The Collected Stories

by Earl

  “You must think of time as unwinding from a spool, and retaining, like wire, its tendency to curl into loops. Time reels off steadily from the spool, but, after its looping, it falls into a systematic order of intertwined spirals. Wherever the loops touch or lie partly together, you have memory repetitions and instinct repetitions. The former are conscious, the latter subconscious.

  “Now any repeated event—where the time loops touch or overlap—has happened only once, yet many times! If you can think of the time wire as braided with three strands—and call those strands past, present, and future—an event can easily happen in all three periods at the place of overlapping loops. And if you multiply the pasts and presents and futures, because they shift position as the time wire reels out, any single event becomes an endlessly repeated oneness! Do you follow me?”

  “No,” said Dakin frankly.

  “No?” There was silence while the entity pondered. Presently: “I think I have tried to have you envision too much at once. And yet I haven’t even explained how the small loops which determine memory and instinct and thought eventually complete a geometric pattern and form much huger looped designs—those which are the looms of atoms and all matter. Yet these loops, composed of the infinitesimally small memory-instinct loops, are themselves incredibly tiny. And again these loops complete a cycle and form the skeleton of ordinary phenomena, which include those of chemistry, physics and such. And these comparatively smaller looped loops form really tremendous circlets which guide the stars and planets in their courses.

  “Time, looped and interlooped, and so on again and again, forms the pattern of the entire universe, from the beginning of all to the ultimate end, from Earth to the remotest galaxy, from the smallest vibron part of an electron to a giant red star, from life to death and beyond death!

  “Your contemporary, Einstein”—Dakin was startled to hear that familiar name from the entity—“came quite close to this conception. He did bind the entire universe up with a single set of formulae; showed the interchangeability of matter and energy; even discovered—without knowing what it was—one of the multiloops of time: that one which causes a light ray to circle back to its starting point after many ages. Had he gone a step further, he would have gained the fame that went to a man who in 1978 first formulated the grand scheme of looped time.

  “As it was, Einstein showed that at the speed of light time has seemingly ceased to flow. What he should have said was that at the speed of light time had completed one of its great loops and had begun to form a still larger one.”

  THERE CAME A PAUSE; Dakin heaved a great sigh. “I’m afraid,” he said despairingly, “that you’re as far above my understanding as your age is beyond my age. Just tell me one thing. When you contacted me, how did you know it would be me, your ancestor?”

  “Because this episode is, or will be, recorded in your diary! In plain words, the account you haven’t yet written in your diary lies before me now. The pages are old and yellow, the ink faded—it is a small, thick book bound in alligator skin.”

  Dakin puzzled over this in a curiously detached way. He knew that little book reposed in his private drawer. How could it simultaneously be in the hands of the entity, and already aged for one hundred and fifty years? How could its pages be filled with words he hadn’t yet written?

  “I can only explain the seeming paradox,” the entity’s voice continued, “by saying that the diary I have exists only because I exist, when neither it nor I have yet occurred, in your conception! Remember that past and future are manmade figments of the mind. We exist, John Dakin, almost side by side!”

  “But why can’t we see one another, then?”

  “Because the time loops, those next larger in dimension, do not coincide to that extent. The smallest time loops are those of instinct and memory. The next larger of conscious thought, by which we are connected. The next larger are those of atoms—of matter. All people—all life, in fact—are in direct contact with the past in instinct, and in memory, if they could probe their innermost mind. Much less often does thought contact—telepathy—happen, as with us. Physical contact, as in the third order of loops, happens much more rarely.

  “Our contact is telepathic, from mind to mind, quite like radio. Your radio set is acting as an amplifying valve between us; it catches up and strengthens thought vibrations. Let’s see—it was in 1956 that the radio principle was applied to telepathy, bringing that direct form of communication into general use. That’s only twenty years in your future. You’ll live to see that day.”

  “I should; I’ll be sixty-four,” said Dakin. A sudden thought struck him and brought goose pimples out on his flesh. The entity wasn’t suggesting he would live that long. The entity stated he would. The entity knew!

  “Yes, of course,” said the voice with its uncanny knowledge of the thoughts passing through Dakin’s mind. “I know your date of death, just as you know that of your father and grandfather.”

  “What is it?” snapped Dakin. “When did I—do I, die?”

  “You will die to-morrow!”

  Dakin gasped. “To-morrow! No! W-what——”

  The entity was laughing again. “Of course not. What if I said at the age of ninety-six, what difference? Would it change the course of your life if you knew?”

  Dakin calmed himself, felt ashamed of his display of an abysmal fear of death. “That is a question,” he said thoughtfully. “If I knew I had to die to-morrow, I’d undoubtedly plan to make the most of my last twenty-four hours of life. For example, I might visit all my closest friends. But if I didn’t know that I was to die, I wouldn’t visit my friends, and there the future has two different paths to follow.”

  THE ENTITY seemed to laugh again. “Still thinking of time as a straight, one-way course! Which is more inevitable? The future, because the past, in occurring, molds the succeeding chain of events? Or the past, because the future, in arriving, determines the preceding course of events? At once you see, or should see, the purely relative, and arbitrary, quality of those quite human conceptions of past, present, and future.”

  “All right,” said Dakin, too weary by now to question, or try to understand.

  “I sense that you are tired, John Dakin,” said the entity then. “It is no wonder, however. Telepathy numbs the brain rapidly, drains its cells of the stored energy which in daily life renews as steadily as used. When shall we meet again?”

  Dakin pondered a moment. To-morrow evening a banquet was to be given by the company in which he was a high-salaried official. It was triviality, but they would expect him——

  “I would suggest,” intruded the voice of the entity, “that you skip that perfunctory affair and again contact me tomorrow evening. You see, there is no telling how long the path of communication will be open to us. The twists in the time loop, which so far have favored us, may at any time break our connection—forever.”

  It had not occurred to Dakin that the inexplicable looping of time, which had brought them together, might wrench them apart. The contact with the entity became suddenly precious. “To-morrow evening, then,” agreed Dakin.

  The entity was gone, with a peculiar click in Dakin’s mind, as if a switch had been turned off. Dakin pulled himself out of a state of blankness. He found himself even more weakened than the evening before. But it was not a physical effect. It was purely mental, with his brain aching and reeling.

  Dakin noticed it was early, only ten o’clock, and decided to take a walk in the cool night air. After an hour’s steady hiking, he found himself in the neighborhood of a friend, and, on sudden impulse, approached his home.

  PROFESSOR WAXFORD greeted his late visitor with some surprise, but none the less cordially. “Professor,” began Dakin when they had taken seats in the parlor, “what is time?”

  Waxford blinked his eyes. “That’s a rotten question to ask a man at this time of night,” he said. They were old friends and always bullied one another. “But if you must have it, why the academic definition of time
is the flow of events. To make a broad sweep of it, the movement of the cosmos from beginning to end.”

  “Does it move uniformly—and in one direction?”

  Waxford laughed. “Do you know,” he said, “that you’re running into astrophysics—and a headache? Time apparently does flow uniformly, although there’s no proof, since our instruments can’t be trusted. You’ve heard of the Einstein clock moving at the speed of light which measures a second that could include the rise and fall of the Roman Empire.”

  “Skip that,” said Dakin. “How about the direction?”

  “Direction?” Waxford frowned. “I’m afraid you’re taking the ‘time-is-the-fourth-dimension’ definition too literally.”

  “I mean,” explained Dakin slowly, “does time ever loop back on itself? Does it ever work in such a way as to bring two separate periods of time in coincidence?”

  Waxford shook his head. “When you try to treat time in just words, you run into meaningless ambiguousness. It must be done by mathematics—the kind that’s helped to make me bald. Einstein has some original ideas about time, in fact about everything. For instance, if a person moved at half the speed of light, time would slow down for him. If he kept that speed up all his life, he might live for centuries—yet to him it would be only threescore ten, by his clock. Relativity.”

  “Time would slow down—would slow down——” Dakin muttered to himself for a moment. His brain was still numb from its ordeal of an hour before; he found it hard to concentrate.

  He found himself saying—“Time doesn’t slow down, because it doesn’t move in the first place—it loops”—without understanding what he meant. But that was what the entity had said.

  “That’s an odd way of looking at it,” said Waxford. “It’s like Einstein saying that gravitation may be just a warp in space, and of space, instead of a force. Explains it in the simplest way, but the most incredible. There are possibilities in a looped or spiraling time system, but too many of the equations end in zero. And zero is the one number mathematicians can’t analyze.”

  “I’ll bet he can analyze it,” said Dakin, and at his friend’s blank stare, added: “My grandson—five times removed.”

  The professor grinned. “Dakin, when you came in I thought you were drunk. Now I know you aren’t, but I advise you to plaster yourself thoroughly.”

  Waxford refused to listen to anything more, and almost pushed Dakin out of the front door. They parted in mock anger. As a parting shot, Dakin promised to come back again and let the professor know why his zeros didn’t work.

  PHILOSOPHIC of temperament, Dakin slept soundly that night, and worked efficiently the next day at his office. He retired to the privacy of his study at nine o’clock that evening. It was Saturday, the evening of the banquet he was skipping to talk to a mind of the future.

  He tried establishing contact at first without the radio. He heard the entity’s voice, but very faintly. At the snap of the radio switch, the voice grew in volume, became clearly understandable. It was calling him by name, asking if he could hear, and to answer. Could it be just a voice induced by his own brain? Those queerly involved explanations of time—were they merely the tortuous twistings of a mind going under?

  “O.K.,” said Dakin, relaxing.

  “O.K., 2086 A.D.”

  “You are entertaining grave doubts that I am a voice from the future, John Dakin,” greeted the entity.

  “Well,” said Dakin, “you—or it—could be a delusion of my own mind.” The entity laughed. “Two years from now,” it said, “you will take a trip to Europe. It is in the records of the Dakin family album. Then, and perhaps then only, will you be sure that I am a voice from the future—the voice of one who knows the future, which has been my past.”

  “But suppose I make it a special point to avoid any such trip to Europe! I would change the future, and would make your prophecy meaningless. It would just cancel you!”

  “It would, but it won’t,” returned the entity. “Look:—your trip to Europe will follow a long chain of other little events in your life for the next two years. You would have to change the entire chain of those events to escape the eventuality of making the trip. As for making it a definite purpose in your life for the next two years to remember not to go to Europe—well, the family record says you went, so you didn’t willfully cancel the trip to thwart fate.”

  “I didn’t because I didn’t—because I didn’t!” said Dakin. “What a way to explain why a thing happens. Cause and effect should determine all events, not a blind destiny.”

  “Cause and effect!” reiterated the entity. “Another name for looped time. Many of the causes of events lie after the effect! Suppose you were to willfully destroy yourself and your son at this moment. I would not exist, nor could I ever have existed, being your descendant. But, if I had not existed, we wouldn’t have had this conversation, and therefore you wouldn’t have had any reason to think of ending your and your son’s lives in order to change destiny. And, since I do exist, the thought, though occurring to you, was never carried out. Now you figure out cause and effect.

  “To use an illustration from history—history to both of us—Martin Luther threw his inkwell at a devil, and that devil was a voice from the future! Precisely as I had been trying to gain contact with you for days, so had this other future entity with Martin Luther. When full contact was established one night, Luther, drugged with religion, thought he was being plagued by a devil, and threw the historic inkwell. But that did not change the future; it was inevitably the future. It was just an incident made possible by the same spiraling of time that has brought us together.

  “The oracles of Delphi, and many other recorded, and more unrecorded, things of a seemingly supernatural turn, are merely manifestations of time having looped and made it possible for minds of the future to contact minds of the past, as with us. You will immediately want to say that the past is therefore actually interfered with by the future.”

  “The way I see it—yes,” agreed Dakin. “Not physically, but mentally, and therefore just as directly. For instance, I did not go to the banquet to-night because of you. If I had gone, that would have been a different event in my past.”

  “BUT YOU SEE,” said the entity, “that turn of events did not occur. And, in not occurring, there has been no change in your future! You say I have made you avoid that possible—in fact, normal—event in your life to-night. That can only be true if you will grant that the future does not depend on the past, for your absence from the banquet does not account for my telling you to not go! I could have told you to go, but you wouldn’t have anyway.”

  “Then why did you tell me not to go?”

  “Because,” said the entity, “I never try to thwart fate, knowing it to be useless. Fate being another name for looped time. You can’t beat fate because you can’t beat looped time.”

  “No?” retorted Dakin. His physical self smiled. “I did, though! The copy of the diary you have—says you told me not to go to the banquet, doesn’t it?”

  “No, it says I told you to go!”

  “What?” cried Dakin. “But yesterday you told me not to go, even after reading my diary and seeing that I had said you had told me—here in my past—to go! You—you made a liar out of yourself!”

  “Oh, no!” The entity laughed. “Because I read this account of your trick in falsifying the diary, too! That makes you the liar, in that you deliberately put the wrong words after me in your diary for last night. You didn’t you see, fool fate. Now suppose, just to help you along, that I hadn’t read about your trick soon enough to tell you not to go. Then, John Dakin, I would have told you to go, and in not going of your own volition, you would not have been able to say I was the cause of your not going, which started this whole argument. And which resulted in your clever, but unsuccessful, trick!”

  Dakin, his mind peculiarly alive, saw that, too, and said: “You win, 2086. You can’t beat looped time!”

  “I’m glad that’s cleared up
,” returned the entity. “Any way you figure it out, the future is as much the cause of the past as vice versa. And therefore neither is cause or effect. Past and future are side-by-side strands in the time wire, and since they are arbitrary according to viewpoint, cause and effect are purely relative. So you see, many of the so-called paradoxes of coexistent times are simply failure to carry through any given situation by plain logic.”

  For a short moment Dakin rested his whirling brain. Then he said: “Of course, we deal there only with actions and thoughts. But getting on a strictly physical basis, you exist only because I have existed before you. I am the cause and you are the effect.”

  The entity laughed, but Dakin sensed it was a sympathetic laugh. “Strangely enough, that statement has no meaning. There is a wise old saying that has come down to our time, which no doubt you’ve heard: ‘Which comes first, the chicken or the egg?’ Applying it to our problem, are you any more the cause of me than I of you? Abstractly speaking, a mind with an unbiased opinion could trace the loops of time from either you to me, or from me to you.

  “Because, you see, wherever the time loops touch or overlap, past and future are purely relative. We have contacted at one of the overlappings, you and I. Physically, you are my progenitor, five times removed in ancestry. But it happens that my descendant eight times removed, with whom I’ve communicated, lived in the year 1742 A.D., and was your ancestor!”

  DAKIN’S BODY jerked convulsively in the chair, and his mind leaped like a frightened thing. Seconds went by. At last he asked quietly: “How can that be possible?”

  “The queer, and yet not so queer, loopings of time,” was the entity’s rejoinder. “That descendant of mine, who was your ancestor, lived nine years in the 23rd Century, and then found himself mysteriously transported to 1742 A.D., and lived a useful life in that period for sixty-one years.