“Bill,” he said, very seriously, “I didn’t invent that damn battery.”
“No?”
“No!” he confirmed. “I pinched the idea. What makes it madder is that I wasn’t quite sure of what I was stealing and, crazier still, I don’t know from whence I stole it.”
“Which is as plain as a pikestaff,” I commented.
“That’s nothing. After twelve years of careful, exacting work I’ve built something else. It must be the most complicated thing in creation.” He banged a fist on his knee, and his voice rose complainingly. “And now that I’ve done it, I don’t know what I’ve done.”
“Surely when an inventor experiments he knows what he’s doing?”
“Not me!” Burman was amusingly lugubrious. “I’ve invented only one thing in my life, and that was more by accident than by good judgment.” He perked up. “But that one thing was the key to a million notions. It gave me the battery. It has nearly given me things of greater importance. On several occasions it has nearly, but not quite, placed within my inadequate hands and half-understanding mind plans that would alter this world far beyond your conception.” Leaning forward to lend emphasis to his speech, he said, “Now it has given me a mystery that has cost me twelve years of work and a nice sum of money. I finished it last night. I don’t know what the devil it is.”
“Perhaps if I had a look at it—”
“Just what I’d like you to do.” He switched rapidly to mounting enthusiasm. “It’s a beautiful job of work, even though I say so myself. Bet you that you can’t say what it is, or what it’s supposed to do.”
“Assuming it can do something,” I put in.
“Yes,” he agreed. “But I’m positive it has a function of some sort.” Getting up, he opened a door. “Come along.”
It was a stunner. The thing was a metal box with a glossy, rhodium-plated surface. In general size and shape it bore a faint resemblance to an upended coffin, and had the same brooding, ominous air of a casket waiting for its owner to give up the ghost.
There were a couple of small glass windows in its front through which could be seen a multitude of wheels as beautifully finished as those in a first-class watch. Elsewhere, several tiny lenses stared with sphinx-like indifference. There were three small trapdoors in one side, two in the other, and a large one in the front. From the top, two knobbed rods of metal stuck up like goat’s horns, adding a satanic touch to the thing’s vague air of yearning for midnight burial.
“It’s an automatic layer-outer,” I suggested, regarding the contraption with frank dislike. I pointed to one of the trapdoors. “You shove the shroud in there, and the corpse comes out the other side reverently composed and ready wrapped.”
“So you don’t like its air, either,” Burman commented. He lugged open a drawer in a nearby tier, hauled out a mass of drawings. “These are its innards. It has an electric circuit, valves, condensers, and something that I can’t quite understand, but which I suspect to be a tiny, extremely efficient electric furnace. It has parts I recognize as cog-cutters and pinion-shapers. It embodies several small-scale multiple stampers, apparently for dealing with sheet metal. There are vague suggestions of an assembly line ending in that large compartment shielded by the door in front. Have a look at the drawings yourself. You can see it’s an extremely complicated device for manufacturing something only little less complicated.”
The drawings showed him to be right. But they didn’t show everything. An efficient machine designer could correctly have deduced the gadget’s function if given complete details. Burman admitted this, saying that, some parts he had made “on the spur of the moment,” while others he had been “impelled to draw.” Short of pulling the machine to pieces, there was enough data to whet the curiosity, but not enough to satisfy it.
“Start the damn thing and see what it does.”
“I’ve tried,” said Burman. “It won’t start. There’s no starting handle, nothing to suggest how it can be started. I tried everything I could think of, without result. The electric circuit ends in those antennae at the top, and I even sent current through those, but nothing happened.”
“Maybe it’s a self-starter,” I ventured. Staring at it, a thought struck me. “Timed,” I added.
“Eh?”
“Set for an especial time. When the dread hour strikes, it’ll go of its own accord, like a bomb.”
“Don’t be so melodramatic,” said Burman, uneasily.
Bending down, he peered into one of the tiny lenses.
“Bz-z-z!” murmured the contraption in a faint undertone that was almost inaudible.
Burman jumped a foot. Then he backed away, eyed the thing warily, turned his glance at me.
“Did you hear that?”
“Sure!” Getting the drawings, I mauled them around. That little lens took some finding, but it was there all right. It has a selenium cell behind it. “An eye,” I said. “It saw you, and reacted. So it isn’t dead even if it does just stand there seeing no evil, hearing no evil, speaking no evil.” I put a white handkerchief against the lens.
“Bz-z-z!” repeated the coffin, emphatically.
Taking the handkerchief, Burman put it against the other lenses. Nothing happened. Not a sound was heard, not a funeral note. Just nothing.
“It beats me,” he confessed.
I’d got pretty fed up by this time. If the crazy article had performed, I’d have written it up and maybe I’d have started another financial snowball rolling for Burman’s benefit. But you can’t do anything with a box that buzzes whenever it feels temperamental. Firm treatment was required, I decided.
“You’ve been all nice and mysterious about how you got hold of this brain wave,” I said. “Why can’t you go to the same source for information about what it’s supposed to be?”
“I’ll tell you—or, rather, I’ll show you.”
From his safe, Burman dragged out a box, and from the box he produced a gadget. This one was far simpler than the useless mass of works over by the wall. It looked just like one of those old-fashioned crystal sets, except that the crystal was very big, very shiny, and was set in a horizontal vacuum tube. There was the same single dial, the same cat’s whisker. Attached to the lot by a length of flex was what might have been a pair of headphones, except in place of the phones were a pair of polished, smoothly rounded copper circles shaped to fit outside the ears and close against the skull.
“My one and only invention.” said Burman, not without a justifiable touch of pride.
“What is it?”
“A time-traveling device.”
“Ha, ha!” My laugh was very sour. I’d read about such things. In fact, I’d written about them. They were bunkum. Nobody could travel through time, either backward or forward. “Let me see you grow hazy and vanish into the future.”
“I’ll show you something very soon.” Burman said it with assurance I didn’t like. He said it with the positive air of a man who knows darned well that he can do something that everybody else knows darned well can’t be done. He pointed to the crystal set. “It wasn’t discovered at the first attempt. Thousands must have tried and failed. I was the lucky one. I must have picked a peculiarly individualistic crystal; I still don’t know how it does what it does; I’ve never been able to repeat its performance even with a crystal apparently identical.”
“And it enables you to travel in time?”
“Only forward. It won’t take me backward, not even as much as one day. But it can carry me forward an immense distance, perhaps to the very crack of doom, perhaps everlastingly through infinity.”
I had him now! I’d got him firmly entangled in his own absurdities. My loud chuckle was something I couldn’t control.
“You can travel forward, but not backward, not even one day back. Then how the devil can you return to the present once you’ve gone into the future?”
“Because I never leave the present,” he replied, evenly. “I don’t partake of the future. I merely s
urvey it from the vantage point of the present. All the same, it is time-traveling in the correct sense of the term.” He seated himself. “Look here, Bill, what are you?”
“Who, me?”
“Yes, what are you.” He went on to provide the answer. “Your name is Bill. You’re a body and a mind. Which of them is Bill?”
“Both,” I said, positively.
“True—but they’re different parts of you. They’re not the same even though they go around like Siamese twins.” His voice grew serious. “Your body moves always in the present, the dividing line between the past and the future. But your mind is more free. It can think, and is in the present. It can remember, and at once is in the past. It can imagine, and at once is in the future, in its own choice of all the possible futures. Your mind can travel through time!”
He’d outwitted me. I could find points to pick upon and argue about, but I knew that fundamentally he was right. I’d not looked at it from this angle before, but he was correct in saying that anyone could travel through time within the limits of his own memory and imagination. At that very moment I could go back twelve years and see him in my mind’s eyes as a younger man, paler, thinner, more excitable, not so cool and self-possessed. The picture was as perfect as my memory was excellent. For that brief spell I was twelve years back in all but the flesh.
“I call this thing a psychophone,” Burman went on. “When you imagine what the future will be like, you make a characteristic choice of all the logical possibilities, you pick your favorite from a multitude of likely futures. The psychophone, somehow—the Lord alone knows how—tunes you into future reality. It makes you depict within your mind the future as it will be shaped in actuality, eliminating all the alternatives that will not occur.”
“An imagination-stimulator, a dream-machine,” I scoffed, not feeling as sure of myself as I sounded. “How do you know it’s giving you the McCoy?”
“Consistency,” he answered, gravely. “It repeats the same features and the same trends far too often for the phenomena to be explained as mere coincidence. Besides,” he waved a persuasive hand, “I got the battery from the future. It works, doesn’t it?”
“It does,” I agreed, reluctantly. I pointed to his psychophone. “I, too, may travel in time. How about letting me have a try? Maybe I’ll solve your mystery for you.”
“You can try if you wish,” he replied, quite willingly. He pulled a chair into position. “Sit here, and I’ll let you peer into the future.”
Clipping the headband over my cranium, and fitting the copper rings against my skull where it sprouted ears, Burman connected his psychophone to the mains, switched it on; or rather he did some twiddling that I assumed was a mode of switching on.
“All you have to do,” he said, “is close your eyes, compose yourself, then try and permit your imagination to wander into the future.”
He meddled with the cat’s whisker. A couple of times he said, “Ah!” And each time he said it I got a peculiar dithery feeling around my unfortunate ears. After a few seconds of this, he drew it out to, “A-a-ah!” I played unfair, and peeped beneath lowered lids. The crystal was glowing like rats’ eyes in a forgotten cellar. A furtive crimson.
Closing my own optics, I let my mind wander. Something was flowing between those copper electrodes, a queer, indescribable something that felt with stealthy fingers at some secret portion of my brain. I got the asinine notion that they were the dexterous digits of a yet-to-be-born magician who was going to shout, “Presto!” and pull my abused lump of think-meat out of a thirtieth-century hat—assuming they’d wear hats in the thirtieth century.
What was it like, or, rather, what would it be like in the thirtieth century? Would there be retrogression? Would humanity again be composed of scowling, fur-kilted creatures lurking in caves? Or had progress continued—perhaps even to the development of men like gods?
Then it happened! I swear it! I pictured, quite voluntarily, a savage, and then a huge-domed individual with glittering eyes—the latter being my version of the ugliness we hope to attain. Right in the middle of this erratic dreaming, those weird fingers warped my brain, dissolved my phantoms, and replaced them with a dictated picture which I witnessed with all the helplessness and clarity of a nightmare.
I saw a fat man spouting. He was quite an ordinary man as far as looks went. In fact, he was so normal that he looked henpecked. But he was attired in a Roman toga, and he wore a small, black box where his laurel wreath ought to have been. His audience was similarly dressed, and all were balancing their boxes like a convention of fish porters. What Fatty was orating sounded gabble to me, but he said his piece as if he meant it.
The crowd was in the open air, with great, curved rows of seats visible in the background. Presumably an outside auditorium of some sort. Judging by the distance of the back rows, it must have been a devil of a size. Far behind its sweeping ridge a great edifice jutted into the sky, a cubical erection with walls of glossy squares, like an immense glass-house.
“F’wot?” bellowed Fatty, with obvious heat. “Wuk, wuk, wuk, mor, noon’n’ni’! Bok onned, ord this, ord that.” He stuck an indignant finger against the mysterious object on his cranium. “Bok onned, wuk, wuk, wuk. F’wot?” he glared around. “F’nix!” The crowd murmured approval somewhat timidly. But it was enough for Fatty. Making up his mind, he flourished a plump fist and shouted, “Th’ell wit’m!” Then he tore his box from his pate.
Nobody said anything, nobody moved. Dumb and wide-eyed, the crowd just stood and stared as if paralyzed by the sight of a human being sans box. Something with a long, slender streamlined body and broad wings soared gracefully upward in the distance, swooped over the auditorium, but still the crowd neither moved nor uttered a sound.
A smile of triumph upon his broad face, Fatty bawled, “Lem see’m make wuk now! Lem see’m—”
He got no further. With a rush of mistiness from its tail, but in perfect silence, the soaring thing hovered and sent down a spear of faint, silvery light. The light touched Fatty. He rotted where he stood, like a victim of ultra-rapid leprosy. He rotted, collapsed, crumbled within his sagging clothes, became dust as once he had been dust. It was horrible.
The watchers did not flee in utter panic; not one expression of fear, hatred or disgust came from their tightly closed lips. In perfect silence they stood there, staring, just staring, like a horde of wooden soldiers. The thing in the sky circled to survey its handiwork, then dived low over the mob, a stubby antenna in its prow sparking furiously. As one man, the crowd turned left. As one man it commenced to march, left, right, left, right.
Tearing off the headband, I told Burman what I’d seen, or what his contraption had persuaded me to think that I’d seen. “What the deuce did it mean?”
“Automatons,” he murmured. “Glasshouses and reaction ships.” He thumbed through a big diary filled with notations in his own hands. “Ah, yes, looks like you were very early in the thirtieth century. Unrest was persistent for twenty years prior to the Antibox Rebellion.”
“What rebellion?”
“The Antibox—the revolt of the automatons against the thirty-first century Technocrats. Jackson-Dkj-99717, a successful and cunning schemer with a warped box, secretly warped hundreds of other boxes, and eventually led the rebels to victory in 3047. His great-grandson, a greedy, thick-headed individual, caused the rebellion of the Boxless Freemen against his own clique of Jacksocrats.”
I gaped at this recital, then said, “The way you tell it makes it sound like history.”
“Of course it’s history,” he asserted. “History that is yet to be.” He was pensive for a while. “Studying the future will seem a weird process to you, but it appears quite a normal procedure to me. I’ve done it for years, and maybe familiarity has bred contempt. Trouble is though, that selectivity is poor. You can pick on some especial period twenty times in succession, but you’ll never find yourself in the same month, or even the same year
. In fact, you’re fortunate if you strike twice in the same decade. Result is that my data is very erratic.”
“I can imagine that,” I told him. “A good guesser can guess the correct time to within a minute or two, but never to within ten or even fifty seconds.”
“Quite!” he responded. “So the hell of it has been that mine was the privilege of watching the panorama of the future, but in a manner so sketchy that I could not grasp its prizes. Once I was lucky enough to watch a twenty-fifth century power pack assembled from first to last. I got every detail before I lost the scene which I’ve never managed to hit upon again. But I made that power pack—and you know the result.”
“So that’s how you concocted your famous battery!”
“It is! But mine, good as it may be, isn’t as good as the one I saw. Some slight factor is missing.” His voice was suddenly tight when he added, “I missed something because I had to miss it!”
“Why?” I asked, completely puzzled.
“Because history, past or future, permits no glaring paradox. Because, having snatched this battery from the twenty-fifth century, I am recorded in that age as the twentieth-century inventor of the thing. They’ve made a mild improvement to it in those five centuries, but that improvement was automatically withheld from me. Future history is as fixed and unalterable by those of the present time as is the history of the past.”
“Then,” I demanded, “explain to me that complicated contraption which does nothing but say bz-z-z.”
“Damn it” he said, with open ire, “that’s just what’s making me crazy! It can’t be a paradox, it just can’t.” Then, more carefully, “So it must be a seeming paradox.”
“O.K. You tell me how to market a seeming paradox, and the commercial uses thereof, and I’ll give it a first-class write up.”
Adventures in Time and Space Page 43