a golden-glowing cylinder whose bottom hung two feet off the floor. For a moment she stood suspended there; and then the glow disappeared and she stepped through to the floor.
“You do not believe me? Well, of course, I don’t expect you to. But there will be proof. There will be proof.
“I was surprised, but somehow I wasn’t much frightened. The person of my visitor was not intimidating. She was just a barefooted young woman, very slender, of average height, clad in a shiny black shift which reached her knees. I cannot say she was well formed. Her body was too thin, her hips too narrow, her head too large. And she was miles from being pretty. Her hair and eyes were all right; they were brown; but her face was plain and flat,-with an extraordinary and forbidding expression of dry intellectuality. The whole effect of her was not normal, yet certainly not weird; she was just peculiar, different—baroque.
“She spoke to me in English! In nonidiomatic English with the words run together and an accent that was atrocious! She asked severely:
“ ‘Do you mind too much this intrusion of mine?’
“ ‘Why—why no!’ I said when I had recovered from the shock of the sound of her speech. ‘But are you real, or just an illusion?’
“ ‘I do not know,’ she replied. ‘That is a tremendous problem. It has occupied the attention of our greatest minds for ages. Excuse me, sir.’ And with these last words she calmly sat herself down on the floor, right where she was, and appeared to go off into deep thought!
“YOU CAN imagine my astonishment! She sat there for a full two minutes, while I gaped at her in wonder. When she rose again to her feet she finished with:
“ ‘I do not know. It is a tremendous problem.’
“I began to suspect that a trick was being played on me, for all this was done with the greatest seriousness.
“ ‘Perhaps there is a magician outside,’ I suggested.
“ ‘I am the magician,’ she informed me.
“ ‘Oh!’ I said ironically. ‘I understand everything now.’
“ ‘Or no, fate is the magician,’ she went on as if in doubt. ‘Or no, I am——A very deep problem’——Whereupon she sat down on the floor and again went off into meditation!
“I stepped around her, examining her from all angles, and, since she was oblivious to everything outside of herself, I made a cursory examination of the thing she had come in on. It looked simple enough—a flat, plain, circular box, maybe four feet in diameter and six inches deep, made of a some sort of dull-green metal. Fixed to its center, and sticking vertically upward, was a post of the same stuff capped with a plate containing a number of dials and levers. Around the edge of the upper surface of the box was a two-inch bevel of what seemed to be yellow glass. And that was all—except that the thing continued to remain fixed in the air two feet off the floor!
“I began to get a little scared. I turned back to the girl and again looked her over from all sides. She was so deep in her thoughts that I dared to touch her. She was real, all right!
“My touch brought her to her feet again.
“ ‘You have a larger head than most men,’ she informed me.
“ ‘Who are you, anyway?’ I asked with increasing amazement. She gave me a name that it took me two days to memorize, so horrible was its jumble of sounds. I’ll just say here that I soon gave her another—Pearl—because she was such a baroque—and by that name I always think of her.
“ ‘How did you get in?’ I demanded.
“She pointed to the box.
“ ‘But what is it?’ I wanted to know.
“ ‘You have no name,’ she replied. ‘It goes to yesterday, to last year, to last thousand years—like that.’
“ ‘You mean it’s a time traveler?’ I asked, astounded. ‘That you can go back and forth in time?’
“ ‘Yes,’ she answered. ‘I stopped to see you, for you are something like me.’
“ ‘You wouldn’t misinform me?’ I asked sarcastically, feeling I must surely be the victim of some colossal practical joke.
“ ‘Oh, no, I would not misinform you,’ she replied aridly.
“I was very skeptical. ‘What do you want here?’ I asked.
“ ‘I should like you to show me the New York of your time. Will you, a little?’
“ ‘If you’ll take me for a ride on that thing, and it works, I’ll show you anything you want,’ I answered, still more skeptical.
“She was glad to do it.
“ ‘Come,’ she commanded. I stepped gingerly up on the box. ‘Stand here, and hold on to this,’ she went on, indicating the rod in the center. I did so, and she stepped up to position just opposite me, and very close. I was conscious of how vulnerable I was if a joke was intended.
“ ‘You must not move,’ she warned me. I assured her I would not. ‘Then, when do you want to go?’
“ ‘A week back,’ I said at random, with, in spite of everything, a creeping sensation going up and down my spine.
“ ‘That will do,’ she decided; and again she warned me not to move. Then her hands went to the controls.
“A golden veil sprang up around us and the room grew dim through it, then disappeared. A peculiar silence came over me, a silence that seemed not so much outside of me as within. There was just a second of this, and then I was again looking into the room through the golden veil. Though it dimmed the light I could clearly make out the figure of a man stretched full length on the floor working on the under part of a piece of apparatus there.
“ ‘It’s I!’ I exclaimed, and every cell in my body leaped at the miracle of it. That this could be! That I could be standing outside of myself looking at myself! That last week had come back, and that I, who already belonged to a later time, could be back there again in it! As I peered, thoughts and emotions all out of control, I saw happen a thing that stilled the last thin voice of inward doubt.
“The man on the floor rolled over, sat up, turned his face—my face—toward us, and, deep in thought, gently fingered a sore place on his head—from a bump that no one, positively, knew anything about. Trickery seemed excluded.
“But a contradictory thing occurred to me. I asked Pearl, ‘Why doesn’t he see us, since he’s looking right this way? I never saw anything at the time.’
“ ‘It is only in the next stage toward arriving that we can be seen,’ she explained with her hands still on the controls. ‘At this moment I’m keeping us unmaterialized. This stage is extremely important. If we tried to materialize within some solid, and not in free space, we should explode.
“ ‘Now, let us return,’ she said. ‘Hold still.’
“The room disappeared; the peculiar silence returned; then I saw the room again, dim through the golden veil. Abruptly the veil vanished and the room came clear; and we stepped down on the floor on the day we had left.
“My legs were trembling so as to be unreliable. I leaned against a table, and my amazing visitor, as it seemed her habit, sat down on the floor.
“That was my introduction to Pearl.”
IV.
FRICK rose and walked to the far corner of the room and back. The thoughts in his mind were causing some internal disturbance, that was obvious.
I prayed that my dictograph was working properly!
When Frick sat down again he was calmer. Not for long could any emotion sweep out of control his fine mind and dominating will. With a faint smile and an outflung gesture of his arm he said:
“That was the beginning!”
Again he paused, and ended it with one of his old chuckles. “I showed Pearl New York. I showed her!
“Charles, Miles, there is just too much,” he resumed at a tangent, shaking his head. “There is the tendency to go off into details, but I’ll try to avoid it. Maybe some other time. I want to be brief, just now.
“Well, I got her some clothes and showed her New York City. It was a major experience. For she was not your ordinary out-of-towner, but a baroque out of far future time. She had learned our language and many of our customs; she was most amazingly mental; and yet, under the difficult task of orienting herself to what she called our crudeness, she exhibited a most delicious naiveté.
“I showed her my laboratory and explained the things I had done. She was not much interested in that. I showed her my house, others too, and explained how we of the twentieth century live.
“ ‘Why do you waste your time acquiring and operating gadgets?’ she would ask. She liked that word ‘gadgets’; it became her favorite. By it she meant electricity, changes of clothing, flying, meals in courses, cigarettes, variety of furniture, even the number of rooms in our homes. She’d say, ‘You are a superior man for this time; why don’t you throw out all your material luxuries so as to live more completely in the realms of the mind?’
“I would ask her what standard she judged our civilization against; but whenever I did that she’d always go obscure, and say she guessed we were too primitive to appreciate the higher values. She consistently refused to describe the sort of civilization she had come from; though, toward the end, she began promising me that if I were a good guide, and answered all her questions, she might—only might—take me there to see it. You can imagine I was a good guide!
“But meanwhile, I got nothing but my own inferences; and what an extraordinary set I acquired from her questions and reactions! You make your own set as I go along!
“I showed her New York. She’d say, ‘But why do the people hurry so? Is it really necessary for all those automobiles to keep going and coming? Do the people like to live in layers? If the United States is as big as you say it is, why do you build such high buildings? What is your reason for having so few people rich, so many people poor?’ It was like that. And endless.
“I took her to restaurants. ‘Why’d’s everybody take a whole hour just to eat?’ I told her that people enjoyed eating; it seemed not to have occurred to her. ‘But if they spent only a few minutes at it they’d have that much more time for meditation!’ I couldn’t but agree.
“I took her to a night club. ‘Why do all those men do all the carrying, and those others all the eating?’ I explained that the first were waiters, the latter guests. ‘Will the guests have a turn at carrying?’ I told her I thought so, some day.
“ ‘Is that man a singing waiter?’
“ ‘No, only a crooner.’
“ ‘Why do those men with the things make such an awful noise?’
“ ‘Because dance bands get paid for making it.’
“ ‘It must be awfully hard on them.’ I told her I hoped so. ‘Are those people doing what you call dancing?’
“ ‘Yes.’
“ ‘Do they like to do it?’
“ ‘Yes.’
“ ‘The old ones, too?’
“ ‘I doubt it.’
“ ‘Then why do they do it?’ I didn’t know. At the end she asked me almost poignantly, ‘Don’t they ever spend any time in meditation?’ and I had to express my doubts.
“IN OUR little jaunts it became increasingly clear, to her that there was very little meditation being done in New York. It was the biggest surprise that our civilization gave her.
“However, she continued to indulge her peculiar habit of going off into meditation when something profound, or interesting, or puzzling came to her attention; and the most extraordinary thing about it was that she had to sit down at it, no matter where she was. If there was a chair handy, all right, but if not, she would plunk right down on the floor, or, outside, even in the street! This was not so bad when we were alone, but once it happened under Murphy’s flagpole in Union Square as we stood observing the bellowings of a soap-box orator, and once again in Macy’s, where we lingered a moment listening to a demonstrator with the last word possible in beauty preparations. It was quite embarrassing! Toward the end I grew adept in detecting signs of the coming descent and was fairly successful in holding her up!
“In all the six days I spent showing Pearl New York, not once did she show any emotion other than that of intellectual curiosity; not once did she smile; not once did she so much as alter the dry expression on her face. And this, my friends, was the creature who became a student and an exponent of love!
“It bears on my main theme, so I will tell you in some detail about her experiences with love, or what she thought was love.
“During the first three days she did not mention the word; and from what I know of her now, I can say with surety that she was holding herself back. During those three days she had seen one performance of ‘Romeo and Juliet,’ had read two romantic novels containing overwhelming love themes, had observed everywhere the instinct for young people to seek each other out, had seen two couples kiss while dancing, had seen the fleet come in and the sailors make for Riverside Drive, and had heard I don’t know how many hours of crooning on radio broadcasts.
“After all this, one day in my drawing-room, she suddenly asked me, ‘What is this love that every one is always talking about?’
“Never dreaming of the part love was to play between us, I answered simply that it was nature’s device to make mature humans attractive to each other and insure the arrival of offspring and the maintenance of the race. That, it seems, is what she thought it was, but what she couldn’t understand was why everybody made such a to-do about it. Take kissing, for instance. That was when a male and a female pushed each other on the lips. Did they like that? I assured her they did. Was it, since they held it so long, a kind of meditation? Well, no, not exactly. Would I try it with her?
“Don’t smile yet, you two—that’s nothing! Wait! Anyway, you wouldn’t want me to spoil my chances of being taken for a visit to her own time, would you?
“Well, we kissed. She stood on tiptoe, her dry face looking up at mine, her arms stiffly at her sides, while I bent down, my sober face looking down at hers, and my arms stiffly at my sides. We both pushed; our lips met; and we stayed that way a little. Then, almost maintaining contact, Pearl asked me, ‘Is it supposed to sort of scrape?’ I assured her it was—something like a scrape. After a moment she said, ‘Then there’s a great mystery here, somewhere——’ And damned if she didn’t squat right down on the floor and go off into a think! I couldn’t keep a straight face, so I bounced out of the room; and when I returned several minutes later there she was still meditating on her kiss. O temporal.
“That kiss happened on the third day, and she stayed six, and for the remainder of her visit in our time she said not one thing more about this thing called love—which told me it was a mystery always on her mind, for she asked questions by the score about every other conceivable thing.
