Chronocules

by D. G. Compton

She finished threading the tape, then moved carefully to the coffee machine. Liza had made care an excellent substitute for natural grace.

  “It’s the grading of the buffering stage that we’re finding difficult at the moment. The rate appears to be more critical than I had imagined. Where theory falls short of practice, I fear. . . . But how are you? I don’t seem to have seen you for days. Or is it weeks? Haven’t seen anybody. My wife doesn’t like it, says it’s not healthy, not fair on the staff. But there’s so little time. And always the next experiment, the very next experiment, is going to be the real breakthrough.”

  He hurried to the take-out platform and began checking focal lengths, talking over his shoulder as he worked.

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  David Silberstein stopped listening, accepted the mug .Liza offered him and thanked her quietly, speaking for the first time since he had entered the laboratory. They exchanged a glance of amused mutual commiseration as fhe professor chattered on. Then she joined the old man at the take-out platform. David watched her check the settings with the professor, referring to the table of contents on her clipboard. It was a job she had obviously carried out to her own perfect satisfaction already, but she showed no signs even of impatience that needed to be contained. She was no more beautiful than she was graceful, but compensated for this lack with careful detailing as intelligently as she did for the other. In no direction did she try too hard. Her moderation pleased the moderate David Silberstein in the depths of his moderate soul. She was a wonder. It was sad that he was forty-five and she but twenty-six. Sad, but not insuperable.

  He turned away, leaving her and the professor to their antiphon. The laboratory had a huge window overlooking the Pill, giving it from the outside the congruous appearance of a somewhat splendid artists studio. The appearance was bom out by glimpses that were possible through this window of a small Bohn 446 computer and a great deal of adjustable staging. Even the pulse generators and accelerators, had they been visible, could well have been the tools of some sculptor working on experimental holograms. And the take-out platform itself resembled nothing so much as a modeling dais, set about with slightly curious cameras.

  The model, on this occasion, was a plain wooden chair. Shades, thought David Silberstein, of Van Gogh. It was an old-fashioned piece, but no antique, in solid, unpainted elm, with scuff-marks on the legs and a patina

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  of grease on the seat and back. Nailheads showed in the edges of the seat where they held the legs in place. The number of molecular structures it represented was formidable. To be able now to take-out over such a wide range was indeed progress.

  The laboratory clock suddenly struck twenty-seven in short quick bursts. It was by way of being a folly, a huge and laborious joke against itself and the Village, its face—filling the entire end wall of the laboratory- set about with secondary dials, with alarm devices, with little doors that opened and shut, releasing trumpeters and cuckoos, little men with umbrellas, a sausage dog that barked, and a fireman with a hose that appeared to squirt water straight at any spectator but never got him wet. The dials told one useful things, like the time of the next train from Calcutta to a small village in central Gujerat, and were never wrong. When trains were canceled due to fire or pestilence or flood, the dials said so. It was, people hoped, a fun clock, and the one thing it never did—in that place above all others—was tell the right time, the right day, the right month or the right year.

  -If one wanted any of this, one went to the little computer responsible for its wrongness. That little computer was naturally always right

  “. . . My dear fellow, I’ve been neglecting you. How was the coffee? Tepid, I don’t doubt. It’s remarkable how with all this”—his gesture included the whole civilized world—“with all this they cannot manage a reliably hot cup of coffee. Not that it’s really at all remarkable. Such an unmitigated blessing to mankind would be out from the start. . . . Shall we start at long last on the experiment?”

  He stared at David Silberstein as if half suspecting that he was the cause of all the delay.

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  “Don’t forget the ear-plugs. Take-out occurs about fifty seconds after activation. Liza? All switches, please.”

  The usual electronic whine started, began to grow. Like the drum roll that preceded a circus trick. David Silberstein wondered if it was really necessary, or added at least in a tiny part for effect. He had read somewhere that a similar whine used to be heard in American prisons before someone was electrocuted.

  “At this stage,” Professor Kravchensky was saying, “the anti-chronocule buffering is taking plcae. When the note changes, that’ll be the accelerators phasing in.”

  The note changed. On cue. Like in a bad movie. Or in a competent scientific experiment.

  “The interaction is computer-monitored, of course. Buffering is not a steady process, and acceleration has to vary accordingly.”

  David Silberstein wondered how long it was to takeout. He slipped in his ear-plugs and automatically consulted the clock: Unhelpfully its second hand was revolving like a windmill, backwards. The noise rose far beyond what, even with ear-plugs, was bearable, but they bore it. Indeed, Professor Kravchensky’s mouth continued to move, steadfastly compering the experiment. Then the noise stopped, going on still as a pain in the head, in the whole body.

  The chair on the take-out platform flickered for a nanosecond, and disappeared. Immediately the sharp sound of implosion as the air rushed in to fill the void, the sexitubercular nothing at the focus of the six accelerators. It was, in spite of everything, a dramatic moment, moving even. Disturbing. Magical to a man who did not believe in magic. Yet explanations were so much gobbledegook. This was magic. Disturbing therefore.

  “You see? You see?” Professor Kravchensky must have been less confident than he had pretended. He was

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  now overjoyed. “You see? Complete take-out. I’ve been right all along. The existence of matter within our three dimensions depends entirely upon its resistance to the chronomic flow. Remove the resistance and you see what happens. The flow takes charge and, pfui—the chair as we knew it is no more.”

  “Tell me, Professor, where is the chair at this moment?”

  In the last experiment David Silberstein had witnessed, the professor’s de-buffering had reduced a china coffee pot to an all too visible pile of catalized cinders. He had been left wondering if the Founder—all of them, in fact—was being taken for a very expensive ride.

  “Where is it? It is nowhere. Or, if you prefer, exactly where it always was, but in a different state. In a state of chronomic unity.”

  “When can we expect it back?”

  “We give the de-buffering agents a tiny life-span. In this case, three minutes. Our problems are with take-out and re-entry. Once achieved, the duration of chronomic unity is within itself meaningless.”

  “When you say chronomic unity, you mean time travel.”

  Professor Kravchensky beat his forehead, did a little run away and back. Liza frowned across at David, angry with him for baiting the professor. Kravchensky would never see it, would always fall.

  “I do not, I. do not, I do not mean anything of the sort. The phrase ‘time travel’ shows a complete misunderstanding of the nature of time. It is we, at this moment, who are the time travelers. Not the chair. We ourselves.” His hands clutched and gestured. “See, my dear fellow, see a boat steaming up a river. The river is strong and the engines of the boat are not. It labors against the current but is swept inexorably back. But

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  observe—within the context of the river, it is still traveling. The river goes by and does not carry the boat wholly with it. My dear fellow—we, and all the universes we know of, are in the position of that boat.”

  Professor Kravchensky came very close, look
ed up at David conspiratorially.

  “But what happens . ■ . what happens if the boat can stop its engines and allow itself to be carried at the will of the river? Within the context of this same river it is now no longer traveling. The water around it remains stationary. The boat has achieved a state of unity with the river. So it is with our chair. It has achieved a state of unity with the chronos. It is no longer traveling. It is we, my dear fellow, battling against the stream, who travel.” He sighed, and brought his hands together meekly. “And in the process we age. The chair does not.” There was a minor detonation, a sound like the previous one played backward, forced out rather than drawn in, and the chair reappeared. The three minutes had expired. So, apparently, had the chair.

  It stood for a few seconds, precise and immaculate, unchanged except for a curious all-over blotting paper blackness, and then crumbled sadly to a small mound of dust, equally black. Half a dozen blackened nails rolled noisily about the platform, and one fell onto the floor.

  “Charcoaling again,” said Professor Kravchensky. “How disappointing.”

  He smiled nervously at David Silberstein.

  “Re-entry must still be too abrupt. It’s not heat that does it, you know. It’s the sudden action of the chrono- cules. The sudden action of the chronocules....”

  Liza reached for the dustpan and brush. In the comer of the laboratory stood a large bin, already half-filled with dust of a curious blotting paper blackness.

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  Liza Simmons rattled the dustpan on the inside of the bin. A faint haze of dust rose in the still air, spilled a little, then settled. Pure carbon, a tetrad, atomic weight 12. She was far too tired to care. The adrenalin roused by this latest experiment had disappeared with its failure, run out like milk from a suddenly broken jug. She felt cold and empty and slightly sick, incapable of the immediate new start the professor would expect. Her tiredness was not physical—she had been at the laboratory hardly more than two hours, after a good night’s sleep—it was occasioned by the dragging of habitual fear, by controlled hysteria. It was the calm panic of someone reasoning with the door-lock of a runaway car. It was the fumbling of banana fingers. It was the tiredness of a cerebellum at continual war with its cortex.

  The rest of the Villagers got on with their work sensibly enough. The solid bulk of the laboratory in their midst was a symbol of comfort (had been designed as such), a reassurance that, if they did their work properly, a solution, a way out, would be found. Liza had ho such reassurance. Only she in the whole Village—for who could guess at what Professor Kravchensky allowed himself to believe?—only she knew that the door of the car was as closed as it had ever been.

  She leaned her head on the wall above the bin. The time was near when she would stop scrabbling at mech-

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  anisms, when she would seek instead the dignity necessary to see any future, any erosions, any death as logical, suitable, deserved, and very small in the scheme of things. The future would still matter, but not as something to be resisted but as something to be joined. (The time for this idea was in fact much farther off than she imagined, for she was very young and the idea was very old.)

  Behind her the professor was at his desk, already working on a new set of figures, babbling, building supposition on supposition, his fingers on the teletype spinning fairy stories for the indifferent computer to consider and reject. And the O.S. watching behind clothed layers of reserve. Judging. She walked out of the laboratory, not being responsible (if she made the effort) for Professor Kravchensky’s image, for the fool he made of himself, for the disconcerting patchiness of his brilliance, out of the laboratory and down the short flight of steps to the garden. The professor did not notice her going. And David Silberstein, who noticed everything, did not notice either.

  She sat on a green-painted bench in one comer of the lawn, among hollyhocks and delphiniums, wallflowers and antirrhinums, consciously cottage garden flowers that rioted down to the dry-stone wall and the wicket gate leading out onto the main street. People said, as if by Way of excuse, that Manny Littlejohn had style: in her present mood she considered his attention to detail vulgar. And curiously insolent

  David Silberstein came down the steps from the laboratory. She knew it was him without turning her head: his tread was measured, that of a man who found the movement of one buttock against the other faintly indecent and did what he could to prevent it. At the bot

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  tom of the steps he paused and sang, half to himself, the first two lines of a medieval roundelay:

  Summer is icumen in,

  Lhude sing cucu!

  It was intended to be an elegant, distancing jest, but it pushed his indecency too far. Now he would come and sit down beside her and talk to her, and about him, about David Silberstein, she would know nothing—not if he was doing his duty, keeping in touch with the staff, not if he lusted after her and didn’t know how to say so, not even if he was simply being polite because he was a very, very polite man. She closed her eyes and her ears and stretched in the sunlight. It was a sexy movement, but it might have been unconscious. David Silberstein came and sat down beside her and talked to her.

  “You look disheartened, Liza. Sometimes you must think you’re never going to make it.” So it was to be a duty talk, it’s always darkest before the dawn. Liza stayed stretched, didn’t move. “Anyway, Liza, suppose you don’t? Suppose you don’t make it? It’s a possibility that needs considering. I wonder if it mightn’t turn out to be for the best. . ..”

  “For the best?” She sat up sharply. Older people were intolerable. “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “Responsibilities. . . . When the environment breaks up, when things begin to snowball, won’t we be needed? Should we really be hustling to get out?”

  “I’m a scientist. My first responsibility is to science.” It was a just claim. How had she got herself dragged into this discussion? It was a just claim.

  “Balls,” said David Silberstein. “A responsibility? To a system of thought?”

  It was outrageous. She was being intruded upon. And where was his appealing reserve? Appealing? Was

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  that what it had been? When he said balls he might just

  as well have flapped them in her face. She stood up.

  “It’s ridiculous, talking about being disheartened. Just because a few experiments don’t work properly.” She chose to turn his words into an attack on the professor. “Each one is part of a planned series. Professor Krav- chensky knows exactly what he’s doing.”

  David Silberstein caught her hand, stopped her from walking away.

  “My dear, you mustn’t make things so complicated.” What was he saying? You never knew with his generation—they were so devious. Perhaps he’d been working around to sex from the very beginning. He ruffled his hair with his free hand, suddenly ten years younger. “I’m sorry—I let you in on the very end of one of my gloomy thought processes. It was inexcusable. Please sit down.”

  She sat. She wondered what she’d answer if he asked her outright. But the words, coming from his mild, inhibited face, were impossible. And she was the one accused of making things complicated. She turned to face him. He was hidden, and intriguing.

  “Would you like us to sex? David?”

  In this context the forename was permissible. And the question was quite open-ended, committing neither of them. But he writhed minutely, like a child pretending it wasn’t ticklish.

  “Sex? How you do jump about, Liza. I don’t really think . . .” And he looked at his watch. My God, he actually looked at his watch. So devious, so incapable of simply saying no thank you. As if it mattered. “I’m afraid I . . . It’s very kind of you to offer, but . . . Well, the thing is, I really wanted to ask you something completely different.”

  The hangups of his age-group in
clear operation.

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  Her words had given him an immediate erection, and still he said no. She patted the hand that still held hers. Reminded of its existence, he took it quickly away. He was both irritating and pitiable. Never, never in his whole life could he just have fun....

  “I’d have asked the professor himself, only it’s really a bit difficult. And I’m not the most tactful of people. The thing is”—he even spoke like a caricature of the fifties—“the thing is, I’m expecting a visit from the Founder either today or tomorrow. One of his ‘surprise’ visits. And I was wondering ...”

  He wasn’t usually as fumbling as this. She must have thrown him badly. She prompted him kindly.

  “You were wondering?”

  “Well, there must be some experiments in time travel —I’m sorry, in chronomic unity—that have been completely successful?”

  “Certainly there have. The simple molecular structures, the metals in particular, have presented no problems at all.”

  “I thought as much. You see, the Founder is bound to call in at the Lab wanting a demonstration.”

  “And you’d like us to set up something easy and reliable to show him. Even if it’s a complete waste of our time.”

  “Tm afraid so. You see, he’s getting restive.” He forestalled her protest. “I know it’s not reasonable of him. I know the amount of progress is enormous. All the

  same...”

  “All the same, we’re costing him a lot and he wants to satisfy himself that he’s getting value for money.”

  She chose bitter words and David Silberstein accepted them. Her resentment against the Founder grew. Payment by results, value for money—as if scientific research were so much shelf space in a supermarket, of

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  fering comfortable returns on a weekly balance sheet. A supermarket with hollyhocks, and pseudo cottages, and a pseudo village hall at the end of a pseudo village street.

  “And what about all these trimmings, Mr. Silberstein? How can he possibly complain about expense, when