Time Travel Omnibus, page 202
Tangled Time
LYING there on the bed, Pete Howell gripped the edge of the mattress convulsively. Impossible to sleep, to think, even . . . Ten hours here in this darkness, with his head splitting! Slowly the leaden minutes dragged by, weighted with pain. Then, after what seemed about half an hour, the throb in his head began to die down. Before he knew it, the pain had disappeared. Pete, eyes fixed on the ceiling, drew a sharp sigh of relief. Whatever the green pill had been composed of, it had worked. More, he felt completely rested, although his eyes were heavy, somehow strained. He seemed cramped, too, as though he had lain in one position for hours. These, however, were minor drawbacks. The main thing was the fact that the pain had gone. Now, perhaps, he could sleep, although he didn’t feel much like it. Pete was just closing his eyes when the door opened, and the blonde girl entered. She had changed from jodhpurs to a gay print dress, and her face in the shadows seemed bright, fresh.
“How goes it?” she asked cheerfully.
“Fine, thanks,” he replied. “My head’s come back to normal. And so quickly, too. I almost feel as though I could eat a bite of supper before going to sleep.”
Laughter, gay and sparkling, filled the room.
“Supper?” the girl said. “You mean breakfast, I think.” She crossed the room, fumbled with the catch of the shutters. Pete gave a sudden gasp. Streams of yellow morning sunlight poured into the room!
“Good God!” he whispered. “I . . . I . . . But I haven’t been asleep! I know it! I’ve been lying here with my eyes open! For half an hour, no more! Unless . . . unless this bump on my head . . .”
“It’s not that. You’re quite sane. And don’t worry. We’ll explain later.” She smiled. “I see from your knapsack that your name’s Pete Howell. Mine’s Stone. Kathryn Stone. Everyone calls me Kit. Come on out to the porch and soak up a little sunshine while I get breakfast.”
Dazedly Pete followed her through the laboratory onto the porch in front of the cottage. He had, he knew, lain there only half an hour, three-quarters, at most. His eyes had been open the entire time. And now it was morning . . .
“Sit down.” The girl motioned toward a big rocker on the edge of the porch. Pete subsided into it. The morning was bright, the sunlight’s warmth tempering the cool breezes. Bird cries, the chatter of squirrels, rose above the rustle of the trees.
“Gosh!” Pete leaned back and let the sun sweep over him. “This is swell! And” . . . he sniffed . . . “bacon and eggs! I’ve been fed up on canned beans!”
Kit Stone laughed, puckishly.
“I’ll make sure you enjoy them,” she said. “Wait here!”
SHE disappeared into the house, returned with a glass of water, a reddish capsule, offered them to Pete. For a moment he hesitated, then, remembering the efficacy of the pill of a half-hour . . . or, apparently, ten hours . . . before, dutifully swallowed it.
“Good,” Kit nodded. “Don’t worry about breakfast. You’ll find it the best you ever had . . . if you like my cooking.”
Then she was gone, but from inside he could hear the clatter of pots and pans. Pete relaxed in his chair. It seemed, somehow, as though falling down the hillside had plunged him into another world. The strange night that had seemed so short, the laboratory inside, this girl and her father, buried in the wildest section of the Ozarks. And what of the chimneys he had seen, the shot which had caused him to land in this queer place . . .
Deep in thought Pete lay back in the rocker, staring at the green hills. Life seemed slow, quiet, drowsy, among the mountains. A feeling of lazy calm gripped him; turning over the queer events of the past night in his mind, he sat there in the patch of sunlight.
Time dragged indefinitely. Pete glanced over his shoulder toward the window. How long it was taking the girl to fix breakfast! He had been sitting there ages. Must be nearer lunchtime than breakfast. Though the sun hadn’t shifted its position. Strange . . . An odd sense of panic swept over Pete. What was wrong with this place? Time was somehow scrambled. A half hour last night between dusk and dawn. And now hours, sitting here in the sunlight, yet the shadows on the lawn had scarcely moved! The thing confused him, sent his weary brain spinning . . .
A cheery hail from across the clearing interrupted his thoughts. Kit’s father, Mr. Stone, was walking up the path toward the cottage. Pete stared . . . and once again a feeling of disbelief seized him. It was taking Mr. Stone an incredibly long time to cross the hollow!
Pete Howell, for all of his being fed up with laboratory work, was an excellent scientist. His mind worked along purely logical lines. Now, as he fixed his gaze on the lean, grey-haired man moving toward him, he tried to reason things out. Why should Mr. Stone, to all intents and purposes, take long, interminable minutes to cross a hundred feet of the clearing? The distance was what it seemed to be . . . perspective proved that . . . nor was the spare figure moving slowly. Stone was, in fact, moving at a brisk, if somewhat shambling, gait. There was, then, only one alternative. Something in his brain must be speeded up. Between his subconscious notations of Mr. Stone’s progress, his brain must be receiving a. great many more thought impulses, thus making the time seem longer. This would be borne out by the fact that to a brain concentrating on a single problem, time flies; while to one at rest, idly taking in dozens, hundreds, of subconscious impressions, flickering from subject to subject, time drags. But on the other hand . . .
Mr. Stone’s endless journey across the clearing had ceased; he commenced the tedious ascent of the steps. It seemed fully five minutes before he reached the porch level, grinned.
“You’re looking lots better,” he said. “How about breakfast?”
Pete nodded, arose. The trip into the house, however, shook him. It seemed to take ages. Yet he, like Mr. Stone, was moving at a perfectly normal rate. The thing was ridiculous. Ravenous hunger and the smell of food, however, drove curiosity from his mind.
“ ‘Lo, Dad!” Kit grinned. “Pete, here, said he liked bacon and eggs, so I gave him a dose of X-2 to make sure he’d enjoy it.”
“You shouldn’t have.” Stone shook a sombre head. “Carran’s in an ugly mood this morning. And one of the guards said he saw someone yesterday, fired at him. This young man must leave as soon as he has eaten . . . for his own sake.”
Pete wasn’t listening. He had already commenced on the bacon and eggs. It was, he felt, the strangest meal he had ever eaten. It seemed to take hours . . . hours of sheer delight as the taste-buds of his lips and tongue revelled in crisp bacon, well-done eggs. He thought of the Christmas dinners as a boy when only the tightness of a well-filled stomach prevented his commencing all over again. Or the ancient Romans who disgorged a meal so that they might have the delight of eating another. Eating . . . one of the few physical, primitive pleasures of life, stretched out indefinitely. Grinning, Pete stoked himself, making up for the supper he had missed the evening before. The delight of satisfying a ravenous appetite, lasting, apparently, hours . . .!
WHEN he had at last finished . . . it seemed as though it should be nearly sundown. . . Pete pushed back his plate.
“Thanks,” he said. “I needed that. And now, if you’d just tell me what this is all about, I’d be grateful. Time . . . everything . . . is so mixed up . . .”
Mr. Stone lit his pipe. Endless minutes seemed to drag by before he spoke.
“I guess we do owe you an explanation,” he admitted. “But you’ve got to promise to say nothing of what you’ve seen and heard . . . got to forget you even saw this place. You and the rest of the world will know soon enough.”
Pete nodded. “I promise,” he said.
“Good.” Mr. Stone arose, fumbled along a shelf. “You’re still under the influence of X-2. I’ll give you a bit of X-1 to counteract it, bring you back to normal.”
Pete drank deeply of the proffered draught, felt the sense of dragging slowness disappear.
“Ah!” he nodded. “Now tell me what’s been happening to me?”
Mr. Stone puffed at his pipe in silence a moment. A clink of dishes sounded from the kitchen as Kit piled them in the sink.
“Time,” Stone said reflectively, “is a tricky business. We have to disregard the evidence of our five normal senses in considering it. Thus if a man runs toward us, we say it takes him a short time to reach us. And if a baby crawls toward us, we say it takes him a long time. That’s the normal deduction from the five senses. But time, as far as human beings go, is dependent upon not physical actions, but upon man’s mental conception of it. Thus, if we were on fire, and the man running toward us carried a fire extinguisher, it might seem like hours before he reached us. Or if we were deeply interested in something, a book, a conversation, the crawling baby might seem to reach us in no time at all. You begin to see what I’m driving at? It’s the mental conception of time that really counts. You’ve read of the minute that seems like a year, you’ve probably stood on a corner waiting for someone and had it seem like ages. At the dentist’s time drags, on your lunchhour it flies. Understand?”
“Right!” Pete nodded. “Yet I don’t see just why . . .”
“I’m not so sure myself. We all know of persons who can awaken at certain hours if they wish. That’s the time-sense . . .[*] but our mental clocks are not infallible, need the support of watches, sunlight, and other physical checks. Thus when a man concentrates, his brain waves, distorted by mental effort, will lose their rhythm. On completion of his lengthy mental task he will have no idea how long he has been at it, since his mental clock has been stopped. Big, well-spaced waves on our charts or short, close ones, indicate a speeding up or a slowing down of the mental clock.
“Now let’s suppose I sit here and smoke a cigarette, an operation which normally takes me eight or nine minutes. And suppose my mental clock is speeded up so that a graph of its progress shows twice the number of zig-zags, of mental impulses than usual. Then, since my brain clock is wrong, the smoking of the cigarette seems to take twice as long. Or, reversing the process, it might be made to seem half as long a period of time. That was what I based my experiments on. I knew that hashish could distort the mental clock . . . persons under its influences have said that a minute seems like an hour, that some simple action, such as crossing a room, seems interminable. Breaking down hashish, I discovered X-2, which has the property of slowing down mental time. X-1 followed shortly afterwards, a natural corollary of the same process.”
“Ah!” Pete nodded. “Then they’re the green and red pills you gave me?”
“Exactly. The coloring is artificial to aid in telling them apart. When we brought you in, suffering from that bump on the head, and found we had no painkillers, I gave you a double dose of X-1, the green capsule. The entire ten hours of night, which would have been spent in agony, passed in what seemed to you a half-hour. Then Kit, as a joke, I suppose, gave you X-2, the red pill, which stretched the pleasure of satisfying a keen appetite over what, mentally, was hours. Those two events, Mr. Howell, are symbolic of the future of the world!
“When I discovered these amazing drugs, I took them to Mr. Thomas Carran, a wealthy industrialist. He at once saw the tremendous consequences, the great happiness to mankind that must result. Here Mr. Carran has recently set up a factory for the manufacture of the two drugs, keeps it well guarded for fear some one may discover the secret. When we’re finished, the time drugs will be put on sale.
“Think what this means, Mr. Howell! Men who have dull, tedious jobs . . . in an assembly line, say . . . will be able to take X-1 and their long day will seem to pass in a half-hour or so! And on their time off, their parties, movies, ball-games, recreation, will seem to last five or ten times as long. The very reverse of present conditions . . . today, dull work seems interminable, good times seem to race by! But with Timeite, X-1 and X-2, a new era awaits mankind! We will be able . . .”
“Dad!” Kit ran in from the kitchen, her face suddenly pale. “Carran . . . coming here. If he sees Pete . . .”
HOWELL and Mr. Stone sprang to their feet; the older man’s eyes were wide with alarm.
“Mr. Carran’s eccentric,” he muttered. “You’d better . . .”
It was too late. The cottage door burst open, a big, red-faced man stepped into the room. Behind him stood two lanky mountaineers carrying rifles.
“Ah!” Carran’s bluish jaw thrust forward. “I believe, Dr. Stone, that our agreement calls for no contacts with the outside world until Timeite is on the market. This is my private property . . .”
“But he was hurt!” Kit burst out. “We couldn’t leave him lying there half-dead, in agony!”
Carran smiled thinly.
“He was trespassing, wasn’t he? And now he knows too much. Walker” . . . he motioned to one of the mountaineers . . . “take this man to the plant and keep him there!”
Howell leaped back as the lean hill-billy moved toward him.
“You’re crazy!” he exclaimed. “You can’t hold me here . . . a prisoner! Hell, that’s kidnapping!”
“Call it what you like,” Carran grunted. “Take him along.”
The mountaineer stepped forward, gun thrown over his arm. And Pete dove . . . low and hard.
Things happened fast. Walker crumpled and his rifle roared, tearing a hole in the ceiling. At the same instant Pete lashed up with a hard brown fist, sent Carran spinning against the wall. Just as he was about to leap through the door, however, the second of Carran’s two guards came to life, raised his rifle. Pete brushed it aside and a moment later he and the guard were rolling about the floor, a bewildering tangle of arms, legs, and profanity.
“Go to it, Pete!” Kit Stone cried, reaching for the fallen rifle. “I . . .”
Shaking his head clear, Carran sprang forward, seized the rifle from the girl.
“Get up!” he growled, prodding Howell in the back.
“You win!” Dismally Pete arose from his adversary, lifted his hands. “What next?”
Dr. Stone, who had been standing in stunned silence, wheeled on Carran.
“You’re mad!” he cried. “Mad! What difference if this man does know what we’re making? All the world will know in a few weeks! If you think my daughter and I are going to stay here while you carry on in this insane manner, you’re mistaken! Contract or no contract, I’m leaving! And I’ll see that the police learn about this . . . this kidnapping!”
Carran laughed heavily, deliberately.
“You’re a fool, Stone,” he grunted. “D’you think I ever had any intention of letting you or your daughter leave here? You who know the formula of Timeite? Or your daughter, this man, who probably have enough information to aid in recreating the formula? Not by a damn sight! When Timeite is placed on the market there’s going to be one man who possesses the secret! Yours truly!”
“But . . . but . . .” Old Stone blinked. “I don’t understand! We were going to put X-1 and X-2 on sale at a moderate rate to be a great benefit to the world! Why. . .”
“Because” . . . Carran was breathing hard . . . “I’m going to be the Master of Time! You claim it will take expert chemists years to break down Timeite, obtain the formula . . . and by then I’ll be running all America . . . all the business world! Sure, Timeite’ll come cheap . . . at first! I’ll probably give it away for the first six months. And it’ll sweep the country like wild-fire. Who wouldn’t want his working hours cut to a quarter, an eighth . . . and his pleasures doubled, trebled? Men, women, and children will all go for it. Minutes of work, study, as against hours of pleasure. And Timeite isn’t habitforming so the drug laws can’t touch me!
“You begin to see, Stone? Six, eight months for America to become accustomed to Timeite, for it to become indispensable to them. Timeite, release for the masses, and Carran, the national benefactor, hero of the workers. Then, I begin to make my demands. Control of finances, control of big business! Unless granted, no more Timeite! Back to a schedule of eight long hours of work, fleeting moments of enjoyment.
“D’you think the public’ll go for that? Not on your life! They’ll grant me anything to get their Timeite. And if anyone tries to use force, I’ll threaten to blow myself, the formula, and the factory sky-high, losing Timeite forever! That will bring ’em around! In another week I give the world time, and am hailed as a benefactor . . . in a year I am in control of all business—made better than a War Dictator, eh?
“Once in power I suppress all research into the secret of X-1 and X-2 under threat of life imprisonment with a daily ration of X-2 to make that lifetime seem centuries! Then I introduce Timeite into other nations, businesses, make them dependent upon me . . .”
Carran’s flaccid lips were flecked with white spots. Apparently the lust for financial power was more than a mere obsession. Pete Howell shook a hopeless head. This madman, the Master of Time! All humanity at his feet, begging for the precious gift of time control . . . It was like a fantastic dream . . .
“Come!” Carran suddenly adopted an urbane air. “You will be my guests at the plant!”
SILENTLY they left the cottage . . . Stone, bent, somehow broken, Kit, chin high, eyes scornful, and Pete, bewildered, raging inwardly at the luck which had led him into this insane place.
Followed by the armed guards, the little procession crossed the clearing, took a path through the pines. At length a large group of buildings, painted green, loomed ahead. A deep whir of machinery, the voices of men, were audible.
“The home of Timeite,” Carran said to Pete, with an elaborate gesture. “Here we manufacture time for a work-weary world!”
Through windows Pete could see stolid workers tending the great machines.
“My men,” Carran announced. “They’ll obey me in anything since their working hours, by virtue of X-1, seem only a few minutes. And their off-hours, interminable.” He pointed to a large building at his right. Through its open door Pete made out a bar, card games, painted women dancing to the tunes of a nickelodeon. “The night shift, off duty. Their hours of relaxation seem endless. A preview of the world of the future!”
Kit Stone averted her eyes, clung to her father’s arm. A moment later they had entered a large, brick building in the center of the factory grounds.
