Dear Mr. Davis: Re: the stock you inquired about. Dividends on the larger block were paid from first quarter 1971 to second quarter 1980 on the original shares, to a trust held in favor of a party named Heinicke. Our reorganization took place in 1980 and the abstract at hand is somewhat obscure, but it appears that the equivalent shares (after reorganization) were sold to Cosmopolitan Insurance Group, which still holds them. Regarding the smaller block of stock, it was held (as you suggested) by Belle D. Gentry until 1972, when it was assigned to Sierra Acceptances Corporation, who broke it up and sold it piecemeal "over the counter." The exact subsequent history of each share and its equivalent after reorganization could be traced if needed, but more time would be required. If this department can be of any further assistance to you, please feel free to call on us. Y. E. Reuther, Ch. A ccl.
After quite a long time I phoned Dr. Albrecht. They rounded him up and I told him who I was, since my office phone had no visual. "I recognized your voice," he answered. "Hi, there, son. How are you getting along with your new job?" "Well enough. They haven't offered me a partnership yet." "Give them time. Happy otherwise? Find yourself fitting back in?" "Oh, sure! If I had known what a great place here and now is I'd have taken the Sleep earlier. You couldn't hire me to go back to 1970." "Oh, come now! I remember that year pretty well. I was a kid then on a farm in Nebraska. I used to hunt and fish. I had fun. More than I have now." "Well, to each his own. I like it now. But look, Doc, I didn't call up just to talk philosophy; I've got a little problem." "Well, let's have it. It ought to be a relief; most people have big problems." "Doc? Is it at all possible for the Long Sleep to cause amnesia?" He hesitated before replying. "It is conceivably possible. I can't say that I've ever seen a case, as such. 1 mean unconnected with other causes." "What are the things that cause amnesia?" "Any number of things. The commonest, perhaps, is the patient's own subconscious wish. He forgets a sequence of events, or rearranges them, because the facts are unbearable to him. That's a functional amnesia in the raw. Then there is the old-fashioned knock on the head-amnesia from trauma. Or it might be amnesia through suggestion . . . under drugs or hypnosis. What's the matter, bub? Can't you find your checkbook?" "It's not that. So far as I know, I'm getting along just fine now. But I can't get some things straight that happened before I took the Sleep . . . and it's got me worried." "Mmm ... any possibility of any of the causes I mentioned?" "Yes," I said slowly. "Uh, all of them, except maybe the bump on the head . . . and even that might have happened while I was drunk." "I neglected to mention," he said dryly, "the commonest temporary amnesia-pulling a blank while under the affluence of alcohol. See here, son, why don't you come see me and we'll talk it over in detail? If I can't tag what is biting you-I'm not a psychiatrist, you know-I can turn you over to a hypno-analyst who will peel back your memory like an onion and tell you why you were late to school on the fourth of February your second-grade year. But he's pretty expensive, so why not give me a whirl first?" I said, "Cripes, Doe, I've bothered you too much already and you are pretty stuffy about taking money." "Son, I'm always interested in my people; they're all the family I have." So I put him off by saying that I would call him the first of the week if I wasn't straightened out. I wanted to think about it anyhow. Most of the lights went out except in my office; a Hired Girl, scrubwoman type, looked in, twigged that the room was still occupied, and rolled silently away. I still sat there. Presently Chuck Freudenberg stuck his head in and said, "I thought you left long ago. Wake up and finish your sleep at home." I looked up. "Chuck, I've got a wonderful idea. Let's buy a barrel of beer and two straws." He considered it carefully. "Well, it's Friday ... and I always like to have a head on Monday; it lets me know what day it is." "Carried and so ordered. Wait a second while I stuff some things in this brief case." We had some beers, then we had some food, then we had more beers at a place where the music was good, then we moved on to another place where there was no music and the booths had hush linings and they didn't disturb you as long as you ordered something about once an hour. We talked. I showed him the patent records. Chuck looked over the Eager Beaver prototype. "That's a real nice job, Dan. I'm proud of you, boy. I'd like your autograph." "But look at this one." I gave him the drafting-machine patent papers. "Some ways this one is even nicer. Dan, do you realize that you have probably had more influence on the present state of the art than, well, than Edison had in his period? You know that, boy?" "Cut it out, Chuck; this is serious." I gestured abruptly at the pile of photostats. "Okay, so I'm responsible for one of them. But I can't be responsible for the other one. I didn't do it . . . unless I'm completely mixed up about my own life before I took the Sleep. Unless I've got amnesia." "You've been saying that for the past twenty minutes. But you don't seem to have any open circuits. You're no crazier than is normal in an engineer." I banged the table, making the stems dance. "I've got to know!" "Steady there. So what are you going to do?" "Huh?" I pondered it. "I'm going to pay a psychiatrist to dig it out of me." He sighed. "I thought you might say that. Now look, Dan, let's suppose you pay this brain mechanic to do this and he reports that nothing is wrong, your memory is in fine shape, and all your relays are closed. What then?" "That's impossible." "That's what they told Columbus. You haven't even mentioned the most likely explanation." "Huh? What?" Without answering he signaled the waiter and told it to bring back the big phone book, extended area. I said, "What's the matter? You calling the wagon for me?" "Not yet." He thumbed through the enormous book, then stopped and said, "Dan, scan this." I looked. He had his finger on "Davis." There were columns of Davises. But where he had his finger there were a dozen "D. B. Davises"-from "Dabney" to "Duncan." There were three "Daniel B. Davises." One of them was me. "That's from less than seven million people," he pointed out. "Want to try your luck on more than two hundred and fifty million?" "It doesn't prove anything," I said feebly. "No," he agreed, "it doesn't. It would be quite a coincidence, I readily agree, if two engineers with such similar talents happened to be working on the same sort of thing at the same time and just happened to have the same last name and the same initials. By the laws of statistics we could probably approximate just how unlikely it is that it would happen. But people forget-especially those who ought to know better, such as yourself-that while the laws of statistics tell you how unlikely a particular coincidence is, they state just as firmly that coincidences do happen. This looks like one. I like that a lot better than I like the theory that my beer buddy has slipped his cams. Good beer buddies are hard to come by." "What do you think I ought to do?" "The first thing to do is not to waste your time and money on a psychiatrist until you try the second thing. The second thing is to find out the first name of this `D. B. Davis' who filed this patent. There will be some easy way to do that. Likely as not his first name will be `Dexter.' Or even `Dorothy.' But don't trip a breaker if it is `Daniel,' because the middle name might be `Berzowski' with a social-security number different from yours. And the third thing to do, which is really the first, is to forget it for now and order another round." So we did, and talked of other things, particularly women. Chuck had a theory that women were closely related to machinery, but utterly unpredictable by logic. He drew graphs on the table top in beer to prove his thesis. Sometime later I said suddenly, "If there were real time travel, I know what I would do." "Huh? What are you talking about?" "About my problem. Look, Chuck, I got here-got to `now' I mean-by a sort of half-baked, horse-and-buggy time travel. But the trouble is I can't go back. All the things that are worrying me happened thirty years ago. I'd go back and dig out the truth if there were such a thing as real time travel." He stared at me. "But there is." "What?" He suddenly sobered. "I shouldn't have said that." I said, "Maybe not, but you already have said it. Now you'd better tell me what you mean before I empty this here stein over your head." "Forget it, Dan. I made a slip." "Talk!" "That's just what I can't do." He glanced around. No one was near us. "It's classified." "Time travel classified? Good God, why?" "Hell, boy, didn't you ever work for the government? They'd classify sex if they could. There doesn't have to be a reason; it's just their policy. But it is classified and I'm bound by it. So lay off." "But-Quit fooling around about it, Chuck; this is important to me. Terribly important." When he didn't answer and looked stubborn I said, "You can tell me. Shucks, I used to have a 'Q' clearance myself. Never suspended, either. It's just that I'm no longer with the government." "What's a `Q' clearance?" I explained and presently he nodded. "You mean an `Alpha' status. You must have been hot stuff, boy; I only rated a `Beta.'" "Then why can't you tell me?" "Huh? You know why. Regardless of your rated status, you don't have the necessary `Need to Know' qualification." "The hell I don't! `Need to Know' is what I've got most of." But he wouldn't budge, so finally I said in disgust, "I don't think there is such a thing. I think you just had a belch back up on you." He stared at me solemnly for a while, then he said, "Danny." "Huh?" "I'm going to tell you. Just remember your `Alpha' status, boy. I'm going to tell you because it can't hurt anything and I want you to realize that it couldn't possibly be of use to you in your problem. It's time travel, all right, but it's not practical. You can't use it." "Why not?" "Give me a chance, will you? They never smoothed the bugs out of it and it's not even theoretically possible that they ever will. It's of no practical value whatsoever, even for research. It's a mere by-product of NullGrav-that's why they classified it." "But, hell, NullGrav is declassified." "What's that got to do with it? If this was commercial, too, maybe they'd unwrap it. But shut up." I'm afraid I didn't, but I'd rather tell this as if I had. During Chuck's senior year at the University of Colorado-Boulder, that is-he had earned extra money as a lab assistant. They had a big cryogenics lab there and at first he had worked in that. But the school had a juicy defense contract concerned with the Edinburgh field theory and they had built a big new physics laboratory in the mountains out of town. Chuck was reassigned there to Professor Twitchell-Dr. Hubert Twitchell, the man who just missed the Nobel Prize and got nasty about it. "Twitch got the notion that if he polarized around another axis he could reverse the gravitational field instead of leveling it off. Nothing happened. So he fed what he had done back into the computer and got wild-eyed at the results. He never showed them to me, of course. He put two silver dollars into the test cage they still used hard money around those parts then-after making me mark them. He punched the solenoid button and they disappeared. "Now that is not much of a trick," Chuck went on. `Properly, he should have followed up by making them reappear out of the nose of a little boy who volunteers to come up on the stage. But he seemed satisfied, so I was-I was paid by the hour. "A week later one of those cartwheels reappeared. Just one. But before that, one afternoon while I was cleaning up after he had gone home, a guinea pig showed up in the cage. It didn't belong in the lab and I hadn't seen it around before, so I took it over to the bio lab on my way home. They counted and weren't short any pigs, although it's hard to be certain with guinea pigs, so I took it home and made a pet out of it. "After that single silver dollar came back Twitch got so worked up he quit shaving. Next time he used two guinea pigs from the bio lab. One of them looked awfully familiar to me, but I didn't see it long because he pushed the panic button and they both disappeared. "When one of them came back about ten days later-the one that didn't look like mine-Twitch knew for sure he had it. Then the resident 0-in-C for the department of defense came around-a chair-type colonel who used to be a professor himself, of botany. Very military type . . . Twitch had no use for him. This colonel swore us both to double-dyed secrecy, over and above our `status' oaths. He seemed to think that he had the greatest thing in military logistics since Caesar invented the carbon copy. His idea was that you could send divisions forward or back to a battle you had lost, or were going to lose, and save the day. The enemy would never figure out what had happened. He was crazy in hearts and spades, of course . . . and he didn't get the star he was bucking for. But the `Critically Secret' classification he stuck on it stayed, so far as I know, right up to the present. I've never seen a disclosure on it." "It might have some military use," I argued, "it seems to me, if you could engineer it to take a division of soldiers at a time. No, wait a minute. I see the hitch. You always had `em paired. It would take two divisions, one to go forward, one to go back. One division you would lose entirely . . . I suppose it would be more practical to have a division at the right time in the first place." "You're right, but your reasons are wrong. You don't have to use two divisions or two guinea pigs or two anything. You simply have to match the masses. You could use a division of men and a pile of rocks that weighed as much. It's an action-reaction situation, corollary with Newton's Third Law." He started drawing in the beer drippings again. "MV equals MV ... the basic rocket ship formula. The cognate time-travel formula is MT equals MT." "I still don't see the hitch. Rocks are cheap." "Use your head, Danny. With a rocket ship you can aim the kinkin' thing. But which direction is last week? Point to it. Just try. You haven't the slightest idea which mass is going back and which one is going forward. There's no way to orient the equipment." I shut up. It would be embarrassing to a general to expect a division of fresh shock troops and get nothing but a pile of gravel. No wonder the ex-prof never made brigadier. But Chuck was still talking: "You treat the two masses like the plates of a condenser, bringing them up to the same temporal potential. Then you discharge them on a damping curve that is effectively vertical. Smacko!-one of them heads for the middle of next year, the other one is history. But you never know which one. But that's not the worst of it; you can't come back." "Look, what use is it for research if you can't come back? Or for commerce? Either way you jump, your money is no good and you can't possibly get in touch with where you started. No equipment-and believe me it takes equipment and power. We took power from the Arco reactors. Expensive . . . that's another drawback." "You could get back," I pointed out, "with cold sleep." "Huh? If you went to the past. You might go the other way; you never know. If you went a short enough time back so that they had cold sleep . . . no farther back than the war. But what's the point of that? You want to know something about 1980, say, you ask somebody or you look it up in old newspapers. Now if there was some way to photograph the Crucifixion . . . but there isn't. Not possible. Not only couldn't you get back, but there isn't that much power on the globe. There's an inverse-square law tied up in it too." "Nevertheless, some people would try it just for the hell of it. Didn't anybody ever ride it?" Chuck glanced around again. "I've talked too much already." "A little more won't hurt." "I think three people tried it. I think. One of them was an instructor. I was in the lab when Twitch and this bird, Leo Vincent, came in; Twitch told me I could go home. I hung around outside. After a while Twitch came out and Vincent didn't. So far as I know, he's still in there. He certainly wasn't teaching at Boulder after that." "How about the other two?" "Students. They all three went in together; only Twitch came out. But one of them was in class the next day, whereas the other one was missing for a week. Figure it out yourself." "Weren't you ever tempted?" "Me? Does my head look fat? Twitch suggested that it was almost my duty, in the interests of science, to volunteer. I said no, thanks; I'd take a short beer instead . . . but that I would gladly throw the switch for him. He didn't take me up on it." "I'd take a chance on it. I could check up on what's worrying me . . . and then come back again by cold sleep. It would be worth it." Chuck sighed deeply. "No more beer for you, my friend; you're drunk. You didn't listen to me. One,"-he started making tallies on the table top-"you have no way of knowing that you'd go back; you might go forward instead." "I'd risk that. I like now a lot better than I liked then; I might like thirty years from now still better." "Okay, so take the Long Sleep again; it's safer. Or just sit tight and wait for it to roll around; that's what I'm going to do. But quit interrupting me. Two, even if you did go back, you might miss 1970 by quite a margin. So far as I know, Twitch was shooting in the dark; I don't think he had it calibrated. But of course I was just the flunky. Three, that lab was in a stand of pine trees and it was built in 1980. Suppose you come out ten years before it was built in the middle of a western yellow pine? Ought to make quite an explosion, about like a cobalt bomb, huh? Only you wouldn't know it." "But- As a matter of fact, I don't see why you would come out anywhere near the lab. Why not to the spot in outer space corresponding to where the lab used to be-I mean where it was. or rather--" "You don't mean anything. You stay on the world line you were on. Don't worry about the math; just remember what that guinea pig did. But if you go back before the lab was built, maybe you wind up in a tree. Four, how could you get back to now even with cold sleep, even if you did go the right way, arrive at the right time, and live through it?" "Huh? I did once, why not twice?" "Sure. But what are you going to use for money?" I opened my mouth and closed it. That one made me feel foolish. I had had the money once; I had it no longer. Even what I had saved (not nearly enough) I could not take with me-shucks, even if I robbed a bank (an art I knew nothing about) and took a million of the best back with me, I couldn't spend it in 1970. I'd simply wind up in jail for trying to shove funny money. They had even changed the shape, not to mention serial numbers, dates, colors, and designs. "Maybe I'd just have to save it up." "Good boy. And while you were saving it, you'd probably wind up here and now again without half trying . . . but minus your hair and your teeth." "Okay, okay. But let's go back to that last point. Was there ever a big explosion on that spot? Where the lab was?" "No, I don't think so." "Then I wouldn't wind up in a tree-because I didn't. Follow me?" "I'm three jumps ahead of you. The old time paradox again, only I won't buy it. I've thought about theory of time, too, maybe more than you have. You've got it just backward. There wasn't any explosion and you aren't going to wind up in a tree . . . because you aren't ever going to make the jump. Do you follow me?" "But suppose I did?" "You won't. Because of my fifth point. It's the killer, so listen closely. You ain't about to make any such jump because the whole thing is classified and you can't. They won't let you. So let's forget it, Danny. It's been a very interesting intellectual evening and the FBI will be looking for me in the morning. So let's have one more round and Monday morning if I'm still out of jail I'll phone the chief engineer over at Aladdin and find out the first name of this other `D. B. Davis' character and who he was or is. He might even be working there and, if so, we'll have lunch with him and talk shop. I want you to meet Springer, the chief over at Aladdin, anyway; he's a good boy. And forget this time-travel nonsense; they'll never get the bugs out of it. I should never have mentioned it, and if you ever say I did I'll look you square in the eye and call you a liar. I might need my classified status again someday." So we had another beer. By the time I was home and had taken a shower and had washed some of the beer out of my system I knew he was right. Time travel was about as practical a solution to my difficulties as cutting your throat to cure a headache. More important, Chuck would find out what I wanted to know from Mr. Springer just over chips and a salad, no sweat, no expense, no risk. And I liked the year I was living in. When I climbed into bed I reached out and got the week's stack of papers. The Times came to me by tube each morning, now that I was a solid citizen. I didn't read it very much, because whenever I got my head soaked full of some engineering problem, which was usually, the daily fripperies you find in the news merely annoyed me, either by boring me or, worse still, by being interesting enough to distract my mind from its proper work. Nevertheless, I never threw out a newspaper until I had at least glanced at the headlines and checked the vital-statistics column, the latter not for births, deaths, and marriages, but simply for "withdrawals," people coming out of cold sleep. I had a notion that someday I would see the name of someone I had known back then, and then I would go around and say hello, bid him welcome, and see if I could give him a hand. The chances were against it, of course, but I kept on doing it and it always gave me a feeling of satisfaction. I think that subconsciously I thought of all other Sleepers as my "kinfolk," the way anybody who once served in the same outfit is your buddy, at least to the extent of a drink. There wasn't much in the papers, except the ship that was still missing between here and Mars, and that was not news but a sad lack of it. Nor did I spot any old friend~ among the newly awakened Sleepers. So I lay back and waited for the light to go out.
I stopped in Denver just long enough to visit a dental-supply house. I had not been in Denver since it had become the capital-after the Six Weeks War, Miles and I had gone straight to California-and the place stunned me. Why, I couldn't even find Colfax Avenue. I had understood that everything essential to the government was buried back under the Rockies. If that is so, then there must be an awful lot of nonessentials still aboveground the place seemed even more crowded than Great Los Angeles. At the dental-supply house I bought ten kilograms of gold, isotope 197, in the form of fourteen-gauge wire. I paid $86.10 a kilogram for it, which was decidedly too much, since gold of engineering quality was selling for around $70 a kilogram, and the transaction mortally wounded my only thousand-dollar bill. But engineering gold comes either in alloys never found in nature, or with isotopes 196 and 198 present, or both, depending on the application. For my purposes I wanted fine gold, undetectable from gold refined from natural ore, and I did not want gold that might burn my pants off if I got cozy with it-the overdose at Sandia had given me a healthy respect for radiation poisoning. I wound the gold wire around my waist and went to Boulder. Ten kilograms is about the weight of a well-filled weekend bag and that much gold bulks almost exactly the same as a quart of milk. But the wire form of it made it bulk more than it would have solid; I can't recommend it as a girdle. But gold slugs would have been still harder to carry, and this way it was always with me. Dr. Twitchell was still living there, though no longer working; he was professor emeritus and spent most of his waking hours in the bar of the faculty club. It took me four days to catch him in another bar, since the faculty club was closed to outlanders like me. But when I did, it turned out to be easy to buy him a drink. He was a tragic figure in the classic Greek meaning, a great man-a very great man-gone to ruin. He should have been up there with Einstein and Bohr and Newton; as it was, only a few specialists in field theory were really aware of the stature of his work. Now when I met him his brilliant mind was soured with disappointment, dimmed with age, and soggy with alcohol. It was like visiting the ruins of what had been a magnificent temple after the roof has fallen in, hail the columns knocked down, and vines have grown over it all. Nevertheless, he was brainier on the skids than I ever was at my best. I'm smart enough myself to appreciate real genius when I meet it. The first time I saw him he looked up, looked straight at me and said, "You again." "Sir?" "You used to be one of my students, didn't you?" "Why, no, sir, I never had that honor." Ordinarily when people think they have seen me before, I brush it off; this time I decided to exploit it if I could. "Perhaps you are thinking of my cousin, Doctor-class of `86. He studied under you at one time." "Possibly. What did he major in?" "He had to drop out without a degree, sir. But he was a great admirer of yours. He never missed a chance to tell people he had studied under you." You can't make an enemy by telling a mother her child is beautiful. Dr. Twitchell let me sit down and presently let me buy him a drink. The greatest weakness of the glorious old wreck was his professional vanity. I had salvaged part of the four days before I could scrape up an acquaintance with him by memorizing everything there was about him in the university library, so I knew what papers he had written, where he had presented them, what earned and honorary degrees he held, and what books he had written. I had tried one of the latter, but I was already out of my depth on page nine, although I did pick up a little patter from it. I let him know that I was a camp follower of science myself; right at present I was researching for a book: Unsung Geniuses. "What's it going to be about?" I admitted diffidently that I thought it would be appropriate to start the book with a popular account of his life and works, provided he would be willing to relax a bit from his well-known habit of shunning publicity. I would have to get a lot of my material from him, of course. He thought it was claptrap and could not think of such a thing. But I pointed out that he had a duty to posterity and he agreed to think it over. By the next day he simply assumed that I was going to write his biography-not just a chapter, a whole book. From then on he talked and talked and I took notes . . . real notes; I did not dare try to fool him by faking, as he sometimes asked me to read back. Finally I said, "Doctor, isn't it true that if it had not been for a certain colonel who was once stationed here you would have had the Nobel Prize hands down?" He cursed steadily for three minutes with magnificent style. "Who told you about him?" "Uh, Doctor, when I was doing research writing for the Department of Defense--I've mentioned that, haven't I?" "No." "Well, when I was, I heard the whole story from a young Ph.D. working in another section. He had read the report and he said it was perfectly clear that you would be the most famous name in physics today . . . if you had been permitted to publish your work." "Hrrmph! That much is true." "But I gathered that it was classified. . . by order of this Colonel, uh, Plushbottom." "Thrushbotham. Thrushbotham, sir. A fat, fatuous, flatulent, foot-kissing fool incompetent to find his hat with it nailed to his head. Which it should have been." "It seems a great pity." "What is a pity, sir? That Thrushbotham was a fool? That was nature's doing, not mine." "It seems a pity that the world should be deprived of the story. I understand that you are not allowed to speak of it." "Who told you that? I say what I please~" "That was what I understood, sir . . . from my friend in the Department of Defense." "Hrrrmph!" That was all I got out of him that night. It took him a week to decide to show me his laboratory. Most of the building was now used by other researchers, but his time laboratory he had never surrendered, even though he did not use it now; he fell back on its classified status and refused to let anyone else touch it, nor had he permitted the apparatus to be torn down. When he let me in, the place smelled like a vault that has not been opened in years. He had had just enough drinks not to give a damn, not so many but what he was still steady. His capacity was pretty high. He lectured me on the mathematics of time theory and temporal displacement (he didn't call it "time travel"), but he cautioned me not to take notes. It would not have helped if I had, as he would start a paragraph with, "It is therefore obvious-" and go on from there to matters which may have been obvious to him and God but to no one else. When he slowed down I said, "I gathered from my friend that the one thing you had not been able to do was to calibrate it? That you could not tell the exact magnitude of the temporal displacement?" "What? Poppycock! Young man, if you can't measure it, it's not science." He bubbled for a bit, like a teakettle, then went on, "Here. I'll show you." He turned away and started making adjustments. All that showed of his equipment was what he called the "temporal locus stage"-just a low platform with a cage around it-and a control board which might have served for a steam plant or a low-pressure chamber. I'm fairly sure I could have studied out how to handle the controls had I been left alone to examine them, but I had been told sharply to stay away from them. I could see an eight-point Brown recorder, some extremely heavy-duty solenoid-actuated switches, and a dozen other equally familiar components, but it didn't mean a thing without the circuit diagrams. He turned back to me and demanded, "Have you any change in your pocket?" I reached in and hauled out a handful. He glanced at it and selected two five-dollar pieces, mint new, the pretty green plastic hexagonals issued just that year. I could have wished that he had picked half fives, as I was running low. "Do you have a knife?" "Yes, sir." "Scratch your initials on each of them." I did so. He then had me place them side by side on the stage. "Note the exact time. I have set the displacement for exactly one week, plus or minus six seconds." I looked at my watch. Dr. Twitchell said, "Five . . four three. . . two. . . one. . . now." I looked up from my watch. The coins were gone. I didn't have to pretend that my eyes bugged out. Chuck had told me about a similar demonstration-but seeing it was another matter. Dr. Twitchell said briskly, "We will return here one week from tonight and wait for one of them to reappear. As for the other one-you saw both of them on the stage? You placed them there yourself?" "Yes, sir." "Where was I?" "At the control board, sir." He had been a good fifteen feet from the nearest part of the cage around the stage and had not approached it since. "Very well. Come here." I did so and he reached into a pocket. "Here's one of your bits. You'll get the other back a week from now." He handed me a green five-dollar coin; it had my initials on it. I did not say anything because I can't talk very well with my jaws 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 it 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 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, 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 dark. "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.
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 could 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."
The Suttons were staying over until Monday morning, so I stayed over. The other club members were all friendly but remarkably unnosy about my personal affairs, less so than any group I've ever been in. I've learned since that this constitutes standard good manners in a skin club, but at the time it made them the most discreet and most polite people I had ever met. John and Jenny had their own cabin and I slept on a cot in the clubhouse dormitory. It was darn chilly. The next morning John gave me a shirt and a pair of blue jeans. My own clothes were wrapped around the gold in a bag in the trunk of his car-which itself was a Jaguar Imperator, all I needed to tell me that he was no cheap shyster. But I had known that by his manner. I stayed overnight with them and by Tuesday I had a little money. I never laid eyes on the gold again, but in the course of the next few weeks John turned over to me its exact mint value as bullion minus the standard fees of licensed gold buyers. I know that he did not deal with the mint directly, as he always turned over to me vouchers from gold buyers. He did not deduct for his own services and he never offered to tell me the details. I did not care. Once I had cash again, I got busy. That first Tuesday, 5 May, 1970, Jenny drove me around and I rented a small loft in the old commercial district. I equipped it with a drafting table, a workbench, an army cot, and darn little else; it already had 120, 240, gas, running water, and a toilet that stopped up easily. I didn't want any more and I had to watch every dime. It was tedious and time-wasting to design by the old compass-and-T-square routine and I didn't have a minute to spare, so I built Drafting Dan before I rebuilt Flexible Frank. Only this time Flexible Frank became Protean Pete, the all-purpose automaton, so linked as to be able to do almost anything a man can do, provided its Thorsen tubes were properly instructed. I knew that Protean Pete would not stay that way; his descendants would evolve into a horde of specialized gadgets, but I wanted to make the claims as broad as possible. Working models are not required for patents, merely drawings and descriptions. But I needed good models, models that would work perfectly and anybody could demonstrate, because these models were going to have to sell themselves, show by their very practicality and by the evident economy designed into them for their eventual production engineering that they would not only work but would be a good investment-the patent office is stuffed with things that work but are worthless commercially. The work went both fast and slow, fast because I knew exactly what I was doing, slow because I did not have a proper machine shop nor any help. Presently I grudgingly dipped into my precious cash to rent some machine tools, then things went better. I worked from breakfast to exhaustion, seven days a week, except for about one weekend a month with John and Jenny at the bare-bottom club near Boulder. By the first of September I had both models working properly and was ready to start on the drawings and descriptions. I designed and sent out for manufacture pretty speckle lacquer cover plates for both of them and I had the external moving parts chrome-plated; these were the only jobs I farmed out and it hurt me to spend the money, but I felt that it was necessary. Oh, I had made extreme use of catalogue-available standard components; I could not have built them otherwise, nor would they have been commercial when I got through. But I did not like to spend money on custom-made prettiness. I did not have time to get around much, which was just as well. Once when I was out buying a servo motor I ran into a chap I had known in California. He spoke to me and I answered before I thought. "Hey, Dan! Danny Davis! Imagine bumping into you here. I thought you were in Mojave?" I shook hands. "Just a quick business trip. I'm going back in a few days." "I'm going back this afternoon. I'll phone Mlles and tell him I saw you." I looked worried and was. "Don't do that, please." "Why not? Aren't you and Miles still buddy-buddy budding tycoons together?" "Well . . . look, Mort, Miles doesn't know I'm here. I'm supposed to be in Albuquerque on business for the company. But I flew up here on the side, on strictly personal and private business. Get me? Nothing to do with the firm. And I don't care to discuss it with Miles." He looked knowing. "Woman trouble?" "Weelll . . . yes." "She married?" "You might say so." He dug me in the ribs and winked. "I catch. Old Miles is pretty puritanical isn't he? Okay, I'll cover for you and someday you can cover for me. Is she any good?" I'd like to cover you with a spade, I thought to myself, you fourth-rate frallup. Mort was the sort of no-good traveling salesman who spends more time trying to seduce waitresses than taking care of his customers-besides which, the line he handled was as shoddy as he was, never up to its specs. But I bought him a drink and treated him to fairy tales about the "married woman" I had invented and listened while he boasted to me of no doubt equally fictitious exploits. Then I shook him. On another occasion I tried to buy Dr. Twitchell a drink and failed. I had seated myself beside him at the restaurant counter of a drugstore on Champa Street, then caught sight of his face in the mirror. My first impulse was to crawl under the counter and hide. Then I caught hold of myself and realized that, out of all the persons living in 1970, he was the one I had least need to worry about. Nothing could go wrong because nothing had. . . I meant "nothing would." No-Then I quit trying to phrase it, realizing that if time travel ever became widespread, English grammar was going to have to add a whole new set of tenses to describe reflexive situations-conjugations that would make the French literary tenses and the Latin historical tenses look simple. In any case, past or future or something else, Twitchell was not a worry to me now. I could relax. I studied his face in the mirror, wondering if I had been misled by a chance resemblance. But I had not been. Twitchell did not have a general-issue face like mine; he had stern, self-assured, slightly arrogant and quite handsome features which would have looked at home on Zeus. I remembered that face only in ruins, but there was no doubt-and I squirmed inside as I thought of the old man and how badly I had treated him. I wondered how I could make it up to him. Twitchell caught sight of me eying him in the mirror and turned to me. "Something wrong?" "No. Uh . . you're Dr. Twitchell, aren't you? At the university?" "Denver University, yes. Have we met?" I had almost slipped, having forgotten that he taught at the city university in this year. Remembering in two directions is difficult. "No, Doctor, but I've heard you lecture. You might say I'm one of your fans." His mouth twitched in a half-smile but he did not rise to it. From that and other things I learned that he had not yet acquired a gnawing need for adulation; he was sure of himself at that age and needed only his own self-approval. "Are you sure you haven't got me mixed up with a movie Star?" "Oh no! You're Dr. Hubert Twitchell . . . the great physicist." His mouth twitched again. "Let's just say that I am a physicist. Or try to be." We chatted for a while and I tried to hang onto him after he had finished his sandwich. I said it would be an honor if he would let me buy him a drink. He shook his head. "I hardly drink at all and certainly never before dark. Thanks anyway. It's been nice meeting you. Drop into my lab someday if you are ever around the campus." I said I would. But I did not make many slips in 1970 (second time around) because I understood it and, anyhow, most people who might have recognized me were in California. I resolved that if I did meet any more familiar faces I would give them the cold stare and the quick brushoff-take no chances. But little things can cause you trouble too. Like the time I got caught in a zipper simply because I had become used to the more convenient and much safer Sticktite closures. A lot of little things like that I missed very much after having learned in only six months to take them for granted. Shaving-I had to go back to shaving! Once I even caught a cold. That horrid ghost of the past resulted from forgetting that clothes could get soaked in rain. I wish that those precious esthetes who sneer at progress and prattle about the superior beauties of the past could have been with me-dishes that let food get chilled, shirts that had to be laundered, bathroom mirrors that steamed up when you needed them, runny noses, dirt underfoot and dirt in your lungs-I had become used to a better way of living and 1970 was a series of petty frustrations until I got the hang of it again. But a dog gets used to his fleas and so did I. Denver in 1970 was a very quaint place with a fine old-fashioned flavor; I became very fond of it. It was nothing like the slick New Plan maze it had been (or would be) when I had arrived (or would arrive) there from Yuma; it still had less than two million people, there were still buses and other vehicular traffic in the streets-there still were streets; I had no trouble finding Colfax Avenue. Denver was still getting used to being the national seat of government and was not quite happy in the role, like a boy in his first formal evening clothes. Its spirit still yearned for high-heeled boots and its Western twang even though it knew it had to grow up and be an international metropolis, with embassies and spies and famous gourmet restaurants. The city was being jerry-built in all directions to house the bureaucrats and lobbyists and contact men and clerk-typists and flunkies; buildings were being thrown up so fast that with each one there was hazard of enclosing a cow inside the walls. Nevertheless, the city had extended only a few miles past Aurora on the east, to Henderson on the north, and Littleton on the south-there was still open country before you reached the Air Academy. On the west, of course, the city flowed into the high country and the federal bureaus were tunneling back into the mountains. I liked Denver during its federal boom. Nevertheless, I was excruciatingly anxious to get back to my own time. It was always the little things. I had had my teeth worked over completely shortly after I had been put on the staff of Hired Girl and could afford it. I had never expected to have to see a dental plastician again. Nevertheless, in 1970 I did not have anti-caries pills and so I got a hole in a tooth, a painful one or I would have ignored it. So I went to a dentist. So help me, I had forgotten what he would see when he looked into my mouth. He blinked, moved his mirror around, and said, "Great jumping Jehosaphat! Who was your dentist?" "Kah hoo hank?" He took his hands out of my mouth. "Who did it? And how?" "Huh? You mean my teeth? Oh, that's experimental work they're doing in . . . India." "How do they do it?" "How would I know?" "Mmm. . . wait a minute. I've got to get some pictures of this." He started fiddling with his X-ray equipment. "Oh no," I objected. "Just clean out that bicuspid, plug it up with anything, and let me out of here." "But-" "I'm sorry, Doctor. But I'm on a dead run." So he did as I said, pausing now and again to look at my teeth. I paid cash and did not leave my name. I suppose I could have let him have the pics, but covering up had become a reflex. It couldn't have hurt anything to let him have them. Nor helped either, as X rays would not show how regeneration was accomplished, nor could I have told him. There is no time like the past to get things done. While I was sweating sixteen hours a day on Drafting Dan and Protean Pete I got something else done with my left hand. Working anonymously through John's law office I hired a detective agency with national branches to dig up Belle's past. I supplied them with her address and the license number and model of her car (since steering wheels are good places to get fingerprints) and suggested that she might have been married here and there and possibly might have a police record. I had to limit the budget severely; I couldn't afford the sort of investigation you read about. When they did not report back in ten days I kissed my money good-by. But a few days later a thick envelope showed up at John's office. Belle had been a busy girl. Born six years earlier than she claimed, she had been married twice before she was eighteen. One of them did not count because the man already had a wife; if she had been divorced from the second the agency had not uncovered it. She had apparently been married four times since then although once was doubtful; it may have been the "war-widow" racket worked with the aid of a man who was dead and could not object. She had been divorced once (respondent) and one of her husbands was dead. She might still be "married" to the others. Her police record was long and interesting but apparently she had been convicted of a felony only once, in Nebraska, and granted parole without doing time. This was established only by fingerprints, as she had jumped parole, changed her name, and had acquired a new social-security number. The agency asked if they were to notify Nebraska authorities. I told them not to bother; she had been missing for nine years and her conviction had been for nothing worse than lure in a badger game. I wondered what I would have done if it had been dope peddling? Reflexive decisions have their complications. I ran behind schedule on the drawings and October was on me before I knew it. I still had the description only half worded, since they had to tie into drawings, and I had done nothing about the claims. Worse, I had done nothing about organizing the deal so that it would hold up; I could not do it until I had a completed job to show. Nor had I had time to make contacts. I began to think that I had made a mistake in not asking Dr. Twitchell to set the controls for at least thirty-two years instead of thirty-one years and a fiddling three weeks; I had underestimated the time I would need and overestimated my own capacity. I had not shown my toys to my friends, the Suttons, not because I wanted to hide them, but because I had not wanted a lot of talk and useless advice while they were incomplete. On the last Saturday in September 1 was scheduled to go out to the club camp with them. Being behind schedule, I had worked late the night before, then had been awakened early by the torturing clang of an alarm clock so that I could shave and be ready to go when they came by. I shut the sadistic thing off and thanked God that they had got rid of such horrible devices in 2001, then I pulled myself groggily together and went down to the corner drugstore to phone and say that I couldn't make it, I had to work.