Clifford Simak - A Death in the House - And Other Stories

He wiped his lips with his napkin, then bunched it on the table.

“I think,” he said, “that Charles may have some inkling of it. He saw something when he came in that you others missed.”

Both Leonard and Mary looked at me. I didn’t say a word. This was Old Prather’s show; let him carry on.

“It seems quite likely,” he said, “that we have a time machine.”

For a moment not one of us said anything, then Leonard leaned forward and said, “You mean someone here has invented—”

“I am sorry,” said Old Prather. “I do not mean that at all. A time machine has fallen into a clump of birch just above the little pond back of the machine shops.”

“Fallen?”

“Well, maybe not fallen. Appeared, perhaps, is a better word. Limpy, the gardener, found it. He is a simple lad. I guess none of you remember him. He came to us just a few years ago.”

“You mean to say it just showed up?” asked Mary.

“Yes, it just showed up. You can see it lying there, although not too clearly, for often it seems a little hazy. Objects at times appear around it, then disappear again—shunted in and out of time, we think. There have been some rather strange mirages around campus. The pagoda, for example.”

He said to me, “The contraption seems to have a penchant for the pagoda.”

Leonard said, with barely concealed nastiness, “Charles is our expert here. He is the time researcher.”

I didn’t answer him, and for a long time nothing was said at all. The silence became a little awkward. Old Prather tried to cover up the awkwardness. “You must know, of course,” he said, “that each of you is here tonight for a special reason. Here is a situation that we must come to grips with and each of you, I’m sure, will make a contribution.”

“But Dr. Prather,” Mary said, “I know less than nothing about the subject. I’ve never thought of time except in an abstract sense. I’m not even in the sciences. My whole life has been music. I’ve been concerned with little else.”

“That is exactly my point,” said Old Prather, “the reason that you’re here. We need an unsullied, an unprejudiced mind—a virgin mind, if you don’t resent the phrase—to look at this phenomenon. We need the kind of thinking that can be employed by someone like yourself, who has never thought of time except, as you have said, in an abstract sense. Both Leonard and Charles have certain preconceptions on the subject.”

“I am gratified, of course,” said Mary, “for the opportunity to be here, and quite naturally I am intrigued by what you call the ‘phenomenon.’ But actually, as you must realize, I have so provincial an attitude toward time that I doubt I can be any help at all.”

Sitting there and listening to her, I found myself in agreement with what she said. For once, Old Prather had managed to outsmart himself. His reason for bringing Mary in as a member of his team seemed utter nonsense to me.

“And I must tell you, as well,” said Leonard, “that I have done no real work on time. Naturally, in mathematics—that is, in some areas of mathematics—time must be taken as a factor, and I am, of course, quite familiar with this. But I have never been primarily concerned with time, and I think you should know—”

Old Prather raised a hand to stop him. “Not so fast,” he said. “It seems to me that all of you are hurrying to disqualify yourselves.” He turned to me. “So you are left,” he said. “You’ve said exactly nothing.”

“Perhaps,” I said, “because I have nothing to say.”

“The fact remains,” he insisted, “that you were with Time Research. I’m burning with curiosity about the project. At least you can tell us something of what it’s all about. I’m particularly interested in how you came to disassociate yourself.“

“I didn’t disassociate myself. I was fired. I was booted out the door. You know the background of the project. The premise, and it is a solid premise, is that if we’re ever to venture beyond the solar system—if we hope to reach the stars—we have to know a little more about the space-time concept than we know now.”

“I heard some rumor,” said Leonard, “of a terrific row. My informant said—”

“I don’t know how terrific,” I said, “but, as far as I was concerned, it was sort of final. You see, I thought in terms of divorcing time from space, splitting the two into separate entities. And, goddam it, when you think of it, they are two separate factors. But science has talked so long of the space-time continuum that it has become an article of faith. There seems to be a prevalent idea that if you separate the two of them you tear the universe apart—that they are somehow welded together to make up the universe. But if you’re going to work with time, you have to work with time alone, not with time and something else. Either you work with time or you work with nothing.”

“It all sounds highly philosophical to me,” said Old Prather.

“Here at Coon Creek,” I told him, “you and several others taught us the philosophical approach. I remember what you used to tell us. Think hard and straight, you said, and to hell with all the curves.”

He coughed a highly artificial cough. “I rather doubt,” he said, “I phrased it quite that way.”

“Of course you didn’t. Mine was an oversimplified translation. Your words were very much more genteel and greatly convoluted. And it’s not as philosophical as it seems; it’s just common sense—some of that hard, straight thinking you always urged upon us. If you are to work with anything, you must first know what you are working with, or at least have some theory as to what it is. Your theory can be wrong, of course.”

“And that,” said Leonard, “was the reason you were canned.”

“That was the reason I was canned. An unrealistic approach, they said. No one would go along with it.”

While I had been talking, Old Prather had risen from the table and walked across the room to an ancient sideboard. He took a book from one of the drawers and walked back to the table. He handed the book to Leonard, then sat down again.

Leonard opened the book and started riffling through the pages. Suddenly he stopped riffling and stared intently at a page.

He looked up, puzzled. “Where did you get this?” he asked.

“You remember I told you certain objects were appearing around the time machine,” said Old Prather. “Appearing and then disappearing—”

“‘What kind of objects?” Mary asked.

“Different things. Mostly commonplace things. I recall there was a baseball bat. A battered bicycle wheel. Boxes, bottles, all kinds of junk. Close around the contraption. We let them go. We were afraid to come too close to it. One could get tangled up with the time effect. No one knows what it might do.”

“But someone,” said Leonard, “managed to snag this book.”

“Limpy,” said Old Prather. “He’s a little short of sense. But, for some reason, he is intrigued by books. Not that he can do much reading in them. Especially in that one.”

“I should think not,” said Leonard. He saw that I was looking intently at him. “All right, Charles,” he said, “I’ll tell you. It is mathematics. Apparently a new kind of mathematics. I’ll have to study it.”

“From the future?” I asked.

“From about two centuries in the future,” said Old Prather, “if you can believe the imprint date.”

“There is no reason, is there, to disbelieve it?”

“Not at all,” said Old Prather, happily.

“One thing,” I said, “that you haven’t mentioned. The dimensions of this machine of yours. What characteristics does it have?”

“If you’re thinking of a container that was designed to carry a human passenger, it’s not that at all. This one’s not nearly big enough. It’s cylindrical, three feet long or less. It’s made of some sort of metal—a metal cylinder. Grillwork of some sort at each end, but no sign of any operational machinery. It doesn’t look like what one would think of as a time machine, but it does seem to have the effects of one. All the objects appearing and disappearing. And the mirages. We call them mirages for lack of a better term. The pagoda, for example, the pagoda that really did blow down, flicking on and off. People walking about, strangers who appear momentarily, then are gone. Occasional structures, like the ghosts of structures, not quite in the present, but not in the future, either. And they have to be from the future, for there’s never been anything like them here. A boat on the pond. So far as I know, the pond has never had a boat. Too small for a boat. As you recall, just a little puddle.”