Cora fidgeted.
It’s not impossible, he thought, half closing his eyes, trying to see it and build it. Consider an attic. Its very atmosphere is Time. It deals in other years, the cocoons and chrysalises of another age. All the bureau drawers are little coffins where a thousand yesterdays lie in state. Oh, the attic’s a dark, friendly place, full of Time, and if you stand in the very center of it, straight and tall, squinting your eyes, and thinking and thinking, and smelling the Past, and putting out your hands to feel of Long Ago, why, it...
He stopped, realizing he had spoken some of this aloud. Cora was eating rapidly.
“Well, wouldn’t it be interesting,” he asked the part in her hair, “if Time Travel could occur? And what more logical, proper place for it to happen than in an attic like ours, eh?”
“It’s not always summer back in the old days,” she said. “It’s just your crazy memory. You remember all the good things and forget the bad. It wasn’t always summer.”
“Figuratively speaking, Cora, it was.”
“Wasn’t.”
“What I mean is this,” he said, whispering excitedly, bending forward to see the image he was tracing on the blank dining room wall. “If you rode your unicycle carefully between the years, balancing, hands out, careful, careful, if you rode from year to year, spent a week in 1909, a day in 1900, a month or a fortnight somewhere else, 1905, 1898, you could stay with summer the rest of your life.”
“Unicycle?”
“You know, one of those tall chromium one-wheeled bikes, single-seaters the performers ride in vaudeville shows, juggling. Balance, true balance, it takes, not to fall off, to keep the bright objects flying in the air, beautiful, up and up, a light, a flash, a sparkle, a bomb of brilliant colors, red, yellow, blue, green, white, gold; all the Junes and Julys and Augusts that ever were, in the air, about you, at once, hardly touching your hands, flying, suspended, and you, smiling, among them. Balance, Cora, balance.”
“Blah,” she said, “blah, blah.” And added, “Blah!”
He climbed the long cold stairs to the attic, shivering.
There were nights in winter when he woke with porcelain in his bones, with cool chimes blowing in his ears, with frost piercing his nerves in a raw illumination like white cold fireworks exploding and showering down in flaming snows upon a silent land deep in his subconscious. He was cold, cold, cold, and it would take a score of endless summers, with their green torches and bronze suns to thaw him free of his wintry sheath. He was a great tasteless chunk of brittle ice, a snowman put to bed each night, full of confetti dreams, tumbles of crystal and flurry. And there lay winter outside forever, a great leaden winepress smashing down its colorless lid of sky, squashing them all like so many grapes, mashing color and sense and being from everyone, save the children who fled on skis and toboggans down mirrored hills which reflected the crushing iron shield that hung lower above town each day and every eternal night.
Mr. Finch lifted the attic trapdoor. But here, here. A dust of summer sprang up about him. The attic dust simmered with heat left over from other seasons. Quietly, he shut the trapdoor down.
He began to smile.
* * * *
The attic was quiet as a thundercloud before a storm. On occasion, Cora Finch heard her husband murmuring, murmuring, high up there.
At five in the afternoon, singingMy Isle of Golden Dreams, Mr. Finch flipped a crisp new straw hat in the kitchen door. “Boo!”
“Did you sleep all afternoon?” snapped his wife. “I called up at you four times and no answer.”
“Sleep?” He considered this and laughed, then put his hand quickly over his mouth. “Well, I guess I did.”
Suddenly she saw him. “My God!” she cried, “where’d you get that coat?”
He wore a red candy-stripe coat, a high white, choking collar and ice-cream pants. You could smell the straw hat like a handful of fresh hay fanned in the air.
“Found ‘em in an old trunk.”
She sniffed. “Don’t smell of mothballs. Look brand-new.”
“Oh, no!” he said hastily. He looked stiff and uncomfortable as she eyed his costume.
“This isn’t a summer stock company,” she said.
“Can’t a fellow have a little fun?”
“That’s all you’ve ever had,” she slammed the oven door. “While I’ve stayed home and knitted, Lord knows, you’ve been down at the store helping ladies’ elbows in and out doors.”
He refused to be bothered. “Cora.” He looked deep into the crackling straw hat. “Wouldn’t it be nice to take a Sunday walk the way we used to do, with your silk parasol and your long dress whishing along, and sit on those wire-legged chairs at the soda parlor and smell the drug store the way they used to smell? Why don’t drug stores smell that way any more? And order two sarsaparillas for us, Cora, and then ride out in our 1910 Ford to Hannahan’s Pier for a box-supper and listen to the brass band. How about it?”
“Supper’s ready. Take that dreadful uniform off.”
“If you could make a wish and take a ride on those oak-laned country roads like they had before cars started rushing, would you do it?” he insisted, watching her.
“Those old roads were dirty. We came home looking like Africans. Anyway,” she picked up a sugar jar and shook it, “this morning I had forty dollars here. Now it’s gone! Don’t tell me you ordered those clothes from a costume house. They’re brand-new—they didn’t come from any trunk!”
“I—” he said.
She raved for half an hour, but he could not bring himself to say anything. The November wind shook the house and, as she talked, the snows of winter began to fall again in the cold steel sky.
“Answer me!” she cried. “Are you crazy, spending our money that way, on clothes you can’t wear?”
“The attic—” he started to say.
She walked off and sat in the living room.
The snow was falling fast now and it was a cold dark November evening. She heard him climb up the stepladder, slowly, into the attic, into that dusty place of other years, into that black place of costumes and props and Time, into a world separate from this world below.
He closed the trapdoor down. The flashlight, snapped on, was company enough. Yes, here was all of Time compressed in a Japanese paper flower. At the touch of memory, everything would unfold into the clear water of the mind, in beautiful blooms, in spring breezes, larger than life. Each of the bureau drawers, slid forth, might contain aunts and cousins and grandmamas, ermined in dust. Yes, Time was here. You could feel it breathing, an atmospheric instead of a mechanical clock.
Now the house below was as remote as another day in the past He half-shut his eyes and looked and looked on every side of the waiting attic.
Here, in prismed chandelier, were rainbows and mornings and noons as bright as new rivers flowing endlessly back through time. His flashlight caught and flickered them alive, the rainbows leapt up to curve the shadows back with colors, with colors like plums and strawberries and concord grapes, with colors like cut lemons and the sky where the clouds drew off after storming and the blue was there. And the dust of the attic was incense, burning, and all of time burning, and all you needed do was peer into the flames. It was indeed a great machine of Time, this attic, he knew, he felt, he was sure, and if you touched prisms here, doorknobs there, plucked tassels, chimed crystals, swirled dust, punched trunk-hasps, and gusted the vox-humana of the old hearth-bellows until it puffed the soot of a thousand ancient fires into your eyes, if, indeed, you played this instrument, this warm machine of parts, if you fondled all of its bits and pieces, its levers and changers and movers, then, then, then!
He thrust out his hands to orchestrate, to conduct, to flourish. There was music in his head, in his mouth shut tight, and he played the great machine, the thunderously silent organ, bass, tenor, soprano, low, high, and at last, at last, a chord that shuddered him so that he had to shut his eyes!
* * * *
About nine o�
�clock that night she heard him calling, “Cora!” She went upstairs. His head peered down at her from above, smiling at her. He waved his hat. “Goodbye, Cora.”
“What do you mean?” she cried.
“I’ve thought it over for three days, and I’m saying goodbye.”
“Come down out of there, you fool!”
“I drew five hundred dollars from the bank yesterday. I’ve been thinking about this. And then when it happened, well . . . Cora . . .” He shoved his eager hand down. “For the last time, will you come along with me?”
“In the attic? Hand down that stepladder, William Finch. I’ll climb up there and run you out of that filthy place!”
“I’m going to Hannahan’s Pier for a bowl of Clam Chowder,” he said. “And I’m requesting the brass band to play Moonlight Bay. Oh, come on, Cora ...” He motioned his extended hand.
She simply stared at his gentle, questioning face.
“Goodbye,” he said.
He waved gently, gently. Then his face was gone, the straw hat was gone.
“William!” she screamed.
The attic was dark and silent.
Shrieking, she ran and got a chair and used it to groan her way up into the musty darkness. She flourished a flashlight. “William! William!”
The dark spaces were empty. A winter wind shook the house.
Then she saw the far west attic window, ajar.
She fumbled over to it. She hesitated, held her breath. Then, slowly, she opened it. The ladder was placed outside the window, leading down onto a porch roof.
She pulled back from the window.
Outside the opened frame the apple trees were in bloom, it was twilight of a summer day in July. Faintly, she heard explosions, firecrackers going off. She heard laughter and distant voices. Rockets burst in the warm air, softly, red, white, and blue, fading.
She slammed the window and stood reeling. “William!”
Wintry November light glowed up through the trap in the attic floor behind her. Bent to it, she saw the snow whispering against the cold clear panes down in that November world where she would spend the next thirty years.
She did not go near the window again. She sat alone in the black attic, smelling the one smell that did not seem to fade. It lingered like a gentle smile, like a sigh of satisfaction, on the air. She took a deep, long breath.
The old, the familiar, the unforgettable scent of drug store sarsaparilla...
<
* * * *
ISAAC ASIMOV
Isaac Asimov has been leading a double life for at least thirty years—as a favorite writer of fiction (such novels asPebble in the Sky and I, Robot, plus a dozen more) and as a respected professor of biochemistry at Boston University and co-author of such frivolous 800-page volumes as Biochemistry and Human Metabolism. With a typewriter constantly at white heat he emits such sparks as ...
“Nobody Here But...”
You see, it wasn’t our fault. We had no idea anything was wrong until I called Cliff Anderson and spoke to him when he wasn’t there. What’s more, I wouldn’t have known he wasn’t there, if it wasn’t that he walked in while I was talking to him.
No, no, no, no—
I never seem to be able to tell this straight. I get too excited. —Look, I might as well begin at the beginning. I’m Bill Billings; my friend is Cliff Anderson. I’m an electrical engineer, he’s a mathematician, and we’re on the faculty of Midwestern Institute of Technology. Now you know who we are.
Ever since we got out of uniform, Cliff and I have been working on calculating machines. You know what they are. Norbert Wiener popularized them in his book, Cybernetics. If you’ve seen pictures of them, you know that they’re great big things. They take up a whole wall and they’re very complicated; also expensive.
But Cliff and I had ideas. You see, what makes a thinking machine so big and expensive is that it has to be full of relays and vacuum tubes just so that microscopic electric currents can be controlled and made to flicker on and off, here and there. Now the really important things are those little electric currents, so—
I once said to Cliff, “Why can’t we control the currents without all the salad dressing?”
Cliff said, “Why not, indeed.” and started working on the mathematics.
How we got where we did in two years is no matter. It’s what we got after we finished that made the trouble. It turned out that we ended with something about this high and maybe so wide and just about this deep-
No, no. I forget that you can’t see me. I’ll give you the figures. It was about three feet high, six feet long, and two feet deep. Got that? It took two men to carry it but it could be carried and that was the point. And still, mind you, it could do anything the wall-size calculators could. Not as fast, maybe, but we were still working.
We had big ideas about that thing, the very biggest. We could put it on ships or airplanes. After a while, if we could make it small enough, an automobile could carry one.
We were especially interested in the automobile angle. Suppose you had a little thinking machine on the dashboard, hooked to the engine and battery and equipped with photoelectric eyes. It could choose an ideal course, avoid cars, stop at red lights, pick the optimum speed for the terrain. Everybody could sit in the back seat and automobile accidents would vanish.
All of it was fun. There was so much excitement to it, so many thrills every time we worked out another consolidation, that I could still cry when I think of the time I picked up the telephone to call our lab and tumbled everything into the discard.
I was at Mary Ann’s house that evening— Or have I told you about Mary Ann yet? No. I guess I haven’t.
Mary Ann was the girl who would have been my fiancée but for two ifs. One, if she were willing, and two, if I had the nerve to ask her. She has red hair and crams something like two tons of energy into about 110 pounds of body which fills out very nicely from the ground to five and a half feet up. I was dying to ask her, you understand, but each time I’d see her coming into sight, setting a match to my heart with every movement, I’d just break down.
It’s not that I’m not good-looking. People tell me I’m adequate. I’ve got all my hair; I’m nearly six feet tall; I can even dance. It’s just that I’ve nothing to offer. I don’t have to tell you what college teachers make. With inflation and taxes, it amounts to just about nothing. Of course, if we got the basic patents rolled up on our little thinking machine, things would be different. But I couldn’t ask her to wait for that, either. Maybe, after it was all set—
Anyway, I just stood there, wishing, that evening, as she came into the living room. My arm was groping blindly for the phone.
Mary Ann said, “I’m all ready, Bill. Let’s go.”
I said, “Just a minute. I want to ring up Cliff.”
She frowned a little, “Can’t it wait?”
“I was supposed to call him two hours ago,” I explained.
It only took two minutes. I rang the lab. Cliff was putting in an evening of work and so he answered. I asked something, then he said something, I asked some more and he explained. The details don’t matter, but as I said, he’s the mathematician of the combination. When I build the circuits and put things together in what look like impossible ways, he’s the guy who shuffles the symbols and tells me whether they’re really impossible. Then, just as I finished and hung up, there was a ring at the door.
For a minute, I thought Mary Ann had another caller and got sort of stiff-backed as I watched her go to the door. I was scribbling down some of what Cliff had just told me while I watched. But then she opened the door and it was only Cliff Anderson after all.
He said, “I thought I’d find you here— Hello, Mary Ann. Say, weren’t you going to ring me at six. You’re as reliable as a cardboard chair.” Cliff is short and plump and always willing to start a fight, but I know him and pay no attention.
I said, “Things turned up and it slipped my mind. But I just called, so what’s
the difference?”
“Called? Me? When?”
I started to point to the telephone and gagged. Right then, the bottom fell out of things. Exactly five seconds before the doorbell had sounded I had been on the phone talking to Cliff in the lab, and the lab was six miles away from Mary Ann’s house.
I said, “I—just spoke to you.”
I wasn’t getting across. Cliff just said, “To me?” again.
Star Science Fiction 1 - [Anthology] Page 17