by Anthology
Though it was not quite so, the body none the less collapsed in a dreadful, stupid heap before my eyes, the last detail to suffer change being the small red bruise that glowed in the right temple before it too was gone. One feeble breath rose from the huddled shape upon the sheets, one last fluttering breath escaped the dried and shrunken flesh that had been lips, bearing with extreme faintness a ghost of happy laughter, and just reaching my ears as I bent closer above the dissolving face: “a moment . . . only a moment . . . and I will tell you . . . escaping way . . . elsewhere and otherwise . . .”
Loud and quite clear behind my back, as the light came closer suddenly, was the piteous, convulsive sound of Vronski’s sobbing, beyond which again, the faint clear note as of a ringing bell that died away into the silence.
EXPERIMENT
Fredric Brown
“The first time machine, gentlemen,” Professor Johnson proudly informed his two colleagues. “True, it is a small-scale experimental model. It will operate only on objects weighing less than three pounds, five ounces and for distances into the past and future of twelve minutes or less. But it works.”
The small-scale model looked like a small scale—a postage scale—except for two dials in the part under the platform.
Professor Johnson held up a small metal cube. “Our experimental object,” he said, “is a brass cube weighing one pound, two point, three ounces. First, I shall send it five minutes into the future.”
He leaned forward and set one of the dials on the time machine. “Look at your watches,” he said.
They looked at their watches, Professor Johnson placed the cube gently on the machine’s platform. It vanished.
Five minutes later, to the second, it reappeared.
Professor Johnson picked it up. “Now five minutes into the past.” He set the other dial. Holding the cube in his hand he looked at his watch. “It is six minutes before three o’clock. I shall now activate the mechanism—by placing the cube on the platform—at exactly three o’clock. Therefore, the cube should, at five minutes before three, vanish from my hand and appear on the platform, five minutes before I place it there.”
“How can you place it there, then?” asked one of his colleagues.
“It will, as my hand approaches, vanish from the platform and appear in my hand to be placed there. Three o’clock. Notice, please.”
The cube vanished from his hand.
It appeared on the platform of the time machine.
“See? Five minutes before I shall place it there, it is there!”
His other colleague frowned at the cube. “But,” he said, “what if, now that it has already appeared five minutes before you place it there, you should change your mind about doing so and not place it there at three o’clock? Wouldn’t there be a paradox of some sort involved?”
“An interesting idea,” Professor Johnson said. “I had not thought of it, and it will be interesting to try. Very well, I shall not . . .
There was no paradox at all. The cube remained.
But the entire rest of the Universe, professors and all, vanished.
EXTEMPORE
Damon Knight
Everybody knew; everybody wanted to help Rossi the time-traveller. They came running up the scarlet beach, naked and golden as children, laughing happily.
“Legend is true,” they shouted. “He is here, just like great-grandfathers say!”
“What year is this?” Rossi asked, standing incongruously shirt-sleeved and alone in the sunlight—no great machines bulking around him, no devices, nothing but his own spindling body.
“Thairty-five twainty-seex, Mista Rossi!” they chorused.
“Thank you. Goodbye.”
“Goodbyee!”
Flick. Flick. Flick. Those were days. Flicketaflicketaflick—weeks, months, years. WHIRRR . . . Centuries, millennia streaming past like sleet in a gale!
Now the beach was cold, and the people were buttoned up to their throats in stiff black cloth. Moving stiffly, like jointed stick people, they unfurled a huge banner: ‘SORI WI DO NOT SPIC YOUR SPICH. THIS IS YIR 5199 OF YOUR CALENDAR. HELO MR. ROSI.”
They all bowed, like marionettes, and Mr. Rossi bowed back. Flick. Flick. FlicketaflicketaWHIRRR . . .
The beach was gone. He was inside an enormous building, a sky-high vault, like the Empire State turned into one room. Two floating eggs swooped at him and hovered alertly, staring with poached eyes. Behind them reared a tilted neon slab blazing with diagrams and symbols, none of which he could recognise before flicketaWHIRRRR . . .
This time it was a wet stony plain, with salt marshes beyond it. Rossi was not interested and spent the time looking at the figures he had scrawled in his notebook. 1956, 1958, 1965 and so on, the intervals getting longer and longer, the curve rising until it was going almost straight up. If only he’d paid more attention to mathematics in school . . . flickRRR . . .
Now a white desert at night, bitter cold, where the towers of Manhattan should have been. Something mournfully thin flapped by over flkRRRR . . .
Blackness and fog was all he could fkRRRR . . .
Now the light and dark blinks in the greyness melted and ran together, flickering faster and faster until Rossi was looking at a bare leaping landscape as if through soap-smeared glasses—continents expanding and contracting, ice-caps slithering down and back again, the planet charging towards its cold death while only Rossi stood there to watch, gaunt and stiff, with a disapproving, wistful glint in his eye.
His name was Albert Eustace Rossi. He was from Seattle, a wild bony young man with a poetic forelock and the stare-you-down eyes of an animal. He had learned nothing in twelve years of school except how to get passing marks, and he had a large wistfulness but no talents at all.
He had come to New York because he thought something wonderful might happen.
He averaged two months on a job. He worked as a short-order cook (his eggs were greasy and his hamburgers burned), a plate-maker’s helper in an offset shop, a shill in an auction gallery. He spent three weeks as a literary agent’s critic, writing letters over his employer’s signature to tell hapless reading-fee clients that their stories stank. He wrote bad verse for a while and sent it hopefully to all the best magazines, but concluded he was being held down by a clique.
He made no friends. The people he met seemed to be interested in nothing but baseball, or their incredibly boring jobs, or in making money. He tried hanging around the Village, wearing dungarees and a flowered shirt, but discovered that nobody noticed him.
It was the wrong century. What he wanted was a villa in Athens; or an island where the natives were childlike and friendly, and no masts ever lifted above the blue horizon; or a vast hygienic apartment in some future underground Utopia.
He bought certain science-fiction magazines and read them defiantly with the covers showing in cafeterias. Afterward, he took them home and marked them up with large exclamatory blue and red and green pencil and filed them away under his bed.
The idea of building a time machine had been growing a long while in his mind. sometimes in the morning on his way to work, looking up at the blue cloud-dotted endlessness of the sky, or staring at the tracery of lines and whorls on his unique fingertips, or trying to see into the cavernous unexplored depths of a brick in a wall, or lying on his narrow bed at night, conscious of all the bewildering sights and sounds and odours that had swirled past him in twenty-odd years, he would say to himself, Why not?
Why not? He found a second-hand copy of J.W. Dunne’s An Experiment with Time and lost sleep for a week. He copied off the charts from it. Scotch-taped them to his wall; he wrote down his startling dreams every morning as soon as he awoke. There was a time outside time, Dunne said, in which to measure time; and a time outside that, in which to measure the time that measured time, and a time outside that . . . Why not?
An article in a barbershop about Einstein excited him, and he went to the library and read the encyclopaedia articles on relativity and space-ti
me, frowning fiercely, going back again and again over the paragraphs he never did understand, but filling up all the same with a threshold feeling, an expectancy.
What looked like time to him might look like space to somebody else, said Einstein. A clock ran slower the faster it went. Good, fine. Why not? But it wasn’t Einstein, or Minkowski, or Wehl who gave him the clue; it was an astronomer named Milne.
There were two ways of looking at time, Milne said. If you measured it by things that moved, like clock hands and the earth turning and going around the sun, that was one kind; Milne called it dynamical time and his symbol for it was τ. But if you measured it by things happening in the atom, like radioactivity and light being emitted, that was another kind; Milne called it kinematic time, or t. And the formula that connected the two showed that it depended on which you used whether the universe had ever had a beginning or would ever have an end—yes in τ time, no in t.
Then it all added together: Dunne saying you didn’t really have to travel along the timetrack like a train, you just thought you did, but when you were asleep you forgot, and that was why you could have prophetic dreams. And Eddington: that all the great laws of physics we had been able to discover were just a sort of spidery framework, and that there was room between the strands for an unimaginable complexity of things.
He believed it instantly; he had known it all his life but had never had any words to think it in—that this reality wasn’t all there was. Pay cheques, grimy window sills, rancid grease, nails in the shoes—how could it be?
It was all in the way you looked at it. That was what the scientists were saying—Einstein, Eddington, Milne, Dunne, all in a chorus. So it was a thing anybody could do, if he wanted it badly enough and was lucky. Rossi had always felt obscurely resentful that the day was past when you could discover something by looking at a teakettle or dropping gunk on a hot stove; but here, incredibly, was one more easy road to fame that everybody had missed.
Between the tip of his finger and the edge of the soiled plastic cover that hideously draped the hideous table, the shortest distance was a straight line containing an infinite number of points. His own body, he knew, was mostly empty space. Down there in the shadowy regions of the atom, in t time, you could describe how fast an electron was moving or where it was, but never both; you could never decide whether it was a wave or a particle; you couldn’t even prove it existed at all, except as the ghost of its reflection appeared to you.
Why not?
It was summer, and the whole city was gasping for breath. Rossi had two weeks off and nowhere to go; the streets were empty of the Colorado vacationers; the renters of cabins in the mountains, the tailored flyers to Ireland, the Canadian Rockies, Denmark, Nova Scotia. All day long the sweaty subways had inched their loads of suffering out to Coney Island and Far Rockaway and back again, well salted, flayed with heat, shocked into a fishy torpor.
Now the island was still; flat and steaming, like a flounder on a griddle; every window open for an unimagined breath of air; silent as if the city were under glass. In dark rooms the bodies lay sprawled like a cannibal feast, all wakeful, all moveless, waiting for Time’s tick.
Rossi had fasted all day, having in mind the impressive results claimed by Yogis, early Christian saints and Amerinds; he had drunk nothing but a glass of water in the morning and another at blazing noon. Standing now in the close darkness of his room, he felt that ocean of Time, heavy and stagnant, stretching away for ever. The galaxies hung in it like seaweed, and down at the bottom it was silted unfathomably deep with dead men. (Seashell murmur: I am.)
There it all was, temporal and eternal, t and tau, everything that was and would be. The electron dancing in its imaginary orbit, the mayfly’s moment, the long drowse of the sequoias, the stretching of continents, the lonely drifting of stars; it cancelled them all against each other, and the result was stillness.
The sequoia’s truth did not make the mayfly false. If a man could only see some other aspect of that totality, feel it, believe it—another relation of tau time to t . . .
He had chalked a diagram on the floor—not a pentacle but the nearest thing he could find, the quadrisected circle of the Michelson apparatus. Around it he had scrawled, ‘e=mc²’, ‘Z ²/n²’, ‘M=M0+3K+2V’. Pinned up shielding the single bulb was a scrap of paper with some doggerel on it:
t, τ, t, τ, t τ t
c
_____
R√ 3
Cartesian co-ordinators x, y, z
—c²t²=me
It was in his head, hypnotically repeating: t tau, t, tau, t tau t . . .
As he stood there, the outlines of the paper swelled and blurred, rhythmically. He felt as if the whole universe were breathing, slowly and gigantically, all one, the smallest atom and the farthest star.
c over R times the square root of three . . .
He had a curious drunken sense that he was standing outside, that he could reach in and give himself a push, or a twist—no, that wasn’t the word, either . . . But something was happening; he felt it, half in terror and half in delight.
less c squared, t squared, equals . . .
An intolerable tension squeezed Rossi tight. Across the room the paper, too near the bulb, crisped and burned. And (as the tension twisted him somehow, finding a new direction for release) that was the last thing Rossi saw before flick, it was daylight, and the room was clotted with moist char, flick, someone was moving across it, too swift to flick. Flick. Flick. Flick, flick, flicketa-flicketa . . .
And here he was. Most incredibly, what had seemed so true was true: by that effort of tranced will, he had transferred himself to another time rate, another relationship of t to τ—a variable relationship, like a huge merry-go-round that whirled and paused, and whirled again.
He had got on; how was he going to get off?
And—most terrifying question—where was the merry-go-round going? Whirling headlong to extinction and cold death, where the universe ended—or around the wheel again, to give him a second chance?
The blur exploded into white light. Stunned but safe inside his portable anomaly, Rossi watched the flaming earth cool, saw the emerging continents furred over with green, saw a kaleidoscope whirl of rainstorm and volcanic fury, pelting ice, earthquake, tsunami, fire!
Then he was in a forest, watching the branches sway as some great shape passed.
He was in a clearing, watching as a man in leather breeches killed a copper-skinned man with an axe.
He was in a log-walled room, watching a man in a wide collar stand up, toppling table and crockery, his eyes like onions.
He was in a church, and an old man behind the pulpit flung a book at him.
The church again, at evening, and two lonely women saw him and screamed.
He was in a bare, narrow room reeking of pitch. Somewhere outside, a dog set up a frenzied barking. A door opened and a wild, whiskery face popped in; a hand flung a blazing stick and flame leaped up . . .
He was on a broad green lawn, alone with a small boy and a frantic white duck. “Good morrow, sir. Will you help me catch this pesky . . .”
He was in a little pavilion. A grey-bearded man at a desk turned, snatching up a silver cross, whispering fiercely to the young man at his side, “Didn’t I tell you!” He pointed the cross, quivering. “Quick, then! Will New York continue to grow?”
Rossi was off guard. “Sure. This is going to be the biggest city . . .”
The pavilion was gone; he was in a little perfumed nook, facing a long room across a railing. A red-haired youth, dozing in front of the fire, sat up with a guilty start. He gulped. “Who . . . who’s going to win the election?”
“What election?” said Rossi. “I don’t—”
“Who’s going to win?” The youth came forward, pale-faced. “Hoover or Roosevelt? Who?”
“Oh, that election. Roosevelt.”
“Uh, will the country . . .”
The same room. A bell was ringing; white lights dazzled his eyes
. The bell stopped. An amplified voice said, “When will Germany surrender?”
“Uh, 1945,” said Rossi, squinting. “May, 1945. Look, whoever you are—”
“When will Japan surrender?”
“Same year. September. Look, whoever you are . . .”
A tousle-headed man emerged from the glare, blinking, wrapping a robe around his bulging middle. He stared at Rossi while the mechanical voice spoke behind him.
“Please name the largest new industry in the next ten years.”
“Uh, television, I guess. Listen, you right there, can’t you . . .”
The same room, the same bell ringing. This was all wrong, Rossi realised irritably. Nineteen thirty-two, 1944 (?)—the next ought to be at least close to where he had started. There was supposed to be a row of cheap rooming houses—his room here.
“. . . election, Stevenson or Eisenhower?”
“Stevenson. I mean, Eisenhower. Now look, doesn’t anybody—”
“When will there be an armistice in Korea?”
“Last year. Next year. You’re mixing me up. Will you turn off that—”
“When and where will atomic bombs next be used in—”
“Listen!” Rossi shouted. “I’m getting mad! If you want me to answer questions, let me ask some! Get me some help! Get me—”
“What place in the United States will be safest when—”
“Einstein!” shouted Rossi.
But the little grey man with the bloodhound eyes couldn’t help him, nor the bald moustachioed one who was there the next time. The walls were inlaid now with intricate tracings of white metal. The voice began asking him questions he couldn’t answer.
The second time it happened, there was a puff and a massive rotten stench rolled into his nostrils. Rossi choked. “Stop that!”
“Answer!” blared the voice. “What’s the meaning of those signals from space?”
