by Anthology
“Mother, people always try and hide from others how they suffer. Does everyone do it?”
“You don’t have to hide it from me chiefly, I suppose, because you can’t.”
“But I don’t know how much you suffer, and it ought to work both ways. Why do we do this awful covering up? What-are we afraid of pity or derision?”
“Help, perhaps.”
“Help! Perhaps you’re right . . . That’s a disconcerting thought.”
They stood there staring at each other, until the older woman said, awkwardly, “We don’t often talk like this, Janet.”
“No.” She wanted to say more. To a stranger in a train, perhaps she would have done; here, she could not deliver.
Seeing nothing more was to be said on that subject, Mrs. Westermark said, “I was going to tell you, Janet, that I thought perhaps it would be better if the children didn’t come back here while things are as they are. If you want to go and see them and stay with them at your parents’ house, I can look after Jack and Mr. Stackpole for a week. I don’t think Jack wants to see them.”
“That’s very kind, Mother. I’ll see. I promised Clemwell, I told Mr. Stackpole that perhaps I’d go and watch him play cricket tomorrow afternoon. It’s not important, of course, but I did say anyhow, I might drive over and see the children on Monday, if you could hold the fort.”
“You’ve still plenty of time if you feel like going today. I’m sure Mr. Stackpole will understand your maternal feelings.”
“I’d prefer to leave it till Monday,” Janet said a little distantly, for she suspected now the motive behind, her mother-in-law’s suggestion.
Where the Scientific American did not reach
Jack Westermark put down the Scientific American and stared at the table top. With his right hand, he felt the beat of his heart. In the magazine was an article about him, illustrated with photographs of him taken at the Research Hospital. This thoughtful article was far removed from the sensational pieces that had appeared elsewhere, the shallow things that referred to him as The Man That Has Done More Than Einstein To Wreck Our Cosmic Picture; and for that very reason it was the more startling, and presented some aspects of the matter that Westermark himself had not considered.
As he thought over its conclusions, he rested from the effort of reading terrestrial books, and Stackpole sat by the fire, smoking a cigar and waiting to take Westermark’s dictation. Even reading a magazine represented a feat in space-time, a collaboration, a conspiracy. Stackpole turned the pages at timed intervals, Westermark read when they lay flat.
He was unable to turn them when, in their own narrow continuum, they were not being turned; to his fingers, they lay under the jelly-like glaze, that visual hallucination that represented an unconquerable cosmic inertia.
The inertia gave a special shine to the surface of the table as he stared into it and probed into his own mind to determine the truths of the Scientific American article.
The writer of the article began by considering the facts and observing that they tended to point towards the existence of local times’ throughout the universe; and that if this were so, a new explanation might be forthcoming for the recession of the galaxies and different estimates arrived at for the age of the universe (and of course for its complexity). He then proceeded to deal with the problem that vexed other writers on the subject; namely, why, if Westermark lost Earth time on Mars, he had not reciprocally lost Mars time back on Earth. This, more than anything, pointed to the fact that local times’ were not purely mechanistic but to some extent at least a psycho-biological function.
In the table top, Westermark saw himself being asked to travel again to Mars, to take part in a second expedition to those continents of russet sand where the fabric of space-time was in some mysterious and insuperable fashion 3.3077 minutes ahead of Earth norm. Would his interior clock leap forward again? What then of the sheen on things earthly?
And what would be the effect of gradually drawing away from the iron laws under which, since its scampering Pleistocene infancy, humankind had lived?
Impatiently he thrust his mind forward to imagine the day when Earth harboured many local times, gleaned from voyages across the vacancies of space; those vacancies lay across time, too, and that little-understood concept (McTaggart had denied its external reality, hadn’t he?) would come to lie within the grasp of man’s understanding. Wasn’t that the ultimate secret, to be able to understand the flux in which existence is staged, as a dream is staged in the primitive reaches of the mind?
And But Would not that day bring the annihilation of Earth’s local time? That was what he had started. It could only mean that local time’ was not a product of planetary elements; there the writer of the Scientific American article had not dared to go far enough; local time was entirely a product of the psyche. That dark innermost thing that could keep accurate time even while a man lay unconscious was a mere provincial; but it could be educated to be a citizen of the universe. He saw that he was the first of a new race, unimaginable in the wildest mind a few months previously.
He was independent of the enemy that, more than Death, menaced contemporary man: Time. Locked within him was an entirety new potential. Superman had arrived.
Painfully, Superman stirred in his seat. He sat so wrapt for so long that his limbs grew stiff and dead without his noticing it.
Universal thoughts may occur if one times carefully enough one’s circumbendibus about a given table
“Dictation,” he said, and waited impatiently until the command had penetrated backwards to the limbo by the fire where Stackpole sat. What he had to say was so terribly important yet it had to wait on these people . . .
As was his custom, he rose and began to walk round the table, speaking in phrases quickly delivered. This was to be the testament to the new way of life . . .
“Consciousness is not expendable but concurrent . . . There may have been many time nodes at the beginning of the human race . . . The mentally deranged often revert to different time rates. For some, a day seems to stretch on forever . . . We know by experience that for children time is seen in the convex mirror of consciousness, enlarged and distorted beyond its focal point . . .” He was momentarily irritated by the scared face of his wife appearing outside the study window, but he brushed it away and continued.
“. . . its focal point . . . Yet man in his ignorance has persisted in pretending time was some sort of uni-directional flow, and homogenous at that . . . despite the evidence to the contrary . . . Our conception of ourselves no, this erroneous conception has become a basic life assumption . . .”
Daughters of daughters
Westermark’s mother was not given to metaphysical speculation, but as she was leaving the room, she turned and said to her daughter-in-law, “You know what I sometimes think?
Jack is so strange, I wonder at nights if men and women aren’t getting more and more apart in thought and in their ways with every generation you know, almost like separate species. My generation made a great attempt to bring the two sexes together in equality and all the rest, but it seems to have come to nothing.”
“Jack will get better.” Janet could hear the lack of confidence in her own voice.
“I thought the same thing about men and women getting wider apart I mean when my husband was killed.”
Suddenly ail Janet’s sympathy was gone. She had recognized a familiar topic drifting onto the scene, knew well the careful tone that ironed away all self-pity as her mother-in-law said, “Bob was dedicated to speed, you know. That was what killed him really, not the fool backing into the road in front of him.”
“No blame was attached to your husband,” Janet said.
“You should try not to let it worry you still.”
“You see the connection though . . . This progress thing.
Bob so crazy to get round the next bend first, and now Jack . . . Oh well, there’s nothing a woman can do.”
She closed the door behind her. Absently, Jan
et picked up the message from the next generation of women: “Thank you for the dollies.”
The resolves and the sudden risks involved
He was their father. Perhaps Jane and Peter should come back, despite the risks involved. Anxiously, Janet stood there, moving herself with a sudden resolve to tackle Jack straight away. He was so irritable, so unapproachable, but at least she could observe how busy he was before interrupting him.
As she slipped into the side hall and made for the back door, she heard her mother-in-law call her. “Just a minute!” she answered.
The sun had broken through, sucking moisture from the damp garden. It was now unmistakably autumn. She rounded the corner of the house, stepped round the rose bed, and looked into her husband’s study.
Shaken, she saw he leaned half over the table. His hands were over his face, blood ran between his fingers and dripped onto an open magazine on the table top. She was aware of Stackpole sitting indifferently beside the electric fire.
She gave a small cry and ran round the house again, to be met at the back door by Mrs. Westermark.
“Oh, I was just . . . Janet, what is it?”
“Jack, Mother! He’s had a stroke or something terrible!”
“But how do you know?”
“Quick, we must phone the hospital1 must go to him.”
Mrs. Westermark took Janet’s arm. “Perhaps we’d better leave it to Mr. Stackpole, hadn’t we. I’m afraid”
“Mother, we must do what we can. I know we’re amateurs.
Please let me go.”
“No. Janet, we’re . . . it’s their world I’m frightened. They’ll come if they want us.” She was gripping Janet in her fright.
Their wild eyes stared momentarily at each other as if seeing something else, and then Janet snatched herself away. “I must go to him,” she said.
She hurried down the hall and pushed open the study door.
Her husband stood now at the far end of the room by the window, while blood streamed from his nose.
“Jack!” she exclaimed. As she ran towards him, .a blow from the empty air struck her on the forehead, so that she staggered aside, falling against a bookcase. A shower of smaller volumes from the upper shelf fell on her and round her. Exclaiming, Stackpole dropped his notebook and ran round the table to her. Even as he went to her aid, he noted the time from his watch: 10.24.
Aid after 10.24 and the tidiness of bed
Westermark’s mother appeared in the doorway.
“Stay where you are,” Stackpole shouted, “or there will be more trouble! Janet, you see what you’ve done. Get out of here, will you? Jack, I’m right with you . . . God knows what you’ve felt, isolated without aid for three and a third minutes!” Angrily, he went across and stood within arm’s length of his patient. He threw his handkerchief down onto the table.
“Mr. Stackpole” Westermark’s mother said tentatively from the door, an arm round Janet’s waist.
He looked back over his shoulder only long enough to say, “Get towels! Phone the Research Hospital for an ambulance and tell them to be here right away.”
By midday, Westermark was tidily in bed upstairs and the ambulance staff, who had treated him for what after all was only nosebleed, had left. Stackpole, as he turned from closing the front door, eyed the two women.
“I feel it is my duty to warn you,” he said heavily, “that another incident such as this might well prove fatal. This time we escaped very lightly. If anything else of this sort happens, I shall feel obliged to recommend to the board that Mr. Westermark is moved back to the hospital.”
Current way to define accidents
“He wouldn’t want to go,” Janet said. “Besides, you are being absurd; it was entirely an accident. Now I wish to go upstairs and see how he is.”
“Just before you go, may I point out that what happened was not an accident or not as we generally define accidents, since you saw the results of your interference through the study window before you entered. Where you were to blame”
“But that’s absurd” both women began at once. Janet went on to say, “I never would have rushed into the room as I did, had I not seen through the window that he was in trouble.”
“What you saw was the result on your husband of your later interference.”
In something like a wail, Westermark’s mother said, “I don’t understand any of this. What did Janet bump into when she ran in?”
“She ran, Mrs. Westermark, into the spot where her husband had been standing 3.3077 minutes earlier. Surely by now you have grasped this elementary business of time inertia?”
“When they both started speaking at once, he stared at them until they stopped and looked at him. Then he said, “We had better go into the living room. Speaking for myself, I would like a drink.”
He helped himself, and not until his hand was round a glass of whisky did he say, “Now, without wishing to lecture to you ladies, J think it is high time you both realised that you are not living in the old safe world of classical mechanics ruled over by a god invented by eighteenth-century enlightenment.
All that has happened here is perfectly rational, but if you are going to pretend it is beyond your female understandings”
“Mr. Stackpole,” Janet said sharply. “Can you please keep to the point without being insulting? Will you tell me why what happened was not an accident? I understand now that when I looked through the study window I saw my husband suffering from a collision that to him had happened three and something minutes before and to me would not happen for another three and something minutes, but at that moment I was so startled that I forgot”
“No, no, your figures are wrong. The total time lapse is only 3.3077 minutes. When you saw your husband, he had been hit half that time1.65385 minutesago, and there was another 1.65385 minutes to go before you completed the action by bursting into the room and striking him.”
“But she didn’t strike him!” the older woman cried.
Firmly, Stackpole diverted his attention long enough to reply. “She struck him at 10.24 Earthtime, which equals 10.20 plus about 36 seconds Mars or his time, which equals 9.59 or whatever Neptune time, which equals 156 and. a half Sinus time. It’s a big universe, Mrs. Westermark! You will remain confused as long as you continue to confuse event with time. May I suggest you sit down and have a drink?”
“Leaving aside the figures,” Janet said, returning to the attackloathsome opportunist the man was”how can you say that what happened was no accident? You are not claiming I injured my husband deliberately, I hope? What you say suggests that I was powerless from the moment I saw him through the window.”
‘Leaving aside the figures . . . ’ ” he quoted. “That’s where your responsibility lies. What you saw through the window was the result of your act; it was by then inevitable that you should complete it, for it had already been completed.”
Through the window, draughts of time blow
“I can’t understand!” she clutched her forehead, gratefully accepting a cigarette from her mother-in-law, while shrugging off her consolatory ‘Don’t try to understand, dear!’ “Supposing when I had seen Jack’s nose bleeding, I had looked at my watch and thought. It’s 10.20 or whenever it was, and he may be suffering from my interference, so I’d better not go in,’ and I hadn’t gone in? Would his nose then miraculously have healed?”
“Of course not. You take such a mechanistic view of the universe. Cultivate a mental approach, try and live in your own century! You could not think what you suggest because that is not in your nature: just as it is not in your nature to consult your watch intelligently, just as you always leave aside the figures,’ as you say. No, I’m not being personal; it’s all very feminine and appealing in a way. What I’m saying is that if before you looked into the window you had been a person to think, ‘However I see my husband now, I must recall he has the additional experience of the next 3.3077 minutes,’ then you could have looked in and seen him unharmed, and you would not have come bu
rsting in as you did.”
She drew on her cigarette, baffled and hurt. “You’re saying I’m a danger to my own husband.”
“You’re saying that.”
“God, howl hate men!” she exclaimed. “You’re so bloody logical, so bloody smug!”
He finished his whisky and set the glass down on a table beside her so that he leant close. “You’re upset just now,” he said.
“Of course I’m upset! What do you think?” She fought a desire to cry or slap his face. She turned to Jack’s mother, who gently took her wrist.
“Why don’t you go off straight away and stay with the children for the weekend, darling? Come back when you feel like it. Jack will be all right and I can look after himas much as he wants looking after.”
She glanced about the room.
“I will. I’ll pack right away. They’ll be glad to see me.” As she passed Stackpole on the way out, she said bitterly, “At least they won’t be worrying about the local time on Sirius!”
“They may,” said Stackpole, imperturbably from the middle of the room, “have to one day.”
All events, all children, all seasons.
MARATHON PHOTOGRAPH
Clifford D. Simak
There is no point in putting this account on paper. For me, a stolid professor of geology, it is an exercise in futility, eating up time that would be better spent in working on my long-projected, oft-delayed text on the Precambrian, for the purpose of which I still am on a two-quarter leave of absence, which my bank account can ill afford. If I were a writer of fiction I could make a story out of it, representing it as no more than a tale of the imagination, but at least with some chance of placing it before the public. If I were anything other than a dry-as-dust college professor, I could write it as a factual account (which, of course, it would be) and submit it to one of the so-called fact magazines that deal in raw sensationalism, with content on such things as treasure hunts, flying saucers, and the underground—and again with the good chance that it might see the light of print, with at least some of the more moronic readers according it some credence. But a college professor is not supposed to write for such media and most assuredly would feel the full weight of academic censure should he do so. There always is, of course,’ the subterfuge of writing under an assumed name and changing the names of those who appear in the text, but even should I not shrink from this (which I do) it would offer only poor protection, since at least part of the story is known to many others and, accordingly, I could be identified quite easily.
