by Anthology
Take it easy on the kid, SilverFox316; everybody kills Hitler on their first trip. I did. It always gets fixed within a few minutes, what’s the harm?
At 18:33:10, SilverFox316 wrote:
Easy for you to say, BigChill, since to my recollection you’ve never volunteered to go back and fix it. You think I’ve got nothing better to do?
11/16/2104
At 10:15:44, JudgeDoom wrote:
Good news! I just left a French battlefield in October 1916, where I shot dead a young Bavarian Army messenger named Adolf Hitler! Not bad for my first time, no? Sic semper tyrannis!
At 10:22:53, SilverFox316 wrote:
Back from 1916 France I come, having at the last possible second prevented Hitler’s early demise at the hands of JudgeDoom and, incredibly, restrained myself from shooting JudgeDoom and sparing us all years of correcting his misguided antics. READ BULLETIN 1147, PEOPLE!
At 15:41:18, BarracksRoomLawyer wrote:
Point of order: issues related to Hitler’s service in the Bavarian Army ought to go in the World War I forum.
11/21/2104
At 02:21:30, SneakyPete wrote:
Vienna, 1907: after numerous attempts, have infiltrated the Academy of Fine Arts and facilitated Adolf Hitler’s admission to that institution. Goodbye, Hitler the dictator; hello, Hitler the modestly successful landscape artist! Brought back a few of his paintings as well, any buyers?
At 02:29:17, SilverFox316 wrote:
All right; that’s it. Having just returned from 1907 Vienna where I secured the expulsion of Hitler from the Academy by means of an elaborate prank involving the Prefect, a goat, and a substantial quantity of olive oil, I now turn my attention to our newer brethren, who, despite rules to the contrary, seem to have no intention of reading Bulletin 1147 (nor its Addendum, Alternate Means of Subverting the Hitlerian Destiny, and here I’m looking at you, SneakyPete). Permit me to sum it up and save you the trouble: no Hitler means no Third Reich, no World War II, no rocketry programs, no electronics, no computers, no time travel. Get the picture?
At 02:29:49, SilverFox316 wrote:
PS to SneakyPete: your Hitler paintings aren’t worth anything, schmuck, since you probably brought them directly here from 1907, which means the paint’s still fresh. Freaking n00b.
At 07:55:03, BarracksRoomLawyer wrote:
Amen, SilverFox316. Although, point of order, issues relating to early 1900s Vienna should really go in that forum, not here. This has been a recurring problem on this forum.
11/26/2104
At 18:26:18, Jason440953 wrote:
SilverFox316, you seem to know a lot about the rules; what are your thoughts on traveling to, say, Braunau, Austria, in 1875 and killing Alois Hitler before he has a chance to father Adolf? Mind you, I’m asking out of curiosity alone, since I already went and did it.
At 18:42:55, SilverFox316 wrote:
Jason440953, see Bylaw 7, which states that all IATT rulings regarding historical persons apply to ancestors as well. I post this for the benefit of others, as I already made this clear to young Jason in person as I was dragging him back from 1875 by his hair. Got that? No ancestors. (Though if anyone were to go back to, say, Moline, Illinois, in, say, 2080 or so, and intercede to prevent Jason440953’s conception, I could be persuaded to look the other way.)
At 21:19:17, BarracksRoomLawyer wrote:
Point of order: discussions of nineteenth-century Austria and twenty-first-century Illinois should be confined to their respective forums.
12/01/2104
At 15:56:41, AsianAvenger wrote:
FreedomFighter69, JudgeDoom, SneakyPete, Jason440953, you’re nothing but a pack of racists. Let the light of righteousness shine upon your squalid little viper’s nest!
At 16:40:17, BigTom44 wrote:
Well, here we frickin’ go.
At 16:58:42, FreedomFighter69 wrote:
Racist? For killing Hitler? WTF?
At 17:12:52, SaucyAussie wrote:
AsianAvenger, you’re not rehashing that whole Nagasaki issue again, are you? We just got everyone calmed down from last time.
At 17:22:37, LadyJustice wrote:
I’m with SaucyAussie. AsianAvenger, you’re making even less sense than usual. What gives?
At 18:56:09, AsianAvenger wrote:
What gives is everyone’s repeated insistence on a course of action which, even if successful, would only save a few million Europeans. It would be no more trouble to travel to Fuyuanshui, China, in 1814 and kill Hong Xiuquan, thus preventing the Taiping Rebellion of the mid-nineteenth century and saving fifty million lives in the process. But, hey, what are fifty million yellow devils more or less, right, guys? We’ve got Poles and Frenchmen to worry about.
At 19:01:38, LadyJustice wrote:
Well, what’s stopping you from killing him, AsianAvenger?
At 19:11:43, AsianAvenger wrote:
Only to have SilverFox316 undo my work? What’s the point?
At 19:59:23, SilverFox316 wrote:
Actually, it seems like a pretty good idea to me, AsianAvenger. No complications that I can see.
At 20:07:25, Big Chill wrote:
Go for it, man.
At 20:11:31, AsianAvenger wrote:
Very well. I shall return in mere moments, the savior of millions!
At 20:14:17, LadyJustice wrote:
Just checked the timeline; congrats on your success, AsianAvenger!
12/02/2104
At 10:52:53, LadyJustice wrote:
AsianAvenger?
At 11:41:40, SilverFox316 wrote:
AsianAvenger, we need your report, buddy.
At 17:15:32, SilverFox316 wrote:
Okay, apparently AsianAvenger was descended from Hong Xiuquan. Any volunteers to go back and stop him from negating his own existence?
12/10/2104
At 09:14:44, SilverFox316 wrote:
Anyone?
At 09:47:13, BarracksRoomLawyer wrote:
Point of order: this discussion belongs in the Qing Dynasty forum. We’re adults; can we keep sight of what’s important around here?
WIRELESS
Rudyard Kipling
“It’s a funny thing, this Marconi business, isn’t it?” said Mr. Shaynor, coughing heavily. “Nothing seems to make any difference, by what they tell me—storms, hills, or anything; but if that’s true we shall know before morning.”
“Of course it’s true,” I answered, stepping behind the counter. “Where’s old Mr. Cashell?”
“He’s had to go to bed on account of his influenza. He said you’d very likely drop in.”
“Where’s his nephew?”
“Inside, getting the things ready. He told me that the last time they experimented they put the pole on the roof of one of the big hotels here, and the batteries electrified all the water-supply, and—” he giggled—“the ladies got shocks when they took their baths.”
“I never heard of that.”
“The hotel wouldn’t exactly advertise it, would it? Just now, by what Mr. Cashell tells me, they’re trying to signal from here to Poole, and they’re using stronger batteries than ever. But, you see, he being the guvnor’s nephew and all that, (and it will be in the papers too), it doesn’t matter how they electrify things in this house. Are you going to watch?”
“Very much. I’ve never seen this game. Aren’t you going to bed?”
“We don’t close till ten on Saturdays. There’s a good deal of influenza in town, too, and there’ll be a dozen prescriptions coming in before morning. I generally sleep in the chair here. It’s warmer than jumping out of bed every time. Bitter cold, isn’t it?”
“Freezing hard. I’m sorry your cough’s worse.”
“Thank you. I don’t mind cold so much. It’s this wind that fair cuts me to pieces.” He coughed again hard and hackingly, as an old lady came in for ammoniated quinine. “We’ve just run out of it in bottles, madam,” said Mr. Shaynor, returning to the professional tone, “but if you will wait
two minutes, I’ll make it up for you, madam.”
I had used the shop for some time, and my acquaintance with the proprietor had ripened into friendship. It was Mr. Cashell who revealed to me the purpose and power of Apothecaries’ Hall what time a fellow a chemist had made an error in a prescription of mine, had lied to cover his sloth, and when error and lie were brought home to him had written vain letters.
“A disgrace to our profession,” said the thin, mild-eyed man, hotly, after studying the evidence. “You couldn’t do a better service to the profession than report him to Apothecaries’ Hall.”
I did so, not knowing what djinns I should evoke; and the result was such an apology as one might make who had spent a night on the rack. I conceived great respect for Apothecaries’ Hall, and esteem for Mr. Cashell, a zealous craftsman who magnified his calling. Until Mr. Shaynor came down from the North his assistants had by no means agreed with Mr. Cashell. “They forget,” said he, “that, first and foremost, the compounder is a medicineman. On him depends the physician’s reputation. He holds it literally in the hollow of his hand, sir.”
Mr. Shaynor’s manners had not, perhaps, the polish of the grocery and Italian warehouse next door, but he knew and loved his dispensary work in every detail. For relaxation he seemed to go no farther afield than the romance of drugs—their discovery, preparation, packing, and export—but it led him to the ends of the earth, and on this subject, and the Pharmaceutical Formulary, and Nicholas Culpepper, most confident of physicians, we met.
Little by little I grew to know something of his beginnings and his hopes—of his mother, who had been a schoolteacher in one of the northern counties, and of his red-headed father, a small job-master at Kirby Moors, who died when he was a child; of the examinations he had passed and of their exceeding and increasing difficulty; of his dreams of a shop in London; of his hate for the price-cutting Co-operative stores; and, most interesting, of his mental attitude towards customers.
“There’s a way you get into,” he told me, “of serving them carefully, and I hope, politely, without stopping your own thinking. I’ve been reading Christy’s New Commercial Plants all this autumn, and that needs keeping your mind on it, I can tell you. So long as it isn’t a prescription, of course, I can carry as much as half a page of Christy in my head, and at the same time I could sell out all that window twice over, and not a penny wrong at the end. As to my prescriptions, I think I could make up the general run of ’em in my sleep, almost.”
For reasons of my own, I was deeply interested in Marconi experiments at their outset in England; and it was of a piece with Mr. Cashell’s unvarying thoughtfulness that, when his nephew the electrician appropriated the house for a long-range installation, he should, as I have said, invite me to see the result.
The old lady went away with her medicine, and Mr. Shaynor and I stamped on the tiled floor behind the counter to keep ourselves warm. The shop, by the light of the many electrics, looked like a Paris-diamond mine, for Mr. Cashell believed in all the ritual of his craft. Three superb glass jars—red, green, and blue—of the sort that led Rosamund to parting with her shoes—blazed in the broad plate-glass windows, and there was a confused smell of orris, Kodak films, vulcanite, tooth-powder, sachets, and almond-cream in the air. Mr. Shaynor fed the dispensary stove, and we sucked cayenne-pepper jujubes and menthol lozenges. The brutal east wind had cleared the streets, and the few passers-by were muffled to their puckered eyes. In the Italian warehouse next door some gay feathered birds and game, hung upon hooks, sagged to the wind across the left edge of our window-frame.
“They ought to take these poultry in—all knocked about like that,” said Mr. Shaynor. “Doesn’t it make you feel fair perishing? See that old hare. The wind’s nearly blowing the fur off him.”
I saw the belly-fur of the dead beast blown apart in ridges and streaks as the wind caught it, showing bluish skin underneath.
“Bitter cold,” said Mr. Shaynor, shuddering. “Fancy going out on a night like this! Oh, here’s young Mr. Cashell.”
The door of the inner office behind the dispensary opened, and an energetic, spade-bearded man stepped forth, rubbing his hands.
“I want a bit of tinfoil, Shaynor,” he said. “Good-evening. My uncle told me you might be coming.” This to me, as I began the first of a hundred questions.
“I’ve everything in order,” he replied. “We’re only waiting until Poole calls us up. Excuse me a minute. You can come in whenever you like—but I better be with the instruments. Give me that tinfoil. Thanks.”
While we were talking, a girl—evidently no customer—had come into the shop, and the face and bearing of Mr. Shaynor changed. She leaned confidently across the counter.
“But I can’t,” I heard him whisper uneasily—the flush on his cheek was dull red, and his eyes shone like a drugged moth’s. “I tell you I’m alone in the place.”
“No, you aren’t. Who’s that? Let him look after it for a half an hour. A brisk walk will do you good. Ah, come now, John.”
“But he isn’t—”
“I don’t care. I want you to; we’ll only go round by St. Agnes. If you don’t—”
He crossed to where I stood in the shadow of the dispensary counter, and began some sort of broken apology about a lady-friend.
“Yes,” she interrupted. “You take the shop for half an hour—to oblige me, won’t you?”
She had a singularly rich and promising voice that well matched her outline.
“All right,” I said. “I’ll do it—but you’d better wrap yourself up, Mr. Shaynor.”
“Oh, a brisk walk ought to help me. We’re only going round by the church.” I heard him cough grievously as they went out together.
I refilled the stove, and, after reckless expenditure of Mr. Cash-ell’s coal, drove some warmth into the shop. I explored many of the glass-knobbed drawers that lined the walls, tasted some disconcerting drugs, and, by the aid of a few cardamoms, ground ginger, chloric-ether, and dilute alcohol, manufactured a new and wildish drink, of which I bore a glassful to young Mr. Cashell, busy in the back office. He laughed shortly when I told him that Mr. Shaynor had stepped out—but a frail coil of wire held all his attention, and he had no word for me bewildered among the batteries and rods. The noise of the sea on the beach began to make itself heard as the traffic in the street ceased. Then briefly, but very lucidly, he gave me the names and uses of the mechanisms that crowded the tables and the floor.
“When do you expect to get the message from Poole?” I demanded, sipping my liquor out of a graduated glass.
“About midnight, if everything is in order. We’ve got our installation-pole fixed to the roof of the house. I shouldn’t advise you to turn on a tap or anything tonight. We’ve connected up with the plumbing, and all the water will be electrified.” He repeated to me the history of the agitated ladies at the hotel at the time of the first installation.
“But what is it?” I asked. “Electricity is out of my beat altogether.”
“Ah, if you knew that you’d know something nobody knows. It’s just It—what we call Electricity, but the magic—the manifestations—the Hertzian waves—are all revealed by this. The coherer, we call it.”
He picked up a glass tube not much thicker than a thermometer, in which, almost touching, were two tiny silver plugs, and between them an infinitesimal pinch of metallic dust. “That’s all,” he said, proudly, as though himself responsible for the wonder. “That is the thing that will reveal to us the Powers—whatever the Powers may be—at work—through space—a long distance away.”
Just then Mr. Shaynor returned alone and stood coughing his heart out on the mat.
“Serves you right for being such a fool,” said young Mr. Cash-ell, as annoyed as myself at the interruption. “Never mind—we’ve all the night before us to see wonders.”
Shaynor clutched the counter, his handkerchief to his lips. When he brought it away I saw two bright red stains.
“I—I’ve got a bit
of rasped throat from smoking cigarettes,” he panted. “I think I’ll try a cubeb.”
“Better take some of this. I’ve been compounding while you’ve been away.” I handed him the brew.
“ ’Twon’t make me drunk, will it? I’m almost a teetotaller. My word! That’s grateful and comforting.”
He set down the empty glass to cough afresh.
“Brr! But it was cold out there! I shouldn’t care to be lying in my grave a night like this. Don’t you ever have a sore throat from smoking?” He pocketed the handkerchief after a furtive peep.
“Oh, yes, sometimes,” I replied, wondering, while I spoke, into what agonies of terror I should fall if ever I saw those bright-red danger-signals under my nose. Young Mr. Cashell among the batteries coughed slightly to show that he was quite ready to continue his scientific explanations, but I was thinking still of the girl with the rich voice and significantly cut mouth, at whose command I had taken charge of the shop. It flashed across me that she distantly resembled the seductive shape on a gold-framed toilet-water advertisement whose charms were unholily heightened by the glare from the red bottle in the window. Turning to make sure, I saw Mr. Shaynor’s eyes bent in the same direction, and by instinct recognized that the flamboyant thing was to him a shrine. “What do you take for your—cough?” I asked.
“Well, I’m the wrong side of the counter to believe much in patent medicines. But there are asthma cigarettes, and there are pastilles. To tell you the truth, if you don’t object to the smell, which is very like incense, I believe, though I’m not a Roman Catholic, Blaudett’s Cathedral Pastilles relieve me as much as anything.”
“Let’s try.” I had never raided a chemist’s shop before, so I was thorough. We unearthed the pastilles—brown, gummy cones of benzoin—and set them alight under the toilet-water advertisement, where they fumed in thin blue spirals.