Manly Wade Wellman - Novel 1940
Read Manly Wade Wellman - Novel 1940 Online
Authors: Twice In Time (v1.1)
Twice In
Time
Manly Wade
Wellman
Contents
THE document herewith given publication was placed in the hands
of the editors in 1939. Whether or not it explains satisfactorily the strange
disappearance of Leo Thrasher near
Florence
,
Italy
,
in the spring of 1938, we do not pretend to decide.
The manuscript came to
America
in the luggage of Father David Sutton, an American priest, at the time of the recent
outbreak of war in
Europe
. Father Sutton was in
Rome
at the time, and elected to remain, in hope of helping war sufferers if his aid
should be needed. But since
Italy
remained neutral, he sent back most of his luggage to
America
by a friend. Later he sent an urgent letter, asking that this manuscript be
examined and published, if possible. It came, Father Sutton said, from the
strongroom of an immemorial theological library in
Florence
,
and was in the original casket that had apparently contained it for a long
period of time.
The priest's friend brought us both Father Sutton's letter
and the casket with the manuscript. This casket is of tarnished silver,
elaborately worked in the Renaissance manner. A plate on the lid bears this
legend, in Italian, French and Latin:
Let no man open or dispose of this casket, on peril of his
soul, before the year 1939.
Father Sutton's
New York
friends insist that if he actually wrote the letter and sent the casket, they
may be taken at face value. If it is a hoax perpetrated in his name, it is both
elaborate and senseless. In any case, it is worth the study of those who love
the curious.
Therefore, while neither affirming nor denying the truth
of what appears, herewith is given in full the purported statement of the
vanished Leo Thrasher.
The Time Reflector
THIS story, as unvarnished as I can make it, must begin
where my twentieth-century life ends —in the sitting room of the suite taken by
George Astley and myself at Tomasulo's inn, on a hill above the
Arno
.
It is the clearest of all my clouded memories of that time. April was the
month, still chilly for
Tuscany
, and
we had a charcoal fire in the grate.
I knelt among my dismantled machinery, before the charcoal
fire, testing the connections here and there.
"So that's your time-traveler, Thrasher?" said
Astley. "Like the one H. G. Wells wrote about?"
"Not in the least like the one H. G. Wells wrote
about," I said
spiritedly,
and not perhaps
without a certain resentful pride. "He described a sort of century-hurdling
mechanical horse. In its saddle you rode forward into the Judgment Day or back
to the beginning. This thing of mine will work, but as a reflector."
I peered into the great cylindrical housing that held my
lens, a carefully polished crystal of alum, more than two feet in diameter. I
smiled with satisfaction.
"It won't carry me into time," I assured. "It'll
throw me."
He leaned back in the easy chair that was too small for
him.
"I don't understand, Leo," he confessed. "Tell
me about it."
"All right—if I must," I said. I had told him so
often before. It was a bore to have to repeat what a man seemed incapable of
understanding. "The operation is comparable to that of a
burning-glass," I explained patiently, "which involves a point of light
and transfers its powers through space to another position. Here" I waved
toward the mass of mechanism "is a device that will involve an object and
transfer, or rather,
reproduce
it to another epoch in time."
"I've tried to read Einstein at least enough to think
of time as an extra dimension," ventured Astley. "But, still, I don't
follow your reasoning. You can't exist in two places at once. That's impossible
in the face of it. Yet from what I gather you can exist, you have existed, in
two separate and distinct times. For instance, you're a grown man now, but when
you were a baby—"
"That's the fourth dimension of it," I broke in.
"The baby Leo Thrasher was, in a way, only the original tip of the
fourth-dimensional me. At ten, I was a cross-section. Now I'm another, six feet
tall, eighteen inches wide, eight inches thick—and quite some more years
deep." I began to tinker with my lights. "Do you see now?"
"A little."
Astley had
produced his oldest and most odorous pipe. "You mean that this present
manifestation of you is a single corridorlike object, reaching in time from the
place of your birth—
Chicago
, wasn't
it?—to here in
Florence
."
"That's something of the truth," I granted, my
head deep in the great boxlike container that housed the electrical part of the
machine. "I exist, therefore, only once in time. But suppose this me is
taken completely out o£ Twentieth Century existence- dematerialized, recreated
in another epoch. That makes twice in time, doesn't it?"
AS I
had many times before, I thrilled to the possibility. It was my father's fault,
all this labor and dream. I had wanted to study art, had wanted to be a
painter, and he had wanted me to be an engineer. But he could not direct my
imagination. At the schools he selected, I found the wheels and belts and
motors all singing to me a song both weird and compelling.
The Machine Age was not enough of a wonder to me. I
demanded of it other wonders-miracles.
"I've read Dunne's theory of corridors in time,"
Astley was musing. "And once I saw a play about them by J. B. Priestly,
wasn't it? What's your reaction to that stuff?"
"That's one of the things I hope to find out
about," I told him. "Of course, I think that there's only the one
corridor, and I'm going to travel down it—or duck out at one point, I
mean
, and reenter farther along.
What I'd like to do would be to reappear in
Florence
of another age,
Florence
of the
Renaissance."
Astley nodded. He preferred the French Gothic period,
because of the swords and the ballads, but he understood my enthusiasm for
Renaissance Italy—to me, the age and home of the greatest painters, poets,
philosophers of all times.
"Then what?" he encouraged me, gaining interest.
"I'll paint a picture—a good one, I hope.
A picture that will properly grace a chapel or church or gallery, a
picture that will be kept for four centuries or more.
Preferably it will
be a
mural, that
cannot be plundered or destroyed without
tearing down a whole important building. When it's finished, I'll come back to
this time, to this hour almost. Of course, I'll have to build myself a new
time-reflector where I am, because it will be impossible to take this one with
me."
"And we'll go together to the chapel or church or
gallery, and look at your Leo Thrasher work of art?" asked Astley. He lighted
his pipe. "It will be your footprint in the sands of another time
. "
Isn't that what you mean?"
"Exactly.
Evidence
that I've been twice in time."
I sighed, with a feeling of rapture,
because for a moment I fancied the adventure already accomplished.
"If I'm not able to do a picture," I told him,
"I'll make my mark—initials or a cross. Cut it in the plinth of a statue,
scratch it on the boards at the back of the Mona Lisa or other paintings that I
know will survive. It will be almost as good a proof." I smiled.
"However, I daresay they'll let me paint. I have a gift that way."
"Perhaps because you're lefthanded," Astley smiled
at me through the blue smoke. "But one thing—in Renaissance Italy, won't
your height and buttery hair
be
out of place?"
"Not among Fifteenth-Century Tuscans," I said
confidently. "There were many with yellow hair and blue eyes. Look at the
old Florentine portraits in any art gallery. Look at the streets of
Florence
today. Not all of those big tawny people are foreigners."
As I talked, I was reassembling my machinery that we had
brought with great care from my native
America
to this spot that I had long since chosen as the obvious place for my
experiment.
The apparatus took shape under my hands. The open
framework, six feet high, as many feet long, and a yard wide, was of metal rods
painstakingly milled to micrometric proportion in
Germany
.
At one end, on a succession of racks, were arranged my
ray-generator, with its light bulbs, specially made with vanadium filaments in
America
.
My cameralike device which concentrated the time-reflection power had been
assembled from parts made by English, German and Swiss experts. And then there
was the lens of alum with its housing, as big and heavy as a piece of
water-main, which I now lifted carefully and clamped into place at the front of
the camera.
ASTLEY stared, and drew on his pipe. It was plain enough
that he looked tolerantly on all my labor as well as my talk, and that he
believed the whole experiment was something of which I would quickly tire.
Though he had been complaisant enough about coming with me and lending what aid
he could to my secret experiment.
"That business you're setting up there looks like the
kind of thing science fictionists write about," he said.
"It's exactly the kind of thing they write
about," I assured him. "As a matter of fact, science fiction has given
me plenty of inspiration, and more than a little information, while I've been
making it. But this is practical and material, Astley, not imaginary."
He had not long to wait to witness the truth of that,
though his phlegmatic nature could never have understood the tenseness that was
making my nerves taut as a spring trap. I knew, however, that nerve strain was to
be expected, for I was nearing the actuality of the experiment to which I had
long given my heart and soul.
I said nothing more, because now, within the tick of
seconds I would know whether my dream could be a reality or if, in fact, that
was all I had toiled and anguished for—a dream!
I am not sure—how could I be certain?—whether my hands
were steady when the great moment came. I know vaguely that my hands did reach
out.
I pressed a switch. At the other end of the framework
there sprang into view a paper-thin sheet of misty vapor, like a piece of
fabric stretched between the
rectangle
of rods. I
could be excused for the theatricality of my gesture.
"Behold the curtain!" I said. "When I
concentrate my rays upon it, all is ready. I need only walk through." I stepped
back. "Five minutes for it to warm up, and I'm off into the past."
I began to take off my clothes, folding them carefully;
the tweed suit, the
necktie
of wine-colored silk. "I
can be reflected through time," I said with a touch of whimsicality,
"but my new clothes must stay here." And more seriously: "I
can't count on molecules to approximate them at the other end of the
business."
"You can't count on molecules to approximate your
body, either," challenged Astley.
I knew that he was not as stolid as he was trying to
appear, for his pipe had gone out, and he was filling it, and I could see that
his hands shook a trifle. He was beginning to wonder whether to take me
seriously or not.
Unimaginative Astley!
"All my diggings into old records at the Biblioteca
Nazionale, yonder in town, have been to find those needed molecules," I
told him. "Look at those notes on the table beside you."
He turned in his big arm-chair—it was none too big for
him, at that—and picked up the jumble of papers that lay there. "You've
written a date at the top of this one," he said as he shuffled them.
"'April Thirtieth, Fourteen-seventy.'
And below it you've
jotted down something I don't
follow :
*Mithraic
ceremony —rain prayer—ox on altar'."
"Which sums up everything," I said, pulling off
my shoes. "Right here right at this inn, which I hunted up for the purpose
of my experiment—a group of cultists gathered on April Thirtieth, Fourteen -
seventy.
Just four hundred and sixty-eight years ago
today."
I leaned over to look at the time-gauge on my camera.
"I'm set for that, exactly."
"Cultists?" repeated Astley, whom I knew from of
old
is apt to clamp mentally upon a single word that
interests him. "What sort of cultists?"
"Contemporaries called them sorcerers and
Satanists," I told him. "But probably they had some sort of hand-me-down
paganism from old Roman days. Something like the worship of Mithras *
At
any rate, they were sacrificing an ox on that day, trying
to bring rain down on their vineyards. I have figured it out like this—if they needed
rain, then that particular April thirtieth must have been bright and sunny,
ideal for my reflection apparatus. They had an ox on the altar, and from its
substance I can reassemble my own tissues to house my personality again. The
original molecules have, of course, dissipated somewhere along the route of the
process in time. Is that all clear?"
ASTLEY nodded slowly, and I stood up without a stitch of clothing.
A pier-glass gave me back a tall pink image, lank but well muscled, crowned
with ruffled hair of tawny gold.
"Well, old man," I said, with what nonchalance I
could, through every nerve in me was tingling, "the machinery's humming.
Here I step into the past."
My companion clamped his pipe between his teeth, but did
not light it again. I could still see the disbelief in his eyes.
"I hope you know what you're about, and won't do
yourself much damage with that thing," he grumbled. "Putting yourself
into such a position isn't like experimenting with rats or guinea pigs, you
know."
"I haven't experimented with rats or guinea
pigs," I informed him, and stepped into the open framework. I turned on
another switch, and through the lens of alum
flowed
an
icyblue light, full of tiny flakes that did not warm my naked skin.
* Charles Godfrey Leiand, in his important work, "
Aradia ;
or the Gospel of the Witches of Italy," traces
connections between witchcraft and the elder pagan faiths of
Rome
.
Mono Lisa
"As a matter of fact," I said in what I was sure
was a parting message, "I've never experimented with anything. Astley, old
boy, you are about to see the first operation of my time reflector upon any
living organism."
Astley leaned forward, concern at last springing out all
over his face. "If anything happens," he protested quickly,
"your family—"
"I have no family.
All dead."
With a lifted hand I forestalled what else he was going to say. "Goodbye,
Astley. Tomorrow, at this time, have a fresh veal carcass, or a fat pig,
brought here. That's for me to materialize myself back."
And I stepped two paces forward, into and through the
misty veil. At once I felt a helpless lightness, as though whisked off my feet
by a great wave of the ocean. Glancing quickly behind me, momentarily I saw the
room and all in it, but somehow vague and transparent—the fading image of the
walls, the windows, my openwork reflector-apparatus, Astley starting to his
feet from the armchair.
Then all vanished into white light.