by Anthology
“Tyrrell discusses that dilemma, and doesn’t dispose of it. I think I can. If somebody has real knowledge of the future, then the future must be available to the present mind. And if any moment other than the bare present exists, then all time must be totally present; every moment must be perpetually coexistent with every other moment,” Allan said.
“Yes. I think I see what you mean. That was Dunne’s idea, wasn’t it?”
“No. Dunne postulated an infinite series of time dimensions, the entire extent of each being the bare present moment of the next. What I’m postulating is the perpetual coexistence of every moment of time in this dimension, just as every graduation on a yardstick exists equally with every other graduation, but each at a different point in space.”
“Well, as far as duration and sequence go, that’s all right,” the father agreed. “But how about the ‘Passage of Time’?”
“Well, time does appear to pass. So does the landscape you see from a moving car window. I’ll suggest that both are illusions of the same kind. We imagine time to be dynamic, because we’ve never viewed it from a fixed point, but if it is totally present, then it must be static, and in that case, we’re moving through time.”
“That seems all right. But what’s your car window?”
“If all time is totally present, then you must exist simultaneously at every moment along your individual life span,” Allan said. “Your physical body, and your mind, and all the thoughts contained in your mind, each at its appropriate moment in sequence. But what is it that exists only at the bare moment we think of as now?”
Blake Hartley grinned. Already, he was accepting his small son as an intellectual equal.
“Please, teacher; what?”
“Your consciousness. And don’t say, ‘What’s that?’ Teacher doesn’t know. But we’re only conscious of one moment; the illusory now. This is ‘now,’ and it was ‘now’ when you asked that question, and it’ll be ‘now’ when I stop talking, but each is a different moment. We imagine that all those nows are rushing past us. Really, they’re standing still, and our consciousness is whizzing past them.”
His father thought that over for some time. Then he sat up. “Hey!” he cried, suddenly. “If some part of our ego is time-free and passes from moment to moment, it must be extraphysical, because the physical body exists at every moment through which the consciousness passes. And if it’s extraphysical, there’s no reason whatever for assuming that it passes out of existence when it reaches the moment of the death of the body. Why, there’s logical evidence for survival, independent of any alleged spirit communication! You can toss out Patience Worth, and Mrs. Osborne Leonard’s Feda, and Sir Oliver Lodge’s son, and Wilfred Brandon, and all the other spirit-communicators, and you still have evidence.”
“I hadn’t thought of that,” Allan confessed. “I think you’re right. Well, let’s put that at the bottom of the agenda and get on with this time business. You ‘lose consciousness’ as in sleep; where does your consciousness go? I think it simply detaches from the moment at which you go to sleep, and moves backward or forward along the line of moment-sequence, to some prior or subsequent moment, attaching there.”
“Well, why don’t we know anything about that?” Blake Hartley asked. “It never seems to happen. We go to sleep tonight, and it’s always tomorrow morning when we wake; never day-before-yesterday, or last month, or next year.”
“It never . . . or almost never . . . seems to happen; you’re right there. Know why? Because if the consciousness goes forward, it attaches at a moment when the physical brain contains memories of the previous, consciously unexperienced, moment. You wake, remembering the evening before, because that’s the memory contained in your mind at that moment, and back of it are memories of all the events in the interim. See?”
“Yes. But how about backward movement, like this experience of yours?”
“This experience of mine may not be unique, but I never heard of another case like it. What usually happens is that the memories carried back by the consciousness are buried in the subconscious mind. You know how thick the wall between the subconscious and the conscious mind is. These dreams of Dunne’s, and the cases in Tyrrell’s book, are leakage. That’s why precognitions are usually incomplete and distorted, and generally trivial. The wonder isn’t that good cases are so few; it’s surprising that there are any at all.” Allan looked at the papers in front of him. “I haven’t begun to theorize about how I managed to remember everything. It may have been the radiations from the bomb, or the effect of the narcotic, or both together, or something at this end, or a combination of all three. But the fact remains that my subconscious barrier didn’t function, and everything got through. So, you see, I am obsessed—by my own future identity.”
“And I’d been afraid that you’d been, well, taken-over by some . . . some outsider.” Blake Hartley grinned weakly. “I don’t mind admitting, Allan, that what’s happened has been a shock. But that other . . . I just couldn’t have taken that.”
“No. Not and stayed sane. But really, I am your son; the same entity I was yesterday. I’ve just had what you might call an educational short cut.”
“I’ll say you have!” His father laughed in real amusement. He discovered that his cigar had gone out, and re-lit it. “Here; if you can remember the next thirty years, suppose you tell me when the War’s going to end. This one, I mean.”
“The Japanese surrender will be announced at exactly 1901—7:01 P. M. present style—on August 14. A week from Tuesday. Better make sure we have plenty of grub in the house by then. Everything will be closed up tight till Thursday morning; even the restaurants. I remember, we had nothing to eat in the house but some scraps.”
“Well! It is handy, having a prophet in the family! I’ll see to it Mrs. Stauber gets plenty of groceries in . . . Tuesday a week? That’s pretty sudden, isn’t it?”
“The Japs are going to think so,” Allan replied. He went on to describe what was going to happen.
His father swore softly. “You know, I’ve heard talk about atomic energy, but I thought it was just Buck Rogers stuff. Was that the sort of bomb that got you?”
“That was a firecracker to the bomb that got me. That thing exploded a good ten miles away.”
Blake Hartley whistled softly. “And that’s going to happen in thirty years! You know, son, if I were you, I wouldn’t like to have to know about a thing like that.” He looked at Allan for a moment. “Please, if you know, don’t ever tell me when I’m going to die.”
Allan smiled. “I can’t. I had a letter from you just before I left for the front. You were seventy-eight, then, and you were still hunting, and fishing, and flying your own plane. But I’m not going to get killed in any Battle of Buffalo, this time, and if I can prevent it, and I think I can, there won’t be any World War III.”
“But—You say all time exists, perpetually coexistent and totally present,” his father said. “Then it’s right there in front of you, and you’re getting closer to it, every watch tick.”
Allan Hartley shook his head. “You know what I remembered, when Frank Gutchall came to borrow a gun?” he asked. “Well, the other time, I hadn’t been home: I’d been swimming at the Canoe Club, with Larry Morton. When I got home, about half an hour from now, I found the house full of cops. Gutchall talked the .38 officers’ model out of you, and gone home; he’d shot his wife four times through the body, finished her off with another one back of the ear, and then used his sixth shot to blast his brains out. The cops traced the gun; they took a very poor view of your lending it to him. You never got it back.”
“Trust that gang to keep a good gun,” the lawyer said.
“I didn’t want us to lose it, this time, and I didn’t want to see you lose face around City Hall. Gutchalls, of course, are expendable,” Allan said. “But my main reason for fixing Frank Gutchall up with a padded cell was that I wanted to know whether or not the future could be altered. I have it on experimental authority that it
can be. There must be additional dimensions of time; lines of alternate probabilities. Something like William Seabrook’s witch-doctor friend’s Fan-Shaped Destiny. When I brought memories of the future back to the present, I added certain factors to the causal chain. That set up an entirely new line of probabilities. On no notice at all, I stopped a murder and a suicide. With thirty years to work, I can stop a world war. I’ll have the means to do it, too.”
“The means?”
“Unlimited wealth and influence. Here.” Allan picked up a sheet and handed it to his father. “Used properly, we can make two or three million on that, alone. A list of all the Kentucky Derby, Preakness, and Belmont winners to 1970. That’ll furnish us primary capital. Then, remember, I was something of a chemist. I took it up, originally, to get background material for one of my detective stories; it fascinated me, and I made it a hobby, and then a source of income. I’m thirty years ahead of any chemist in the world, now. You remember I. G. Farbenindustrie? Ten years from now, we’ll make them look like pikers.”
His father looked at the yellow sheet. “Assault, at eight to one,” he said. “I can scrape up about five thousand for that—Yes; in ten years—Any other little operations you have in mind?” he asked.
“About 1950, we start building a political organization, here in Pennsylvania. In 1960, I think we can elect you President. The world situation will be crucial, by that time, and we had a good-natured nonentity in the White House then, who let things go till war became inevitable. I think President Hartley can be trusted to take a strong line of policy. In the meantime, you can read Machiavelli.”
“That’s my little boy, talking!”
Blake Hartley said softly. “All right, son; I’ll do just what you tell me, and when you grow up, I’ll be president . . . Let’s go get supper, now.”
TIME BUM
C.M. Kornbluth
Harry Twenty-Third Street suddenly burst into laughter. His friend and sometimes roper Farmer Brown looked inquisitive.
“I just thought of a new con,” Harry Twenty-Third Street said, still chuckling.
Farmer Brown shook his head positively. “There’s no such thing, my man,” he said. “There are only new switches on old cons. What have you got—a store con? Shall you be needing a roper?” He tried not to look eager as a matter of principle, but everybody knew the Fanner needed a connection badly. His girl had two-timed him on a badger game, running off with the chump and marrying him after an expensive, month-long buildup.
Harry said, “Sorry, old boy. No details. It’s too good to split up. I shall rip and tear the suckers with this con for many a year, I trust, before the details become available to the trade. Nobody, but nobody, is going to call copper after I take him. It’s beautiful and it’s mine. I will see you around, my friend.”
Harry got up from the booth and left, nodding cheerfully to a safeblower here, a fixer there, on his way to the locked door of the hangout. Naturally he didn’t nod to such small fry as pickpockets and dope peddlers. Harry had his pride.
The puzzled Farmer sipped his lemon squash and concluded that Harry had been kidding him. He noticed that Harry had left behind him in the booth a copy of a magazine with a space ship and a pretty girl in green bra and pants on the cover.
“A furnished . . . bungalow?” the man said hesitantly, as though he knew what he wanted but wasn’t quite sure of the word.
“Certainly, Mr. Clurg,” Walter Lacblan said. “I’m sure we can suit you. Wife and family?”
“No,” said Clurg. “They are . . . far away.” He seemed to get some secret amusement from the thought And then, to Walter’s horror, he sat down calmly in empty air beside the desk and, of course, crashed to the floor looking ludicrous and astonished.
Walter gaped and helped him up, sputtering apologies and wondering privately what was wrong with the man. There wasn’t a chair there. There was a chair on the other side of the desk and a chair against the wall. But there just wasn’t a chair where Clurg had sat down.
Clurg apparently was unhurt; he protested against Walter’s apologies, saying: “I should have known, Master Lachlan. It’s quite all right; it was all my fault What about the bang—the bungalow?”
Business sense triumphed over Walter’s bewilderment. He pulled out his listings and they conferred on the merits of several furnished bungalows. When Walter mentioned that the Curran place was especially nice, in an especially nice neighborhood—he lived up the street himself—Clurg was impressed. “I’ll take that one,” he said. “What is the . . . feoff?” Walter had learned a certain amount of law for his real-estate license examination; he recognized the word. “The rent is seventy-five dollars,” he said. “You speak English very well, Mr. Clurg.” He hadn’t been certain that the man was a foreigner until the dictionary word came out “You have hardly any accent.”
“Thank you,” Clurg said, pleased. “I worked hard at it Let me see—seventy-five is six twelves and three.” He opened one of his shiny-new leather suitcases and calmly laid six heavy little paper rolls on Walter’s desk. He broke open a seventh and laid down three mint-new silver dollars. “There I am,” he said. “I mean, there you are.”
Walter didn’t know what to say. It had never happened before. People paid by check or in bills. They just didn’t pay in silver dollars. But it was money—why shouldn’t Mr. Clurg pay in silver dollars if he wanted to? He shook himself, scooped the rolls into his top desk drawer and said: “111 drive you out there if you like. It’s nearly quitting time anyway.”
Walter told his wife Betty over the dinner table: “We ought to have him in some evening. I can’t imagine where on Earth he comes from. I had to show him how to turn on the kitchen range. When it went on he said, ‘Oh, yes—electricity!’ and laughed his head off. And he kept ducking the question when I tried to ask him in a nice way. Maybe he’s some kind of a political refugee.”
“Maybe . . .” Betty began dreamily, and then shut her mouth. She didn’t want Walter laughing at her again. As it was, he made her buy her science-fiction magazines downtown instead of at neighborhood newsstands. He thought it wasn’t becoming for his wife to read them. He’s so eager for success, she thought sentimentally.
That night while Walter watched a television variety show, she read a story in one of her magazines. (Its cover, depicting a space ship and a girl in green bra and shorts, had been prudently torn off and thrown away.) It was about a man from the future who had gone back in time, bringing with him all sorts of marvelous inventions. In the end the Time Police punished him for unauthorized time traveling. They had come back and got him, brought him back to his own time. She smiled. It would be nice if Mr. Clurg, instead of being a slightly eccentric foreigner, were a man from the future with all sorts of interesting stories to tell and a satchelful of gadgets that could be sold for millions and millions of dollars.
After a week they did have Clurg over for dinner. It started badly. Once more he managed to sit down in empty air and crash to the floor. While they were brushing him off he said fretfully: “I can’t get used to not—” and then said no more.
He was a picky eater. Betty had done one of her mother’s specialties, veal cutlet with tomato sauce, topped by a poached egg. He ate the egg and sauce, made a clumsy attempt to cut up the meat, and abandoned it. She served a plate of cheese, half a dozen kinds, for dessert, and Clurg tasted them uncertainly, breaking off a crumb from each, while Betty wondered where that constituted good manners.
His face lit up when he tried a ripe cheddar. He popped the whole wedge into his mouth and said to Betty: “I will have that, please.”
“Seconds?” asked Walter. “Sure. Don’t bother, Betty. I’ll get it.” He brought back a quarter-pound wedge of the cheddar.
Walter and Betty watched silently as Clurg calmly ate every crumb of it He sighed. “Very good. Quite like—” The word, Walter and Betty later agreed, was see-mon-joe. They were able to agree quite early in the evening, because Clurg got up after eating the cheese, sa
id warmly, Thank you so much!” and walked out of the house.
Betty said, “What—on—Earth!”
Walter said uneasily, “I’m sorry, doll. I didn’t think he’d be quite that peculiar—”
“—But after all!”
“—Of course he’s a foreigner. What was that word?”
He jotted it down.
While they were doing the dishes Betty said, “I think he was drunk. Falling-down drunk.”
“No,” Walter said. “It’s exactly the same thing he did in my office. As though he expected a chair to come to him instead of him going to a chair.” He laughed and said uncertainly, “Or maybe he’s royalty. I read once about Queen Victoria never looking around before she sat down, she was so sure there’d be a chair there.”
“Well, there isn’t any more royalty, not to speak of,” she said angrily, hanging up the dish towel. “What’s on TV tonight?”
“Uncle Miltie. But . . . uh . . . I think I’ll read. Uh . . . where do you keep those magazines of yours, doll?
Believe I’ll give them a try.”
She gave him a look that he wouldn’t meet, and she went to get him some of her magazines. She also got a slim green book which she hadn’t looked at for years. While Walter flipped uneasily through the magazines she studied the book. After about ten minutes she said: “Walter. Seemonjoe. I I think I know what language it is.”
He was instantly alert. “Yeah? What?”
“It should be spelled c-i-m-a-n-g-o, with little jiggers over the C and G. It means ‘Universal food’ in Esperanto.”
“Where’s Esperanto?” he demanded.
“Esperanto isn’t anywhere. It’s an artificial language. I played around with it a little once. It was supposed to end war and all sorts of things. Some people called it the language of the future.” Her voice was tremulous.
Walter said, “I’m going to get to the bottom of this.”
He saw Clurg go into the neighborhood movie for the matinee. That gave him about three hours.