A Handful of Time (7 page)

Actually, of course, I didn’t have any problems solved, but this was my first break. This was the first message I got that
didn’t
say, YOUR CREDIT IS GOOD.

I don’t know, really, why one delusion made me feel insane and two delusions restored my sanity. Except that I was never convinced that the first was a delusion. And there is a logic deep in the human mind that makes a probable reality out of two possible realities.

My lack of scientific training stood me in good stead.

I felt as though I had something to work on. It was an antique desk. That must be significant. Of what? I had glimmerings of an idea, but I didn’t know where it would lead.

My next stop was an antique shop. But after I stared at an expressionless foot stool for an hour the proprietor came up and folded his arms at me.

“You counting the stitches in the
petits points?”
he asked threateningly.

I did my best to look like an insulted millionaire and left.

So I went to the museum. There, at least, I could stare. Even if I looked suspicious I could always say I was an art student.

I didn’t know what to pick. Something below my eye level, since that’s where my messages had been appearing. That left out paintings and hangings.

I decided to start back at the beginning. In the quiet chill of the deserted museum, in the midst of the Egyptian collection, the incongruity of the whole thing struck me again. The messages were so silly: YOUR CREDIT IS GOOD. WITH LUCK AND PLUCK YOU WILL RISE TO GREATNESS. The one thing that had not occurred to me was that the messages might be supernatural. That was because they were silly. The supernatural might be many things. But not silly.

Still, there is an aura of old, old magic about Egyptian things. I looked at the strange, square-carved bodies and enigmatic faces of Egyptian art. I settled on an ancient sarcophagus, so full of time it should have fallen to dust centuries ago. I watched, almost hoping it would yield no message.

It did. The message was in hieroglyphics. Much too fast for me to copy the curious little pictures.

I shifted to the Greek collection, because I know a few Greek letters and I might be able to keep the letters in mind long enough to write them down.

That night I called the boss and told him I wouldn’t be able to go out on the road for a week. It’s a slack season, anyway, so he said all I had to lose was my commission.

The Greek collection yielded a message the next day. Twice. I couldn’t read it, of course, but I got it down.

The Classics professor at the University was delighted for the opportunity.

“The only thing people ever bring me to read any more is Roman numerals. When the journals start using Arabic numbers I’ll be obsolete.”

“Nice for the Arabs, though,” I remarked, not knowing quite what to say.

But I didn’t fed as flippant as I sounded. Standing there in the cramped office, full of the dusty, chalky smell of learning, I was filled with excitement and,
deep
inside, shot through with cold needles. Now that there was a third message, I expected it to explain everything.

The professor read the message and frowned. “Shaky looking sigmas,” he said, “but I can make it out. Where did you get this, anyway?”

“Er… my girl friend wrote it to me,” I said. “In a letter. You know.”

“Not the girl for you,” he said. “The sentence reads: I RULE BECAUSE I AM STRONG.”

The room seemed to fold in on me, a little, dark room staring at me with the one bright eye of the window. I sat down. I must have been pale.

“Perhaps it’s a joke,” the professor offered, seeing something was wrong.

“Is it a quotation?” I asked, grasping at straws in an unknown sea.

“Not exactly,” the professor said. “But it’s fifth century Greek and you’ll find something very like it in Thucydides, book III and book V. The philosophy was a pitfall that Athens fell into. She abandoned democracy for rule by force. Athens murdered the entire population of the island of Melos and they said, ‘The strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.’ Not very pretty.”

Not pretty. Mass murder. Why was I getting the message? Was it a
message
or was that just my first reaction that I hadn’t thought to abandon? What was it all about?

In any case, it didn’t seem likely that it was a personal message for me.

I went back to the museum. The next thing I got a message out of was a Louis XV bed. It was in French, so I copied it down dutifully and brought it to the French Embassy.

I got thrown out.

I brought it to the University.

I got thrown out.

I got out a book on eighteenth century French mores and a French lexicon. I burned the message carefully. It’s a wonder it didn’t burn up by itself.

Contrite, I began concentrating on a Puritan Hornbook. Sure enough, your soul is doomed to hell.

Gloomily I wandered over to an early cotton gin. MOVE TO THE CITY, the message said.

That was odd.

MOVE TO THE CITY. That’s what everybody would be doing soon after the invention of the cotton gin. The Industrial Revolution.

A command?

Why?

There was some pattern, some meaning. But my mind kept backing away from every pattern I made. I needed to forget it and come back to it later.

I left the museum in the early evening and dropped into a movie. It was an inconsequential western. I don’t even remember what it was about. I
do
remember coming out of the movie with an overwhelming urge to eat an ice cream cone. I figured seeing a cowboy movie had triggered a childhood desire.

To my surprise, I found an ice cream stand set up in the lobby of the theatre. People were flocking around it, al-thought it was a chilly night and the popcorn looked warm and comfortable. I waited until they were all gone.

“You know,” I told the girl, “it’s a funny thing, you having this ice cream stand here, I was dying for an ice cream cone and I come out and here’s an ice cream stand.”

The girl popped her gum and turned worn blue eyes on me. “It ain’t my ice cream stand, it ain’t my idea and it ain’t funny. You been took, mister.”

“What do you mean?” If she were an alien from another planet about to explain my messages, I wouldn’t have been surprised. “What do you know about it.”

“Subgliminel,” she said darkly. “Something like that. They flash these pictures of ice cream during the movie. So fast you don’t know how you seen them. Then you want to buy the ice cream. You don’t know why, you just want to. Me, I don’t like it.”

I didn’t know whether she didn’t like the ice cream or the subliminal suggestion. But she’d given me an idea. A darn good idea.

Subliminal suggestion.

I was back to my eye doctor bright and early the next day.

“How many people,” I asked him, “have this spastic strabismus, or whatever I have?”

“Some chromatic aberration,” he said reprovingly, “and a rare kind of intermittent spastic strabismus. Very few people have it.” He shook his head as though it were, indeed, a sad situation. “We get to see it so seldom.”

It almost made me feel inadequate.

But I understand now why I was seeing things other people weren’t seeing. If I wasn’t having delusions.

I wondered what would happen if I put an ad in the paper asking people with my kind of eye trouble to get in touch with me.

Suppose I got an answer. And suppose the other guy
didn’t
see messages. How would I ask him without giving myself away? And suppose he did? Would he know any more than me? More than likely anybody with my experience would be in the booby hatch. If I hadn’t caught that message on the psychiatrist’s antique desk I would be, too. Maybe that’s where I’d end up anyway.

I went by the library and got out a stack of books. Then I came home and made myself a big pot of coffee. There was an inviting-looking bottle of bourbon on the shelf, but I shook off the temptation. I could at least
try
to solve my problem.

The thing to do was pretend it was someone else’s problem. Something I read in a book. Not something that made me turn cold all over. Because an unnatural occurrence, no matter how silly it is, is the most frightening thing in the world. If the ghost of Hamlet’s father had wiggled its ears, Hamlet would not have laughed. And when time stops in its tracks to say, YOUR CREDIT IS GOOD, it’s not funny.

Before I attacked the books I thought out the basic thing that scared me. The analogy to a movie. Was the world a three-di movie? The actors, the setting, all without substance? Then what was I?

Cogito, ergo sum, I thought. I’m glad someone pointed that out.

Or am I part of someone else’s thoughts? A dream. What would happen if they woke up? Whose dream was it? Mine or theirs? Like the riddle of the Red King in
Alice in Wonderland.
A futile line of thought. That could be true of life aside from the messages.

I didn’t want to get off brooding about life in general. Take it as real.

The messages, then. Were they real or a delusion? There was something I was now armed to decide. Could I have imagined the Greek? The French? No, I couldn’t read either. I didn’t know either period of history.

And the Greek message
was
a meaningful phrase. I pulled out the copy of Thucydides I had gotten from the library and checked on the references the professor had given me. It checked out.

Pride. Rule by force. Finally, unnecessary cruelty. I flipped through several books on Greek history. It was that philosophy that led to the downfall of Athens. It motivated the war that ended the golden age of Athens. It ruined her alliances. Finally, it lost the war for her.

That message, then, had a meaning. If not a purpose.

The others.

The Louis XV bed. Was that message a reflection of the times or a cause of the mores it implied? It had a result. Louis XV said, “Apres moi, le deluge.” And there sure was. Heads rolled the next generation.

MOVE TO THE CITY. A direct command.

That one set me thinking. The growth of the factory. The move to the city. Inventions or no inventions, would the Industrial Revolution have come about merely because the means for it were there? Why were the means for it not there just as well in the seventeenth century? The sixteenth? Or even earlier.

Why were the Greeks, who displayed such outstanding ability in all other ways, so technologically backward? Could they envision no other way of life?

Or was it because they were not motivated that way?

They had fire and metal and craft to work it.

They had brains and world enough and time.

They even had legends of robots. There were the automatic handmaidens of silver and gold wrought by Hephaestus to serve the gods on Olympus. There was the brazen man Talus who guarded the island of Crete for King Minos.

And yet all their work was done by hand.

Then take the Chinese. All the centuries they had gunpowder they used it for toys. And yet they fought wars. Did no one think of using gunpowder for weapons?

It’s not the circumstances of life that matter, I decided. It’s the motivation.

Where does motivation come from?

When I asked myself this question I had to get up and pour myself a drink. For the question suddenly slid into the question I had really been after when I sought to find what the messages meant. What I really wanted to know was where they came from.

My reaction was instinctive. I looked upward… “I know you’re there,” I shouted. “Now I know you’re there. Who are you?”

There was only the silence of my familiar, frowzy sitting room. The worn furniture, tired with years of living with me, seemed to look at me curiously. What answer did I expect?

It occurred to me, briefly, to wonder if I were being blasphemous. Then I dismissed the thought as illogical. The creator had no need for such crude methods of communication.

My eyes dropped to the floor. YOUR CREDIT IS GOOD. Sure that motivated us now. It had become the entire basis of our economy. Let people start doubting it and what would result? Not a local depression. A free-world depression. The pivot would break and life would come tumbling around our shoulders. Then there would be too many angry men. What matter which side would start the war? If men are angry enough, they can destroy the world. The means are too easy now.

However, a depression wasn’t likely. Nobody needs to be told. YOUR CREDIT IS GOOD. We just assume it. We live on it.

We live, I concluded, on some one else’s motivation. Have been.

Why? Are we animals in someone’s zoo? A giant child’s toy? A sociological experiment of some other race?

O.K. So I knew we were being motivated by subliminal suggestion. Free will was a laugh. How would I tell the world?

Make a speech? Write letters to the paper? Write my congressman?

I could make quite a splash in California, I knew. But that wasn’t the sort of thing I had in mind.

It’s the classic situation. If I did the wrong thing once I’d be considered a crackpot forever.

I thought of getting in touch with Dr. Rhine at Duke. But then my problem was not one in parapsychology. It was a physical reality. It should be explainable in molecular terms‌—‌the messages were
there,
on matter, calculated to appear just below the level of conscious sight. They must make at least some faint disturbance in the matter on which they were printed. Some discoverable disturbance.

And their effect was a psychological fact. Who would be interested? Psychologists.

How would I find those least likely to laugh at me?

I thought of calling one of the big Foundations and finding out who had been given grants to work on psychological problems. But that was too big. My problem was specialized. And I didn’t know which Foundation would have it.

Finally I called the public library and said I wanted to find out who could help me with a problem in subliminal motivation. They dug out their lists of research teams. There were plenty of them. I had my choice.

The one I finally settled on was a semi-military psychological research program studying cultural motivation. It was a good choice.