The next jump-back came at 9.11. Somewhere I'd left the mantelpiece, gone back to the sofa and lit a cigarette.
It was 9.04. Helen had opened the verandah windows and was looking out into the street.
The set was on again so I pulled the plug out at the main. I threw the cigarette into the fire; not having seen myself light it, made it taste like someone else's.
'Harry, like to go out for a stroll?' Helen suggested. 'It'll be rather nice in the park.'
Each successive jump-back gave us a new departure point. If now I bundled her outside and got her down to the end of the road, at the next jump we'd both be back in the lounge again, but probably have decided to drive to the pub instead.
'Harry?'
'What, sorry?'
'Are you asleep, angel? Like to go for a walk? It'll wake you up.'
'All right,' I said. 'Go and get your coat.'
'Will you be warm enough like that?'
She went off into the bedroom.
I walked round the lounge and convinced myself that I was awake. The shadows, the solid feel of the chairs, the definition was much too fine for a dream.
It was 9.08. Normally Helen would take ten minutes to put on her coat.
The jump-back came almost immediately.
It was 9.06.
I was still on the sofa and Helen was bending down and picking up her work basket.
This time, at last, the set was off.
'Have you got any money on you?' Helen asked.
I felt in my pocket automatically. 'Yes. How much do you want?'
Helen looked at me. 'Well, what do you usually pay for the drinks? We'll only have a couple.'
'We're going to the pub, are we?'
'Darling, are you all right?' She came over to me. 'You look all strangled. Is that shirt too tight?'
'Helen,' I said, getting up. 'I've got to try to explain something to you. I don't know why it's happening, it's something to do with these billows of gas the sun's releasing.'
Helen was watching me with her mouth open.
'Harry,' she started to say nervously. 'What's the matter?'
'I'm quite all right,' I assured her. 'It's just that everything is happening very rapidly and I don't think there's much time left.'
I kept on glancing at the clock and Helen followed my eyes to it and went over to the mantelpiece. Watching me she moved it round and I heard the pendulum jangle. - 'No, no,' I shouted. I grabbed it and pushed it back against the wall.
We jumped back to 9.07.
Helen was in the bedroom. I had exactly a minute left.
'Harry,' she called. 'Darling, do you want to, or don't you?'
I was by the lounge window, muttering something.
I was out of touch with what my real self was doing in the normal time channel. The Helen talking to me now was a phantom.
It was I, not Helen and everybody else, who was riding the merrygo-round.
Jump.
9.07-15.
Helen was standing in the doorway.
'... down to the... the...' I was saying.
Helen watched me, frozen. A fraction of a minute left.
I started to walk over to her. to walk over to her ver to her er I came out of it like a man catapulted from a revolving door. I was stretched out flat on the sofa, a hard aching pain running from the top of my head down past my right ear into my neck.
I looked at the time .9.45. I could hear Helen moving around in the dining room. I lay there, steadying the room round me, and in a few minutes she came in carrying a tray and a couple of glasses.
'How do you feel?' she asked, making up an alka-seltzer.
I let it fizzle down and drank it.
'What happened?' I asked. 'Did I collapse?'
'Not exactly. You were watching the play. I thought you looked rather seedy so I suggested we go out for a drink. You went into a sort of convulsion.'
I stood up slowly and rubbed my neck. 'God, I didn't dream all that! I couldn't have done.'
'What was it about?'
'A sort of crazy merry-go-round - 'The pain grabbed at my neck when I spoke. I went over to the set and switched it on. 'Hard to explain coherently. Time was - ' I flinched as the pain bit in again.
'Sit down and rest,' Helen said. 'I'll come and join you. Like a drink?'
'Thanks. A big scotch.'
I looked at the set. On Channel 1 there was a breakdown sign, a cabaret on 2, a flood-lit stadium on 5, and a variety show on 9. No sign anywhere of either Diller's play or the panel game.
Helen brought the drink in and sat down on the sofa with me.
'It started off when we were watching the play,' I explained, massaging my neck.
'Sh, don't bother now. Just relax.'
I put my head on Helen's shoulder and looked up at the ceiling, listening to the sound coming from the variety show. I thought back through each turn of the round-about, wondering whether I could have dreamt it all.
Ten minutes later Helen said, 'Well, I didn't think much of that. And they're doing an encore. Good heavens.'
'Who are?' I asked. I watched the light from the screen flicker across her face.
'That team of acrobats. The something Brothers. One of them even slipped. How do you feel?'
'Fine.' I turned my head round and looked at the screen.
Three or four acrobats with huge v-torsos and skin briefs were doing simple handstands on to each other's arms. They finished the act and went into a more involved routine, throwing around a girl in leopard skin panties. The applause was deafening. I thought they were moderately good.
Two of them began to give what seemed to be a demonstration of dynamic tension, straining against each other like a pair of catatonic bulls, their necks and legs locked, until one of them was levered slowly off the ground.
'Why do they keep on doing that?' Helen said. 'They've done it twice already.'
'I don't think they have,' I said. 'This is a slightly different act.'
The pivot man tremored, one of his huge banks of muscles collapsed, and the whole act toppled and then sprung apart.
'They slipped there the last time,' Helen said.
'No, no,' I pointed out quickly. 'That one was a headstand. Here they were stretched out horizontally.'
'You weren't watching,' Helen told me. She leant forward. 'Well, what are they playing at? They're repeating the whole thing for the third time.'
It was an entirely new act to me, but I didn't try to argue.
I sat up and looked at the clock.
10.05.
'Darling,' I said, putting my arm round her. 'Hold tight.'
'What do you mean?'
'This is the merry-go-round. And you're driving.'
1956
The Concentration City
Noon talk on Millionth Street: 'Sorry, these are the West Millions. You want 9775335th East.'
'Dollar five a cubic foot? Sell!'
'Take a westbound express to 495th Avenue, cross over to a Redline elevator and go up a thousand levels to Plaza Terminal. Carry on south from there and you'll find it between 568th Avenue and 422nd Street.'
'There's a cave-in down at KEN County! Fifty blocks by twenty by thirty levels.'
'Listen to this - "PYROMANIACS STAGE MASS BREAKOUT! FIRE POLICE CORDON BAY COUNTY!"
'It's a beautiful counter. Detects up to .005 per cent monoxide. Cost me three hundred dollars.'
'Have you seen those new intercity sleepers? They take only ten minutes to go up 3,000 levels!'
'Ninety cents a foot? Buy!'
'You say the idea came to you in a dream?' the voice snapped. 'You're sure no one else gave it to you.'
'No,' M. said. A couple of feet away from him a spot-lamp threw a cone of dirty yellow light into his face. He dropped his eyes from the glare and waited as the sergeant paced over to his desk, tapped his fingers on the edge and swung round on him again.
'You talked it over with your friends?'
'Only the first theory,'
M. explained. 'About the possibility of flight.'
'But you told me the other theory was more important. Why keep it from them?'
M. hesitated. Outside somewhere a trolley shunted and clanged along the elevated. 'I was afraid they wouldn't understand what I meant.'
The sergeant laughed. 'Do you mean they would have thought you really were insane?'
M. shifted uncomfortably on the stool. Its seat was only six inches off the floor and his thighs felt like slabs of inflamed rubber. After three hours of cross-questioning logic had faded. 'The concept was a little abstract. There weren't any words for it.'
The sergeant shook his head. 'I'm glad to hear you say it.' He sat down on the desk, watched M. for a moment and then went over to him.
'Now look,' he said confidentially. 'It's getting late. Do you still think both theories are reasonable?'
M. looked up. 'Aren't they?'
The sergeant turned to the man watching in the shadows by the window. 'We're wasting our time,' he snapped. 'I'll hand him over to Psycho. You've seen enough, haven't you, Doctor?'
The surgeon stared at his hands. He had taken no part in the interrogation, as if bored by the sergeant's method of approach.
'There's something I want to find out,' he said. 'Leave me alone with him for half an hour.'
When the sergeant had gone the surgeon sat down behind the desk and stared out of the window, listening to the dull hum of air through the ventilator shaft which rose out of the street below the station. A few roof lights were still burning and two hundred yards away a single policeman patrolled the iron catwalk running above the street, his boots ringing across the darkness.
M. sat on the stool, elbows between his knees, trying to edge a little life back into his legs.
Eventually the surgeon glanced down at the charge sheet.
Name Franz M.
Age 20.
Occupation Student.
Address 3599719 West 783rd St. Level 549-7705-45KN1 (Local).
Charge Vagrancy.
'Tell me about this dream,' he said, idly flexing a steel rule between his hands as he looked across at M.
'I think you've heard everything, sir,' M. said.
'In detail.'
M. shifted uneasily. 'There wasn't much to it, and what I do remember isn't too clear now.'
The surgeon yawned. M. waited and then started to recite what he had already repeated twenty times.
'I was suspended in the air above a flat stretch of open ground, something like the floor of an enormous arena. My arms were out at my sides, and I was looking down, floating - , 'Hold on,' the surgeon interrupted. 'Are you sure you weren't swimming?'
'No,' M. said. 'I'm certain I wasn't. All around me there was free space. That was the most important part about it. There were no walls. Nothing but emptiness. That's all I remember.'
The surgeon ran his finger along the edge of the rule.
'Go on.'
'Well, the dream gave me the idea of building a flying machine. One of my friends helped me construct it.'
The surgeon nodded. Almost absently he picked up the charge sheet and crushed it with a single motion of his hand.
'Don't be absurd, Franz!' Gregson remonstrated. They took their places in the chemistry cafeteria queue. 'It's against the laws of hydrodynamics. Where would you get your buoyancy?'
'Suppose you had a rigid fabric vane,' Franz explained as they shuffled past the hatchways. 'Say ten feet across, like one of those composition wall sections, with hand grips on the ventral surface. And then you jumped down from the gallery at the Coliseum Stadium. What would happen?'
'You'd make a hole in the floor. Why?'
'No, seriously.'
'If it was large enough and held together you'd swoop down like a paper dart.'
'Glide,' Franz said. 'Right.' Thirty levels above them one of the intercity expresses roared over, rattling the tables and cutlery in the cafeteria. Franz waited until they reached a table and sat forward, his food forgotten.
'And say you attached a propulsive unit, such as a battery-driven ventilator fan, or one of those rockets they use on the Sleepers. With enough thrust to overcome your weight. What then?'
Gregson shrugged. 'If you could control the thing, you'd, you'd...'He frowned at Franz. 'What's the word? You're always using it.'
'Fly.'
'Basically, Matheson, the machine is simple,' Sanger, the physics lector, commented as they entered the science library. 'An elementary application of the Venturi Principle. But what's the point of it? A trapeze would serve its purpose equally well, and be far less dangerous. In the first place consider the enormous clearances it would require. I hardly think the traffic authorities will look upon it with any favour.'
'I know it wouldn't be practical here,' Franz admitted. 'But in a large open area it should be.'
'Allowed. I suggest you immediately negotiate with the Arena Garden on Level 347-25,' the lector said whimsically. 'I'm sure they'll be glad to hear about your scheme.'
Franz smiled politely. 'That wouldn't be large enough. I was really thinking of an area of totally free space. In three dimensions, as it were.'
Sanger looked at Franz curiously. 'Free space? Isn't that a contradiction in terms? Space is a dollar a cubic foot.' He scratched his nose. 'Have you begun to construct this machine yet?'
'No,' Franz said.
'In that event I should try to forget all about it. Remember, Matheson, the task of science is to consolidate existing knowledge, to systematize and reinterpret the discoveries of the past, not to chase wild dreams into the future.'
He nodded and disappeared among the dusty shelves.
Gregson was waiting on the steps.
'Well?' he asked.
'Let's try it out this afternoon,' Franz said. 'We'll cut Text 5 Pharmacology. I know those Fleming readings backwards. I'll ask Dr McGhee for a couple of passes.'
They left the library and walked down the narrow, dimly-lit alley which ran behind the huge new civil engineering laboratories. Over seventy-five per cent of the student enrolment was in the architectural and engineering faculties, a meagre two per cent in pure sciences. Consequently the physics and chemistry libraries were housed in the oldest quarter of the university, in two virtually condemned galvanized hutments which once contained the now closed philosophy school.
At the end of the alley they entered the university plaza and started to climb the iron stairway leading to the next level a hundred feet above. Halfway up a white-helmeted F. P. checked them cursorily with his detector and waved them past.
'What did Sanger think?' Gregson asked as they stepped up into 637th Street and walked across to the suburban elevator station.
'He's no use at all,' Franz said. 'He didn't even begin to understand what I was talking about.'
Gregson laughed ruefully. 'I don't know whether I do.'
Franz took a ticket from the automat and mounted the down platform. An elevator dropped slowly towards him, its bell jangling.
'Wait until this afternoon,' he called back. 'You're really going to see something.'
The floor manager at the Coliseum initialled the two passes. - 'Students, eh? All right.' He jerked a thumb at the long package Franz and Gregson were carrying. 'What have you got there?'
'It's a device for measuring air velocities,' Franz told him.
The manager grunted and released the stile.
Out in the centre of the empty arena Franz undid the package and they assembled the model. It had a broad fan-like wing of wire and paper, a narrow strutted fuselage and a high curving tail.
Franz picked it up and launched it into the air. The model glided for twenty feet and then slithered to a stop across the sawdust.
'Seems to be stable,' Franz said. 'We'll tow it first.'
He pulled a reel of twine from his pocket and tied one end to the nose. As they ran forward the model lifted gracefully into the air and followed them around the stadium, ten feet off the floor.
'
Let's try the rockets now,' Franz said. He adjusted the wing and tail settings and fitted three firework display rockets into a wire bracket mounted above the wing.
The stadium was four hundred feet in diameter and had a roof two hundred and fifty feet high. They carried the model over to one side and Franz lit the tapers.
There was a burst of flame and the model accelerated across the floor, two feet in the air, a bright trail of coloured smoke spitting out behind it. Its wings rocked gently from side to side. Suddenly the tail burst into flames. The model lifted steeply and looped up towards the roof, stalled just before it hit one of the pilot lights and dived down into the sawdust.
They ran across to it and stamped out the glowing cinders. 'Franz!' Gregson shouted. 'It's incredible! It actually works.'
Franz kicked the shattered fuselage. 'Of course it works,' he said impatiently. 'But as Sanger said, what's the point of it?'
'The point? It flies! Isn't that enough?'
'No. I want one big enough to hold me.'
'Franz, slow down. Be reasonable. Where could you fly it?'
'I don't know,' Franz said fiercely. 'But there must be somewhere!'
The floor manager and two assistants, carrying fire extinguishers, ran across the stadium to them.
'Did you hide the matches?' Franz asked quickly. 'They'll lynch us if they think we're Pyros.'
Three afternoons later Franz took the elevator up 150 levels to 677-98, where the Precinct Estate Office had its bureau.
'There's a big development between 493 and 554 in the next sector,' one of the clerks told him. 'I don't know whether that's any good to you. Sixty blocks by twenty by fifteen levels.'
'Nothing bigger?' Franz queried.
The clerk looked up. 'Bigger? No. What are you looking for - a slight case of agoraphobia?'
Franz straightened the maps spread across the counter. 'I wanted to find an area of more or less continuous development. Two or three hundred blocks long.'
The clerk shook his head and went back to his ledger. 'Didn't you go to engineering school?' he asked scornfully. 'The City won't take it. One hundred blocks is the maximum.'
Franz thanked him and left.
A south-bound express took him to the development in two hours. He left the car at the detour point and walked the three hundred yards to the end of the level.
The Complete Short Stories: Volume 1 Page 4
