Sense of Wonder: A Century of Science Fiction (294 page)

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; there’s no danger. 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 fifty-two years and a hundred and fifty-three days,” she informed us conversationally. “Purely arbitrary. One date is as good as another, but January 1, 1900, is an almost automatic choice. I’ll be gone sixty seconds. Ready, Ace?”

“Ready.” He had been slowly circling the engines, checking the dials. He took his place before the largest, the monster in the corner, 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.”

“Okay. 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 the 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.”

“Ten seconds,” said Ace firmly.

Still I couldn’t think with any clarity. She had stood there; then she was gone. What…? Midbin was right: we had let her go to destruction. Certainly more than a minute had passed by now.

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

She stood perfectly still, overwhelmed. Then 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, without pause, almost a little drunkenly. In her excitement her words cluttered her tongue; from time to time she had to go back and repeat a phrase or sentence to make it intelligible.

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 actually been unconscious, even for an instant, though she had an 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 unremodeled 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 birds. Alongside the door hung bits of harness beyond repair, some broken bridles, and a faded calendar on which the ink of the numerals 1897 was still bright.

The minute she had allotted this first voyage seemed fantastically short and incredibly long. All the paradoxes she had brushed aside as of no immediate concern now confronted her. Since she had gone back to a time before she was born, she must 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 on 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-l’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.

Suppose…But she had a thousand suppositions and questions. Was she really herself in the flesh, or in some mental projection? A pinch would do no good; that might be projection also. Would she be visible to the people of the time, or was she a ghost from the future? Oh, there was so much to learn, so much to encounter!

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 rubbed his belly and then his thinning hair. “Hallucination,” he propounded at last, “a logical, consistent hallucination. Answer to an overriding wish.”

“You mean Barbara was never gone?” asked Ace. “Was she visible to you—or Mr. H. or Hodge—during that minute?”

“Illusion,” said Midbin, “group illusion brought on by suggestion and anxiety.”

“Nonsense,” exclaimed Barbara. “Unless you’re accusing Ace and me of faking you’ll have to account for what you just called the logical consistency of it. Your group illusion and my individual hallucination fitting so neatly together.”

Midbin recovered some of his poise. “The two phenomena are separate, connected only by some sort of emotional hypnosis. Certainly your daydream of having been back in 1900 is an emotionally induced aberration.”

“And your daydream that I wasn’t here for a minute?”

“The eyes are quickly affected by the feelings. Note tears, ‘seeing red,’ and so forth.”

“Very well, Oliver. The only thing to do is to let you try HX- 1 yourself.”

“Hey, my turn’s supposed to be next,” protested Ace.

“Of course. But no one is going to use it again today. Tomorrow morning. Bring Catty, Hodge, if she wants to come, but please don’t say anything to anyone else till we’ve made further demonstrations, otherwise we’ll be besieged by fellows wanting to take short jaunts into popular years.”

I had little inclination to discuss what had happened with anyone, even Catty. Not that I shared Midbin’s theory of nothing material having taken place; I knew I’d not seen Barbara for sixty seconds, and I was convinced her account of them was accurate. What confused me was the shock to my preconceptions involved in her proof. If time and space, matter and energy were the same, as fog and ice and water are the same, then I—the physical I at least—and Catty, the world and the universe must be, as Enfandin had insisted, mere illusion. In that sense Midbin had been right.

I went furtively to the workshop next day without telling Catty, as though we were all engaged in some dark necromancy, some sacrilegious rite.

Apparently I was the only one who had spent an anxious night; Mr. Haggerwells looked proud, Barbara looked satisfied, Ace cocky, and even Midbin, for no understandable reason, benign.

“All here?” inquired Ace. “I’m eager as a fox in a henhouse. Three minutes in 1885. Why 1885? I don’t know; a year when nothing much happened, I suppose. Ready, Barbara?”

He returned to report he had found the barn well occupied by both cattle and fowl, and been scared stiff of discovery when the dogs set up a furious barking.

“That pretty well settles the question of corporeal presence,” I remarked.

“Not at all,” said Mr. Haggerwells unexpectedly. “Dogs are notoriously psychic.”

“Ah,” cried Ace, bringing his hands from behind his back, “look at this. I could hardly have picked it up with psychic feelers.”

“This” was a new-laid egg, sixty-seven years old. Or was it? Trips in time are confusing that way.

Barbara was upset, more than I thought warranted. “Oh, Ace, how could you be so foolish? We daren’t be anything but spectators, as unseen as possible.”

“Why? I’ve a notion to court my grandmother and wind up as my own grandfather.”

“Don’t be stupid. 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 with the egg has done. It’s absolutely essential not to betray ourselves in any way. Please remember this in future.”

“You mean, ‘Remember this in past,’ don’t you?”

“Ace, this isn’t a joke.”

“It isn’t a wake either. I can’t see the harm in bringing back tangible proof. Loss of one egg isn’t going to send the prices up for 1885 and cause retroactive inflation. You’re making a mountain out of a molehill—or an omelette out of a single egg.”

She shrugged helplessly. “Oliver, I hope you won’t be so foolish.”

“Since I don’t expect to arrive in, say, 1820, I can safely promise neither to steal eggs nor court Ace’s female ancestors.”

He was gone for five minutes. The barn had apparently not yet been built in 1820, and he found himself on a slight rise in a field of wild hay. The faint snick of scythes, and voices not too far off, indicated mowers. He 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.

“At least that’s what I imagined I saw,” he concluded.

“Did you imagine these?” asked Ace, pointing to the straws.

“Probably. It’s at least as likely as time travel.”

“But what about corroboration? Your experience, and Barbara’s, and Ace’s confirm each other. Doesn’t that mean anything?”

“Certainly. Only I’m not prepared to say what. 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.…”

After more fruitless argument, he and I left the workshop. I was again reminded of Enfandin—Why should I believe my eyes? I felt though that Midbin was carrying skepticism beyond rational limits; Barbara’s case was proved.

“Yes, yes,” he answered when I said this. “Why not?”

I puzzled over his reply. Then he added abruptly, “No one can help her now.”

XVIII.

THE WOMAN TEMPTED ME

Gently, Catty said, “I’ve never understood why you cut yourself off from the past the way you have, Hodge.”

“Ay? What do you mean?”

“Well, you’ve not communicated with your father or mother since you left home fourteen years ago. You say you had a dear friend in the man from Haiti, yet you’ve never tried to find out whether he lived or died.”

“Oh, that way. I thought you meant…something different.” By not taking advantage of Barbara’s offer I certainly was cutting myself off from the past.

“Yes?”

“Well, I guess more or less everyone at the Haven has done the same thing. Let outside ties grow weak, I mean. You for one—”

“But I have no parents, no friends anywhere else. All my life is here.”

“Well, so is mine.”

“Ah, dear Hodge, it is unlike you to be so indifferent.”

“Catty darling, you were brought up comfortably in an atmosphere knowing nothing of indenting or sharecropping, of realizing the only escape from wretchedness was in a miracle—usually translated as a winning number in the lottery. I can’t convey to you the meaning of utterly loveless surroundings, I can only say that affection was a luxury my mother and father couldn’t afford.”

“Perhaps not, but you can afford it. Now. And nothing of what you have said applies to Enfandin.”

I squirmed shamefacedly. My ingratitude and callousness must be apparent to everyone; even Barbara, I remembered, had once asked me much the same questions Catty asked now. How could I explain, even to my own satisfaction, how procrastination and guilt made it impossible for me to take the simple steps to discover what had happened to my friend? By a tremendous effort I might have broken through the inertia years ago, just after Enfandin had been wounded, but each day and month between confirmed the impossibility more strongly. “Let the past take care of itself,” I muttered.