Time Travel Omnibus, page 321
“I knew nothing about it, Ser Jorus. You must believe me.”
Jorus went on relentlessly, “Administrator, here are the facts. The accused, having stolen a time traveler, set the controls manually for a forbidden spacetime sector. Such sectors are restricted, as you know, because they are keys to the future; interference with such key spots will automatically alter the future and create a different line of probability. Keaton, in 1943, in his cellar laboratory, succeeded in working out the formula for what we know now as M-Power. He hurried upstairs, opened his safe, and noted down the formula in his book, in such a form that it could very easily have been deciphered and applied even by a layman. At that time, there was an explosion in Keaton’s laboratory and he replaced the notebook in the safe and went downstairs, neglecting, however, to relock the safe. Keaton was killed; he had not known the necessity of keeping M-Power away from radium, and the atomic synthesis caused the explosion. The subsequent fire destroyed Keaton’s notebook, even though it had been within the safe. It was charred into illegibility, nor was its value suspected. Not until the first year of the twenty-first century was M-Power rediscovered.”
Smith said, “I didn’t know all that, Ser Jorus.”
“You are lying. Our organization does not make mistakes. You found a key spot in the past and decided to change it, thus altering our present. Had you succeeded, Dennis Holt of 1943 would have taken Keaton’s notebook out of the burning house and read it. His curiosity would have made him open the notebook. Pie would have found the key to M-Power. And. because of the very nature of M-Power, Dennis Holt would have become the most powerful man in his world time. According to the variant probability line you were aiming at, Dennis Holt, had he got that notebook, would have been dictator of the world now. This world, as we know it, would not exist, though its equivalent would—a brutal, ruthless civilization ruled by an autocratic Dennis Holt, the sole possessor of M-Power. In striving for that end, the prisoner has committed a serious crime.”
Smith lifted his head. “I demand euthanasia,” he said. “If you want to blame me for trying to get out of this damned routine life of mine, very well. I never had a chance, that’s all.”
The Administrator raised his eyebrows. “Your record shows you have had many chances. You are incapable of succeeding through your own abilities; you are in the only job you can do well. But your crime is, as Jorus says, serious. You have tried to create a new probability present, destroying this one, by tampering with a key-spot in the past. And, had you succeeded, Dennis Holt would now be dictator of a race of slaves. Euthanasia is no longer your privilege; your crime is too serious. You must continue to live, at your appointed task, until the day of your natural death.”
Smith choked. “It was his fault—if he’d got that notebook in time—”
Jorus looked quizzical. “His? Dennis Holt, at the age of twenty, in 1943 . . . his fault? No, it is yours, I think—for trying to change your past and your present.”
The Administrator said: “Sentence has been passed. It is ended.”
And Dennis Holt, at the age of ninety-three, in the year of our Lord 2016, turned obediently and went slowly back to his job, the same one he would fill now until he died.
And Dennis Holt, at the age of twenty, in the year of our Lord 1943, drove his taxi home from Brooklyn, wondering what it had all been about. The veils of rain swept slanting across the windshield. Denny took another drink out of the bottle and felt the rye steal comfortingly through his body.
What had it all been about?
Banknotes rustled crisply in his pocket. Denny grinned. A thousand smackeroos! His stake. His capital. With that, now, he could do plenty—and he would, too. All a guy needed was a little ready money, and he could go places.
“You bet!” Dennis Holt said emphatically. “I’m not going to hold down the same dull job all my life. Not with a thousand bucks—not me!”
THE END.
PARADOX LOST
Fredric Brown
Well—the suggestion may be slightly cockeyed, and the story thoroughly wacky—but something did destroy the dinosaurs—
A blue bottle fly had got in through the screen, somehow, and it droned in monotonous circles around the ceiling of the classroom. Even as Professor Dolohan droned in monotonous circles of logic up at the front of the class. Shorty McCabe, seated in the back row, glanced from one to another of them and finally settled on the bluebottle fly as the more interesting of the two.
“The negative absolute,” said the professor, “is, in a manner of speaking, not absolutely negative. This is only seemingly contradictory. Reversed in order, the two words acquire new connotations. Therefore—”
Shorty McCabe sighed inaudibly and watched the bluebottle fly, and wished that he could fly around in circles like that, and with such a soul-satisfying buzz. In comparative sizes and decibels, a fly made more noise than an airplane.
More noise, in comparison to size, than a buzz saw. Would a buzz saw saw metal? Say, a saw. Then one could say he saw a buzz saw saw a saw. Or leave out the buzz and that would be better: I saw a saw saw a saw. Or, better yet: Sue saw a saw saw a saw.
“One may think,” said the professor, “of an absolute as a mode of being—”
“Yeah,” thought Shorty McCabe, “one may think of anything as anything else, and what does it get you but a headache?” Anyway, the bluebottle fly was becoming more interesting. It was flying down now, toward the front of the classroom, and maybe it would light on Professor Dolohan’s head. And buzz.
No, but it lighted somewhere out of sight behind the professor’s desk. Without the fly for solace, Shorty looked around the classroom for something else to look at or think about. Only the backs of heads; he was alone in the back row, and—well, he could concentrate on how the hair grew on the backs of people’s necks, but it seemed a subject of limited fascination.
He wondered how many of the students ahead of him were asleep, and decided that half of them were; and he wished he could go to sleep himself, but he couldn’t. He’d made the silly mistake of going to bed early the night before and as a result he was now wide awake and miserable.
“But,” said Professor Dolohan, “if we disregard the contravention of probability arising in the statement that the positive absolute is less than absolutely positive, we are led to—” Hooray! The bluebottle fly was back again, rising from its temporary concealment back of the desk. It droned upward to the ceiling, paused there a moment to preen its wings, and then flew down again, this time toward the back of the room.
And if it kept that spiral course, it would go past within an inch of Shorty’s nose. It did. He went cross-eyed watching it and turned his head to keep it in sight. It flew past and—
It just wasn’t there any more. At a point about twelve inches to the left of Shorty McCabe, it had suddenly quit flying and suddenly quit buzzing, and it wasn’t there. It hadn’t died and hadn’t fallen into the aisle. It had just—
Disappeared. In midair, four feet above the aisle, it had simply ceased to be there. The sound it had made seemed to have stopped in midbuzz, and in the sudden silence the professor’s voice seemed louder, if not funnier.
“By creating, through an assumption contrary to fact, we create a pseudo-real set of axioms which are, in a measure, the reversal of existing—”
Shorty McCabe, staring at the point where the fly had vanished, said “Gaw!”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Sorry, professor. I didn’t speak,” said Shorty. “I . . . I just cleared my throat.”
“—by the reversal of existing—What was I saying? Oh, yes. We create an axiomatic basis of a pseudo-logic which would yield different answers to all problem. I mean—”
Seeing that the professor’s eyes had left him, Shorty turned his head again to look at the point where the fly had ceased to fly. Had ceased, maybe, to be a fly? Nuts; it must have been an optical illusion. A fly went pretty fast. If he’s suddenly lost sight of it—
He shot a look out of the comer of his eye at Professor Dolohan, and made sure that the professor’s attention was focused elsewhere. Then Shorty reached out a tentative hand toward the point, or the approximate point where he’d seen the fly vanish.
He didn’t know what he expected to find there, but he didn’t feel anything at all. Well, that was logical enough. If the fly had flown into nothing and he, Shorty, had reached out and felt nothing, that proved nothing. But, somehow, he was vaguely disappointed. He didn’t know what he’d expected to find; hardly to touch the fly that wasn’t there, or to encounter a solid but invisible obstacle, or anything. But—what had happened to the fly?
Shorty put his hands on the desk and, for a full minute, tried to forget the fly by listening to the professor. But that was worse than wondering about the fly.
For the thousandth time he wondered why he’d ever been such a sap as to enroll in this Logic 2B class. He’d never pass the exam. And he was majoring in paleontology, anyway. He liked paleontology; a dinosaur was something you could get your teeth into, in a manner of speaking. But logic, phooey; 2B or not 2B. And he’d rather study about fossils than listen to one.
He happened to look down at his hands on the desk.
“Gaw!” he said.
“Mr. McCabe?” said the professor.
Shorty didn’t answer; he couldn’t. He was looking at his left hand. There weren’t any fingers on it. He closed his eyes.
The professor smiled a professorial smile. “I believe our young friend in the back seat has . . . uh . . . gone to sleep,” he said. “Will someone please try—”
Shorty hastily dropped his hands into his lap. He said, “I . . . I’m O. K., professor. Sorry. Did you say something?”
“Didn’t you?”
Shorty gulped. “I . . . I guess not.”
“We were discussing,” said the professor—to the class, thank Heaven, and not to Shorty individually—”the possibility of what one might refer to as the impossible. It is not a contradiction in terms for one must distinguish carefully between impossible and un-possible. The latter—”
Shorty surreptitiously put his hands back on the desk and sat there staring at them. The right hand was all right. The left—He closed his eyes and opened them again and still all the fingers of his left hand were missing. They didn’t feel missing.
Experimentally, he wriggled the muscles that ought to move them and he felt them wriggle.
But they weren’t there, as far as his eyes could see. He reached over and felt for them with his right hand—and he couldn’t feel them. His right hand went right through the space that his left-hand fingers ought to occupy, and felt nothing. But still he could move the fingers of his left hand. He did.
It was very confusing.
And then he remembered that was the hand he had used in reaching out toward the place where the bluebottle fly had disappeared. And then, as though to confirm his sudden suspicion, he felt a light touch on one of the fingers that wasn’t there. A light touch, and something light crawling along his finger. Something about the weight of a bluebottle fly. Then the touch vanished, as though it had flown again.
Shorty bit his lips to keep from saying “Gaw!” again. He was getting scared.
Was he going nuts? Or had the professor been right and was he asleep after all? How could he tell? Pinching? With the only available fingers, those of his right hand, he reached down and pinched the skin of his thigh, hard. It hurt. But then if he dreamed he pinched himself, couldn’t he also dream that it hurt?
He turned his head and looked toward his left. There wasn’t anything to see that way; the empty desk across the aisle, the empty desk beyond it, the wall, the window, and blue sky through the pane of glass.
But—
He glanced at the professor and saw that his attention was now on the blackboard where he was marking symbols. “Let N,” said the professor, “equal known infinity, and the symbol a equal the factor of probability.”
Shorty tentatively reached out his left hand again into the aisle and watched it closely. He thought he might as well make sure; he reached out a little farther. The hand was gone. He jerked back his wrist, and sat there sweating.
He was nuts. He had to be nuts.
Again he tried to move his fingers and felt them wriggle very satisfactorily, just as they should have wriggled. They still had feeling, kinetic and otherwise. But—He reached his wrist toward the desk and didn’t feel the desk. He put it in such a position that his hand, if it had been on the end of his wrist, would have had to touch or pass through the desk, but he felt nothing.
Wherever his hand was, it wasn’t on the end of his wrist. It was still out there in the aisle, no matter where he moved his arm. If he got up and walked out of the classroom, would his hand still be out there in the aisle, invisible? And suppose he went a thousand miles away? But that was silly.
But was it any sillier than that his arm should rest here on the desk and his hand be two feet away? The difference in silliness between two feet and a thousand miles was only one of degree.
Was his hand out there?
He took his fountain pen out of his pocket and reached out with his right hand to approximately the point where he thought it was, and—sure enough—he was holding only a part of a fountain pen, half of one. He carefully refrained from reaching any farther, but raised it and brought it down sharply.
It rapped—he felt it—across the missing knuckles of his left hand! That tied it! It so startled him that he let go of the pen and it was gone. It wasn’t on the floor of the aisle. It wasn’t anywhere. It was just gone, and it had been a good five-dollar pen, too.
Gaw! Here he was worrying about a pen when his left hand was missing. What was he going to do about that?
He closed his eyes. “Shorty McCabe,” he said to himself, “you’ve got to think this out logically and figure out how to get your hand back out of whatever that is. You daren’t get scared. Probably you’re asleep and dreaming this, but maybe you aren’t, and, if you aren’t, you’re in a jam. Now let’s be logical. There is a place out there, a plane or something, and you can reach across it or put things across it, but you can’t get them back again.
“Whatever else is on the other side, your left hand is. And your right hand doesn’t know what your left hand is doing because one is here and the other is there, and never the twain shall—Hey, cut it out, Shorty. This isn’t funny.”
But there was one thing he could do, and that was find out roughly the size and shape of the—whatever it was. There was a box of paper clips on his desk. He picked up a few in his right hand and tossed one of them out into the aisle. The paper clip got six or eight inches out into the aisle, and vanished. He didn’t hear it land anywhere.
So far, so good. He tossed one a bit lower; same result. He bent down at his desk, being careful not to lean his head out into the aisle, and skittered a paper clip across the floor out into the aisle, saw it vanish eight inches out. He tossed one a little forward, one a bit backward. The plane extended at least a yard to the front and back, roughly parallel with the aisle itself.
And up? He tossed one upward that arced six feet above the aisle and vanished there. Another one, higher yet and in a forward direction. It described an arc in the air and landed on the head of a girl three seats forward in the next aisle. She started a little and put up a hand to her head.
“Mr. McCabe,” said Professor Dolohan severely, “may I ask if this lecture bores you?”
Shorty jumped. He said, “Y—No, professor. I was just—”
“You were, I noticed, experimenting in ballistics and the nature of a parabola. A parabola, Mr. McCabe, is the curve described by a missile projected into space with no continuing force other than its initial impetus and the force of gravity. Now shall I continue with my original lecture, or would you rather we called you up before the class to demonstrate the nature of paraboloid mechanics for the edification of your fellow students?”
“I’m sorry, professor,” said Shorty. “I was . . . uh . . . I mean I . . . I mean I’m sorry.”
“Thank you, Mr. McCabe. And now”—The professor turned again to the blackboard. “If we let the symbol b represent the degree of unpossiblity, in contradistinction to c—”
Shorty stared morosely down at his hands—his hand, rather—in his lap. He glanced up at the clock on the wall over the door and saw that in another five minutes the class period would be over. He had to do something, and do it quickly.
He turned his eyes toward the aisle again. Not that there was anything there to see. But there was plenty there to think about. Half a dozen paper clips, his best fountain pen, and his left hand.
There was an invisible something out there. You couldn’t feel it when you touched it, and objects like paper clips didn’t click when they hit it. And you could get through it on one direction, but not in the other. He could reach his right hand out there and touch his left hand with it, no doubt, but then he wouldn’t get his right hand back again. And pretty soon class would be over and—
Nuts. There was only one thing he could do that made any sense. There wasn’t anything on the other side of that plane that hurt his left hand, was there? Well, then, why not step through it? Wherever he’d be, it would be all in one piece.
He shot a glance at the professor and waited until he turned to mark something on the blackboard again. Then, without waiting to think it over, without daring to think it over, Shorty stood up in the aisle.
The lights went out. Or he had stepped into blackness.
He couldn’t hear the professor any more, but there was a familiar buzzing noise in his ears that sounded like a bluebottle fly circling around somewhere nearby in the darkness.
He put his hands together, and they were both there; his right hand clasped his left. Well, whatever he was, he was all there. But why couldn’t he see?
Somebody sneezed.
Shorty jumped, and then said, “Is . . . uh . . . anybody there?” His voice shook a little, and he hoped now that he was really asleep and that he’d wake up in a minute.
