Far Out
Page 20
The leaves danced suddenly in a stronger breeze. “Guess we’ll see them in about a minute,” Jimmy said. “If you got the right time, that is.” His weight shifted, and Vogel knew he was staring up at the dials on the control board, even before his high voice read aloud: “May twenty-eight, nineteen sixty. Eleven-nine-thirty-two A.M.”
His voice grew higher. “Here they come.”
In the screen, a flicker of running bodies passed under the trees. Vogel saw bare brown backs, sports shirts, tee shirts, dark heads and blond. There were eight or nine boys in the pack, all aged about twelve; the last, lagging behind, was a slender brown-haired boy who seemed a little younger. He paused, clearly visible for a moment through the leaves, and looked up with a white face. Then he turned and was gone into the dark flickering green.
“There I go,” said Jimmy’s raw voice. “Now we’re climbing up the slope to the quarry. Dark and kind of clammy up there, so many old spruces you can’t even see the sky. That moss was just like cold mud when you stepped on it barefoot.”
“Try to relax,” said Vogel carefully. “Would you like to do it later?”
“No, now,” said Jimmy convulsively. His voice steadied “I’m a little tensed up, I guess, but I can do it. I wasn’t really scared; it was the way it happened, so sudden. They never gave me time to get ready.”
“Well, that’s what the machine is for,” said Vogel soothingly. “More time—time enough for everything.”
“I know it,” said Jimmy in an inattentive voice.
Vogel sighed. These afternoons tired him; he was not a young man any more and he no longer believed in his work. Things did not turn out as you expected. The work had to be done, of course; there was always the chance of helping someone, but it was not the easy, automatic thing that youth in its terrible confidence believed.
There was a rustle in the screen, and Vogel saw Jimmy’s hands clench into desperate fists on his knees.
A boy flashed into view, the same boy, running clumsily with one hand over his face. His head rocked back and forth. He blundered past, whipped by undergrowth, and the swaying branches closed behind him.
Jimmy’s hands relaxed slowly. “There I go,” his voice said, low and bitter. “Running away. Crying like a baby.”
After a moment Vogel’s spidery fingers reached out to the controls. The viewpoint drifted slowly closer to the ground. Galaxies of green leaves passed through it like bright smoke, and then the viewpoint stopped and tilted, and they were looking up the leaf-shadowed path, as if from a point five feet or so above the ground.
Vogel asked carefully, “Ready now?”
“Sure,” said Jimmy, his voice thin again.
The shock of the passage left him stumbling for balance, and he fetched up against a small tree. The reeling world steadied around him; he laughed. The tree trunk was cool and papery under his hand; the leaves were a dancing green glory all around. He was back in Kellogg’s Woods again, on that May day when everything had gone wrong, and here it was, just the same as before. The same leaves were on the trees; the air he breathed was the same air.
He started walking up the trail. After a few moments he discovered that his heart was thumping in his chest. He hated them, all the big kids with their superior, grinning faces. They were up there right now, waiting for him. But this time he would show them, and then afterward, slowly, it would be possible to stop hating. He knew that. But oh, Christ, how he hated them now!
It was dark under the spruces as he climbed, and the moss was squashy underfoot. For a passing moment he was sorry he had come. But it was costing his family over a thousand dollars to have him sent back. They were giving him this golden chance, and he wouldn’t waste it.
Now he could hear the boys’ voices, calling hollow, and the cold splash as one of them dived.
Hating and bitter, he climbed to where he could look down across the deep shadowed chasm of the old quarry. The kids were all tiny figures on the other side, where the rock slide was, the only place where you could climb out of the black water. Some of them were sitting on the rocks, wet and shivering. Their voices came up to him small with distance.
Nearer, he saw the dead spruce that lay slanting downward across the edge of the quarry, with its tangled roots in the air. The trunk was silvery grey, perhaps a foot thick at the base. It had fallen straight down along the quarry wall, an old tree with all the stubs of limbs broken off short, and its tip was jammed into a crevice. Below that, there was a series of ledges you could follow all the way down.
But first you had to walk the dead tree.
He climbed up on the thick, twisting roots, trying not to be aware just yet how they overhung the emptiness below. Down across the shadowed quarry, he could see pale blurs of faces turning up one by one to look at him.
Now he vividly remembered the way it had been before, the line of boys tightrope-walking down the tree, arms waving for balance, bare or tennis-shoed feet treading carefully. If only they hadn’t left him till last!
He took one step out onto the trunk. Without intending to, he glanced down and saw the yawning space under him—the black water, and the rocks.
The tree swayed under him. He tried to take the next step and found he couldn’t. It was just the same as before, and he realized now that it was impossible to walk the tree—you would slip and fall, down, down that cliff to the rocks and the cold water. Standing there fixed between the sky and the quarry, he could tell himself that the others had done it, but it didn’t help. What good was that, when he could see, when anybody could see, it was impossible?
Down there, the boys were waiting, in their cold and silent comradeship.
Jimmy stepped slowly back. Tears of self-hatred burned his lids, but he climbed over the arching roots and left the quarry edge behind him, hearing the clear, distant shouts begin again as he stumbled down the path.
“Don’t blame yourself too much,” said Vogel in his grey voice. “Maybe you just weren’t ready, this time.”
Jimmy wiped his eyes angrily with the heel of his hand. “I wasn’t ready,” he muttered. “I thought I was, but… Must have been too nervous, that’s all.”
“Or, maybe…” Vogel hesitated. “Some people think it’s better to forget the past and solve our problems in the present.”
Jimmy’s eyes widened with shock. “I couldn’t give up now!” he said. He stood up, agitated. “Why, my whole life would be ruined—I mean, I never thought I’d hear a thing like that from you, Mr. Vogel. I mean, the whole point of this machine, and everything…”
“I know,” said Vogel. “The past can be altered. The scholar can take his exam over again, the lover can propose once more, the words that were thought of too late can be spoken. So I always believed.” He forced a smile. “It’s like a game of cards. If you don’t like the hand that is dealt to you, you can take another, and after that, another…”
“That’s right,” said Jimmy, sounding appeased. “So if you look at it that way, how can I lose?”
Vogel did not reply but stood up courteously to see him to the door.
“So, then, I’ll see you tomorrow, Mr. Vogel,” Jimmy said.
Vogel glanced at the wall calendar; it read, April 21, 1978. “Yes, all right,” he answered.
In the doorway, Jimmy looked back at him with pathetic hopefulness—a pale, slender thirty-year-old man, from whose weak eyes a lost boy seemed to be staring, pleading… “There’s always tomorrow, isn’t there, Mr. Vogel?” he asked.
“Yes,” said Vogel wearily. “There’s always tomorrow.”
EXTEMPORE
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 CALINDAR. HELO MR ROSI.”
They all bowed, like marionettes, and Mr. Rossi bowed back. Flick. Flick. Flicketaflicketa WHIRRR…
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 recognize before flicketa WHIRRRR…
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… flick RRR…
Now a white desert at night, bitter cold, where the towers of Manhattan should have been. Something mournfully thin flapped by over flk RRRR…
Blackness and fog was all he could fk RRRR…
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, icecaps 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 star-eyou-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 platemaker’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 encyclopedia articles on relativity and spacetime, 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 T. 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 T 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 and 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 Americans; 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.)
The sequoia’s truth did not make the May fly 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”, “Z²/n²”, “M = Ma + 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-ordinates x, y, z
−c²e² = 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…