Time Travel Omnibus, page 338
“You can no more be sure you lived and breathed than you can be sure of what you do under anaesthetic,” he said. “But you were still heading along a Time Line—not of your own volition, mind you—but inevitably, because Time sweeps us along with it. And so, when the curve struck the normal straight Time Line leading from past to future—the World Line, that is, which Earth herself is following—you became a part of it again, but you were twenty-five years ahead of the present.”
I nodded slowly. So far he made sense.
“You stayed there for a period of which you are uncertain, chiefly because your sense of Time had become catastrophically upset. And then, still impelled along this circular Time Line, you came back through hyperspace and once more intersected the normal Now Line exactly twenty-four hours afterwards. Events then proceeded normally for a while until—still following the circle—you passed through hyperspace to a past event. Then, hyperspace intervened once more, and so you came back to Now.”
“Then as the circles grow larger from the center the gaps will become correspondingly greater?” I questioned, and my voice sounded as though it did not belong to me.
DR. PEMBROKE gave me a sympathetic glance and nodded.
“Just so; and the mathematical accuracy of first, twenty-five and then, two hundred years—forward and backward—shows that the problem is not a disorder but a mathematical fluke quite beyond human power to alter. You move in a circle, Mr. Mills, not a straight line, and unless at some point the circle turns back on itself—an unlikely possibility since the Universe is a perfect cyclic scheme—I can foresee nothing else but . . . endless circular traveling, gradually taking in vast segments of Time until . . .”
PEMBROKE stopped and the room seemed deathly quiet. For some reason though, I was calm now the thing was explained.
“Can you account for my not feeling tired?” I asked presently.
“Certainly. You somewhat resemble a battery. You use up energy in a forward movement into Time because you are, in essence, moving into the unexplored—but in the backward movement the energy replaces itself because you are merely returning to a state already lived. You cannot grow old, or tired, or suffer from catabolism in the ordinary way because you represent a perfect balance between catabolism and anabolism, the exact amount of each being equal because each journey is the same amount of Time—namely, first twenty-five, then two hundred. And next—well, who knows?”
“Look here,” I said slowly. “This last time I went back two hundred years, as I told you, but I was somebody else—a pioneer or something of two centuries ago. I was never that!”
“In a past life you must have been,” he answered calmly. “Otherwise you could not have taken over that identity.”
“Then when I was that person why didn’t I know what lay in the future?”
“Perhaps you did. Can you be sure that you didn’t?”
This was becoming involved all right but, after all, I wasn’t sure. No, darn it, I couldn’t answer it. Maybe I had known!
“And when I was a boy of seven?” I asked. “I presume I became a boy again because I was just at that age?”
“Just so. Time-instants are indestructible. You are bound to become at a certain instant what you are at that instant. Otherwise Time itself would become a misnomer. You will ask why—at seven years of age—you did not know what you would do at thirty-two? Again I say, are you sure you didn’t?”
“I—I don’t know. I don’t think so—unless it was buried in my subconscious or something.”
“It must have been. It was there, that knowledge, but maybe you considered it as just a dream fancy and thought no more about it, just as we speculate on how we may look in, say, ten years time and then dismiss it as pure imagination. But with you such an imagining would be fact. And incidentally, as for your carrying a memory of these present experiences about with you. remember that your physical self is all that is affected by Time. Mind and memory cannot alter.”
“And—what happens now?” I simply dragged the words out.
“For your sake, young man, I hope things will straighten out for you. But if they don’t I have a proposition. Tell me, have you any relatives?”
“None living, no. I was intending to marry Miss Hargreaves here very soon.”
“Mmmm, just so. Well, the Institute of Science is prepared to subsidize a trust by which anybody you may name can benefit. In return we ask that in your swing back to the Now Line you will give us every detail of what has been happening to you during your absences.”
I shook my head bewilderedly. “I’ll—I’ll do it willingly, but I don’t want the money. And Bet—Miss Hargreaves—has plenty of money anyway. Doc, isn’t there some way to remedy all this?” I asked desperately. “I can tell from your making this proposition that you consider it serious.”
“I’m sorry, Mr. Mills. I really am. But no human agency can come to grips with your problem.”
I was silent through a long interval, Betty seated now at my side. I looked at her hopelessly.
“Bet, sweetheart, what do you say? Do you know anybody who needs money in trust?”
“No!” she answered bitterly. “Money is the cheapest, most earthy compensation science can offer you for a ruined life. I don’t want any part of it. Oh, Dick! There must be some way out of this!”
I shook my head. There wasn’t I knew it now . . . Finally I told Pembroke that the money had better be handed over to scientific research, and on my all too infrequent returns to Now I would tell everything I knew.
“We could marry,” I whispered to Betty. “Only it wouldn’t be fair to you. A day might come when I’d never return.”
PEMBROKE confirmed this quietly. “It will,” he said. “When your circular line takes so wide an orbit that it passes beyond the ends of the Now Line into hyperspace, you’ll vanish forever.”
Then I was doomed indeed! All I could hope for was an occasional glimpse of Betty. As for the rest, I didn’t know. . . .
My five-hour stay was taken up in signing legal documents. Then once more I was swept inevitably into hyperspace. So I went through the gray enigma which baffles description and this time I was six hundred years ahead of the Now Line. There was still progress, the building of superb cities, the conquest of other worlds, a sense of greater equality and comradeship between both sexes . . .
So back to Now for a brief spell with a tearful Betty, a long description of my experiences to the scientists, a banquet in my honor at the Science Institute—then outwards and backwards into the past, for a gap of another six hundred years.
Back and forth as the circle widened. . . . I have tried to keep out of this narrative the inner horror I experienced at it all—the dull, dead futility of being flung by nameless force into an ever widening gulf. Each time, of course, as the circle widened I went further afield.
Hundreds of years, thousands of years, from one end of the pendulum’s swing to the other—backwards into scores of lives which had long since been effaced from memory; forwards into a wonder world of ever increasing splendor . . .
Then, in the tens of thousands of years ahead, I saw Man was pretty close to leaving his material form altogether and becoming purely mental. So much so that, on my visit after this one, Earth was empty and turning one face to the sun. Age, old and remorseless, was crawling over a once busy planet.
At the opposite end of the scale life was swinging down into the Neanderthal man stage, and then further back still to where Man was not even present.
But there were amoeba, the first forms of life, and I fancy that I must have been one of these!
Backwards—forwards—with the visions of Now mere shadows in a universe which was to me insane. Nothing made sense any more. I was losing touch with every well remembered thing, with the dear girl who always awaited my comings and goings—growing older, but always loyal. And around her the cold, impersonal scientists logging down information that could chart the course of civilizations for ages to come. No wonder I had seen progress ahead! My own guidance had prevented any mistakes and in those distant visions I had seen the fruit of my own advice! Incredible—yet true.
Gradually I realized that my Time Circle was now becoming so huge that it was involving a stupendous orbit which did not include Earth but the Universe as a whole, proving how independent of normal Time Lines had my vicious circle become.
In my swing I saw the birth of the Earth and the gradual slowing down of the Universe. This, I think, is destined to be my last return to the Now Line, for the next curve will be so enormous that—well, I do not think I shall be able to make contact with the Now Line at all. The scientists have charted it all out for me.
The curve will take me to the period of the initial explosion which created the expanding universe out of—what? That will be in the past. And my futureward movement will carry me to that state of sublime peace where all the possible interchanges of energy have been made, where there exists thermodynamical equilibrium and the death of all that is. At either end of the curve Time is nonexistent! This is where I may at last find rest.
As I think on these things, writing these last words in the world of Now, I cannot help but marvel at what I have done . . . But I hate it! I hate it with all my human soul! Opposite to me in this bright room Betty is seated, silent, dry-eyed, faithful to the last. Science is still represented in the quiet men in the chairs by the far wall, all of them busy writing and checking notes.
Never was so strange a sentence passed on a human being!
The grayness is coming! I have no time to write any more. . . .
FOREVER IS TODAY
Charles E. Ksanda
Edmund—Carsten, millionaire scientist, seems to bend the cycle of eternity to his own wishes—with strange results!
MICHAEL BARRY opened his eyes. For a moment he thought the pendulum still hung there, poised over his bed, the silver sphere at its end swinging toward him. Then the dream retreated. He sat up in bed and rubbed his eyes. His body was cold and wet with perspiration.
Sunlight poured through the windows and the clock said ten. Nothing unusual about that. The flash of white fire was gone too. White fire—an explosion? The dream teetered precariously at the edge of his mind. The dream seemed almost real—a man’s face, disturbingly familiar, and something about his marrying Joyce.
That last thought, he decided bitterly, proved it was only a nightmare. Judging from Joyce’s actions the past several months the possibility of matrimony was exactly zero.
Then the pendulum swung past his head, and the dream was severed completely from his conscious mind.
Barry had been drinking too much lately, he knew. He rose, did his exercises, showered, dressed, and decided that he felt fine. There was no hangover. Still remembrance of the dream, the nightmare really, disturbed him. He shrugged. Caught in the moment between sleep and awakening, flashes of thought had gone through his mind. Now he could remember nothing.
He pulled the top sheet off his desk calendar and looked at the date. Thursday, September 13, 1945. It was his day off, and he was supposed to be home. Why the uncomfortable feeling, this staring at a calendar?
“You’re getting jittery, old man.” he thought.
Where had he been last night? He tried to remember but couldn’t.
Definitely he would have to stay away from liquor. No girl, including Joyce, was worth these advancing signs of delirium tremens.
The phone was ringing. He lifted the receiver and the puzzled look on his face gave way to annoyance. He started to slam down the receiver, but thought better of it.
“All right,” he said. “Business before pleasure, Carsten. This is my day off, but if you have a good story I’ll get it. I’ll be there in half an hour.”
DOWNSTAIRS he stopped at the coffee shop and swore quietly at himself while waiting for his order. The Tribune, he was deciding, could either go climb a tree or get someone else to fill the Sunday magazine section with extravagance about science’s latest world-shaking discoveries. Tomorrow he was going back to straight reporting.
After his second cup of coffee he went outside and found a taxi. He directed the driver to the Empire Building, then sat back in the seat and relaxed. Again the remembrance that something had been disturbing him, and again the failure to remember what it was. He decided that he hadn’t been altogether awake and forgot it. It was a fine day and he felt good.
He got off the elevator on the top floor of the Empire Building. Edmund Carsten himself met him at the door, smiling faintly. Barry’s mouth twitched in distaste. “Little Napoleon,” he always wanted to call him. Carsten was a small, wiry man with an easy air of importance. He was, Barry admitted, especially with his Continental manners, a man who would probably appeal to women.
“Won’t you come in?” Carsten said.
For the fraction of a second, Barry hesitated. Some vague, incomprehensible warning, like a flash of memory, touched his mind. He shook it off. It was crazy.
“Please come in,” Carsten repeated quietly.
Barry went in.
As he stood in the outer office of what once had been Dr. Winthrop’s old laboratory, Michael Barry realized that all the nights of methodical drinking had been an antidote for nothing. Looking at the empty desk in the corner he could see Joyce as clearly as the first day he had come here. He could remember the frown that had made her face even prettier when he explained his intention of doing a series of popular articles on her father’s experiments for the Sunday magazine section.
He had seen her with amazing regularity after that, until Dr. Winthrop’s sudden death. Then, somehow, things had completely changed, Why, was beyond his understanding.
“Come into the laboratory,” Carsten invited. “As soon as the other party has arrived I will have something of great interest to show you. I’m sure the readers of your paper will find it so, since it concerns them very directly.”
The laboratory, Barry observed, had been the scene of considerable recent activity. The late Dr. Winthrop’s equipment had been pushed unceremoniously to one side of the large room. Empty packing cases, lengths of heavy cable, and tools were strewn over the floor. That only confirmed what he already knew—that Carsten, and Joyce with him, had been coming to the laboratory regularly for the past two months.
Carsten had noticed his examination of the room. He pointed to the left wall, rocked slowly back and forth on his heels and smiled.
“There,” he said. “Not a bad job for one whose previous interest was solely in the intrigues of finance.”
At the left side of the room, between two giant silver needles, stood a circular thing of dull metal that looked to Barry like a large shallow wash basin. He laughed.
“Carsten,” he said sarcastically, “don’t tell me you’ve turned scientist.”
“Why not?” Carsten shrugged. “Finance or science or philosophy—or plumbing. A clever man can get what he wants from any field of knowledge. The clever man understands the intrigue of each.” He poked a finger at Barry’s chest. “But he supplies only the ideas. He lets others work out the intricacies.”
“So you’re replacing Winthrop?”
“In a manner of speaking, yes. It was my hand that guided his work for a number of years. True, it was a hand that guided toward lucrative channels. I suggested—he did. But for two years before his death he was working principally on something which was his own idea. That research led to an, invention which, because of his premature death, Dr. Winthrop was never able to demonstrate.
“The wash basin there?”
Carsten nodded. “I knew of the old man’s liking for you, Michael, so I’m pleased to allow you to witness today what may well be the greatest achievement of all time.” Carsten laughed at some private amusement. “Yes, of all time.”
BARRY didn’t like Carsten’s eyes. They had always been shrewd, like tiny black diamonds. Now, he felt, there was something more, something that might prove dangerous.
“Come, sit down.” Carsten took him by the arm. “I know you have never liked me, but that’s something I can’t help. Let’s forget our differences and have a drink while we wait.”
Barry was puzzled. The whole thing didn’t make sense. Maybe one drink would clear his head. He looked at Carsten, but could read nothing in those bright black eyes.
“Make it a small one,” he said.
* * *
Joyce Winthrop sat straight and still in the back seat of the taxi. Ordinarily she was a woman at whom the driver would have glanced more than once in his mirror. Her face now, however, was white and drawn, her hands clenched tightly on a scrap of paper in her lap. The determined set of her face gave no clue to whether the dried tears were from sorrow or anger or cold fury.
She seemed close to hysteria. Her lips formed words that were less than a whisper.
“I’ll tell them exactly how it happened, the way my room seemed strange, as though this morning I were awakening there for the first time. The way I almost remembered something—something from yesterday, or only from a dream? I’ll tell how that memory made me open my father’s diary, read the notes he had made on the last day of his life. Looking at the hastily scribbled equation, at what seemed only a jumble of symbols and Greek letters, and suddenly seeing—”
“This is it, miss.”
“The Empire Building? Excuse me, I must have been talking to myself.”
The driver grinned. “I do it all the time. It’s good for the health.”
She paid him, hesitated for a moment on the sidewalk and then went into a drugstore. She waited nervously for an empty phone booth, stepped inside and dialed the operator.
“I want the police,” she said.
Michael Barry heard the hall door open. Carsten excused himself and went into the outer office. Looking at the metal basin, whose performance Carsten had called him to witness, he wondered what it possibly was supposed to do.
The huge black box against the wall was a transformer, he realized. Beside it was a switchboard. The two silver needles pointed at one another across a diameter of the basin, and at right angles to them an arc of metal curved gradually upward from the rim to a point nearly half-way across the room. A metal cable, suspended from the ceiling, held a silver sphere about eight inches in diameter which hung above the center of the basin.
