The Best Alternate History Stories of the 20th Century Page 29

Barbara had come up, unheard, behind me. This was the first time we had been alone together since our break, two years before.

  “It looks like a tremendous amount of work,” I evaded.

  “It was a tremendous amount of work. This construction has been the least of it. Now it’s done. Or has begun—depending how you look at it.”

  “All done?”

  She nodded, her face triumphant. “First test today.”

  “Oh well . . . in that case—”

  “Don’t go, Hodge—please. I meant to ask you and Catty to the more formal trial, but now you’re here for the preliminary I’m glad. Ace, Father and Midbin’ll be along in a minute.”

  “Midbin?”

  “I insisted. It’ll be nice to show him the mind can produce something besides fantasies and hysterical hallucinations.”

  I began to speak, then swallowed the words. The dig at Catty was insignificant beside the supreme confidence, the abnormal assurance prompting the invitation to witness a test which could only reveal the impossibility of applying her cherished theories. I felt an overwhelming pity. “Surely,” I said at last, seeking to make some preparation for the disillusionment that was bound to come, “surely you don’t expect it to work the first time?”

  “Why not? There are bound to be minor adjustments to be made, allowances for erratic chronology caused by phenomena like the pull of comets and so forth. It may be some time before Ace can set me down at the exact year, month, day, hour and minute agreed upon. But the fact of space-time-energy-matter correspondence can just as well be established this afternoon as next year.”

  She was unaccountably at ease for someone whose lifework was about to be weighed. I have shown more nervousness in discussing a disputed date with the honorary secretary of a local historical society.

  “Sit down,” she invited; “there’s nothing to do or see till Ace comes. I’ve missed you, Hodge.”

  I felt this was a dangerous remark, and wished I’d stayed far away from the workshop. I hooked my leg over a stool—there were no chairs—and coughed to hide the fact I was afraid to answer, I’ve missed you too, and afraid not to.

  “Tell me about your own work, Hodge. Catty says you’re having difficulties.”

  I was annoyed with Catty, but whether for confiding in Barbara or specifically for revealing something unheroic, I didn’t stop to consider. At any rate this annoyance probably diluted the feeling I was somehow disloyal in conversing with Barbara at all. Or it may be the old, long-established bond—I almost wrote, of sympathy, but it was so much more complex than the word indicates—was reawakened by proximity and put me in the mood to tell my troubles. It is even possible I had the altruistic purpose of fortifying Barbara against inevitable disappointment on a misery-loves-company basis. Be that as it may, I found myself pouring out the whole story.

  She jumped up and put her hands on my shoulders. I would not be truthful if I said that, looking into her eyes, gray and warm, I did not feel some reciprocation. “Hodge! It’s wonderful—don’t you see?”

  “Oh . . .” I was completely confused. “I . . . uh . . .”

  “Look: now you can go back—back to the past in your own person and see everything with your own eyes, instead of relying on second- or third-hand accounts. You can verify every fact, study every move, every actor. You can write history as no one ever did before, for you’ll be writing it as a witness, yet with the perspective of a different period. You’ll be taking the mind of the present, with its judgment and its knowledge of the patterns, back to receive the impressions of the past. It almost seems HX-1 was devised especially for this.”

  There was no doubt she believed, that she was really and unselfishly glad her work could aid mine. I was overcome by pity, helpless to soften the blow of disillusionment to fall so soon, and filled with an irrational hatred of the great apparatus she had built and which was about to destroy her.

  I was saved from having to mask my emotions by the arrival of her father, Ace and Midbin. Thomas Haggerwells began tensely, “Barbara, Ace says you intend to test this—this thing on yourself. Is that true?”

  Midbin didn’t wait for her answer. I thought, with something of a shock, Midbin has gotten old; I never noticed it. “Listen to me. There’s no point now in saying part of your mind realizes the impossibility of this demonstration and that it’s willing for you to annihilate yourself in the attempt and so escape from conflicts which have no resolution—”

  Ace Dorn, who looked as strained as they, in contrast to Barbara’s ease, growled, “Let’s go.”

  She smiled reassuringly at us. “Please, Father, don’t worry. And Oliver . . .”

  Her smile was almost mischievous and very unlike the Barbara I had known. “Oliver, HX-1 owes more to you than you will ever know.”

  She ducked under the transparent ring and walked to the center of the floor, glancing up at the reflector, moving an inch or two to stand directly beneath it. “The controls are already adjusted to minus 52 years and 11 days,” she informed us conversationally. “Purely arbitrary. One date is good as another, but January 1, 1900, is an almost automatic choice. I’ll be gone 60 seconds. Ready, Ace?”

  “Ready.” Ace had been slowly circling the engines, checking the dials. He took his place before the largest, holding a watch in his hand. “Three forty-three and ten,” he announced.

  Barbara was consulting her own watch. “Three forty-three and ten,” she confirmed. “Make it at three forty-three and twenty.”

  “OK. Good luck.”

  “You might at least try it on an animal first,” burst out Midbin, as Ace twirled the valve under his hand. The transparent ring glowed, the metal reflector threw back a dazzling light. I blinked. When I opened my eyes the light was gone and the center of the workshop was empty.

  No one moved. Ace frowned over his watch. I stared at the spot where Barbara had stood. I don’t think my mind was working; I had the feeling my lungs and heart certainly were not. I was a true spectator, with all faculties save sight and hearing suspended.

  “ . . . on an animal first.” Midbin’s voice was querulous.

  “Oh, God!” muttered Thomas Haggerwells.

  Ace said casually—too casually, “The return is automatic. Set beforehand for duration. Thirty more seconds.”

  Midbin said, “She is . . . this is . . .” He sat down on a stool and bent his head almost to his knees.

  Mr. Haggerwells groaned, “Ace, Ace—you should have stopped her.”

  Still I couldn’t think. Barbara had stood there; then she was gone. What . . . ? Midbin must be right; we had let her go to destruction. Certainly much more than a minute had passed now.

  The ring glowed and the brilliant light was reflected. “It did, oh, it did!” Barbara cried. “It did!”

  She came out of the circle and kissed Ace, who patted her gently on the back. I suddenly noticed the pain of holding my breath and released a tremendous sigh. Barbara kissed her father and Midbin—who was still shaking his head—and, after the faintest hesitation, me. Her lips were ice-cold.

  The shock of triumph made her voluble. Striding up and down, she spoke with extraordinary rapidity.

  When the light flashed, she too involuntarily closed her eyes. She had felt a strange, terrifying weightlessness, an awful disembodiment, for which she had been unprepared. She thought she had not been actually unconscious, even for an instant, though she had the impression of ceasing to exist as a unique collection of memories, and of being somehow dissolved. Then she had opened her eyes.

  At first she was shocked to find the barn as it had been all her life, abandoned and dusty. Then she realized she had indeed moved through time; the disappearance of the engines and reflector showed she had gone back to the unremodelled workshop.

  Now she saw the barn was not quite as she had known it, even in her childhood, for while it was unquestionably abandoned, it had evidently not long been so. The thick dust was not so thick as she remembered, the sagging cobwebs not so dense.
Straw was still scattered on the floor; it had not yet been entirely carried away by mice or inquisitive nesting birds. Beside the door hung bits of harness beyond repair, some broken bridles, and a faded calendar on which the ink of the numerals 1897 still stood.

  The minute she had allotted this first voyage seemed fantastically short and incredibly long. All the paradoxes she had always brushed aside as of no immediate concern now confronted her. Since she had gone back to a time before she was born, she must always have existed as a visitor prior to her own conception; she could presumably be present during her own childhood and growth, and by making a second and third visit, multiply herself as though in facing mirrors, so that an infinite number of Barbara Haggerwells could occupy a single segment of time.

  A hundred other parallel speculations raced through her mind without interfering with her rapid and insatiable survey of the commonplace features of the barn, features which could never really be commonplace to her since they proved all her speculations so victoriously right.

  Suddenly she shivered with the bitter cold and burst into teeth-chattering laughter. She had made such careful plans to visit the First of January—and had never thought to take along a warm coat.

  She looked at her watch; only twenty seconds had passed. The temptation to defy her agreement with Ace not to step outside the tiny circle of HX-1’s operating field on the initial experiment was almost irresistible. She longed to touch the fabric of the past, to feel the worn boards of the barn, to handle as well as look. Again her thoughts whirled with speculation; again the petty moment stretched and contracted. She spent eternity and instantaneity at once.

  When the moment of return came, she again experienced the feeling of dissolution, followed immediately by the light. When she opened her eyes she was back.

  Midbin, who could not deny Barbara’s disappearance for a full minute while we all watched, nevertheless insisted she had suffered some kind of hallucination. He could offer no explanation of her vanishing before our eyes, but insisted that this and her alleged traveling in time were two separate phenomena. Her conviction she had been back to 1900 he attributed to her emotional eccentricity.

  The logical answer to this obstinate skepticism was to invite him to see for himself. To Ace, of course, belonged the honor of the second journey; he elected to spend three minutes in 1885, returning to report he had found the barn well occupied by both cattle and fowl, and been scared stiff of discovery when dogs set up a furious barking. He brought back with him a new laid egg 67 years old. Or was it? Trips in time are confusing that way.

  Barbara was upset—more than I thought warranted. “We daren’t be anything but invisible spectators,” she scolded. “The faintest indication of our presence, the slightest impingement on the past may change the whole course of events. We have no way of knowing what actions have no consequences—if there can be any. Goodness knows what your idiocy in removing the egg has done. It’s absolutely essential not to betray our presence in any way. Remember this in the future.”

  The next day Midbin spent five minutes in 1820. The barn had not yet been built, and he found himself in a field of wild hay. The faint snick of scythes, and voices not too far off, indicated mowers. Midbin dropped to the ground. His view of the past was restricted to tall grass and some persistent ants who explored his face and hands until the time was up and he returned with broken spears of ripe hay clinging to his clothes.

  I was reminded of Enfandin’s, “Why should I believe my eyes?” by Midbin’s reaction. He did not deny that a phenomenon had taken place, nor that his experience coincided with Barbara’s theories. On the other hand he didn’t admit he had actually been transported into the past. “The mind can do anything, anything at all. Create boils and cancers—why not ants and grass? I don’t know—I don’t know. . . .” And he added abruptly, “No one can help her now.”

  X

  For the next two months Barbara and Ace explored HX-1’s possibilities. They quickly learned its limited range which was, subject to slight variations, little more than a century. When they tried to operate beyond this range the translation simply didn’t take place, though the same feeling of dissolution occurred. When the light faded they were still in the present. Midbin’s venture into the hayfield had been a freak, possibly due to peculiar weather conditions at both ends of the journey. They had not known this at the time nor realized that by hazarding this marginal zone the traveler might be lost. They set 1850 as a safe limit.

  Nor would HX-1 work in reverse; the future remained closed. Also they discovered that time spent in the past consumed an equal amount of time in the present; they could not return to a point a minute after departure when they had been gone for an hour. As near as I could understand Barbara this was because of the limitations of HX-1: duration was set in the present. In order to come back to a time-point not in correspondence with the period actually spent, another engine—or at least another set of controls—would have to be taken into the past. Even then radical changes would have to be made since HX-1 didn’t work for the future.

  Within these limits (and another, more inconvenient one: that they couldn’t visit the identical past moment twice; there was no possibility of meeting one’s time-traveling self) they roamed almost at will. Ace spent a full week in October 1896, walking as far as Philadelphia, enjoying the enthusiasm and fury of the presidential campaign. Knowing President Bryan was not only going to be elected, but would serve three terms, he found it hard indeed to obey Barbara’s stricture and not cover confident Whig bets on Major McKinley.

  Though both sampled the war years they brought back nothing useful to me—no information or viewpoint I couldn’t have got from any of a score of books. Lacking historians’ training or interests, their tidbits were those of limited onlookers, not chroniclers.

  I grew increasingly fretful. I held long colloquies with myself which invariably ended inconclusively. Why not? I asked myself. Surely this is the unique opportunity. Never before has it been possible for an historian to check back at will, to go over an event as often as he might please, to write of the past with the detachment of the present and the accuracy of an eye-witness knowing specifically what to look for. Why don’t you take advantage of HX-1 and see for yourself?

  Against this reasoning I objected—what? Fear? Uneasiness? The superstition that I was tampering with a taboo, with matters forbidden to human limitations? “You mustn’t try any shortcuts. Promise me that, Hodge.” Well, Catty was a darling. She was my beloved wife, but she was neither scholar nor oracle. Woman’s intuition? A respectable phrase, but what did it mean? And didn’t Barbara, who first suggested my using HX-1, have womanly intuition also?

  A half-dozen times I started to speak to Catty. Each time I repressed the words. What was the use of upsetting her? Promise me that, Hodge. But I had not promised. This was something I had to settle for myself.

  What was I afraid of? Because I’d never grasped anything to do with the physical sciences did I attribute some anthropomorphism to their manifestations and, like a savage, fear the spirit imprisoned in what I didn’t understand? I had never thought of myself as hidebound, but I was acting like a 90-year-old professor asked to use a typewriter instead of a goose quill.

  I recalled Tyss’s, “You are the spectator type, Hodgins.” And once I had called Tyss out of the depths of my memory I couldn’t escape his familiar, sardonic, interminable argument. Why are you fussing yourself, Hodgins? What is the point of all this introspective debate? Don’t you know your choice has already been made? And that you have acted according to that decision an infinite number of times and will do so an infinite number of times again? Relax, Hodgins; you have nothing to worry about. Free-will is an illusion; you cannot alter what you are about to decide under the impression that you have decided.

  My reaction to this imagined interjection was frenzied, unreasonable. I cursed Tyss and his damnable philosophy. I cursed the insidiousness of his reasoning which had planted seed in my brain to
sprout at a moment like this. Yet in spite of the violence of my rejection of the words I attributed to Tyss, I accepted one of them. I relaxed. The decision had been made. Not by mechanistic forces, not by blind response to stimulus, but by my own desire.

  And now to my aid came the image of Tyss’s antithesis, Rene Enfandin. Be a skeptic, Hodge; be always the skeptic. Prove all things; hold fast to that which is true. Joking Pilate, asking, What is truth? was blind—but you can see more aspects of the absolute truth than any man has had a chance to see before. Can you use the chance well, Hodge?

  Once I had answered the imaginary question with a wholehearted affirmative and so buttressed my determination to go, I was faced with the problem of telling Catty. I told myself I could not bear the thought of her anxiety; that she would worry despite the fact others had frequently used HX-1. I was sure she would be sick with apprehension while I was gone. No doubt this was all true, but I also remembered her, Promise me you won’t take any shortcuts, Hodge. . . .

  I finally took the weak, the ineffective course. I said I’d decided the only way to face my problem was to spend four or five days going over the actual field of Gettysburg. Here, I explained, unconvincingly, I thought I might at last come to the conclusion whether to scrap all my work and start afresh, or not.

  She pretended to believe me and begged me to take her along. After all, we had spent our honeymoon on battlefields. I pleaded that her presence would distract me; my thoughts would go out to her rather than the problem. Her look was tragic with understanding.

  I dressed in clothes I often used for walking trips, clothes which bore no mark of any fashion and might pass as current wear among the poorer classes in any era of the past hundred years. I put a packet of dried beef in my pocket and started for the workshop.

  As soon as I left the cottage I laughed at my hypersensitivity, at all the to-do I’d made over lying to Catty. This was but the first excursion; I planned many more. There was no reason why she shouldn’t accompany me on them. I grew lighthearted as my conscience eased and I even congratulated myself on my skill in not having told a single technical falsehood to Catty. I began to whistle—never a habit of mine—as I made my way along the path to the workshop.