Time Travail (32 page)

I started down. Before I could help her she
picked herself up bleeding and moaning. She hobbled over to Harvey
where he was sitting, stiff already, at the console. His eyes were
turned completely inward. They were white like a statue’s. He was
wearing the permanent-wave helmet on his naked skull. His Harpo
Marx wig was lying on the cement floor. There were sheets of paper,
a pencil and his opened spiral notebook on the console. On the page
was a scrawled sentence.

Trip ten: 11:21 am April
12
.

The same smell as in the dead room. There was also
the bottle of white wine and the chipped red goblet for
celebrations, half-filled. There was nothing to celebrate, for him.
He wasn’t breathing.

Hanna threw herself on her knees and covered
his thighs with kisses, moved her face up into shameful territory.
She moaned. How could she do that before a witness? I thought with
envy and dismay. Now she gave him a bleeding bear hug of love.

The helmet slipped off his skull and crashed
to the floor. He sat there a rigid statue with his bumpy naked
skull reddish in the miserly light of the bulbs. There was an ugly
red welt on his forehead. I expected him to slump over to the
floor.

He blinked.

I blinked back, violently.

The whiteness turned into bloodshot eyes,
back to things outside. He blinked hard again, squinted as though
blinded by the cellar-gloom and peered about. Now his eyes tried to
focus on us. A minute passed. His face slowly filled with tragic
outrage as he continued staring at us. His lips moved soundlessly.
Finally he whispered:

“To return. From that. To this. To you
two.”

There was silence. Then he asked:

“Time?”

“Three twenty-two,” I said.

“Morning or. Afternoon?”

“Morning.”

“What date?”

“The thirteenth.”

“What month?”

“April.”

Hanna was sobbing. Her lank hair wilded over
him. Harvey pushed her away feebly. He reached for the pencil and
the spiral notebook. His hand was trembling badly. He told her to
stop it, to go back to bed. He tried to write. His great nose
almost touched the paper. He couldn’t focus here. Hanna painfully
started pulling herself up the stairs. She was still sobbing.
Yawning, I started stumbling up after her.

“Not you. I need you. I can’t write.”

He held out the spiral notebook and pencil
impatiently. I returned and took them. I drew up a chair and sat
down. He started in.

Stifling my yawns I tried to take down his
account of what was, supposedly, the first voyage of exploration of
the past in the history of mankind.

***

Sixteen

Did I get it right? Communication with him,
even two-way, had never been easy. Now one-way, and the wrong way
at that, it was practically impossible. There were his usual
emission difficulties, aggravated by a monologue that lasted hours
with no possible recourse to the written word on his part. He lost
his voice on and off for minutes and I had nothing but
lip-movements to go by.

The contents of his account didn’t make
things easier. They were notes to himself. A good deal of his
hoarse whispering had to do with incomprehensible technical
matters. I soon gave up trying to record them. I often nodded off
during those arid stretches. He’d ball up sheets of paper and throw
them in my face saying he didn’t pay me to sleep.

What I did understand I didn’t believe
(except in brief moments of weakness) or didn’t want to believe.
Disbelief weakened my attention. Lots of things probably got past
me.

He began with an analysis of the
preliminaries to voyage, the preconditions concerning machine and
mind. As soon as he started in on the machine my pencil gave up. It
went back to work when he began discussing mental preparatives.

On the brink of sleep was the most
favorable state. At least twenty hours of sleep-deprivation was
indicated. As expected, the trips had steadily improved since ray
treatment and chemotherapy had come to an end. The total blockage
they’d induced soon wore off. Salt and aspirin proved fatal to
trip-receptivity. Cough syrup favorable. Codeine? Strong liquor
disastrous, with the notable exception of gin (alkaloid of
juniper-berry? Investigate). Sweet California white wine effective
in sharpening perception. Note to me: any more bottles in house? If
not, find brand (
Lord’s Vineyards
) and buy two dozen more bottles. But real receptivity
breakthrough came from hospital marijuana.

At this point I almost laughed at the
crazy idea of a hospital peddling joints. Later I learned from
Hanna that hospitals did issue doses of marijuana to patients
suffering from what he had in that stage. He’d smoked three joints
in the fifty-three minutes preceding the trip, he said. Here Harvey
paused and added a note that he instructed me to underline twice.
Hanna should contact the hospital immediately and get more
marijuana. Find precise concentration of THC, tetrahydrocannabinol,
the psychoactive ingredient of
cannabis sativa
. He’d used up half of the monthly ration in preparation
for the trip.

Now the trip itself.

Subject pinpointed and activated: Mrs
Morgenstern and Mrs Weizman in conversation.

Approximate date: mid-July 1952.
Error-latitude of twenty days, ten days either way.

July 1952. She’d died five months later.

All the old pain came back again. It worsened
at the confused thought that somehow he’d revived her and that
she’d die again. There may also have been longing to see her
myself. It was one of the instants of belief, the contagion of
craziness.

I immediately understood this and broke free
of the pain and longing. I rejected his imminent account and its
foreseen terrors as mental derangement aggravated by drugs and
alcohol. He’d spent weeks on the sofa of the dead room. I’d been
away for only two days. How could he possibly have attempted ten
trips in that brief time? Or tested all that alcohol, whiskey, rum,
vodka, gin, etc? Inevitably it would have ended in a titanic binge,
fatal in his condition.

It was all another manifestation of his
mental state. I knew I should feel sorry for him but I couldn’t
forgive him for involving my mother in his ravings.

He went on, now analyzing the quality of the
image. (Why didn’t he say something about my mother?) This had had
been excellent. The one difference with normal perception was a
slight accentuation of the three-dimensional effect, similar to
what an old-fashioned stereoscope gave you. Expected but oppressive
for the first few minutes was an absolute silence unmatchable in
here-time. There was little chance this audio deficiency would ever
be remedied. Here Harvey went into more technical considerations
and I was awakened by the first of the paper-balls.

The two women had been seated there in the
living room chatting in that absolute silence. After a while he’d
been able to do a little lip-reading. For his mother it was easy.
He saw his name on her lips constantly and although he couldn’t
make out exactly what she was saying about him the facial
expressions he remembered so well guided him. So he knew when she
was talking about his scholastic and professional achievements,
about his hush-hush Government project, about his health. He could
almost resurrect it all verbatim from memory. He saw her dabbing at
her eyes and that could only be Rachel.

It had been harder to read Mrs Weizman’s lips
with the exception of that one phrase about her son.

What phrase? I couldn’t help asking, pencil
poised, in a quick return to semi-belief. He ignored my
question.

A major disappointment was the partial
failure of image-stabilization, something he’d only gradually
realized. The temporal sequence accessible to visit proved to be
only a few minutes long and not the hour he’d activated on the
screen and which included the arrival of women friends with cakes
and an ensuing bridge-game. He’d never witnessed it in then-time.
There was only that preliminary chat.

If the trip lasted as long as it had
(measured in here-time: four hours and two minutes) it was because
the scene was repeated over and over, something not too easy to
detect when the subject was two middle-aged women chatting
statically in armchairs. It was only slowly that he realized they
were saying the same things over and over to a degree that
surpassed remembered reality at least for Mrs Weizman.

She couldn’t have said as often as she had,
“I’m so worried about Jerry.” He’d had great leisure in that month
of subjective there-time to read their lips and see Mrs Weizman say
it perhaps a hundred times.

Worried about what? I almost blurted it out,
although I could guess her reasons. I badly wanted to reassure her,
tell her it had ended with just a suspended sentence a day before
her death, that I’d given up the book-business, had been watching
my step ever since, didn’t so much as jay-walk any more, had
finally, years later, landed a university job and had lived far
longer than she had and was in reasonably good health, physically
speaking.

Compensating for the limitation on objective
duration was the radical modification of time-perception, a
confirmation of conjecture and the justification of forty years of
research. Then-time relived proved to be closer to titmouse-time
than to human time. Just what the ratio of difference between
objective now-time and subjective then-time was couldn’t be
determined. Subjective time was by definition not measurable. He
judged the ratio to have been somewhere in a margin of 1: 25-50.
Meaning that one second of our objective now-time expanded to
approximately half a minute or a whole minute. On emergence, that
idiotic brutal emergence, (why had I let Hanna do that?) he’d had
the impression of having spent weeks, perhaps a month in the living
room.

Time slowdown more than offset random spatial
selection. The visitor wasn’t in control of the images. They didn’t
obey his will. The person you wanted to see and approach was there
of course because you’d selected that scene with her there. But
once you were transported (“projected” would be a more accurate
term) everything had equal value, things and people. You would
contemplate a curtain-fold for a day of subjective then-time before
the two women returned, still chatting. But that curtain-fold, or
carpet pattern or table-edge or whatever gave you the same
indescribable feeling as the view of the people.

Here Harvey broke off and his eyes closed. I
could imagine them white and brain-directed again beneath the lids.
Maybe a minute went by. I was on the brink of dozing off myself.
But he wasn’t sleeping. He was searching for the word. Finally he
opened his eyes and pronounced a word I’d never heard on his lips.
“Joy,” he said. Not even a whole day’s contemplation of a flowerpot
was a deprivation. The joy was just a little muted. You knew she
was there behind you in that room. You knew Momma was there in the
flowered armchair chatting with Mrs Weizman in the striped
armchair. The joy couldn’t be described. Deep and lasting as it
couldn’t be here. When had he last felt such joy? Maybe never
before in his life. And she was there to be revisited whenever he
liked. And maybe the subjective time-ratio could be indefinitely
extended. Couldn’t a second of “here-time” be expanded to an hour
of “there-time”?

He invited me, mathematical wizard, to figure
it out, how long if the trip lasted twenty-four hours of objective
here-time? He leaned forward stiffly and stared into my eyes. How
long? Quick! And quickly I said, “A couple of days short of five
years.” Strangely I had no trouble doing that. It came out as on a
calculator-screen at the touch of a finger.

Later, in bed, I laboriously went through the
calculations and reached 43,000 hours. Divided by 24 that gave you
1791 days: four years, 331 days, nearly five years as I’d said
spontaneously.

He went on and on. It went past me. I did get
what turned out to be the final observation. Control of the
trip-experience was of course necessary. There might well be
personal variables. How much of the experience derived from
subjectivity? Would another mind have experienced the same
time-differential, the feeling of joy? There would have to be
another time-traveler.

He stopped.

There was silence in the cellar where we were
seated facing each other. I finished scribbling what he’d said and
stared down at it. The silence went on. I imagined he’d fallen
asleep again. I looked up into his blood-shot eyes staring into
mine.

After a while I looked down at the pad again,
underlined certain things, distributed punctuation marks and then I
fell asleep for I don’t know how long. What awakened me was the
slap of the pad and clatter of the pencil on the cement floor.
They’d slipped off my lap. Harvey was asleep. I bent down to pick
up the pad and pencil.

Near his feet I saw joint-butts and a
second bottle of
Lord’s Vineyards
. It was empty. I also noticed that the tinkered
permanent-wave helmet was unplugged. Of course it might have
happened when Hanna bear-hugged him and the helmet fell off his
skull. But that wasn’t likely.

It had been a good trip, all right. Stewed
and stoned the way he was he could have visited the moons of
Jupiter and dictated all the details to me. He probably would have
said he saw my mother sitting there in an icy crater, worrying
about me. Or even the girl I’d shown those moons to. I remembered
their names: Io and Europa. What was the girl’s name again? I was
very tired. I went to bed.