Isaac Asimov - Asimov's Mysteries

He laughed aloud as he read that and when he completed all of them, he turned back to the first. He looked up at me sharply. 'Don't go. Listen to what they say.'

'I've read them already, Lancelot.'

'Listen, I tell you.'

He read every one aloud to me, lingering on their praises of the dead, then said to me, aglow with self-satisfaction, 'Do you still think something will go wrong?'

I said hesitantly, 'If the police come back to ask why I thought you were in trouble…'

'You were vague enough. Tell them you had had bad dreams. By the time they decide to push investigations further, if they do, it will be too late.'

To be sure, everything was working, but I could not hope that all would continue so. And yet the human mind is odd; it will persist in hoping even when it cannot hope.

I said, 'Lancelot, when this is all over and you are famous, really famous, then after that, surely you can retire. We can go back to the city and live quietly.'

'You are an imbecile. Don't you see that once I am recognized, I must continue? Young men will flock to me. This laboratory will become a great Institute of Temporal Investigation. I'll become a legend in my lifetime. I will pile my greatness so high that no one afterward will ever be able to be anything but an intellectual dwarf compared to me.' He raised himself on tiptoe, eyes shining, as though he already saw the pedestal onto which he would be raised.

It had been my last hope of some personal shreds of happiness and a small one. I sighed.

I asked the undertaker that the body be allowed to remain in its coffin in the laboratories before burial in the Stebbins family plot on Long Island. I asked that it remain unembalmed, offering to keep it in a large refrigerated room with the temperature set at forty. I asked that it not be removed to the funeral home.

The undertaker brought the coffin to the laboratory in frigid disapproval. No doubt this was reflected in the eventual bill. My offered explanation that I wanted him near me for a last period of time and that I wanted his assistants to be given a chance to view the body was lame and sounded lame. Still, Lancelot had been most specific in what I was to say.

Once the dead body was laid out, with the coffin lid still open, I went to see Lancelot.

'Lancelot,' I said, 'the undertaker was quite displeased. I think he suspects that something odd is going on.'

'Good,' said Lancelot with satisfaction.

'But-'

'We need only wait one more day. Nothing will be brought to a head out of mere suspicion before then. Tomorrow morning the body will disappear, or should.'

'You mean it might not?' I knew it; I knew it.

There could be some delay, or some prematurity. I have never transported anything this heavy and I'm not certain how exactly my equations hold. To make the necessary observation is one reason I want the body here and not in a funeral parlor.'

'But in the funeral parlor it would disappear before witnesses.'

'And here you think they will suspect trickery?'

'Of course.'

He seemed amused. They will say: Why did he send his assistants away? Why did he run experiments himself that any child could perform and yet manage to kill himself running them? Why did the dead body happen to disappear without witnesses? They will say: There is nothing to this absurd story of time travel. He took drugs to throw himself in a cataleptic trance and doctors were hoodwinked.'

'Yes,' I said faintly. How did he come to understand all that?

'And,' he went on, 'when I continue to insist I have solved time travel and that I was indisputably pronounced dead and was not indisputably alive, orthodox scientists will heatedly denounce me as a fraud. Why, in one week, I will have become a household name to every man on Earth. They will talk of nothing else. I will offer to make a demonstration of time travel before any group of scientists who wish to see it. I will offer to make the demonstration on an intercontinental TV circuit. Public pressure will force scientists to attend, and the networks to give permission. It doesn't matter whether people will watch hoping for a miracle or for a lynching. They will watch! And the n I will succeed and who in science will ever have had a more transcendent climax to his life?'

I was dazzled for a moment, but something unmoved within me said: Too long, too complicated; something will go wrong.

That evening, his assistants arrived and tried to be respectfully grieving in the presence of the corpse.

Two more witness to swear they had seen Lancelot dead; two more witnesses to confuse the issue and help build events to their stratospheric peak.

By four the next morning, we were in the cold-room, bundled in overcoats and waiting for zero moment. Lancelot, in high excitement, kept checking his instruments and doing I-know-not-what with them. His desk computer was working constantly, though how he could make his cold fingers jiggle the keys so nimbly, I am at a loss to say.

I, myself, was quite miserable. There was the cold, the dead body in the coffin, the uncertainty of the future.

We had been there for what seemed an eternity and finally Lancelot said, 'It will work. It will work as predicted. At the most, disappearance will be five minutes late and this when seventy kilograms of mass are involved. My analysis of chronous forces is masterly indeed.' He smiled at me, but he also smiled at his own corpse with equal warmth.

I noticedthat his lab jacket, which he had been wearing constantly for three days now, sleeping in it I am certain, had become wrinkled and shabby. It was about as it had seemed upon the second Lancelot, the dead one, when it had appeared.

Lancelot seemed to be aware of my thoughts, or perhaps only of my gaze, for he looked down at his jacket and said, 'Ah, yes, I had better put on the rubber apron. My second self was wearing it when it appeared.'

'What if you didn't put it on?'I asked tonelessly.

'I would have to. It would be a necessity. Something would have reminded me. Else it would not have appeared in one.' His eyes narrowed. 'Do you still think something will go wrong?'

'I don't know,' I mumbled.

'Do you think the body won't disappear, or that I'll disappear instead?'

When I didn't answer at all, he said in a half-scream, 'Can't you see my luck has changed at last? Can't you see how smoothly and according to plan it is all working out? I will be the greatest man who ever lived. Come, heat up the water for the coffee.' He was suddenly calm again. 'It will serve as celebration when my double leaves us and I return to life. I haven't had any coffee for three days.'

It was only instant coffee he pushed in my direction, but after three days that, too, would serve. I fumbled at the laboratory hot-plate with my cold fingers until Lancelot pushed me roughly to one side and set a beaker of water upon it.

'It'll take a while,' he said, turning the control to 'high.' He looked at his watch, then at various dials on the wall. 'My double will be gone before the water boils. Come here and watch.' He stepped to the side of the coffin.

I hesitated. 'Come,' he said peremptorily.

I came.

He looked down at himself with infinite pleasure and waited. We both waited, staring at a corpse. There was the phfft sound and Lancelot cried out, 'Less than two minutes off.'

Without a blur or a wink, the dead body was gone.

The open coffin contained an empty set of clothes. The clothes, of course, had not been those in which the dead body had been brought back. They were real clothes and they stayed in reality. There they now were: underwear within shirt and pants; shirt within tie; tie within jacket. Shoes had turned over, dangling socks from within them. The body was gone.

I could hear water boiling.

'Coffee,' said Lancelot. 'Coffee first. Then we call the police and the newspapers.'