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I stood. “How about a drink?”
Now he smiled. “Thanks. The exact prescription I want.”
Pouring from a brandy bottle — sometimes it was needful for both a patient and myself, when I must pronounce sentence — I wondered what had triggered my impulse. Kids don’t booze, except a little beer on the sly. Do they? It came to me afresh, here was no longer a kid.
He drank in the way of an experienced if not heavy drinker. How had he learned? He’d been gone barely a month.
I sat again and said: “I don’t ask for secrets, Jack, though you know I hear a lot in my line of work, and keep them. I demand your help in constructing a story, and laying out a program of future behavior, which will get your mother off the hook.”
He frowned. “You’re right. The trouble is, I can’t think what to tell you.”
“The truth, maybe?”
“Doc, you don’t want that. Believe me, you don’t.”
“Beauty is truth, truth beauty-” Why did Keats hand the world that particular piece of BS? He’d studied medicine; he knew better. “Jack, I’ll bet you ten dollars I can relate a dozen true stories which’ll shock you worse than you could ever shock me.”
“I won’t bet,” he said harshly. “It wouldn’t be fair to you.”
I waited.
He tossed off his drink and held out the glass. In the yellow lamplight, gaunt against the winter window, his face congealed with resolution. “Give me a refill, please,” he said, “and I will tell you.”
“Great.” The bottle shook a bit in my grasp as the liquor clucked forth. “I swear to respect any confidentiality.”
He laughed, a rattling noise. “No need for oaths, Doc. You’ll keep quiet.”
I waited.
He sipped, stared past me, and murmured: “I’m glad. It’s been such a burden, through my whole life, never to share the the fact of what I am.”
I streamed smoke from my lips and waited.
He said in a rush, “For the most part I was in the San Francisco area, especially Berkeley. For more than a year.”
My fingers clenched on the pipe bowl.
“Uh-huh.” He nodded. “I came home after a month’s absence. But I’d spent about eighteen months away. From the fall of 1969 to the end of 1970.”
After a moment, he added: “That’s not a whole year and a half. But you’ve got to count my visits to the further future.”
Steam hissed in the radiator. I saw a sheen of sweat on the forehead of my all but adopted son. He gripped his tumbler as tightly as I my pipe. Yet in spite of the tension in him, his voice remained level.
“You have a time machine?” I breathed.
He shook his head. “No. I move around in time by myself. Don’t ask me how. I don’t know.”
His smile jerked forth. “Sure, Doc,” he said. “Paranoia. The delusion that I’m something special in the cosmos. Okay, I’ll give you a demonstration.” He waved about. “Come here, please. Check. Make certain I’ve put no mirrors, trapdoors, gimmickry in your own familiar office.”
Numbly, I felt around him, though it was obvious he’d had no chance to bring along, or rig, any apparatus.
“Satisfied?” he asked. “Well, I’ll project myself into the future. How far? Half an hour? No, too long for you to sit here gnawing your pipe. Fifteen minutes, then.” He checked his watch against my wall clock. “It’s 4:17, agreed? I’ll reappear at 4:30, plus or minus a few seconds.” Word by word: “Just make sure nobody or nothing occupies this chair at that period. I can’t emerge in the same space as another solid body.”
I stood back and trembled. “Go ahead, Jack,” I said through the thuttering in my veins.
Tenderness touched him. He reached to squeeze my hand. “Good old Doc. So long.”
And he was gone. I heard a muted whoosh of air rushing in where he had sat, and nothing else. The chair stood empty. I felt, and no form occupied it.
I sat down once more at my desk, and stared for a quarter of an hour which I don’t quite remember.
Abruptly, there he was, seated as he had been.
I struggled not to faint. He hurried to me. “Doc, here, take it easy, everything’s okay, here, have a drink—”
Later he gave me a one-minute show, stepping back from that near a future to stand beside himself, until the first body vanished.
Night gathered.
“No, I don’t know how it works,” he said. “But then, I don’t know how my muscles work, not in the way you know — and you’ll agree your scientific information is only a glimmer on the surface of a mystery.”
“How does it feel?” I asked, and noticed in surprise the calm which had come upon me. I’d been stu
“Hard to describe.” He frowned into darkness. “I… will myself backward or forward in time… the way I will to, oh, pick my glass off your desk. In other words, I order whatever-it-is to move me, the same as we order our fingers to do something, and it happens.”
He searched for words before he went on: “I’m in a shadow world while I time-travel. Lighting varies from zero to gray. If I’m crossing more than one day-and-night period, it flickers. Objects look dim, foggy, flat. Then I decide to stop, and I stop, and I’m back in normal time and solidness… No air reaches me on my way. I have to hold my breath, and emerge occasionally for a lungful if the trip takes that long in my personal time.”
“Wait,” I said. “If you can’t breathe en route, can’t touch anything or be touched, can’t be seen-how come you have the feeble vision you do? How can light affect you?”
“I don’t know either, Doc. I’ve read physics texts, however, trying to get a notion about that as well as everything else. And, oh, it must be some kind of force which moves me. A force operating in at least four dimensions, nevertheless a force. If it has an electromagnetic component, I can imagine how a few photons might get caught in the field of it and carried along. Matter, even ionized matter, has rest mass and therefore can’t be affected in this fashion… That’s a layman’s guess. I wish I dared bring a real scientist in on this.”
“Your guess is too deep for me already, friend. Uh, you said a crossing isn’t instantaneous, as far as you yourself are concerned. How long does it take? How many minutes per year, or whatever?”
“No particular relationship. Depends on me. I feel the effort I’m exerting, and can gauge it roughly. By, well, straining, I can move… faster… than otherwise. That leaves me exhausted, which seems to me to prove that time traveling uses body energy to generate and apply the thrusting force… It’s never taken more than a few minutes, according to my watch; and that was a trip through several centuries.”
“When you were a baby—” My voice halted.
He nodded anew. “Yeah, I’ve heard about the incident. Fear of falling’s an instinct, isn’t it? I suppose when my mother dropped me, I threw myself into the past by sheer reflex and thereby caused her to drop me.”
He took a swallow of brandy. “My ability grew as I grew. I probably have no limit now, if I can stop at need, along the way, to rest. But I am limited in the mass I can carry along. That’s only a few pounds, including clothes. More, and I can’t move; it’s like being weighted down. If you grabbed me, for instance, I’d be stuck in normal time till you let go, because you’re too much for me to haul. I couldn’t just leave you behind; the force acts, or tries to act, on everything in direct contact with me.” A faint smile. “Except Earth itself, if I happen to be barefoot. I suppose that much mass, bound together not only by gravitation but by other, even stronger forces, has a — what? — a cohesion? — of its own.”
“You warned me against putting a solid object where you pla
“Right,” he answered. “I can’t, in that case. I’ve experimented. Traveling through time, I can move around meanwhile in space if I want. That’s how I managed to appear next to myself. By the way, the surface I’m on may rise or sink, but I rise or sink likewise, same as when a person stands somewhere in normal time. And, aside from whatever walking I do, I stay on the same geographical spot. Never mind that this planet is spi