Time Travel Omnibus, page 416
Was it only a hallucination? Something brought about by intense concentration and wishful thinking?
Now let’s see. You visualize a cube. Then you ESP it a half twist and seal the edges together. You seal that surface all around you . . .
Sometimes I think I have it. Sometimes I despair. If only I were a Bright instead of a Tween!
October 23rd
I DON’T see how I managed to make so much work of teleporting myself. It’s the simplest thing in the world, no effort at all.
Why, a child could do it! That sounds like a gag, considering that it was two children who showed me how, but I mean the whole thing is easy enough for almost any kid to learn. The problem is understanding the steps . . . no, not understanding, because I can’t say I do, but working out the steps in the process.
There’s no danger, either. No wonder it felt like a still picture at first, for the speeding up is incredible. That bullet I got in the way of, for instance—I was able to go and meet it and walk along beside it while it traveled through the air. To the men who were dueling I must have been no more than an instantaneous streak of movement.
That’s why the youngsters laughed at the suggestion of danger. Even if they materialized right in the middle of an atomic blast, it is so slow by comparison that they could TP right out again before they got hurt. The blast can’t travel any faster than the speed of light, you see, while there is no limit to the speed of thought.
But I still haven’t given them permission to teleport themselves out of this time yet. I want to go over the ages pretty carefully before I do; I’m not taking any chances, even though I don’t see how they could wind up in any trouble. Still, Robert claimed the Brights went from the future back into the beginning, which means they could be going through time and overtake any of the three of us, and one of them might be hostile . . .
I feel like a louse, not taking Jim’s cameras, specimen boxes, and recorders along. But there’s time for that. Plenty of time, once I get the feel of history without being encumbered by all that stuff to carry.
Speaking of time and history—what a rotten job historians have done! For instance:
George III of England was neither crazy nor a moron. He wasn’t a particularly nice guy, I’ll admit—I don’t see how anybody could be with the amount of flattery I saw—but he was the victim of empire expansion and the ferment of the Industrial Revolution. So were all the other European rulers at the time, though he certainly did better than Louis of France. At least George kept his job and his head.
On the other hand, John Wilkes Booth was definitely psychotic. He could have been cured if they’d had our methods of psychotherapy then, and Lincoln, of course, wouldn’t have been assassinated. It was almost a compulsion to prevent the killing, but I didn’t dare . . . God knows what effect it would have had on history. Strange thing, Lincoln looked less surprised than anybody else when he was shot—sad, yes, and hurt emotionally, at least as much as physically, yet you’d swear he was expecting it.
Cheops was plenty worried about the number of slaves who died while the pyramid was being built. They weren’t easy to replace. He gave them four hours off in the hottest part of the day, and I don’t think any slaves in the country were fed or housed better.
I never found any signs of Atlantis or Lemuria, just tales of lands far off—a few hundred miles was a big distance then, remember—that had sunk beneath the sea. With the Ancients exaggerated notion of geography a big island was the same as a continent. Some islands did disappear, naturally, drowning a few thousand villages and herdsmen. That must have been the source of the legends.
Columbus was a stubborn cuss. He was thinking of turning back when the sailors mutinied, which made him obstinate. I still can’t see what was eating Genghis Khan and Alexander the Great—it would have been a big help to learn the languages, because their big campaigns started off more like vacation or exploration trips. Helen of Troy was attractive enough, considering, but she was just an excuse to fight.
There were several attempts to federate the Indian tribes before the white man and the Five Nations, but going after wives and slaves ruined the movement every time. I think they could have kept America if they had been united and, it goes without saying, knew the deal they were going to get. At any rate, they might have traded for weapons and tools and industrialized the country somewhat in the way the Japanese did. I admit that’s only speculation, but this would certainly have been a different world if they’d succeeded!
One day I’ll put it all in a comprehensive and corrected history of mankind, complete with photographs, and then let the “experts” argue themselves into nervous breakdowns over it.
I didn’t get very far into the future. Nowhere near the Star Men or, for that matter, back to the beginning that Robert told us about. It’s a matter of reasoning out the path and I’m not a Bright. I’ll take Robert and Star along as guides, when and if.
What I did see of the future wasn’t so good, but it wasn’t so bad either. The real mess obviously doesn’t happen until the Star Men show up very far ahead in history, if Robert is right, and I think he is. I can’t guess what the trouble will be, but it must be something ghastly if they won’t be able to get out of it even with the enormously advanced technology they’ll have. Or maybe that’s the answer. It’s almost true of us now.
November 14, Friday
THE Howells have gone for a weekend trip and left Robert in my care. He’s a good kid and no trouble. He and Star have kept their promise, but they’re up to something else. I can sense it, and that feeling of expectant dread is back with me.
They’ve been secretive of late. I catch them concentrating intensely, sighing with vexation, and then breaking out into unexplained giggles.
“Remember your promise,” I warned Star while Robert was in the room.
“We’re not going to break it, Daddy,” she answered seriously.
They both chorused, “No more leaving this time.”
But they both broke into giggles!
I’ll have to watch them. What good it would do, I don’t know. They’re up to something, yet how can I stop them? Shut them in their rooms? Tan their hides?
I wonder what someone else would recommend.
Sunday night
THE kids are gone!
I’ve been waiting an hour for them. I know they wouldn’t stay away so long if they could get back. There must be something they’ve run into. Bright as they are, they’re still only children.
I have some clues. They promised me they wouldn’t go out of this present time. With all her mischievousness, Star has never broken a promise to me—as her typically feminine mind interprets it, that is. So I know they are in our own time.
On several occasions Star has brought it up, wondering where the Old Ones, the Bright Ones, have gone—how they got off the Moebius strip.
That’s a clue. How can I get off the Moebius strip and remain in the present?
A cube won’t do it. There we have a mere journey along the single surface. We have a line; we have a plane; we have a cube.
And then we have a supercube—a tesseract. That is the logical progression of mathematics. The Bright Ones must have pursued that line of reasoning.
Now I’ve got to do the same, but without the advantage of being a Bright. Still, it’s not the same as expecting a normally intelligent person to produce a work of genius. (Genius by our standards, of course, which I suppose Robert and Star would classify as Tween.) Anyone with a pretty fair I.Q. and proper education and training can follow a genius’ logic, provided the steps are there and especially if it has a practical application. What he can’t do is initiate and complete that structure of logic. I don’t have to—that was done for me by a pair of Brights, and I “simply” have to apply their findings.
Now let’s see if I can.
Be reducing the present-past-future of a man to a Moebius strip, we have sheared away a dimension. It is a two-dimensional strip, because it has no depth. (Naturally it would be impossible for a Moebius strip to have depth; it only has one surface.)
Reducing it to two dimensions makes it possible to travel anywhere you want to go on it via the third dimension. And you’re in the third dimension when you enfold yourself in the twisted cube.
Let’s go a step higher, into one more dimension. In short, the tesseract. To get the equivalent of a Moebius strip with depth you have to go into the fourth dimension, which, it seems to me, is the only way the Bright Ones could get off this closed cycle of past-present-future-past. They must have reasoned that one more notch up the dimensions was all they needed. It is equally obvious that Star and Robert have followed the same line of reasoning; they wouldn’t break their promise not to leave the present—and getting off the Moebius strip into another present world, is a sort of devious way, to keep that promise.
I’m putting all this speculation down for you, Jim Pietre, knowing first that you’re a Tween like myself and, second, that you’re sure to have been doing a lot of thinking about what happened after I sent you the coin Star dropped. I’m hoping you can explain all this to Bill and Ruth Howell—or enough, in any case, to let them understand the truth about their son, Robert, and my daughter, Star, and where the children may have gone.
I’m leaving these notes where you will find them, when you and Bill and Ruth search the house and grounds for us. If you read this, it will be because I have failed in my search for the youngsters. There is also the possibility that I’ll find them and that we won’t be able to get back onto this Moebius strip. Perhaps time has different value there or doesn’t exist at all. What it’s like off the strip is anybody’s guess.
Bill and Ruth: I wish I could give you hope that I will bring Robert back to you. But all I can do is wish. It may be no more than wishing upon a star—my Star.
I’m trying now to take six cubes and fold them in on one another so that every angle is a right angle.
It’s not easy, but I can do it, using every bit of concentration I’ve learned from the kids. All right, I have six cubes and I have every angle a right angle.
Now if, in the folding, I ESP the tesseract a half twist around myself and—
THE MIDDLE OF THE WEEK AFTER NEXT
Murray Leinster
Lock your door, friend, and go hide in a closet—that nice, little, pink-cheeked man is experimenting again!
IT CAN be reported that Mr. Thaddeus Binder is again puttering happily around the workshop he calls his laboratory, engaged again upon something that he—alone—calls philosophic-scientific research. He is a very nice, little, pink-cheeked person, Mr. Binder—but maybe somebody ought to stop him.
Mr. Steems could be asked for an opinion. If the matter of Mr. Binder’s last triumph is mentioned in Mr. Steems’ hearing, he will begin to speak, rapidly and with emotion. His speech will grow impassioned; his tone will grow shrill and hoarse at the same time; and presently he will foam at the mouth. This occurs though he is not aware that he ever met Mr. Binder in person, and though the word “compenetrability” has never fallen upon his ears. It occurs because Mr. Steems is sensitive. He still resents it that the newspapers described him as the Taxi Monster—a mass murderer exceeding even M. Landru in the number of his victims. There is also the matter of Miss Susie Blepp, to whom Mr. Steems was affianced at the time, and there is the matter of Patrolman Cassidy, whose love-life was rearranged. Mr. Steems’ reaction is violent. But the background of the episode was completely innocent. It was even chastely intellectual.
The background was Mr. Thaddeus Binder. He is a plump little man of sixty-four, retired on pension from the Maintenance Department of the local electric light and power company. He makes a hobby of a line of research that seems to have been neglected. Since his retirement, Mr. Binder has read widely and deeply, quaffing the wisdom of men like Kant, Leibnitz, Maritain, Einstein, and Judge Rutherford. He absorbs philosophical notions from those great minds and then tries to apply them practically at his workbench. He does not realize his success. Definitely!
Mr. Steems drove a taxicab in which Mr. Binder rode just after one such experiment. The whole affair sprang from that fact. Mr. Binder had come upon the philosophical concept of compenetrability. It is the abstract thought that—all experience to the contrary notwithstanding—two things might manage to be in the same place at the same time. Mr. Binder decided that it might be true. He experimented. In Maintenance, before his retirement, he had answered many calls in the emergency truck, and he knew some things that electricity on the loose can do. He knows some other things that he doesn’t believe yet. In any case, he used this background of factual data in grappling with a philosophical concept. He made a device. He tried it. He was delighted with the results. He then set out to show it to his friend Mr. McFadden.
IT WAS about five o’clock in the afternoon of May 3rd. Mr. Binder reached the corner of Bliss and Kelvin Streets near his home. He had a paper-wrapped parcel under his arm. He saw Mr. Steems’ cab parked by the curb. He approached and gave the address of his friend, Mr. McFadden, on Monroe Avenue. Mr. Steems looked at him sourly. Mr. Binder got into the cab and repeated the address. Mr. Steems snapped, “I got it the first time!” He pulled out into the traffic, scowling. Everything was normal.
Mr. Binder settled back blissfully. The inside of the cab was dingy and worn, but he did not notice. The seat-cushion was so badly frayed that there was one place where a spring might stab through at any instant. But Mr. Binder beamed to himself. He had won an argument with his friend, Mr. McFadden. He had proof of his correctness. It was the paper parcel on his lap.
The cab passed Vernon Street. It went by Dupuy Street. Mr. Binder chuckled to himself. In his reading, the idea of compenetrability had turned up with a logical argument for its possibility that Mr. Binder considered hot stuff. He had repeated that argument to Mr. McFadden, who tended to skepticism. Mr. McFadden had said it was nonsense. Mr. Binder insisted that it was a triumph of inductive reasoning. Mr McFadden snorted. Mr. Binder said, “All right, I’ll prove it!” Now he was on the way to do so.
His reading of abstruse philosophy had brought him happiness. He gloated as he rode behind Mr. Steems. He even untied his parcel to admire the evidence all over again. It was a large, thin, irregularly-shaped piece of soft leather, supposedly a deerskin. It has been a throw-over on the parlor settee, and had had a picture of Hiawatha and Minnehaha on it. The picture was long gone, now, and the whole thing was about right to wash a car with; but Mr. Binder regarded it very happily. It was his proof that compenetrability was possible.
Another cab eeled in before Mr. Steems, forcing him to stop or collide. Mr. Steems jammed on his brakes, howling with wrath. The brakes screamed, the wheels locked, and Mr Binder slid forward off his seat. Mr. Steems hurled invective at the other driver. In turn, he received invective. They achieved heights of eloquence, which soothed their separate ires. Mr. Steems turned proudly to Mr. Binder.
“That told him off, huh?”
Mr. Binder did not answer. He was not there. The back of the cab was empty. It was as if Mr. Binder had evaporated.
Mr. Steems fumed. He turned off abruptly into a side street, stopped his cab, and investigated. Mr. Binder was utterly gone. A large patch of deerskin lay on the floor. On the deerskin there was an unusual collection of small objects. Mr. Steems found:
1 gold watch, monogrammed THB, still running
87 cents in silver, nickel, and copper coins
1 pocket-knife
12 eyelets of metal, suitable for shoes
1 pair spectacles in metal case
1 nickel-plated ring, which would fit on a tobacco-pipe
147 small bits of metal, looking like zipper-teeth
1 key-ring, with keys
1 metal shoelace tip
1 belt-buckle, minus belt
Mr. Steems swore violently. “Smart guy, huh!” he said wrathfully. “Gettin’ a free ride! He outsmarted himself, he did! Let ’im try to get this watch back! I never seen ’im!”
HE POCKETED the watch and money. The other objects he cast contemptuously away. He was about to heave out the deer hide when he remembered that Miss Susie Blepp had made disparaging remarks about the condition of his cab. So had her mother, while grafting dead-head cab-rides as Mr. Steems’ prospective mother-in-law. Mr. Steems said, “The hell with her!” But then, grudgingly, he spread the deerhide over the backseat cushion. It helped. It hid the spring that was about to stab through.
Mr. Steems was dourly pleased. He went and hocked Mr. Binder’s watch and felt a great deal better. He resumed his lawful trade of plying the city streets as a common carrier. Presently he made a soft moaning sound.
Susie’s mother stood on the curb, waving imperiously. His taxi flag was up. Trust her to spot that first! He couldn’t claim he was busy. Bitterly, he pulled in and opened the back door for her. She got in, puffing a little. She was large and formidable, and Mr. Steems marveled gloomily that a cute trick like Susie could have such a battleaxe for a mother.
“Susie told me to tell you,” puffed Mrs. Blepp, “that she can’t keep tonight’s date.”
“Oh, no?” said Mr. Steems sourly.
“No,” said Susie’s mother severely. She waited challengingly for Steems to drive her home (any hesitation on his part would mean a row with Susie). She slipped off her shoes. She settled back.
Mr. Steems drove. As he drove, he muttered. Susie was breaking a date.
Maybe she was going out with, someone else. There was a cop named Cassidy who always looked wistfully at Susie, even in the cab of her affianced boyfriend. Mr. Steems muttered anathemas upon all cops.
He drew up before Susie’s house Susie wouldn’t be home yet. He turned to let Susie’s mother out.
His eyes practically popped out of his head.
The back of the cab was empty. On the seat there was 17 cents in pennies, one nickel, a slightly greenish wedding-ring, an empty lipstick container, several straight steel springs, twelve bobbie pins, assorted safety pins, and a very glittering dress-ornament. On the floor Mrs. Blepp’s shoes remained—size ten-and-a-half.
