The Circle of Zero, Stanley Grauman Weinbaum [books to read this summer TXT] 📗

too little of finance. I wouldn’t know how to interpret my memories.’

‘Who, then?’

‘You!’ He jabbed that long finger against me.

I was thoroughly startled. ‘Me? Oh, no! Not a chance of it!’

‘Jack,’ he said querulously, ‘didn’t you study hypnotism in my course? Didn’t you learn how harmless it is? You know what tommy-rot the idea is of one mind dominating another. You know the subject really hypnotizes himself, that no one can hypnotize an unwilling person. Then what are you afraid of?’

‘I—well,’ I didn’t know what to answer.

I’m not afraid,’ I said grimly. ‘I just don’t like it.’

‘You’re afraid!’

‘I’m not!’

‘You are!’ He was growing excited.

It was at that moment that Yvonne’s footsteps sounded in the hall. His eyes glittered. He looked at me with a sinister hint of cunning.

‘I dislike cowards,’ he whispered. His voice rose. ‘So does Yvonne!’

The girl entered, perceiving his excitement. ‘Oh!’ she frowned. ‘Why do you have to take these theories so to heart, father?’

‘Theories?’ he screeched. ‘Yes! I have a theory that when you walk you stand still and the sidewalk moves back. No—then the sidewalk moves back. No—then the sidewalk would split if two people walked towards each other—or maybe it’s elastic. Of course it’s elastic! That’s why the last mile is the longest. It’s been stretched!’

Yvonne got him to bed.

Well, he talked me into it. I don’t know how much was due to my own credulity and how much to Yvonne’s solemn dark eyes. I half-believed the professor by the time he’d spent another evening in argument but I think the clincher was his veiled threat to forbid Yvonne my company. She’d have obeyed him if it killed her. She was from New Orleans too, you see, and of Creole blood.

I won’t describe that troublesome course of training. One has to develop the hypnotic habit. It’s like any other habit, and must be formed slowly. Contrary to the popular opinion morons and people of low intelligence can’t ever do it. It takes real concentration—the whole knack of it is the ability to concentrate one’s attention—and I don’t mean the hypnotist, either.

I mean the subject. The hypnotist hasn’t a thing to do with it except to furnish the necessary suggestion by murmuring, ‘Sleep—sleep—sleep—sleep …’ And even that isn’t necessary once you learn the trick of it.

I spent half-an-hour or more nearly every evening, learning that trick. It was tedious and a dozen times I became thoroughly disgusted and swore to have no more to do with the farce. But always, after the half-hour’s humouring of de Neant, there was Yvonne, and boredom vanished. As a sort of reward, I suppose, the old man took to leaving us alone. And we used our time, I’ll wager, to better purpose than he used his.

But I began to learn, little by little. Came a time, after three weeks of tedium, when I was able to cast myself into a light somnambulistic state. I remember how the glitter of the cheap stone in Professor de Neant’s ring grew until it filled the world and how his voice, mechanically dull, murmured like the waves in my ears. I remember everything that transpired during those minutes, even his query, ‘Are you sleeping?’ and my automatic reply, ‘Yes.’

By the end of November we had mastered the second state of lethargy and then—I don’t know why, but a sort of enthusiasm for the madness took hold of me. Business was at a standstill. I grew tired of facing customers to whom I had sold bonds at a par that were now worth fifty or less and trying to explain why. After a while I began to drop in on the professor during the afternoon and we went through the insane routine again and again.

Yvonne comprehended only a part of the bizarre scheme. She was never in the room during our half-hour trials and knew only vaguely that we were involved in some sort of experiment which was to restore our lost money. I don’t suppose she had much faith in it but she always indulged her father.

It was early in December that I began to remember things. Dim and formless things at first—sensations that utterly eluded the rigities of words. I tried to express them to de Neant but it was hopeless.

‘A circular feeling,’ I’d say. ‘No—not exactly—a sense of spiral—not that, either. Roundness—I can’t recall it now. It slips away.’

He was jubilant. ‘It comes!’ he whispered, grey beard awaggle and pale eyes glittering. ‘You begin to remember!’

‘But what good is a memory like that?’

‘Wait! It will come clearer. Of course not all your memories will be of the sort we can use. They will be scattered. Through all the multifold eternities of the past-future circle you can’t have been always Jack Anders, securities salesman.

‘There will be fragmentary memories, recollections of times when your personality was partially existent, when the Laws of Chance had assembled a being who was not quite Jack Anders, in some period of the infinite worlds that must have risen and died in the span of eternities.

‘But somewhere, too, the same atoms, the same conditions, must have made you. You’re the black grain among the trillions of white grains and, with all eternity to draw in from, you must have been drawn before—many, many times.’

‘Do you suppose,’ I asked suddenly, ‘that anyone exists twice on the same earth? Reincarnation in the sense of the Hindus?’

He laughed scornfully. ‘The age of the earth is somewhere between a thousand million and three thousand million years. What proportion of eternity is that?’

‘Why—no proportion at all. Zero.’

‘Exactly. And zero represents the chance of the same atoms combining to form the same person twice in one cycle of a planet. But I have shown that trillions, or trillions of trillions of years ago, there must have been another earth, another Jack Anders, and’—his voice took on that whining note—‘another crash that ruined Jack Anders and old de Neant. That is the time you must remember out of lethargy.’

‘Catalepsy!’ I said. ‘What would one remember in that?’

‘God knows.’

‘What a mad scheme!’ I said suddenly. ‘What a crazy pair of fools we are!’ The adjectives were a mistake.

‘Mad? Crazy?’ His voice became a screech. ‘Old de Neant is mad, eh? Old Dawn of Nothingness is crazy! You think time doesn’t go in a circle, don’t you? Do you know what a circle represents? I’ll tell you!

‘A circle is the mathematical symbol for zero! Time is zero—time is a circle. I have a theory that the hands of a clock are really the noses, because they’re on the clock’s face, and since time is a circle they go round and round and round …’

Yvonne slipped quietly into the room and patted her father’s furrowed forehead. She must have been listening.

Nightmare or Truth?

‘Look here,’ I said at a later time to de Neant. ‘If the past and future are the same thing, then the future’s as unchangeable as the past. How, then, can we expect to change it by recovering our money?’

‘Change it?’ he snorted. ‘How do you know we’re changing it? How do you know that this same thing wasn’t done by that Jack Anders and de Neant back on the other side of eternity? I say it was!’

I subsided, and the weird business went on. My memories—if they were memories—were becoming clearer now. Often and often I saw things out of my own immediate past of twenty-seven years, though of course de Neant assured me that these were visions from the past of that other self on the far side of time.

I saw other things too, incidents that I couldn’t place in my experience, though I couldn’t be quite sure they didn’t belong there. I might have forgotten, you see, since they were of no particular importance. I recounted everything dutifully to the old man immediately upon awakening and sometimes that was difficult—like trying to find words for a half-remembered dream.

There were other memories as well—bizarre, outlandish dreams that had little parallel in human history. These were always vague and sometimes very horrible and only their inchoate and formless character kept them from being utterly nerve-racking and terrifying.

At one time, I recall, I was gazing through a little crystalline window into a red fog through which moved indescribable faces—not human, not even associable with anything I had ever seen. On another occasion I was wandering, clad in furs, across a cold grey desert and at my side was a woman who was not quite Yvonne.

I remember calling her Pyroniva, and knowing that the name meant ‘Snowy-fire’. And here and there in the air about us floated fungoid things, bobbing around like potatoes in a water-bucket. And once we stood very quiet while a menacing form that was only remotely like the small fungi droned purposefully far overhead, toward some unknown objective.

At still another time I was peering, fascinated, into a spinning pool of mercury, watching an image therein of two wild winged figures playing in a roseate glade—not at all human in form but transcendently beautiful, bright and iridescent.

I felt a strange kinship between these two creatures and myself and Yvonne but I had no inkling of what they were, nor upon what world, nor at what time in eternity, nor even of what nature was the room that held the spinning pool that pictured them.

Old Aurore de Neant listened carefully to the wild word-pictures I drew.

‘Fascinating!’ he muttered. ‘Glimpses of an infinitely distant future caught from a ten-fold infinitely remote past. These things you describe are not earthly; it means that somewhere, sometime, men are actually to burst the prison of space and visit other worlds. Some day …’

‘If these glimpses aren’t simply nightmares,’ I said.

They’re not nightmares,’ he snapped, ‘but they might as well be for all the value they are to us.’ I could see him struggle to calm himself. ‘Our money is still gone. We must try, keep trying for years, for centuries, until we get the black grain of sand, because black sand is a sign of gold-bearing ore …’ He paused. ‘What am I talking about?’ he said querously.

Well, we kept trying. Interspersed with the wild, all but indescribable visions came others almost rational. The thing became a fascinating game. I was neglecting my business—though that was small loss—to chase dreams with old Professor Aurore de Neant.

I spent evenings, afternoons and finally mornings, too, living in the slumber of the lethargic state or telling the old man what fantastic things I had dreamed—or, as he said, remembered. Reality became dim to me. I was living in an outlandish world of fancy and only the dark, tragic eyes of Yvonne tugged at me, pulled me back into the daylight world of sanity.

I have mentioned more nearly rational visions. I recall one a city—but what a city! Sky-piercing, white and beautiful and the people of it were grave with the wisdom of gods, pale and lovely people, but solemn, wistful, sad. There was the aura of brilliance and wickedness that hovers about all great cities, that was born, I suppose, in Babylon and will remain until great cities are no more.

But that was something else, something intangible. I don’t know exactly what to call it but perhaps the word decadence is as close as any word we have. As I stood at the base of a colossal structure there was the whir of quiet machinery but it seemed to me, nevertheless, that the city was dying.

It might have been the moss that grew green on the north walls of the buildings. It might have been the grass that pierced here and there through