Virtual Unrealities, The Short Fiction of Alfred Bester (25 page)

Sam shifted gears and began again. Hassel listened intently. He nodded. He grunted. “Uh huh. Uh huh. Right. I see. Thought so. A continuum, eh? Acts performed in past must alter future. Then I’m on the right track. But act must be significant, eh? Mass-action effect. Trivia cannot divert existing phenomena streams. Hmmm. But how trivial is a grandmother?”

“What are you trying to do, Henry?”

“Kill my wife,” Hassel snapped. He hung up. He returned to his laboratory. He considered, still in a jealous rage.

“Got to do something significant,” he muttered. “Wipe Greta out. Wipe it all out. All right, by God! I’ll show ’em.”

Hassel went back to the year 1775, visited a Virginia farm and shot a young colonel in the brisket. The colonel’s name was George Washington, and Hassel made sure he was dead. He returned to his own time and his own home. There was his redheaded wife, still in the arms of another.

“Damn!” said Hassel. He was running out of ammunition. He opened a fresh box of cartridges, went back in time and massacred Christopher Columbus, Napoleon, Mohammed and half a dozen other celebrities. “That ought to do it, by God!” said Hassel

He returned to his own time, and found his wife as before.

His knees turned to water; his feet seemed to melt into the floor. He went back to his laboratory, walking through nightmare quicksands.

“What the hell is significant?” Hassel asked himself painfully. “How much does it take to change futurity? By God, I’ll really change it this time. I’ll go for broke.”

He traveled to Paris at the turn of the twentieth century and visited a Madame Curie in an attic workshop near the Sorbonne. “Madame,” he said in his execrable French, “I am a stranger to you of the utmost, but a scientist entire. Knowing of your experiments with radium— Oh? You haven’t got to radium yet? No matter. I am here to teach you all of nuclear fission.”

He taught her. He had the satisfaction of seeing Paris go up in a mushroom of smoke before the automatic recall brought him home. “That’ll teach women to be faithless,” he growled … “Guhhh!” The last was wrenched from his lips when he saw his redheaded wife still— But no need to belabor the obvious.

Hassel swam through fogs to his study and sat down to think. While he’s thinking I’d better warn you that this not a conventional time story. If you imagine for a moment that Henry is going to discover that the man fondling his wife is himself, you’re mistaken. The viper is not Henry Hassel, his son, a relation, or even Ludwig Boltzmann (1844-1906). Hassel does not make a circle in time, ending where the story begins—to the satisfaction of nobody and the fury of everybody—for the simple reason that time isn’t circular, or linear, or tandem, discoid, syzygous, longinquitous, or pandicularted. Time is a private matter, as Hassel discovered.

“Maybe I slipped up somehow,” Hassel muttered. “I’d better find out.” He fought with the telephone, which seemed to weigh a hundred tons, and at last managed to get through to the library.

“Hello, Library? This is Henry.”

“Who?”

“Henry Hassel.”

“Speak up, please.”

“
HENRY HASSEL
!”

“Oh. Good afternoon, Henry.”

“What have you got on George Washington?”

Library clucked while her scanners sorted through her catalogues. “George Washington, first president of the United States, was born in—”

“First president? Wasn’t he murdered in 1775?”

“Really, Henry. That’s an absurd question. Everybody knows that George Wash—”

“Doesn’t anybody know he was shot?”

“By whom?”

“Me.”

“When?”

“In 1775.”

“How did you manage to do that?”

“I’ve got a revolver.”

“No, I mean, how did you do it two hundred years ago?”

“I’ve got a time machine.”

“Well, there’s no record here,” Library said. “He still doing fine in my files. You must have missed.”

“I did not miss. What about Christopher Columbus? Any record of his death in 1489?”

“But he discovered the New World in 1492.”

“He did not. He was murdered in 1489.”

“How?”

“With a forty-five slug in the gizzard.”

“You again, Henry?”

“Yes.”

“There’s no record here,” Library insisted. “You must be one lousy shot.”

“I will not lose my temper,” Hassel said in a trembling voice.

“Why not, Henry?”

“Because it’s lost already,” he shouted. “All right! What about Marie Curie? Did she or did she not discover the fission bomb which destroyed Paris at the turn of the century?”

“She did not. Enrico Fermi—”

“She did.”

“She didn’t.”

“I personally taught her. Me. Henry Hassel.”

“Everybody says you’re a wonderful theoretician, but a lousy teacher, Henry. You—”

“Go to hell, you old biddy. This has got to be explained.”

“Why?”

“I forget. There was something on my mind, but it doesn’t matter now. What would you suggest?”

“You really have a time machine?”

“Of course I’ve got a time machine.”

“Then go back and check.”

Hassel returned to the year 1775, visited Mount Vernon, and interrupted the spring planting. “Excuse me, colonel,” he began.

The big man looked at him curiously. “You talk funny, stranger,” he said. “Where you from?”

“Oh, a freshwater school you never heard of.”

“You look funny too. Kind of misty, so to speak.”

“Tell me, colonel, what do you hear from Christopher Columbus?”

“Not much,” Colonel Washington answered. “Been dead two, three hundred years.”

“When did he die?”

“Year fifteen hundred some-odd, near as I remember.”

“He did not. He died in 1489.”

“Got your dates wrong, friend. He discovered America in 1492.”

“Cabot discovered America. Sebastian Cabot.”

“Nope. Cabot came a mite later.”

“I have infallible proof!” Hassel began, but broke off as a stocky and rather stout man, with a face ludicrously reddened by rage, approached. He was wearing baggy gray slacks and a tweed jacket two sizes too small for him. He was carrying a .45 revolver. It was only after he had stared for a moment that Henry Hassel realized that he was looking at himself and not relishing the sight.

“My God!” Hassel murmured. “It’s me, coming back to murder Washington that first time. If I’d made this second trip an hour later, I’d have found Washington dead. Hey!” he called. “Not yet. Hold off a minute. I’ve got to straighten something out first.”

Hassel paid no attention to himself; indeed, he did not appear to be aware of himself. He marched straight up to Colonel Washington and shot him in the gizzard. Colonel Washington collapsed, emphatically dead. The first murderer inspected the body, and then, ignoring Hassel’s attempt to stop him and engage him in dispute, turned and marched off, muttering venomously to himself.

“He didn’t hear me,” Hassel wondered. “He didn’t even feel me. And why don’t I remember myself trying to stop me the first time I shot the colonel? What the hell is going on?”

Considerably disturbed, Henry Hassel visited Chicago and dropped into the Chicago University squash courts in the early 1940s. There, in a slippery mess of graphite bricks and graphite dust that coated him, he located an Italian scientist named Fermi.

“Repeating Marie Curie’s work, I see,
dottore?”
Hassel said.

Fermi glanced about as though he had heard a faint sound.

“Repeating Marie Curie’s work,
dottore?
” Hassel roared.

Fermi looked at him strangely, “where you from,
amico?
”

“State.”

“State Department?”

“Just State. It’s true, isn’t it,
dottore
, that Marie Curie discovered nuclear fission back in nineteen ought ought?”

“No! No! No!” Fermi cried. “We are the first, and we are not there yet. Police! Police! Spy!”

“This time I’ll go on record,” Hassel growled. He pulled out his trusty .45, emptied it into Dr. Fermi’s chest, and awaited arrest and immolation in newspaper files. To his amazement, Dr. Fermi did not collapse. Dr. Fermi merely explored his chest tenderly and, to the men who answered his cry, said, “It is nothing. I felt in my within a sudden sensation of burn which may be a neuralgia of the cardiac nerve, but is most likely gas.”

Hassel was too agitated to wait for the automatic recall of the time machine. Instead he returned at once to Unknown University under his own power. This should have given him a clue, but he was too possessed to notice. It was at this time that I (1913–1975) first saw him—a dim figure tramping through parked cars, closed doors and brick walls, with the light of lunatic determination on his face.

He oozed into the library, prepared for an exhaustive discussion, but could not make himself felt or heard by the catalogues. He went to the Malpractice Laboratory, where Sam, the Simplex-and-Multiplex Computer, has installations sensitive up to 10,700 angstroms. Sam could not see Henry, but managed to hear him through a sort of wave-interference phenomenon.

“Sam,” Hassel said. “I’ve made one hell of a discovery.”

“You’re always making discoveries, Henry,” Sam complained. “Your data allocation is filled. Do I have to start another tape for you?”

“But I need advice. Who’s the leading authority on time, reference to succession of, travel in?”

“That would be Israel Lennox, spatial mechanics, professor of, Yale.”

“How do I get in touch with him?”

“You don’t, Henry. He’s dead. Died in ’75.”

“What authority have you got on time, travel in, living?”

“Wiley Murphy.”

“Murphy? From our own Trauma Department? That’s a break. Where is he now?”

“As a matter of fact, Henry, he went over to your house to ask you something.”

Hassel went home without walking, searched through his laboratory and study without finding anyone, and at last floated into the living room, where his redheaded wife was still in the arms of another man. (All this, you understand, had taken place within the space of a few moments after the construction of the time machine; such is the nature of time and travel.) Hassel cleared his throat once or twice and tried to tap his wife on the shoulder. His fingers went through her.

“Excuse me, darling,” he said. “Has Wiley Murphy been in to see me?”

Then he looked closer and saw that the man embracing his wife was Murphy himself.

“Murphy!” Hassel exclaimed. “The very man I’m looking for. I’ve had the most extraordinary experience.” Hassel at once launched into a lucid description of his extraordinary experience, which went something like this: “Murphy, u – v = (u
^½
— v
^¼
) (u
^a
+ u
^x
+ v
^y
) but when George Washington F (x)y
⁺
dx and Enrico Fermi F (u
^½
) dxdt one half of Marie Curie, then what about Christopher Columbus times the square root of minus one?”

Murphy ignored Hassel, as did Mrs. Hassel. I jotted down Hassel’s equations on the hood of a passing taxi.

“Do listen to me, Murphy,” Hassel said. “Greta dear, would you mind leaving us for a moment? I— For heaven’s sake, will you two stop that nonsense? This is serious.”

Hassel tried to separate the couple. He could no more touch them than make them hear him. His face turned red again and he became quite choleric as he beat at Mrs. Hassel and Murphy. It was like beating an Ideal Gas. I thought it best to interfere.

“Hassel!”

“Who’s that?”

“Come outside a moment. I want to talk to you.”

He shot through the wall. “Where are you?”

“Over here.”

“You’re sort of dim.”

“So are you.”

“Who are you?”

“My name’s Lennox, Israel Lennox.”

“Israel Lennox, spatial mechanics, professor of, Yale?”

“The same.”

“But you died in ’75.”

“I disappeared in ’75.”

“What d’you mean?”

“I invented a time machine.”

“By God! So did I,” Hassel said. “This afternoon. The idea came to me in a flash—I don’t know why—and I’ve had the most extraordinary experience. Lennox, time is not a continuum.”

“No?”

“It’s a series of discrete particles—like pearls on a string.”

“Yes?”

“Each pearl is a ‘Now.’ Each ‘Now’ has its own past and future, but none of them relate to any others. You see? if a = a
_l
+ a
₂
ji + ax (b
₁
)—”

“Never mind the mathematics, Henry.”

“It’s a form of quantum transfer of energy. Time is emitted in discrete corpuscles or quanta. We can visit each individual quantum and make changes within it, but no change in any one corpuscle affects any other corpuscle. Right?”

“Wrong,” I said sorrowfully.

“What d’you mean, ‘Wrong’?” he said, angrily gesturing through the cleave of a passing coed. “You take the trochoid equations and—”

“Wrong,” I repeated firmly. “Will you listen to me, Henry?”

“Oh, go ahead,” he said.

“Have you noticed that you’ve become rather insubstantial? Dim? Spectral? Space and time no longer affect you?”

“Yes?”

“Henry, I had the misfortune to construct a time machine back in ’75.”

“So you said. Listen, what about power input? I figure I’m using about 7.3 kilowatts per—”

“Never mind the power input, Henry. On my first trip into the past, I visited the Pleistocene. I was eager to photograph the mastodon, the giant ground sloth, and the saber-tooth tiger. While I was backing up to get a mastodon fully in the field of view at f/6.3 at 1/100th of a second, or on the LVS scale—”

“Never mind the LVS scale,” he said.

“While I was backing up, I inadvertently trampled and killed a small Pleistocene insect.”

“Aha!” said Hassel.

“I was terrified by the incident. I had visions of returning to my world to find it completely changed as a result of this single death. Imagine my surprise when I returned to my world to find that nothing had changed.”

“Oho!” said Hassel.

“I became curious. I went back to the Pleistocene and killed the mastodon. Nothing was changed in 1975. I returned to the Pleistocene and slaughtered the wildlife—still with no effect. I ranged through time, killing and destroying, in an attempt to alter the present.”