Time Travel Omnibus, page 233
“Fairly put,” conceded Frost. “I’ll give a fair answer. Scientific belief is based on observation, is it not? Either one’s own observations, or those of a competent, reliable observer. I believe in the existence of a two-dimensional time scheme because I have actually observed it.”
The clock ticked on for several seconds.
Jenkins said, “But that is impossible, professor. You aren’t built to observe two time dimensions.”
“Easy, there,” answered Frost. “I am built to perceive them one at a time—and so are you. I’ll tell you all about it, but before I do so, I must explain the theory of time I was forced to evolve in order to account for my experience.
“Ordinarily, most people think of time as a track that they run on from their births to their deaths, as inexorably as a train follows its rails—they feel instinctively that time follows a straight line, the past lying behind, the future out in front. Now I have reason to believe—to know, in fact—that time is analogous to a surface rather than a line, and a rolling, hilly surface, at that. Think of this time track we follow over the surface of time as a winding road cut through hills. Every little way the road branches, and the branches follow side canyons.
“At these branches the crucial decisions of your life take place.
“You can turn to the right or the left into entirely different futures. Occasionally there is a switch-back in the road where one can scramble up or down a bank and skip over a few thousand or million years—if he doesn’t have his eyes so fixed on the road that he misses the short cut.
“Once in a while another road crosses at right angles. Neither its past nor its future has any connection whatsoever with the world we know. If you happened to take that turn you might find yourself on another planet in another space-time with nothing left of you or your world but the continuity of your ego.
“Or, if you have the necessary intellectual strength and courage, you may leave the roads, or paths of high probability, and strike out over the hills of possible time, cutting through the roads as you come to them, following them for a little way, even following them backward, with the past ahead of you, and the future behind you.
“Or you might roam around the hilltops, doing nothing but the extremely improbable. I can not imagine what that would be like—perhaps a bit like ‘Alice Through the Looking Glass.’
“Now as to my evidence—the reason I know all this to be true: When I was eighteen years old I had a decision to make that affected my future. My father suffered financial reverses and I decided to quit college and go to work. Eventually I went into business for myself, and, to cut it short, in 1943 I was convicted of an offense in connection with my business operations and went to prison.”
Helen Fisher gave a startled gasp. “1943, doctor? You mean ’33?”
“No, Miss Fisher. You must understand that I am speaking of events that did not take place on this time track.”
“Oh!” She looked puzzled, but held her peace.
“WHILE in prison I had plenty of time to ponder my mistakes. Prison has a peculiar effect on a man’s mind. I drifted farther and farther away from reality, and lived more and more in an introspective world of my own. One night, in a way not then clear to me, my ego left my cell, went back along the time track, and I awoke in my room at my college fraternity house.
“This time I was wiser. Instead of leaving school, I found part-time work, graduated, and eventually arrived where you now see me.”
He paused and glanced at expressions varying from open doubt to fascinated wonder.
“Doctor,” asked young Monroe, “can you give us any idea as to what happened—as to how the stunt was done?”
“Yes, I can,” Frost assented. “I worked on that problem for many years, trying to recapture the conditions under which it occurred. Recently I have succeeded, and have made several little excursions into possibility.”
Estelle Martin, who had kept quiet up to then, leaned forward and spoke in an intense whisper.
“Tell us how, Professor Frost. I must know!”
“The means is very simple. The key lies in convincing the subconscious mind that it can be done—”
“Then the Berkeleian idealism is proved!”
“In a way, Miss Martin. To one’ who believes in Bishop Berkeley’s philosophy, the infinite possibilities of two-dimensional time offer proof that the mind creates its own world, but a Spencerian determinist, such as our good friend Howard Jenkins, would never leave the road of maximum probability. To him the world would be mechanistic and real.
“But as to the method—I have perfected a technique which will enable others to travel about in the pattern of times as I have done. That is the real reason why these Friday-evening meetings of the seminar have been held in my home—so that when the time came, you all might try it if you wished.”
He got up and went to a large cabinet at the far end of the room.
“You mean we could go tonight, doctor?”
“Yes indeed. The process is one of hypnotism and suggestion. Neither are actually necessary, but that is the quickest way of teaching the subconscious to break out of its groove and go where it pleases. I use a revolving ball, or similar device, to tire the conscious mind into a simple hypnosis. During that period the subject listens to a recording which suggests the time road to be followed, whereupon he does follow it. It is as simple as that. Do any of you care to try it?”
“Is it likely to be dangerous, doctor?”
He shrugged his shoulders. “The process isn’t—just a deep sleep and a phonograph record. But the world of the time track you visit will be just as real as the world of this time track, with equivalent physical hazards—such as prisons! You are all over twenty-one. I am not urging you, I am merely offering you the opportunity.”
Monroe stood up. “I’m going, doctor.”
“Good! Just sit over here and use these earphones. Anyone else?”
“Count me in.” It was Helen Fisher.
Estelle Martin stood and joined them. Howard Jenkins went hastily to her side. “Are you going to try this business?”
“Most certainly.”
He turned to Frost. “I’m in, doc.”
FROST seated them where they could wear the earphones, and then said:
“You will remember the different types of things I said you could do; branch off, go at right angles into a different world, skip over into the past or future, or cut straight through the maze of probable tracks on a path of extreme improbability. I have records for all of those.”
Monroe was first again. “I’ll take a right-angle turn and a brand-new world.”
Estelle did not hesitate. “I want to—how did you put it?—climb up a bank to a higher road somewhere in the future.”
“I’ll try that, too.” It was Jenkins.
“I’ll take the remote-possibilities track,” put in Helen Fisher.
“That takes care of everybody,” commented the professor. “Now—all of these records contain the suggestion for you to return to this room two hours from now, figured along this time track. Put on your earphones. The records run thirty minutes. I’ll start them and the ball together.”
He swung a glittering, many-faceted sphere from a hook in the ceiling, started it whirling, and turned a small spotlight on it. Then he turned off all the other lights and started the records all at once by throwing a master switch. The scintillating ball twirled round and round for many revolutions, slowed and reversed and twirled back again. Dr. Frost turned his eyes away to keep from being fascinated by it. Presently he grew weary, and slipped out into the hall to smoke a cigarette. Half an hour passed, and there came the single note of a gong. He hurried back into the room and switched on the light.
Three of the four figures had disappeared.
The remaining figure was Howard Jenkins, who opened his eyes and blinked at the light. “Well, doctor, I guess it didn’t work.”
The doctor raised his eyebrows. “No? Take a look around you.”
The younger man glanced about him. “Where are the others?”
“Where? Anywhere,” replied Frost with a shrug, “and any when.”
Jenkins jerked off his earphones and jumped to his feet. “Doctor, what have you done to Estelle?” Frost gently disengaged a hand from his sleeve. “I haven’t done anything with her, Howard. She’s on another time track.”
“But I meant to go with her.”
“And I tried to send you with her.”
“But why didn’t I go?”
“I can’t say for sure—probably the suggestion wasn’t strong enough to overcome your skepticism. But don’t be alarmed, son. We expect her back in a couple of hours, you know.”
“Don’t be alarmed! That’s easy to say. I didn’t want her to try this damn-fool stunt in the first place, but I knew I couldn’t change her mind, so I wanted to go along to look out for her. She’s so impractical. But see here, doc—where are their bodies? I thought we would just stay here in the room in a sort of trance.”
“Not at all, Jenkins. Apparently you didn’t understand me in the least. These other time tracks are perfectly real, as real as this one we are in. Their whole beings have gone off on other tracks, just as if they had turned down a side street off a boulevard.”
“But that’s impossible—it contradicts the law of conservation of energy!”
“You must recognize a fact when you see one—they are gone. Besides, it doesn’t contradict the law; it simply extends it to include the total universe, with its second time dimension.”
Jenkins rubbed a hand over his face and pulled at his lower lip. “I suppose so. But in that case, anything can happen to her—she could even be killed out there. And I can’t do a damn thing about it. Oh, I wish we had never seen this damned seminar!”
The professor showed no resentment at this remark, but instead placed an arm around his shoulders. “Since you can’t help her, why not calm down? Besides, you have no real reason to believe that she is in any danger. She may be, it’s true, but we have no data to go on. Why borrow trouble? Let’s go out to the kitchen and open a bottle of ale while we wait for them to return.” He gently urged him toward the door.
AFTER a couple of glasses of ale and a few cigarettes, Jenkins was somewhat calmed down. The professor made conversation.
“How did you happen to sign up for this course, Howard?”
“It was the only course I could take with Estelle.”
“I thought so. I let you take it for reasons of my own. I thought that your hard-headed materialism would hold down some of the loose thinking in such a class. Take Helen Fisher, for example; she is prone to reason brilliantly from insufficient data. You help to keep her down to earth.”
“To be frank, Dr. Frost, I could never see the need for all this highfalutin’ discussion. I like facts.”
“But you engineers are as bad as the metaphysicians—you ignore any fact that you can’t weigh in scales. If you can’t bite it, it’s not real. You believe in a mechanistic, deterministic universe, and ignore the real facts of human consciousness, human will, and human freedom of choice—facts that you have directly experienced!”
“But all these things can be explained in terms of reflexes.”
The professor spread his hands. “Why don’t you admit that there are a few things about psychology that you don’t understand as yet?” He paused and cocked his head. “Did you hear something?”
“I think I did.”
Then they both heard it—a clear contralto voice, “Doctor! Dr. Frost!”
Jenkins whirled around. “That’s Estelle!” They ran back to the study, the doctor endeavoring manfully but unsuccessfully to keep up.
But it was not Estelle. Standing in the hallway was Helen Fisher, her sweater torn and dirty, her stockings missing, and a barely healed scar puckering one cheek. Frost stopped and surveyed her, a perturbed look on his face. “Are you all right, child?” he inquired anxiously.
She grinned boyishly. “I’m O.K. You should see the other guy.”
“Tell us all about it.”
“In a minute. How about a cup of coffee for the prodigal? And I wouldn’t turn up my nose at some scrambled eggs and some—lots of—toast. Meals are inclined to be irregular where I’ve been.”
“Yes indeed. Right away,” answered Frost, “but where have you been?”
“Let a gal eat, please,” she begged. “I won’t hold out on you. What is Howard looking so sour about?”
The professor whispered a hurried explanation. She gave Jenkins a compassionate glance. “Oh, she hasn’t? I thought I’d be last man in. I was away so long. What day is this?”
Frost glanced at his wrist watch. “You’re right on time; it’s just eleven o’clock.”
“The hell you say! Oh, excuse me, doctor. ‘Curiouser and curiouser,’ said Alice. All in a couple of hours. Just for the record, I was gone several weeks, at least.”
When her third cup of coffee had washed down the last of the toast, she consented to begin:
“When I woke I was falling upstairs—through a nightmare, several nightmares. Don’t ask me to describe that—nobody could. That went on for a week, maybe, then things started to come into focus. 3 don’t know in just what order things happened, but when I first started to notice things clearly I was standing in a little barren valley. It was cold, and the air was thin and acrid. It burned my throat. There were two suns in the sky, one big and reddish, the other smaller and too bright to look at.”
“Two suns!” exclaimed Howard. “But that’s not possible—binary stars don’t have planets.”
She favored him with a stare. “Have it your own way—‘I vas dere, Sharlie.’ Just as I was taking this all in, something whizzed overhead and I ducked. That was the last I saw of that place.
“I slowed down next back on Earth—at least it looked like it—and in a city. It was a big city in a highly evolved technical culture. I was in a trafficway with a lot of fast-moving traffic on it. I stepped out and tried to flag one of the vehicles—a long, crawling caterpillar thing with about fifty wheels—when I caught sight of what was driving it, and dodged back in a hurry. It wasn’t a man, and it wasn’t an animal, either—not one I’ve ever seen, or heard of. It wasn’t a bird, or a fish, nor an insect. The god that thought up the inhabitants of that city doesn’t deserve worship. I don’t know what they were, but they crawled and they crept and they stank. Ugh!” She made a grimace as if trying to eject something unpleasant from her mouth.
“I slunk around holes in that place,” she continued, “for a couple of weeks, before I recovered the trick of jumping the time track. I was pretty desperate, for I thought that the suggestion to return to now hadn’t worked. I couldn’t find much to eat, and I was lightheaded part of the time. I drank out of what I suspect was their drainage system, but there was nobody to ask, and I didn’t really want to know. I was thirsty.”
“Did you see any human beings?”
“I’m not sure. I saw some shapes that might have been men squatting around in a circle down in the tunnels under the city, but something frightened them, and they scurried away before I could get close enough to look.”
“What else happened there?”
“Nothing much. I found the trick again that same night and got away from there as fast as I could. I am afraid I lost the true scientific spirit, professor—I didn’t really care how the other half’ lived!
“This time I had better luck. I was on Earth again, but in pleasant rolling hills, like the Blue Ridge Mountains. It was summer, and very lovely. I found a little stream and took off my clothes and bathed. It was wonderful. After I had found some ripe berries I lay down in the sun and went to sleep.
“I woke wide awake with a start. Someone was bending over me. It was a man, but no Robert Taylor. He was a Neanderthal. I should have run, but I tried to grab my clothes first, so he grabbed me. I was led back into camp, a Sabine woman, with my new spring sports outfit tucked fetchingly under one arm.
“I wasn’t so bad off. It was the Old Man who had found me, and he seemed to regard me as a strange pet, about on a par with the dogs that snarled around the bone heap, rather than as a member of his harem. I fed well enough, if you aren’t fussy—I wasn’t fussy after living in the tunnels under that awful city. I even learned to eat slugs and things like that because I was afraid to refuse what the Old Man offered. They aren’t really so bad—no worse than raw oysters.
“The Neanderthal isn’t a bad fellow at heart—rather good-natured, although inclined to play a little rough. That’s how I got this.” She fingered the scar on her cheek. “I had about decided to stay quite a while and study them, when one day I made a mistake. It was a rather chilly morning, and I put on my clothes for the first time since I had arrived. One of the young bucks saw me, and I guess it aroused his romantic nature. The Old Man was away at the time and there was no one to stop him.
“He grabbed me before I knew what was happening and tried to show his affection. Have you ever been nuzzled by a caveman, Howard? They have halitosis, not to mention B.O. I was too startled to concentrate on the time trick, or else I would have slipped right out into space-time and left him clutching air.
“I finally showed him a jujitsu trick I learned in Phys. Ed. II, then I ran like hell and skinned up a tree. I counted up to a hundred and tried to be calm. Pretty soon I was shooting upstairs in a nightmare again, and very happy to be doing it.”
“THEN you came back here?”
“Not by a whole lot—worse luck! I landed in this present, all right, and apparently along this time dimension, but there was plenty that was wrong with it. I was standing on the south side of Forty-second Street in New York City. I knew where I was, for the first thing I noticed was the big lighted letters that chase around the Times Building and spell out news flashes. It was running backward, and was hard to read. I was trying to figure out ‘DETROIT BEAT TO HITS NINE GET YANKEES’ when I saw two cops close to me facing me, but running as hard as they could backward—away from me.” Dr. Frost smothered an ejaculation. “What did you say?”
