Far Out

by Damon Knight

  Television. Television, thought Cavanaugh dreamily, would have to shut up and put up.

  No more campaign oratory.

  No more banquet speeches.

  No more singing commercials.

  Cavanaugh sat up. “Listen,” he said tensely. “Could you fix just the writing—not the speech?”

  The Hooligan goggled at him and held out the disk Cavanaugh took it and slowly began putting the idea into careful pictures…

  The Hooligan was gone—vanished like a burst soap bubble at the end of a headfirst dive across Cavanaugh’s drawing table.

  Cavanaugh sat where he was, listening. From outside, after a moment, came a confused, distance-muted roar. All over the city—all over the world, Cavanaugh supposed—people were discovering that they could read again; that the signs meant what they said; that each man’s sudden island had been rejoined to the main.

  It lasted twenty minutes and then faded slowly. In his mind’s eye” Cavanaugh saw the orgy of scribbling that must be beginning now. He sat, and listened to the blessed silence.

  In a little while a growing twinge forced itself upon his attention, like a forgotten toothache. After a moment, Cavanaugh identified it as his conscience. Just who are you, conscience was saying, to take away the gift of speech—the thing that once was all that distinguished man from the apes?

  Cavanaugh dutifully tried to feel repentant, but it didn’t work. Who said it was a gift? he asked his conscience. What did we use it for?

  I’ll tell you, he said. In the cigar store: Hey, waddya think of them Yankees? Yeah, that was som’n, wasn’t it? Sure was! I tell you…

  At home: So, how was the office t’day? Aa, Same goddamn madhouse. How’d it go with you? Awright. I can’t complain. Kids okay? Yaa. Uh-huh. What’s f-dinner?

  At a party: Hello, Harry! Whattaya say, boy! How are ya? That’s good. How’s the… so I said to him, you can’t tell me what I’m gonna… like to, but it don’t agree with me. It’s my stummick; th’ doctor says… organdy, with little gold buttons… Oh, yeah? Well, how would you like a poke in the snoot?

  On the street corners: Lebensraum… Nordische Blut…

  I, said Cavanaugh, rest my case.

  Conscience did not reply.

  In the silence, Cavanaugh walked across the room to the record cabinet and pulled out an album. He could read the lettering on its spine: MAHLER, The Song of the Earth.

  He picked out one of the disks and put it on the machine—the “Drunkard’s Song” in the fifth movement.

  Cavanaugh smiled beatifically; listening. It was an artificial remedy, he was thinking; from the Hooligan’s point of view the human race was now permanently a little tipsy. And so what?

  The words the tenor was singing were gibberish to Cavanaugh—but then they always had been; Cavanaugh spoke no German. He knew what the words meant.

  Was geht mich denn der Frühling an!?

  Lasst mich betrunken sein?

  “What then is the spring to me?

  … Let me be drunk!”

  ANACHRON

  The body was never found. And for that reason alone, there was no body to find.

  It sounds like inverted logic—which, in a sense, it is—but there’s no paradox involved. It was a perfectly orderly and explicable event, even though it could only have happened to a Castellare.

  Odd fish, the Castellare brothers. Sons of a Scots-Englishwoman and an expatriate Italian, born in England, educated on the Continent, they were at ease anywhere in the world and at home nowhere.

  Nevertheless, in their middle years, they had become settled men. Expatriates like their father, they lived on the island of Ischia, off the Neapolitan coast, in a palace—quattrocento, very fine, with peeling cupids on the walls, a multitude of rats, no central heating and no neighbours.

  They went nowhere; no one except their agents and their lawyers came to them. Neither had ever married. Each, at about the age of thirty, had given up the world of people for an inner world of more precise and more enduring pleasures. Each was an amateur—a fanatical, compulsive amateur.

  They had been born our of their time.

  Peter’s passion was virtu. He collected relentlessly, it would not be too much to say savagely; he collected as some men hunt big game. His taste was catholic, and his acquisitions filled the huge rooms of the palace and half the vaults under them—paintings, statuary, enamels, porcelain, glass, crystal, metalwork. At fifty, he was a round little man with small, sardonic eyes and a careless patch of pinkish goatee .

  Harold Castellare, Peter’s talented brother, was a scientist. An amateur scientist. He belonged in the nineteenth century, as Peter was a throwback to a still earlier epoch. Modern science is largely a matter of teamwork and drudgery, both impossible concepts to a Castellare. But Harold’s intelligence was in its own way as penetrating and original as a Newton’s or a Franklin’s. He had done respectable work in physics and electronics, and had even, at his lawyer’s instance, taken out a few patents. The income from these, when his own purchases of instruments and equipment did not consume it, he gave to his brother, who accepted it without gratitude or rancour.

  Harold, at fifty-three, was spare and shrunken, sallow and spotted, with a bloodless, melancholy countenance; on his upper lip grew a neat hedge of pink-and-salt moustache, the companion piece and antithesis of his brother’s goatee.

  On a certain May morning, Harold had an accident.

  Goodyear dropped rubber on a hot stove; Archimedes took a bath; Curie left a piece of uranium ore in a drawer with a photographic plate. Harold Castellare, working patiently with an apparatus which had so far consumed a great deal of current without producing anything more spectacular than some rather unusual corona effects, sneezed convulsively and dropped an ordinary bar magnet across two charged terminals.

  Above the apparatus a huge, cloudy bubble sprang into being.

  Harold, getting up from his instinctive crouch, blinked at it in profound astonishment. As he watched, the cloudiness abruptly disappeared and he was looking through the bubble at a section of tesselated flooring that seemed to be about three feet above the real floor. He could also see the corner of a carved wooden bench, and on the bench a small, oddly shaped stringed instrument.

  Harold swore fervently to himself, made agitated notes, and then began to experiment. He tested the sphere cautiously with an electroscope, with a magnet, with a Geiger counter. Negative. He tore a tiny bit of paper from his notepad and dropped it toward the sphere. The paper disappeared; he couldn’t see where it went.

  Speechless, Harold picked up a metre stick and thrust it delicately forward. There was no feeling of contact; the rule went into and through the bubble as if the latter did not exist. Then it touched the stringed instrument, with a solid click. Harold pushed. The instrument slid over the edge of the bench and struck the floor with a hollow thump and jangle.

  Staring at it, Harold suddenly recognized its tantalizingly familiar shape.

  Recklessly he let go the metre stick, reached in and picked the fragile thing out of the bubble. It was solid and cool in his fingers. The varnish was clear, the colour of the wood glowing through it. It looked as if it might have been made yesterday.

  Peter owned one almost exactly like it, except for preservation—a viola d’amore of the seventeenth century.

  Harold stooped to look through the bubble horizontally. Gold and rust tapestries hid the wall, fifty feet away, except for an ornate door in the centre. The door began to open; Harold saw a flicker of umber.

  Then the sphere went cloudy again. His hands were empty; the viola d’amore was gone. And the metre stick, which he had dropped inside the sphere, lay on the floor at his feet.

  “Look at that,” said Harold simply.

  Peter’s eyebrows went up slightly. “What is it, a new kind of television?”

  “No, no. Look here.” The viola d’amore lay on the bench, precisely where it had been before. Harold reached into the sphere and drew it out.
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  Peter started. “Give me that.” He took it in his hands, rubbed the smoothly finished wood. He stared at his brother. “By God and all the saints,” he said. “Time travel.”

  Harold snorted impatiently. “My dear Peter, ‘time’ is a meaningless word taken by itself, just as ‘space’ is.”

  “But, barring that; time travel.”

  “If you like, yes.”

  “You’ll be quite famous.”

  “I expect so.”

  Peter looked down at the instrument in his hands. “I’d like to keep this, if I may.”

  “I’d be very happy to let you, but you can’t.”

  As he spoke, the bubble went cloudy; the viola d’amore was gone like smoke.

  “There, you see?”

  “What sort of devil’s trick is that?”

  “It goes back… Later you’ll see. I had that thing out once before, and this happened. When the sphere became transparent again, the viol was where I had found it.”

  “And your explanation for this?”

  Harold hesitated. “None. Until I can work out the appropriate mathematics—”

  “Which may take you some time. Meanwhile, in layman’s language—”

  Harold’s face creased with the effort and interest of translation. “Very roughly, then—I should say it means that events are conserved. Two or three centuries ago—”

  “Three. Notice the sound holes.”

  “Three centuries ago, then, at this particular time of day, someone was in that room. If the viola were gone, he or she would have noticed the fact. That would constitute an alteration of events already fixed; therefore it doesn’t happen. For the same reason, I conjecture, we can’t see into the sphere, or—” he probed at it with a fountain pen—“I thought not—or reach into it to touch anything; that would also constitute an alteration. And anything we put into the sphere while it is transparent comes out again when it becomes opaque. To put it very crudely, we cannot alter the past.”

  “But is seems to me that we did alter it. Just now, when you took the viol out, even if no one of that time saw it happen.”

  “This,” said Harold, “is the difficulty of using language as a means of exact communication. If you had not forgotten all your calculus… However. It may be postulated (remembering of course that everything I say is a lie, because I say it in English) than an event which doesn’t influence other events is not an event. In other words—”

  “That, since no one saw you take it, it doesn’t matter whether you took it or not. A rather dangerous precept, Harold; you would have been burned at the stake for that at one time.”

  “Very likely. But it can be stated in another way or, indeed, in an infinity of ways which only seem to be different. If someone, let us say God, were to remove the moon as I am talking to you, using zero duration, and substitute an exact replica made of concrete and plaster of Paris, with the same mass, albedo and so on as the genuine moon, it would make no measurable difference in the universe as we perceive it—and therefore we cannot certainly say that it hasn’t happened. Nor, I may add, does it make any difference whether it has nor not.”

  “ ‘When there’s no one about on the quad,’ ” said Peter.

  “Yes. A basic and, as a natural consequence, a meaningless problem of philosophy. Except,” he added, “in this one particular manifestation.”

  He stared at the cloudy sphere. “You’ll excuse me, won’t you, Peter? I’ve got to work on this.”

  “When will you publish, do you suppose?”

  “Immediately. That’s to say, in a week or two.”

  “Don’t do it till you’ve talked it over with me, will you? I have a notion about it.”

  Harold looked at him sharply. “Commercial?”

  “In a way.”

  “No,” said Harold. “This is not the sort of thing one patents or keeps secret, Peter.”

  “Of course. I’ll see you at dinner, I hope?”

  “I think so. If I forget, knock on the door, will you?”

  “Yes. Until then.”

  “Until then.”

  At dinner, Peter asked only two questions.

  “Have you found any possibility of changing the time your thing reaches—from the seventeenth century to the eighteenth, for example, or from Monday to Tuesday?”

  “Yes, as a matter of fact. Amazing. It’s lucky that I had a rheostat already in the circuit; I wouldn’t dare turn the current off. Varying the amperage varies the time set. I’ve had it up to what I think was Wednesday of last week—at any rate, my smock was lying over the workbench where I left it, I remember, Wednesday afternoon. I pulled it out. A curious sensation, Peter—I was wearing the same smock at the time. And then the sphere went opaque and of course the smock vanished. That must have been myself, coming into the room.”

  “And the future?”

  “Yes. Another funny thing, I’ve had it forward to various times in the near future, and the machine itself is still there, but nothing’s been done to it—none of the things I’m thinking I might do. That might be because of the conservation of events, again, but I rather think not. Still farther forward there are cloudy areas, blanks; I can’t see anything that isn’t in existence now, apparently, but here, in the next few days, there’s nothing of that.

  “It’s as if I were going away. Where do you suppose I’m going?”

  Harold’s abrupt departure took place between midnight and morning. He packed his own grip, it would seem, left unattended, and was seen no more. It was extraordinary, of course, that he should have left at all, but the details were in no way odd. Harold had always detested what he called “the tyranny of the valet”. He was, as everyone knew, a most independent man.

  On the following day Peter made some trifling experiments with the time-sphere. From the sixteenth century he picked up a scent bottle of Venetian glass; from the eighteenth, a crucifix of carved rosewood; from the nineteenth, when the palace had been the residence of an Austrian count and his Italian mistress, a hand-illuminated copy of De Sade’s La Nouvelle Justine, very curiously bound in human skin.

  They all vanished, naturally, within minutes or hours—all but the scent bottle. This gave Peter matter for reflection.

  There had been half a dozen flickers of cloudiness in the sphere just futureward of the bottle; it ought to have vanished, but it hadn’t. But then, he had found it on the floor near a wall with quite a large rat hole in it.

  When objects disappeared unaccountably, he asked himself, was it because they had rolled into rat holes, or because some time fisher had picked them up when they were in a position to do so?

  He did not make any attempt to explore the future. That afternoon he telephoned his lawyers in Naples and gave them instructions for a new will. His estate, including his half of the jointly owned Ischia property, was to go to the Italian government on two conditions: (1) that Harold Castellare should make a similar bequest of the remaining half of the property and (2) that the Italian government should turn the palace into a national museum to house Peter’s collection, using the income from his estate for its administration and for further acquisitions. His surviving relatives—two cousins in Scotland—he cut off with a shilling each.

  He did nothing more until after the document had been brought out to him, signed and witnessed. Only then did he venture to look into his own future.

  Events were conserved, Harold had said—meaning, Peter very well understood, events of the present and future as well as of the past. But was there only one pattern in which the future could be fixed? Could a result exist before its cause had occurred?

  The Castellare motto was Audentes fortuna juvat—into which Peter, at the age of fourteen, had interpolated the word “prudentesque”: “Fortune favours the bold—and the prudent.”

  Tomorrow: no change; the room he was looking at was so exactly like this one that the time sphere seemed to vanish. The next day: a cloudy blur. And the next, and the next…

  Opacity, stra
ight through to what Peter judged, bv the distance he had moved the rheostat handle, to be ten years ahead. Then, suddenly, the room was a long marble hall filled with display cases.

  Peter smiled wryly. If you were Harold, obviously you could not look ahead and see Peter working in your laboratory. And if you were Peter, equally obviously, you rt 111111 not look ahead and know whether the room you saw was an improvement you yourself were going to make, or part of a museum established after your death, eight or nine years from now, or…

  No. Eight years was little enough, but he could not even be sure of that. It would, after all, be seven years before Harold could be declared legally dead…

  Peter turned the vernier knob slowly forward. A flicker, another, a long series. Forward faster. Now the flickering melted into a greyness; objects winked out of existence and were replaced by others in the showcases; the marble darkened and lightened again, darkened and lightened, darkened and remained dark. He was, Peter judged, look ing at the hall as it would be some five hundred years ill the future. There was a thick film of dust on every exposed surface; rubbish and the carcass of some small animal had been swept carelessly into a corner.

  The sphere clouded.

  When it cleared, there was an intricate trail of footprints in the dust, and two of the showcases were empty.

  The footprints were splayed, trifurcate, and thirty inches long.

  After a moment’s deliberation Peter walked around the workbench and leaned down to look through the sphere from the opposite direction. Framed in the nearest of the four tall windows was a scene of picture-postcard banality: the sun-silvered bay and the fore-shortened arc of the city, with Vesuvio faintly fuming in the background. But there was something wrong about the colours, even greyed as they were by distance.

  Peter went and got his binoculars.

  The trouble was, of course, that Naples was green. Where the city ought to have been, a rankness had sprouted. Between the clumps of foliage he could catch occasional glimpses of grey-white that might equally well have been boulders or the wreckage of buildings. There was no movement. There was no shipping in the harbour.