by Earl
“What happened in his case was that the looping of time, giving him contact with the 18th Century while living in the 23rd, gave him contact both mentally and physically. A vast step beyond what you and I have. It is to be explained by the overlapping of those small loopings of time which form the material body of the universe. To him it was like a doorway, through which, with a boy’s curiosity, he naturally stepped. Once, in the year 1742, the doorway closed and he stayed to become your ancestor.”
“Oh, it can’t be!” groaned Dakin. “I must not believe it. It’s——it’s madness!”
“No, John Dakin, it’s not madness. It’s just an indication of the inextricable way the universe is woven together. Past and future—don’t you see how arbitrary they are? That is why, in the schools of my time, we teach that those illusionary qualities of past, present and future are merely three strands in the time wire. It is not the flow or time which is unreeling from the great cosmic spool; it is the pattern of time, and of all things.
“Your age accounts time as that merely which the clock measures off. But time, in its grander scope, is the matrix of the cosmos. Einstein—to mention him again—saw part of the scheme, calling it ‘space time.’ But that is only half of it—one must conceive of ‘space-time-matter-thought.’ But that will not come—in your future—until the mathematicians realize that the number 00.00 is different from just zero. All the paradoxes of time lie in the cipher zero.”
“Just what Waxford said,” commented Dakin, half to himself. “What if I told my mathematician friend to take apart the zeros in his time equations? Would he solve the secret——”
“Before 1978?” finished the entity. “Still trying to uncurl the loops of time? No, he wouldn’t. You see, in getting the hint from you, the relative position of past and——”
“Let’s skip that,” interjected Dakin pleadingly, and went on: “But tell me, does that sort of thing happen very often, where a person steps from one age to another, being at the same time his own ancestor and his own descendant?”
“More often than your rather unimaginative age would believe. Have you ever read the book ‘Lo!’ by your comtemporary, Charles Fort? He speculated rather closely in some things, although the rest was wild guesswork. But he does mention the fact that people are mysteriously disappearing off the earth and others appearing from nowhere. It is true. The overlappings of the numberless time loops quite often open the doors between past and future.
“Your very prosaic age refuses to credit such things, but the ages previous did not. Perhaps most of the tales of demons, witches, ghosts and such were based on these transpositions of people and animals. Classical mythology, in its essence, is a series of records of beings who came from nowhere. The early Grecians simply dressed the accounts, as did the later ages. Your peculiar age, stilted and hard-headed, refuses to believe at all. My age and those following, believed and found the explanation—looped time.”
“Looped time,” echoed Dakin. “And you can’t beat it—wait! Maybe I can beat it, Mr. Dakin of 2086.”
“Miss Dakin, if you please! Miss Joan Dakin—and I will marry a Dakin.”
“What? Oh, gosh——”
“Telepathy is quite sexless.” The entity laughed.
Dakin recovered his poise. “Anyway,” he said, “that diary of mine you have—it says I did not go to the banquet to-night—you’re sure of that?”
“Yes—too sure!”
Dakin failed to catch the sudden sadness in the entity’s mind voice. He went on eagerly: “Well, look—I’m going to that banquet right now! It’s not too late. That beats your looped time—knocks it for a loop, in fact. I’ll——”
Dakin was aware of a bell ringing. It was the telephone out in the hallway. His contact with the entity thus rudely broken, he went to the phone.
“Yes, John Dakin speaking . . . My son? . . . He’s—what! . . . Accident! . . . In their car—his friend killed? . . . But my son! What’s happened to him?”
A minute later Dakin slipped the receiver on the hook with nerveless fingers. His son had been killed in the head-on smash-up with another car! Like an automaton, Dakin went back to his study, slumped into his chair.
He had forgotten about his queer determination to beat looped time by going to a banquet he didn’t go to. And in this way had looped time triumphed after all. He had forgotten the entity, too, in his sudden shock, until he felt its mental radiations prying into his consciousness.
“John Dakin, what is it I see? Your son is—dead?”
Dakin raised haggard eyes, as though trying to seek out the speaker. “You dare to ask that!” he cried. “It’s there—must be—in my diary. You knew it all the time!” His voice changed to a moan: “Why didn’t you tell me? We might have beat looped time—saved my son——”
A sudden, startled look came into Dakin’s eyes. His voice rose to a half scream: “My only son dead! And that means you don’t exist! Lord! You can’t exist! You’re a hoax—a delusion! Go away—I won’t listen to something which doesn’t exist! Lord!”
THE LAST WORDS Dakin heard from the entity were enigmatical ones. Dakin had no chance to demand an explanation, for right afterward their contact had been broken—forever. The strange looping of time which had brought their mentalities together as suddenly tore them apart.
Dakin pondered the words for many months. After the hurt which came with his son’s death had healed, he was able to look back upon his contact with the entity in careful perspective.
Incredible as it had all been, unbelievable though the things were that he had heard, Dakin believed. Believed in spite of the seeming paradox of the entity having no existence with the death of his son.
Dakin tried every sort of mental gymnastic he could think of to explain away the paradox. He juggled centuries and pasts and futures. He tried figuring a turn of events that would make the entity an ancestor instead of a descendant. He even tried diagraming the loopings of time. But all the while, in the back of his mind, he knew the true answer.
The entity had said: “Your son is dead. He died unmarried, without issue. Therefore I must not exist. But, stubbornly enough, I continue to exist. The answer, John Dakin, is simpler than you think.”
And Dakin realized that three years later, when he led his second bride to the altar.
STATIC
They Could Conquer Civilization with Professor Hobson’s Invention—but One Unexpected Spark Upset Their Cunning Plans!
“STAND still, professor. We’ve got a gun on you!” The tall, spare man at the work-bench, dressed in a grey laboratory coat, turned slowly. He put down the electrometer in his hand. When he had faced about, he took in the two masked figures emerging from the supply room door. Then his eyes fastened on the ugly-looking silencer-equipped pistol one of them held levelled at his heart, and to the snub-nosed automatic the other carried, The look of annoyed surprise in his face changed to stunned bewilderment. What could burglars want, in the electrical laboratory of a research scientist?
“We’re not common house-breakers,” informed the taller of the intruders. He pocketed his automatic. The handkerchief, where it covered his mouth, wrinkled as if he were smiling. “No, not burglars. We’ve come for something more precious than money.” He paused as if waiting for an answer, but the scientist merely stared.
“What we want is—that!”
The masked man pointed to an apparatus set at one end. of the long work-bench. Resembling the inner workings of a radio, with many tubes and coils, it did not look like the radically new invention it was. Three feet above, supported by bakelite rods, was a parabolic mirror of shining chromium. The scientist did not turn to look where the finger pointed, but his eyes widened suddenly and then narrowed. He stared at the intruders in silence.
“You’re taking it pretty calmly, Professor Hobson. You must realize that your invention could do much harm—in the wrong hands!”
“Harm?” queried the scientist, speaking for the first time. “I don’t quite
understand.” He went on:
“It transmits high frequency energy over the ether, but only in a dephased—or call it static—form. It has the virtue of small power loss, but gives its own little twist in the process. The received energy takes the damnable shape of ‘blobbed’ electricity. Factory-made static, in plain words. It’s like transmitting a dog and having it come out in the form of frankfurters. You see—”
“You can save the rest, Professor Hobson,” cut in the taller man. He motioned to his companion, then walked close to the scientist. I’ll tell you what your gadget can do in an enlarged form. It can take up and shoot out as a beam any given kilowattage, in high frequency form, a distance of a hundred miles without a serious power loss. The electrical energy thus transmitted without wires cannot be received in useful form, for it is dephased—lumped and knotted in static nodes. But, Professor, it has the peculiar faculty of inducing violent charges in metallic obstructions. Killing charges, Professor!”
THE eyes of the two men locked.
The other masked man stood at his side, gun in hand pointed unwaveringly at the scientist.
Again the masked man smiled beneath his handkerchief, a smile that, revealed, would have been sardonic.
“Think once, Professor Hobson, of that beam centered on an airplane high up. Think of those thousands of watts curling into a vortex around the pilot, searing him to a crisp in three seconds. Think of it as a death ray sweeping across an advancing army’s front—picture each gun sparkling like a superstatic machine, charring each soldier’s hand and arm. Imagine this beam centered on an arsenal, changing metal containers to hot bolts of electricity!”
The scientist broke the tense silence that followed with a chuckle. Yet his eyes remained grim and narrow. He straightened a fold of his lab coat, and spoke quietly: “Why have you approached me in this way? With guns—like burglars. Why not an appointment at my home?”
“Purposes of secrecy,” retorted the other shortly. “I represent a foreign power. To be melodramatic, I am a spy. In the traditional spy manner, I came in through an open window. Our organization spotted your first article in the Electronic Journal on power transmission via ether. After the third article, announcing the static feature of the experiment, our scientists became vitally interested. Three months ago you had succeeded in your work to the point of eliminating most of the power loss. We thought that was all we needed. Huge projectors were built, modeled after your apparatus. But they didn’t work the way they should have. Something was lacking.”
The scientist merely raised his brows as the speaker looked pointedly at him.
“The key to the whole thing’—something the articles didn’t reveal—rested in the inventor’s mind. Our offer is a hundred thousand if you’ll give us the formula locked in your brain.”
“Km. A hundred thousand,” mused the scientist. “A hundred thousand dollars for the formula that would unloose a hell of rays on unsuspecting human beings. The answer, gentlemen, is—no!”
The masked man looked at the scientist sharply.
“Two hundred thousand!”
“My formula is not for sale!”
The two masked men exchanged glances. The shorter of them took a step forward. The nose of his gun tilted slightly. But the other masked man waved him back, faced the scientist.
“Don’t be a fool, Professor!” he grated. “You’re in no position to refuse.” His tone changed to mockery. “If you’re thinking of pulling a little coup when the night man comes around at twelve let me inform, you that both the night man and watchman are quietly working off a heavy dose of blackjacking! We’ve had you under observation for weeks, and knew your habit of working in this laboratory many nights. That made it easy—just a matter of getting the two watchmen out of the way. So now, what choice have you?”
Professor Hobson could sense the triumphant grin behind the other’s mask. His own features he forced to remain expressionless. If helped to calm his beating heart.
“If I refuse, what then?”
Something of a harsh chuckle came from behind the mask as the spy answered:
“The alternative is what you might expect.” He jerked a thumb backward. “My partner has a-quick trigger finger.”
“I see,” breathed the scientist. “But if you killed me, my formula would die with me.”
“You forget there is the machine itself, Professor. We could take it away and solve the secret from that. Yet that would be much trouble, and would take time. We would much prefer to get the formula direct from you, and we would pay you well and have you our friend rather than our enemy.”
The scientist heaved a sigh and straightened up. He shrugged, resignedly.
“You win, gentlemen.” As he spoke, he moved toward the desk in the corner of the laboratory.
“Stop! Stop, where you are!” Hobson turned in surprise.
“But you want the formula for the key part of that apparatus. I must write it down for you.”
“Clever, Professor, clever,” said the spy mockingly. “But we wouldn’t be able to use the wrong formula. You’re, going to give me the formula I want in words. I’ll write it down.”
“But you wouldn’t understand. It’s in complicated mathematical symbols.”
THE spy laughed derisively.
“I am a scientist, as well as a spy. I know my vectors and alphas. For that reason I was chosen for this mission—so that I could check on the spot the formula which is the key to your beam projector. Let’s get busy, Professor.”
The spy made his way to the apparatus at the end of the work-bench. The other masked man shifted his position, moved closer to that side of the large laboratory. Noting how methodical these movements were.
Professor Hobson felt the sinking feeling that comes with a hopeless situation.
He could see no way out. The menacing gun barred any escape. His secret formula must be given out—to save his own life. His own life! But what of those countless lives that would be lost as a direct result of this? What of those thousands, perhaps millions, who would die by electrocution through his discovery! For the scientist had no doubt that whatever country was back of this night’s doings would make full use of the destructive powers of his invention.
Professor Hobson was still deep in these thoughts as he reached a hand into the heart of the machine and extracted from it a pear-shaped object of glass and metal.
“It is easy enough,” he began as the spy listened, “to transmit through the ether forms of high frequency energy, but the power loss is tremendous. My approach to the problem was to discover a new medium of transmission—the sub-ether, which—”
“You had all that in your various papers in the Journal,” cut in the spy. “I am familiar with every step of your operations except the final one of giving your beam a definite form like a beam of visible light.”
“Simply neo-cathode emanation,” explained the scientist. “I run the induced high frequency energy into this cathode electronizer, trap it, and send it out as a cathode ray, which, as you know, is a beam instead of a radiation.”
“You trap it I There’s the. secret. Just how, Professor, do you trap it?” The scientist took a long breath, looked once hopelessly around, and then began the explanation of the secret he alone knew. For many minutes he talked, poured out in quick words the amazing method by which he converted his energy into a beam. A dawning look of comprehension came into the masked scientist’s eyes. It was like pouring liquid into a wide funnel and having it come out in a needle-thin stream.
Suddenly Professor Hobson stopped, perspiring.
“I must demonstrate at this point,” he said. In his eyes was a grim, wild purpose. His lips twitched. But before the spy looked into his face, in sudden suspicion, he had controlled his emotions. He brought a guileless smile to his lips. “You will understand better what follows if I show how the meters read at each stage of the process.”
“All right,” agreed the scientist spy. “But I’m warning you, Hobson, any trick
ery and—” He gestured toward his henchman. “You’re well covered, Professor. Now go on with your little demonstration.
THE scientist nodded, put the pear-shaped cathode tube back in the machine with nervous fingers. He clipped it firmly into place. He snapped a switch, turned a dial. A hum sounded, increased in pitch, reached its tone level and stayed there. With the twist of a rheostat knob, a, bank of tubes glowed forth like pale coals. “I am setting it first at fifty watts,” said the professor. “Watch the readings now.”
But it was not until the scientist had thrown the final switch that the masked man, still suspicious, took his eyes off his face and looked down at the dials.
“See?” indicated the scientist. “The power lumps up—becomes static. And this static is no more useful than the static which sneaks into radio programs. As I increase the power—one hundred watts this time—the dephasing value increases. You see, at a glance, the Inherent defect of this machine for energy transmission.”
“But what an ideal long range weapon,” said the masked man with shining eyes. “What power it has and—”
“One hundred and fifty watts,” interrupted the scientist. “Look at the meter for the cathode electronizer. You’ll notice the ‘beat note’ is more pronounced with increase of power. Now two hundred watts—notice there is less and less flow—more and more concentrated power in the ‘beat notes.’ ”
“Two hundred watts is your capacity, isn’t it?” reminded the spy. “The cathode electronizer is getting hot. Better shut it off, or—”
“Two hundred and fifty watts!” shouted the scientist suddenly, giving the power dial a savage twist, “and watch her blow all to hell!”
The masked man jerked erect with a startled oath. The man with the gun steadied his hand, pressed his finger. Professor Hobson flung an arm before his eyes, jumped back.
HE heard two loud noises then, so close together so as to be almost simultaneous. The pungent sting of ozone filled his lungs.