Time Travel Omnibus, page 301
Men were too obstinate, too blind, too practical; so—
The superman that had been Squadron Leader Ernest William Clair smiled a secret smile. He was here to see that a world would be born—properly.
THE END.
TO FOLLOW KNOWLEDGE
Frank Belknap Long
A completely strange story of a machine designed to travel time and universes—and of the theory that, in an infinity of worlds, somewhere every event must have its exact duplicate, and its near-duplicate, even a near-duplicate that was luckier, happier, than the original—
“To follow knowledge like a sinking star,
Beyond the utmost bounds of human thought
Tennyson
Cummings put his hand out through the porthole and dug his fingers into the river.
“Oh, my aunt!” he mouthed.
Ralph Temple, rolling over in his bunk, blinked drowsily. “Wassamatta, Ned?”
“Nothing much. River’s getting harder, that’s all. River’s all scrooched up.”
Temple sat up straight. Although they were in almost total darkness he could see the shadowy outlines of his companion’s head and shoulders. He could also hear the paddle wheels turning, and smell the dank, high walls of the rain forest.
“Turn on the niagara lamp, and take a look,” Cummings urged. “I must be going nuts!”
Temple got swayingly to his feet. He was beginning to remember now. It was coming back.
“How would you like to have twenty toes instead of ten?” Morrison had asked. “How would you like to turn around and meet yourself—yesterday?”
Up above a dull, spreading radiance was coming into sight. It seemed to flow down toward him over something that looked a little like the keyboard of a piano which someone had designed without calipers to avoid offending a forty-foot giant.
He couldn’t stand not knowing. Clutching his hat firmly, he climbed up toward the light.
“Holy smokes!” he gasped.
He had been merely stunned at first, down in the thick blackness, but up here under the cold, brittle stars a man had either to cry out or go mad.
He cried out. Into the vast, stellar night went his little voice and the knobby legs of Pegasus seemed to lengthen. But, of course, that was nonsense. The constellations couldn’t change. Not while he—
His lips tightened, and all the blood drained from his face. The night sky had begun to lurch. Pegasus was growing horns, and there was a frothy cluster of new stars surrounding the Pleiades.
Someone was calling to him from the thick blackness. “Ralph, where are you? Come back at once.”
He crawled back on his hands and knees. He was conscious as he straightened of a dozen eyes trained relentlessly upon him. He stood rigid in the darkness, his spine a column of ice, his fists knotted up tight.
It seemed ages before a match flared and his darling came into view. Her coppery hair, unbound and falling like a veil before her face, failed utterly to cloak the fury in her gaze.
“Well, you did it,” she rasped, staring at him as though he were some loathsome Insect that ought to be crushed.
“Joan, I—”
“I thought the machine was unfinished,” she flung at him.
“I know. I thought so myself.”
He looked around at the seated girls. Giggling, they had trooped in to look at the bare, dry bones of an untested guess.
Well, the guess was going places now. It was traveling at full throttle, and the morning papers would have a sensational story to report.
His stomach felt tight and hollow and he was sweating at every pore. “I’m sorry,” he choked.
“You ought to be, Ralph Temple,” the coppery-haired girl flared. “One minute we are in the Museum of Industrial Arts and Sciences. The next we are in darkness Heaven knows where.”
“Where is Ned?” Temple asked hoarsely. “I was just now talking to him.”
“Ned says he’s in another place. A sort of cabin or stateroom, with water flowing past outside the portholes. Only it isn’t water. It’s thick, like glue.”
Temple felt around beneath him until he located a chair. He sat down and swabbed a perspiring brow.
All right, he had played Pandora. But plenty of people of both sexes had done that since the Faradays and the Morrisons had started inventing things back in the dim Pleistocene. Plenty of people had cut their thumbs on experimental arrowheads, and poked around in kitchen middens, and lifted the lid on hives of mechanical bees.
It wasn’t a crime to play Pandora. But building a time machine, and pretending it was just a guess in up-to-the-minute plastics and mysterious curves was . . . was—
Well, he hoped they’d arrest Morrison and send him to prison for life. It was all coming back now. Morrison had persuaded the directors of the Museum of Industrial Arts and Sciences that his big, unfinished question mark of a machine would pack them in at the Science of Tomorrow Exhibit.
Morrison was never so persuasive as when he stressed the value of publicity to men as “impractical” as himself. It hadn’t taken him more than five minutes to convince the directors that mathematical physicists were white-haired boys to the Fourth Estate, and could pull Sunday supplement write-ups out of their hats.
Bitterly Temple recalled that he, Morrison, and Ned were supposed to be buddies. They had gone through military school and college together and shared youth’s long dream of incredible things to come. Then Morrison had strayed off toward a Ph. D., Ned had taken up engineering, and he, Ralph Temple, had inherited two million dollars.
It made a difference. You could not expect a scholarly mathematical physicist, an engineer bronzed by sun and wind in the tropics, and a Park Avenue playboy to remain close buddies.
You could not expect it, but, hell—it had happened. To Ned and himself had come passes to the Museum of Industrial Arts and Sciences accompanied by chummy little notes from Morrison.
Ned
Dear :
Ralph
My machine goes on exhibition tomorrow. I’m hoping the public will be sufficiently impressed to contribute a cool million. There’s a lad named Ralph Temple could start the ball rolling, but first he’ll have to come and see.
All best, as always,
Morri.
Outside the Science of Tomorrow Exhibit, Morrison had greeted them effusively, and opened up with:—“Ralph, Joan—Ned, old fellow. Say, this is all right.”
“You’re telling me,” Ned had chuckled. “Ralph is letting me hold Joan’s hand in the fourth dimension. Did you notice?”
“No, but you may be doing that in sober actuality one of these days. How would you like to travel in the direction of motion with the speed of light? How would you like to turn around and meet yourself—yesterday?”
“What would Ralph have to do?” Joan had asked.
Temple had turned away, and was frowning heavily, but Ned appeared to be enjoying himself hugely.
He winked at Temple’s girl. “He’d have to be double-jointed in the fourth dimension. But he wasn’t asking Ralph. He was asking me.”
Morrison grinned. “I was asking both of you.”
“Well, to meet himself yesterday a man would either have to be double-jointed in the fourth dimension, or travel completely around the Universe of Stars. Isn’t that so?”
Morrison shook his head. “No, not at all. When my machine is completed he would simply have to depress a little knob, and—pouf!”
“You mean he’d vanish?” Joan asked.
“From Earth, yes. But things would become interesting for him elsewhere.”
They had then gone into Morrison’s machine. It was curious, but he couldn’t remember what the machine looked like now.
Morrison had stayed outside. A group of giggling schoolgirls had come in, girls ranging in years from sixteen to twenty.
Joan had pointed to a little, gleaming knob. “That knob, do you suppose?”
Oh, God, why had he done it? He was not a young show-off, but a man with graying temples and crow’s-feet around his eyes. He was not a zany.
Or was he? Like most sensitive and imaginative men he had a chameleon side to this nature. In an environment of giggling frivolity his personality underwent a change. He could become positively infantile when the people around him were behaving like high-grade morons.
“Sweetheart,” he said suddenly, “how much would you be willing to bet that Morrison wasn’t kidding us?”
“How much would I be willing—”
“—to bet, darling? I have a feeling I could set this machine in motion just by shutting my eyes and pressing down hard.”
“I’ll just bet you couldn’t.”
“I’ll bet I could.”
“I bet you couldn’t.”
“I bet I could.”
“You couldn’t.”
“I could.”
“Couldn’t.”
“Could.”
“Say, what is this?” Ned had interposed. “How much would it cost me to get in on it?”
“We’ll all be in on it together,” Temple had replied, depressing the knob.
Joan was plucking at his sleeve now, a rising hysteria in her voice.
“Ask Ned where he is,” she pleaded. “He can hear us, Ralph.”
Temple stood up. It was with an effort that he kept his voice low. “Where are we?” he husked. “That’s what I want to know. Where are we?”
“We’re inside the machine, of course,” Joan said, as though she were addressing a child. “But Ned isn’t. He’s somewhere else. When I speak to him he answers, but he keeps talking about portholes and water than doesn’t flow. Where can he be?”
“I’ll find out,” Temple said, and shouted, “Ned, Ned, can you hear me?”
“I can hear you, all right,” Ned’s voice came angrily out of the darkness. “Where did you go?” One of the schoolgirls began to sob in the darkness.
“Stop that,” Joan said sharply. “Stop that at once.”
The sobbing subsided.
“Where are you, Ned?” Joan asked.
“Joan? Is that you, Joan? I told you. I’m in a sort of cabin, and Ralph was here with me. But he climbed up somewhere, and now he’s talking to me, and I can’t see him.”
“Do you remember anything about Morrison’s time machine?” Joan asked.
“Morrison? Good heavens, I haven’t seen the old boy in five . . . no, six years.”
“See?” Joan said. “I told you. Ned is somewhere else.”
“Ned,” Temple said. “Think back carefully. Where were you before you woke up, and told me that the water had turned to glue?”
“Say, what is this?” Morrison muttered. “You were right here with me. You ought to know.”
“But Ralph wasn’t with you,” Joan said. “He was here with us. He crawled up out of sight, and came back again, but he wasn’t gone for more than a minute.”
“Hold on, Joan,” Temple said. “That isn’t strictly true. I was with him, but I did climb up toward the stars. Over something that felt a little like an ascending flight of stairs . . . no, a good deal like. Then I climbed down back. But I wasn’t here before I climbed up.”
“But you were,” Joan insisted. “I lit a match and saw you.”
“But how could I be in two places at the same time?”
“Didn’t Morrison say something about . . . about meeting yourself yesterday?”
“Ralph, Ralph, I remember now,” Ned’s voice tore out of the darkness. “We’re in the Morning Star. We’re steaming up the Orinoco. Ralph, are you there?”
Ralph was, but he didn’t say anything. He just sat down on the edge of the bunk, and stared at Cummings. The sun was pushing into the cabin now, and he could see the muddy brown river streaming by. By lying in his bunk, and reaching out a hand he could easily enough have scooped up a little water. But he had asked Ned to do the scooping, because he had awakened logy, and reaching down would have robbed him of a yawn.
The boat was one of those flat-bottomed jobs with paddle wheels on both sides, and the deck of their cabin was so far below water level that the brown tide kept threatening to come in through the open ports.
All that had seemed pretty nice once. Temple had been younger by fifteen years, and hadn’t come into his inheritance yet. Lying there in the cool Brazilian dawn, with the water almost level with his eyes, he had thought himself the luckiest young chap alive.
There was something about the lower levels of a rain forest, glimpsed across muddy brown water, that lifted a man to the stars.
The stars. The changing stars, up there above him somewhere.
He sucked in his breath sharply. Ned was staring at him as though he had suddenly sprouted horns and towered to an incredible height.
“Ralph, you look ghastly,” he husked. “You look twenty years older.”
“I am older, Ned,” he said.
“Huh?”
“Ned, this is the trip we took right after I graduated, right after you got your first job. You were trying to persuade me to go in for engineering, too.”
He looked straight at Cummings.
“Ned, last night we split a bottle of port. Just now we both awakened with slight hangovers. You asked me how far up I thought we were. I said you could find out by scooping up some water, and tasting it. The Orinoco is brackish for two hundred miles.”
“I know,” Ned said. “And I just now told you that the river—”
“Never mind what you told me. That isn’t important. Ned, we didn’t split that bottle of port last night. It wasn’t last night. It was years ago. You’re still a college kid, but I’m not. I’ve aged a helluva lot.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Ned said shakily.
“Ned, think back. Don’t you remember what happened in the Museum of Industrial Arts and Sciences?”
“I never heard of the place.”
“But you just now spoke to Joan. You spoke to Joan out of the darkness.”
“Joan? I . . . yes, the name is familiar. I have a feeling that if she spoke to me I would know her.”
“Don’t you remember my leaving you and crawling up toward the stars?” Temple prodded.
“You . . . you climbed up, and saw the stars?”
“Yes, and crawled back into darkness. I spoke to you there, and you answered me. Now I’m going to raise my voice and try to speak to Joan. “Joan,” he called. “Joan, can you hear me?”
“Oh, darling, where are you?”
“We’re in a boat with paddle wheels steaming up the River Orinoco—in South America,” he added, to make sure that she would not misunderstand him.
“Darling, climb up the stairs again. You can, can’t you?”
“No. There are no longer any stairs.”
“But I climbed up, darling. Just now. Ralph, we are in the center of a strange new star cluster. All the stars are different.”
Temple scarcely heard her. He was staring out the open port at something black and ungainly that had emerged from the rain forest and was winging its way toward the ship.
It was not a bird, but a flying reptile with membraneous wings which looked—he caught his breath—which looked exactly like a pterodactyl!
Someone was screaming in the darkness. “Oh, don’t let it touch me. Keep it off, keep it away from me.”
Temple dragged himself forward on his hands and knees, his heart hammering against his ribs. One of the schoolgirls was down on the floor and an enormous, shadowy something was bending over her. An enormous carapaced something which bore a terrifying resemblance to a giant water bug.
Fiercely Temple grappled with it. There was a long-drawn, plaintive wail, and the thing flaked away in his clasp, leaving his fingers locked together.
A match flared, and Joan came into view, her brows raised and her eyes searching his face.
Temple looked down at the thing. It wasn’t. That is to say, there was a negation of light on the floor which could have been made by something vanishing. Only that, and nothing more.
But the schoolgirl was in his arms, and her companions were clustering about him.
“No wonder you came back,” Joan almost hissed.
She backed away from him, her eyes blazing.
The match went out.
Impatiently Temple untangled the cool, clinging arms of a girl of perhaps eighteen from about himself.
“Joan, I found myself on my hands and knees in the darkness. I heard this young lady scream, and saw something—”
“You did? I saw nothing.”
“Oh, but there was a something,” the girl sobbed. “He saved my life.”
Temple felt around beneath him until he located a chair. He sat down.
“Joan. I think I can explain everything,” he said.
“Ralph Temple, I don’t care to listen,” came out of the darkness.
“You ought to listen,” the schoolgirl sobbed. “I’ll listen. What is it, Ralph?”
“Ralph. Of all the gall!”
“Joan, listen to me. You know what happens if you travel with the speed of light?”
“I know. A lot of silly children get romantic notions about a man old enough to be a grandfather.”
“Joan, I am thirty-seven,” Temple reminded her. “And I’m not getting any older. Ned is fifteen years younger, and at any moment I may be a youngster myself. I think we ought to know where we stand. There may be surprises ahead for all of us.”
“You mean, Ned went back in Time? But if we were just traveling with the speed of light we’d be the same forever. We wouldn’t even be moving about where . . . wherever we are. But we are moving about. Therefore we must be traveling a little faster than the speed of light. We must—No, wait a minute.”
She paused an instant, then resumed. “I was a problem child in physics at Vassar, but I seem to remember that only time on Earth would stand still. If you moved with the speed of light and looked back at Earth, everything would appear to be standing still. If you moved faster, events on Earth would unhappen.”
“That’s right,” Temple said. “People who don’t think things through imagine that events would repeat themselves in little jerks. Come to a head, so to speak, and then unwind feet foremost. Actually they would unhappen continuously, roll backward until all history repeated itself in reverse.”
