Ahead of Time

by Henry Kuttner

  Shock

  WHEN GREGG LOOKED up from his book to see the man crawling through the wall of his apartment, he thought briefly that he was crazy. Such things don't happen to a middle-aged physicist who has arranged his life into an ordered pattern. Nevertheless, there was now a hole in the wall, and a half-naked person with macrocephalia was wedging himself through it.

  "Who the hell are you?" Gregg demanded, recovering the use of his tongue.

  The man spoke an odd sort of English, slurred and with an extraordinary tonal range, but recognizable. "I'm a mugwump," he announced, balancing on his middle. "My mug's in . . . eh? . . . in 1953 and my wump's in . . . uh!" He gave a convulsive wriggle and burst through, sprawling on the carpet and breathing hard. "That was a nardly squeeze. The valve isn't quite big enough yet. Forthever."

  It made sense, but not much. Manning Gregg's heavy, leonine features darkened. He reached out, seized a heavy book end, and rose.

  "I am Halison," the newcomer announced, adjusting his toga. "This should be 1953. Norvunder soverless."

  "What?"

  "Semantic difficulty," Halison told him. "I am from about . . . well, several thousand years in the future. Your future."

  Gregg's gaze went in the hole in the wall. "You're talking English."

  "Learned it in 1970. This isn't my first trip into past. Many of them. Looking for something. Important—skandarly important. I use mental power to warp space-time pharron, so valve opens. Lend me clothes, if you please?"

  Still holding the book end, Gregg walked to the wall and looked through the circular gap, just large enough to admit a small man's body. All he could see was a blue, bare wall apparently a few feet away. The adjoining apartment? Improbable.

  "Valve will open wider later," Halison said. "Open at night, closed by day. I must be back before Thursday. Ranil-Mens visits me on Thursdays. But now may I beg clothes? There is something I must find—— I have been searching in time for a long carvishtime. Please?"

  He was still squatting on the floor. Gregg stared down at his extraordinary visitor. Halison was certainly not Homo sapiens 1953. He had a pinched, bright-pink face, with very large bright eyes, and his cranium was abnormally developed and totally bald. He had six fingers and his toes had fused. And he kept up a continual nervous trembling, as though his metabolism had gone haywire.

  "Good Lord!" Gregg said, suddenly understanding. "This isn't a gag. Is it?" His voice rose.

  "Gag, gag, gag. Nevishly holander sprae? Was mugwump wrong? Hard to know what to say in new time-world. You have no conception of our advanced culture, sorry. Hard to get down to same plane with you. Civilization moved fast, fast, after your century. There is not much time. Talk later, but important now that you lend me clothes."

  There was a cold, hard knot just under Gregg's backbone. "Yes, but—wait. If this isn't some——"

  "Forgive me," Halison remarked. "I am looking for something; great hurry. I will return soon. By Thursday anyway to see Ranil-Mens. I get much wisdom from him. Now, forgive reedishly." He touched Gregg's forehead.

  The physicist said, "Talk a bit slower, pl——"

  Halison was gone.

  Gregg whirled, searching the room with his gaze. Nothing. Except that the hole in the wall had doubled in diameter. What the hell.

  He looked at the clock. It was just past eight. It should have been about seven. An hour had passed, it seemed, since Halison had reached out to touch his forehead.

  As a sample of hypnotism, it was damned impressive.

  Gregg carefully found a cigarette and lit it. Drawing smoke into his lungs, he looked at the valve from across the room and considered. A visitor from the future, eh? Well——

  Struck by an obvious thought, he went into the bedroom and discovered that a suit of clothes, a brown Harris tweed, had been confiscated. A shirt was missing, a tie, and a pair of shoes. But the hole in the wall eliminated the chance that this was merely a clever theft. For one thing, Gregg's wallet was still in his trousers pocket.

  He looked through the valve again, but still could see nothing but the blue wall. It obviously wasn't in the next-door apartment of Tommy MacPherson, the aging playboy who had given up night-clubbing for more peaceful pursuits, at his doctor's suggestion. Nevertheless, Gregg went into the hall and rang the buzzer beside MacPherson's door.

  " 'Lo, Mac," he said when a round, pale face, topped by carefully dyed chestnut hair, appeared to blink sleepily at him. "Busy? I'd like to come in a minute."

  MacPherson enviously eyed Gregg's cigarette. "Sure. Make yourself at home. I've been going over some incunabula my Philadelphia man sent me, and wishing for a drink. Highball?"

  "If you'll join me."

  "Wish I could," MacPherson groaned. "But I'm too young to die. What's up?" He followed Gregg into the kitchen and watched the other man carefully examining the wall. "Ants?"

  "There's a hole in my wall," Gregg said. "It doesn't come through, though." Which proved that the valve was definitely off the beam. It had to open either into MacPherson's kitchen or else—some other place.

  "Hole in your wall? How come?"

  "I'll show you."

  "I'm not that curious," MacPherson remarked. "Phone the landlord. He may be interested."

  Gregg scowled. "I mean it, Mac. I want you to take a look. It's—funny. And I'd rather like confirmation."

  "It's either a hole or it isn't," MacPherson said simply. "Is that razor-edged brain of yours poisoned by alcohol? I wish mine was." He looked wistfully at the portable bar.

  "You're no help," Gregg said. "But you're better than nobody. Come on!" He lugged the protesting MacPherson into his apartment and pointed to the valve. Mac went over, muttering something about a mirror, and peered into the gap. He whistled softly. Then he put his arm through, stretching it as far as possible, and tried to touch the blue wall. He couldn't quite make it.

  "The hole's got bigger," Gregg said quietly, "even since a few minutes ago. You see it too, eh?"

  MacPherson found a chair. "Let's have a drink," he grunted. "I need it. Anyhow it's an excuse. Make it short, though," he added with a flash of last-minute caution.

  Gregg mixed two highballs and gave MacPherson one. As they drank, he told the other what had happened. Mac was unhelpful.

  "Out of the future? Glad it didn't happen to me. I'd have gone off my crock."

  "It's perfectly logical," Gregg argued, partly with himself. "The guy—Halison—certainly wasn't a 1953 product."

  "He must have looked like a combination of Pogo and Karloff."

  "Well, you don't look like a Neanderthaler or a Piltdown man, do you? That skull of his—Halison must have a tremendous brain. His I.Q.—well!"

  "What good's all that if he wouldn't talk to you?" MacPherson asked cogently.

  For some reason Gregg felt a slow flush creeping warmly up his neck. "I must have seemed like an ape to him," he said flatly. "I could scarcely understand him—and no wonder. But he'll be back."

  "By Thursday? Who's this Ranilpants?"

  "Ranil-Mens," Gregg said. "A friend, I suppose. A . . . a teacher. Halison said he got wisdom from him. Perhaps Ranil-Mens is a professor at some future university. I can't quite think straight. You don't realize the implications of all this, Mac, do you?"

  "I don't want to," MacPherson said, tasting his drink. "I'm a bit scared."

  "Rationalize it away," Gregg advised. "I'm going to." He looked again at the wall. "That hole's getting pretty big. Wonder if I could step through it?" He walked close to the valve. The blue wall was still there, and a blue floor at a slightly lower level than his own gray carpet. A pungent, pleasant breath of air floated in from the unknown, oddly reassuring.

  "Better not," MacPherson said. "It might close up on you."

  For answer Gregg vanished into the kitchen and returned with a length of thin clothesline. He made a loop around his waist, handed the other end to MacPherson, and crushed out his cigarette in a convenient tray.

  "It won't close till
Halison gets back. Or anyway it won't close too fast. I hope. Sing out if you see it starting to shut, though, Mac. I'll come diving back headfirst."

  "Crazy fool," MacPherson said.

  Gregg, rather pale around the lips, stepped into the future. The valve was more than four feet in diameter by now, its lower edge two feet from the carpet. Gregg had to duck. He straightened up, remembering to breathe, and looked back through the hole into MacPherson's white face.

  "It's O.K.," he said.

  "What's over there?"

  Gregg flattened himself against the blue wall. The floor felt soft under his feet. The four-foot circle was like a cut-out disk, an easel set up in empty air, a film process shot. He could see MacPherson there, and his own room.

  But he was in another room now, large, lit with a cool radiant glow, and utterly different from anything he had ever seen before.

  The windows drew his attention first, oval, tall openings in two of the blue walls, transparent in the center and fading around the edges to translucence and then azure opaqueness. Through them he glimpsed lights, colored lights that moved. He took a step forward and hesitated, looking back to where MacPherson waited.

  "What's it like?"

  "I'll see," Gregg said, and circled the valve. It was invisible from the other side. Perhaps light rays were bent around it. He couldn't tell. A little frightened, he returned briefly to glimpse MacPherson again, and, relieved, continued his explorations.

  The room was about thirty feet square, with a high-domed roof, and the lighting source was at first difficult to discover. Everything in the room had a slight glow. Absorption of sunlight, Gregg thought, like luminous paint. It seemed effective.

  There wasn't much to see. There were low couches, functional-looking padded chairs, comfortable and pastel-tinted, and a few rubbery tables. A square glassy block as large as a small overnight bag, rubbery in texture, was on the blue floor. Gregg could not make out its purpose. When he picked it up gingerly, colors played phosphorescently for a few moments within it.

  There was a book on one of the tables, and he pouched this for future reference. MacPherson hailed him.

  ''Manning? O.K. in there?"

  "Yeah. Just a minute."

  Where were the doors? Gregg grinned wryly. He was slightly handicapped by lacking even the basic technological knowledge for this unknown world. The doors might be activated by pressure, light, or sound. Or even odor, for all he knew. A brief inspection could tell him nothing. But he was worried about the valve. If it closed——

  Well, no great harm would be done, Gregg supposed. This future world was peopled by humans sufficiently similar to himself. And they'd have enough intelligence to return him to his own time-sector—Halison's appearance proved that. Nevertheless, Gregg preferred to have an open exit.

  He went to the nearest window and looked out. The constellations in the purple sky had changed slightly, not much, in a few thousand years. The rainbow lights darted here and there. Aircraft. Beneath him, the dark masses of buildings were dimly visible in the shadow. There was no moon. A few towers rose to his own height, and he could make out the rounded silhouettes of their summits.

  One of the lights swept toward him. Before Gregg could draw back he glimpsed a small ship—antigravity, he thought—with a boy and a girl in the open cockpit. There was neither propeller nor wing structure. The pair resembled Halison in their large craniums and pinched faces, though both had hair on their heads. They, too, wore togalike garments.

  And they did not seem strange, somehow. There was no—alienage. The girl was laughing, and, despite her bulging forehead and meager features, Gregg thought her strangely attractive. Certainly there was no harm in these people. The vague fears of a coldly, ruthlessly inhuman superrace went glimmering.

  They glided past, not twenty feet away, looking straight at Gregg—and did not see him. Astonished, the physicist reached out to touch the smooth, slightly warmish surface of the pane. Odd!

  But there were no lights in the other buildings. The windows must be one-way only, to insure privacy. You could see out, but not in.

  "Manning!"

  Gregg turned hurriedly, re-coiling the rope as he returned to the valve. MacPherson's worried frown greeted him.

  "I wish you'd come back. I'm getting jittery."

  "All right," Gregg said amiably, and crawled through the hole. "But there's no danger. I bagged a book. Here's some very post-incunabula for you!" He drew the volume from his pocket.

  MacPherson took it but didn't open it immediately. His pale eyes were on Gregg's.

  "What did you find?"

  Gregg went into detail. "Quite remarkable in its suggestions, you know. A tiny slice out of the future. It didn't seem so strange when I was in there, but now it seems funny. My drink's warm. Another?"

  "No. Oh, well—yes. Short."

  MacPherson examined the book while Gregg went into the kitchen. Once he glanced up at the valve. It was a little larger, he thought. Not much. Perhaps it had nearly reached its maximum.

  Gregg came back. "Can you read it? No? Well, I expected that. Halison said he had to learn our language. I wonder what he's looking for—in his past?"

  "I wonder who Ranil-Mens is."

  "I'd like to meet him. Thank God I've got training. If I can get Halison—or somebody—to explain things to me, I ought to be able to grasp the rudiments of future technology. What a chance, Mac!"

  "If he's willing."

  "You didn't meet him," Gregg said. "He was friendly, even though he did hypnotize me. What's that?" He seized the book to examine a picture.

  "Octopus," MacPherson suggested.

  "Chart. I wonder. It looks almost like an atomic structure, but it's no compound I've ever run into. I wish I could read these infernal wiggles. They look like a combination of Burmese and Pitman. Even the numerical system's different from the Arabic. A whole treasure chest out there, and no key!"

  "Hm-m-m. Could be. It still looks a bit dangerous to me."

  Gregg eyed MacPherson. "I don't think so. There's no reason at all for anticipating trouble. Dime-novel stuff."

  "What is life but a dime novel?" MacPherson asked moodily, rather bottle-dizzy from the unaccustomed liquor.

  "That's your way of looking at it. And the way you live it." Gregg's tone was unpleasant, chiefly because he was allergic to MacPherson's casually hopeless philosophy. "Try being logical for a change. The race is advancing, in spite of dictators and professional reformers. The industrial revolution started speeding up social mutations. Natural mutations tie in with that. It's progressive. In the next five hundred years we'll have covered as much ground as we did in the last ten thousand. A snowball rolling downhill."

  "So what?"

  "So the ultimate result is logic," Gregg said, "and that doesn't mean a cold-blooded inhuman logic, either. Not when it's human logic. It takes emotions and psychology into account. It will, that is. There won't be Great Brains wanting to conquer universes, or enslaving the remnants of humans. We've seen that. Halison—he was willing to talk, but in too much of a hurry just then. He said he'd explain later."

  "All I know is that there's a hole in the wall," MacPherson said. "It's one of those things that doesn't happen. Now it's happened. Sorry I've got my wind up."

  "That's the way you're keeping your emotional balance," Gregg told him. "I prefer to do it along the lines of mathematics. Working out the equation, from what factors we've got. Induction won't tell us much, but it shows what a tremendous thing the whole must be. A perfect world——"

  "How d'you know?"

  Gregg was stumped. "Well, it seemed that way. In a few thousand years civilization will have time to apply technology and use the nuances. Physically and mentally. The best part of it is that they won't be snooty about it. They can't. Anyhow, Halison wasn't."

  "That hole isn't getting any bigger," MacPherson said. "I've been watching a spot on the wallpaper."

  "Well," Gregg said inconclusively, "it's not getting smal
ler, either. Wish I knew how to open the doors in there. So damn much I can't understand by myself!"

  "Have another drink. That may help."

  It didn't, much. Gregg didn't quite dare go through the valve again, for fear it might close suddenly, and he sat with MacPherson, smoking, drinking, and talking, while the night moved slowly on. From time to time they re-examined the book. That told them nothing.

  Halison remained absent. At three a.m. the valve began closing. Gregg remembered what the man from the future had said; that the gap would open at night and remain closed by day. Presumably it would open again. If it didn't, then the chance of a hundred lifetimes had been muffed!

  In half an hour the valve had shut completely, leaving no trace on the wallpaper. MacPherson, glassy about the eyes, returned to his own apartment. Gregg locked the book in a desk drawer and went to bed to snatch a few hours' sleep before the alarm roused him.

  Later, dressing, Gregg phoned Haverhill Research to say he would not be in that day. In case Halison showed up, he wanted to be on hand. But Halison did not arrive. Gregg spent the morning crushing out cigarettes and thumbing through the book. In the afternoon he sent it by messenger to Courtney, at the university, with a brief note asking for information. Courtney, whose forte was languages, telephoned to say he was baffled.

  Naturally he was curious. Gregg spent an awkward five minutes putting him off, and decided to be more wary next time. He was not anxious to release his secret to the world. Even MacPherson—well, that couldn't be helped now. But this was Manning Gregg's discovery, and it was only fair that he should have first rights.

  Gregg's selfishness was completely unmercenary. Had he analyzed his motives, he would have realized that he was greedy for intellectual intoxication—that was the only suitable term. Gregg did have a really fine, keen-edged brain, and took an intense delight in using it. He could get positively drunk on the working out of technical problems, the same pleasure an engineer feels at sight of a beautifully executed blueprint, or a pianist confronted by an intricate composition. He was a perfectionist. And to be given a key to the perfect world of the future——

  He was not certain of its perfection, of course, but later he felt more certain. Especially after the valve slowly began opening at six thirty that evening.