Tales Before Narnia

by Douglas A. Anderson

  As he bent, the loop of flex from the head-phones slipped from his shoulder and fell across the ground-plate, the tips of the metal terminals resting on the bare copper. Instantly he dropped a hand to switch them off, but before he could do so there came a blinding flare of light all about him and a stunning crash of sound.

  He threw himself back, blinded and dazed. His first thought was that in some inconceivable manner the gap had shorted and he was electrocuted; but when he could think clearly he realised that the charge was not sufficient for a flash, and in any case, Schouten had not closed the switch which completed the circuit.

  After a moment of blinking and a fleeting sensation of severe nausea had passed, he was surprised and relieved to find himself still alive. Surprisingly, too, the laboratory seemed to have suffered no damage; the gap was there, windows, apparatus, all unchanged, his friends bending over a bench….

  No; something was wrong! His clothes, the head-phones, had vanished completely. He stood agape with amazement beside the gleaming copper gap stark naked.

  For some time, he told me, he could do nothing but stand there like a village idiot, with staring eyes and hanging jaw. Helplessly he gazed around, as though the missing clothes might be dangling in mid-air, and as he did so he became aware that there was someone else in the room whom he had not noticed before. This was a smallish dark-haired man, thin-faced, clad in a sober grey suit, wearing a pair of head-phones, the free flex of which was slung carelessly over his shoulder.

  After a minute of vague half-remembering, the realisation of where he had seen that figure previously struck Rostof like a blow.

  He was looking at himself!

  After a shock such as Rostof had passed through, and coming up against an impossibility like this, a normal man might be excused for becoming a little deranged mentally. Through his mind there flashed wild conjectures, of which the chief seemed to be that he was either dreaming or mad—or perhaps he was dead. I think myself that only his scientific training saved his reason. For while his brain rocked with bewilderment, it still mechanically observed and noted. An underlying curiosity drove him on, though his conscious mind was still too dazed with shock to function properly.

  The figure in grey when he first noticed it, was walking—backwards. It jerked back, like a film run in reverse, towards the door, passed through it; and Rostof followed like a dream-walker. His other self turned sharply to the right into the narrow cupboard of a radio-room, walked—still backwards—to the chair and sat down in it. Then he pushed the phone leads into their sockets and appeared to be listening.

  Rostof approached the figure slowly and touched it gingerly on the shoulder, then took hold of it more firmly and shook it—or tried to. For in spite of his strongest efforts he could make not the slightest impression on the sitting figure. It was like touching an image of granite, save that this one undoubtedly lived. Even the cloth of the coat had no resiliency, was as hard and unyielding to the touch as adamant.

  He tugged vainly, he spoke, shouted in the man’s ear. No response. Rostof studied the face of the man in the chair; it was without a doubt his own face, just as if he were looking into a mirror. With that thought came a wild fear that in some incredible manner he had been transported into some stranger’s body in an exchange of personalities. In sudden, unreasoning terror he ran to the small mirror that hung on the wall, dreading to see an unknown face reflected there.

  What he saw came with the terrific shock of utter unexpectedness. There was no reflection at all.

  THE PROBLEM

  He could see the opposite wall, part of the room, everything in the normal range of view, but no face looked out at him. It was an uncanny, shaking experience. Crane and stretch as he liked, he could see not a scrap of his own body in the mirror.

  He looked down. There was his body, indubitably. He held his hand before his eyes, crooked the fingers; they were there all right, he could swear. He slapped his thigh, felt the sting of his palm, saw the red mark grow on his skin.

  In that moment Rostof was like a small child, bewildered by events totally out of its normal experience, scared and lost. Everything in the world seemed to have gone suddenly and horribly wrong, and he wanted badly to find something right and normal which he could use as an anchor for his tottering reason. He wanted to talk with friends, to see human beings acting sanely again.

  He ran back into the main laboratory. Schouten and Matheson were at one of the work-benches. He went up to Schouten and spoke to him, tugged at his sleeve, and a thrill of horror shot through him as he realised that the same dreadful, granite-like hardness had taken possession of his friend. He could make no more impression on Schouten than on a moving statue.

  He turned quickly to Matheson, and the history-master was in the same condition. Rostof frantically punched him in the ribs, and yelped with pain, for his knuckles were barked and skinned as though he had struck a brick wall. A sickening sense of impotency, of being nothing more substantial than a ghost, swept over him.

  As he watched his friends, another thing struck him. All their movements were in reverse. Matheson was filing up an angle and he drew his file back across the metal at each stroke, while the forward stroke was made through the air. Queerest of all, Schouten was cutting through a metal strip with a hacksaw, and here again his strokes seemed all wrong; but the amazing thing was that the cut, instead of growing deeper into the metal, was growing smaller and shrinking towards the top.

  He watched in fascination until at last the saw-blade reached the top and was withdrawn, leaving virgin, untouched metal behind. Suddenly Schouten stepped backwards and cannoned into Rostof; but he did not falter or deviate in his stride the least fraction of an inch. It was Rostof who, feeling as if he had been struck by a steam-engine, went staggering aside to sprawl on the floor.

  He got up and watched his friend stalk solemnly backward to the tool-rack and hang the hack-saw up. Telling me afterwards, Rostof said:

  “I think I went a little crazy then. I stood in the middle of the floor and screamed, shouted at the top of my voice at them. I cursed and raved, pleaded and prayed, waved my arms to heaven. I begged them to quit fooling and be sane, though goodness only knows what joke I could have thought they were playing. I believe that for a bit I blubbered like a kid….”

  As I have said before, the inborn scientist in him probably saved his reason. After a while, when he had quietened down, his mind fastened on the problem before him. The problem; that was it! If he could only keep calm and watch and think, perhaps some explanation would offer itself. At least he was still alive (though he was not perfectly sure about that), and he could still reason and use his wits, apparently.

  At this juncture Matheson left the bench and walked from the room, again backwards. Rostof followed him into the little kitchen where they had a fire and a wash-bowl and prepared an occasional late meal. Matheson made toward the towel which hung on a roller beside the bowl, turned round, and appeared to be going through the motions of drying his hands. As the other watched, a gurgling sound from the basin attracted his attention.

  A flood of soapy, dirty-looking water was welling up from the drain outlet and rapidly filling the basin. Rostof, absorbed in this phenomenon, had barely time to skip aside as Matheson moved to the basin, inserted the plug, took the soap from the dish and proceeded to wash his hands.

  When he had finished, Rostof’s eyes again widened in surprise, for the water was perfectly clean and clear, while Matheson’s hands were grimy, but apparently quite dry; and as he made an adjustment to the tap, the water suddenly began to flow upwards in a narrow pillar through the tap.

  Rostof let Matheson go back to the lab unattended while he watched this amazing phenomenon of water spurting up through the tap. A miniature water-spout, with a few queer splashed about its base, quivered up straight and true through the orifice; the level in the basin rapidly dropped, and only an inch or so remained in the bottom when Matheson returned. As the last few drops shot up into the
tap, he twisted the handle, and there was left only an empty, perfectly dry basin.

  Matheson made backwards for the lab door, and Rostof was following when he happened to glance casually at the clock. He noted the time mechanically, and was continuing after the other when a sudden thought froze him in his tracks.

  He looked again at the clock. There was no mistake; the hands showed seventeen minutes past six. Yet when he had come out of the radio room and glanced up at the clock in passing, it had been half-past six.

  BACKWARDS IN TIME

  He stood as if petrified, gazing at the clock. It was in that moment that the first flicker of the nerve-shaking idea licked through his mind. It was a possible, but crazy explanation of the whole, ridiculous affair. He slumped into a chair and tried to think coherently.

  Was it possible that when that puzzling flare of light had come, his Time-sense had in some way been reversed—turned back to front, as it were? Or to put it another way, had he been plunged into a Time Stream which flowed in exactly the opposite direction to the normal one?

  You understand, of course, that at that time Rostof had not the vaguest notion of what had happened as he stood by the gap, save a suspicion that some form of electrical discharge had taken place. But the more he thought, the more it seemed possible that only some such incredible reversal of Time could explain the phenomena which so puzzled him.

  If he were steadily progressing backwards in Time, then the surprising topsy-turviness of external actions became more understandable. His friends walking backwards, for instance; the water that flowed upwards; his ability to see himself. He was simply witnessing the Past, like seeing a film run in reverse. But more than witnessing—he was living through the Past, every second taking him deeper and deeper into it.

  He looked at the clock again. He was already separated from the world of normal Time by three-quarters of an hour. He began to sweat as the horror of the situation took hold of him. Three-quarters of an hour is not long in everyday life, but to him it was as good as eternity. It seemed he was doomed never again to converse with his friends or any human being, never to see again a sane, understandable world.

  Try to picture him as he sat there, naked, defenceless, fighting to keep calm and grapple intelligently with a situation that should have sent him mad. Imagine his incredible loneliness; one small human, plunging towards a vague and misty future which lay in the Past, while with each second everything that stood for friendship, safety and comfort, was hurtling farther away in the opposite direction….

  Grimly, he dragged his mind from the image and concentrated it on the scientific side of the problem. For a while he could not understand the impenetrable hardness of external objects which he had experienced; it seemed they ought rather to be of intangible transiency, much as a dream, since he was reviewing the Past. But a moment’s thought gave him the logical answer.

  The Past is definite, shaped, unalterable, as nothing else in Creation is. Therefore, to argue that he could make the slightest impression on it, that he could move or alter an object here, was to argue that he could change the whole history of the world or cosmos. Everything he saw about him had happened, and could not be changed in any way. On the other hand, he was fluid, movable, alterable, since his future still lay before him, even if it had been reversed; he was the intruder, the anomaly. In any clash between himself and the Past, then, the Past would prove irresistible every time.

  No wonder they could not hear him shout; no wonder they could not feel a punch. He was no more than a chimera.

  He sat gnawing his lip and frowning at the clock for almost an hour. There would be all sorts of queer effects. He would have to keep dodging out of people’s way or run the risk of being brained; if he happened to get into the path of a fly or a bee going at speed, it would bore through him more surely than any bullet. The Sun, for him, would sink in the east and rise in the west. He would see trees and plants growing downward until they shrank into the ground and turned to seed; the seed would leap through the air or be carried by birds to the parent tree, would change to flowers, to buds, back through all the endless cycle….

  At last he roused himself and made his way to the outer door. Fortunately for him, it was ajar, and he managed to squeeze through; he had no desire to be shut in when Shouten left at three o’clock.

  The district where the laboratory was situated was not a busy one, and before long he realised that it would be best for him to avoid all busy thoroughfares. Never until now had he realised how much the world depended on forward movement, how rare in normal life is retrogression. It was a startling experience to see motor-cars suddenly whizz round corners, travelling backwards; to see pigeons take off from the ground stern first in a flurry of wings; to see a black feather which had fallen from a crow’s wing in the Past float up into the air and neatly fix itself into the bird’s sable plumage as it flew solemnly backwards.

  He found it almost impossible to pre-judge people’s movements; all his instinctive mental calculations were upset. A man looking into a shop window would without warning slip into reverse and come striding at Rostof, who would leap wildly aside; a ball lying in the roadway would suddenly start into life, come rolling and bouncing along, then fly past his head into the hand of the urchin who had once thrown it. After a time he learned to keep a wary eye on any movable object near-by, but the process of learning was a painful business and involved many bruises and shakings.

  DOOMED…

  All through Thursday, as the afternoon drew on to morning and the Sun rose to the south and began to arch downward into the east, Rostof wandered at random, his plight almost forgotten in the unparalleled novelty of his surroundings, which appealed to the scientist in him. There seemed no reason to hope that the condition in which he found himself would ever revert to normal, though the prospect of spending the rest of his life as a helpless ghost among the scenes of an iron-bound Past was not pleasant.

  But by the middle of the morning, the thought of a prolonged existence in this state ceased to bother him. For he realised what he should have done before, that unless a miracle happened, in a few days he would be dead of starvation and thirst.

  Not until the pangs of hunger drove him to try to sample some sandwiches from a coffee-stall was the realisation brought home to him. Tug and strain as he might, he could not lift the smallest crumb. He tried bending his head to bite a piece from a sandwich, but it was like trying to bite a concrete slab. He tried to lift a cup of coffee, but it was immobile as a rock. In a sudden panic he dipped his fingers into the cup, trying to scoop up a little of the liquid. He could not even ripple the surface; it was like scratching at a block of brown glass.

  He stood there in dismay. It was only to be expected, of course. In any case, even if he had been able to contrive any crumb of food down his throat he could not have digested it; and if he moved away it would simply rip a hole in him, since it would inevitably stay fixed in its own position.

  Strangely enough, the knowledge that he was a doomed man did not utterly unnerve him. In spite of the jokes that were levelled at him, I think there was the stuff of a truly great character in that insignificant little schoolteacher. His Odyssey is a more bizarre one than any Ulysses ever dreamed of, yet the hunger for knowledge, the intellectual interest of a pioneer in a mighty experiment, transcended for him the fear of a slow and lonely death.

  He even smiled wryly as a workman stepped backwards up to the stall, turned, picked up an empty cup, lifted it to his lips, and after a moment set down a steaming full cup of coffee. The man made munching motions with his jaws, and presently took from his mouth a morsel of sandwich; more followed, until in a few minutes a complete and untouched ham sandwich lay on the plate before him. Then he took a coin from the proprietor of the stall and put it away in his pocket as he backed briskly away.

  Rostof lingered for a second or two longer, fascinated by the sight of steam appearing out of thin air and gushing into the spout of the big coffee-urn, then he, too, wen
t on his way.

  When at length the dusk of early morning fell, he began to think of finding somewhere to sleep, but there was to be little sleep for him that night. There was no chance, he soon discovered, of finding anything soft on which to lie. A heap of hay in a stable-yard tempted him, but it was like lying on sharp, hair-thin wire without the slightest yield to it.

  For the greater part of the Wednesday night he wandered disconsolately through the empty streets, until fatigue forced him to sit on a door-step and rest his back against the door. If it was hard, it was at least smooth. He dared not let himself sleep for fear he should be sleeping when anyone came in or out of the door, but towards Wednesday evening he dropped into a troubled slumber for an hour.

  With the chiming of ten o’clock from the church tower he awoke, and rose wearily to move on. The Wednesday night crowds were still about, and he felt it would not be safe to sleep longer. He rubbed a hand over his stubbled chin as he went.

  You will note that the metabolism of his body still continued normally. His hair still grew, his body became fatigued and needed food, blood circulated steadily in his veins, his heart thumped in regulation time. Which explains why he was able to remember the whole train of events from Tuesday to Thursday, and back again to Tuesday; as far as his physical self was concerned it was one unbroken period of time.

  Throughout the Wednesday he worked more and more out towards the countryside, avoiding the busier thoroughfares. He was feeling faint with hunger and exhaustion and his reflexes were slower in responding to danger signals, as was proved by one or two narrow escapes.

  Once he came upon a cat walking gravely backwards towards a low wall, and unthinkingly tried to cut in between cat and wall. As he drew level, however, the cat crouched and suddenly sprang tail first through the air towards the top of the wall. Rostof was not quite quick enough in dodging, and she caught him a glancing blow on the shoulder that sent him spinning a dozen yards and left a raw gash that dripped blood along his arm. After that he roused himself to walk more warily; but despite his care, he was almost caught in the morning.