C. L. Moore - Tryst In Time

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Tryst in Time

Eric Rosner at twenty had worked his way round the world on cattle boats,

killed his first man in a street brawl in Shanghai, escaped a firing squad by

a hairbreadth, stowed away on a pole-bound exploring ship.

At twenty-five he had lost himself in Siberian wilderness, led a troup of

Tatar bandits, commanded a Chinese regiment, fought in a hundred battles,

impartially on either side.

At thirty there was not a continent nor a capital that had not known him, not

a jungle nor a desert nor a mountain range that had not left scars upon his

great Viking body. Tiger claws and the Russian knout, Chinese bullets and the

knives of savage black warriors in African forests had written their tales of

a full and perilous life upon him. At thirty he looked backward upon such a

gorgeous, brawling, color-splashed career as few men of sixty can boast. But

at thirty he was not content.

Life had been full for him, and yet as the years passed he was becoming

increasingly aware of a need for something which those years were empty of.

What it was he did not know. He was not even consciously aware of missing

anything, but as time went on he turned more and more to a search for

something new-anything new. Perhaps it was his subconscious hunting blindly

for what life had lacked.

There was so very little that Eric Rosen had not done in his thirty riotous

years that the search for newness rapidly became almost feverish, and almost

in vain. Riches he had known, and poverty, much pleasure and much pain, and

the extremes of human experience were old tales to him. Ennui replaced the

zest for living that had sent him so gayly through the exultant years of his

youth. And for a man like Eric Rosner ennui was like a little death.

Perhaps, in part, all this was because he had missed love. No girl of all the

girls that had kissed him and adored him and wept when he

left them had mattered a snap of the fingers to Eric Rosner. He searched on

restlessly.

In this mood of feverish hunting for new things, he met the scientist, Walter

Dow. It happened casually, and they might never have met a second time had not

Eric said something offhand about the lack of adventure which life had to

offer a man. And Dow laughed.

"What do you know about adventure?" he demanded. He was a little man with a

shock of prematurely white hair and a face that crinkled into lines of

derision as he laughed. "You've spent your life among dangers and

gunfire-sure! But that's not real adventure. Science is the only field where

true adventure exists. I mean it! The things that are waiting to be discovered

offer fields of excitement like nothing you ever heard of. One man in a

lifetime couldn't begin to touch the edges of what there is to know. I tell

you I--"

"Oh, sure," interrupted Eric lazily. "I see what you mean. But all that's not

for me. I'm a man of action; I haven't any brains. Hunching over a microscope

isn't my idea of fun."

The argument that began then developed into a queer sort of antagonistic

friendship which brought the two men together very often in the weeks that

passed. But they were to know one another much more intimately than that

before the true urgency of what lay in the minds of each became clear to the

other.

Walter Dow had spent a lifetime in the worship of one god-inertia. "There is a

bedrock," he used to say reverently, "over which the tides of time ebb and

flow, over which all things material and immaterial, as the layman sees them,

change and fade and form again. But the bedrock remains. Complete inertia!

What couldn't we do if we attained it!"

"And what," asked Eric, "is inertia?"

Dow shot him a despairing glance.

"Everybody knows what inertia is. Newton's first law of motion is the law of

inertia, stating that every body remains in a state of rest or of uniform

motion in a straight line unless impressed forces change it. That's what makes

people in a moving car swerve to one side when the car goes round a bend. It's

what makes it so difficult for a horse to start a heavy load moving, though

once it's in motion the strain eases. There's nothing that doesn't obey the

law-nothing!

"But Newton didn't dream what measureless abysses of force lay behind his

simple statement. Or what an understatement it was. Describing inertia by

stating Newton's law is like describing the sea

by saying there's foam on the waves. The inertia force is inherent in

everything, just as there's moisture in everything. But behind that inertia,

manifest so obscurely in matter, is a vastness of power much greater

comparatively than the vastnesses of the seas which are the storehouses for

the relatively tiny amounts of moisture in everything you see.

"I can't make you understand; you don't speak the language. And I sometimes

wonder if I could explain even to another physicist all that I've discovered

in the past ten years. But I do very firmly believe that it would be possible

to anchor to that bedrock of essential, underlying inertia which is the base

upon which matter builds and-and allow time itself to whirl by!"

"Yeah, and find yourself floating in space when you let go." Eric grinned.

"Even I've heard that the universe is in motion through space. I don't know

about time, but I'm pretty sure space would block your little scheme."

"I didn't mean you'd have to-to dig your anchor right into the rock,"

explained Dow with dignity. "It'd be a sort of a drag to slow you down, not a

jerk that would snatch you right off the Earth. And it'd

involve-immensities-even then. But it could be done. It will be done. By

Heaven, I'll do it!"

Eric's sunburned face sobered.

"You're not kidding?" he asked. "A man could-coj~dd drag his anchor and let

time go by, and 'up-anchor' in another age? Say! Make me an anchor, and I'll

be your guinea pig!"

Dow did not smile.

"That's the worst of it," he said. "All this is pure theory and will have to

remain that, in spite of all I've bragged. It would be absolutely blind

experimenting, and the very nature of the element I'm experimenting with

precludes any proof of success or failure. I could-to be frank with you I

have-sent objects out through time--"

"You have!" Eric leaned forward with a jerk and laid an urgent hand on Dow's

arm. "You really have?"

"Well, I've made them vanish. I think it proves I've succeeded, but I have no

way of knowing. The chances are countless millions to one against my landing

an experiment in my own immediate future, with all the measureless vastness of

time lying open. And, of course, I can't guide it."

"Suppose you landed in your own past?" queried Eric.

Dow smiled.

"The eternal question," he said. "The inevitable objection to the very idea of

time travel. Well, you never did, did you? You know it

never happened! I think there must be some inflexible law which forbids the

same arrangement of matter, the pattern which is one's self, from occupying

the same space time more than once. As if any given section of space time were

a design in which any arrangement of atoms is possible, except that no pattern

may appear exactly twice.

"You see, we know of time only enough to be sure that it's far beyond any

human understanding. Though I think the past and the future may be visited,

which on the face of it seems to predicate an absolutely preordained future, a

fixed and unchangeable past-yet I do not believe that time is arbitrary. There

must be many possible futures. The one we enter upon is not the only way. Have

you ever heard that theory explained? It's not a new one-the idea that at

every point of our progress we confront crossroads, with a free choice as to

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C. L. Moore - Tryst In Time

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