Time Travel Omnibus, page 572
“Then came the news, kept from her at first, that there was confusion in communicating with the returning ship. A sensational tabloid broke the secrecy by declaring that the nine-man crew had all gone mad. And the ship had overshot its landing area, crashing into the Atlantic. Her first reaction had been a purely selfish one, no, not selfish, but from the self: He’ll never lie with me again. And infinite love and sorrow.
At his rescue, the only survivor, miraculously unmaimed, her hope had revived. Since then, it had remained embalmed, as he was embalmed in time. She tried to visualise love as it would be now, with everything happening first to him, before she had begun his movement of pleasure even before she . . . No, it wasn’t possible! But of course it was, if they worked it out first intellectually; then if she just lay flat . . . But what she was trying to visualise, all she could visualise, was not love-making, merely a formal prostration to the exigencies of glands and time flow.
She sat up in bed, longing for movement, freedom. She jumped out and opened the lower window; there was still a tang of cigar smoke in the dark room.
They worked it out intellectually
Within a couple of days, they had fallen into routine. It was as if the calm weather, perpetuating mildness, aided them.
They had to be careful to move slowly through doors, keeping to the left, so as not to bump into each other a tray of drinks was dropped before they agreed on that. They devised simple knocking systems before using the bathroom. They conversed in bulletins that did not ask questions unless questions were necessary. They walked slightly apart. In short, they made detours round each other’s lives.
“It’s really quite easy as long as one is careful,” Mrs.
Westermark senior said to Janet. “And dear Jack is so patient!”
“I even get the feeling he likes the situation.”
“Oh, my dear, how could he like such an unfortunate predicament?”
“Mother, you realise how we all exist together, don’t you?
No, it sounds too terrible1 daren’t say it.”
“Now don’t you start getting silly ideas. You’ve been very brave, and this is not the time for us to be getting upset, just as things are going well. If you have any worries, you must tell Clem. That’s what he’s here for.”
“I know.”
“Well then.”
She saw Jack walk in the garden. As she looked, he glanced up, smiled, said something to himself, stretched out a hand, withdrew it, and went, still smiling, to sit on one end of the seat on the lawn. Touched, Janet hurried over to the french windows, to go and join him.
She paused. Already, she saw ahead, saw her sequence of actions, for Jack had already sketched them into the future.
She would go onto the lawn, call his name, smile, and walk over to him when he smiled back. Then they would stroll together to the seat and sit down, one at each end.
The knowledge drained all spontaneity from her. She might have been working a treadmill, for what she was about to do had already been done as far as Jack was concerned, with his head start in time. Then if she did not go, if she mutinied, turned back to the discussion of the day’s chores with her mother-in-law . . . That left Jack mouthing like a fool on the lawn, indulging in a fantasy there was no penetrating. Let him do that, let Stackpole see; then they could drop this theory about Jack’s being ahead of time and would have to treat him for a more normal sort of hallucinatory insanity. He would be safe in Clem’s hands.
But Jack’s actions proved that she would go out there. It was insane for her not to go out there. Insane? To disobey a law of the universe was impossible, not insane. Jack was not disobeying he had simply tumbled over a law that nobody knew was there before the first expedition to Mars; certainly they had discovered something more momentous than anyone had expected, and more unforeseen. And she had lost, no, she hadn’t lost yet! She ran out onto the lawn, calling to him, letting the action quell the confusion in her mind.
And in the repeated event there was concealed a little freshness, for she remembered how his smile, glimpsed through the window, had held a special warmth, as if he sought to reassure her. What had he said? That was lost. She walked over to the seat and sat beside him.
He had been saving a remark for the statutory and unvarying time lapse.
“Don’t worry, Janet,” he said. “It could be worse.”
“How?” she asked, but he was already answering: “We could be a day apart. 3.3077 minutes at least allows us a measure of communication.”
“It’s wonderful how philosophical you are about it,” she said. She was alarmed at the sarcasm in her tone.
“Shall we have a talk together now?”
“Jack, I’ve been wanting to have a private talk with you for some time.”
“I?”
The tall beeches that sheltered the garden on the north side were so still that she thought, “They will look exactly the same for him as for me.”
He delivered a bulletin, looking at his watch. His wrists were thin. He appeared frailer than he had done when they left hospital. “I am aware, my darling, how painful this must be for you. We are both isolated from the other by this amazing shift of temporal function, but at least I have the consolation of experiencing the new phenomenon, whereas you.”
“I?”
Talking of interstellar distances
“I was going to say that you are stuck with the same old world all of mankind has always known, but I suppose you don’t see it that way.” Evidently a remark of hers had caught up with him, for he added inconsequentially, “I’ve wanted a private talk with you.”
Janet bit off something she was going to say, for he raised a finger irritably and said, “Please time your statements, so that we do not talk at cross purposes. Confine what you have to say to essentials. Really, darling. I’m surprised you don’t do as Clem suggests, and make notes of what is said at what time.”
“That1 just wanted we can’t act as if we were a board meeting. I want to know your feelings, how you are thinking, so that I can help you, so that eventually you will be able to live a normal life again.”
He was timing it so that he answered almost at once, “I am not suffering from any mental illness, and I have completely recovered my physical health after the crash. There is no reason to foresee that my perceptions will ever lapse back into phase with yours. They have remained an unfluctuating 3.3077 minutes ahead of terrestrial time ever since our ship left the surface of Mars.”
He paused. She thought. It is now about 11.03 by my watch, and there is so much I long to say. But it’s 11.06 and a bit by his time, and he already knows I can’t say anything. It’s such an effort of endurance, talking across this three and a bit minutes; we might just as well be talking across an interstellar distance.
Evidently he too had lost the thread of the exercise, for he smiled and stretched out a hand, holding it in the air. Janet looked round. Clem Stackpole was coming out towards them with a tray full of drinks. He set it carefully down on the lawn, and picked up a martini, the stem of which he slipped between Jack’s fingers.
“Cheers!” he said, smiling, and, “Here’s your tipple,” giving Janet her gin and tonic. He had brought himself a bottle of pale ale.
“Can you make my position clearer to Janet, Clem? She does not seem to understand it yet.”
Angrily, she turned to the behaviourist. “This was meant to be a private talk, Mr. Stackpole, between my husband and myself.”
“Sorry you’re not getting on too well, then. Perhaps I can help sort you out a bit. It is difficult, I know.”
3.3077
Powerfully, he wrenched the top off the beer bottle and poured the liquid into the glass. Sipping, he said, “We have always been used to the idea that everything moves forward in time at the same rate. We speak of the course of time, presuming it only has one rate of flow. We’ve assumed, too, that anything living on another planet in any other part of our universe might have the same rate of flow. In other words, although we’ve long been accustomed to some oddities of time, thanks to relativity theories, we have accustomed ourselves, perhaps, to certain errors of thinking. Now we’re going to have to think differently. You follow me.”
“Perfectly.”
“The universe is by no means the simple box our predecessors” imagined. It may be that each planet is encased in its own time field, just as it is in its own gravitational field. From the evidence, it seems that Mars’s time field is 3.3077 minutes ahead of ours on Earth. We deduce this from the fact that your husband and the eight other men with him on Mars experienced no sensation of temporal difference among them-selves, and were unaware that anything was untoward until they were away from Mars and attempted to get into communication again with Earth, when the temporal discrepancy at once showed up. Your husband is still living in Mars time.
Unfortunately, the other members of the crew did not survive the crash; but we can be sure that if they did, they too would suffer from the same effect. That’s clear, isn’t it?”
“Entirely. But I still cannot see why this effect, if it is as you say’ ”
“It’s not what you say, Janet, but the conclusion arrived at by much cleverer men than 1.” He smiled as he-said that, adding parenthetically, “Not that we don’t develop and even alter our conclusions every day.”
“Then why was a similar effect not noticed when the Russians and Americans returned from the moon?”
“We don’t know. There’s so much we don’t know. We surmise that because the moon is a satellite of Earth’s, and thus within its gravitational field, there is no temporal discrepancy. But until we have more data, until we can explore further, we know so little, and can only speculate so much.
It’s like trying to estimate the runs of an entire innings when only one over has been bowled. After the expedition gets back from Venus, we shall be in a much better position to start theorising.”
“What expedition to Venus?” she asked, shocked.
“It may not leave for a year yet, but they’re speeding up the programme. That will bring us really invaluable data.”
Future time with its uses and abuses
She started to say, “But after this surely they won’t be fool enough,” Then she stopped. She knew they would be fool enough. She thought of Peter saying, “I’m going to be a spaceman too. I want to be the first man on Saturn!”
The men were looking at their watches. Westermark transferred his gaze to the gravel to say, “This figure of 3.3077 is surely not a universal constant. It may vary1 think it will vary from planetary body to planetary body. My private opinion is that it is bound to be connected with solar activity in some way. If that is so, then we may find that the men returning from Venus will be perceiving on a continuum slightly in arrears of Earth time.”
He stood up suddenly, looking dismayed, the absorption gone from his face.
“That’s a point that hadn’t occurred to me,” Stackpole said, making a note. “If the expedition to Venus is primed with these points beforehand, we should have no trouble about organising their return. Ultimately, this confusion will be sorted out, and I’ve no doubt that it will eventually vastly enrich the culture of mankind. The possibilities are of such enormity that . . .”
“It’s awful! You’re all crazy!” Janet exclaimed. She jumped up and hurried off towards the house.
Or then again
Jack began to move after her towards the house. By his watch, which showed Earth time, it was 11.18 and twelve seconds; he thought, not the first time, that he would invest in another watch, which would be strapped to his right wrist and show Martian time. No, the one on his left wrist should show Martian time, for that was the wrist he principally consulted and the time by which he lived, even when going through the business of communicating with the earth-bound human race.
He realised he was now moving ahead of Janet, by her reckoning. It would be interesting to have someone ahead of him in perception; then he would wish to converse, would want to go to the labour of it. Although it would rob him of the sensation that he was perpetually first in the universe, first everywhere, with everything dewy in that strange light. Mars light! He’d call it that, till he had it classified, the romantic vision preceding the scientific, with a touch of the grand permissible before the steadying discipline closed in. Or then again, suppose they were wrong in their theories, and the perceptual effect was some freak of the long space journey itself; supposing time were quantal . . . Supposing all time were quantal. After all, ageing was a matter of steps, not a smooth progress, for much of the inorganic world as for the organic.
Now he was standing quite still on the lawn. The glaze was coming through the grass, making it look brittle, almost tingeing each blade with a tiny spectrum of light. If his perceptual time were further ahead than it was now, would the Mars’ light be stronger, the Earth more translucent? How beautiful it would look! After a longer star journey one would return to a cobweb of a world, centuries behind one in perceptual time, a mere embodiment of light, a prism. Hungrily, he visualised it. But they needed more knowledge.
Suddenly he thought, ‘If I could get on the Venus expedition! If the Institute’s right, I’d be perhaps six, say five and a half no, one can’t say but I’d be ahead of Venerean time. I must go. I’d be valuable to them. I only have to volunteer, surely.’
He did not notice Stackpole touch his arm in cordial fashion and go past him into the house. He stood looking at the ground and through it, to the stoney vales of Mars and the unguessable landscapes of Venus.
The figures move
Janet had consented to ride into town with Stackpole. He was collecting his cricket shoes, which had been restudded; she thought she might buy a roll of film for her camera. The children would like photos of her and Daddy together. Standing together.
As the car ran beside trees, their shadows flickered red and green before her vision. Stackpole held the wheel very capably, whistling under his breath. Strangely, she did not resent a habit she would normally have found irksome, taking it as a sign that he was not entirely at his ease.
“I have an awful feeling you now understand my husband better than I do,” she said.
He did not deny it. “Why do you feel that?”
“I believe he does not mind the terrible isolation he must be experiencing.”
“He’s a brave man.”
Westermark had been home a week now. Janet saw that each day they were more removed from each other, as he spoke less and stood frequently as still as a statue, gazing at the ground raptly. She thought of something she had once been afraid to utter aloud to her mother-in-law; but with Clem Stackpole she was safer.
“You know why we manage to exist in comparative harmony,” she said. He was slowing the car, half-looking at her.
“We only manage to exist by banishing all events from our lives, all children, all seasons. Otherwise we’d be faced at every moment with the knowledge of how much at odds we really are.”
Catching the note in her voice, Stackpole said soothingly, “You are every bit as brave as he is, Janet.”
“Damn being brave. What I can’t bear is nothing!”
Seeing the sign by the side of the road, Stackpole glanced into his driving mirror and changed gear. The road was deserted in front as well as behind. He whistled through his teeth again, and Janet felt compelled to go on talking.
“We’ve already interfered with time too much all of us, I mean. Time is a European invention. Goodness knows how mixed up in it we are going to get if well, if this goes on.”
She was irritated by the lack of her usual coherence.
As Stackpole spoke next, he was pulling the car into a lay-by, stopping it by overhanging bushes. He turned to her smiling tolerantly. “Time was God’s invention, if you believe in God, as I prefer to do. We observe it, tame it, exploit it where possible.”
“Exploit it!”
“You mustn’t think of the future as if we were all wading knee deep in treacle or something.” He laughed briefly, resting his hands on the steering wheel. “What lovely weather it is! I was wondering on Sunday I’m playing cricket over in the village. Would you like to come and watch the match?
And perhaps we could have tea somewhere afterwards.”
All events, all children, all seasons
She had a letter next morning from Jane, her five-year-old daughter, and it made her think. All the letter said was: “Dear Mummy, Thank you for the dollies. With love from Jane,” but Janet knew the labour that had gone into the inch-high letters. How long could she bear to leave the children away from their home and her care?
As soon as the thought emerged, she recalled that during the previous evening she had told herself nebulously that if there was going to be ‘anything’ with Stackpole, it was as well the children would be out of the way purely, she now realised, for her convenience and for Stackpole’s. She had not thought then about the children; she had thought about Stackpole who, despite the unexpected delicacy he had shown, was not a man she cared for.
‘And another intolerably immoral thought,’ she muttered unhappily to the empty room, ‘what alternative have I to Stackpole?’
She knew Westermark was in his study. It was a cold day, too cold and damp for him to make his daily parade round the garden. She knew he was sinking deeper into isolation, she longed to help, she feared to sacrifice herself to that isolation, longed to stay outside it, in life. Dropping the letter, she held her head in her hands, closing her eyes as in the curved bone of her skull she heard all her possible courses of action jar together, future lifelines that annihilated each other.
As Janet stood transfixed, Westermark’s mother came into the room.
“I was looking for you,” she said. “You’re so unhappy, my dear, aren’t you?”
“Mother, people always try and hide from others how they suffer. Does everyone do it?”
“You don’t have to hide it from me chiefly, I suppose, because you can’t.”
“But I don’t know how much you suffer, and it ought to work both ways. Why do we do this awful covering up? What-are we afraid of pity or derision?”
