Then a shred of dim light appears—it’s the weak light in the time machine, and you’ve located it.
You put the atomic generator in the luggage space, throw the papers down beside it, and climb into the cockpit, sweating and mumbling. You reach forward toward the green button, and hesitate—but there’s a’ red one beside it, and you finally decide on that.
Suddenly, there’s a confused yell from the direction of the elevator, and a beam of light strikes against your eyes, with a shout punctuating it. Your finger touches the red button.
You’ll never know what the shouting was about—whether they finally doped out the fact they’d been robbed, or whether they were trying to help you. You don’t care then. The field springs up around you, and the next button you touch—the one on the board that hasn’t been used so far—sends you off into the nothingness. There is no beam of light, you can’t hear a thing, and you’re safe.
It isn’t much of a trip back. You sit there smoking and letting your nerves settle back to normal. You notice a third set of buttons, with some pencil marks over
them—PRESS-THESE TO RETURN TO YOURSELF THIRTY
years—and you begin waiting for the air to get stale. It doesn’t because there is only one of you this time.
Instead, everything flashes off, and you’re sitting in the machine in your own back yard.
You’ll figure out the cycle in more details later. You get into the machine hi front of your house, go to the future in the subbasement, land in your backyard, and then hop back thirty years to pick up yourself, landing hi front of your house. Just that. But right then, you don’t care. You jump out and start pulling out that atomic generator and taking it inside.
It isn’t hard to disassemble—but you don’t learn a thing; just some plates of metal, some spiral coils, and a few odds and ends—all things that can be made easily enough, all obviously of common metals. But when you put it together again, about an hour later, you notice something—everything in it is brand new, and there’s one set of copper wires «missing! It won’t work. You put some #12 house wire in, exactly like the set on the other side, drop in some iron filings, and try it again.
And with the controls set at 120 volts, 60 cycles, and 15 amperes, you get just that. You don’t need the power company any more. And you feel a little happier when you realize that the luggage space wasn’t insulated from time effects by a field, so the motor has moved backward in time, somehow, and is back to its original youth—minus the replaced wires the guard mentioned—which probably wore out because of the makeshift job you’ve just done.
But you begin getting more of a jolt when you find that the papers are all in your own writing, that your name is down as the inventor, and that the date of the patent application is 1991.
Yeah. It will begin to soak in, then. You pick up an atomic generator in the future and bring it back to the past—your present—so that it can be put in the museum with you as the inventor so you can steal it to be the inventor. And you do it in a time machine which you bring back to~ yourself to take yourself into the future to return to take back to yourself.
Who invented anything? And who built them? While your riches from the generator are piling in, and little kids from school are coming around to stare at the man who changed history and made atomic power so common that no nation could hope to be anything but a democracy and a peaceful one—after some of the worst times in history for a few years—while your name becomes as common as Ampere, or Faraday, or any other spelled without a capital letter, you’re thinking of that.
And one day, you come across an old poem—something about some folks calling it evolution and others calling it God. You go out, make a few provisions for the future, and come back to climb into the time machine that’s waiting in the building you had put around it. Then you’ll be knocking on your own door, thirty years back—or right now, from your view—and telling yourself all these things I’m telling you.
But now…
Well, the drinks are finished, you’re woozy enough to go along with me without protest, and I want to find out just why those people up there came looking for you and shouting, before the time machine left.
Come on, let’s go.
The Monster
His feet were moving with an automatic monotony along the souncWeadening material of the flooring. He looked at them, seeing them in motion, and listened for the little taps they made. Then his eyes moved up along the rough tweed of his trousers to the shorter motion of his thighs. There was something good about the movement, almost a purpose.
He tried making his arms move, and found that they accepted the rhythm, the right arm moving forward with the left leg, giving a feeling of balance. It was nice to feel the movement, and nice to know that he could walk so smoothly.
His eyes tired of the motion quickly, however, and he glanced along the hall where he was moving. There were innumerable doors along it; it was a long hall, with a bend at the end. He reached the bend, and began to wonder how he could make the turn. But his feet seemed to know better than he, since one of them shortened its stride automatically, and his body swung right, before picking up the smooth motion again.
The new hallway was like the old one, painted white, with the long row of doors. He began to wonder idly what might lie behind all the doors. A universe of hallways and doors that branched off into more hallways? It seemed purposeless to him. He slowed his steps, just as a series of sounds reached him from one of the doors.
It was speech—and that meant there was someone else in this universe in which he had found himself. He stopped outside the door, turning his head to listen. The sounds were muffled, but he could make out most of the words.
Politics, his mind told him. The word had some meaning to him, but not much. Someone inside was talking to someone else about the best way to avoid the battle on the moon, now that both powers had bases there. There was a queer tone of fear to the comments on the new iron-chain reaction bombs and what they could do from the moon.
It meant nothing to him, except that he was not alone, and that it stirred up knowledge in his head of a world like a ball in space with a moon that circled it. He tried to catch more conversation, but it had stopped, and the other doors seemed silent. Then he found one where a speaker was cursing at the idea of introducing robots into a world already a mess, calling someone else by name.
That hit the listener, sending shocks of awareness down his consciousness. He had no name! Who was he? Where was he? And what had come before he found himself here?
He found no answers, savagely though he groped through his reluctant mind. A single word emerged— amnesia, loss of memory. Did that mean he had once had memories? Then he tried to reason out whether an amnesiac would have a feeling of personality, but could not guess. He could not even be sure he had none.
He stared at the knob of the door, wondering if the men inside would know the answers. His hand moved to the knob slowly. Then, before he could act, there was the sudden, violent sound of running footsteps down the hall.
He swung about to see two men come plunging around the corner and toward him. It hadn’t occurred to hfm that legs could move so quickly. One man was thicker than he was, dressed in a dirty smock of some kind, and the other was neat and trim, in figure and
dress, in a khaki outfit he wore like a badge. The one in khaki opened his mouth.”
“There he is! Stop him! You—Expeto! Haiti George…”
Expeto… George Expeto! So he did have a name—unless the first name belonged to the other man. No matter, it was a name. George accepted it and gratitude ran through him sharply. Then he realized the senselessness of the order. How could he halt when he was already standing still? Besides, there were those rapid motions….
The two men let out a yell as George charged into motion, finding his legs could easily hold the speed of a running motion. He stared doubtfully at another corner, but somehow his responses were equal to it. He started
