Possible Tomorrows

by Groff Conklin (Ed. )

  “But you don’t know this young man. What if he is an agent for the Commissioner of Research?”

  “Not likely and I’ll take that chance.” He made a fist of his right hand and rubbed it gently against the palm of his left. “He’s on my side now. I’m sure of it. He can’t help but be. I can recognize intellectual curiosity when I see it in a man’s eyes and face and attitude and it’s a fatal disease for a tame scientist Even today it takes time to beat it out of a man and the young ones are vulnerable. Oh, why stop at anything? Why not build our own chronoscope and tell the government to go to—”

  He stopped abruptly, shook his head and turned away.

  “I hope everything will be all right” said Mrs. Potterley, feeling helplessly certain that everything would not be, and frightened, in advance, for her husband’s professorial status and the security of their old age.

  It was she alone, of them all, who had a violent presentiment of trouble. Quite the wrong trouble, of course.

  Jonas Foster was nearly half an hour late in arriving at the Potterley’s off-campus house. Up to that very evening, he had not quite decided he would go. Then, at the last moment he found he could not bring himself to commit the social enormity of breaking a dinner appointment an hour before the appointed time. That and the nagging of curiosity.

  The dinner itself passed interminably. Foster ate without appetite. Mrs. Potterley sat in distant absent-mindedness, emerging out of it only once to ask if he were married and to make a depreciating sound at the news that he was not. Dr. Potterley, himself, asked neutrally after his professional history and nodded his head primly.

  It was as staid, stodgy—boring, actually—as anything could be.

  Foster thought: He seems so harmless.

  Foster had spent the last two days reading tip on Dr. Potterley. Very casually, of course, almost sneakily. He wasn’t particularly anxious to be seen in the Social Science Library. To be sure, history was one of those borderline affairs and historical works were frequently read for amusement or edification by the general public.

  Still, a physicist wasn’t quite the “general public.” Let Foster take to reading histories and he would be considered queer, sure as relativity, and after a while the head of the department would wonder if his new instructor were really “the man for the job.”

  So he had been cautious. He sat in the more secluded alcoves and kept his head bent when he slipped in and out at odd hours.

  Dr. Potterley, it turned out, had written three books and some dozen articles on the ancient Mediterranean worlds, and the later articles—all in ‘Historical Reviews’—had all dealt with pre-Roman Carthage from a sympathetic viewpoint.

  That at least, checked with Potterley’s stray and had soothed Foster’s suspicions somewhat And yet Foster felt that it would have been much wiser, much safer, to have scotched the matter at the beginning.

  A scientist shouldn’t be too curious, he thought in bitter dissatisfaction with himself. It’s a dangerous trait.

  After dinner, he was ushered into Potterley’s study and he was brought up sharply at the threshold. The walls were simply lined with books.

  Not merely films. There were films, of course, but these were far outnumbered by the books—print on paper. He wouldn’t have thought so many books would exist in usable condition.

  That bothered Foster. Why should anyone want to keep so many books at home? Surely all were available in the University library, or, at the very worst at the Library of Congress, if one wished to take the minor trouble of checking out a microfilm.

  There was an element of secrecy involved in a home library. It breathed of intellectual anarchy. That last thought oddly, calmed Foster. He would rather Potterley be an authentic anarchist than a play-acting agent provocateur.

  And now the hours began to pass quickly and astonishingly. “You see,” Potterley said, in a dear, unflurried voice, “it was a matter of finding, if possible, anyone who had ever used chronoscopy in his work. Naturally, I couldn’t ask baldly, since that would be unauthorized research.”

  “Yes,” said Foster, dryly. He was a little surprised such a small consideration would stop the man.

  “I used indirect methods—”

  He had. Foster was amazed at the volume of correspondence dealing with small disputed pants of ancient Mediterranean culture which somehow managed to elicit the casual remark over and over again: “Of course, having never made use of chronoscopy—” or “Pending approval of my request for chronoscopic data, which appears unlikely at the moment—”

  “Now these aren’t blind questionings,” said Potterley. “There’s a monthly booklet put out by the Institute few Chronoscopy in which items concerning the past as determined by time-viewing are printed. Just one or two items.

  “What impressed me first was the triviality of most of the items, their insipidity. Why should such researches get priority over my work? So I wrote to people who would be most likely to do research in the directions described in the booklet. Uniformly, as I have shown you, they did not make use of the chronoscope. Now let’s go over it point by point”

  At last Foster, his head swimming with Potterley’s meticulously gathered details, asked, “But why?”

  “I don’t know why,” said Potterley, “but I have a theory. The original invention of the chronoscope was by Sterbinski—you see, I know that much—and it was well-publicized. But then the government took over the instrument and decided to suppress further research in the matter or any use of the machine. But then, people might be curious as to why it wasn’t being used. Curiosity is such a vice, Dr. Foster.”

  Yes, agreed the physicist to himself.

  “Imagine the effectiveness, then,” Potterley went on, “of pretending that the chronoscope wasbeing used. It would then be not a mystery, but a commonplace. It would no longer be a fitting object for legitimate curiosity nor an attractive one for illicit curiosity.”

  “You were curious,” pointed out Foster.

  Potterley looked a trifle restless. “It was different in my case,” he said angrily. “I have something that must be done, and I wouldn’t submit to the ridiculous way in which they kept putting me off.”

  A bit paranoid, too, thought Foster, gloomily.

  Yet he had ended up with something, paranoid or not. Foster could no longer deny that something peculiar was going on in the matter of neutrinics.

  But what was Potterley after? That still bothered Foster. If Potterley didn’t intend this as a test of Foster’s ethics, what did he want?

  Foster put it to himself logically. If an intellectual anarchist with a touch of paranoia wanted to use a chronoscope and was convinced that the powers-that-be were deliberately standing in his way, what would he do?

  Supposing it were I, he thought. What would I do?

  He said slowly, “Maybe the chronoscope doesn’t exist at and—”

  Potterley started. There was almost a crack in his general calmness. For an instant, Foster found himself catching a glimpse of something not at all calm.

  But the historian kept his balance and said, “Oh, no, there must be a chronoscope.”

  “Why? Have you seen it? Have I? Maybe that’s the explanation of everything. Maybe they’re not deliberately holding out on a chronoscope they’ve got Maybe they haven’t got it in the first place.”

  “But Sterbinski lived. He built a chronoscope. That much is a fact”

  “The books say so,” said Foster, coldly.

  “Now listen,” Potterley actually reached over and snatched at Foster’s jacket sleeve. “I need the chronoscope. I must have it Don’t tell me it doesn’t exist What we’re going to do is find out enough about neutrinics to be able to—”

  Potterley drew himself up short.

  Foster drew his sleeve away. He needed no ending to that sentence. He supplied it himself. He said, “Build one of our own?”

  Potterley looked sour as though he would rather not have said it point-blank. Nevertheless, he said, �
�Why not?”

  “Because that’s out of the question,” said Foster. “If what I’ve read is correct then it took Sterbinski twenty years to build his machine and several millions in composite grants. Do you think you and I can duplicate that illegally? Suppose we had the time, which we haven’t and suppose I could learn enough out of books, which I doubt where would we get the money and equipment? The chronoscope is supposed to fill a five-story building, for Heaven’s sake.”

  “Then you won’t help me?”

  “Well, I’ll tell you what. I have one way in which I may be able to find out something—”

  “What is that?” asked Potterley at once.

  “Never mind. That’s not important. But I may be able to find out enough to tell you whether the government is deliberately suppressing research by chronoscope. I may confirm the evidence you already have or I may be able to prove that your evidence is misleading. I don’t know what good it will do you in either case, but it’s as far as I can go. It’s my limit”

  Potterley watched the young man go finally. He was angry with himself. Why had he allowed himself to grow so careless as to permit the fellow to guess that he was thinking in terms of a chronoscope of his own? That was premature.

  But then why did the young fool have to suppose that a chronoscope might not exist at all?

  It had to exist It had to. What was the use of saying it didn’t?

  And why couldn’t a second one be built? Science had advanced in the fifty years since Sterbinski. All that was needed was knowledge.

  Let the youngster gather knowledge. Let him think a small gathering would be his limit. Having taken the path to anarchy there would be no limit. If the boy were not driven onward by something in himself, the first steps would be error enough to force the rest Potterley was quite certain he would not hesitate to use blackmail.

  Potterley waved a last good-by and looked up. It was beginning to rain.

  Certainly! Blackmail if necessary, he would not be stopped.

  Foster steered his car across the bleak outskirts of town and scarcely noticed the rain.

  He was a fool, he told himself, but he couldn’t leave things as they were. He had to know. He damned his streak of undisciplined curiosity, but he had to know.

  But he would go no further than Uncle Ralph. He swore mightily to himself that it would stop there. In that way, there would be no evidence against him, no real evidence. Uncle Ralph would be discreet.

  In a way, he was secretly ashamed of Uncle Ralph. He hadn’t mentioned him to Potterley partly out of caution and partly because he did not wish to witness the lifted eyebrow, the inevitable half-smile. Professional science-writers, however useful, were a little outside the pale, fit only for patronizing contempt. The fact that, as a class, they made more money than did research scientists, only made matters worse, of course.

  Still, there were times when a science-writer in the family could be a convenience. Not being really educated, they did not have to specialize. Consequently, a good science-writer knew practically everything. And Uncle Ralph was one of the best.

  Ralph Nimmo had no college degree and was rather proud of it “A degree,” he once said to Jonas Foster, when both were considerably younger, “is a first step down a ruinous highway. You don’t want to waste one degree so you go on to graduate work and doctoral research. You end up a thoroughgoing ignoramus on everything in the world except for one subdivisional sliver of nothing.

  “On the other hand, if you guard your mind carefully and keep it blank of any clutter of information till maturity is readied, filling it only with intelligence and training it only in clear thinking, you then have a powerful instrument at your disposal and you can become a science-writer.”

  Nimmo received his first assignment at the age of twenty-five, after he had completed his apprenticeship and been out in the field for less than three months. It came in the shape of a clotted manuscript whose language would impart no glimmering of understanding to any reader, however qualified, without careful study and some inspired guesswork. Nimmo took it apart and put it together again—after five long and exasperating interviews with the authors, who were biophysicists—making the language taut and meaningful and smoothing the style to a pleasant gloss.

  “Why not?” he would say tolerantly to his nephew, who countered his strictures on degrees by berating him with his readiness to hang on the fringes of science. “The fringe is important. Your scientists can’t write. Why should they be expected to? They aren’t expected to be grandmasters at chess or virtuosos at the violin, so why expect them to know how to put words together? Why not leave that for specialists, too?

  “Good Lord, Jonas, read your literature of a hundred years ago. Discount the fact that the science is out of date and that some of the expressions are old-fashioned. Just try to read it and make sense out of it It’s just jaw-cracking, amateurish. Papers are published uselessly; whole articles which are either non-significant non-comprehensible or both.”

  “But science-writers don’t get recognition, Uncle Ralph,” protested the young Foster, who was getting ready to start his college career and was rather starry-eyed about it “You could be a terrific researcher.”

  “I get recognition,” said Nimmo. “Don’t think for a minute I don’t Sure, a biochemist or a strato-meteorologist won’t give me the time of day, but they pay me well enough. Just find out what happens when some first-class chemist finds the Commission has cut his year’s allowance for science-writing. He’ll fight harder for enough funds to afford me, or someone like me, than to get a recording ionograph.”

  He grinned broadly and Foster grinned back. Actually, he was proud as well as ashamed of his paunchy, round-faced, stub-fingered uncle, whose vanity made him brush his fringe of hair futilely over the desert on his pate and made him dress like an unmade haystack because such negligence was his trademark.

  And now Foster entered his uncle’s cluttered apartment in no mood at all for grinning. He was nine yean older now and so was Uncle Ralph. For nine more years, papers in every branch of science bad come to Ralph Nimmo for polishing and a little of each had crept into his capacious mind.

  Nimmo was eating seedless grapes, popping them into his mouth one at a time. He tossed a bunch to Foster who caught them by a hair, then bent to retrieve individual grapes that had tom loose and fallen to the floor.

  “Let them be. Don’t bother,” said Nimmo, carelessly. “Someone comes in here to clean once a week. What’s up? Having trouble with your grant application write-up?”

  “I haven’t really got into that yet”

  “You haven’t? Get a move on, boy. Are you waiting for me to offer to do the final arrangement?”

  “I couldn’t afford you, uncle.”

  “Aw, come on. It’s all in the family. Grant me all popular publication rights and no cash need change hands.”

  Foster nodded. “If you’re serious, it’s a deal.”

  “It’s a deal.”

  It was a gamble, of course, but Foster knew enough of Nimmo’s science-writing to realize it could pay off. Some dramatic discovery of public interest on primitive man or on a new surgical technique, or on any branch of spationautics could mean a very cash-attracting article in any of the mass media of communication.

  It was Nimmo, for instance, who had written up for scientific consumption, the series of papers by Bryce and co-workers that elucidated the fine structure of two cancer viruses, for which job he asked for the picayune payment of fifteen hundred dollars, provided popular publication rights were included. He then wrote up, exclusively, the same work in semi dramatic form for use in trimensional video for a twenty-thousand-dollar advance plus rental royalties that were still craning in after five years.

  Foster said bluntly, “What do you know about neutrinics, uncle?”

  “Neutrinics?” Nimmo’s small eyes looked surprised. “Are you working in that? I thought it was pseudo-gravitic optics.”

  “It is p.g.o. I just happen to
be asking about neutrinics.”

  “That’s a devil of a thing to be doing. You’re stepping out of line. You know that, don’t you?”

  “I don’t expect you to call the Commission because I’m a little curious about things.”

  “Maybe I should before you get into trouble. Curiosity is an occupational danger with scientists. I’ve watched it work. One of them will be moving quietly along on a problem, then curiosity leads him up a strange creek. Next thing you know they’ve done so little on their proper problem, they can’t justify for a project renewal. I’ve seen more—”

  “All I want to know,” said Foster, patiently, “is what’s been passing through your hands lately on neutrinics.”

  Nimmo leaned back, chewing at a grape thoughtfully, “Nothing. Nothing ever. I don’t recall ever getting a paper on neutrinics.”

  “What!” Foster was openly astonished. “Then who does get the work?”

  “Now that you ask,” said Nimmo, “I don’t know. Don’t recall anyone talking about it at the annual conventions. I don’t think much work is being done there.”

  “Why not?”

  “Hey, there, don’t bark. I’m not doing anything. My guess would be-—”

  Foster was exasperated. “Don’t you know?”

  “I’ll tell you what I know about neutrinics. It concerns the applications of neutrino movements and the forces involved—”

  “Sure. Sure. Just as electronics deals with the applications of electron movements and the forces involved and pseudo-gravities deals with the applications of artificial gravitational fields. I didn’t come to you for that. Is that all you know?”

  “And,” said Nimmo with equanimity, “neutrinics is the basis of time-viewing and that is all I know.”

  Foster slouched back in his chair and massaged one lean cheek with great intensity. He felt angrily dissatisfied. Without formulating it explicitly in his own mind, he had felt sure, somehow, that Nimmo would crane up with some late reports, bring up interesting facets of modern neutrinics, send him back to Potterley able to say that the elderly historian was mistaken, that his data was misleading, his deduction mistaken.