Time Travel Omnibus, page 325
It must be old. Not only is the engraving on the blade obliterated by wear; there is the telltale little serif near the hilt, where that utterly keen, hard edge has been worn back a little by use and honing. The black stuff of the hilt looks newer, and the carving is clearer, though still very old. Grandfather thought that it was made of some very heavy wood, possibly impregnated with a plastic of some sort, and that it had been made to replace an earlier hilt which had become worn out or broken. The metal of the guard and the plate and rivets which hold the hilt are ordinary silver, in one of the new stainless alloys which were just then coming into fairly general use.
Well—there it was. Walter Toynbee, who was probably the most competent archeologist the world has yet seen, had gone into the future in a Malecewicz shuttle. He had dug up a knife, and brought it back with him. And it was made of a material—a metal—of which our science knew absolutely nothing.
Three days later Walter Toynbee was dead. It may have been some virus picked up in that distant future which he had visited, to which our generation of mankind had developed no resistance. It may have been the strain of the trip into time, or the excitement and exertion of what he did there. He washed up, and we went home together to supper. We had it together, in the kitchen, because the family had finished and the dishes were done. Grandfather examined the knife while we were eating, but he wouldn’t talk about it then. He was tired: he wanted to sleep. He never awoke.
In my father, old Walter’s only son, the family talents had taken another turn. He was a more practical man than his father, and had done his noted parent many a good turn by husbanding and stimulating the family fortunes when they most needed it. Where grandfather had been interested in the minutiae and complexities of the ancient cultures whose dust he cleared away, father was one of the then popular cyclic historians who tried to see civilization as a whole—as a kind of super-organism—and to find recurring patterns in Man’s gradual progression from the jungle to Parnassus. I am not implying that old Walter had no interest in synthesis and generalization—it is, as a matter of fact, a tradition that he had adopted the name Toynbee out of admiration for an historian of that name—a scholar of scholars—who lived and wrote in the early years of the last century. There is a letter among his papers which suggests that our original patronym may have been Slavic. If so, it might also explain his long and warm friendship with the unfortunate Malecewicz.
Be that as it may, Grandfather’s death set in motion events whose result is all too familiar to all who have chosen to identify their lives with the pursuit of archeology. By the time the public lamentations had begun to die away, the press found a new sensation in the knife. The experts mulled over it and reported with remarkable unanimity that the engraving on the blade and hilt, while clearly of the same provenance, resembled no known human script or style of decoration. Finding their progress blocked, they called on the metallurgists and chemists to identify the blue metal of the blade, and on the botanists to specify the wood—if it was wood—of which the hilt was made.
Need I continue? There was more quibbling for its own sake in those days than there is now. Every expert was jealous of his personal acumen and insistent upon being the Only Right Man. It was considered fitting and proper that experts should disagree. But it gradually dawned on everyone concerned that here was something where there could be no disagreement, and what was more, something which might very well open new vistas of human progress.
Physically and chemically the blue stuff was a metal, though it was no metal chemistry had ever described or imagined. When they had succeeded in sawing out a sliver of the blade for tests, and finally got it into solution, its chemical behavior placed it quite outside the periodic system of the elements. The physicists went to work on another sample with X rays and spectographs, and arrived at much the same result. The more they studied it, the less they knew, for sooner or later some experiment would succeed in knocking over any hypothesis which they might have built up on the basis of their previous investigations.
Out of it all eventually came the judgment which stands today: that the blue stuff might well be some familiar metal, but that its atomic and molecular structure—and consequently its physical and chemical properties—had been modified or tampered with in a manner unknown to our science, making it to all intents and purposes a new state of matter. The botanists returned the same report. The black material had the structure of wood, and it might be any of several common tropical woods or it might be something quite alien, but it, too, had been hardened—indurated—through internal transformations which left it something entirely new to our planet.
That ended the first stage of the battle. When the experts threw up their hands in despair, the attack shifted to another quarter. The knife came back to my father, and he promptly made it the nucleus of a Toynbee Museum of Human Acculturation at his and Malecewicz’s university, where it is today. But it was common knowledge that old Walter had brought the thing from the future. That meant that somewhere in the coming centuries of our race was a science which could create such unheard of things as the blue metal, and that the stuff was sufficiently common with them for knives to be made of it. Its electrical properties alone were such as to open a host of possible uses for it—father had been offered a small fortune by a certain great electrical concern for the material in the knife alone—and science decided to visit that future civilization, learn its secrets, and profit suitably thereby.
So the experiments shifted to time traveling. Malecewicz’s notes were unearthed again and published; Grandfather’s shuttle was dismantled and reconstructed a dozen times; Balmer found himself in a position to charge almost any fee as a consultant to industrial laboratories, universities, and private speculators who were hot on the trail of tomorrow. Shuttles were built on every hand, and men—and women—disappeared into the future. One by one they straggled back, empty-handed and thoroughly disgruntled. The future had no such metal.
There was a brief period in which everyone who had failed to solve the problem of the knife tried to cast doubts on Walter Toynbee, but the thing existed, its nature was what it was, and presently the hubbub swung around full circle to the place it had started. Grandfather had been an archeologist. He had gone into the future, and excavated the knife from the detritus of what might conceivably have been a colony or a chance visitant from another world—even another galaxy—someone—or something—of which the rest of humanity at that moment in time was quite unaware.
Archeology had found the thing. Science craved it. It was up to archeology to find it—or its source—again.
So we became, in the language of the popularizers, the Mother Science—spawning off all sorts of minuscule specialties, lording it over a score of devoutly adulatory slave sciences, enjoying our position and taking every advantage of it.
I grew up in that atmosphere. From the time I could talk and listen, Grandfather had filled me with the wonders of the past and the romance of their discovery. Now the whole world was awake to the glories of archeology as the science of sciences which would open a whole new world to struggling Mankind. Is it any wonder I chose to follow in my grandfather’s footsteps?
Let me say now that men like my father and grandfather, who had needed no world-shaking anomaly to intrigue them with their chosen study, never lost their heads in the storm of recognition which swept over them. It might have been better if they had. Archeology was in the saddle; very well, it was going to ride—and ride hard. Projects which had been tabled for lack of funds were financed in a twinkling. Tools and instruments of investigation which had been regarded as extremists’ pipe dreams were invented on demand. With new tools came new techniques, and with new techniques came a hierarchy of skilled technicians, statisticians in place of explorers, desk work in place of excavation, piddling with detail instead of drawing in broad strokes the panorama of advancing civilization which men like Schliemann, and Evans, and Breasted, and that first Toynbee—yes, and old Walter Toynbee after them all—had seen with clear and understanding eyes.
We have no one to blame but ourselves. I fully realize that. We dug our own hole; we furnished it lavishly; we built a wall around it to exclude the non-elite; we arranged to be fed and comforted while we dawdled with our trivia; and then we pulled the hole in on top of ourselves. We wore a rut so deep that we can never climb out of it. So I dream of cutting my grandfather’s throat instead of realizing that if I were the man he was—if I had the courage to break away from the stultified pattern I have helped to make, and go primitive, dig in the dirt with a trowel, regain the thrill of new worlds—the barriers would disappear and I would be free again, as men were meant to be.
Of course, by the time I was old enough for the university the whole business was well under way. My father, with his cycles in mind, had instigated a project whereby Archeology—it rated the capital by now—would uncover and describe the entire growth, maturity, and decline of representative communities, our own included. A colleague—or maybe he was a competitor—at Harvard was all for starting all over again at the beginning and redigesting the entire corpus of archeological data accumulated by grubbers since the beginning of time, using the new statistical attacks and the college’s vast new calculating machine. He got his money. Science had declared that Archeology was the magician which would presently pass out unbounded benefits to one and all, and one and all swarmed to get on Santa Claus’ good side.
I served my apprenticeship doing the dirty work for the men who voyaged into the future and sent back reams and sheaves of notes out of which we desk-workers were supposed to pull blue metal rabbits. This was the era of specialism: when trained mechanics did the digging, when stenographers and solido-scanners took the notes, and when laboratory drudges squeezed out of them every possible drop of information which super-statistics could extract.
I remember the worst pest of them all—a man with as much personality as my grandfather, though of a different kind—who nearly imposed his infernal pattern on the science for a generation. He had been a mathematical physicist who turned to archeology in what he claimed was an attempt to fit human behavior “in its broader sense” into some set of universal field-equations he had distilled out of his stars and atoms, and which purported to express the Totality of All, or some such pat phrase, in a large nutshell.
Of course, any such over-view of civilization was music to my father’s ears, and he gave the man the run of the Museum and a voice in all our activities. Hill—that was his name—at once announced the precept that it was quite unnecessary to find blue-metal knives in some future culture. By making a sufficiently exhaustive collection of data at any particular moment, and applying his field equations in their humano-cultural aspect—I am trying here to recall his jargon—it would be possible to predict accurately when and where such knives must be.
Hill had a shock of red hair, a barrel chest, and a loud voice. He spoke often and in the right places. Myriads of miserable students like myself had to mull over the tons of notes which expeditions under his direction sent back. We translated facts into symbols, put the symbols through his mill, and got out more symbols. Nine times, by count, he announced to the world that “now he had it”—and nine times by count a simple checkup showed that the poor beleaguered natives of whatever era it was he had chosen as It had never heard of such a metal. Some of them had never heard of metal.
By the time I was twenty-three and had my own license to explore past and future indiscriminately, we had a pretty good overall view of the future of humanity. We had libraries of histories which had been written in millennia to come. We had gadgets and super-gadgets developed by future civilizations, some of which we could use and most of which we were able to misuse. The world we supposedly enjoy today was in the making, and you know what it is like.
I had done altogether too well at whipping the esteemed Dr. Hill’s hodgepodge of miscellaneous data into some semblance of intelligibility. The powers that were—and are—announced that I might spend the rest of my life, for the good of Humanity, fiddling with the same kind of stuff. But I was young, and I was a Toynbee. I stood up and demanded my rights, and they gave them to me. I could go out like all the rest and hunt for the knife.
I am not a fool. Moreover, I had had the advantage of knowing my grandfather—better even than Father ever did. I knew how he would think and how he would react. He was the kind of man who went at things hard—all out—to the limit of his ability. It seemed clear enough to me that the first step in finding the knife was to determine what that limit was—although in thirteen years or so nobody had chosen that approach.
Balmer was still alive, and I made him dig out the plans and specifications he had drawn up when he made Grandfather’s shuttle. I got hold of the notes the experts had made when they tore the machine apart after his death, and they checked. And then I had Balmer set me up just the same kind of old gray cube out of which Walter Toynbee had stumbled that day, with the blue knife in his dusty old ditty bag.
It was bigger, of course—I had to have room for the kind of equipment a field man considered necessary in my day. I’d never had any training or experience with the kind of work old Walter did with his own two hands, a camera, and a trowel. The profession had been mechanized, and it was silly not to use the best I could lay my hands on. The time field, though, was the same, and it should carry me just as far as it had carried its originator thirteen years before.
It did. Malecewicz, by stretching his original model, had been able to get fifteen years out of it. Grandfather’s huge old vault of a machine lofted him nearly twenty times as far into the future of our race—and of our town. As I had suspected from the specifications of the machine, it dropped me somewhere near the middle of that interregnum which followed the Hemispheric Wars, when half the cities of America had been reduced to rubble, disease and famine had put the population of the planet back into a hunting-fishing-food-gathering economy, and all that remained of civilization was a memory which would someday be revived, restored, and started off again.
I am not saying that in thirteen years of trying nobody had hit upon this particular period in the future. It is true that having hit it they let common sense scare them off. It was obvious that that level of culture could never produce so sophisticated a scientific marvel as the knife. There was no evidence in the ruins they found to show that our own culture, up to and during the time of the Wars, had done so. Ergo: onward and upward. Try another thousand years. Try a million.
I had a slightly different point of view on the matter. I knew grandfather. He would go as far as his machine could take him. I had duplicated that. He would look around him for a promising site, get out his tools, and pitch in. Well, I could do that, too.
There is enough uncertainty—backlash, if you want to call it that—in the operation of any time shuttle so that you can never be certain that you will hit any specific moment or even any specific day or week in the future. Put that down to mechanical imperfections, if you like—I know some do—but I consider it a matter of the inexactitude of the physical universe, and I doubt that there is ever anything that we can do about it. You can approximate—hopping back and forth across the time you want until you get reasonably close—but that is a makeshift solution, borrowed from practical mathematics. I didn’t try.
If you’ve read your history of the next five hundred years, you’ll know that the gas attacks toward the end of the war had stripped the Atlantic coastal regions of vegetation and every other living thing. I got out of the shuttle in a dusty landscape where the bare bones of the planet stuck up in shattered stumps in a wind-swept desert of gullied clay. I might be ahead of my grandfather’s time—in which case I saw a paradox brewing—or I might be following him. As it turned out, it was the latter.
I knew from what others had learned that there was no life in this coastal strip until much later. Gradually vegetation worked its way into the arid strip, insects and mammals followed, men followed them—but this is no essay on the future. There was no point in hunting for survivors; Grandfather certainly hadn’t. For on all sides stretched the wreckage of our own city—or its counterpart of three centuries from now—and I knew that he would have stood just as I was standing, looking it over with an appraising eye, wondering where to begin.
One mass of fallen masonry, half submerged in a drift of sand, towered higher than the rest. It would provide a vantage point from which to size up the situation. As I plodded toward it through the soft sand I found myself watching for his footprints, so certain was I that this must be the place and the time. It was nonsense, of course; my own tracks were filling in as the wind curled sand into them.
Then I saw it—and that day thirteen years before came rushing back to me. Of course there would be traces! Walter Toynbee would never in his life have abandoned a dig as promising as this—a dig where surface-scratching had yielded him a relic like the knife. But for his sickness and death he would have been planning a return expedition—a camp—a full-scale attack. Not half the equipment he had taken with him was in the shuttle when he returned. And there, at the eastern base of the mound, the tatters of a red bandanna whipping in the wind, a short-handled shovel was driven into a crack in the masonry.
I fingered the shreds of red cloth. It was his. He always had one stuffed in the pocket of his jeans. Duster—sun shield—lashing—he had a score of uses for them. Any field worker had in those days, before there was a tool for every purpose.
The crevice into which the shovel had been wedged widened as it went down. Sand had drifted into it, filling it to within a few feet of the top. By all the tenets of civilized archeology I should first prepare my aerial plan of the entire complex of ruins, erect the light tower with its instrument board to establish a zero reference plane for the solidograph, and assemble the scanner. When a grid had been projected on the screen of the excavator, it would be time enough to think of beginning the actual investigation.
