THE ANCESTRAL THREAD, by Emil Petaja
Originally publshed in Amazing Stories, May 1947.
“How about taking in the baseball game out at Poinsettia Playground, Sydney, old kidney?”
I twirled my natty straw hat, and looked down at Susie May’s eleven year old nephew hopefully.
She had sent me over to take care of him this beautiful Sunday afternoon. His pa and ma had left town and were afraid to leave him alone. He had been acting peculiar lately. They were worried.
He ignored me.
He only stared out of the window of their big, ancient, atrocious Alvarado Street house, his mind a million miles away.
“Maybe the movies?” I tried again, with a playful jab in the ribs. “There’s a killer-diller at the Westlake.”
No answer.
Sydney sat on the window seat in the front hall. His little hand was propped under his chin; his sandy hair drooped carelessly almost over his heavy horn-rimmed spectacles; his boyish lips were a grim thoughtful line.
Rodin’s “Thinker” popped into my mind. A young Thinker, that hadn’t grown up yet.
“Hmmm,” I said, reading the title of the book Syd had been reading and which was lying open nearby. “Prof. Albert Einstein’s Theory of Relativity. Hmmm… You do pick ’em deep, don’t you, Syd, old kid!”
At this he turned his head. He eyed me frowningly. His eyes were blue, cold blue. I felt abashed under their penetrating scrutiny. And Sydney’s thick specs made them look twice as big, and sort of uncanny. Especially on an eleven year old boy.
“Who are you?” Susie May’s nephew asked. “And what do you want?”
Well! Right then you could have knocked me down with a fender. I’d given up my only free day in the week to entertain this brat of a nephew, and had stood there ten minutes twirling my straw hat and making suggestion after suggestion for a gay and carefree afternoon.
“Come out of the clouds, kiddo. You know me!” I tried to sound gruff.
“Oh, Uncle Lemuel Mason. To be sure.” He gave off a slow grave smile. “You must forgive my seeming discourtesy in permitting my mental preoccupation to prelude prepension while you were—”
“It’s all right,” I grinned, ruffling his sandy hair. “Think nothing of it.”
I rubbed my chin thoughtfully. So this was part of his odd behavior—talking like a pint-size Thesaurus.
“Well, Syd,” I added, in a moment. “What’s the verdict? Baseball, movies, or—?”
He shook his head.
“They have no appeal for me,” he smiled. “I’d be much better occupied in perusing Einstein further, or—”
“Or what?” I asked in astonishment, as he hesitated.
“Or working in my laboratory. Mentally I’ve been mulling over a furtherance of my own Theory of Mental Progression, which even in its present embryonic stages may well change the whole course of my highly significant experimentations.”
And he never cracked a smile when he said it!
I sat down. I had to, I was that dumbfounded.
“Er… Tell me about it,” I gasped uneasily, when I caught my breath.
“Afraid you wouldn’t understand, Uncle Lem.” Syd shook his head and again emitted that grave professorial smile. “It is far too involved. Even I—”
Even he…
I had to laugh then. It was too much.
Sydney and I weren’t what you’d call bosom pals, but in the few times I’d talked with him before he had struck me as a perfectly normal though bright young fellow. A little given to imaginative reading maybe. But nothing like this!
“Come on outside in the fresh air, Syd. You’ve had your little joke.” I took his hand, and tugged him off his perch. “We’ll take a nice walk around the park, and decide what we want to do.”
“You—you don’t believe me—either?” His boyish treble accused, as he pulled his hand out of mine. His big eyes held an unhappy vexed look.
I had better humor him, I determined. These little mental quirks can develop into pure unadulterated buggyness if not handled delicately.
“Sure I do.” I essayed a smile, and again urged him toward the sunlight that blinked through the green leaves outside the open door.
“Wait a minute!”
Sydney’s face reddened with anger and excitement.
“I’m getting sick and tired of all this small-minded treatment!” he went on, his boy’s voice quivering. “Heretofore I’ve kept my experiments to myself, but now it’s high time I told somebody. Uncle Lem Mason,” he ended on a note of high command. “You follow me upstairs—to my laboratory in the attic!”
What else could I do?
He leaped up the stairs like a gazelle, and I trotted after, more like a pack mule.
Sydney shut the attic door behind us, and switched on some lights.
I rubbered around me.
The attic was one whopping big room. Over in one corner was a long porcelain topped work bench that appeared to have known long usage. It was littered with motley junk, both tools for working with metals, as well as scientific chemistry apparati.
Opposite this versatile work bench was a gargantuan machine. That’s all I could call it. It might have been a threshing machine or a Rube Goldberg salad mixer, for all the sense it made to me. But it was, I could see, equipped with dials, levers, and gauges, and in front of it was a curious metal chair that faced two metal handles.
Most of the attic was dusty and cob-webbed, as though it hadn’t been used for many years, but the machine and the work bench were spic and span. The metal gleamed, and the glass showed evidence of recent polishing.
“Don’t tell me you built all this!” I exclaimed incredulously, as Syd busied himself about the place in a proprietary manner.
“Certainly not,” he denied.
“Who did?”
“Professor Maximillian Leyton.”
Syd began. “He owned and lived in this old house for over twenty years. Until he disappeared very mysteriously some fifteen years back.
“His heirs, who lived in the East and had had little or nothing to do with the old scientist in many decades, got the property off their hands as soon as they legally could. They sold it to my father, sight unseen.
“Old Leyton had conducted a lot of unprecedented experiments in his laboratory at one of the big California colleges, and was considered a little wacky. This led to his dismissal. He became very misanthropic, and worked up here in this attic all alone, allowing no one up here, not even his housekeeper.
“Apparently Leyton hadn’t a friend or confidante in the whole world. Occasionally he was in the habit of making trips to various parts of the country, and when he vanished nobody cared much, thinking he had disappeared by preference. The attic was boarded up, and his efforts here dismissed as so much junk…”
“No!” I grinned.
Syd’s young-old eyes gave me an icy massage.
“The machine was so bulky that my father didn’t bother to have it moved, so it was left here. We didn’t use the attic anyway.
“But one rainy afternoon last April I was wandering around the old dark halls up here, playing Daniel Boone stalking a bear.” Syd smiled crookedly. “You see, I was only a child then, with a child’s mental limitations—”
“What do you think you—”
“Quiet!” Syd snapped, like a grand-pop at a seven-year-old. “In my play, I kicked loose one of the boards over the attic door, managed to work the lock open, and squeezed my way in.
“I discovered the machine, all covered with dust. And this machine has changed everything for me. Everything.”
“How?” I ventured.
He was so in earnest I didn’t feel like laughing any more.
Syd’s exaggerated optics burned into mine, like cold blue flames, radiant with knowledge.
“The machine has shown me all there is to know about myself,” the wonder boy said. “From the furthest roots of my pre-human ancestry, to the high-point in the life of my
great grand-son!”
All I could do was give out a shrill whistle, and sit myself down on an old apple box.
Sydney paid me little heed. He walked briskly over to the huge machine, and started the thing to humming by twisting various dials, and throwing a switch.
For a few minutes he was absorbed in his amazing child’s play, then he perched himself on the work bench and went on with his story:
“I have always been possessed of an overwhelming curiosity, even as a boy of eleven,” the boy of eleven said serenely. “So I poked about this machine after wiping the dust off, and twisted dials, and pulled levers, wondering what on earth its purpose might be. Nothing happened.
“Then it occurred to me to hunt for an explanation in the drawers of the work bench. I wiped away more dust, and kept searching around, day after day.
“You see, I was getting over the mumps, and wasn’t allowed to go to school. I had all day to spend up here in the attic, and try to solve this perplexing mystery.
Finally, one day, I discovered a notebook, filled with almost illegible writing. I couldn’t make much out of the writing, since Professor Leyton was anything but methodical. He seems to have worked pell-mell. Everything indicates that. I doubt that anybody could successfully build another machine like this one from his insufficient notes.
“But there was a diagram of the machine in the notebook, and some instructions for its operation noted thereon. Or course it took my child-mind days to make any headway in my attempts to read it and comprehend these instructions. But somehow I did.
“Mostly it was by accident.
“I hadn’t the foggiest notion of what would happen to me when I tried the machine, but I was all for plunging ahead. So one bright Spring day I sat down on that metal chair, after taking a capsule from the box I found with the notebook as directed in the diagram, and turned dials, then threw the switch, and waited excitedly for what might occur…”
“So what did happen?”
Sydney smiled.
“First nothing. So I tried again. And again. Then little by little I discovered what I’d been doing wrong, and revised my attempts accordingly.
“For instance, I discovered that my hands were to keep holding on the two bright metal handles directly in front of the chair until the machine had made contact with my mind. A series of wave-like shocks passed up my little arms and into my body.
“I was frightened. I tried to let go of the handles, but they stuck as if glued.
“I felt I couldn’t bear it much longer. A terrifying vertigo seemed to be sweeping me on and out of my body. I swooped through time and space, as though on a cosmic roller-coaster.”
“What happened? I panted, rocking on my apple box.
“I passed out…”
* * * *
“‘When I came out of it,” Syd continued in his boyish treble, “the vertigo had passed. My hands still gripped the handles, but my mind was clear, very clear. And it was filled with phantasmagoric bits of new knowledge, as if it had been dipped in some cosmic mind-pool.
“For instance, I knew which dial I should turn now, and that the lever on my extreme right would automatically shut the whole machine off, should that be necessary.
“But I didn’t want the machine off. I wanted to test its full powers.
“I found that now I could lift one hand off the handle and still maintain contact. So I twisted one of the two large dials directly above the handles. The one clumsily marked ‘Back’. I turned it two notches only.
“Immediately I wasn’t in the attic any longer…
“I was in an old-fashioned office, sitting behind a big desk, with a cigar in my mouth, and my feet propped up on a waste basket. I was grown up, and dressed in a funny tight-trousered suit of loud checks. I wore a black mustache that curled up at the ends. I stroked it from time to time, very proudly.
“I was talking, dictating a letter to a pretty girl whose chestnut hair was wrapped into a weird bun at the back of her neck. She was dressed in a prim white shirt-waist and ankle-length skirt that fell over high button shoes.
“You must understand, that while suddenly I was this old-time gentleman, seeing what he saw through his eyes, hearing what he heard, and feeling what he felt; at the same time I was powerless to direct his movements. I played the role of a mental kibitzer.
“The girl kept saying, ‘Yes, Mister Rayson.’
“My own mind was able to wonder about this. I am Sydney Rayson. My father is Mister Rayson. My grandfather was Mister—
“I was on the point of solving this riddle, when the man that was me for the moment got up, tossed his cigar into a nearby cuspidor, and took the girl in his arms. She didn’t seem to mind. She blushed even prettier when he kissed her.
“‘Not Mister Rayson,’ he admonished. ‘Malcolm.’
“Just then the door behind them opened. A large, over-dressed woman blew in. She was full of dangerous curves, but it seemed to me that three pigeons on her hat was just a little too many.
“‘Well!’ she cried. ‘So this is how you behave behind your fiancée’s back, you cad. Take that! And that!’
“The first that was a hefty clout on the ear. The second was a ring which she removed from her fat finger and flung in his face, nearly knocking an eye out.
“The door banged behind her, smashing the glass. Malcolm Rayson sighed, a relieved sort of sigh, and continued where he had left off when so violently interrupted…”
“Who was this guy Malcolm?” I, Lem Mason, asked this precocious nephew.
“My grandfather, of course!” Syd proclaimed. “His name was Malcolm, and he married his secretary, although at one time he was engaged to his boss’s voluptuous daughter.”
“How come you lived in his mind? What’s this machine for?” I quizzed. “And why that particular moment?”
“If you’ll allow me to finish!” Syd growled, falsetto. “So after this little incident was over I found myself slowly fading out of Malcolm Rayson’s mind, and returning to my own body here in the attic.
“I pulled down the lever that shut the machine off, and called it a day…
“Now, to answer your questions,” said this amazing quiz kid. “I lived in my grandfather’s mind for a while because that is the function of this machine—to open up unused portions of the mind where ancestral memories are stored, and to let you relive these memories as in a three-dimensional motion picture. I turned the dial two notches—thus, two generations back.
“And the reason I relived that particular moment is because that memory is the strongest in grandfather’s portion of the ancestral thread of memory. In grandfather’s mind that memory stood out ahead of all others. It was transmitted in the genes, or inheritable elements, to my father, who in turn transmitted it to me.
“In subsequent experiments, I found that it was always the high-point in each ancestor’s life that the machine was able to pick up and recreate.”
I found an apple on the work bench, and nibbled on it thoughtfully. As I nibbled and thought I stared at Professor Leyton’s ancestral juke-box, that Syd had prodded into action.
“Do tell,” I murmured, still, incredulous. “And did you relive any more high-points in your ancestors’ lives? Further back?”
“Certainly,” Syd retorted calmly. “Many of them.”
“Tell me about ’em.”
“I can’t. It would take days, there were so many, some of them so very complex…
“For instance, there was Abigail Georgie Rayson, my great-great grandmother, who was subjected to the ducking stool back in Colonial days, for talking in church. That was the most vivid, embarrassing moment of her life.
“There was an English ancestor, Sir Hamilton Fiske-Rayeson, who died in the War of the Roses; there was Agnes Rurrson, who was forcibly wedded to a tyrannical Roman general; there was Caracalla, the blood-lusty Roman Emperor, whose appearance in the family ancestral thread springs from no pretty scene; there was Latoto, a slave in ancient Babylon.
>
“And further back—dwellers in cities that have crumbled into dust, and are now not even listed in the archives of archeology.
“Back, back, back—to ancestors that cowered in cliff caves, conversing in grunts and growls, shivering with terror when the hooves of the mastodons trampled above their heads like thunder.
“And even further back…”
I blinked.
“Further back? What could be further back than the cavemen?”
Syd’s big eyes seemed to be seeing it all again, as he spoke:
“Back to midnight shapes that swung from tree to tree with hairy agile arms; back to things that lumbered over steaming hills and made outlandish unhuman noises; back to things that slithered on their loathesome bellies through primordial slimes…”
“My goodness,” I hissed. “You did go back!”
My tone seemed to irritate Susie May’s nephew. He turned on me sharply.
“You don’t believe me!” he accused, pointing a little smutty finger at me.
“Well,” I admitted. “It’s a lot to swallow all in one lump. And here’s another thing, I seem to remember you making a crack about your great-grandson. Just where does he come into the three-dimensional motion picture?”
“Ah,” Syd sighed, with some satisfaction. “Then at least I know you were listening, not daydreaming. But you seem to have forgotten one little detail—the second big dial, the one marked ‘Ahead’!”
“What about it?”
“That dial brought my mind in contact with high-points in my future generations’ lives!”
* * * *
“Are you kidding?” That was all I could think to snort.
He ignored my flippancy. He talked on as though to himself. I champed on my apple, and listened, squinting over at him in righteous doubt.
“You see, lame-brain, Professor Leyton’s astonishing purpose seems to have been to accumulate all the knowledge he could, both past and present. Unfortunately for him, his very greed for knowledge was his own undoing. He didn’t realize the danger he was putting himself in.
“Nor did I…”
“Having plumbed the depths of the past, I was all for venturing into the undiscovered realms of the future.
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