Time Travel Omnibus, page 592
Today I finished programming the computer, and then another session with Lashovitz.
9 P.M., Monday Evening, October 18, 1959.
The last batch of books has been processed. The most useful was The Young Hitler I Knew by August Kubizek, a boyhood friend in Linz and Vienna. I pray his memory is on a higher level than most memoir writers.
It went well with Lashovitz. He says I am a “natural subject.” I hope so. Unfortunately, he has had little experience with sleep-trance hypnosis and seems to consider it on a level with that popular nonsense a few years back about learning languages from a tape recorder on a nightstand. But he has been most useful. My main problem remains one of time. I will only have two days, and the hypnosis must be effective. I can now auto-suggest myself into trance with relative alacrity, but the crucial point remains the sustained suggestion from the tapes. Here the computer must not lead me astray. God knows I fed it all available material on both of us, but no machine is infallible. And there can be no room for error. I have only one chance.
Tel Aviv, Tuesday, October 19, 1959.
Of all people, Lochner showed up today. I can’t make out the man. He says he’s here on Technion business, but I suspect I am the sole object of his visit. He showed himself into my office this morning, all friendship and apologies. His manner is infuriating. I have lived long enough to distinguish deference from condescension, but I make an effort to be polite. He is, in a sense, an ally against Zirin.
“Doctor,” he opens up in that flat nasal voice of his, “I think you know my respect for you. At the university, Foundations Of Social Therapy was a kind of bible to me—”
“The book was outdated when it was published in 1938,” I interrupt, but he just smiles sadly. God, how sick I am of all of them!
“Doctor,” he goes on, “I think I can speak for other members of the board when I tell you how much I regret this controversy over your current project. If you could only explain your objectives to us in more detail, I’m sure the opposition would melt away.”
I try to keep my voice level. “I explained my objectives to Dr. Zirin last month.” And that, I add silently, was my first mistake.
“That explanation,” Lochner goes on, “seems to have begun the whole misunderstanding. Dr. Zirin is a bit vague in his objections, but he seems to feel you’re using university funds for something . . . . well, something beyond the realm of science, something closer to spiritualism. He maybe overstating the case, but. . . .”
“I told Zirin nothing to invite such a conclusion,” I cut in, though of course I told the idiot far more than his pygmy brain could ever comprehend. “I merely discussed in general terms certain theories about the memory-inducing potential of hypnosis. My present work is purely theoretical, in any case.”
Lochner looks uncomfortable.
“Dr. Hirsch, Lev Zirin is not an enemy of yours. He’s always supported your work, even when other members of the board preferred funding studies with more pragmatic goals. But his report on your new project. . . .”
I could hold myself back no longer. “His report is a lie!”
My voice breaks on the words, but I cannot stop.
“And Zirin is a fool, a parochial fraud! Mental eunuchs like him will never comprehend the new . . . the original. . . .”
I falter. I am shaking, more furious with myself than Lochner. Sweat streams down the back of my neck. What is happening to my self-control?
Lochner just looks at me sadly, the smug little nonentity. He gets up to leave and puts one hand on my shoulder.
“Doctor, try to remember how much we all admire you and your work. But you’re obviously under a strain. Perhaps you’ve been taxing yourself too harshly on this new project. If you had a chance to rest, to review your findings . . . .”
I shake his hand from me. This is going all wrong, but I seem to have lost my grip on the conversation.
“I don’t need a ‘rest,’ Lochner,” I whisper, my voice the rustle of dry leaves. “And neither you nor Zirin nor the whole pack of castrati on your damned Projects Board is going to put me out to pasture. I’ll finish my work with or without your support.”
I fall back into my chair, limp, exhausted. My hands are trembling and I clasp them tight in my lap. Lochner just looks at me again with that supercilious, pitying expression of his and slowly walks away. He stops for a moment in the doorway.
“Doctor,” he says in a soft voice, “no people on earth is more obsessed with history than us Jews. There are times when that obsession can become unhealthy. I think you understand me.”
He leaves before I can answer him.
This incident with Lochner ruins the whole day for me. There is only one explanation for his visit: Zirin has won over some more of the board, and they are reconsidering the project. Even my two weeks respite is now in jeopardy. Lochner must have come to get my side of the case and I, like an adolescent, jump hysterically at him. My nerves are strung taut as wire. I do need a rest. But there is no time. Now, more than ever, there is no time.
Tel Aviv, Wednesday, October 20, 1959.
I’m speeding up the project. Yesterday’s contretemps with Lochner is a storm signal I cannot disregard. I am dictating the tapes now on the computer’s recommendations, without reprogramming it for verification. This lengthens the odds against me, but I have no choice. It must be this weekend.
Tel Aviv, Thursday morning, October 21, 1959.
The tape decks are complete. I will install them tomorrow morning. There will be no trouble about the weekend. Rappaport goes to Haifa for one of his interminable conferences, and the rest of them will be at the beach, or wife-swapping, or otherwise celebrating this Promised Land of ours. The institute will be empty.
Strangely, I feel no sense of exhilaration—or apprehension, for that matter. There are a thousand reasons for failure, God knows: my own insufficient study of the methodology, the weaknesses inherent in auto-suggestion, the danger of discovery halfway through by some officious custodian. Above all, the simple fact that I am predicating everything on a technique vitally different from that which succeeded with Miriam: she was instructed to remember a specific incident, a trauma in her own past life, while I am focusing on an historic period with no subjective, psychological relevancy. Only in one sense are we alike: both of us, if I am successful, will have followed an Ariadne thread of hate through the maze of time. Miriam back to the summer of 1950 . . . and I to the winter of 1913.
I realize that even if my theory of what happened to Miriam is correct (and there is no objective proof of it other than my fading memories of her uncle’s file), the odds are still fantastically high against recreating her experience. And, yet, I have this unshakable assurance of success. It is almost a deja vu feeling, as if in some other life I have gone through all this once before and succeeded. Perhaps I have. Perhaps that is why I can feel no thrill of excitement at the prospect. It is all still an obsession with me, but a strangely passionless one.
Tel Aviv, Thursday evening, October 21, 1959.
Earlier tonight I had dinner at Lueder’s, on Dizengoff Street. I took a table on the terrace. It is the first time in months I have “dined,” as opposed to my customary wolfing down of tasteless sandwiches in the lab, and I view it, childishly perhaps, as a farewell gift to myself. A sort of bon voyage to my world, and my life.
As I am finishing my meal, Zvi comes in with some of his friends. He looks surprised to see me, but is effusive, introductions all around, tries to get me to join his table. I decline but am not annoyed. I watch them go off, Zvi with his girl, a sabra like himself, young, tanned, hair like honey. How proud, how assured, how natural they all are—and physically, how much like the old “Strength Through Joy” posters of the proud, blond young Aryan and his Valkyrie mate. Valhalla in Palestine; that would have posed a problem for Streicher.
Suddenly, I feel sad. For the first time since the project began I experience something like regret. I look across the terrace at Zvi and his friends laughing under the lantern-laced trees, and I wonder if they know that they have just met their murderer. It is my duty to liquidate their world—to snuff it out like a candle. If I succeed, how many of them will see life—and where? What women will never meet their intended husbands; what children will never be born? Will I not be committing a genocide as real as Hitler’s, and even more final? But I owe no debt to them, any of them. There is only Rachel, and David, and Ruth. To wipe the reality of Auschwitz from the blank slates of their futures is worth a thousand Zvis, and his country, his poor Israel, destined to die stillborn in the placid hearts of a generation that never looked through barbed wire, never heard the tramp of jackboots. And my personality will dissolve along with theirs—whatever path I follow after 1913, what is me today shall never exist. And yet, if I could only see Rachel and David in my mind. I remember their voices, even their touch, but their faces dissolve into mist whenever I attempt to capture them. They are all I have left of reality, and yet they are the substance of shadows. Am I extinguishing a world to remember the faces of my children?
Tel Aviv, Friday, October 22, 1959.
The hypnopaedia is installed and functions properly. I have dispensed with the encephalograph and electrocardiagram; this experiment will not be entered in any record book. Intravenous feeding is impossible, of course, but I only have two days to succeed or fail, in any case. Nutrition is the last of my worries.
I have installed a photic stimulator to assist me into trance. This is a photoelectric instrument synchronized to the natural frequencies of the brain. Once tuned in to the subject’s individual frequency, it vastly diminishes resistance to auto-hypnosis by shortening induction time and deepening the hypnotic level. I pray it does not fail me.
I am leaving these notes on my desk. Their recovery will mean my failure—if they still exist, so shall the world I wish to destroy. I cannot conceive of partial success; if my mind does slip the bonds of time, I know I will accomplish my mission. I still do not know how Miriam killed her uncle and disrupted the temporal balance, but kill she did. The intensity of my hate is at least as deep as hers, and the power of my mind infinitely greater. I shall not go back as a tourist.
I will return after closing tonight and lock off the laboratory. Barring accidents, I have until Monday morning. It took longer in Miriam’s case, but I have improved the techniques and am spared the added problem of breaking through schizoid withdrawal. Once I have auto-suggested myself into trance and the tape decks go to work, the process should move swiftly—to success, or failure.
I was wise in acting now. This morning there was a long memo on my desk from Kravitz in the bursar’s office. They’ve discovered that I tapped the contingency fund and have requisitioned my receipts from disbursements. The tone it polite, but Kravitz must be going crazy wondering why I have ordered thirty-seven biographies of Adolf Hitler! Luckily, he has not yet contacted Zirin and the board. But he will soon. Thank God I didn’t wait another week.
Rereading these books, I realize that I have never explicitly discussed the objective of the project. It is quite simple. I—whatever part of me escapes the crucible of the present—intend to travel back to the Vienna of January, 1913. There, I shall kill a boy of twenty-four named Adolf Hitler.
Tel Aviv, Friday evening, 8:30 P.M., October 22, 1959.
I am writing this hurriedly, as a postscript. There are just a few minutes remaining to me. I think everyone has left the building, but I will wait a little longer to be sure.
To whom do I address these notes, I wonder? The people who will find me on Monday morning, rigid in trance, strapped to a talking bed? The men who will shake their heads and murmur their regrets as they carry me off to some mental institution, or push me into a “kind” pensioned retirement? For that is, of course, what will happen if I fail. But, again, perhaps with the ersatz euphoria of megalomania, I am convinced things will be otherwise. I am addressing this memo to the vast swirling limbo that will engulf this present “reality” if—when—I succeed. What exactly will happen at the moment I kill Hitler in 1913, I do not know. Will future time, the time in which he lived to found the Third Reich and stamp his imprint on a screaming world, just cease to be? Or will it unravel slowly, the threads of possibility leading from the spindle of Hitler’s personality dissolving one by one? Or—and I do not care for this thought—will two parallel worlds branch off from the moment that temporal continuity is disrupted, one in which Hitler died at the age of twenty-four and the other in which he lived on until 1945, writing his name in blood across the map of Europe. That I do not want. There must be no world, ever, where Ruth and Rachel and David look at me with begging eyes, where they are dragged from me to the truck, where I watch frozen as the rifle butts thud into their bodies, where I do nothing, where I do not die, where I live.
It is true, of course. If I had died, this world, this reality about me could live on. I do not really hate even Hitler; it is hatred for myself that moves me. What greater horror is there than survival? The lucky ones all died. They were sucked into the earth of Europe, spewed into its darkening skies. The great voracious machine that was the Third Reich devoured their thousand component parts; the bones and juices were melted down like a turkey after Christmas dinner, the hair sheared off to stuff the herrenvolk’s mattresses, the gold plucked from the teeth. A million flowers bloom from their flesh across Czechoslovakia, Germany, Austria, Hungary, Poland . . . . And a few of us left, rejects from the charnel house, Kasper Hausers thrust into a world grown alien, wandering across the face of the moon with dead eyes, echoing hearts. Nothing left but the impotence of hate, the iron despair of existence. And I alone, at last, can do something, can change it all . . . can bring them back, resurrect them, watch the lips of six million graves open to kiss the sky, fashion another world, another life for them. The power of God in the hands of a ghost. I am empty, and I cannot even remember Rachel’s face.
Everyone has left, and I am going into the laboratory.
24, Curzon Street
London, W. 1
November 18, 1959
Dr. Jaacov Rappaport
Maimonides Hospital
57 Herzl Street
Tel Aviv, Republic of Israel
Dear Dr. Rappaport:
I am enclosing the attached document for your private consideration. As you know, for some time Stacchmann and myself have been working on an official history of the Institut fur Neuro-pat hologie. In a recent examination of some of Freud’s unpublished notes, mainly fragments and memos to Lossman, I came upon the following piece of paper, apparently an extract from a journal or working notebook. Several things about it lead me to ask your advice. For one thing, it is signed by Dr. Karl Hirsch, apparently the same Hirsch responsible for The Foundations of Social Therapy. I know of his postwar work with you, and I was grieved to learn of his recent death. Furthermore, the note puports to be written in 1913, and indeed the quality of the paper and the state of the ink indicate it is not of recent origin. However, the message refers to Adolf Hitler. It is addressed to Freud, but there is a notation on it that appears to be in the handwriting of Jung. I can only assume the whole thing is some kind of elaborate fraud, perhaps initiated by a graduate student here who read of Dr. Hirsch’s death. But it somehow disturbs me. The papers among which this extract was found have been under lock and key in the university archives; and, what is more, I have been studying them intensively for several weeks and am conversant with every item in the file. The enclosed seems to have sprung out of thin air. This is obviously some kind of hoax, but I find the whole affair perplexing. Can you shed any light on it?
In any case, I look forward to seeing you at the Brussels
Conference.
Fraternally,
Gabriel Berman
November 24, 1959
Dr. Lev Zirin Hebrew University Jerusalem Lev:
What on earth do you make of the enclosed? And how old was Hirsch in 1913? I will be in Jerusalem next week, and I wish you would fill me in on your initial doubts about Hirsch and his last project. Didn’t he die after experimenting on himself? And if the old man did go crackers at the end, did his mania encompass long-distance forgery? Keep this to yourself in any event.
Yours,
Yaacov
Enclosure (for your eyes only):
Vienna, January 26, 1913.
Not a date, but an epitaph. May God forgive me.
It worked, beautifully, smoothly, inexorably, as I knew it would, as it had to. It worked, because time could not be changed.
How long I can keep on writing this, I do not know. If I finish, I will send it to the one man who deserves it, Sigmund Freud. My teacher. In this world he is a man of fifty-seven, just blossoming into fame. Yes, let him have this, and if he doesn’t throw it away, perhaps years later it will strike a chord. A peculiar form of revenge, I suppose. Fitting.
These lines are not written by my hand. The fingers that hold the pen are long, sensitive. An artist’s hand, graceful. The hand of Adolf Hitler.
It should have been obvious. In my obsession, I never gave serious thought to the most vital element of the entire equation: how had Miriam killed her uncle? Granted the ability of the mind to transcend time, it must remain a disembodied entity in that other-when, an observer, not an actor. Then how to manipulate material objects, move the razor to the throat, the gun to the temple? So obvious, and I never thought of it. Miriam’s mind traveled back and entered the mind of her uncle. The force of her hate wedded her consciousness to his and gave her possession. Possession. Perhaps this accounts for the countless tales throughout history of demons that seize the mind, of satanic forces wrestling for the souls of men. Perhaps others have traveled back, without my alchemist’s kit of science, entering the brains of their victims, possessing them. As I have. As I almost have. Miriam’s uncle was not murdered, at least not in the technical sense of the word. He committed suicide.
