by Fritz Leiber
He went into the cafeteria. The early morning crowd that he had often watched through the windows was there. The girl who made flapjacks in the window had just flipped one and it hung in the air. Then it floated over as if caught by a slight breeze, and sank slowly down as if settling in water.
The breakfasters, like the people in the street, were all dead in this new way, moving with almost imperceptible motion. And all had apparently died in the act of drinking coffee, eating eggs, or munching toast. And if there were only time enough, there was even a chance that they would get the drinking, eating, and munching done with, for there was the shadow of movement in them all.
The cashier had the register drawer open and money in her hand, and the hand of the customer was outstretched for it. In time, somewhere in the new leisurely time, the hands would come together and the change be given. And so it happened. It may have been a minute and a half, or two minutes, or two and a half. It is always hard to judge time, and now it had become all but impossible.
“I am still hungry,” said Charles Vincent, “but it would be foolhardy to wait for service here. Should I help myself? They will not mind if they are dead. And if they are not dead, in any case it seems that I am invisible to them.”
He wolfed several rolls. He opened a bottle of milk and held it upside down over his glass while he ate another roll. Liquids had all become perversely slow.
But he felt better for his erratic breakfast. He would have paid for it, but how?
He left the cafeteria and walked about the town as it seemed still to be quite early, though one could depend on neither sun nor clock for the time any more. The traffic lights were unchanging. He sat for a long time in a little park and watched the town and the big clock in the Commerce Building tower; but like all the clocks it was either stopped or the hand would creep too slowly to be seen.
It must have been just about an hour till the traffic lights changed, but change they did at last. By picking a point on the building across the street and watching what moved past it, he found that the traffic did indeed move. In a minute or so, the entire length of a car would pass the given point.
He had, he recalled, been very far behind in his work and it had been worrying him. He decided to go to the office, early as it was or seemed to be.
He let himself in. Nobody else was there. He resolved not to look at the clock and to be very careful of the way he handled all objects because of his new propensity for breaking things. This considered, all seemed normal there. He had said the day before that he could hardly catch up on his work if he put in two days solid. He now resolved at least to work steadily until something happened, whatever it was.
For hour after hour he worked on his tabulations and reports. Nobody else had arrived. Could something be wrong? Certainly something was wrong. But this was not a holiday. That was not it.
Just how long can a stubborn and mystified man plug away at his task? It was hour after hour after hour. He did not become hungry nor particularly tired. And he did get through a lot of work.
“It must be half done. However it has happened, I have caught up on at least a day’s work. I will keep on.”
He must have continued silently for another eight or ten hours.
He was caught up completely on his back work.
“Well, to some extent I can work into the future. I can head up and carry over. I can put in everything but the figures of the field reports.”
And he did so.
“It will be hard to bury me in work again. I could almost coast for a day. I don’t even know what day it is, but I must have worked twenty hours straight through and nobody has arrived. Perhaps nobody ever will arrive. If they are moving with the speed of the people in the nightmare outside, it is no wonder they have not arrived.”
He put his head down on his arms on the desk. The last thing he saw before he closed his eyes was the misshapen left thumb that he had always tried to conceal a little by the way he handled his hands.
“At least I know that I am still myself. I’d know myself anywhere by that.”
Then he went to sleep at his desk.
Jenny came in with a quick click-click-click of high heels, and he wakened to the noise.
“What are you doing dozing at your desk, Mr. Vincent? Have you been here all night?”
“I don’t know, Jenny. Honestly I don’t.”
“I was only teasing. Sometimes when I get here a little early I take a catnap myself.”
The clock said six minutes till eight and the second hand was sweeping normally. Time had returned to the world. Or to him. But had all that early morning of his been a dream? Then it had been a very efficient dream. He had accomplished work that he could hardly have done in two days. And it was the same day that it was supposed to be.
He went to the water fountain. The water now behaved normally. He went to the window. The traffic was behaving as it should. Though sometimes slow and sometimes snarled, yet it was in the pace of the regular world.
The other workers arrived. They were not balls of fire, but neither was it necessary to observe them for several minutes to be sure they weren’t dead.
“It did have its advantages,” Charles Vincent said. “I would be afraid to live with it permanently, but it would be handy to go into for a few minutes a day and accomplish the business of hours. I may be a case for the doctor. But just how would I go about telling a doctor what was bothering me?”
Now it had surely been less than two hours from his first rising till the time that he wakened to the noise of Jenny from his second sleep. And how long that second sleep had been, or in which time enclave, he had no idea. But how account for it all? He had spent a long while in his own rooms, much longer than ordinary in his confusion. He had walked the city mile after mile in his puzzlement. And he had sat in the little park for hours and studied the situation. And he had worked at his own desk for an outlandish long time.
Well, he would go to the doctor. A man is obliged to refrain from making a fool of himself to the world at large, but to his own lawyer, his priest, or his doctor he will sometimes have to come as a fool. By their callings they are restrained from scoffing openly.
Dr. Mason was not particularly a friend. Charles Vincent realized with some unease that he did not have any particular friends, only acquaintances and associates. It was as though he were of a species slightly apart from his fellows. He wished now a little that he had a particular friend.
But Dr. Mason was an acquaintance of some years, had the reputation of being a good doctor, and besides Vincent had now arrived at his office and been shown in. He would either have to—well, that was as good a beginning as any.
“Doctor, I am in a predicament. I will either have to invent some symptoms to account for my visit here, or make an excuse and bolt, or tell you what is bothering me, even though you will think I am a new sort of idiot.”
“Vincent, every day people invent symptoms to cover their visits here, and I know that they have lost their nerve about the real reason for coming. And every day people do make excuses and bolt. But experience tells me that I will get a larger fee if you tackle the third alternative. And, Vincent, there is no new sort of idiot.”
Vincent said, “It may not sound so silly if I tell it quickly. I awoke this morning to some very puzzling incidents. It seemed that time itself had stopped, or that the whole world had gone into super-slow motion. The water would neither flow nor boil, and fire would not heat food. The clocks, which I first believed had stopped, crept along at perhaps a minute an hour. The people I met in the streets appeared dead, frozen in lifelike attitudes. And it was only by watching them for a very long time that I perceived that they did indeed have motion. One car I saw creeping slower than the most backward snail, and a dead man at the wheel of it. I went to it, opened the door, and put on the brake. I realize
d after a time that the man was not dead. But he bent forward and broke his face on the steering wheel. It must have taken a full minute for his head to travel no more than ten inches, yet I was unable to prevent his hitting the wheel. I then did other bizarre things in a world that had died on its feet. I walked many miles through the city, and then I sat for hours in the park. I went to the office and let myself in. I accomplished work that must have taken me twenty hours. I then took a nap at my desk. When I awoke on the arrival of the others, it was six minutes to eight in the morning of the same day, today. Not two hours had passed from my rising, and time was back to normal. But the things that happened in that time that could never be compressed into two hours.”
“One question first, Vincent. Did you actually accomplish the work of many hours?”
“I did. It was done, and done in that time. It did not become undone on the return of time to normal.”
“A second question. Had you been worried about your work, about being behind?”
“Yes. Emphatically.”
“Then here is one explanation. You retired last night. But very shortly afterward you arose in a state of somnambulism. There are facets of sleepwalking which we do not at all understand. The time-out-of-focus interludes were parts of a walking dream of yours. You dressed and went to your office and worked all night. It is possible to do routine tasks in a somnambulistic state rapidly and even feverishly, with an intense concentration—to perform prodigies. You may have fallen into a normal sleep there when you had finished, or you may have been awakened directly from your somnambulistic trance on the arrival of your co-workers. There, that is a plausible and workable explanation. In the case of an apparently bizarre happening, it is always well to have a rational explanation to fall back on. They will usually satisfy a patient and put his mind at rest. But often they do not satisfy me.”
“Your explanation very nearly satisfies me, Dr. Mason, and it does put my mind considerably at rest. I am sure that in a short while I will be able to accept it completely. But why does it not satisfy you?”
“One reason is a man I treated early this morning. He had his face smashed, and he had seen—or almost seen—a ghost: a ghost of incredible swiftness that was more sensed than seen. The ghost opened the door of his car while it was going at full speed, jerked on the brake, and caused him to crack his head. This man was dazed and had a slight concussion. I have convinced him that he did not see any ghost at all, that he must have dozed at the wheel and run into something. As I say, I am harder to convince than my patients. But it may have been coincidence.”
“I hope so. But you also seem to have another reservation.”
“After quite a few years in practice, I seldom see or hear anything new. Twice before I have been told a happening or a dream on the line of what you experienced.”
“Did you convince your patients that it was only a dream?”
“I did. Both of them. That is, I convinced them the first few times it happened to them.”
“Were they satisfied?”
“At first. Later, not entirely. But they both died within a year of their first coming to me.”
“Nothing violent, I hope.”
“Both had the gentlest deaths. That of senility extreme.”
“Oh. Well, I’m too young for that.”
“I would like you to come back in a month or so.”
“I will, if the delusion or the dream returns. Or if I do not feel well.”
After this Charles Vincent began to forget about the incident. He only recalled it with humor sometimes when again he was behind in his work.
“Well, if it gets bad enough I may do another sleepwalking act and catch up. But if there is another aspect of time and I could enter it at will, it might often be handy.”
Charles Vincent never saw his face at all. It is very dark in some of those clubs and the Coq Bleu is like the inside of a tomb. He went to the clubs only about once a month, sometimes after a show when he did not want to go home to bed, sometimes when he was just plain restless.
Citizens of the more fortunate states may not know of the mysteries of the clubs. In Vincent’s the only bars are beer bars, and only in the clubs can a person get a drink, and only members are admitted. It is true that even such a small club as the Coq Bleu had thirty thousand members, and at a dollar a year that is a nice sideline. The little numbered membership cards cost a penny each for the printing, and the member wrote in his own name. But he had to have a card—or a dollar for a card—to gain admittance.
But there could be no entertainments in the clubs. There was nothing there but the little bar room in the near darkness.
The man was there, and then he was not, and then he was there again. And always where he sat it was too dark to see his face.
“I wonder,” he said to Vincent (or to the bar at large, though there were no other customers and the bartender was asleep), “I wonder if you have ever read Zurbarin on the Relationship of Extradigitalism to Genius?”
“I have never heard of the work nor of the man,” said Vincent. “I doubt if either exists.”
“I am Zurbarin,” said the man.
Vincent hid his misshapen left thumb. Yet it could not have been noticed in that light, and he must have been crazy to believe there was any connection between it and the man’s remark. It was not truly a double thumb. He was not an extradigital, nor was he a genius.
“I refuse to become interested in you,” said Vincent. “I am on the verge of leaving. I dislike waking the bartender, but I did want another drink.”
“Sooner done than said.”
“What is?”
“Your glass is full.”
“It is? So it is. Is it a trick?”
“Trick is the name for anything either too frivolous or too mystifying for us to comprehend. But on one long early morning of a month ago, you also could have done the trick, and nearly as well.”
“Could I have? How would you know about my long early morning—assuming there to have been such?”
“I watched you for a while. Few others have the equipment to watch you with when you’re in the aspect.”
So they were silent for some time, and Vincent watched the clock and was ready to go.
“I wonder,” said the man in the dark, “if you have read Schimmelpenninck on the Sexagintal and the Duodecimal in the Chaldee Mysteries?”
“I have not and I doubt if anyone else has. I would guess that you are also Schimmelpenninck and that you have just made up the name on the spur of the moment.”
“I am Schimm, it is true, but I made up the name on the spur of a moment many years ago.”
“I am a little bored with you,” said Vincent, “but I would appreciate it if you’d do your glass-filling trick once more.”
“I have just done so. And you are not bored; you are frightened.”
“Of what?” asked Vincent, whose glass was in fact full again.
“Of reentering a dread that you are not sure was a dream. But there are advantages to being both invisible and inaudible.”
“Can you be invisible?”
“Was I not when I went behind the bar just now and fixed you a drink?”
“How?”
“A man in full stride goes at the rate of about five miles an hour. Multiply that by sixty, which is the number of time. When I leave my stool and go behind the bar, I go and return at the rate of three hundred miles an hour. So I am invisible to you, particularly if I move while you blink.”
“One thing does not match. You might have got around there and back, but you could not have poured.”
“Shall I say that mastery over liquids is not given to beginners? But for us there are many ways to outwit the slowness of matter.”
“I believe that you are a hoaxer. Do you know Dr.
Mason?”
“I know that you went to see him. I know of his futile attempts to penetrate a certain mystery. But I have not talked to him of you.”
“I still believe that you are a phony. Could you put me back into the state of my dream of a month ago?”
“It was not a dream. But I could put you again into that state.”
“Prove it.”
“Watch the clock. Do you believe that I can point my finger at it and stop it for you? It is already stopped for me.”
“No, I don’t believe it. Yes, I guess I have to, since I see that you have just done it. But it may be another trick. I don’t know where the clock is plugged in.”
“Neither do I. Come to the door. Look at every clock you can see. Are they not all stopped?”
“Yes. Maybe the power has gone off all over town.”
“You know it has not. There are still lighted windows in those buildings, though it is quite late.”
“Why are you playing with me? I am neither on the inside nor the outside. Either tell me the secret or say that you will not tell me.”
“The secret isn’t a simple one. It can only be arrived at after all philosophy and learning have been assimilated.”
“One man cannot arrive at that in one lifetime.”
“Not in an ordinary lifetime. But the secret of the secret (if I may put it that way) is that one must use part of it as a tool in learning. You could not learn all in one lifetime, but by being permitted the first step—to be able to read, say, sixty books in the time it took you to read one, to pause for a minute in thought and use up only one second, to get a day’s work accomplished in eight minutes and so have time for other things—by such ways one may make a beginning. I will warn you, though. Even for the most intelligent, it is a race.”