TIME PRIME

by H. Beam Piper

  Something clicked in Allan Hartley’s mind. He remembered now what that incident had been. He knew, too, what he had to do.

  “Dad, aren’t there some cartridges left for the Luger?” he asked.

  Blake Hartley snapped his fingers. “By George, yes! I have a German automatic I can let you have, but I wish you’d bring it back as soon as possible. I’ll get it for you.”

  Before he could rise, Allan was on his feet.

  “Sit still, Dad; I’ll get it. I know where the cartridges are.” With that, he darted into the house and upstairs.

  The Luger hung on the wall over his father’s bed. Getting it down, he dismantled it, working with rapid precision. He used the blade of his pocketknife to unlock the endpiece of the breechblock, slipping out the firing pin and buttoning it into his shirt pocket. Then he reassembled the harmless pistol, and filled the clip with 9-millimeter cartridges from the bureau drawer.

  There was an extension telephone beside the bed. Finding Gutchall’s address in the directory, he lifted the telephone and stretched his handkerchief over the mouthpiece. Then he dialed Police Headquarters.

  “This is Blake Hartley,” he lied, deepening his voice and copying his father’s tone. “Frank Gutchall, who lives at...take this down”—he gave Gutchall’s address”— has just borrowed a pistol from me, ostensibly to shoot a dog. He has no dog. He intends shooting his wife. Don’t argue about how I know; there isn’t time. Just take it for granted that I do. I disabled the pistol—took out the firing pin—but if he finds out what I did, he may get some other weapon. He’s on his way home, but he’s on foot. If you hurry, you may get a man there before he arrives, and grab him before he finds out the pistol won’t shoot.”

  “Okay, Mr. Hartley. We’ll take care of it. Thanks.”

  “And I wish you’d get my pistol back, as soon as you can. It’s something I brought home from the other War, and I shouldn’t like to lose it.”

  “We’ll take care of that, too. Thank you, Mr. Hartley.”

  He hung up, and carried the Luger and the loaded clip down to the porch.

  “Look, Mr. Gutchall; here’s how it works,” Allan said, showing it to the visitor. Then he slapped in the clip and yanked up on the toggle loading the chamber. “It’s ready to shoot now; this is the safety.” He pushed it on. “When you’re ready to shoot, just shove it forward and up, and then pull the trigger. You have to pull the trigger each time; it’s loaded for eight shots. And be sure to put the safety back when you’re through shooting.”

  “Did you load the chamber?” Blake Hartley demanded.

  “Sure. It’s on safe now.”

  “Let me see.” His father took the pistol, being careful to keep his finger out of the trigger guard, and looked at it.

  “Yes, that’s all right.” He repeated the instructions Allan had given, stressing the importance of putting the safety on after using. “Understand how it works?” he asked.

  “Yes, I understand how it works. Thank you, Mr. Hartley. Thank you, too, young man.”

  Gutchall put the Luger in his hip pocket, made sure it wouldn’t fall out, and took his leave.

  “You shouldn’t have loaded it,” Hartley père reproved when he was gone.

  Allan sighed. This was it; the masquerade was over.

  “I had to, to keep you from fooling with it,” he said. “I didn’t want you finding out that I’d taken out the firing pin.”

  “You what?”

  “Gutchall didn’t want that gun to shoot a dog; he doesn’t have one. He meant to shoot his wife with it. He’s a religious maniac; sees visions, hears voices, receives revelations, talks with the Holy Ghost. The Holy Ghost probably put him up to this caper. I’ll submit that any man who holds long conversations with the Deity isn’t to be trusted with a gun, and neither is any man who lies about why he wants one. And while I was at it, I called the police on the upstairs phone. I had to use your name; I deepened my voice and talked through a handkerchief.”

  “You—” Blake Hartley jumped as though bee-stung. “Why did you have to do that?”

  “You know why. I couldn’t have told them, ‘This is little Allan Hartley, just thirteen years old; please, Mr. Policeman, go and arrest Frank Gutchall before he goes root-toot-toot at his wife with my pappa’s Luger.’ That would have gone over big, now, wouldn’t it?”

  “And suppose he really wants to shoot a dog; what sort of a mess will I be in?”

  “No mess at all. If I’m wrong—which I’m not—I’ll take the thump for it myself. It’ll pass for a dumb kid trick, and nothing’ll be done. But if I’m right, you’ll have to front for me. They’ll keep your name out of it, but they’d give me a lot of cheap boy-hero publicity, which I don’t want.” He picked up his pencil again. “We should have the complete returns in about twenty minutes.”

  That was a ten-minute under-estimate, and it was another quarter-hour before the detective-sergeant who returned the Luger had finished congratulating Blake Hartley and giving him the thanks of the Department. After he had gone, the lawyer picked up the Luger, withdrew the clip, and ejected the round in the chamber.

  “Well,” he told his son, “you were right. You saved that woman’s life.” He looked at the automatic, and then handed it across the table. “Now, let’s see you put that firing pin back.”

  Allan Hartley dismantled the weapon, inserted the missing part, and put it together again, then snapped it experimentally and returned it to his father. Blake Hartley looked at it again, and laid it on the table.

  “Now, son, suppose we have a little talk,” he said softly.

  “But I explained everything.” Allan objected innocently.

  “You did not,” his father retorted. “Yesterday you’d never have thought of a trick like this; why, you wouldn’t even have known how to take this pistol apart. And at dinner, I caught you using language and expressing ideas that were entirely outside anything you’d ever known before. Now, I want to know—and I mean this literally.”

  Allan chuckled. “I hope you’re not toying with the rather medieval notion of possession,” he said.

  Blake Hartley started. Something very like that must have been flitting through his mind. He opened his mouth to say something, then closed it abruptly.

  “The trouble is, I’m not sure you aren’t right,” his son continued. “You say you find me—changed. When did you first notice a difference?”

  “Last night, you were still my little boy. This morning—” Blake Hartley was talking more to himself than to Allan. “I don’t know. You were unusually silent at breakfast. And come to think of it, there was something…something strange… about you when I saw you in the hall upstairs.... Allan!” he burst out, vehemently. “What has happened to you?”

  Allan Hartley felt a twinge of pain. What his father was going through was almost what he, himself, had endured in the first few minutes after waking.

  “I wish I could be sure, myself, Dad,” he said. “You see, when I woke this morning, I hadn’t the least recollection of anything I’d done yesterday. August 4, 1945, that is,” he specified. “I was positively convinced that I was a man of fortythree, and my last memory was of lying on a stretcher, injured by a bomb explosion. And I was equally convinced that this had happened in 1975.”

  “Huh?” His father straightened. “Did you say nineteen seventy-five?” He thought for a moment. “That’s right; in 1975, you will be forty-three. A bomb, you say?”

  Allan nodded. “During the siege of Buffalo, in the Third World War,” he said, “I was a captain in G5—Scientific Warfare, General Staff. There’d been a transpolar air invasion of Canada, and I’d been sent to the front to check on service failures of a new lubricating oil for combat equipment. A week after I got there, Ottawa fell and the retreat started. We made a stand at Buffalo and that was where I copped it. I remember being picked up, and getting a narcotic injection. The next thing I knew, I was in bed upstairs and it was 1945 again, and I was back in my own little thirteen-y
ear-old body.”

  “Oh, Allan, you just had a nightmare to end nightmares!” his father assured him, laughing a trifle too heartily. “That’s all!”

  “That was one of the first things I thought of. I had to reject it; it just wouldn’t fit the facts. Look; a normal dream is part of the dreamer’s own physical brain, isn’t it? Well, here is a part about two thousand per cent greater than the whole from which it was taken. Which is absurd.”

  “You mean all this Battle of Buffalo stuff? That’s easy. All the radio commentators have been harping on the horrors of World War III, and you couldn’t have avoided hearing some of it. You just have an undigested chunk of H. V. Kaltenborn raising hell in your subconscious.”

  “It wasn’t just World War III; it was everything. My four years at high school, and my four years at Penn State, and my seven years as a reporter on the Philadelphia Record. And my novels: Children of the Mist, Rose of Death, Conqueror’s Road. They were no kid stuff. Why, yesterday I’d never even have thought of some of the ideas I used in my detective stories, that I published under a nom de plume. And my hobby, chemistry; I was pretty good at that. Patented a couple of processes that made me as much money as my writing. You think a thirteen-year-old just dreamed all that up? Or, here; you speak French, don’t you?” He switched languages and spoke at some length in good conversational slang-spiced Parisian. “Too bad you don’t speak Spanish, too,” he added, reverting to English. “Except for a Mexican accent you could cut with a machete, I’m even better there than in French. And I know some German, and a little Russian.”

  Blake Hartley was staring at his son, stunned. It was some time before he could make himself speak. “I could barely keep up with you, in French,” he admitted. “I can swear that in the last thirteen years of your life, you had absolutely no chance to learn it. All right; you lived till 1975, you say. Then, all of a sudden, you found yourself back here, thirteen years old, in 1945. I suppose you remember everything in between?” he asked. “Did you ever read James Branch Cabell? Remember Florian de Puysange, in The High Place?”

  “Yes. You find the same idea in ‘Jurgen’ too,” Allan said. “You know, I’m beginning to wonder if Cabell mightn’t have known something he didn’t want to write.”

  “But it’s impossible!” Blake Hartley hit the table with his hand, so hard that the heavy pistol bounced. The loose round he had ejected from the chamber toppled over and started to roll, falling off the edge. He stooped and picked it up. “How can you go back, against time? And the time you claim you came from doesn’t exist, now; it hasn’t happened yet.” He reached for the pistol magazine to insert the cartridge, and as he did, he saw the books in front of his son.

  “Dunne’s Experiment with Time,” he commented. “And J. N. M. Tyrrell’s Science and Psychical Phenomena. Are you trying to work out a theory?”

  “Yes.” It encouraged Allan to see that his father had unconsciously adopted an adult-to-adult manner. “I think I’m getting somewhere, too. You’ve read these books? Well, look, Dad; what’s your attitude on precognition? The ability of the human mind to exhibit real knowledge, apart from logical inference, of future events? You think Dunne is telling the truth about his experiences? Or that the cases in Tyrrell’s book are properly verified, and can’t be explained away on the basis of chance?”

  Blake Hartley frowned. “I don’t know,” he confessed. “The evidence is the sort that any court in the world would accept, if it concerned ordinary, normal events. Especially the cases investigated by the Society for Psychical Research: they have been verified. But how can anybody know of something that hasn’t happened yet? If it hasn’t happened yet, it doesn’t exist, and you can’t have real knowledge of something that has no real existence.”

  “Tyrrell discusses that dilemma,” Allan said, “and doesn’t dispose of it. I think I can. If somebody has real knowledge of the future, then the future must be available to the present mind. And if any moment other than the bare present exists, then all time must be totally present; every moment must be perpetually coexistent with every other moment,” Allan said.

  “Yes. I think I see what you mean. That was Dunne’s idea, wasn’t it?”

  “No. Dunne postulated an infinite series of time dimensions, the entire extent of each being the bare present moment of the next. What I’m postulating is the perpetual coexistence of every moment of time in this dimension, just as every graduation on a yardstick exists equally with every other graduation, but each at a different point in space.”

  “Well, as far as duration and sequence go, that’s all right,” the father agreed. “But how about the Passage of Time?”

  “Well, time does appear to pass. So does the landscape you see from a moving car window. I’ll suggest that both are illusions of the same kind. We imagine time to be dynamic because we’ve never viewed it from a fixed point, but if it is totally present, then it must be static, and in that case, we’re moving through time.”

  “That seems all right. But what’s your car window?”

  “If all time is totally present, then you must exist simultaneously at every moment along your individual life span,” Allan said. “Your physical body, and your mind, and all the thoughts contained in your mind, each at its appropriate moment in sequence. But what is it that exists only at the bare moment we think of as now?”

  Blake Hartley grinned. Already, he was accepting his small son as an intellectual equal. “Please, teacher; what?”

  “Your consciousness. And don’t say, ‘What’s that?’ Teacher doesn’t know. But we’re only conscious of one moment: the illusory now. This is ‘now,’ and it was ‘now’ when you asked that question, and it’ll be ‘now’ when I stop talking, but each is a different moment. We imagine that all those nows are rushing past us. Really, they’re standing still, and our consciousness is whizzing past them.”

  His father thought that over for some time. Then he sat up.

  “Hey!” he cried suddenly. “If some part of our ego is time-free and passes from moment to moment, it must be extraphysical, because the physical body exists at every moment through which the consciousness passes. And if it’s extraphysical, there’s no reason whatever for assuming that it passes out of existence when it reaches the moment of the death of the body. Why, there’s logical evidence for survival, independent of any alleged spirit communication! You can toss out Patience Worth, and Mrs. Osborne Leonard’s Feda, and Sir Oliver Lodge’s son, and Wilfred Brandon, and all the other spirit-communicators, and you still have evidence.”

  “I hadn’t thought of that,” Allan confessed. “I think you’re right. Well, let’s put that at the bottom of the agenda and get on with this time business. You ‘lose consciousness’ as in sleep; where does your consciousness go? I think it simply detaches from the moment at which you go to sleep, and moves backward or forward along the line of moment-sequence to some prior or subsequent moment, attaching there.”

  “Well, why don’t we know anything about that?” Blake Hartley asked. “It never seems to happen. We go to sleep tonight, and it’s always tomorrow morning when we wake; never the day before yesterday, or last month, or next year.”

  “It never…or almost never…seems to happen; you’re right there. Know why? Because if the consciousness goes forward, it attaches at a moment when the physical brain contains memories of the previous, consciously unexperienced, moment. You wake, remembering the evening before, because that’s the memory contained in your mind at that moment, and back of it are memories of all the events in the interim. See?”

  “Yes. But how about backward movement, like this experience of yours?”

  “This experience of mine may not be unique, but I’ve never heard of another case like it. What usually happens is that the memories carried back by the consciousness are buried in the subconscious mind. You know how thick the wall between the subconscious and the conscious mind is. These dreams of Dunne’s, and the cases in Tyrrell’s book, are leakage. That’s why precognit
ions are usually incomplete and distorted, and generally trivial. The wonder isn’t that good cases are so few; it’s surprising that there are any at all.” Allan looked at the papers in front of him. “I haven’t begun to theorize about how I managed to remember everything. It may have been the radiations from the bomb, or the effect of the narcotic, or both together, or something at this end, or a combination of all three. But the fact remains that my subconscious barrier didn’t function, and everything got through. So, you see, I am possessed—by my own future identity.”

  “And I’d been afraid that you’d been, well, taken-over by some…some outsider.” Blake Hartley grinned weakly. “I don’t mind admitting, Allan, that what’s happened has been a shock. But that other...I just couldn’t have taken that.”

  “No. Not and stayed sane. But really, I am your son; the same entity I was yesterday. I’ve just had what you might call an educational short cut.”

  “I’ll say you have!” His father laughed in real amusement. He discovered that his cigar had gone out, and re-lit it. “Here; if you can remember the next thirty years, suppose you tell me when the War’s going to end. This one, I mean.”

  “The Japanese surrender will be announced at exactly 1901—7:01 P. M. present style—on August 14. A week from Tuesday. Better make sure we have plenty of grub in the house by then. Everything will be closed up tight till Thursday morning; even the restaurants. I remember we had nothing to eat in the house but some scraps.”

  “Well! It is handy, having a prophet in the family! I’ll see to it Mrs. Stauber gets plenty of groceries in…Tuesday a week? That’s pretty sudden, isn’t it?”

  “The Japs are going to think so,” Allan replied. He went on to describe what was going to happen. His father swore softly. “You know, I’ve heard talk about atomic energy, but I thought it was just Buck Rogers stuff. Was that the sort of bomb that got you?”

  “That was a firecracker to the bomb that got me. That thing exploded a good ten miles away.”