Sunday is Three Thousand Years Away and Other SF Classics Read online

  “Give him the data that he would have after the transfer and he would deduce the entire experiment, at least my relationship to it, in a very short time. I soon decided that the only possible satisfactory way would be to obtain his voluntary aid. That is why I allowed the establishment of a strong personal relationship with the subject.

  “I will tell him exactly what we want, who I am and where I come from.

  I will bring him here tonight to meet my family and you, Dr. Harkase. He will be glad to come with me voluntarily.”

  “You realize the value of the specimen, of course. If he refuses voluntary assistance it will be difficult to make use of him later. And we have searched a long time for another closed-cycle person besides yourself.”

  “I have no doubt of his willingness.”

  “You believe he will consent to remain there—provided you explain his affiliation beyond Four?”

  Rena smiled softly. “I could persuade him to do, voluntarily, anything within his power. That is why my plan is so much better than the original one. “

  CHAPTER II: The Door

  They had a date for that night. He was late but George still drove slowly toward the apartment where Rena lived.

  He was still bemused by that pen of Rena’s, writing snatches of thought that certainly were not his own. He had been unable to make it write anything that he wanted it to—not even his own name. It simply wobbled about, producing a meaningless scrawl—and then scraps of information about some mysterious “Cell Four” and admission from Rena, “I love you, George.”

  He had deliberately left it at the plant because that would give him better excuse to examine it further. He determined to say nothing to Rena about it until she brought up the subject. But where had she obtained it?

  Hank’s Drug had never heard of such a thing—quite understandably.

  A half hour late, he finally knocked on the door of Rena’s apartment.

  Rena opened the door as if she had been standing there waiting for him. There was the faint scent of some perfume, nameless to him and faintly narcotic in its penetrating illusion of exotic flowers.

  She smiled at him. “Come in, darling. Did you bring my pen—the one I left on your desk this afternoon?”

  He was taken aback by the abruptness of her question. He had supposed she would hedge about the matter of the strange instrument.

  “No— I didn’t think of it. I was going to but — “

  She took his arm and led him to the sofa before the fireplace. “George, darling, you can’t lie worth a darn, can you ?”

  “That calls for a smile, lady, or better still — ” He put his arm around her.

  “Wait a minute. Let me tell you, exactly what you did. You wondered why the pen wouldn’t write for you as it did when I was sitting there. The more you tried the less it would do anything for you. Finally the clock moved around and you had to go and so you shoved it in your desk and locked it up with the idea that tomorrow you’d really tinker and find out what made it go.”

  “Well — “

  Her expression suddenly changed. She leaned back against him, the white softness of her shoulders outlined against the dark cloth of his shirt sleeve. She looked steadily into the low fire in the hearth.

  “I’ll tell you about that pen. I don’t know quite how to start because, you see, it was made twenty-six hundred years ago—or rather from now.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “My pen. It was made in a day when privacy and truth are honored to the extent that your use of it this afternoon would have horrified a member of the culture that produced it.”

  “You’re talking plain nonsense Rena. Where did you get that pen? Who made it?”

  “Didn’t it seem as if I were writing with it instead of you?”

  “Yes, it did. I began to think I was going off my rocker. It was almost as if you were talking to me once or twice.”

  “It’s nothing particularly marvelous—just a gadget. IVs attuned by a very delicate mechanism to the waves of my thalamus—so that when I want to use it I simply move it along the paper. The mechanism inside, activated by my thought patterns, does the actual writing.

  “It can write almost as fast as I can think. But for me only—no one else. If anyone else attempts to use it he may pick up my thoughts if they happen to lie above what we call class-B intensity, which is the level required to operate the pen.

  “But among its manufacturers it is unthinkable that privacy should be invaded through a misplaced pen. Therefore we have no fear of using it—or even of losing it. Another one can always be obtained.”

  “Where? Where can you obtain such pens?” He was conscious of his own voice in his ears but it seemed to come from a distance over a poor audio reproducer. “Who knows how to make them?”

  “There are shops where you can step in and have a brain-wave check and get a stock pen adjusted to your own characteristics—shops in my own town, among my own people.”

  “But where?”

  “Twenty-six hundred years—straight through that door!”

  She pointed suddenly to a closed door across the room. He half rose, moving impulsively towards it.

  She drew him down beside her again. “Wait, George. You can’t get in there yet. You’ll have to listen to what I have to say.”

  He sat back slowly, searching her face with his eyes to find some clue to her meaning. He had a fleeting sense that a thin transparent barrier had suddenly risen between them. It brought a shock of fear that was like a blow beneath his heart.

  “You have an unfortunate phrase in your language,” said Rena slowly. “Time travel. It’s unfortunate because your mind is conditioned by it to contemplate impossible paradoxes. We use a better term—historical extension. What you might call a time machine—we call an historical alternator.

  “Your civilization has been built around the automobile and the electric generator for the past thirty years. Can you imagine a civilization built similarly around another machine—an historical alternator? That is the civilization I grew up in.”

  She paused and he watched her face in silence. He watched for some sudden wrinkling at the corners of her mouth or her eyes that would tell him this was something she had dreamed up to tell him. But there was none of that. There was a dreadful terrifying honesty of expression that told him that every word she had spoken was true.

  It appalled him, the sickening gap of time that he glimpsed between them. He didn’t stop now to question how it could be, how such a thing could be brought about or through what manner of technology it was born. He only knew that it was so.

  He reached out a hand as if to draw her safely closer across that gap, “I have to believe you,” he said. “But I don’t understand it. Tell me about it. What is it going to mean to us?”

  “I’m a student in the University there, she said. “I’m studying to be an Experimental Historian. My coming here is a part of an experiment I’m doing for graduate study.”

  “And I’m—just a part of your experiment! Is that what you’re trying to say?”

  Sudden mist clouded her eyes as she scanned his face. “Do you think I would have lied to you?” Then a faint smile softened the hurt upon her face.

  “I keep forgetting you’re such a savage. I forget that you’ve never known what it is like in a culture where people do not lie to each other.”

  “I’m sorry, darling. I’m afraid I don’t know what that’s like. I know I don’t understand a thing you’re telling me and minute by minute I’m getting more scared that it means you re lost to me.”

  “No—it will never mean that. The original intent of the experiment was that I should get you to accompany me to an era that is as yet unpenetrated but it was not meant that I should fall in love with you.”

  “Is that bad—for your experiment, I mean?” he asked whimsically.

  “Not particularly. Provided I can still persuade you to go with me.”

  “You’d have a hard ti
me talking me out of it but where are we going?”

  “It’s difficult to explain without your having a broad background in historical physics. Time is stratified in an extremely complex manner. We call these strata cells. There are certain ones which are completely impenetrable to our viewing instruments and from which we can draw no samples whatever with the alternators.

  “Historians have been able to project inert samples into these cells but no personal exploration has been possible. For a long time the existence of these impenetrable cells was not even known because our instruments show other cells beyond them. Only careful mathematical analyses of the discontinuities involved finally proved their existence.”

  “Well, how can we go if they are impenetrable? And even if we can I’m not sure I want my wife romping around through ages that no one can get into.”

  “You don’t understand. Every individual born has a certain inherent historical characteristic that does not follow any known laws of heredity.

  “There are certain ones who have what is called an open cycle characteristic, who are permanently barred from use of the alternators. Their history is so intimately bound up with that of their environment that they could not be wrenched out of it without catastrophic consequences to the whole historical fabric. They are in the minority and are rather unhappy individuals. On a par, say, with a trailer tourist of your culture, suddenly deprived of his driver’s license for life.

  “Most of us have a spiral-like cycle, at least that is the nearest word description that can be applied to the mathematical formulation that describes them. Their history can be extended by the alternators. They move from one level to another of their spiral and alter permissible probabilities without harmful results.

  “The third type is an extreme rarity, the closed-cycle type. It was first predicted by mathematical formulations alone by my professor, Dr. Harkam was the first of the type ever discovered. We have searched through centuries of history for another. You’re it.”

  “And what are the characteristics of our type?” asked George.

  “We can move anywhere, in any time, and do just about as we please in any age of the world’s history without having the slightest effect upon the general historical environment.”

  George laughed. “That doesn’t sound very complimentary. You mean we can do any darn thing we please and we’ll still never amount to anything because we can’t affect history?”

  Rena nodded. “I’m afraid that’s about it. When I first learned of it I felt about the, same as you. It’s rather a disheartening situation in a way.

  We could be utterly destroyed and our passing would be as tangible as the well-known hole in a pool of water.

  “But actually it’s not anything to be greatly mourned. The, effects of the other types are characterized mostly by duration rather than benevolence or usefulness. The waves of our particular splash simply die out sooner, that’s all.”

  “No children, even?”

  “That’s an entirely different matter. Dr. Harkase says that you have a strong potential affiliation on the other side of Cell Four to which we are going. Probably it means children.”

  “That’s something anyway. I always pictured myself in the role of paterfamilias. But the pen—tell me what happened this afternoon.”

  “As soon as I left you I went back to the University to the class session in Experimental History. We were discussing this experiment and you picked up some of the things I was thinking while in class. My mind was wandering, you see.” She smiled in recollection of what she had let him write.

  “But how?” he exploded. ‘You say the University is twenty-six hundred years in the future. How could the pen respond to your thoughts across such a span of time?”

  “‘That is an accidental but unavoidable nuisance feature of the instruments. Human thought is a process operating entirely outside the time-space continuum as understood in your physics. Time is meaningless at the level where thought mechanisms operate.

  “The pen responds to its tuned stimulus as if time did not exist. There have been many efforts to block out this effect but so far they have been unsuccessful. Because of this there are serious penalties involved should one of us take a pen into another age.

  “So far only Harkase and the other students know what; I did but I must have it back. If it were permanently lost I might be forbidden to operate an alternator again and in addition be subject to an operation that would change my wave characteristic so that the pen would not respond.

  “It’s a long study to comprehend a small part of the ramifications involved in displacing basic knowledge temporally, You can understand, however, that it could have serious consequences. That is what is involved in the matter of the pen. So you must be careful. I’ll come down for it early in the morning.”

  “How was I able to write with it the first time when it responds only to your thoughts ?”

  She smiled and he understood then what she had done.

  “Sometimes I think you take too much for granted,” he teased.

  Rena stirred and sat on the edge of the sofa. “There’s much more that I could tell you but that is enough for now. I’m going to take you to my home. You will meet my parents and Dr. Harkase. There will be a number of other students there also.

  “You will glimpse incomprehensible facets of our culture but you will not be a total stranger to the people there. Nearly all of them have visited in this time. Be sure to say nothing of our marriage. I have not told any of them yet. And remember that, while no one there will ever lie to you, to them you will always be a savage.”

  George stood up and took her hand. “The thing I like about you, darling, is that you are so complimentary.”

  Together, they walked towards that door across the room.

  This wasn’t real, he thought. He was just George Brooks, engineer, on a date with his girl friend. She couldn’t be talking seriously about a land of supercivilization centuries ahead of them in time. His emotional response was lagging far behind his intellectual comprehension of the situation.

  It caught up when Rena opened the door.

  Emotionally he had fully expected to see another room beyond. But there was nothing tangible to be seen. His eyes recorded only a smothering grayness that joined faintly like fog confined behind glass.

  “That’s the way it always looks,” said Rena. “The transition area distorts all sensory phenomena. It may make you a little sick or dizzy the first time but just keep hold of my hand.”

  He realized that she was pulling at him and that he was standing as if cemented to the floor. He relaxed and allowed her to lead him towards the opening.

  CHAPTER III: The Music

  It was not like fog. She disappeared into it as if being swallowed by gray mud. And then he saw his own hand begin to vanish into the stuff as she drew him on. An involuntary response caused him to jerk back from it. He felt Rena’s hand tug at him sharply as if in irritation.

  There was no feeling. Light and sound vanished. It was utter absence of sensation. All that was tangible was the touch of Rena’s hand—and a sudden intolerable sickness in his stomach.

  They came out of it before he had taken a third step. A deep breath of air and a moment of focusing his eyes on an object that held still was enough to wipe out the vertigo.

  He glanced about.

  “This is my room,” said Rena.

  It was something of a shock, he thought afterward, when he first looked at the walls of the room that looked simply like walls. And the bed that looked like a bed. He didn’t know what kind of surroundings to expect but he was prepared for any fantasy. The normal appearance of the room was in itself a shock.

  The architecture and furnishings were severely simple. The only betrayal of advanced civilization lay in the exact proportions and subtle colorings.

  “Since I do most of my studying here, I keep the alternator here so I won’t bother anyone else with my comings and goings. Spatially we’re about four mil
es from our location in your time.”

  “But we only took a couple of steps!”

  “That’s all that’s necessary. The alternator takes care of that. Let’s go out and join the others now. Perhaps I should warn you about Mother. She will probably give you the most trouble but don’t be dismayed by her.

  “She’s rather like your amateur tourists in some ways. She absorbs only a superficial knowledge of the cultures she visits. Her hobby is music and she will probably ask you to join in something she has picked up from her visits to your time.”

  He grinned. ‘Don’t worry. I can take care of Mother.”

  His earlier reassurance was suddenly shaken when Rena started walking towards a perfectly blank wall. As she approached, it seemed to fade in one area and an oval section grew crystal clear. She passed through and turned. “Come on.”

  He followed, mouth slightly agape. He looked back as the wall resumed its opaque hue. “What a gadget! I’d like to take that back with me.”

  “Don’t let Dr. Harkase hear any remarks like that or he will give you his special two-hour lecture on the legal aspects of temporal displacement of scientific knowledge.”

  “They can’t put me in jail for looking—and maybe accidentally figuring out how something works.”

  She stopped, her face serious. “Once having passed through the alternator field you are forever within the jurisdiction of our laws. Don’t ever forget that fact, George, It’s extremely important.”

  They moved along a short hallway, and came out into a large room which was half-celled and half-open to the Sky. Only later did George realize that the “open” section was actually covered with a transparent dome. Household living space seemed to merge indistinctly into outdoor garden.

  There were a dozen or so people standing in conversational groups of twos or threes about the room. Their eyes turned uniformly in his direction as George entered beside Rena.