Part 14

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 youre accusing Ace and me of faking youll 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.”

“Hay, 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 weve 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 hen-house. 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 newlaid 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 darent be anything but spectators, as unseen as possible.”

“Why? Ive 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 isnt a joke.”

“It isn’t a wake either. I can’t see the harm in bringing back tangible proof. Loss of one egg isnt going to send the prices up for 1885 and cause retroactive inflation. Youre 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. Doesnt 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.”

_18._ _THE WOMAN TEMPTED ME_

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

“Ay? What do you mean?”

“Well, youve 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 youve 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 couldnt 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.

“Oh Hodge! What a thing for an historian to say.”

“Catty, I can’t.”

The conversation made me nervous and fidgetty. It also made me remember much I preferred to let fade: the Grand Army, Sprovis, the counterfeit pesetas.... All the evil I had unwillingly abetted. If a man did nothing, literally nothing, all his life, then he might be free of culpability. Manichaeism, said Enfandin. No absolution.

My idleness, I knew very well, heightened all these feelings of degradation. Were I able to continue in the happy, cocksure way I had gone about my note-gathering and the writing of volume one, I would have neither the time nor susceptibility to be plagued by this disquiet. As it was I seemed to be able to do nothing but act as audience for what was going on in the workshop.

With childish eagerness Barbara and Ace explored HX-1’s possibilities for the next two months. They quickly learned that its range was limited to little more than a century, though this limit was subject to slight variations. When they tried to operate beyond this range the translation simply didnt 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 set 1850 as a safe limit, with an undefined marginal zone further back which was not to be hazarded lest conditions change during the journey and the traveler be lost.

Why this limit existed at all was a matter of dispute between them, a dispute of which I must admit I understood little. Barbara spoke of subjective factors which seemed to mean that HX-1 worked slightly differently in the case of each person it transported; Ace of magnetic fields and power relays, which didnt mean anything to me at all. The only thing they agreed on was that the barrier was not immutable; HX-2 or 3 or 20, if they were ever built, would undoubtedly overcome it.

Nor would HX-1 work in reverse; the future remained closed, probably for similar reasons, whatever they were. Here again they disputed, Ace holding an HX could be built for this purpose, Barbara insisting that new equations would have to be worked out.

They confirmed their tentative theory 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, this was because duration was set in the present. In order to come back to a time-point not in correspondence with the period actually spent, another HX, or at least another set of controls, would have to be taken into the past. And then they would not work since HX-1 could not penetrate the future.

The most inconvenient circumscription was the inability of one person to visit the same past moment twice. When the attempt was made the feeling of dissolution did not occur, the light went on and off with no effect upon the would-be traveler standing beneath it. Here Barbara’s “subjective factor” was triumphant, but why, or how it worked, they did not know. Nor did they know what would happen to a traveler who attempted to overlap by being already on the spot prior to a previous visit; it was too dangerous to try.

Within these limits 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 couldnt have got from any of a score of books. Lacking historians’ interests or training, their tidbits were those of curious onlookers, not probing chroniclers. It was tantalizing to know that Barbara had seen Secretary Stanton at the York depot or that Ace had overheard a farmer say casually that Southron scouts had stopped at his place the day before and they had thought neither incident worth investigating further.

I grew increasingly fretful. I held long colloquies with myself which always ended inconclusively. _Why not?_ I asked. _Surely this is the unique opportunity. Never before has it been possible for an historian to check back at will, to select a particular moment for personal scrutiny, to write of the past with the detachment of the present and the accuracy of an eyewitness knowing specifically what to look for. Why don’t you take advantage of HX-1 and see for yourself?_

Against this I objected—what? Fear? Uneasiness? The “subjective factor” in HX-1? The superstitious notion that I might be tampering with a taboo, with matters forbidden to human shortcomings? _You mustnt try any shortcuts. Promise me that, Hodge._ Well, Catty was a darling. She was my beloved wife, but she was neither scholar nor oracle. On what grounds did she protest? Woman’s intuition? A respectable phrase, but what did it mean? And didnt Barbara, who first suggested my using HX-1, have womanly intuition also?

A half-dozen times I tried to steer our talk in the direction of my thoughts; each time I allowed the words to drift to another topic. 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 didnt understand? (But HX-1 _did_ have subjective factors.) I had never thought of myself as hidebound, but I was acting like a ninety-yearold 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 him out of my memory I couldnt 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 it 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, nor by blind response to stimulus, but by my own desire.

And now to my aid came the image of Tyss’s antithesis, René 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? That is the only question._

Once I could answer it with a vigorous affirmative, and so buttress the determination to go, I was faced with the problem of telling Catty. I could not shut her out of so important a move. 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, for my object could not be accomplished in a matter of minutes or hours. I was sure she would be sick with apprehension during the days I would be gone. No doubt this was all true, but I also remembered, _Promise me, Hodge_....

I finally took the weak, the ineffective course. I said I’d decided the only way to face my problem was to go to Gettysburg and spend three or four days going over the actual field. 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.

Her faintly oblique eyes were inscrutable. She pretended to believe me and begged me to take her along. After all, we had spent our honeymoon on battlefields.

Would it be possible? Two people had never stood under the reflector together, but surely it would work? I was tempted, but I could not subject Catty to the risk, however slight. Besides, how could I explain?

“But Catty, with you there I’d be thinking of you instead of the problem.”

“Ah, Hodge, have we already been married so long you must get away from me to think?”

“No matter how long, that time will never come. Perhaps I’m wrong, Catty. It’s just a feeling I have.”

Her look was tragic with understanding. “You must do as you think right. Don’t ... don’t be gone too long, my dear.”

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 others for the months after Gettysburg. There was no reason why she shouldnt 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.

Barbara was alone. Her ginger hair gleamed in the light of a gas globe; her eyes were green as they always were when she was exultant. “Well, Hodge?”

“Well, Barbara, I....”

“Have you told Catty?”

“Not exactly. How did you know?”

“I knew before you did, Hodge. After all, we’re not strangers. All right. How long do you want to stay?”

“Four days.”

“That’s long for a first trip. Don’t you think you’d better try a few sample minutes?”

“Why? Ive seen you and Ace go often enough and heard your accounts. I’ll take care of myself. Have you got it down fine enough yet so you can invariably pick the hour of arrival?”

“Hour and minute,” she answered confidently. “What’ll it be?”

“About midnight of June 30, 1863,” I answered. “I want to come back on the night of July Fourth.”

“Youll have to be more exact than that. For the return, I mean. The dials are set on seconds.”

“All right, make it midnight going and coming then.”

“Have you a watch that keeps perfect time?”

“I don’t know about perfect—” “Take this one. It’s synchronized with the master control clock.” She handed me a large, rather awkward timepiece which had two independent faces side by side. “We had a couple made like this; the duplicate dials were useful before we were able to control HX-1 so exactly. One shows 1952 Haggershaven time.”

“Ten thirty-three and fourteen seconds,” I said.

“Yes. The other will show 1863 time. You won’t be able to reset the first dial—but for goodness sake remember to keep it wound—and set the second for ... 11:54, zero. That means in six minutes youll leave, to arrive at midnight. Remember to keep that one wound too, for youll go by that regardless of variations in local clocks. Whatever else happens, be in the center of the barn at midnight—allow yourself some leeway—by midnight, July Fourth. I don’t want to have to go wandering around 1863 looking for you.”

“You won’t. I’ll be here.”

“Five minutes. Now then, food.”

“I have some,” I answered, slapping my pocket.

“Not enough. Take this concentrated chocolate along. I suppose it won’t hurt to drink the water if youre not observed, but avoid their food. One never knows what chain might be started by the casual theft—or purchase, if you had enough old coins—of a loaf of bread. The possibilities are limitless and frightening. Listen: how can I impress on you the importance of doing nothing that could possibly change the future—our present? I’m sure to this day Ace doesnt understand, and I tremble every moment he spends in the past. The most trivial action may begin a series of disastrous consequences. Don’t be seen, don’t be heard. Make your trip as a ghost.”

“Barbara, I promise I’ll neither assassinate General Lee nor give the North the idea of a modern six-barreled cannon.”

“Four minutes. It’s not a joke, Hodge.”

“Believe me,” I said, “I understand.”

She looked at me searchingly. Then she shook her head and began making her round of the engines, adjusting the dials. I slid under the glass ring as I’d so often seen her do and stood casually under the reflector. I was not in the least nervous. I don’t think I was even particularly excited.

“Three minutes,” said Barbara.

I patted my breast pocket. Notebook, pencils. I nodded.

She ducked under the ring and came toward me. “Hodge....”

“Yes?”

She put her arms on my shoulders, leaning forward. I kissed her, a little absently. “Clod!”

I looked at her closely, but there were none of the familiar signs of anger. “A minute to go, it says here,” I told her.

She drew away and went back. “All set. Ready?”

“Ready,” I answered cheerfully. “See you midnight, July Fourth, 1863.”

“Right. Goodbye, Hodge. Glad you didnt tell Catty.”

The expression on her face was the strangest I’d ever seen her wear. I could not, then or now, quite interpret it. Doubt, malice, suffering, vindictiveness, entreaty, love, were all there as her hand moved the switch. I began to answer something—perhaps to bid her wait—then the light made me blink and I too experienced the shattering feeling of transition. My bones seemed to fly from each other; every cell in my body exploded to the ends of space.

The instant of translation was so brief it is hard to believe all the multitude of impressions occurred simultaneously. I was sure my veins were drained of blood, my brain and eyeballs dropped into a bottomless void, my thoughts pressed to the finest powder and blown a universe away. Most of all, I knew the awful sensation of being, for that tiny fragment of time, not Hodgins McCormick Backmaker, but part of an _I_ in which the I that was me merged all identity.

Then I opened my eyes. I was emotionally shaken; my knees and wrists were watery points of helplessness, but I was alive and functioning, with my individuality unimpaired. The light had vanished. I was in darkness save for faint moonlight coming through the cracks in the barn. The sweetish smell of cattle was in my nostrils, and the slow, ponderous stamp of hooves in my ears. I had gone back through time.

_19._ _GETTYSBURG_

The barking of the dogs was frenzied, filled with the hoarse note indicating they had been raising the alarm for a long time without being heeded. I knew they must have been baying at the alien smells of soldiers for the past day, so I was not apprehensive that their scent of me would bring investigation. How Barbara and Ace had escaped detection on journeys which didnt coincide with abnormal events was beyond me; with such an unnerving racket in prospect I would either have given up the trips or moved the apparatus.

Strange, I reflected, that the cows and horses were undisturbed. That no hysterical chicken leaped from the roost in panic. Only the dogs scented my unnatural presence. Dogs who, as Mr Haggerwells remarked, are supposed to sense things beyond the perceptions of man.

Warily I picked my way past the livestock and out of the barn, fervently hoping the dogs were tied, for I had no mind to start my adventure by being bitten. Barbara’s warnings seemed inadequate indeed; one would think she or Ace might have devised some method of neutralizing the infernal barking. But of course they could hardly do so without violating her rule of non-interference.