“Please try and control yourself. Dr. Westing can administer medication if you require it.”
“The second time, he was on a chaise longue he had put in for me near his favorite workbench. So I could talk to him there.”
“And his behavior on these two occasions?”
“Well, the first time I had been so worried, and I saw him lying there on the bed the way he used to, and without thinking I just called out, ‘Snookums!’—that’s what I always used to call him.”
“And his behavior? Give me as much detail as possible.”
“He seemed to hear me, and started to get up...”
“And disappeared?”
“Yes, it was terrible. The second time, when he was on the chaise, I was carrying some dirty beakers and Erlenmeyer flasks over to the sink to wash. When I saw him there I dropped them, and as soon as I did he disappeared.”
Street nodded. “Very suggestive. I think at this point we had better examine the day bed, the chaise longue, and that chair. Tell me, Miss Dodson, of the five of us, which is closest in height to the professor?”
“Why . . .” She hesitated for a moment. “Why, Dr. Westing, I suppose.”
“Excellent,” said Street. We all trooped after him as he crossed the huge laboratory to the day bed Alice Dodson had indicated. “Westing,” Street murmured, “if you will oblige me.”
“But what is it you wish me to do?”
“I want you to lie down on that bed. On his back, Miss Dodson?”
“More on his side, I think.”
“And try,” St. Louis put in, “to look like a genius, Doc.” Wide shushed him.
“Don’t hesitate to arrange his limbs, Miss Dodson,” Street told her; “this is important. There, is that satisfactory?”
The girl nodded.
Street whipped a tape rule from his pocket and made a series of quick measurements of my position, jotting down the results on a notepad. “And now, Miss Dodson, please give me the date and time when you saw the professor here—as exactly as possible.”
“October twelfth. It was about ten-twenty.”
“Excellent. And now the chaise.”
At the chaise longue we repeated the same procedure, Miss Dodson giving the date and time as October 18th, at ten minutes to eleven.
When I had been measured in the chair as well, Street said, “And today is October twenty-fifth. At what time did you see the professor?”
“It was about one o’clock this afternoon.”
While Street scribbled calculations on his pad, Wide cleared his throat. “I notice, Street, that the time of this most recent apparition would seem to violate what might earlier have appeared to be an invariable rule; that is, that Dodson’s ghost appeared at or very nearly at ten-thirty in the morning.”
Street nodded. “If my theory is correct, we shall see that those significant-looking times were mere coincidences, arising from the fact that it was at about that time each day that Miss Dodson entered this room. You did say, did you not, Miss Dodson, that you came every day?”
The girl shook her head. “I suppose I did, but actually the first apparition frightened me so much that I didn’t come again until—”
“Until the eighteenth, when you saw him the second time. I suspected as much.”
“Street,” I exclaimed, “you understand this dreadful business. For heaven’s sake tell us what has been happening.”
“I shall expound my theory in a moment,” Street replied, “but first I intend to attempt an experiment which, should it succeed, will confirm it and perhaps provide us with valuable information as well. Miss Dodson, your ‘father’—like myself—dabbled in every sort of science, did he not?”
“Yes, at least... I think so.”
“Then is there such a thing as a wind tunnel in this laboratory? Or any sort of large, powerful fan?”
“He—he was interested in the techniques air-conditioning engineers use to make their systems as noisy as possible, Mr. Street. I think he had a big fan for that’.”
After a ten-minute search we found it, a powerful industrial-grade centrifugal fan. “Exactly what we need,” Street enthused. “St. Louis, you and Westing take the other side of this thing. We want to set it up on the lab bench nearest the escalator.”
When we had positioned it there, Street turned to the girl and said, “Miss Dodson, at this point I require your fullest cooperation—the success of this experiment depends primarily upon yourself. I have placed the fan where you see it, and I intend to spike the base to the top of the bench and permanently wire the motor to make it as difficult as possible for anyone to disconnect. I want your solemn word that you will not disconnect it, or interfere with its operation in any way; and that you will exert your utmost effort to prevent any other person whatsoever from doing so before November seventh.”
“You think,” the girl said in so low a tone that I could scarcely make out the words, “that he is still alive, don’t you?”
“I do.”
“If this fan runs all that time, will it bring him back to us?”
“It may help.”
“Then I promise.”
“Even should the professor be restored to you, it must remain in operation—do you understand? It might be wise, for example, to persuade him to take a brief holiday, leaving the fan untouched.”
“I will do my best,” the girl said. “He likes the seaside.”
Street nodded, and without another word walked to the wall, threw one of the main circuit breakers, and began soldering the fan-motor leads into a 220-volt utility circuit. Under Wide’s direction St. Louis and I found hammers and a gross of heavy nails, with which we secured the base to the benchtop.
“Now,” Street announced when all our tasks were complete, “once again I shall require cooperation—this time from every one of you. I shall stand here at the circuit breaker. The rest of you must scatter yourselves over this entire laboratory, each taking a section of it as his own responsibility. When I turn on the fan, things will begin to blow about. What we are looking for will, I think, be a slip of notebook paper, and when you observe it, it will be at a distance of about seventy-six centimeters from the floor. Seize it at once—if you wait for it to settle we are lost.”
We did as he asked, and no sooner was the last of us in position than the huge fan sprang into life with hurricane force. A tremendous wind seemed to sweep the entire laboratory, and several pieces of light glassware went over with a crash.
Keeping my eyes fixed, as Street had suggested, at a height of seventy-six centimeters above the floor, I at once observed a sheet of paper fluttering in the machine-made wind. I have often observed that a scrap of paper, blown about, will seem to appear when its surface faces me and disappear when it is edge-on, and for an instant I assumed that the peculiar character of this one stemmed from a similar cause; then I realized that this was not the case—the sheet was, in fact, actually disappearing and reappearing as it danced in the gale. Street and I both dived for it at once. He was a shade the quicker; for a split second I saw the tips of his fingers vanish as though amputated by some demonic knife; then he was waving die paper overhead in triumph.
“Street!” I exclaimed, “you’ve got it! What is it?”
“There’s no need to shout, Westing. If you’ll step back here behind the inlet we can talk quite comfortably. I was relying upon a brilliant scientist’s habitual need to reduce his thoughts to paper, and it has not failed me.”
“What is it?” I asked. “Can I see it?”
“Certainly,” Street said, handing me the paper. Miss Dodson, Wide, and St. Louis crowded around.
The note read:
160 cm—4:00
159.5—2:00
159.0—12:00
d = 14,400 sec/cm X h
“Brief,” Street remarked, “but eminently satisfying. The great scientist’s calculations agree astonishingly well with my own.”
“But, Street,” I protested, “it doesn’t tell
us anything. It’s only a formula.”
“Precisely the way I have always felt about those prescriptions of yours, Westing.”
Wide said, “I think it’s time you reported, Street.”
“It will take only a few moments now for me to begin the rescue of Professor Dodson,” Street told him. “And then we will have some minutes in which to talk. Have you ever practiced yoga, Mr. Wide? No? A pity.”
Before our astonished eyes Street proceeded to stand on his head, assuming the posture I believe is known as “The Pole.” We heard him say in a distinct voice, “When you grow tired of this, Professor, you have only to use the escalator. Use the escalator.” Then with the agility of an acrobat he was upright again, slightly red of face.
“I believe, sir,” Wide said, “that you owe us an explanation.”
“And you shall have it. It occurred to me today, while I sat in the lodgings I share with Dr. Westing, that Professor Dodson’s disappearance might be in some way connected with his membership in the Peircian Society. That he was a member was stated in the dossier you passed on to me, Wide, as you may recall.”
Wide nodded.
“I began my investigation, as Dr. Westing can testify, by rereading the complete works of Peirce and Knight, keeping in mind that as a Peircian Dodson ardently believed that the persecuted philosopher had arranged his own supposed death and reappeared under the nom de guerre of Knight; certainly, as the Peircians point out, a suitable one—and particularly so when one keeps in mind that a knight’s chief reliance was upon that piercing weapon the lance, and that Knight was what is called a freelance.
“I also, I may say, kept before me the probability that as both a Peircian and as a man of high intellectual attainments Dodson would be intimately familiar with what is known of the life and work of both men.” -
“Do you mean to say,” I exclaimed, “that your reading led you to the solution of this remarkable case?”
“It pointed the way,” Street acceded calmly. “Tell me, Westing, Wide, any of you, what was Charles Sanders Peirce’s profession?”
“Why, Street, you mentioned it yourself a moment ago. He was a philosopher.”
“I hope not. No, poor as that shamefully treated scholar was, I would not wish him in so unremunerated a trade as that. No, gentlemen—and Miss Dodson—when his contemporaries put the question to Peirce himself, or to his colleagues, the answer they received was that Peirce was a physicist. And in one of Knight’s books, in an introduction to a piece by another writer, I found this remarkable statement: It deals with one of the most puzzling questions in relativity, one to which Einstein never gave an unequivocal answer: If all four space-time dimensions are equivalent, how is it that we perceive one so differently from the rest? That question is sufficiently intriguing by itself—conceive of the fascination it must have held for Dodson, believing, as he did, that it had originated in the mind of Peirce.”
“I begin to see what you are hinting at, Street,” Wide said slowly, “but not why it affected Dodson more because he thought Peirce the author.”
“Because,” Street answered, “Peirce—Peirce the physicist—was the father of pragmatism, the philosophy which specifically eschews whatever cannot be put into practice.”
“I see,” said Wide.
“Well, I don’t,” announced St. Louis loudly. He looked at Miss Dodson. “Do you, kid?”
“No,” she said, “and I don’t see how this is going to help Sn—the professor.”
“Unless I am mistaken,” Street told her, “and I hope I am not, he no longer requires our help—but we can wait a few moments longer to be sure. Your ‘father,’ Miss Dodson, decided to put Knight’s remark to a practical test. When you entered the room this evening, I was in the act of examining the device he built to do it, and had just concluded that that was its nature. Whether he bravely but foolhardily volunteered himself as his own first subject, or whether—as I confess I think more likely—he accidentally exposed his own person to its action, we may never learn; but however it came about, we know what occurred.”
“Are you trying to say,” I asked, “that. Dodson discovered some form of time travel?”
“We all travel in time, Westing,” Street said gravely. “What Professor Dodson did—he had discovered, I may add parenthetically, that the basis for the discrimination to which Knight objected was physiological—was to bend his own perception of the four dimensions so that he apprehended verticality as we do duration, and duration as we do verticality.”
“But that formula,” I began, “and the note itself—”
“Once I understood Dodson’s plight,” Street explained, “the question was quantitative: How was vertical distance—as seen by ourselves—related to duration as perceived by Dodson? Fortunately Miss Dodson’s testimony provided the clue. You will remember that on the twelfth she had seen Dodson lying on a day bed, this being at approximately ten-thirty in the morning. On the eighteenth, six days later but at about the same time, she saw. him on her chaise longue. A moment ago I measured your position, with you posed as the missing man had appeared, but I still did not know what portion of the body governed the temporal displacement. The third apparition, however, resolved that uncertainty. It took place seven days and two hours and ten minutes after the second. Dodson’s feet were actually lower this time than they had been in his first two appearances; his center of gravity was scarcely higher than it had been when he had half reclined on the chaise; but his head was considerably higher—enough to account nicely for the time lapse. Thus I located the ‘temporal determinant’—as I have been calling it to myself—in the area of the frontal lobes of the brain. When you were lying on the day bed, Westing, this spot was fifty centimeters from the floor; when you were in the chaise, seventy-four centimeters; and when you sat in that low chair, ninety-two and one-half centimeters. From these figures an easy calculation showed that one centimeter equaled four hours of duration. Dodson himself arrived at the same figure, doubtless when he noted that the hands of that large clock on the wall appeared to jump when he moved his head. As a true scientist he expressed it in the pure cgs system: vertical displacement times fourteen thousand four hundred seconds per centimeter equals duration.”
“And he wrote it on that slip of paper.”
Street nodded. “At some time in our future, since if it had been in the past we could not have put the paper in motion, as we did, by setting up a fan in the present with assurances that it would remain in operation for some time. Doubtless he used one of the laboratory benches as an impromptu writing desk, and I have calculated that when he stood erect he was in November sixth.”
“Where we will doubtless see him,” Wide said.
“I think not.”
“But, Street,” I interrupted, “why should that note have undergone the same dislocation?”
“Why should other inanimate objects behave as they do? Unquestionably because they have been in contact with us, and there is, as far as we know, no natural opposing force which behaves as Dodson. There was, of course, some danger in grasping the note, but I counted on my own greater mass to wrench it from its unnatural space-time orientation. I had noted, you see, that Miss Dodson’s descriptions of her ‘father’ did not state that he was nude, something she would undoubtedly have commented on had that been the case—ergo, he could be said to bend his clothing into his own reference frame.”
“But why did he vanish,” Miss Dodson demanded tearfully, “whenever he saw me?”
“He did not vanish,” Street replied, “he simply stood up, and, standing, passed into November sixth, as I have already explained. The first time because he heard you call his name, the second because you startled him by dropping glassware, and the third time because, as a gentleman of the old school, he automatically rose when a woman entered the room. He doubtless realized later that he could reappear to you by taking his seat once more, but he was loath to frighten you, and hoped he could think his way out of his predicament; the hint h
e required for that I believe I have provided: you see, when I stood on my head just now I appeared to Dodson at about the time he suffered his unfortunate accident; the formula I have already quoted, plus the knowledge that Dodson had vanished thirteen days ago, allowed me to calculate that all I need do was to place my own ‘temporal determinant’—the area of my frontal lobes— fourteen centimeters above the floor.”
“But where is he now?”
Street shrugged. “I have no way of knowing, really. Obviously, he is not here. He might be at the opera or attending a seminar, but it seems most probable that he is in the apartment below us.” He raised his voice. “Professor! Professor Dodson, are you down there?”
A moment later I saw a man of less than medium height, with white hair and a straggling yellow mustache, appear at the foot of the escalator. It was Professor Dodson! “What is it?” he asked testily. “Alice, who the hell are these people?”
Universe 5 - [Anthology] Page 16
