I did not say anything because I can’t talk very well with my jaw sagging loosely. He went on, “Your remarks last week disturbed me. So I visited this place on Wednesday, something I have not done for—oh, more than a year. I found this coin on the stage, so I knew that I had been...would be...using the equipment again. It took me until tonight to decide to demonstrate it to you.”
I looked at the coin and felt it. “This was in your pocket when we came here tonight?”
“Certainly.”
“But how could it be both in your pocket and my pocket at the same time?”
“Good Lord, man, have you no eyes to see with? No brain to reason with? Can’t you absorb a simple fact simply because it lies outside your dull existence? You fetched it here in your pocket tonight—and we kicked it into last week. You saw. A few days ago I found it here. I placed it in my pocket. I fetched it here tonight. The same coin...or, to be precise, a later segment of its space-time structure, a week more worn, a week more dulled—but what the canaille would call the ‘same’ coin. Although no more identical in fact than is a baby identical with the man the baby grows into. Older.”
I looked at it. “Doctor...push me back in time by a week.”
He stared angrily. “Out of the question!”
“Why not? Won’t it work with people?”
“Eh? Certainly it will work with people.”
“Then why not do it? I’m not afraid. And think what a wonderful thing it would be for the book...if I could testify of my own knowledge that the Twitchell time displacement works.”
“You can report it of your own knowledge. You just saw it.”
“Yes,” I admitted slowly, “but I won’t be believed. That business with the coins...I saw it and I believe it. But anyone simply reading an account of it would conclude that I was gullible, that you had hoaxed me with some simple legerdemain.”
“Damn it, sir!”
“That’s what they would say. They wouldn’t be able to believe that I actually had seen what I reported. But if you were to ship me back just a week, then I could report of my own knowledge—”
“Sit down. Listen to me.” He sat down, but there was no place for me to sit, although he did not seem aware of it. “I have experimented with human beings long ago. And for that reason I resolved never to do it again.”
“Why? Did it kill them?”
“What? Don’t talk nonsense.” He looked at me sharply, added, “You are not to put this in the book.”
“As you say, sir.”
“Some minor experiments showed that living subjects could make temporal displacements without harm. I had confided in a colleague, a young fellow who taught drawing and other matters in the school of architecture. Really more of an engineer than a scientist, but I liked him; his mind was alive. This young chap—it can’t hurt to tell you his name: Leonard Vincent—was wild to try it...really try it; he wanted to undergo major displacement, five hundred years. I was weak. I let him.”
“Then what happened?”
“How should I know? Five hundred years, man! I’ll never live to find out.”
“But you think he’s five hundred years in the future?”
“Or the past. He might have wound up in the fifteenth century. Or the twenty-fifth. The chances are precisely even. There’s an indeterminacy—symmetrical equations. I’ve sometimes thought...no, just a chance similarity in names.”
I didn’t ask what he meant by this because I suddenly saw the similarity, too, and my hair stood on end. Then I pushed it out of my mind; I had other problems. Besides, a chance similarity was all it could be—a man could not get from Colorado to Italy, not in the fifteenth century.
“But I resolved not to be tempted again. It wasn’t science, it added nothing to the data. If he was displaced forward, well and good. But if he was displaced backward...then possibly I sent my friend to be killed by savages. Or eaten by wild animals.”
Or even possibly, I thought, to become a “Great White God.” I kept the thought to myself. “But you needn’t use so long a displacement with me.”
“Let’s say no more about it, if you please, sir.”
“As you wish, Doctor.” But I couldn’t drop it. “Uh, may I make a suggestion?”
“Eh? Speak up.”
“We could get almost the same result by a rehearsal.”
“What do you mean?”
“A complete dry run, with everything done just exactly as if you were intending to displace a living subject—I’ll act out that part. We’ll do everything precisely as if you meant to displace me, right up to the point where you would push that button. Then I’ll understand the procedure ...which I don’t quite, as yet.”
He grumbled a little but he really wanted to show off his toy. He weighed me and set aside metal weights just equal to my hundred and seventy pounds. “These are the same scales I used with poor Vincent.”
Between us we placed them on one side of the stage. “What temporal setting shall we make?” he asked. “This is your show.”
“Uh, you said that it could be set accurately?”
“I said so, sir. Do you doubt it?”
“Oh no, no! Well, let’s see, this is the twenty-fourth of May—suppose we...how about, uh, say thirty-one years, three weeks, one day, seven hours, thirteen minutes, and twenty-five seconds?”
“A poor jest, sir. When I said ‘accurate’ I meant ‘accurate to better than one part in one hundred thousand.’ I have had no opportunity to calibrate to one part in nine hundred million.”
“Oh. You see, Doctor, how important an exact rehearsal is to me, since I know so little about it. Uh, suppose we call it thirty-one years and three weeks. Or is that still too finicky?”
“Not at all. The maximum error should not exceed two hours.” He made his adjustments. “You can take your place on the stage.”
“Is that all?”
“Yes. All but the power. I could not actually make this displacement with the line voltage I used on those coins. But since we aren’t actually going to do it, that doesn’t matter.”
I looked disappointed and was. “Then you don’t actually have what is necessary to produce such a displacement? You were speaking theoretically?”
“Confound it, sir, I was not speaking theoretically.”
“But if you don’t have the power...?”
“I can get the power if you insist. Wait.” He went to a corner of the lab and picked up a phone. It must have been installed when the lab was new; I hadn’t seen one like it since I was awakened. There followed a brisk conversation with the night superintendent of the university’s powerhouse. Dr. Twitchell was not dependent on profanity; he could avoid it entirely and be more biting than most real artists can be when using plainer words. “I am not in the least interested in your opinions, my man. Read your instructions. I have full facilities whenever I wish them. Or can you read? Shall we meet with the president at ten tomorrow morning and have him read them to you? Oh? So you can read? Can you write as well? Or have we exhausted your talents? Then write this down: Emergency full power across the bus bars of the Thornton Memorial Laboratory in exactly eight minutes. Repeat that back.”
He replaced the instrument. “People!”
He went to the control board, made some changes, and waited. Presently, even from where I stood inside the cage, I could see the long hands of three sets of meters swing across their dials and a red light came on at the top of the board. “Power,” he announced.
“Now what happens?”
“Nothing.”
“That’s just what I thought.”
“What do you mean?”
“What I said. Nothing would happen.”
“I’m afraid I don’t understand you. I hope I don’t understand you. What I meant is that nothing would happen unless I closed this pilot switch. If I did, you would be displaced precisely thirty-one years, three weeks.”
“And I still say nothing would happen.”
His face grew da
rk. “I think, sir, you are being intentionally offensive.”
“Call it what you want to. Doctor, I came here to investigate a remarkable rumor. Well, I’ve investigated it. I’ve seen a control board with pretty lights on it; it looks like a set for a mad scientist in a grabbie spectacular. I’ve seen a parlor trick performed with a couple of coins. Not much of a trick, by the way, since you selected the coins yourself and told me how to mark them; any parlor magician could do better. I’ve heard a lot of talk. But talk is cheap. What you claim to have discovered is impossible. By the way, they know that down at the department. Your report wasn’t suppressed; it’s simply filed in the screwball file. They get it out and pass it around now and then for a laugh.”
I thought the poor old boy was going to have a stroke there and then. But I had to stimulate him by the only reflex he had left, his vanity.
“Come out of there, sir. Come out. I’m going to thrash you. With my bare hands I’m going to thrash you.”
The rage he was in, I think he might have managed it, despite age and weight and physical condition. But I answered, “You don’t scare me, Pappy. That dummy button doesn’t scare me either. Go ahead and push it.”
He looked at me, looked at the button, but still he didn’t do anything. I snickered and said, “A hoax, just as the boys said it was. Twitch, you’re a pompous old faker, a stuffed shirt. Colonel Thrushbotham was right.”
That did it.
X
EVEN AS HE stabbed at the button I tried to shout at him not to do it. But it was too late; I was already falling. My last thought was an agonized one that I didn’t want to go through with it. I had chucked away everything and tormented almost to death a poor old man who hadn’t done me any harm—and I didn’t even know which way I was going. Worse, I didn’t know that I would get there.
Then I hit. I don’t think I fell more than four feet but I had not been ready for it. I fell like a stick, collapsed like a sack.
Then somebody was saying, “Where the devil did you come from?”
It was a man, about forty, bald-headed but well built and lean. He was standing facing me with his fists on his hipbones. He looked competent and shrewd and his face was not unpleasant save that at the moment he seemed sore at me.
I sat up and found that I was sitting on granite gravel and pine needles. There was a woman standing by the man, a pleasant pretty woman somewhat younger than he. She was looking at me wide-eyed but not speaking.
“Where am I?” I said foolishly. I could have said, “When am I?” but that would have sounded still more foolish, and besides, I didn’t think of it. One look at them and I knew when I was not—I was sure it was not 1970. Nor was I still in 2001; in 2001 they kept that sort of thing for the beaches. So I must have gone the wrong way.
Because neither one of them wore anything but smooth coats of tan. Not even Sticktite. But they seemed to find it enough. Certainly they were not embarrassed by it.
“One thing at a time,” he objected. “I asked you how you got here?” He glanced up. “Your parachute didn’t stick in the trees, did it? In any case, what are you doing here? This is posted private property; you’re trespassing. And what are you doing in that Mardi Gras getup?”
I didn’t see anything wrong with my clothes—especially in view of the way they were dressed. But I didn’t answer. Other times, other customs—I could see that I was going to have trouble.
She put a hand on his arm. “Don’t, John,” she said gently. “I think he’s hurt.”
He looked at her, glanced back sharply at me. “Are you hurt?”
I tried to stand up, managed it. “I don’t think so. A few bruises, maybe. Uh, what date is today?”
“Huh? Why, it’s the first Sunday in May. The third of May, I think. Is that right, Jenny?”
“Yes, dear.”
“Look,” I said urgently, “I got an awful knock on the head. I’m confused. What’s the date? The whole date?”
“What?”
I should have kept my mouth shut until I could pick it up off something, a calendar or a paper. But I had to know right then; I couldn’t stand to wait. “What year?”
“Brother, you did get a lump. It’s 1970.” I saw him staring at my clothes again.
My relief was almost more than I could stand. I’d made it, I’d made it! I wasn’t too late. “Thanks,” I said. “Thanks an awful lot. You don’t know.” He still looked as if he wanted to call out the reserves, so I added nervously, “I’m subject to sudden attacks of amnesia. Once I lost, uh—five whole years.”
“I should think that would be upsetting,” he said slowly. “Do you feel well enough to answer my questions?”
“Don’t badger him, dear,” she said softly. “He looks like a nice person. I think he’s just made a mistake.”
“We’ll see. Well?”
“I feel all right...now. But I was pretty confused for a minute there.”
“Okay. How did you get here? And why are you dressed that way?”
“To tell the truth, I’m not sure how I got here. And I certainly don’t know where I am. These spells hit me suddenly. As for how I’m dressed... I guess you could call it personal eccentricity. Uh...like the way you’re dressed. Or not dressed.”
He glanced down at himself and grinned. “Oh, yes. I’m quite aware that the way my wife and I are dressed...or not dressed...would call for explanation under some circumstances. But we prefer to make trespassers do the explaining instead. You see, you don’t belong here, dressed that way or any other, while we do—just as we are. These are the grounds of the Denver Sunshine Club.”
JOHN AND JENNY SUTTON were the sort of sophisticated, unshockable, friendly people who could invite an earthquake in for tea. John obviously was not satisfied with my fishy explanations and wanted to cross-examine me, but Jenny held him back. I stuck to my story about “dizzy spells” and said that the last I remembered was yesterday evening and that I had been in Denver, at the New Brown Palace. Finally he said, “Well, it’s quite interesting, even exciting, and I suppose somebody who’s going into Boulder can drop you there and you can get a bus back into Denver.” He looked at me again. “But if I take you back to the clubhouse, people are going to be mighty, mighty curious.”
I looked down at myself. I had been made vaguely uneasy by the fact that I was dressed and they were not—I mean I felt like the one out of order, not they. “John...would it simplify things if I peeled off my clothes too?” The prospect did not upset me; I had never been in one of the bare-skin camps before, seeing no point in them. But Chuck and I had spent a couple of weekends at Santa Barbara and one at Laguna Beach—at a beach skin makes sense and nothing else does.
He nodded. “It certainly would.”
“Dear,” said Jenny, “he could be our guest.”
“Mmm...yes. My only love, you paddle your sweet self into the grounds. Mix around and manage to let it be known that we are expecting a guest from...where had it better be, Danny?”
“Uh, from California. Los Angeles. I actually am from there.” I almost said “Great Los Angeles” and realized that I was going to have to guard my speech. “Movies” were no longer “grabbies.”
“From Los Angeles. That and ‘Danny’ is all that is necessary; we don’t use last names, unless offered. So, honey, you spread the word, as if it were something everybody already knew. Then in about half an hour you have to meet us down by the gate. But come here instead. And fetch my overnight bag.”
“Why the bag, dear?”
“To conceal that masquerade costume. It’s pretty conspicuous, even for anyone who is as eccentric as Danny said he is.”
I got up and went at once behind some bushes to undress, since I wouldn’t have any excuse for locker-room modesty once Jenny Sutton left us. I had to do it; I couldn’t peel down and reveal that I had twenty thousand dollars’ worth of gold, figured at the 1970 standard of sixty dollars an ounce, wrapped around my waist. It did not take long, as I had made a belt out of the
gold, instead of a girdle, the first time I had had trouble getting it off and on to bathe; I had double-looped it and wired it together in front.
When I had my clothes off I wrapped the gold in them and tried to pretend that it all weighed only what clothes should. John Sutton glanced at the bundle but said nothing. He offered me a cigarette—he carried them strapped to his ankle. They were a brand I had never expected to see again.
I waved it but it didn’t light. Then I let him light it for me. “Now,” he said quietly, “that we are alone, do you have anything you want to tell me? If I’m going to vouch for you to the club, I’m honor-bound to be sure, at the very least, that you won’t make trouble.”
I took a puff. It felt raw in my throat. “John, I won’t make any trouble. That’s the last thing on earth that I want.”
“Mmm...probably. Just ‘dizzy spells’ then?”
I thought about it. It was an impossible situation. The man had a right to know. But he certainly would not believe the truth...at least I would not have in his shoes. But it would be worse if he did believe me; it would kick up the very hoorah that I did not want. I suppose that if I had been a real, honest, legitimate time traveler, engaged in scientific research, I would have sought publicity, brought along indisputable proof, and invited tests by scientists.
But I wasn’t; I was a private and somewhat shady citizen, engaged in hanky-panky I didn’t want to call attention to. I was simply looking for my Door into Summer, as quietly as possible.
“John, you wouldn’t believe it if I told you.”
“Mmm...perhaps. Still, I saw a man fall out of empty sky...but he didn’t hit hard enough to hurt him. He’s wearing funny clothes. He doesn’t seem to know where he is or what day it is. Danny, I’ve read Charles Fort, the same as most people. But I never expected to meet a case. But, having met one, I don’t expect the explanation to be as simple as a card trick. So?”
“John, something you said earlier—the way you phrased something— made me think you were a lawyer.”