Time Warps

by Isaac Asimov

  Ahead of us a low roar went up. We were riding out of the defile, and a broad valley lay spread out before us. Along this valley moved a train of clumsy, lumbering wagons. I saw men on horseback—men in blue, whose appearance and whose horses were fresher than ours. The rest is dim and confused.

  I remember a bugle blown. I saw a tall, rangy man on a great horse at the head of our column draw his sword and stand up in his stirrups, and his voice rang above the blast of the bugle: “Charge! Holler, boys, holler!”

  Then there was a shout that rent the skies apart, and we stormed out of the defile and down into the valley like a mountain torrent. I was like two men—one that rode and shouted and slashed right and left with a reddened saber, and one who sat wondering and fumbling for something elusive which he could not grasp. But the conviction was growing that I had experienced all this before; it was like living an episode forewarned in a dream.

  The blue line held for a few minutes, then it broke in pieces before our irresistible onslaught, and we hunted them up and down the valley. The battle resolved itself into a hundred combats, where men in blue and men in gray circled each other on stamping, rearing horses, with bright blades glittering in the rising sun.

  My gaunt horse stumbled and went down and I

  pulled myself free. In my daze I did not take off his saddle. I walked toward a group of officers and men who were clustered about the tall man who had led the charge. As I approached, I heard him say: “Gentlemen, it seems the enemy has shot off one of my stirrups.”

  Then before I could hear anything else, I came face to face with a man I recognized at last. Yet like all else he was subtly altered. I gasped: “Why grandad! You’re young again! You’re younger than I am!” And in that flash I knew, and I clenched my fists and stood dumbly waiting, frozen, paralyzed, unable to speak or stir. Then something crashed against my head, and with the impact, a great blaze of light lighted universal darkness for an instant, and then all was oblivion.

  Sweet William, he has died of grief,

  And I shall die of sorrow!

  My grandfather’s voice still wailed in my ears, faint with the distance, as I staggered to my feet, pressing my hand to the gash the bay’s hoof had laid open in my scalp. I was sick and nauseated and my head swam dizzily. My grandfather was still singing. Less than seconds had elapsed since the bay’s hoof felled me senseless on the littered stable floor. Yet in those brief seconds I had traveled through the eternities and back. I knew at last my true cosmic identity and the reason for those dreams of wooded mountains and gurgling rivers and of a brave, sweet face which had haunted my dreams since childhood.

  Going out into the corral, I caught the mustang and saddled him, without bothering to dress my scalp wound. It had quit bleeding and my head was clearing. I rode down the valley and up the hill until I came to the Ormond house, perched in gaunt poverty on a sandy hillside, limned against the brown post-oak thickets behind it. The paint on the warped boards had long ago been worn away by rain and sun, both equally fierce in the hills of the Divide.

  I dismounted and entered the yard with its barbed wire fence. Chickens pecking on the porch scampered squawking out of the way, and a scrawny hound bayed at me. The door opened to my knock and Jim Ormond stood framed in it, a gaunt, stooped man with sunken cheeks and lackluster eyes and gnarled hands.

  He looked at me in dull surprise, for we were only acquaintances.

  “Is Miss Rachel—” I began. “Is she—has she—” I halted in some confusion. He shook his bushy head.

  “She’s dyin’. Doc Blaine’s with her. I reckon her time’s come. She don’t want to live, noway. She keeps callin’ for Joel Grimes, pore old soul.”

  “May I come in?” I asked. “I want to see Doc Blaine.” Even the dead can not intrude uninvited on the the dying.

  “Come in.” He drew aside, and I went into the miserably bare room. A frowsy-headed woman was moving about listlessly, and cotton-headed children looked timidly at me from other doorways. Doc Blaine came out from an inner room and stared at me.

  “What the devil are you doing here?”

  The Ormonds had lost interest in me. They went wearily about their tasks. I came close to Doc Blaine and said in a low voice. “Rachel! I must see her!” He stared at the insistence of my tone, but he is a man who sometimes instinctively grasps things that his conscious mind does not understand.

  He led me into a room and I saw an old, old woman lying on a bed. Even in her old age her vitality was apparent, though that was waning fast. She lent a new atmosphere even to the wretched surroundings. And I knew her and stood transfixed. Yes, I knew her, beyond all the years and the changes they had wrought.

  She stirred and murmured: “Joel! Joel! I’ve waited for you so long! I knew you’d come.” She stretched out withered arms, and I went without a word and seated myself beside her bed. Recognition came into her glazing eyes. Her bony fingers closed on mine caressingly. Her touch was that of a young girl.

  “I knew you’d come before I died,” she whispered. “Death couldn’t keep you away. Oh, the cruel wound on your head, Joel! But you’re past suffering, just as I’ll be in a few minutes. You never forgot me, Joel?”

  “I never forgot you, Rachel,” I answered, and I felt Doc

  Blaine’s start behind me and knew that my voice was not that of the John Grimes he knew, but another, a different voice whispered down the ages. I did not see him go, but I knew he tip-toed out.

  “Sing to me, Joel,” she whispered. “There’s your guitar hanging on the wall. I’ve kept it always. Sing the song you sang when we met that day beside the Cumberland River. I always loved it.”

  I took up the ancient guitar, and though I had never played one before, I had no doubts. I struck the worn strings and sang, and my voice was weird and golden. The dying woman’s hands were on my arm, and as I looked, I saw and recognized the picture I had seen in the defile of the dawn. I saw youth and love everlasting and understanding.

  Sweet William lies in the upper churchyard;

  And by his side, his lover,

  And on his grave grew a lily-white rose,

  And on hers grew a briar.

  They grew, they grew to the church steeple-top,

  And there they grew no higher,

  They tied themselves in a true lover’s knot,

  And there remained for ever.

  The string snapped loudly. Rachel Ormond was lying still and her lips were smiling. I disengaged my hand gently from her dead fingers and went out. Doc Blaine met me at the door.

  “Dead?”

  “She died years ago,” I said heavily. “She waited long for him; now she must wait somewhere else. That’s the hell of war; it upsets the balance of things and throws lives into confusion that eternity cannot make right.”

  There was something tremendously exciting about the opening of the Biofilm Institute. Even a hardened Sunday supplement writer like Wellman Zatz felt it.

  Arlington Prescott a wiper in a contact-eyeglass factory; while searching for a time machine; had invented the Biotime Camera; a standard movie camera—minus sound; of course—that projected a temporal beam; re-accumulated if and focused it on a temporal-light-sensitized film. When he discovered that he had to be satisfied with merely photographing the past not physically visiting if Prescott had quit doing research and become principal of a nursery school.

  But; Zatz explained; dictating his notes by persfone to a voxtyper in the telenews office; the Biofilm Institute was based on Prescott’s repudiated invention. A huge; massive building; mostly below ground; in the twenty-third century style; and equipped with 1,000 Biotime Cameras; it was the gift of Humboldt Maxwell; wealthy manufacturer of Snack Capsules. There were 1,000 teams of biographers; military analysts; historians; etc.; to begin recording history as it actually happened—with special attention; according to Maxwell’s grant; to past leaders of industry; politics; science; and the arts; in the order named.

  Going through the Biofilm Institute
, Wellman Zatz gained mostly curt or snarled interviews with the Bioteams; fishing through time for incidents or persons was a nervous job, and they resented interruptions.

  He settled finally on a team that seemed slightly friendlier. They were watching what looked like a scene from Elizabethan England on the monitor screen.

  “Sir Isaac Newton,” Kelvin Burns, the science biographer, grunted in reply to Zatz’s question. “Great man. We want to find out why he went off the beam.”

  Zatz knew about that, of course. Sunday feature articles for centuries had used the case of Sir Isaac to support arguments for psychic phenomena. After making all his astonishing discoveries by the age of twenty-five, the great seventeenth century scientist had spent the rest of his long life in a hunt for precognition, the philosopher’s stone, and other such paraphernalia of mysticism.

  “My guess,” said Mowbray Glass, the psychiatrist, “is paranoia caused by feelings of rejection in childhood.”

  But the screen showed a happy boy in what seemed to be a normal seventeenth century home and school environment. Glass grew puzzled as Sir Isaac eventually produced his binomial theorem, differential and integral calculus, and went to work on gravity—all without evidencing any symptoms of emotional imbalance.

  “The most unbelievable demonstrative and deductive powers I’ve encountered,” said Pinero Schmidt, the science integrator. “I can’t believe such a man could go mystical.”

  “But he did,” Glass said, and tensed. “Look!”

  Alone in a dark, cumbersomely furnished study, the man on the screen, wearing a satin coat, stock and breeches, glanced up sharply. He looked directly into the temporal beam for a moment, and stared into the shadows of the room. He grabbed up a silver candlestick and searched the corners, holding the heavy candlestick like a weapon.

  “He’s mumbling something,” reported Gonzalez Carson, the lip-reader. “Spies. He thinks somebody’s after his discoveries.”

  Burns looked puzzled. “That’s the first sign we’ve seen of breakdown. But what caused it?”

  “I’m damned if I know,” admitted Glass.

  “Heredity?” Zatz suggested.

  “No,” Glass said positively. “It’s been checked.”

  The Bioteam spent hours prying further. When the scientist was in his thirties, he developed a continuing habit of looking up and smiling secretly. On his deathbed, forty years later, he moved his lips happily, without fear.

  “ ‘My guardian angel,’ ” Carson interpreted for them. “ ‘You’ve watched over me all my life. I am content to meet you now.’ ”

  Glass started. He went to one Bioteam after another, asking a brief question of each. When he came back, he was trembling.

  “What’s the answer, Doc?” Zatz asked eagerly.

  “We can’t use the Biotime Camera any more,” Glass said, looking sick. “My colleagues have been investigating the psychoses of Robert Schumann, Marcel Proust and others, who all eventually developed delusions of persecution.”

  “Yeah, but why?” Zatz persisted.

  “Because they thought they were being spied upon. And they were, of course. By us!”

  The storm ruined my plan.

  Not by seasickness. I’d come prepared for the worst; knowing how rough it could get on a sailing ship of the Nineteenth Century. I outrode the storm easily, stowed away in the hold. Not even the breakage of some of the 1,700 barrels of alcohol carried as a cargo bothered me although the stench was terrific.

  But on the morning of 25 November 1872, the first mate, Albert Richardson, sent the second mate, Andrew Gilling, below with two of the German seaman to assay the storm damage. They found me and I was hauled aloft before Captain Briggs as a stowaway.

  Captain Briggs of the Mary Celeste eyed my strange clothing with deep curiosity, but his interest was obviously more concerned with my unauthorized presence. He said sternly, “When did you get aboard?”

  I realized that I had to impress him. I smiled. “You delayed your sailing from the Fifth November to the Sixth so that you and Mrs. Briggs could have dinner aboard Die Gratia with Captain Morehouse,” I said.

  “How can you know so much?” he exclaimed. “How can you live as a stowaway for almost twenty days?”

  I held up my chronithon contactor, knowing that now I could impress him indeed. “Captain Briggs,” I said. “I am a time-traveling historian from the Twenty-Second Century.” I pointed to the big red button on the top. “Until I depress this button and return to my own day and age, every morning I receive my daily ration of food and water. It’s about—”

  I’d timed it close. I was interrupted by the click of the chronithon as it time-transferred my daily ration. I opened the cabinet and offered a bite of twenty-second century breakfast to the captain.

  He said, “This is a sailor’s tall tale, I think. You claim that you’re a time-traveling historian? Then tell me, why are you here on Mary Celeste?”

  “Captain Briggs,” I said, “the Time Machine was invented in 1987. Within twenty years every historical event had been painstakingly researched and authentically written—rewritten—by time-traveling historians who viewed the event as partaking eye-witnesses. By my time, fame and fortune awaits any man who has the luck and dogged determination to scour historic time to locate some event that has not been recounted faithfully to the last niggling little detail. Why, Captain Briggs, in Jim Bishop’s famous The Day Columbus Landed they record the name of the man who owned the hen that laid the egg that Columbus stood on end to impress Isabella with his ability. And so, Captain Briggs, I stowed away because I—”

  A woman’s voice interrupted me, I turned to look at the captain’s wife who, of course, was the only woman aboard Mary Celeste. She was carrying little Sophia Matilda in her arms. She said, “Edward, what unearthly manner of ship is that?”

  The steward, Edward Head, replied, “I don’t rightly know, ma-am.”

  I turned to look. No more than fifty feet from the starboard rail was vast barge. Upon the barge were serried rows of seats that stretched upwards and backwards for hundreds of feet. The seats were filling rapidly; ushers were escorting the spectators efficiently, vendors were selling refreshments and programs. A thrumming sound came from overhead and I looked up to watch the materialization of jetcopters and personnel

  carriers and even a poised spacecraft hanging in a dome above our heads.

  Over the lee rail came a crew of technicians carrying the heavy Ward-Workman tridi recorders of the Twenty-Seventh Century, and their director pulled a script from his pocket and said:

  “Joe, you and Pete dislocate the binnacle and break the compass. Al, open the fore hatch and lazarette. Tony, that spring-wound chronometer is a pre-atomic clock and worth a fortune to the National Museum, put it among my personal loot, along with the sextant. You can keep the ship’s register, but give the navigation books to George with my compliments. Let’s see, um. Sails, jib and fore-topmast. Now toss the yawl overboard; get it out of the way. It’s missing.” One of his men came up and said something to him that I could not hear. “No,” he replied, “It would not be more dramatic to dummy-up a half-eaten breakfast and a pan of milk warming on the stove for the baby. Too many writers tried to make it that way in the beginning. I know what’s authentic.”

  Then he paused as the Ward-Workman cameramen panned around Mary Celeste making close-up and approach shots. One by one they finished their work and reported to him.

  “Fine,” he said, looking at his strapwatch. “Nowlet’s back off for some long shots. And remember, we don’t know what kind of a catastrophe this is going to be, so keep those tridi recorders running constantly until I tell you to stop!”

  Captain Benjamin Spooner Briggs of Mary Celeste put an arm around his wife. To me he said, “I don’t completely understand, but I do get enough to realize that we re the subject of something evil.”

  “Yes,” I replied, “you—”

  “We re not waiting here to let it happen to us!” he snappe
d.

  “But you can’t change history!” I objected.

  Watch,” he said roughly. And then with a stentorian voice, Captain Briggs roared: “Abandon ship!”

  The captain and his wife, still carrying their daughter Sophia Matilda, mingled with the photorecording crew. The two mates, the steward, the four German seamen went over the side and swam swiftly for the barges. There were flurries of

  activity when they went aboard the barges, but the activity stilled and I was alone on Mary Celeste.

  I looked around me and realized that Captain Briggs hadn’t changed history. He’d made it!

  Slowly the barges emptied, the spectators returned to their own time and place among the Centuries. Sorrowfully I pressed my button and went home. My fame would never be, my fortune would never start. My book would remain unwritten, for I knew full well that potential customers for my book on this historic event had been here as an eyewitness. After seeing it, who’d bother to buy my book?

  On 4 December 1872, Captain Morehouse of Die Gratia sighted Mary Celeste yawing in a mild sea with jib and foretopmast sails set, no one at the helm and no one aboard. The binnacle was knocked out of place, the compass was broken. The sextant, chronometer, ship’s register and navigation books were missing. The ship’s yawl, lashed to the main hatch, was missing. The fore hatch and lazarette were open and about a dozen of the ship’s cargo of 1,700 barrels of alcohol were broken or leaking badly.

  The last notation in the ship’s deck log had been made early in the morning of 25 November 1872, and the account of the previous hours indicated that Mary Celeste had come through a severe storm on the previous day and most of the night.