Short Fiction, Stanley G. Weinbaum [chromebook ebook reader .TXT] 📗

the energy output of the whole universe is not an infinite number of horsepowers. Then he applies this more than infinite power to travel at two hundred and four thousand miles per second for ten seconds. He has then penetrated the past. How far?”

Again I hesitated.

“I’ll tell you. One second!” He glared at me. “Now all you have to do is to design such a machine, and then van Manderpootz will admit the possibility of traveling into the future⁠—for a limited number of seconds. As for the past, I have just explained that all the energy in the universe is insufficient for that.”

“But,” I stammered, “you just said that you⁠—”

“I did not say anything about traveling into either future or past, which I have just demonstrated to you to be impossible⁠—a practical impossibility in the one case and an absolute one in the other.”

“Then how do you travel in time?”

“Not even van Manderpootz can perform the impossible,” said the professor, now faintly jovial. He tapped a thick pad of typewriter paper on the table beside him. “See, Dick, this is the world, the universe.” He swept a finger down it. “It is long in time, and”⁠—sweeping his hand across it⁠—“it is broad in space, but”⁠—now jabbing his finger against its center⁠—“it is very thin in the fourth dimension. Van Manderpootz takes always the shortest, the most logical course. I do not travel along time, into past or future. No. Me, I travel across time, sideways!”

I gulped. “Sideways into time! What’s there?”

“What would naturally be there?” he snorted. “Ahead is the future; behind is the past. Those are real, the worlds of past and future. What worlds are neither past nor future, but contemporary and yet⁠—extemporal⁠—existing, as it were, in time parallel to our time?”

I shook my head.

“Idiot!” he snapped. “The conditional worlds, of course! The worlds of ‘if.’ Ahead are the worlds to be; behind are the worlds that were; to either side are the worlds that might have been⁠—the worlds of ‘if!’ ”

“Eh?” I was puzzled. “Do you mean that you can see what will happen if I do such and such?”

“No!” he snorted. “My machine does not reveal the past nor predict the future. It will show, as I told you, the conditional worlds. You might express it, by ‘if I had done such and such, so-and-so would have happened.’ The worlds of the subjunctive mode.”

“Now how the devil does it do that?”

“Simple, for van Manderpootz! I use polarized light, polarized not in the horizontal or vertical planes, but in the direction of the fourth dimension⁠—an easy matter. One uses Iceland spar under colossal pressures, that is all. And since the worlds are very thin in the direction of the fourth dimension, the thickness of a single light wave, though it be but millionths of an inch, is sufficient. A considerable improvement over time-traveling in past or future, with its impossible velocities and ridiculous distances!”

“But⁠—are those⁠—worlds of ‘if’⁠—real?”

“Real? What is real? They are real, perhaps, in the sense that two is a real number as opposed to √−2, which is imaginary. They are the worlds that would have been if⁠—Do you see?”

I nodded. “Dimly. You could see, for instance, what New York would have been like if England had won the Revolution instead of the Colonies.”

“That’s the principle, true enough, but you couldn’t see that on the machine. Part of it, you see, is a Horsten psychomat (stolen from one of my ideas, by the way) and you, the user, become part of the device. Your own mind is necessary to furnish the background. For instance, if George Washington could have used the mechanism after the signing of peace, he could have seen what you suggest. We can’t. You can’t even see what would have happened if I hadn’t invented the thing, but I can. Do you understand?”

“Of course. You mean the background has to rest in the past experiences of the user.”

“You’re growing brilliant,” he scoffed. “Yes. The device will show ten hours of what would have happened if⁠—condensed, of course, as in a movie, to half an hour’s actual time.”

“Say, that sounds interesting!”

“You’d like to see it? Is there anything you’d like to find out? Any choice you’d alter?”

“I’ll say⁠—a thousand of ’em. I’d like to know what would have happened if I’d sold out my stocks in 2009 instead of ’10. I was a millionaire in my own right then, but I was a little⁠—well, a little late in liquidating.”

“As usual,” remarked van Manderpootz. “Let’s go over to the laboratory then.”

The professor’s quarters were but a block from the campus. He ushered me into the Physics Building, and thence into his own research laboratory, much like the one I had visited during my courses under him. The device⁠—he called it his “subjunctivisor,” since it operated in hypothetical worlds⁠—occupied the entire center table. Most of it was merely a Horsten psychomat, but glittering crystalline and glassy was the prism of Iceland spar, the polarizing agent that was the heart of the instrument.

Van Manderpootz pointed to the headpiece. “Put it on,” he said, and I sat staring at the screen of the psychomat. I suppose everyone is familiar with the Horsten psychomat; it was as much a fad a few years ago as the ouija board a century back. Yet it isn’t just a toy; sometimes, much as the ouija board, it’s a real aid to memory. A maze of vague and colored shadows is caused to drift slowly across the screen, and one watches them, meanwhile visualizing whatever scene or circumstances he is trying to remember. He turns a knob that alters the arrangement of lights and shadows, and when, by chance, the design corresponds to his mental picture⁠—presto! There is his scene recreated under his eyes. Of course his own mind adds the details. All the screen actually shows are these tinted blobs of light and shadow, but the thing can be amazingly real. I’ve seen occasions when I could have sworn the psychomat showed pictures