by Anthology
They had been born out of their time.
Peter’s passion was virtu. He collected relentlessly, it would not be too much to say savagely; he collected as some men hunt big game. His taste was catholic, and his acquisitions filled the huge rooms of the palace and half the vaults under them—paintings, statuary, enamels, porcelain, glass, crystal, metalwork. At fifty, he was a round little man with small, sardonic eyes and a careless patch of pinkish goatee.
Harold Castellare, Peter’s talented brother, was a scientist. An amateur-scientist. He belonged in the nineteenth century, as Peter was a throwback to a still earlier epoch. Modem science is largely a matter of teamwork and drudgery, both impossible concepts to a Castellare. But Harold’s intelligence was in its own way as penetrating and original as a Newton’s or a Franklin’s. He had done respectable work in physics and electronics, and had even, at his lawyer’s insistence, taken out a few patents. The income from these, when his own purchases of instruments and equipment did not consume it, he gave to his brother, who accepted it without gratitude or rancor.
Harold, at fifty-three, was sparse and shrunken, sallow and spotted, with a bloodless, melancholy countenance: on his upper lip grew a neat hedge of pink-and-salt mustache, the companion piece and antithesis of his brother’s goatee.
On a certain May morning, Harold had an accident.
Goodyear dropped rubber on a hot stove; Archimedes took a bath: Becquerel left a piece of uranium ore in a drawer with a photographic plate. Harold Castellare, working patiently with an apparatus which had so far consumed a great deal of current without producing anything more spectacular than some rather unusual corona effects, sneezed convulsively and dropped an ordinary bar magnet across two charged terminals.
Above the apparatus a huge, cloudy bubble sprang into being.
Harold, getting up from his instinctive crouch, blinked at it in profound astonishment. As he watched, the cloudiness abruptly disappeared and he was looking through the bubble at a section of tessellated flooring that seemed to be about three feet above the real floor. He could also see the comer of a carved wooden bench, and on the bench a small, oddly shaped stringed instrument.
Harold swore fervently to himself, made agitated notes, and then began to experiment. He tested the sphere cautiously with an electroscope, with a magnet, with a Geiger counter. Negative. He tore a tiny bit of paper from his notepad and dropped it toward the sphere. The paper disappeared; he couldn’t see where it went.
Speechless, Harold picked up a meter stick and thrust it delicately forward. There was no feeling of contact: the rule went into and through the bubble as if the latter did not exist. Then it touched the stringed instrument, with a solid click. Harold pushed. The instrument slid over the edge of the bench and struck the floor with a hollow thump and jangle.
Staring at it, Harold suddenly recognized its tantalizing familiar shape.
Recklessly he let go the meter stick, reached in and picked the fragile thing out of the bubble. It was solid and cool in his fingers. The varnish was clear, the color of the wood glowing through it. It looked as if it might have been made yesterday.
Peter owned one almost exactly like it, except for preservation—a viola d’amore of the seventeenth century.
Harold stooped to look through the bubble horizontally. Gold and rust tapestries hid the wall, fifty feet away, except for an ornate door in the center. The door began to open; Harold saw a flicker of umber.
Then the sphere went cloudy again. His hands were empty; the viola d’amore was gone. And the meter stick, which he had dropped inside the sphere, lay on the floor at his feet.
“Look at that,” said Harold simply.
Peter’s eyebrows went up slightly. “What is it, a new kind of television?”
“No, no. Look here.” The viola d’amore lay on the bench, precisely where it had been before. Harold reached into the sphere and drew it out.
Peter started. “Give me that.” He took it in his hands, rubbed the smoothly finished wood. He stared at his brother. “By God and all the saints,” he said. ‘Time travel.” Harold snorted impatiently. “My dear Peter, ‘time’ is a meaningless word taken by itself, just as ‘space’ is.”
“But, barring that, time travel.”
“If you like, yes.”
“You’ll be quite famous.”
“I expect so.”
Peter looked down at the instrument in his hands. “I’d like to keep this, if I may.”
“I’d be very happy to let you, but you can’t.”
As he spoke the bubble went cloudy; the viola d’amore was gone like smoke.
“There, you see?”
“What sort of devil’s trick is that?”
“It goes back . . . Later you’ll see. I had that thing out once before, and this happened. When the sphere became transparent again, the viol was where I had found it.”
“And your explanation for this?”
Harold hesitated. “None. Until I can work out the appropriate mathematics—”
“Which may take you some time. Meanwhile, in layman’s language—”
Harold’s face creased with the effort and interest of translation. “Very roughly, then—I should say it means that events are conserved. Two or three centuries ago—”
“Three. Notice the sound holes.”
“Three centuries ago, then, at this particular time of day, someone was in that room. If the viola was gone, he or she would have noticed the fact. That would constitute an alteration of events already fixed; therefore it doesn’t happen. For the same reason, I conjecture, we can’t see into the sphere, or—” he probed at it with a fountain pen—“I thought not—or reach into it to touch anything; that would also constitute an alteration. And anything we put into the sphere while it is transparent comes out again when it becomes opaque. To put it very crudely, we cannot alter the past.”
“But it seems to me that we did alter it. Just now, when you took the viol out, even if no one of that time saw it happen.”
“This,” said Harold, “is the difficulty of using language as a means of exact communication. If you had not forgotten all your calculus . . . However. It may be postulated (remembering of course that everything I say is a lie, because I say it in English) that an event which doesn’t influence other events is not an event. In other words—”
“That, since no one saw you take it, it doesn’t matter whether you took it or not. A rather dangerous precept, Harold; you would have been burned at the stake for that at one time.”
“Very likely. But it can be stated in another way, or indeed, in an infinity of ways which only seem to be different. If someone, let us say God, were to remove the moon as I am talking to you, using zero duration, and substitute an exact replica made of concrete and plaster of Paris, with the same mass, albedo and so on as the genuine moon, it would make no measurable difference in the universe as we perceive it—and therefore we cannot certainly say that it hasn’t happened. Nor, I may add, does it make any difference whether it has or not.”
“ ‘When there’s no one about on the quad,’ ” said Peter. “Yes. A basic and, as a natural consequence, a meaningless problem of philosophy. Except,” he added, “in this one particular manifestation.”
He stared at the cloudy sphere. “You’ll excuse me, won’t you, Peter? I’ve got to work on this.”
“When will you publish, do you suppose?”
“Immediately. That’s to say, in a week or two.”
“Don’t do it till you’ve talked it over with me, will you? I have a notion about it.”
Harold looked at him sharply. “Commercial?”
“In a way.”
“No,” said Harold. ‘This is not the sort of thing one patents or keeps secret, Peter.”
“Of course. I’ll see you at dinner, I hope?”
“I think so. If I forget, knock on the door, will you?”
“Yes. Until then.”
“Until then.”
At dinne
r, Peter asked only two questions.
“Have you found any possibility of changing the time your thing reaches—from the seventeenth century to the eighteenth, for example, or from Monday to Tuesday?”
“Yes, as a matter of fact. Amazing. It’s lucky that I had a rheostat already in the circuit; I wouldn’t dare turn the current off. Varying the amperage varies the time set. I’ve had it up to what I think was Wednesday of last week—at any rate, my smock was lying over the workbench where I left it, I remember, Wednesday afternoon. I pulled it out. A curious sensation, Peter—I was wearing the same smock at the time. And then the sphere went opaque and of course the smock vanished. That must have been myself, coming into the room.”
“And the future?”
“Yes. Another funny thing. I’ve had it forward to various times in the near future, and the machine itself is still there, but nothing’s been done to it—none of the things I’m thinking I might do. That might be because of the conservation of events, again, but I rather think not. Still farther forward there are cloudy areas, blanks; I can’t see anything that isn’t in existence now, apparently, but here, in the next few days, there’s nothing of that.
“It’s as if I were going away. Where do you suppose I’m going?”
Harold’s abrupt departure took place between midnight and morning. He packed his own grip, it would seem, left unattended, and was seen no more. It was extraordinary, of course, that he should have left at all, but the details were in no way odd. Harold had always detested what he called “the tyranny of the valet.” He was, as everyone knew, a most independent man.
On the following day Peter made some trifling experiments with the time-sphere. From the sixteenth century he picked up a scent bottle of Venetian glass; from the eighteenth, a crucifix of carved rosewood; from the nineteenth, when the palace had been the residence of an Austrian count and his Italian mistress, a hand-illuminated copy of De Sade’s La Nouvelle Justine, very curiously bound in human skin.
They all vanished, naturally, within minutes or hours—all but the scent bottle. This gave Peter matter for reflection. There had been half a dozen flickers of cloudiness in the sphere just futureward of the bottle; it ought to have vanished, but it hadn’t. But then, he had found it on the floor near a wall with quite a large rat hole in it.
When objects disappeared unaccountably, he asked himself, was it because they had rolled into rat holes, or because some time fisher had picked them up when they were in a position to do so?
He did not make any attempt to explore the future. That afternoon he telephoned his lawyers in Naples and gave them instructions for a new will. His estate, including his half of the jointly owned Ischia property, was to go to the Italian government on two conditions: (1) that Harold Castellare should make a similar bequest of the remaining half of the property and (2) that the Italian government should turn the palace into a national museum to house Peter’s collection, using the income from his estate for its administration and for further acquisitions. His surviving relatives—two cousins in Scotland—he cut off with a shilling each.
He did nothing more until after the document had been brought out to him, signed and witnessed. Only then did he venture to look into his own future.
Events were conserved, Harold had said—meaning, Peter very well understood, events of the present and future as well as of the past. But was there only one pattern in which the future could be fixed? Could a result exist before its cause had occurred?
The Castellare motto was Audentes fortuna juvat—into which Peter, at the age of fourteen, had interpolated the word “prudentesque”: “Fortune favors the bold—and the prudent.”
Tomorrow: no change; the room he was looking at was so exactly like this one that the time sphere seemed to vanish. The next day: a cloudy blur. And the next, and the next . . .
Opacity, straight through to what Peter judged, by the distance he had moved the rheostat handle, to be ten years ahead. Then, suddenly, the room was a long marble hall filled with display cases.
Peter smiled wryly. If you were Harold, obviously you could not look ahead and see Peter working in your laboratory. And if you were Peter, equally obviously, you could not look ahead and know whether the room you saw was an improvement you yourself were going to make, or part of a museum established after your death, eight or nine years from now, or . . .
No. Eight years was little enough, but he could not even be sure of that. It would, after all, be seven years before Harold could be declared legally dead . . .
Peter turned the vernier knob slowly forward. A flicker, another, a long series. Forward faster. Now the flickering melted into a grayness; objects winked out of existence and were replaced by others in the showcases; the marble darkened and lightened again; darkened and lightened, darkened and remained dark. He was, Peter judged, looking at the hall as it would be some five hundred years in the future. There was a thick film of dust on every exposed surface; rubbish and the carcass of some small animal had been swept carelessly into a comer.
The sphere clouded.
When it cleared, there was an intricate trail of footprints in the dust, and two of the showcases were empty.
The footprints were splayed, trifurcate, and thirty inches long.
After a moment’s deliberation Peter walked around the workbench and leaned down to look through the sphere from the opposite direction. Framed in the nearest of the four tall windows was a scene of picture-postcard banality: the sun-silvered bay and the foreshortened arc of the city, with Vesuvio faintly fuming in the background. But there was something wrong about the colors, even grayed as they were by distance.
Peter went and got his binoculars.
The trouble was, of course, that Naples was green. Where the city ought to have been, a rankness had sprouted. Between the clumps of foliage he could catch occasional glimpses of gray-white that might equally well have been boulders or the wreckage of buildings. There was no movement. There was no shipping in the harbor.
But something rather odd was crawling up the side of the volcano. A rust-orange pipe, it appeared to be, supported on hairline struts like the legs of a centipede, and ending without rhyme or reason just short of the top.
While Peter watched, it turned slowly blue.
One day further forward: now all the display cases had been looted; the museum, it would seem, was empty.
Given, that in five centuries the world, or at any rate the department of Campania, has been overrun by a race of Somethings, the human population being killed or driven out in the process; and that the conquerors take an interest in the museum’s contents, which they have accordingly removed.
Removed where, and why?
This question, Peter conceded, might have a thousand answers, nine hundred and ninety-nine of which would mean that he had lost his gamble. The remaining answer was: to the vaults, for safety.
With his own hands Peter built a hood to cover the apparatus on the workbench and the sphere above it. It was unaccustomed labor; it took him the better part of two days. Then he called in workmen to break a hole in the stone flooring next to the interior wall, rig a hoist, and cut the power cable that supplied the time-sphere loose from its supports all the way back to the fuse box, leaving him a single flexible length of cable more than a hundred feet long. They unbolted the workbench from the floor, attached casters to its legs, lowered it into the empty vault below, and went away.
Peter unfastened and removed the hood. He looked into the sphere.
Treasure.
Crates, large and small, racked in rows into dimness.
With pudgy fingers that did not tremble, he advanced the rheostat. A cloudy flicker, another, a leaping blur of them as he moved the vernier faster—and then there were no more, to the limit of the time-sphere’s range.
Two hundred years, Peter guessed— A.D. 2700 to 2900 or thereabout—in which no one would enter the vault. Two hundred years of “unliquidated time.”
He put the rheostat bac
k to the beginning of that uninterrupted period. He drew out a small crate and prized it open.
Chessmen, ivory with gold inlay, Florentine, fourteenth century. Superb.
Another, from the opposite rack.
T’ang figurines, horses and men. ten to fourteen inches high. Priceless.
The crates would not burn, Tomaso told him. He went down to the kitchen to see, and it was true. The pieces lay in the roaring stove untouched. He fished one out with a poker; even the feathery splinters of the unplaned wood had not ignited.
It made a certain extraordinary kind of sense. When the moment came for the crates to go back, any physical scrambling that had occurred in the meantime would have no effect; they would simply put themselves together as they had been before, like Thor’s goats. But burning was another matter; burning would have released energy which could not be replaced.
That settled one paradox, at any rate. There was another that nagged at Peter’s orderly mind. If the things he took out of that vault, seven hundred-odd years in the future, were to become part of the collection bequeathed by him to the museum, preserved by it, and eventually stored in the vault for him to find—then precisely where had they come from in the first place?
It worried him. Peter had learned in life, as his brother had in physics, that one never gets anything for nothing.
Moreover, this riddle was only one of his perplexities, and that not among the greatest. For another example, there was the obstinate opacity of the time-sphere whenever he attempted to examine the immediate future. However often he tried it, the result was always the same: a cloudy blank, all the way forward to the sudden unveiling of the marble gallery.
It was reasonable to expect the sphere to show nothing at times when he himself was going to be in the vault, but this accounted for only five or six hours out of every twenty-four. Again, presumably, it would show him no changes to be made by himself, since foreknowledge would make it possible for him to alter his actions. But he laboriously cleared one end of the vault, put up a screen to hide the rest and made a vow—which he kept—not to alter the clear space or move the screen for a week. Then he tried again—with the same result.