Time Travel Omnibus Volume 1

by Anthology

  I stared stupidly, perhaps, yet not as stupidly as I doubtless looked. I realised, at least, that from the point of view of a different consciousness having new faculties, our own best scientific dicta must be childishly inadequate and false. But I found no useful word to say. Fatigue, too, began to stupefy me. “It was a good question all the same,” he went on, “the one you put. Our three-dimensional consciousness has no faculty that can know anything of a universe that is certainly many-dimensional. Our best knowledge is a dream, born of dream-minds in a dream-civilisation. To tell us how water runs downhill is to tell us nothing—why it runs downhill is god-like.” He looked me over as man might regard a stupid employee who had done his best, and then suddenly something I found awful crept into the face.

  “I doubt, I doubt now our getting anything,” he whispered lower than before, and the voice made me think of ice. “He’ll wake of course, right enough, but—but he’ll leave us before he can—speak. Leave finally I mean,” his voice breaking queerly. “Just pay his debt and go before we can get a word. The debt—twenty-five years—twenty-five stolen years. Taken from here, they can only be repaid here. In our time, I mean—for where he has been they are not even a moment—”

  He stopped, he stood stock-still. He looked me over again, but with an intensity and thoroughness that made me avoid an inspection I found too much. I trembled a little in spite of myself.

  “Something I could understand?” I stammered. “You mean—I should witness it?”

  The expression that frightened me was gone: he was still grave, extremely perplexed, but his look became human, sympathetic, gentle towards me, as he nodded his head in answer. “Yes,” he murmured, “witness it, and with your own eyes.” I left it there, asking no further question because I dared not, and he went on quickly: “If he wakes, have questions ready. Avoid his eyes, I advise. Hang on firmly, tightly, to your own personality. Grip yourself like iron. Ask him”—he reflected a moment—“ask if he knows death—if he can speak of the War—if love, Love, mind you—exists with value—if—if—”

  He shrugged his great shoulders; the tired eyes that had not closed all night gave me a warmer look. “Oh, ask your own questions,” he added almost hopelessly. “Just ask what occurs to you. And if anything—happens, call me up instantly. The telephone is at your hand. I shall be near—in this building.” He read the shock in my face, of course. “Can you stand it?” he asked suddenly, moving away towards the door, my heart sinking as I noticed it.

  I nodded stiffly. “Sudden, swift repayment, you mean?” I stammered. His head bowed as he turned the handle.

  “Departure—final departure?” I heard my own horrified whisper.

  “All those years—in just a moment?” For I caught his meaning, such was the intensity of his mind. With a shock I caught it. Decay and age involve considerable time, as I understood time, for normal life lays such process so gradually, slowly, softly on us all. Years compressed into a moment could only be appalling.

  Vronski, now half out of the room, his face a mask of white, answered below his breath, a mere whisper that was dreadful with a kind of spiritual pain:

  “If at all—it must be very rapid, may seem almost instantaneous,” came the syllables across the quiet air. “Sweet, too, if terrible. The questions first, remember—if you can.” And the door closed noiselessly behind him.

  Alone again, after taking the coffee he had left me in a thermos, I tried to think out the questions I would ask. Something, perhaps subconscious guidance, assured me my cousin would not wake for hours. Were our deeper selves in telepathic communication possibly? I cannot say, I did not even try to think. At the time I was sure of nothing except that it was safe for me to take my rest and sleep, and this I therefore did, opening my eyes again after what must have been many hours, for it was well on into the short winter afternoon and dusk had come. My mind felt clear, it felt also calm, and this calmness I noticed with something of surprise. It has always seemed to me remarkable, indeed, that my nerves and faculties supported the entire experience as they did, and that I did not, almost literally, lose my senses. The riot of tearing emotions I certainly had known, bewilderment, excitement, a raging curiosity and fear beyond easy description, but deep within me all the time was some centre that held steady enough, some part of me that observed and judged, burned with a clear light, and even, for intolerable flashes, understood.

  When I woke, at any rate, there was no violence of feeling in me, the tumult had died down, and only two words seemed to ring on hauntingly in my mind, with some touch of the turmoil that had first accompanied them. The combination, “sweet and terrible,” was unusual still, but the horror with which I had first heard them did not now appear. And, after a cautious inspection of the sleeper and the bed in the next room to assure myself that there was no sign of change as yet, I bent my mind to the framing of the questions as best I might.

  Yet behind each attempt, and despite my strongest effort to deny it, rose always the ghost of an expectant dread—the dread that before there was time to ask a single one, perhaps, something would happen to prevent, something to render replies impossible, something rapid, sweet and terrible. And this ghost of twenty-five years to be repaid I could not lay, it waved a shroud, as it were, above each word my pencil traced.

  Within its limitations, none the less, my mind worked reasonably well, though the difficulty of choosing words and subject were too much for me. The subject was so vast, the field it might cover so inexhaustible. All the great adventuring Discoverers, from Buddha to Christ, I remembered, used childish local parables to convey something they themselves knew that yet lay beyond language, beyond any faculties their listeners possessed. How might I, thus, explain to a dog, watching me turn mere pages, that I am deeply immersed in the soul-fortunes of a dozen living characters? And how, similarly, could I, the dog this time, ask intelligently about a superhuman experience? I fell back, at last, upon questions of a very simple kind.

  I would ask for information on what I called “man-in-the-street” matters, questions about what a commonplace mind like my own would like to know. If Mantravers had actually changed his type of consciousness so that his new faculties made him free of time in more than our one dimension, and in space of more than three, what could he report intelligibly about his experiences? Was he conscious, for instance, of being away from ordinary London life, or was he living both lives simultaneously, one life parallel to the other? Was there continuity of memory and personality, was the duration long or short and what did he do, feel, suffer and enjoy? I longed to know whether his experiences and reactions in this state of “elsewhere and otherwise” were commensurable with our three-dimensional existence, and while I knew it could not possibly be so, I had this burning curiosity to hear what he might say. Did he look forward into a future and back into a past, or were these both simultaneously accessible in the sense that a biography, from childhood to old age, lie between the covers of a book, for the reader to choose any period he will? If, too, the future was accessible to him now, as we say, could he thence influence, even alter, the past? Above all, I longed to know about what, on earth, is called happiness. Having risen above the world of effects which is human knowledge, into the world of causes, which is reality, did he gain satisfaction, rest for the spirit, peace?

  I laid my pencil down, having covered sheet upon sheet with questions I knew to be futile—because I should never ask them. They were worthless, in any case, because unanswerable. I challenged myself, as I challenge anybody, to think of better ones. He had no terms, I had no terms, in which comprehensible answers could be given and understood. The Great War? Pain? Sleep? Love?—I drew my pencil through at least a hundred such, and leaned back in my chair to await events . . .

  Dusk was falling, the room darkening, shadows gathering, and my eyes, ever on the mysterious sleeper, saw details of wall and furniture less clearly now. Outlines of bed and chairs and windows faded, the silhouette of the sheets above the sleeper became f
ilmed, there was a blur over the entire room, yet I had the queer feeling that this was less due to the waning light than to a lack of reality in the objects themselves. Each picture lost vividness because it was but a transient appearance of something more real that lay behind, something the senses never knew because no sense could apprehend directly. The idea came, then vanished again. At the same time I became aware of an invading stupor stealing over me, a stupor I fought against with all my power—not sleep or exhaustion of physical kind, but a dulling of my surface consciousness, as though some brighter faculty beyond it were trying to assert itself. That I resisted was, I came to believe long afterwards, a mistake; I here missed an opportunity, offered directly or indirectly by Mantravers. I can only guess at this. It was fear that prevented. Remembering Vronski’s vehement warning, I held on to myself as tightly as I could, afraid of losing grip upon my personality. I was afraid, too, of being caught unawares, of being taken by surprise, suddenly horrified at the sight of the sleeper rising from his bed, coming across the room, standing beside me, looking down into my face . . . And, it seemed, a long period passed, whose duration quite escaped my measurement, for though I can swear I did not sleep, I recall that my eyes now opened with a sudden start, and my ears similarly became sharply alert. Had twelve hours passed or twenty-four, or a few minutes only? It was the first definite thought that came to me—was it evening still, or early morning? The same thin layer as of dusk or twilight lay upon the room, but objects were more plainly visible than before. There was a light somewhere, it seemed.

  The questions rose, but there was no time to satisfy them, for the nerves of sight and hearing were too insistent for me to think of anything else. There had, once again, been sound and movement. I looked, I listened, with all my power. The sleeping man was sitting up in his bed, that bell-like resonance vibrated in the air, the syllables of my name still echoed. I saw the figure, half upright, like some awful deity upon its throne, and the same second, the first instant of paralysis having passed, I had sprung to my feet. And it was at this moment, as I dashed across the carpet, that I heard a cock crow in the distance, and knew that it was early morning.

  “Come to me, come quickly,” rang the bell-like voice, “before I leave. Let the useless questions go. Just come to me.”

  I was already beside the bed. He was sitting up, leaning back upon his hands. I had the extraordinary impression he was going to rise and take the air. The radiance in his eyes and face and skin was marvellous. I saw a dark blue stain glow out upon his right temple, then fade away. It was like a bullet wound. All memory of my questions had wholly vanished. “Dying—you mean?” came automatically from my lips. “Is it—death?”

  And then he laughed. His eyes ran over my face, the eyes I had been told to avoid.

  “My second death. There are so many. This is the life I owed de Frasne. All the lives are simultaneous . . .”

  A flow of words that rushed on I cannot remember, even if I registered them. They held no meaning for me—in the instant of utterance, that is, they held a meaning I understood, as in a timeless flash, but meaning and understanding were gone again as soon as born. Only the shattering effect remained, as of something better left untold, unknown. The laughter, too, unnerved me, that sweet, careless, unearthly laughter that seemed to break up and destroy whatever was left of coherence in me.

  “Tell us,” I believe I cried, “tell me—before you go.” I know that something of the sort burst from me. I can still hear my hoarse, breathless cry saying this. I was shaking with terror at the same time lest he touch me, for his hand came groping towards me where I stood against the bed. It seemed to me that if he touched me, my being somehow must dissolve. It seemed my very self was threatened, while yet that threatened self, trembling in the balance, understood why “life must be lost to find it,” and that my courage failed. The awful yearning and the awful dread were there. It was the bell-like voice, with its sound of death or freedom, that caught me back into my pitiful restricted cage again, though not before I had realised something of the loneliness, the deific beauty and glory in that loss of self without which no heaven is attainable.

  “Stop thinking,” was what I caught of his answer. “Behind thought lies the entrance. Reason and thinking hold us in the life of least importance. Go behind both to find the beginning—behind the mind—into a different way. You will find several lives together and at once—and more than one kind of death . . .”

  His meaning, at the moment, flashed like lightning across my understanding, but his eyes were now holding mine, and I could not speak. Did his conditions flow over into me? Did I borrow some faint reflection of what he knew, of where he was, of a difference he tried to convey? I cannot say. Words left my mind, for they were useless, vain, meaningless. No words existed anywhere—the few he used are reported as feebly, inaccurately, as those I fought to choose for myself. The mind, as an instrument, lay helpless, withered. His eyes held mine. I looked, that is, straight into his own. And I understood—oh, so easily and clearly and simply then—that my full earth-life was but a fraction, a trivial rivulet, that ran parallel with numerous other streams that were deeper, mightier, more important. It was a question of focusing upon this little rivulet, or spreading attention and consciousness over them all, yet simultaneously. In his eyes I read this fantastic but literal certainty. I became aware of stresses of a kind never before experienced. No mental or emotional tension life had brought me hitherto, either by way of love, hate, passion, yearning, fear, was akin to it. I was stretched and altered, altered above all, in my deepest essential being, and yet such alteration was easy, natural, right, while entirely new, and different to anything I could, imaginatively or intellectually, have even supposed possible. For above all I noticed this—that it was unlike anything my mind could have even imagined. .

  I watched him, and as I watched the light I had already noticed in the room increased a little, as though it came closer. Its origin I had not guessed, though I certainly had not fancied it, and it was, I knew, external to himself. Both bed and occupant became a shade clearer. I stared with intense and feverish attention. I could have sworn there was a change, the flutter of a change. That was the word—it fluttered, then was gone. But it returned, this faint, fluttering difference. I noticed it a second time. It was lost again. Something touched the face, there was a change upon the features. It vanished. With it came over me a rushing instinct that I must be quick, I must act instantly, or the opportunity would be lost forever. This certainty swept me like an icy wind, and the ghostly dread I could not lay moved down the air. What Vronski feared might happen was on the way, closer, nearer, even imminent. I must plunge in as best I could, and I made the effort, as the hundred questions flew past me in their glittering series. I picked one out, then another, and another, but could not speak them, could not utter even a sound, for all were useless, meaningless, and the awful flutter, meanwhile, had re-appeared, this time lingering. Thought froze in me. I closed my eyes a second. It was his quiet laughter that made me open them again the next moment. The light had come closer than before, and the ghastly signature upon his face, I saw, had deepened. I actually saw it spring back, this fluttering alteration, to settle like a great bright insect on the face. He was speaking, but the bell-like note had left the voice, and then the lips stopped moving, the eyes lost their terrible radiance, the whole skin paled, the arms supporting the body sagged.

  “Christ!” I heard my voice with a stifled shriek, his curious light laughter still audible across it. It was that same happy, careless laughter, no pain, not even anxiety, possible with such a sound, a laughter of relief rather. And the voice came with it as a bell ringing across great distances: “Ah, that above all else, the way of light,” reached my ears faintly, brokenly, a profound wavering sigh accompanying it. “I will tell you, tell all I can—show you the escaping way—the why . . .” the syllables dying into incoherence then, so that I bent over to catch the scarcely audible whisper that almost stopped my he
art. Though confused, words running into each other, their meaning penetrated: “a moment—a moment only—I must first pay back the stolen years—now and here. After that I will tell!”

  The whisper died out because the lips through which it came were gone already. I remember an odd sound behind me, an increase of light as well, but it was impossible to turn my head. The horror of what Vronski’s cryptic words had suggested was nothing to the horror of what I saw. I stared. The whole dreadful sight came, it seemed, in a single second. Twenty-five years rushed on him in a single moment. He did not stare back because the eyes, following the lips, were no longer there to stare with. The features all ran away together. In the space of a few seconds, fifteen perhaps at most, Sydney Mantravers aged twenty-five years, became a quarter of a century older. The accumulation of this period’s decay was upon him, all over him, with an abrupt, appalling rush. The skin grew loose and wrinkled, changing, even hiding the eyes so that it seemed they disappeared; the muscles slackened, sprayed, sagged away, chin and neck showing it most clearly. There was a ghastly crumpling together of the entire physical frame. The shrivelling seemed intensified by its swiftness. I remember that no comprehensible feeling was in me, horror having passed into something else, and similarly, no thought took the brain. Tire “bends” rose as a picture, because probably my mind contained it as the only comparable human experience, the hideous “bends” that divers know on rising too rapidly from deep waters before the decompression can be applied, or, when caught unawares in too great depths, the frame is jellied, the entire body crammed up into the helmet. There rose another picture too—of a mummy exposed suddenly to air and damp becoming a little heap of dust soon after. These awful pictures rose, then vanished, as though the mind automatically searched for a parallel.