by Anthology
Astonishingly, he was right; I did want to tell someone, very much. Quickly, before I could change my mind, I said, “I use a little black box with knobs on it, brass knobs.” I stopped, stared for a few seconds at a white Coast Guard cutter sliding into view from behind Angel Island, then shrugged and turned back to Ihren. “But you aren’t a physicist; how can I explain? All I can tell you is that it really is possible to send a man into an earlier time. Far easier, in fact, than any of the theorists had supposed. I adjust the knobs, the dials, focusing the black box on the subject like a camera, as it were. Then”—I shrugged again—“well, I switch on a very faint specialized kind of precisely directed electric current or beam. And while my current is on—how shall I put it? He is afloat, in a manner of speaking; he is actually free of time, which moves on ahead without him. I’ve calculated that he is adrift, the past catching up with him at a rate of twenty-three years and eleven weeks for each second my current is on. Using a stopwatch, I can send a man back to whatever time he wishes with a plus or minus accuracy of three weeks. I know it works because—well, Tom Veeley is only one example. They all try to do something to show me they arrived safely, and Veeley said he’d do his best to get into the newsreel shot when Jones won the Open Golf Championship. I checked the newsreel last week to make sure he had.”
The inspector nodded. “All right; now, why did you do it? They’re criminals, you know; and you helped them escape.”
I said, “No, I didn’t know they were criminals, Inspector. And they didn’t tell me. They just seemed like nice people with more troubles than they could handle. And I did it because I needed what a doctor needs when he discovers a new serum—volunteers to try it! And I got them; you’re not the only one who ever read that news report.”
“Where’d you do it?”
“Out on the beach not far from the Cliff House. Late at night when no one was around.”
“Why out there?”
“There’s some danger a man might appear in a time and place already occupied by something else, a stone wall or building, his molecules occupying the same space. He’d be all mixed in with the other molecules, which would be unpleasant and confining. But there’ve never been any buildings on the beach. Of course the beach might have been a little higher at one time than another, so I took no chances. I had each of them stand on the lifeguard tower, appropriately dressed for whatever time he planned to enter, and with the right kind of money for the period in his pocket. I’d focus carefully around him so as to exclude the tower, turn on the current for the proper time, and he’d drop onto the beach of fifty, sixty, seventy, or eighty years ago.”
For a while the inspector sat nodding, staring absently at the rough planks of the pier. Then he looked up at me again, vigorously rubbing his palms together. “All right, Professor, and now you’re going to bring them all back!” I began shaking my head, and he smiled grimly and said, “Oh, yes, you are, or I’ll wreck your career! I can do it, you know. I’ll bring out everything I’ve told you, and I’ll show the connections. Each of the missing people visited you more than once. Undoubtedly some of them were seen. You may even have been seen on the beach. Time I’m through, you’ll never teach again.” I was still shaking my head, and he said dangerously, “You mean you won’t?”
“I mean I can’t, you idiot! How the hell can I reach them? They’re back in 1885, 1906, 1927, or whatever; it’s absolutely impossible to bring them back. They’ve escaped you, Inspector—forever.”
He actually turned white. “No!” he cried. “No; they’re criminals and they’ve got to be punished, got to be!”
I was astounded. “Why? None of them’s done any great harm. And as far as we’re concerned, they don’t exist. Forget them.”
He actually bared his teeth. “Never,” he whispered, then he roared, “I never forget a wanted man!”
“Okay, Javert.”
“Who?”
“A fictional policeman in a book called Les Miserables. He spent half his life hunting down a man no one else wanted any more.”
“Good man; like to have him in the department.”
“He’s not generally regarded too highly.”
“He is by me!” Inspector Ihren began slowly pounding his fist into his palm, muttering, “They’ve got to be punished, they’ve got to be punished,” then he looked up at me. “Get out of here,” he yelled, “fast!” and I was glad to, and did. A block away I looked back, and he was still sitting there on the dock slowly pounding his fist in his palm.
I thought I’d seen the last of him then but I hadn’t; I saw Inspector Ihren one more time. Late one evening about ten days later he phoned my apartment and asked me—ordered me—to come right over with my little black box, and I did even though I’d been getting ready for bed; he simply wasn’t a man you disobeyed lightly. When I walked up to the big dark Hall of Justice he was standing in the doorway, and without a word he nodded at a car at the curb. We got in, and drove in silence out to a quiet little residential district.
The streets were empty, the houses dark; it was close to midnight. We parked just within range of a corner street light, and Ihren said, “I’ve been doing some thinking since I saw you last, and some research.” He pointed to a mailbox beside the street lamp on the corner a dozen feet ahead. “That’s one of the three mailboxes in the city of San Francisco that has been in the same location for almost ninety years. Not that identical box, of course, but always that location. And now we’re going to mail some letters.” From his coat pocket, Inspector Ihren brought out a little sheaf of envelopes, addressed in pen and ink, and stamped for mailing. He showed me the top one, shoving the others into his pocket. “You see who this is for?”
“The chief of police.”
“That’s right; the San Francisco chief of police—in 1885! That’s his name, address, and the kind of stamp they used then. I’m going to walk to the mailbox on the corner, and hold this in the slot. You’ll focus your little black box on the envelope, turn on the current as I let it go, and it will drop into the mailbox that stood here in 1885!”
I shook my head admiringly; it was ingenious. “And what does the letter say?”
He grinned evilly. “I’ll tell you what it says! Every spare moment I’ve had since I last saw you, I’ve been reading old newspapers at the library. In December, 1884, there was a robbery, several thousand dollars missing; there isn’t a word in the paper for months afterward that it was ever solved.” He held up the envelope. “Well, this letter suggests to the chief of police that they investigate a man they’ll find working in Haring’s Restaurant, a man with an unusually long thin face. And that if they search his room, they’ll probably find several thousand dollars he can’t account for. And that he will absolutely not have an alibi for the robbery in 1884!” The Inspector smiled, if you could call it a smile. “That’s all they’ll need to send him to San Quentin, and mark the case closed; they didn’t pamper criminals in those days!”
My jaw was hanging open. “But he isn’t guilty! Not of that crime!”
“He’s guilty of another just about like it! And he’s got to be punished; I will not let him escape, not even to 1885!”
“And the other letters?”
“You can guess. There’s one for each of the men you helped get away, addressed to the police of the proper time and place. And you’re going to help me mail them all, one by one. If you don’t I’ll ruin you, and that’s a promise, Professor.” He opened his door, stepped out, and walked to the corner without even glancing back.
I suppose there are those who will say I should have refused to use my little black box no matter what the consequences to me. Well, maybe I should have, but I didn’t. The inspector meant what he said and I knew it, and I wasn’t going to have the only career I ever had or wanted be ruined. I did the best I could; I begged and pleaded. I got out of the car with my box; the inspector stood waiting at the mailbox. “Please don’t make me do this,” I said. “Please! There’s no need! You haven�
�t told anyone else about this, have you?”
“Of course not; I’d be laughed off the force.”
“Then forget it! Why hound these poor people? They haven’t done so much; they haven’t really hurt anyone. Be humane! Forgiving! Your ideas are at complete odds with modern conceptions of criminal rehabilitation!”
I stopped for breath, and he said, “You through, Professor? I hope so, because nothing will ever change my mind. Now, go ahead and use that damn box!” Hopelessly I shrugged, and began adjusting the dials.
I am sure that the most baffling case the San Francisco Bureau of Missing Persons ever had will never be solved. Only two people—Inspector Ihren and I—know the answer, and we’re not going to tell. For a short time there was a clue someone might have stumbled onto, but I found it. It was in the rare photographs section of the public library; they’ve got hundreds of old San Francisco pictures, and I went through them all and found this one. Then I stole it; one more crime added to the list I was guilty of hardly mattered.
Every once in a while I get it out, and look at it; it shows a row of uniformed men lined up in formation before a San Francisco police station. In a way it reminds me of an old movie comedy because each of them wears a tall helmet of felt with a broad turn-down brim, and long uniform coats to the knees. Nearly every one of them wears a drooping mustache, and each holds a long nightstick poised at the shoulder as though ready to bring it down on Chester Conklin’s head. Keystone Kops they look like at first glance, but study those faces closely and you change your mind about that. Look especially close at the face of the man at the very end of the row, wearing sergeant’s stripes. It looks positively and permanently ferocious, glaring out (or so it always seems) directly at me. It is the implacable face of Martin O. Ihren of the San Francisco police force, back where he really belongs, back where I sent him with my little black box, in the year 1893.
THE FINAL DAYS
David Langford
It was under the hot lights that Harman always felt most powerful. The air throbbed and sang with dazzlement and heat, wherein opponents—Ferris merely the most recent—might shrivel and wilt; but Harman sucked confidence from cameras, glad to expose something of himself to a nation of watchers, and more than a nation. Just now the slick, machine-stamped interviewer was turned away, towards Ferris; still Harman knew better than to peer surreptitiously at his own solid, blond and faintly smiling image in the monitor. Control was important, and Harman’s image was imperturbable: his hands lay still and relaxed, the left on the chair-arm, the right on his thigh, their stillness one of the many small negative mannerisms which contributed to the outward Harman’s tough dependability.
Gradually the focus was slipping away from Ferris, whose mere intelligence and sincerity should not be crippling his handling of the simplest, the most hypothetical questions.
“What would be your first act as President, Mr. Ferris?”
“Well, er . . . it would depend on . . .”
And the monitor would ruthlessly cut back to Harman in relaxed close-up, faintly smiling. One of the tricks was to be always the same. Ferris, alternately tense and limp, seemed scarcely camera-trained. Why? Ferris did not speak naturally toward the interviewer, nor oratorically into the camera which now pushed close, its red action-light ablink; his gaze wavered as he assembled libertarian platitudes, and his attention was drawn unwillingly beyond the arena’s heat and light, to something that troubled him. Harman glanced easily about the studio, and followed Ferris’s sick fascination to his own talisman, the magic box which traced the threads of destiny. (Always to be ready with a magniloquent phrase; that was another of the tricks.)
He could have laughed. Ferris, supposedly a seasoned performer and a dangerous opponent, could not adapt to this novelty. Four days to go, and his skill was crumbling under the onslaught of a gigantically magnified stage-fright. Posterity was too much for him.
Looking up from the box, the technician intercepted Harman’s tightly relaxed gaze and held up five fingers; and five more; and four. Harman’s self-confidence and self-belief could hardly burn brighter. Fourteen watchers. Favoured above all others, he had never before scored higher than ten. The wheel still turned his way, then. Ecce homo; man of the hour; man of destiny; he half-smiled at the clichés, but no more than half.
The interviewer swivelled his chair to Harman, leaving Ferris in a pool of sweat. His final questions had been gentle, pityingly gentle; and Ferris with flickering eyes had fumbled nearly all.
“Mr. Ferris has explained his position, Mr. Harman, and I’m sure that you’d like to state yours before I ask you a few questions.”
Harman let his practised voice reply at once, while his thoughts sang fourteen . . . fourteen.
“I stand, as I have said before, for straight talking and honest action. I stand for a rejection of the gutless compromises which have crippled our economy. I want a fair deal for everyone, and I’m ready to fight to see they get it.”
The words were superfluous. Harman’s followers had a Sign.
“I’ll tell you a true story about something that happened to me a while ago. I was walking home at night, in a street where vandals had smashed up half the lights, and a mugger came up to me. One of those scum who will be swept from the streets when our program of police reform goes through.”
(He detected a twitch of resentment from Ferris; but Ferris was off-camera now.)
“He showed me a knife and asked for my wallet, the usual line of talk. Now I’m not a specially brave man, but this was what I’d been talking about when I laid it on the line about political principles. You just don’t give in to threats like that. So I said damn you, come and try it, and you know, he just crumpled up. There’s a moral in that story for this country, a moral you’ll see when you think who’s threatening us right now—”
It was a true story. As it happened, the security man on Harman’s tail had shot the mugger as he wavered.
“A few questions, then,” said the interviewer. “I think we’re all waiting to hear more about the strangest gimmick ever included in a Presidential campaign. A lot of people are pretty sceptical about these scientists’ claims, you know. Perhaps you could just briefly tell the viewers what you yourself think about these eyes, these watchers—?”
When you’re hot, you’re hot. Harman became still chattier.
“It’s not a gimmick and it’s not really part of my campaign. Some guys at the Gravity Research Foundation discovered that we—or some of us—are being watched. By, well, posterity. As you’ll know from the newspapers, they were messing about with a new way of picking up gravity waves, which is something a plain man like me knows nothing about; and instead their gadget spotted these (what did they call them?) little knots of curdled space. The nodes, they called them later, or the peepholes. The gadget tells you when they’re looking and how many are looking. It turns out that ordinary folk”—he suppressed the reflexive like you and me—“aren’t watched at all; important people might get one or two or half-a-dozen eyes on them . . .”
At a sign from the interviewer, a previously dormant camera zoomed in on the technician and the unremarkable-looking Box. “Can you tell us how many—eyes—are present in this studio, sir?”
The technician paused to make some minor adjustment, doubtless eager for his own tiny share of limelight. He looked up after a few seconds, and said:
“Fifteen.”
Ferris shuddered very slightly.
“Of course,” said Harman smoothly, “some of these will be for Mr. Ferris.” Ferris, he knew, had two watchers; intermittently; and it seemed that he hated it. The interviewer, giant of this tiny studio world, was never watched for his own sake when alone. He was marking time now, telling the tale of Sabinnen, that artist whom they tagged important in earlier tests of the detectors. Sabinnen was utterly obscure at that time; that ceased when they tracked the concentration of eight eyes, and his cupboardful of paintings came to light, and did it not all hang together, this not
ion of the Future watching the famous before their fame?
Harman revelled in the silent eyes which so constantly attended him. It recalled the curious pleasure of first finding his home and office bugged; such subtle flattery might dismay others, but Harman had nothing to hide.
“But I must emphasize that this is only a pointer,” he said, cutting in at the crucial moment. “The people have this hint of the winning side, as they might from newspaper predictions or opinion polls—but the choice remains theirs, a decision which we politicians must humbly accept. Of course I’m glad it’s not just today’s voters who have faith in me—” He was full of power; the words came smoothly, compellingly, through the final minutes—while Ferris stared first morosely at his shoe and then bitterly at Harman, while the interviewer (momentarily forgetful of the right to equal time, doubtless reluctant to coax the numbered Ferris through further hoops) listened with an attentive silence which clearly said In four days you will be President.
Then it was over, and Harman moved through a triumphal procession of eager reporters, scattering bonhomie and predictions of victory, saluted again and again by electronic flashes which for long minutes burnt green and purple on his retinas; and so to the big, quiet car with motorcycles before and behind, off into the anonymous night. He wondered idly whether any reporter had been kind enough to beg an opinion or two from Ferris.
*****
He refused to draw the car’s shades, of course, preferring to remain visible to the public behind his bullet-proof glass. There was a risk of assassination, but though increasing it was still small. (How the eyes must have hovered over JFK, like a cloud of eager flies. But no one could wish to assassinate Harman . . . surely.) He settled in the rear seat, one hand still relaxed upon the leather, the other resting calmly on his own right thigh. The outline of the chauffeur’s head showed dimly through more impervious glass . . . In four days he would rate six motorcyclists before and behind; with two only to supplement the eye-detector’s van and this purring car, he felt almost alone. Better to recall the seventeen watchers (the number had been rising still, the Argus eyes of destiny marking him out); or the eye of the camera, which held within it a hundred million watchers here and now. The show had gone well. He felt he might have succeeded without the silent eyes, the nodes of interference born of the uncertainty principle which marked where information was siphoned into the years ahead. How far ahead? No one knew; and it did not matter. Harman believed in himself and knew his belief to be sincere, even without this sign from heaven to mark him as blessed of all men.