Knight, Damon - Anachron

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ANACHRON

by DAMON KNIGHT

First published in 'If' Januar '54

THE BODY was never found. And for that reason alone, there was no body to find.

It sounds like inverted logic -- which, in a sense, it is -- but there's no paradox involved.

It was a perfectly orderly and explicable event, even though it could only have happened to a

Castellare.

Odd fish, the Castellare brothers. Sons of a Scots-Englishwoman and an expatriate Italian,

born in England, educated on the Continent, they were at ease anywhere in the world and at home

nowhere.

Nevertheless, in their middle years, they had become settled men. Expatriates like their

father, they lived on the island of Ischia, off the Neapolitan coast, in a palace -- quattrocento,

very fine, with peeling cupids on the walls, a multitude of rats, no central heating and no

neighbors.

They went nowhere, no one except their agents and their lawyers came to them. Neither had

ever married. Each, at about the age of thirty, had given up the world of people for an inner

world of more precise and more enduring pleasures. Each was an amateur -- a fanatical, compulsive

amateur.

They had been born out of their time.

Peter's passion was virtu. He collected relentlessly, it would not be too much to say

savagely; he collected as some men hunt big game. His taste was catholic, and his acquisitions

filled the huge rooms of the palace and half the vaults under them -- paintings, statuary,

enamels, porcelain, glass, crystal, metalwork. At fifty, he was a round little man with small,

sardonic eyes and a careless patch of pinkish goatee.

Harold Castellare, Peter's talented brother, was a scientist. An amateur scientist. He

belonged in the nineteenth century, as Peter was a throwback to a still earlier epoch. Modern

science is largely a matter of teamwork and drudgery, both impossible concepts to a Castellare.

But Harold's intelligence was in its own way as penetrating and original as a Newton's or a

Franklin's. He had done respectable work in physics and electronics, and had even, at his lawyer's

insistence, taken out a few patents. The income from these, when his own purchases of instruments

and equipment did not consume it, he gave to his brother, who accepted it without gratitude or

rancor.

Harold, at fifty-three, was spare and shrunken, sallow and spotted, with a bloodless,

melancholy countenance; on his upper lip grew a neat hedge of pink-and-salt mustache, the

companion piece and antithesis of his brother's goatee.

On a certain May morning, Harold had an accident.

Goodyear dropped rubber on a hot stove; Archimedes took a bath; Becquerel left a piece of

uranium ore in a drawer with a photographic plate. Harold Castallare, working patiently with an

apparatus which had so far consumed a great deal of current without producing anything more

spectacular than some rather unusual corona effects, sneezed convulsively and dropped an ordinary

bar magnet across two charged terminals.

Above the apparatus a huge, cloudy bubble sprang into being.

Harold, getting up from his instinctive crouch, blinked at it in profound astonishment. As he

watched, the cloudiness abruptly disappeared and he was looking through the bubble at a section of

tesselated flooring that seemed to be about three feet above the real floor. He could also see the

corner of a carved wooden bench, and on the bench a small, oddly shaped stringed instrument.

Harold swore fervently to himself, made agitated notes, and then began to experiment. He

tested the sphere cautiously with an electroscope, with a magnet, with a Geiger counter. Negative.

He tore a tiny bit of paper from his notepad and dropped it toward the sphere. The paper

disappeared; he couldn't see where it went.

Speechless, Harold picked up a meter stick and thrust it delicately forward. There was no

feeling of contact; the rule went into and through the bubble as if the latter did not exist. Then

it touched the stringed instrument, with a solid click. Harold pushed. The instrument slid over

the edge of the bench and struck the floor with a hollow thump and jangle.

Staring at it, Harold suddenly recognized its tantalizingly familiar shape.

Recklessly he let go the meter stick, reached in and picked the fragile thing out of the

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