The Past Through Tomorrow

by Robert A. Heinlein

  “Will you continue, Doctor Pinero?”

  “Why should I?”

  The chairman shrugged his shoulders. “You came for that purpose.”

  Pinero arose. “So true. So very true. But was I wise to come? Is there anyone here who has an open mind, who can stare a bare fact in the face without blushing? I think not. Even that so beautiful gentleman who asked you to hear me out has already judged me and condemned me. He seeks order, not truth. Suppose truth defies order, will he accept it? Will you? I think not. Still, if I do not speak, you will win your point by default. The little man in the street will think that you little men have exposed me, Pinero, as a hoaxer, a pretender. That does not suit my plans. I will speak.

  “I will repeat my discovery. In simple language I have invented a technique to tell how long a man will live. I can give you advance billing of the Angel of Death. I can tell you when the Black Camel will kneel at your door. In five minutes time with my apparatus I can tell any of you how many grains of sand are still left in your hourglass.” He paused and folded his arms across his chest. For a moment no one spoke. The audience grew restless. Finally the chairman intervened.

  “You aren’t finished, Doctor Pinero?”

  “What more is there to say?”

  “You haven’t told us how your discovery works.”

  Pinero’s eyebrows shot up. “You suggest that I should turn over the fruits of my work for children to play with. This is dangerous knowledge, my friend. I keep it for the man who understands it, myself.” He tapped his chest.

  “How are we to know that you have anything back of your wild claims?”

  “So simple. You send a committee to watch me demonstrate. If it works, fine. You admit it and tell the world so. If it does not work, I am discredited, and will apologize. Even I, Pinero, will apologize.”

  A slender stoop-shouldered man stood up in the back of the hall. The chair recognized him and he spoke:

  “Mr. Chairman, how can the eminent doctor seriously propose such a course? Does he expect us to wait around for twenty or thirty years for some one to die and prove his claims?”

  Pinero ignored the chair and answered directly:

  “Pfui! Such nonsense! Are you so ignorant of statistics that you do not know that in any large group there is at least one who will die in the immediate future? I make you a proposition; let me test each one of you in this room and I will name the man who will die within the fortnight, yes, and the day and hour of his death.” He glanced fiercely around the room. “Do you accept?”

  Another figure got to his feet, a portly man who spoke in measured syllables. “I, for one, can not countenance such an experiment. As a medical man, I have noted with sorrow the plain marks of serious heart trouble in many of our elder colleagues. If Doctor Pinero knows those symptoms, as he may, and were he to select as his victim one of their number, the man so selected would be likely to die on schedule, whether the distinguished speaker’s mechanical egg-timer works or not.”

  Another speaker backed him up at once. “Doctor Shepard is right. Why should we waste time on voodoo tricks? It is my belief that this person who calls himself Doctor Pinero wants to use this body to give his statements authority. If we participate in this farce, we play into his hands. I don’t know what his racket is, but you can bet that he has figured out some way to use us for advertising for his schemes. I move, Mister Chairman, that we proceed with our regular business.”

  The motion carried by acclamation, but Pinero did not sit down. Amidst cries of “Order! Order!” he shook his untidy head at them, and had his say:

  “Barbarians! Imbeciles! Stupid dolts! Your kind have blocked the recognition of every great discovery since time began. Such ignorant canaille are enough to start Galileo spinning in his grave. That fat fool down there twiddling his elk’s tooth calls himself a medical man. Witch doctor would be a better term! That little bald-headed runt over there— You! You style yourself a philosopher, and prate about life and time in your neat categories. What do you know of either one? How can you ever learn when you won’t examine the truth when you have a chance? Bah!” He spat upon the stage. “You call this an Academy of Science. I call it an undertaker’s convention, interested only in embalming the ideas of your red-blooded predecessors.”

  He paused for breath and was grasped on each side by two members of the platform committee and rushed out the wings. Several reporters arose hastily from the press table and followed him. The chairman declared the meeting adjourned.

  The newspapermen caught up with him as he was going out by the stage door. He walked with a light springy step, and whistled a little tune. There was no trace of the belligerence he had shown a moment before. They crowded about him. “—How about an interview, doc?” “What dyu think of Modern Education?” “You certainly told ‘em. What are your views on Life after Death?” “Take off your hat, doc, and look at the birdie.”

  He grinned at them all. “One at a time, boys, and not so fast. I used to be a newspaperman myself. How about coming up to my place, and we’ll talk about it?”

  A few minutes later they were trying to find places to sit down in Pinero’s messy bed-living-room, and lighting his cigars. Pinero looked around and beamed. “What’ll it be, boys? Scotch, or Bourbon?” When that was taken care of he got down to business. “Now, boys, what do you want to know?”

  “Lay it on the line, doc. Have you got something, or haven’t you?”

  “Most assuredly I have something, my young friend.”

  “Then tell us how it works. That guff you handed the profs won’t get you anywhere now.”

  “Please, my dear fellow. It is my invention. I expect to make some money with it. Would you have me give it away to the first person who asks for it?”

  “See here, doc, you’ve got to give us something if you expect to get a break in the morning papers. What do you use? A crystal ball?”

  “No, not quite; Would you like to see my apparatus?”

  “Sure. Now we are getting somewhere.”

  He ushered them into an adjoining room, and waved his hand. “There it is, boys.” The mass of equipment that met their eyes vaguely resembled a medico’s office x-ray gear. Beyond the obvious fact that it used electrical power, and that some of the dials were calibrated in familiar terms, a casual inspection gave no clue to its actual use.

  “What’s the principle, doc?”

  Pinero pursed his lips and considered. “No doubt you are all familiar with the truism that life is electrical in nature? Well, that truism isn’t worth a damn, but it will help to give you an idea of the principle. You have also been told that time is a fourth dimension. Maybe you believe it, perhaps not. It has been said so many times that it has ceased to have any meaning. It is simply a cliché that windbags use to impress fools. But I want you to try to visualize it now and try to feel it emotionally.”

  He stepped up to one of the reporters. “Suppose we take you as an example. Your name is Rogers, is it not? Very well, Rogers, you are a space-time event having duration four ways. You are not quite six feet tall, you are about twenty inches wide and perhaps ten inches thick. In time, there stretches behind you more of this space-time event reaching to perhaps nineteen-sixteen, of which we see a cross-section here at right angles to the time axis, and as thick as the present. At the far end is a baby, smelling of sour milk and drooling its breakfast on its bib. At the other end lies, perhaps, an old man someplace in the nineteen-eighties. Imagine this space-time event which we call Rogers as a long pink worm, continuous through the years, one end at his mother’s womb, the other at the grave. It stretches past us here and the cross-section we see appears as a single discrete body. But that is illusion. There is physical continuity to this pink worm, enduring through the years. As a matter of fact there is physical continuity in this concept to the entire race, for these pink worms branch off from other pink worms. In this fashion the race is like a vine whose branches intertwine and send out shoots. Only by taking a cro
ss-section of the vine would we fall into the error of believing that the shootlets were discrete individuals.”

  He paused and looked around at their faces. One of them, a dour hardbitten chap, put in a word.

  “That’s all very pretty, Pinero, if true, but where does that get you?”

  Pinero favored him with an unresentful smile. “Patience, my friend. I asked you to think of life as electrical. Now think of our long pink worm as a conductor of electricity. You have heard, perhaps, of the fact that electrical engineers can, by certain measurements, predict the exact location of a break in a trans-Atlantic cable without ever leaving the shore. I do the same with our pink worms. By applying my instruments to the cross-section here in this room I can tell where the break occurs, that is to say, when death takes place. Or, if you like, I can reverse the connections and tell you the date of your birth. But that is uninteresting; you already know it.”

  The dour individual sneered. “I’ve caught you, doc. If what you said about the race being like a vine of pink worms is true, you can’t tell birthdays because the connection with the race is continuous at birth. Your electrical conductor reaches on back through the mother into a man’s remotest ancestors.”

  Pinero beamed. “True, and clever, my friend. But you have pushed the analogy too far. It is not done in the precise manner in which one measures the length of an electrical conductor. In some ways it is more like measuring the length of a long corridor by bouncing an echo off the far end. At birth there is a sort of twist in the corridor, and, by proper calibration, I can detect the echo from that twist. There is just one case in which I can get no determinant reading; when a woman is actually carrying a child, I can’t sort out her life-line from that of the unborn infant.”

  “Let’s see you prove it.”

  “Certainly, my dear friend. Will you be a subject?”

  One of the others spoke up. “He’s called your bluff, Luke. Put up, or shut up.”

  “I’m game. What do I do?”

  “First write the date of your birth on a sheet of paper, and hand it to one of your colleagues.”

  Luke complied. “Now what?”

  “Remove your outer clothing and step upon these scales. Now tell me, were you ever very much thinner, or very much fatter, than you are now. No? What did you weigh at birth? Ten pounds? A fine bouncing baby boy. They don’t come so big any more.”

  “What is all this flubdubbery?”

  “I am trying to approximate the average cross-section of our long pink conductor, my dear Luke. Now will you seat yourself here. Then place this electrode in your mouth. No, it will not hurt you; the voltage is quite low, less than one micro-volt, but I must have a good connection.” The doctor left him and went behind his apparatus, where he lowered a hood over his head before touching his controls. Some of the exposed dials came to life and a low humming came from the machine. It stopped and the doctor popped out of his little hide-away.

  “I get sometime in February, nineteen-twelve. Who has the piece of paper with the date?”

  It was produced and unfolded. The custodian read, “February 22nd, 1912.”

  The stillness that followed was broken by a voice from the edge of the little group. “Doc, can I have another drink?”

  The tension relaxed, and several spoke at once, “Try it on me, doc.”

  “Me first, doc, I’m an orphan and really want to know.”

  “How about it, doc. Give us all a little loose play.”

  He smilingly complied, ducking in and out of the hood like a gopher from its hole. When they all had twin slips of paper to prove the doctor’s skill, Luke broke a long silence:

  “How about showing how you predict death, Pinero.”

  “If you wish. Who will try it?”

  No one answered. Several of them nudged Luke forward. “Go ahead, smart guy. You asked for it.” He allowed himself to be seated in the chair. Pinero changed some of the switches, then entered the hood. When the humming ceased, he came out, rubbing his hands briskly together.

  “Well, that’s all there is to see, boys. Got enough for a story?”

  “Hey, what about the prediction? When does Luke get his ‘thirty’?”

  Luke faced him. “Yes, how about it? What’s your answer?”

  Pinero looked pained. “Gentlemen, I am surprised at you. I give that information for a fee. Besides, it is a professional confidence. I never tell anyone but the client who consults me.”

  “I don’t mind. Go ahead and tell them.”

  “I am very sorry. I really must refuse. I agreed only to show you how, not to give the results.”

  Luke ground the butt of his cigaret into the floor. “It’s a hoax, boys. He probably looked up the age of every reporter in town just to be ready to pull this. It won’t wash, Pinero.”

  Pinero gazed at him sadly. “Are you married, my friend?”

  “No.”

  “Do you have any one dependent on you? Any close relatives?”

  “No. Why, do you want to adopt me?”

  Pinero shook his head sadly. “I am very sorry for you, my dear Luke. You will die before tomorrow.”

  “SCIENCE MEET ENDS IN RIOT”

  “SAVANTS SAPS SAYS SEER”

  “DEATH PUNCHES TIMECLOCK”

  “SCRIBE DIES PER DOC’S DOPE”

  “‘HOAX’ CLAIMS SCIENCE HEAD”

  “… within twenty minutes of Pinero’s strange prediction, Timons was struck by a falling sign while walking down Broadway toward the offices of the Daily Herald where he was employed.

  “Doctor Pinero declined to comment but confirmed the story that he had predicted Timons’ death by means of his so-called chronovitameter. Chief of Police Roy…”

  Does the FUTURE worry You????????

  Don’t waste money on fortune tellers— Consult

  Doctor Hugo Pinero, Bio-Consultant

  to help you plan for the future by infallible

  scientific methods.

  No Hocus-Pocus

  No “Spirit” Messages

  $10,000 Bond posted in forfeit to back our predictions

  Circular on request

  SANDS of TIME, Inc.

  Majestic Bldg., Suite 700

  (adv.)

  * * *

  Legal Notice

  To whom it may concern, greetings; I, John Cabot Winthrop III, of the firm Winthrop, Winthrop, Ditmars & Winthrop, Attorneys-at-Law, do affirm that Hugo Pinero of this city did hand to me ten thousand dollars in lawful money of the United States, and instruct me to place it in escrow with a chartered bank of my selection with escrow instructions as follows:

  The entire bond shall be forfeit, and shall forthwith be paid to the first client of Hugo Pinero and/or Sands of Time, Inc. who shall exceed his life tenure as predicted by Hugo Pinero by one per centum, or to the estate of the first client who shall fail of such predicted tenure in a like amount, whichever occurs first in point of time.

  I do further affirm that I have this day placed this bond in escrow with the above related instructions with the Equitable-First National Bank of this city.

  Subscribed and sworn,

  John Cabot Winthrop III

  Subscribed and sworn to before me

  this 2nd day of April, 1951.

  Albert M. Swanson

  Notary Public in and for this county and state

  My commission expires June 17, 1951.

  * * *

  “Good evening Mr. and Mrs. Radio Audience, let’s go to Press! Flash! Hugo Pinero, The Miracle Man from Nowhere, has made his thousandth death prediction without a claimant for the reward he posted for anyone who catches him failing to call the turn. With thirteen of his clients already dead it is mathematically certain that he has a private line to the main office of the Old Man with the Scythe. That is one piece of news I don’t want to know before it happens. Your Coast-to-Coast Correspondent will not be a client of Prophet Pinero…”

  The judge’s watery baritone cut through the stale air of
the courtroom. “Please, Mr. Weems, let us return to our muttons. This court granted your prayer for a temporary restraining order, and now you ask that it be made permanent. In rebuttal, Mr. Pinero claims that you have presented no cause and asks that the injunction be lifted, and that I order your client to cease from attempts to interfere with what Pinero describes as a simple lawful business. As you are not addressing a jury, please omit the rhetoric and tell me in plain language why I should not grant his prayer.”

  Mr. Weems jerked his chin nervously, making his flabby grey dewlap drag across his high stiff collar, and resumed:

  “May it please the honorable court, I represent the public—”

  “Just a moment. I thought you were appearing for Amalgamated Life Insurance.”

  “I am, Your Honor, in a formal sense. In a wider sense I represent several other of the major assurance, fiduciary, and financial institutions; their stockholders, and policy holders, who constitute a majority of the citizenry. In addition we feel that we protect the interests of the entire population; unorganized, inarticulate, and otherwise unprotected.”

  “I thought that I represented the public,” observed the judge drily. “I am afraid I must regard you as appearing for your client-of-record. But continue; what is your thesis?”

  The elderly barrister attempted to swallow his Adam’s apple, then began again. “Your Honor, we contend that there are two separate reasons why this injunction should be made permanent, and, further, that each reason is sufficient alone. In the first place, this person is engaged in the practice of soothsaying, an occupation proscribed both in common law and statute. He is a common fortune teller, a vagabond charlatan who preys on the gullibility of the public. He is cleverer than the ordinary gypsy palm-reader, astrologer, or table tipper, and to the same extent more dangerous. He makes false claims of modern scientific methods to give a spurious dignity to his thaumaturgy. We have here in court leading representatives of the Academy of Science to give expert witness as to the absurdity of his claims.