Far and away, p.8
Far and Away, page 8
Bill wiped tears from his eyes. “I was right. Don’t you see, Snulbug? Man can’t be licked. My magic was lousy. All it could call up was you. You brought me what was practically a fake, and I got caught on the merry-go-round of time trying to use it. You were right enough there; no good could come of that magic.
“But without the magic, just using human psychology, knowing a man’s weaknesses, playing on them, I made a sirupvoiced old bandit endow the very research he’d tabooed, and do more good for humanity than he’s done in all the rest of his life. I was right, Snulbug. You can’t lick Man.”
Snulbug’s snakes writhed into knots of scorn. “People!” he snorted. “You’ll find out.” And he shook his head with dismal satisfaction.
Elsewhen
“My dear Agatha,” Mr. Partridge announced at the breakfast table, “I have invented the world’s first successful time machine.”
His sister showed no signs of being impressed. “I suppose this will run the electric bill up even higher,” she observed.
Mr. Partridge listened meekly to the inevitable lecture. When it was over, he protested, “But, my dear, you have just listened to an announcement that no woman on earth has ever heard before. Never before in human history has anyone produced an actual working model of a time-traveling machine.”
“Hm-m-m,” said Agatha Partridge. “What good is it?”
“Its possibilities are untold.” Mr. Partridge’s pale little eyes lit up. “We can observe our pasts and perhaps even correct their errors. We can learn the secrets of the ancients. We can plot the uncharted course of the future—new conquistadors invading brave new continents of unmapped time. We can—”
“Will anyone pay money for that?”
“They will flock to me to pay it,” said Mr. Partridge smugly.
His sister began to look impressed. “And how far can you travel with your time machine?”
Mr. Partridge buttered a piece of toast with absorbed concentration, but it was no use. His sister repeated the question: “How far can you go?”
“Not very far,” Mr. Partridge admitted reluctantly. “In fact,” he added hastily as he saw a more specific question forming, “hardly at all. And only one way. But remember,” he went on, gathering courage, “the Wright brothers did not cross the Atlantic in their first model. Marconi did not launch radio with—”
Agatha’s brief interest had completely subsided. “I thought so,” she said. “You’d still better watch the electric bill.”
It would be that way, Mr. Partridge thought, wherever he went, whomever he saw. “How far can you go?” “Hardly at all.” “Good day, sir.” People cannot be made to see that to move along the time line with free volitional motion for even one fraction of a second is as great a miracle as to zoom spectacularly ahead to 5900 A.D. He had, he could remember, felt disappointed at first himself—
The discovery had been made by accident. An experiment which he was working on—part of his long and fruitless attempt to re-create by modern scientific method the supposed results described in ancient alchemical works—had necessitated the setting up of a powerful magnetic field. And part of the apparatus within this field was a chronometer.
Mr. Partridge noted the time when he began his experiment. It was exactly fourteen seconds after nine thirty. And it was precisely at that moment that the tremor came. It was not a serious shock. To one who, like Mr. Partridge, had spent the past twenty years in southern California it was hardly noticeable. But when he looked back at the chronometer, the dial read ten thirteen.
Time can pass quickly when you are absorbed in your work, but not so quickly as all that. Mr. Partridge looked at his pocket watch. It said nine thirty-one. Suddenly, in a space of seconds, the best chronometer available had gained forty-two minutes.
The more Mr. Partridge considered the matter, the more irresistibly one chain of logic forced itself upon him. The chronometer was accurate; therefore it had registered those forty-two minutes correctly. It had not registered them here and now; therefore the shock had jarred it to where it could register them. It had not moved in any of the three dimensions of space; therefore—
The chronometer had gone back in time forty-two minutes, and had registered those minutes in reaching the present again. Or was it only a matter of minutes? The chronometer was an eight-day one. Might it have been twelve hours and forty-two minutes? Forty-eight hours? Ninety-six? A hundred and ninety-two?
And why and how and—the dominant question in Mr. Partridge’s mind—could the same device be made to work with a living being?
It would be fruitless to relate in detail the many experiments which Mr. Partridge eagerly performed to verify and check his discovery. They were purely empirical in nature, for Mr. Partridge was that type of inventor who is short on theory but long on gadgetry. He did frame a very rough working hypothesis—that the sudden shock had caused the magnetic field to rotate into the temporal dimension, where it set up a certain—he groped for words—a certain negative potential of entropy, which drew things backward in time. But he would leave the doubtless highly debatable theory to the academicians. What he must do was perfect the machine, render it generally usable, and then burst forth upon an astonished world as Harrison Partridge, the first time traveler. His dry little ego glowed and expanded at the prospect.
There were the experiments in artificial shock which produced synthetically the earthquake effect. There were the experiments with the white mice which proved that the journey through time was harmless to life. There were the experiments with the chronometer which established that the time traversed varied directly as the square of the power expended on the electromagnet.
But these experiments also established that the time elapsed had not been twelve hours nor any multiple thereof, but simply forty-two minutes. And with the equipment at his disposal, it was impossible for Mr. Partridge to stretch that period any further than a trifle under two hours.
This, Mr. Partridge told himself, was ridiculous. Time travel at such short range, and only to the past, entailed no possible advantages. Oh, perhaps some piddling ones—once, after the mice had convinced him that he could safely venture himself, he had a lengthy piece of calculation which he wished to finish before dinner. An hour was simply not time enough for it; so at six o’clock he moved himself back to five again, and by working two hours in the space from five to six finished his task easily by dinner time. And one evening when, in his preoccupation, he had forgotten his favorite radio quiz program until it was ending, it was simplicity itself to go back to the beginning and comfortably hear it through.
But though such trifling uses as this might be an important part of the work of the time machine once it was established—possibly the strongest commercial selling point for inexpensive home sets—they were not spectacular or startling enough to make the reputation of the machine and—more important—the reputation of Harrison Partridge.
The Great Harrison Partridge would have untold wealth. He could pension off his sister Agatha and never have to see her again. He would have untold prestige and glamor, despite his fat and his baldness, and the beautiful and aloof Faith Preston would fall into his arms like a ripe plum. He would—
It was while he was indulging in one of these dreams of power that Faith Preston herself entered his workshop. She was wearing a white sports dress and looking so fresh and immaculate that the whole room seemed to glow with her presence.
“I came out here before I saw your sister,” she said. Her voice was as cool and bright as her dress. “I wanted you to be the first to know. Simon and I are going to be married next month.”
Mr. Partridge never remembered what was said after that. He imagined that she made her usual comments about the shocking disarray of his shop and her usual polite inquiries as to his current researches. He imagined that he offered the conventional good wishes and extended his congratulations, too, to that damned young whippersnapper Simon Ash. But all his thoughts were that he wanted her and needed her and that the great, the irresistible Harrison Partridge must come into being before next month.
Money. That was it. Money. With money he could build the tremendous machinery necessary to carry a load of power—and money was needed for that power, too—that would produce truly impressive results. To travel back even as much as a quarter of a century would be enough to dazzle the world. To appear at the Versailles peace conference, say, and expound to the delegates the inevitable results of their too lenient—or too strict?—terms. Or with unlimited money to course down the centuries, down the millennia, bringing back lost arts, forgotten secrets—
“Hm-m-m!” said Agatha. “Still mooning after that girl? Don’t be an old fool.”
He had not seen Agatha come in. He did not quite see her now. He saw a sort of vision of a cornucopia that would give him money that would give him the apparatus that would give him his time machine that would give him success that would give him Faith.
“If you must moon instead of working—if indeed you call this work—you might at least turn off a few switches,” Agatha snapped. “Do you think we’re made of money?”
Mechanically he obeyed.
“It makes you sick,” Agatha droned on, “when you think how some people spend their money. Cousin Stanley! Hiring this Simon Ash as a secretary for nothing on earth but to look after his library and his collections. So much money he can’t do anything but waste it! And all Great-uncle Max’s money coming to him too, when we could use it so nicely. If only it weren’t for Cousin Stanley, I’d be an heiress. And then—”
Mr. Partridge was about to observe that even as an heiress Agatha would doubtless have been the same intolerant old maid. But two thoughts checked his tongue. One was the sudden surprising revelation that even Agatha had her inner yearnings, too. And the other was an overwhelming feeling of gratitude to her.
“Yes,” Mr. Partridge repeated slowly. “If it weren’t for Cousin Stanley—”
By means as simple as this, murderers are made.
The chain of logic was so strong that moral questions hardly entered into the situation.
Great-uncle Max was infinitely old. That he should live another year was out of the question. And if his son Stanley were to pre-decease him, then Harrison and Agatha Partridge would be his only living relatives. And Maxwell Harrison was as infinitely rich as he was infinitely old.
Therefore Stanley must die, and his death must be accomplished with a maximum of personal safety. The means for that safety were at hand. For the one completely practical purpose of a short-range time machine, Mr. Partridge had suddenly realized, was to provide an alibi for murder.
The chief difficulty was in contriving a portable version of the machine which would operate over a considerable period of time. The first model had a traveling range of two minutes. But by the end of the week, Mr. Partridge had constructed a portable time machine which was good for forty-five minutes. He needed nothing more save a sharp knife. There was, Mr. Partridge thought, something crudely horrifying about guns.
That Friday afternoon he entered Cousin Stanley’s library at five o’clock. This was an hour when the eccentric man of wealth always devoted himself to quiet and scholarly contemplation of his treasures. The butler, Bracket, had been reluctant to announce him, but “Tell my cousin,” Mr. Partridge said, “that I have discovered a new entry for his bibliography.”
The most recent of Cousin Stanley’s collecting manias was fiction based upon factual murders. He had already built up the definitive library on the subject. Soon he intended to publish the definitive bibliography. And the promise of a new item was an assured open-sesame.
The ponderous gruff joviality of Stanley Harrison’s greeting took no heed of the odd apparatus he carried. Everyone knew that Mr. Partridge was a crackpot inventor.
“Bracket tells me you’ve got something for me,” Cousin Stanley boomed. “Glad to hear it. Have a drink? What is it?”
“No thank you.” Something in Mr. Partridge rebelled at accepting the hospitality of his victim. “A Hungarian friend of mine was mentioning a novel about one Bela Kiss.”
“Kiss?” Cousin Stanley’s face lit up with a broad beam. “Splendid! Never could see why no one used him before. Woman killer. Landru type. Always fascinating. Kept ’em in empty gasoline tins. Never could have been caught if there hadn’t been a gasoline shortage. Constable thought he was hoarding, checked the tins, found corpses. Beautiful! Now if you’ll give me the details—”
Cousin Stanley, pencil poised over a P-slip, leaned over the desk. And Mr. Partridge struck.
He had checked the anatomy of the blow, just as he had checked the name of an obscure but interesting murderer. The knife went truly home, and there was a gurgle and the terrible spastic twitch of dying flesh.
Mr. Partridge was now an heir and a murderer, but he had time to be conscious of neither fact. He went through his carefully rehearsed motions, his mind numb and blank. He latched the windows of the library and locked each door. This was to be an impossible crime, one that could never conceivably be proved on him or on any innocent.
Mr. Partridge stood beside the corpse in the midst of the perfectly locked room. It was four minutes past five. He screamed twice, very loudly, in an unrecognizably harsh voice. Then he plugged his portable instrument into a floor outlet and turned a switch.
It was four nineteen. Mr. Partridge unplugged his machine. The room was empty and the door open.
Mr. Partridge knew his way reasonably well about his cousin’s house. He got out without meeting anyone. He tucked the machine into the rumble seat of his car and drove off to Faith Preston’s. Toward the end of his long journey across town he carefully drove through a traffic light and received a citation noting the time as four-fifty. He reached Faith’s at four fifty-four, ten minutes before the murder he had just committed.
Simon Ash had been up all Thursday night cataloging Stanley Harrison’s latest acquisitions. Still he had risen at his usual hour that Friday to get through the morning’s mail before his luncheon date with Faith. By four thirty that afternoon he was asleep on his feet.
He knew that his employer would be coming into the library in half an hour. And Stanley Harrison liked solitude for his daily five-o’clock gloating and meditation. But the secretary’s work desk was hidden around a corner of the library’s stacks, and no other physical hunger can be quite so dominantly compelling as the need for sleep.
Simon Ash’s shaggy blond head sank onto the desk. His sleep-heavy hand shoved a pile of cards to the floor, and his mind only faintly registered the thought that they would all have to be alphabetized again. He was too sleepy to think of anything but pleasant things, like the sailboat at Balboa which brightened his weekends, or the hiking trip in the Sierras planned for his next vacation, or above all Faith. Faith the fresh and lovely and perfect, who would be his next month—
There was a smile on Simon’s rugged face as he slept. But he woke with a harsh scream ringing in his head. He sprang to his feet and looked out from the stacks into the library.
The dead hulk that slumped over the desk with the hilt protruding from its back was unbelievable, but even more incredible was the other spectacle. There was a man. His back was toward Simon, but he seemed faintly familiar. He stood close to a complicated piece of gadgetry. There was the click of a switch.
Then there was nothing.
Nothing in the room at all but Simon Ash and an infinity of books. And their dead owner.
Ash ran to the desk. He tried to lift Stanley Harrison, tried to draw out the knife, then realized how hopeless was any attempt to revive life in that body. He reached for the phone, then stopped as he heard the loud knocking on the door.
Over the raps came the butler’s voice. “Mr. Harrison! Are you all right, sir?” A pause, more knocking, and then, “Mr. Harrison! Let me in, sir! Are you all right?”
Simon raced to the door. It was locked, and he wasted almost a minute groping for the key at his feet, while the butler’s entreaties became more urgent. At last Simon opened the door.
Bracket stared at him—stared at his sleep-red eyes, his blood-red hands, and beyond him at what sat at the desk. “Mr. Ash, sir,” the butler gasped. “What have you done?”
Faith Preston was home, of course. No such essential element of Mr. Partridge’s plan could have been left to chance. She worked best in the late afternoons, she said, when she was getting hungry for dinner; and she was working hard this week on some entries for a national contest in soap carving.
The late-afternoon sun was bright in her room, which you might call her studio if you were politely disposed, her garret if you were not. It picked out the few perfect touches of color in the scanty furnishings and converted them into bright aureoles surrounding the perfect form of Faith.
The radio was playing softly. She worked best to music, and that, too, was an integral portion of Mr. Partridge’s plan.
Six minutes of unmemorable small talk—What are you working on? How lovely! And what have you been doing lately? Pottering around as usual. And the plans for the wedding?—and then Mr. Partridge held up a pleading hand for silence.
“When you hear the tone,” the radio announced, “the time will be exactly five seconds before five o’clock.”
“I forgot to wind my watch,” Mr. Partridge observed casually. “I’ve been wondering all day exactly what time it was.” He set his perfectly accurate watch.
He took a long breath. And now at last he knew that he was a new man. He was at last the Great Harrison Partridge.
“What’s the matter?” Faith asked. “You look funny. Could I make you some tea?”
“No. Nothing. I’m all right.” He walked around behind her and looked over her shoulder at the graceful nude emerging from her imprisonment in a cake of soap. “Exquisite, my dear,” he observed. “Exquisite.”
“I’m glad you like it. I’m never happy with female nudes; I don’t think women sculptors ever are. But I wanted to try it.”
