Time Travel Omnibus, page 426
MY UNCLE OTTO had been saying that since the business of the “Schlemmelmayer Effect” first started up. Maybe that surprises you. Maybe you think it was the Schlemmelmayer Effect that made my uncle Otto famous. Well, it’s all in how you look at it.
He discovered the Effect back in 1952 and the chances are you know as much about it as I do. In a nutshell, he devised a germanium relay of such a nature as to respond to thoughtwaves, or anyway, to the electro-magnetic fields of the brain cells. He worked for years to build such a delay into a flute, so that it would play music under the pressure of nothing but thought. It was his love, his life, it was to revolutionize music. Everyone would be able to play; no skill necessary—only thought.
Then, five years ago, this young fellow at Consolidated Arms, Stephen Wheland, modified the Schlemmelmayer Effect and reversed it. He devised a field of supersonic waves that could activate the brain via a germanium relay, fry it, and kill a rat at twenty feet. Also, they found out later, men.
After that, Wheland got a bonus of ten thousand dollars and a promotion, while the major stockholders of Consolidated Arms proceeded to make millions when the government bought the patents and placed its orders.
My uncle Otto? He made the cover of Time.
After that, everyone who was close to him, say within a few miles, knew he had a grievance. Some thought it was the fact he had received no money; others that his great discovery had been made an instrument of war and killing.
Nuts! It was his flute! That was the real tack on the chair of his life. Poor Uncle Otto. He loved his flute. He carried it with him always, ready to demonstrate. It reposed in its special case on the back of his chair when he ate, and at the head of his bed when he slept. Sunday mornings in the University physics laboratories were made hideous by the sounds of my uncle Otto’s flute, under imperfect mental control, flatting its way through some tearful German folk song.
The trouble was that no manufacturer would touch it. As soon as its existence was unveiled, the musicians’ union threatened to silence every demi-quaver in the land; the various entertainment industries called its lobbyists to attention and marked them off in brigades for instant action; and even old Pietro Faranini stuck his baton behind his ear and made fervent statements to the newspapers about the impending death of art. Uncle Otto never recovered.
He was saying, “Yesterday were my final hopes. Consolidate informs me they will in my honor a banquet give. Who knows, I say to myself. Maybe they will my flute buy.” Under stress, my uncle Otto’s word-order tends to shift from English to Germanic.
The picture intrigued me.
“What an idea,” I said. “A thousand giant flutes secreted in key spots in enemy territories blaring out singing commercials just flat enough to—”
“Quiet! Quiet!” My uncle Otto brought down the flat of his hand on my desk like a pistol shot, and the plastic calendar jumped in fright and fell down dead. “From you also mockery,? Where is your respect?”
“I’m sorry, uncle Otto.”
“Then listen. I attended the banquet and they made speeches about the Schlemmelmayer Effect and how it harnessed the power of mind. Then when I thought they would announce they would my flute buy, they give me this!” He took out what looked like a two thousand dollar gold-piece and threw it at me. I ducked.
HAD IT hit the window, it would have gone through and brained a pedestrian, but it hit the wall. I picked it up. You could tell by the weight that it was only gold-plated. On one side it said: “The Elias Bancroft Sudford Award” in big letters and “to Dr. Otto Schlemmelmayer for his contributions to science” in small letters. On the other side was a profile, obviously not of my uncle Otto. In fact, it didn’t look like any breed of dog; more like a pig.
“That,” said my uncle Otto, “is Elias Bancroft Sudford, chairman of Consolidated Arms!”
He went on, “So when I saw that was all, I got up and very politely, said: ‘Gentlemen, dead drop!’ and walked out.”
“Then you walked the streets all night,” I filled in for him, “and came here without even changing your clothes. You’re still in your tuxedo.”
My uncle Otto stretched out an arm and looked at its covering. “A tuxedo?” he said.
“A tuxedo!” I said.
His long, jowled cheeks turned blotchy red and he roared, “I come here on something of first-rate importance and you insist on about nothing but tuxedos talking. My own nephew!”
I let the fire burn out. My uncle Otto is the brilliant one in the family, so except for trying to keep him from falling into sewers and walking out of windows, we morons try not to bother him.
I said, “And what can I do for you, uncle?”
I tried to make it sound businesslike; I tried to introduce the lawyer-client relationship.
He waited impressively, and said, “I need money.”
He had come to the wrong place. I said, “Uncle, right now I don’t have—”
“Not from you,” he said.
I felt better.
He said, “There is a new Schlemmelmayer Effect; a better one. This one I do not in scientific journals publish. My big mouth shut I keep. It entirely my own is.” He was leading a phantom orchestra with his bony fist as he spoke.
“From this new Effect,” he went on, “I will make money and my own flute factory open.”
“Good,” I said, thinking of the factory and lying.
“But I don’t know how.”
“Bad,” I said, thinking of the factory and lying.
“The trouble is my mind is brilliant. I can conceive concepts beyond ordinary people. Only, Harry, I can’t conceive ways of making money. It’s a talent I do not have.”
“Bad,” I said, not lying at all.
“So I come to you as a lawyer.”
I sniggered a little deprecating snigger.
“I come to you,” he went on, “to make you help me with your crooked, lying, sneaking, dishonest lawyer’s brain.”
I filed the remark, mentally, under unexpected compliments and said, “I love you, too, uncle Otto.”
He must have sensed the sarcasm because he turned purple with rage and yelled, “Don’t be touchy. Be like me, patient, understanding, and easygoing, lumphead. Who says anything about you as a man? As a man, you are an honest dunderkopf, but as a lawyer, you have to be a crook. Everyone knows that.”
I sighed. The Bar Association warned me there would be days like this.
“What’s your new Effect, Uncle Otto?” I asked.
He said, “I can reach back into Time and bring things out of the past.”
I acted quickly. With my left hand I snatched my watch out of the lower left vest-pocket and consulted it with all the anxiety I could work up. With my right hand I reached for the telephone.
“Well, Uncle,” I said heartily, “I just remembered an extremely important appointment I’m already hours late for. Always glad to see you. And now, I’m afraid I must say good-by. Yes, sir, seeing you has been a pleasure, a real pleasure. Well, good-bye. Yes, sir—”
I failed to lift the telephone out of its cradle. I was pulling up all right, but my uncleOtto’s hand was on mine and pushing down. It was no contest. Have I said my uncle Otto was once on the Heidelberg wrestling team in ’32?
He took hold of my elbow gently (for him) and I was standing. It was a great saving of muscular effort (for me).
“Let’s,” he said, “to my laboratory go.”
He to his laboratory went. And since I had neither the knife nor the inclination to cut my left arm off at the shoulder, I to his laboratory went also. . . .
MY UNCLE OTTO’S laboratory is down a corridor and around a corner in one of the university buildings. Ever since the Schlemmelmayer Effect had turned out to be a big thing, he had been relieved of all course work and left entirely to himself. His laboratory looked it.
I said, “Don’t you keep the door locked anymore?”
He looked at me slyly, his huge nose wrinkling into a sniff. “It is locked. With a Schlemmelmayer relay, it’s locked. I think a word—and the door opens. Without it, nobody can get in. Not even the President of the University. Not even the janitor.”
I got a little excited, “Great guns, Uncle Otto. A thought-lock could bring you—”
“Hah! I should sell the patent for someone else rich to get? After last night? Never. In a while, I will myself rich become.”
One thing about my uncle Otto. He’s not one of these fellows you have to argue and argue with before you can get him to see the light. You know in advance he’ll never see the light.
So I changed the subject. I said, “And the time-machine?”
My uncle Otto is a foot taller than I am, thirty pounds heavier, and strong as an ox. When he puts his hands around my throat and shakes, I have to confine my own part in the conflict to turning blue.
I turned blue accordingly.
He said, “Ssh!”
I got the idea.
He let go and said, “Nobody knows about Project X.” He repeated, heavily. “Project X. You understand?”
I nodded. I couldn’t speak anyway with a larynx that was only slowly healing.
He said, “I do not ask you to take my word for it. I will for you a demonstration make.”
I tried to stay near the door.
He said, “Do you have a piece of paper with your own handwriting on it?”
I fumbled in my inner jacket pocket. I had notes for a possible brief for a possible client on softie possible future day.
Uncle Otto said, “Don’t show it to me. Just tear it up. In little pieces tear it up and in this beaker the fragments put.”
I tore it into one hundred and twenty-eight pieces.
He considered them thoughtfully and began adjusting knobs on a—well, on a machine. It had a thick opal-glass slab attached to it that looked like a dentist’s tray.
There was a wait. He kept adjusting.
Then he said, “Aha!” and I made a sort of queer sound that doesn’t translate into letters.
About two inches above the glass tray there was what seemed to be a fuzzy piece of paper. It came into focus while I watched and—oh, well, why make a big thing out of it? It was my notes. My handwriting. Perfectly legible. Perfectly legitimate.
“Is it all right to touch it?” I was a little hoarse, partly out of astonishment and partly because of my uncle Otto’s gentle ways of enforcing secrecy.
“You can’t,” he said, and passed his hand through it. The paper remained behind untouched. He said, “It’s only an image at one focus of a four-dimensional paraboloid. The other focus is at a point in time before you tore it up.”
I put my hand through it, too. I didn’t feel a thing.
“Now watch,” he said. He turned a knob on the machine and the image of the paper vanished. Then he took out a pinch of paper from the pile of scrap, dropped them in an ashtray and set a match to it. He flushed the ash down the sink. He turned a knob again and the paper appeared, but with a difference. Ragged patches in it were missing.
“The burned pieces?” I asked.
“Exactly. The machine must trace in time along the hyper-vectors of the molecules on which it is focussed. If certain molecules are in the air dispersed—Vff-f-ft!”
I had an idea. “Suppose you just had the ash of a document.”
“Only those molecules would be traced back.”
“But they’d be so well distributed,” I pointed out, “that you could get a hazy picture of the entire document.”
“Hmm. Maybe.”
THE idea became more exciting. “Well, then, look, Uncle Otto. Do you know how much police departments would pay for a machine like this. It would be a boon to the legal—”
I stopped. I didn’t like the way he was stiffening. I said, politely, “You were saying, Uncle?”
He was remarkably calm about it. He spoke in scarcely more than a shout. “Once and for all, nephew. All my inventions I will myself from now on develop. First I must some initial capital obtain. Capital from some source other than my ideas selling. After that, I will for my flutes a factory to manufacture open. That comes first. Afterward, afterward, with my profits I can time-vector machinery manufacture. But first my flutes. Before anything, my flutes. Last night, I so swore.
“Through selfishness of a few the world of great music is being deprived. Shall my name in history as a murderer go down? Shall the Schlemmelmayer Effect a way to fry men’s brains be? Or shall it beautiful music to mind bring? Great, wonderful, enduring music?”
He had a hand raised oracularly and the other behind his back. The windows gave out a shrill hum as they vibrated to his words.
I said, quickly, “Uncle Otto, they’ll hear you.”
“Then stop shouting,” he retorted. “But look,” I protested, “How do you plan to get your initial capital, if you won’t exploit this machinery?”
“I haven’t told you. I can make an image real. What if the image is valuable?”
That did sound good. “You mean, like some lost document, manuscript, first edition—things like that?”
“Well, no. There’s a catch. Two catches. Three catches.”
I waited for him to stop counting, but three seemed the limit.
“What are they?” I asked. He said, “First, I must have the object in the present to focus on or I can’t locate it in the past.”
“You mean you can’t get anything that doesn’t exist right now where you can see it.”
“Yes.”
“In that case, catches two and three are purely academic. But what are they, anyway?”
“I can only remove about a gram of material from the past.”
A gram! A thirtieth of an ounce! “What’s the matter? Not enough power?”
My uncle Otto said impatiently, “It’s an inverse exponential relationship. All the power in the universe more than maybe two grams couldn’t bring.”
This left things cloudy. I said, “The third catch?”
“Well.” He hesitated. “The further the two foci separated are, the more flexible the bond. It must a certain length be before into the present it can be drawn. In other words, I must at least one hundred fifty years into the past go.”
“I see,” I said, (not that I really did,). “Let’s summarize.”
I TRIED to sound like a lawyer. “You want to bring something from the past out of which you can coin a little capital. It’s got to be something that exists and which you can see so it can’t be a lost object of historical or archaeological value. It’s got to weigh less than a thirtieth of an ounce so it can’t be the Kullinan diamond or anything like that. It’s got to be at least one hundred and fifty years old, so it can’t be a rare stamp.”
“Exactly,” said my uncle Otto. “You’ve got it.”
Got what? I thought two seconds. “Can’t think of a thing,” I said. “Well, good-bye, uncle Otto.”
I didn’t think it would work, but I turned to go.
It didn’t work. My uncle Otto’s hands came down on my shoulders and I was standing tip-toe on an inch of air.
“You’ll wrinkle my jacket, Uncle Otto.”
“Harold,” he said. “As a lawyer to a client, you owe me more than a quick good-bye.”
“I didn’t take a retainer,” I managed to gargle. My shirt collar was beginning to fit very tightly about my neck. I tried to swallow and the top button pinged off.
He reasoned, “Between relatives a retainer is a formality. As a client and as an uncle, you owe me absolute loyalty. And besides, if you do not help me out, I will tie your legs behind your neck and dribble you like a basketball.”
Well, as a lawyer, I am always susceptible to logic. I said, “I give up. I surrender. You win.”
He let me drop.
And then—this is the part that seems most unbelievable to me when I look back at it all—I got an idea.
It was a whale of an idea. A piperoo. The one in a lifetime that everyone gets once in a lifetime.
I didn’t tell Uncle Otto the whole thing at the time. I wanted a few days to think about it. But I told him what to do. I told him he would have to go to Washington. It wasn’t easy to argue him into it, but, on the other hand, if you know my uncle Otto, there are ways.
I found two ten dollar bills lurking pitifully in my wallet and gave them to him.
I said, “I’ll make out a check for the train-fare and you can keep the two tens if it turns out I’m being dishonest with you.”
He considered. “A fool to risk twenty dollars for nothing you aren’t,” he admitted.
He was right, too. . . .
HE WAS back in two days and pronounced the object focussed. After all it was on public view. It’s in a nitrogen-filled, air-tight case, but my uncle Otto said that didn’t matter. And back in the laboratory, four hundred miles away, the focussing remained accurate. My uncle Otto assured me of that, too.
I said, “Two things, uncle Otto, before we do anything.”
“What? What? What?” He went on at greater length, “What? What? What? What?”
I gathered he was growing anxious. I said, “Are you sure that if we bring into the present a piece of something out of the past, that piece won’t disappear out of the object as it now exists?”
My uncle Otto cracked his large knuckles and said, “We are creating new matter, not stealing old. Why else should we enormous energy need?”
I passed on to the second point. “What about my fee?”
You may not believe this, but I hadn’t mentioned money till then. My uncle Otto hadn’t either, but then, that follows.
His mouth stretched in a bad imitation of an affectionate smile. “A fee?”
“Ten percent of the take,” I explained, “is what I’ll need.”
His jowls drooped, “But how much is the take?”
“Maybe a hundred thousand dollars. That would leave you ninety.”
“Ninety thousand—Himmel! Then why do we wait?”
He leaped at his machine and in half a minute the space above the dentist’s tray was agleam with an image of parchment.
It was covered with neat script, closely spaced, looking like an entry for an old-fashioned penmanship prize. At the bottom of the sheet there were names: one large one and fifty-five small ones.
