As You Were Page 4

  The cold breeze from the window made him shiver. He glanced around the looted library uncertainly. He couldn’t prevent the burglary unless he went farther back in time than the clock seemed willing or able to take him. Besides, if he were found here he wouldn’t put it past Uncle Edmund to have him arrested for burglary.

  He twitched at the clock-hands tentatively. Until now he had had no chance for experimentation. If he turned it forward, would he leap ahead through time, back to tomorrow morning—using the clock’s tabular key, as it were, instead of the backspacer?

  No. He turned the hand ahead, without result. The rain still blew through the broken window. Prokofieff never altered a beat. Even without the thunderstorm the burglars could have broken the window unheard, Owen thought, and morosely left the rifled library.

  Rather hopelessly he went upstairs to his own bedroom, curious to see what he would find. The bed was freshly made. On the table beside it stood nothing, not even a glass of beer. Naturally enough, since Dr. Krafft hadn’t brought him any beer until nearly ten-forty last night—last night? Or now?

  “That,” Owen told himself, “is a problem for Dunne. If you need a Time Two to measure Time One in, you’d need a whole new language for what I’m doing now.”

  Lightning flashed, and outside appeared the recrudescent cypress, valiantly in place again on the edge of the cliff.

  “Cypress redivivus,” Owen said with a moan. “Oh, no, not again!”

  He glanced up at the black sky above it, as though half expecting to see the hull of a funny-looking schooner hovering in mid-air, and thought worriedly that three people can’t dream the same dream by coincidence. And it was the same dream.

  CHAPTER V

  And Patience With Time

  Peter looked around the room in discouragement. What next? Backward he could not go, obviously. Forward again seemed the only way, and that apparently had to happen in the usual, minute-by-minute process of ordinary living. So he had tonight to live through, dream and all (would it be the same, supposing he slept?), and afterward breakfast, Egan’s arrival, and uncle’s vindictive call to Metro and the ultimate loss of Lady Pantagruel.

  Must it happen exactly as before, or could the past be changed? Of course it could be changed. He’d changed it. Originally he hadn’t gone into the library at ten o’clock. But in its essentials, was it alterable? He hadn’t done very well in trying to stop a clash between Uncle Edmund and Egan.

  Lightning flared, and the doomed cypress tossed its branches wildly at the cliff-edge. In ten minutes—he glanced at the clock—the wretched tree would get it again. In about eight minutes Dr. Krafft would enter with the beer and the query for Maxl.

  Krafft was the man. He could explain all this if anyone could. He might even help to work out a solution, except that—Owen sighed—he wouldn’t believe the tale. Last night—this night—Owen had tried to show proof enough to engage the scientist’s attention, and it couldn’t be done. Not without automatically wiping out all the necessary memories from Krafft’s mind.

  “A lot of good you are,” he said to the clock, shaking it again and remembering the Mad Hatter in the same moment. For an instant he had a perfectly horrible feeling that this clock in his hand was the identical clock which the Mad Hatter had taken from his pocket and consulted, with many shakings, to learn what day of the month it was. “ ‘If you’d only kept on good terms with Time,’ ” the Mad Hatter said, and he must have been an authority on the subject, “ ‘he’ll do almost anything you like with the clock.’ ” It had been butter—the best butter—that stopped that particular clock. A lubricant.

  “Is that what happened to me?” Owen inquired of the empty air. “When I—drank—out of the thing? A sort of lubricant, that makes me frictionless in time? But where did it come from? What is the clock?”

  Then he thought of the three dreams about the schooner shaped like a wooden shoe, and the fishermen probing the depths of time while they swung at anchor upon—what? This clock? Something clock-shaped to look like a normal thing here at the sea-bottom, but not a clock at all. . . . Mustn’t frighten the fish.

  “This,” Owen thought in sudden panic, “could be dangerous. I’ve got to talk to Dr. Krafft!”

  * * *

  “To myself, I say beer,” the elderly savant declared, holding up a foaming glass. He paused in the doorway, beaming placidly. “Then I think, for a young man at bedtime—what is this, Peter? Still up?”

  “Dr. Krafft, I’ve got to talk to you!” Owen took the glass from his hand and pulled a chair forward. “Please sit down. Listen, Doctor. It’s about time travel. I mean, something’s happened. That is, I’ve got to prove to you that there is such a thing as time travel.”

  “You have got to prove to me that there is such a thing as time travel?” the astounded old gentleman said, slightly stunned. “Why in the world do you suppose I have devoted the major part of my life to experimenting on this subject? No, Peter, it is good of you, but you do not have to prove it to me. You have guessed it, my boy—I am convinced already.”

  “You don’t understand,” Owen said wildly. “Look—it’s exactly ten thirty-eight now, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, so it is. Why do you carry that clock around?”

  “Never mind. You know that cypress out on the point, beyond the terrace? Well, in exactly three minutes that tree’s going to be struck by lightning and fall over the cliff.”

  “Ah, I see,” Dr. Krafft murmured with surprising calm. “In three minutes?”

  “You aren’t surprised?”

  “After my years of experience with prescient dreams?” Krafft inquired infuriatingly. “No, I am not surprised. You dreamed the tree would be struck, eh? So, I will make a note of it.”

  “I didn’t dream it!” Owen cried. “It happened. I saw it happen. Over and over I saw it.”

  “A recurrent dream? That is usually the most interesting of all.”

  “Every tonight at ten-forty the cypress gets hit by lightning,” Owen said in a low, despairing voice. “Nobody cares. Nobody but me.”

  “Of course I care, Peter,” Dr. Krafft said encouragingly. “See, I have made a note of it. At ten-forty we will watch. I will give you a footnote in my next book, perhaps. But one thing at a time.”

  “One thing at a time,” Owen murmured, and laughed a hollow laugh.

  “Eh? First, Maxl—my little Maxl. Yes. I have lost Maxl.”

  “Maxl has been kidnaped,” Peter said swiftly. “Never mind. Maybe I can find him for you. Maybe I can stop the kidnapers before they ever happened, if you’ll only listen. Please sit down. Now. Dr. Krafft—” Owen made his voice impressive. “I’ve lived through this night once already. More than once. I lived straight through to ten o’clock tomorrow. Then I jumped back to ten tonight. Now I’m on the escalator of normal time being carried forward, and I can’t move the clock’s hands back past ten.” He looked despairingly at Krafft. “If you can’t help me,” he said in a piteous voice, “I’m ruined.”

  * * *

  Of all this, however, Krafft heard only the name of Maxl. Normally he was a kind old man, much concerned with the troubles of his friends, but we all have our personal phobias, and we know Dr. Krafft’s.

  “Maxl, kidnaped?” he demanded, springing from his chair. “When? How? Tell me at once Peter!”

  “Burglars broke into the library and looted Uncle Edmund’s safe,” Owen said somewhat tiredly. “Maxl was sitting on the desk. At least, you seemed pretty sure he was. They took him. Why, nobody will ever know unless I can turn the clock back past ten o’clock.”

  “You have guessed it!” Dr. Krafft cried in an excited voice. “Now I remember! I did leave Maxl on Edmund’s desk this morning. He was scolding me because I could not think of some foolish dialogue for his foolish new play, and I was trying to collapse a tesseract-form into a cube through a new time-dimension in my own mind. So naturally, I was thinking of Maxl—yes, yes! Thank you, Peter! I must hurry right down.”

&nb
sp; “Don’t,” Owen urged him. “I just came from the library. Maxl’s gone. So are uncle’s gold coins. The burglars had got there before ten, you see.”

  “Gone! And you said nothing? But Peter, Peter, we must act! We must call the police, before the burglars who took Maxl get too far away!”

  “Wait, Dr. Krafft. Please listen a minute. I tell you, I’ve lived through all this before and I know! The best way to get Maxl back is to prevent his being stolen at all. If you’ll only listen to me, maybe we can figure out a way to turn the clock back past ten, and everything will be perfect.”

  “Peter, Peter,” Dr. Krafft murmured sadly, “I fear I was carrying coals to Newcastle when I brought you a drink tonight. Go to bed, my friend, and sleep. Tomorrow when your head is clearer we will talk. Just now, I must go!”

  Lightning outside the window made the black panes burn violet for an instant. There was an ominous crack of cypress limbs accepting the stroke of destiny once more. Then the second flash, exactly on schedule, revealed the tree toppling with a resigned, fatalistic lurch over the cliff.

  “Ah?” Dr. Krafft said on a rising inflection, glancing at the clock. He took his notebook from his dressing-gown pocket and scribbled briefly. “Ten-forty exactly. Most interesting, Peter. Most interesting! Your dream was quite accurate. Of course we must allow for the laws of coincidence.”

  “Dr. Krafft, do you remember your dream last night?” Owen demanded, “About the time-travelers and the ship?”

  Krafft blinked inquiringly. “Last night? No.”

  Owen clutched his head. “No, no, no! I’m sorry! My mistake. You haven’t dreamed it yet. That’s for tonight and it hasn’t happened yet. Angels and ministers of grace, defend us, isn’t there any way to convince you?”

  “Peter,” Dr. Krafft said with mild solemnity. “Sit down. There on the bed. That’s right. Pile the pillows up. Be comfortable, my boy. Now, you see? I sit down here. I too am comfortable. Poor Maxl will wait. We must get to the bottom of this. Tell me, please, what is on your mind.”

  Owen told him.

  “May I see the clock?” Krafft asked when the story came to its end. Silently Owen handed it over. Krafft examined it carefully, scratched without effect at the blue enamel, shook it, listened to it, compared its dial with the electric clock. Then he pinched the knob on its back and twirled the hands easily and smoothly back past ten, past nine, past eight. He looked up.

  “You see?” he murmured to Owen. “You see?”

  “Of course I see,” Owen said with deliberate patience. “Anyone can do it but me. I proved that to you once before, tonight. I can’t do it, though.”

  “Try,” Krafft urged, holding out the clock.

  “Oh no! I don’t want to wipe out everything that’s happened tonight up to ten. Look, Doctor. Call it hypothetical if you have to. But given that premise, won’t you please try to work out an explanation for me? Hypothetically!”

  “Hypothetically,” Krafft murmured with an infuriating mildness, “you have indeed a most interesting paradox. I must confess it all holds together very convincingly—if one accepts the single impossible premise of the clock. I should like to write it all down, later, as a nice problem in temporal logic. But later, later, when I find Maxl again. Now, I cannot really concentrate.”

  “Try!” Owen urged him. He held out an empty hand, palm up. “Imagine Maxl’s sitting on my hand. Look at him. Think!”

  * * *

  Dr. Krafft’s faded blue eyes gazed interestedly at empty space, becoming slightly crossed as he focused on an intangible Maxl.

  “If there were a schooner full of time travelers,” Owen prompted him desperately. “If they dropped anchor—hypothetically, symbolically, not literally—and the anchor looked like this clock, and my story were a problem you had to solve, what would occur to you?”

  “I would say first,” Dr. Krafft murmured, still gazing fixedly at the unseeable Maxl, “that the clock has no seams anywhere. Have you observed that? The average clock has many cracks left after assembly, so that one can tell how it was made. This is all one piece. A new method, no doubt. Some way of casting that leaves no joints or seams. However, hypothetically, let us consider.

  “Now, clocks are most interesting relics, in a way, of the ancient Chaldean, Egyptian, and kindred mathematical systems. So are compasses. These two things represent almost the only vestigial remnants in our own society of the old sexagesimal mathematics, founded on sixty instead of ten, like our decimal method. So that actually, both space and time are still measured in the ancient way. So it strikes me that for travelers in time to cast out a space-anchor in the likeness of a clock would seem not entirely nonsensical. Eh, Maxl?”

  The white head shook impatiently. “No, no, it is nonsense. And there is no Maxl.”

  “Go on, Doctor,” Owen urged. “You’re doing fine. If the clock were a temporal anchor, then what? That draught I drank—or thought I drank—does it suggest anything to you? A sort of temporal lubricant, like the best butter?”

  “When I have Maxl,” Krafft said, “and I concentrate closely with his help, I sometimes succeed in letting my consciousness slip free from this continuum of space-time, as if—as if there were a certain reorientation in a direction that has no equivalent in space. As if I were frictionless, if you like, in time. Now if one accepts as a hypothesis that you did somehow absorb from the clock a draught of some lubricant—it does not make much practical sense, of course—one result might be that you, and only you, are so geared to the clock that you are pulled backward in time by it when you reset the hands.”

  “As if the anchor were dragging?” Owen suggested with interest. “Maybe the schooner’s drifting backward in time too, and whenever I reset the hands, the anchor slips and drags into the past. I wonder if they’re noticing it?”

  Krafft chuckled. “Mixing a temporal lubricant would not be easy, my boy.”

  “No, of course not. But you know the fluid clutch? You mix up millions of tiny iron-particles with oil, and when you magnetize the iron the oil freezes solid until it’s released again. What if I drank something like that?”

  “Then you would remain fixed solid in normal time until you turned the clock back, releasing yourself from time, allowing the anchor to drag you back. Yes. I can visualize that. Do not, however, confuse time with space, except to remember that duration is as vast as space, perhaps vaster. Whatever keeps us embedded in our normal time-plenum, we should be grateful to it. To be frictionless in time might be very dangerous. Only inertia would keep one from slipping off into past or future or cross-time parallels. Most awkward! The slightest push from anything else that happened to be moving through time with you might send you hurtling away.”

  “But what could?”

  “Well, your schooner might, if you collided with it. Or another time-traveler, which isn’t likely. You must consider the sea upon which that schooner might float as a—a sort of paratime as distinct from the serial times which we live in and perceive in prescient dreams and in memories. When you are frictionless in time, as you are while the clock turns back, and of course I speak hypothetically, my boy—then you are at the mercy of any casual traveler through paratime who may collide with you and send you sailing off helpless, unable to get any traction to stop yourself. I advise you to look out for time-travelers.”

  “Like a rocket-ship in space,” Owen murmured. “That’s not important, though. Look here, Doctor—why can’t I get back beyond ten o’clock? If twelve hours is its limit, and I suppose it has to be with this sort of numbering on the dial, why can’t I turn it now to twelve hours ago as of right this minute?”

  “Because you aren’t existing now, obviously, my boy,” Krafft assured him. “Hypothetically, hypothetically, of course. You have not really cheated time. You follow your normal progression through paratime, as the planets follow theirs through space, though still revolving in their orbits and on their axes. I would assume, from the data at hand, that you obey immutable laws by existing lega
lly, as it were, in tomorrow morning at the hour of ten, when you turned back the clock. It returned you—hypothetically—to ten tonight.”

  * * *

  He nodded at the blue clock Owen held.

  “If we remain inside our hypothesis, Peter, we might draw all sorts of wondrous inferences from the way that clock is sealed. Arbitrarily we consider a clock a collection of cogs geared to measure time. Inside that clock we might, if we were to open it, find something very different indeed. The space-time plenum, my boy, is basically a matter of frequency, which reminds one irresistibly of the atomic clock, with its monitoring oscilloscope. That operates on quantum transition, as you no doubt know. The symmetric output pulse is produced by the absorption-line frequency of ammonia gas absorbing control signals, so the clock has a potential accuracy of something like one part in ten billion. It tells time, Peter, by the movements of atoms themselves. Frequency, you see! It all fits very neatly together—in hypothesis. A clock is precisely what your time-travelers might well toss overboard for an anchor, a device which could be set to a particular space-time frequency so they would not slip off for lack of friction while they study.”

  “You dreamed,” Owen informed him, “that they were studying the bubbles your tesseract-experiments sent up to the surface of the sea.”

  “No doubt, no doubt,” Krafft murmured.

  “But Doctor, you did! Wait. Tonight you’ll dream it.”

  Krafft laughed gently. “I should not be surprised if I did, Peter, after this very interesting talk. But you and not I would be its originator!”

  “They’re the originators,” Owen said stubbornly, glancing up as if toward the hull of the hovering ship. “From the future, I wonder?”

  “Perhaps natives of paratime itself,” Krafft suggested in an indulgent voice. “Perhaps they exist only in absolute time, like deep-sea creatures. One might imagine that the pressure of normal time could crush them, as deep-sea pressure would crush a man. Except that the compacting would have to occur through time—they would be squeezed into an instantaneous existence, like mayflies.” He chuckled. “Perhaps that is what mayflies are, Peter—compressed time-travelers, their whole lifetimes crushed together into a day!”