A Death in the House : And Other Stories

The Birch Clump Cylinder

As Bronson drove the car up the curving road that led to the front of Cramden Hall, I became aware that there had been some change, although it took a moment to figure what it was.

“The pagoda’s gone,” I said.

“Blew down one night several years ago,” said Bronson. “High wind came up. Flimsy thing, it was.”

Nothing else had changed, it seemed. Coon Creek didn’t change. It stayed stodgy and a bit ramshackle and tried its humble best to seem of no account.

“Just as well it’s gone,” said Bronson. “It never seemed to fit. Just a little flighty for my taste.”

The car wheeled up and stopped in front of the pillared portico.

“You go on in,” said Bronson. “Old Prather’s waiting for you. I’ll put away the car and bring in your bags.”

“Thanks for meeting me,” I said. “It’s been a long time, Bronson.”

“Fifteen years,” said Bronson. “Maybe nearer twenty. None of us gets any younger. You never have been back.”

“No,” I said, “I haven’t.”

The car pulled away, and as it moved out of my line of vision I saw I had been wrong. For the pagoda wasn’t gone; the pagoda was still there. It squatted in the evening light exactly as I remembered it, standing in the park-like area inside the driveway curve, with a pine at one corner of it and a sprawling yew along the side.

“Charles,” a voice said behind me. “Charles, it’s good to see you.”

I turned and saw it was Old Prather, fumbling down the steps towards me.

I went rapidly up to meet him, and we stood there for a moment, looking at one another in the fading light. He hadn’t changed too much—a little older, perhaps, a bit more frazzled at the edges, but the same erect, stiff posture that barely escaped being military. The imagined scent of chalk dust still clung to him; he was as imperious as ever, but, I thought, looking at him, perhaps a shade more kindly, mellowed with the years.

“The place looks the same as ever,” I said. “Too bad the pagoda—”

“The pesky thing blew down,” he said. “Gave us no end of trouble cleaning up the mess.”

We went trudging up the steps together. “It was kind of you to come,” he said. “As you may have gathered, we have a spot of trouble. On the phone, you understand, I couldn’t be specific.”

“I jumped at the chance to come,” I said. “Not doing anything, of course. Not since I was booted out of Time Research.”

“But that was two years ago. And you weren’t booted.”

“It is three years,” I said, “and I most emphatically was booted.”

“Dinner, I think, is ready,” he said, “and we had best get to it. Old Emil—”

“Emil is still here?” I asked.

Old Prather chuckled thinly. “We carry on,” he said. “Bronson and myself and Emil. Young men coming up, but they are not quite ready. We all get crotchety and at times a little prickly. Emil, especially. He is crustier than ever and is apt to scold you if you’re late for meals or don’t eat quite enough. He takes it as a slur on his cooking.”

We reached the door and went into the foyer.

“And now,” I said, “suppose you spell out this pagoda mummery.”

“You saw it, then?” he said.

“Of course I saw it. After Bronson had told me it had blown down. And it was still there when you said it had blown down. If this is some elaborate gag, just because I worked on Time Research—”

“It is no trick,” he said. “It’s part of the reason you are here. We’ll talk about it later, but now we must go in to dinner or Emil will be outraged. Did I mention, by the way, that a couple of your classmates will be dining with us? Leonard Asbury. You remember him, of course.”

“Dr. Prather,” I said, “I have spent all these years trying not to remember him. He was a little twerp. And what other assorted alumni have you hauled in on this pagoda business?”

He said, without any shame at all, “Only one other. Mary Holland.”

“She was the one who broke your heart. She went into music.”

“Charles,” he said, “you mistake my function and the purpose of this institute if you think she broke my heart. The world could ill have afforded to lose the kind of music she has written.”

“So,” I said, “a famous mathematician, a talented composer, a down-at-the-heels time researcher. When it comes to picking a team, you really go all out.”

His eyes took on a merry twinkle. “Come on in to dinner,” he said, “or Emil will wear out his tongue on us.”

The dinner had been a good one, simple and hearty—vichyssoise, a salad, prime ribs and a baked potato, with wine that was not bad at all.

Old Prather had done a lot of inconsequential and rather pompous talking. The man was a good host; you have to give him that. The rest of us said little—the kind of tentative, exploratory talk that old acquaintances, too long separated, are likely to engage in.

I studied the two of them, and I knew that they were studying me as well. I could imagine both were wondering why Old Prather had invited me, for which I could not blame them.

Leonard Asbury, I decided, was still a little twerp. His thin black hair was slicked down against his skull. His face had a hard and foxy look. When he spoke, his thin lips scarcely moved. I didn’t like the bastard a bit more than I ever did.

Mary was something else again. She had been a pretty girl, and we had had some dates—nothing serious, just dates. But now her beauty had settled into a sort of matronly composure, and I had the feeling there was a lot of emptiness behind that contented face.

It was damned unsettling—the two of them. I was uneasy and wished I had not come.

“And now,” said Old Prather, “let us get down to business. For I suppose you must guess that there is some business. A rather urgent matter.”

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.”

“You’ve taken precautions against someone stumbling into its field?”

“We’ve put a fence around it. Ordinarily, someone is watching to warn off stray visitors. But, as you know, we seldom have stray visitors. We’ll all go out and have a look at it tomorrow, first thing after breakfast.”

“Why not now?” asked Leonard.

“No reason,” said Old Prather, “but we wouldn’t be able to see much. We have no lights out there. However, if you wish—”

Leonard made a gesture of agreement. “Tomorrow’s soon enough,” he said.

“Another thing you may have been wondering about,” said Old Prather, “is how it got there. As I told you, the gardener found it. I said at first it fell, then corrected myself and said it had arrived. The correction was not quite an honest one. There is some evidence it fell—some broken branches in the birch clump that might have been broken when the thing plunged through the trees.”

“You say ‘fell,’” said Mary. “Fell from where?”

“We are not sure, but we do have a hypothesis. Something happened west of here a few nights ago. A plane was reported down. Out in the hills. A wild and tangled country, as you may remember. Several people saw it falling. Searchers were sent out, but now the story is that there never was a plane. The news reports indicate it might have been a meteorite, mistaken for a plane. It is fairly clear that someone stepped in and quickly hushed it up. I made a few discreet inquiries of friends in Washington, and the word seems to be that a spaceship fell. Not one of our ships. All of ours can be accounted for. The supposition is that it may have been an alien ship.”

“And you think the time machine fell off the alien ship,” said Leonard. “It was breaking up and—”

“But why would an alien ship carry a time machine?” asked Mary.

“Not a time machine,” I said. “A time engine. A drive that uses time as a source of energy.”

Unable to sleep, I let myself out to go for a walk. The moon had just risen above the eastern hills, shedding a sickly light that barely dispersed the dark.

I hadn’t been able to sleep. I had closed my eyes and tried, but then had been compelled to open them and stare up at the ceiling that was really not a ceiling, but just a square of darkness.

A time engine, I told myself. Time used as energy. Christ, then, I had been right! If it turned out that the thing in the clump of birch out there above the lake actually was an engine, then I had been right and all the others had been wrong. And, more than that, if time could be used as an energy, the universe lay open—not just the nearby stars, not just the galaxy, but the entire universe, everything that was. For if time could be manipulated—and to use it as a source of energy would mean that it would have to be capable of manipulation—then the distances of space would no longer count at all, would never need to be considered, and man could go anywhere he wished.

I looked up at the stars and I wanted to shout at them: Now we have you by the throat, now you are reachable, now your remoteness can no longer count with us. Your remoteness or the even more incredible remoteness of your sister stars that are so far that no matter how fiercely the fires may burn within them, we can catch no glimpse of them. Not even the dimmer stars, nor even the stars unseeable, are beyond our reach.

I wanted to yell at them, but of course I did not yell at them. You do not yell at stars. A star is too impersonal a thing to think of yelling at.

I walked down the driveway and followed a sidewalk that angled up the hill toward the observatory, and looking off to my left, I thought: Just over that little rise of ground in the clump of birch that stands above the pond. Trying to envision the cylinder that lay in the clump of birch, I wondered for the thousandth time if it might really be what I thought it was.

As I went around a curve in the winding walk, a man rose silently from a bench where he had been sitting. I stopped, somewhat startled by his sudden appearance; I had thought that at this time of night I would have been alone.

“Charley Spencer,” said the man. “Can it be Charley Spencer?”

“It could be,” I said. His face was in the shadow, and I could not make it out.

“I must apologize,” he said, “for intruding on your walk. I thought I was alone. You may not remember me. I am Kirby Winthrop.”

I went back through my memory, and a name came out of it. “But I do remember you,” I said. “You were a year or two behind me. I have often wondered what became of you.” Which was a lie, of course; I’d never thought of him.

“I stayed on,” he said. “There’s something about the place that gets into the blood. Doing some teaching. Mostly research. Old Prather pulled you in on the time machine?”

“Myself and some others,” I told him. “What do you know about it?”

“Nothing, really. It’s outside my field. I’m in cybernetics. That’s why I’m out here. I often come out on the hill, when it’s quiet, and think.”

“When it comes to cybernetics,” I told him, “I rank as fairly stupid.”

“It’s a wide field,” he said. “I’m working on intelligence.”

“Indeed,” I said.

“Machine intelligence,” he said.

“Can machines be intelligent?” I asked.

He said, “I rather think they can.”

“You’re making progress, then?”

“I have a theory I am working on,” he said.

“Well, that is fine,” I said. “I wish you all success.”

I sensed in him a hunger to talk, now that he had found someone new he could tell about his work; but I was not about to stand around with him out there in the night.

“I think I’ll turn back,” I said. “It’s getting chilly and maybe now I can get some sleep.”

I turned to go, and he said to me, “I’d like to ask you something, Charley. How many people have you ever told you got your education at Coon Creek?”

The question startled me, and I turned back to face him.

“That’s a funny question, Kirby.”

“Maybe so,” he said, “but how many have you?”

“As few as possible,” I said. I hesitated for a moment, waiting for him to speak, and when he didn’t, I said, “It was good to see you, Kirby,” and I headed back toward the hall.

But he called after me, and I swung around again.

“There is something else,” he said. “What do you know of the history of Coon Creek?”

“Not a thing,” I said. “I’m not even curious.”

“I was,” he said, “and I did some checking. Do you know there has never been a cent of public money in this place? And in all its history, it has never had a research grant. So far as I can find, it has never applied for one.”

“There is an endowment of some sort,” I said. “Someone by the name of Cramden, way back in the eighties. Cramden Hall is named for him.”

“That is right,” said Winthrop, “but there never was a Cramden. Someone put up the money in his name, but there never was a Cramden. No one by the name of Cramden.”

“Who was it, then?”

“I don’t know,” he said.

“Well,” I said, “I don’t suppose it makes a great deal of difference now. Coon Creek is here and that is all that counts.”

I started off down the walk again, and this time he let me go.

Good to see you, I had told him, but it had not been good. I scarcely remembered the man—a name out of the past, a name without a face. And I still did not have the face, for his back had been toward the moon and I had not seen his face.

And all that silly talk about did I often mention Coon Creek and who had endowed the college. What had the man been getting at and why should he be so concerned? In any case, I told myself, it did not matter to me. I wasn’t going to be here long enough for it to matter to me.

I went back to the driveway. When I got to the foot of the stairs that led to Cramden Hall, I turned around and looked back down the curving drive toward the manicured landscape that lay within the curve.

Coon Creek, I thought. God, yes, Coon Creek. It was a place you never mentioned because it had a corny sound and people always asked you where it was and what kind of school it was; and there really were no answers. “I never heard of it,” they’d say, “but it sounds so interesting.”

You couldn’t tell them they had never heard of it because they were not supposed to hear of it, that it was quietly tucked away and had its corny name so that no one in his right mind would ever want to go to it. Nor could you tell them that the school selected its students rather than the students selecting it, that it went out and recruited brains, exactly as other colleges, intent on winning football teams, recruited brawn.

“Brains” would not be the precise word, since some of us—and I was one of them—were not all that brainy. Rather it was an ability of a certain kind which had never been quite defined, an approach to problems and a philosophy that was undefined as well known, of course, to certain people, but certainly not to those chosen ones who were invited to become students at Coon Creek. How they found us no one really knew, and who was behind it all was unknown as well. The government, I had always thought, but I had been far from sure. The selection process had a sort of undercover secret sneakiness that had the feel of government. Although, if what Winthrop had told me was correct, it was not government.

Not all of us, of course, turned out as well as might have been expected. I had not for one. And Mary . . . well, maybe Mary hadn’t either. During her days at the institute, I recalled, she had exhibited an interest in economics that must have been upsetting to Old Prather and perhaps to many others; and then she had gone off at a tangent into music, which must have been the farthest from what those who engineered the college must have had in mind. Leonard, of course, was another case—one of the more successful ones—a brilliant mathematician who was pushing science beyond logic and into an intuitional area that gave some promise of arriving at some understanding not only of the mechanism, but of the purpose of the universe.

I stood for a short time looking at the driveway and the area it enclosed—waiting, I think, for the pagoda to come back again; but it did not come back, so I turned and went up the stairs.

The time machine, as Old Prather had described it, was wedged between the boles of the clump of birch. It had a sort of hazy, flickering look to it, but not so much that it could not be seen with some clarity. The space around it was fairly clear of time-debris. There were a tennis ball and an old boot, but that was all. While we watched the boot went away.

“We did a little preliminary investigation,” Old Prather said, “before the three of you arrived. We rigged up a camera on a boom and got it in as close as we could manage to photograph the entire surface—all, that is, except the portion of it that is resting on the ground. We lost the first camera. It was shifted into time or whatever happens when you get too close to it. We didn’t lose the second camera, and we found out one thing. Close down against the ground and shielded by a tree trunk is what appears to be a control of some sort.”

Old Prather opened the folder he carried underneath his arm, and we crowded around to look. A couple of photographs showed what seemed to be a control, a circular patch set into the metal of the cylinder; but that was all, a circular patch. There were no calibration marks, but there seemed to be three little projections set into the edge of the circle. The projections at one time could have been tied into a control mechanism of some sort, but there was nothing to indicate they had.

“Nothing else?” asked Leonard.

“Only a couple of rough spots on the surface,” said Old Prather. He found the photographs. “One on one end, another on the opposite end.”

“They could mark the positions,” I said, “where the time engine was mounted on the craft. If it is a time engine and was on a craft. The spots where the engine broke from its mountings.”

“You’re fairly certain of that, though,” said Leonard, a little nastily.

“It’s an idea,” I said. “That is all it is.”

“It seems to me,” said Leonard, “that we need more people in on this than just the three of us. Charley here is the only one of us who knows anything about time and—”

“Whatever I know of it,” I told him, “is only theoretical. I’d have no idea how a contraption like this could be put together. We can’t just go wading in. If it is a time engine, I would guess it is only idling; but we still have no idea what a time-force can do. Maybe it’s not too powerful, but the power is probably fluctuating. If we start messing around with it and do something that turns it on full power—”

Old Prather nodded gravely. “I can realize the danger,” he said, “but if it’s possible to do so, I’d prefer to see this discovery kept within the family. It would be against my grain to share it with someone else—especially with the government. And if we went to anyone it should be the government.”

“Our time machine would be easier to work with,” said Mary, “if we could get it out of that birch clump—out into the open where we could roll it around and get at it better.”

“We had thought of that,” said Old Prather, “but we were afraid to touch it. We could pry it out of there, of course, but—”

“I don’t think,” said Leonard, “that we should touch it yet. Even the slightest jar might affect the mechanism. Trouble is, we’re working in the dark. We don’t know what we have. If we could turn it off—but I haven’t the faintest idea how to turn it off. That control circle, maybe, if it is a control. But how do you get to it to turn it?”

“You said Limpy got the book,” Mary said to Old Prather. “How did he manage it? Did he reach in and get it?”

“He was carrying a hoe,” Old Prather said. “He hooked it out with that.”

“Maybe,” said Leonard, “someone in the shops could rig up something we could use to manipulate the circle. Attach it to a long handle, and we might reach in. There are those three little nibs on the outside of the circle. If we had a tool of some sort that would engage them, we might be in business.”

“That’s fine,” I said, “but would you know which way to turn the circle?”

We needn’t have worried which way to turn it. The shop rigged up a tool, working from the photographs. The first time it was not quite the right size. The second time around it fit, but it didn’t work. It slid past the nibs. The metal had what appeared to be an oily quality. There seemed no way to get a grip on it. The shop went on, working into the night, trying to engineer something that might do the job. But all of us, even the shop, knew there was little chance.

That night at dinner we tried to talk it out. There was no talking it out, however. The problem had too many angles to it—not just how we’d get the engine shut down, but what we’d do with it once it was shut down. How did you go about investigating a time mechanism? If you were lucky, of course, you might take it apart, photographing and diagramming each step in taking it apart. You might even be able to take it apart and put it back together and still not be able to find what made it operate. Even when you had it all spread out, even when you had examined every component of it, understanding the relationship of each component to all the rest of it, the principle might still escape you.

Chances were, we agreed, that stripping it down would involve some danger, perhaps considerable danger. Somewhere within that metal cylinder was a factor no one understood. Checks and balances were built into the machine to control that factor. Unbalance this system and you would be face to face with time, or that factor we called “time”; and no one, absolutely no one, knew what time might be.

“What we’ll need,” said Leonard, “is something that will contain time, that will insulate it.”

“Okay,” I said. “That is exactly it. Something that damps the time factor while we work, so that we aren’t blown back into the Carboniferous or forward to the point where the universe is approaching heat death.”

“I don’t think the time force is that strong,” Old Prather objected.

“Probably not, the way it is now,” said Leonard. “Charley thinks the engine is idling, maybe barely functioning. But if that thing out there is what we think it is, it has to have the requisite power to drive a spaceship over many light-years.”

“The damping factor would have to be something that is immaterial,” I said. “Something that is not a part of the material universe. Anything that has mass would be affected by time. What we need is something upon which time has no effect.”

“Light, maybe,” said Mary. “Lasers.”

Leonard shook his head. “Either time affects light,” he said, “or light has established its own time parameter. It travels only so fast. And while it may not seem so, it is actually material. Light can be bent by a strong magnetic field. What we need is something outside time and independent of it.”

“Well, maybe the mind, then,” said Mary. “Thought. Telepathic thought aimed at the engine, establishing some sort of rapport with it.”

“That fits our specifications,” Old Prather agreed, “but we’re a thousand years too soon. We don’t know what thought is. We don’t know how the mind operates. We have no telepaths.”

“Well,” said Mary, “I did my best. I came up with two bad ideas. How about the rest of you?”

“Witchery,” I said. “Let us go to Africa or the Caribbean and get us a good witch doctor.”

I had meant to be facetious, but it didn’t seem to strike them that way. They sat there looking at me like three solemn owls.

“A resonance of some sort,” said Leonard.

“I know about that,” said Mary, “and it wouldn’t work. You’re talking about a kind of music, and I know music. Time is a part of music. Music is based on time.”

Leonard frowned. “I said it wrong,” he told us, “and without too much thought. What I was thinking about were atoms. Perhaps there is no such thing as time in atomic structure. Some investigators have advanced the theory. If we could line up atoms, get them into some sort of random step—” He shook his head. “No, it wouldn’t work. There’s no way in God’s world that it could be done, and even if it could, I guess it wouldn’t work.”

“A strong magnetic field,” said Old Prather. “Wrap the engine in a magnetic field.”

“Fine,” I said. “That might do the trick. The field might bend and contain time. But, aside from the fact that we can’t build such a field…”

“If we could,” said Mary, “we couldn’t work inside the field. What we’re talking about is how to control time so we can investigate the engine.”

“The only thing left is death,” I said. “Death is a timeless thing.”

“Can you tell me what death is?” snapped Leonard.

“No, I can’t,” I said, grinning at him.

“You’re a smart aleck,” he said viciously. “You always were.”

“Now, now,” said Old Prather, completely horrified. “Let us have more wine. There’s still some left in the bottle.”

“We aren’t getting anywhere,” said Mary, “so what difference does it make? Death sounds as good to me as any of the others.”

I bowed to her with mock gravity, and she made a face at me. Old Prather went skipping around the table like a concerned cricket, pouring the wine.

“I hope,” he said, “the boys in the shop can come up with something that will turn the control dial.”

“If they don’t,” said Mary, “we’ll do it by hand. Have you ever thought how the human hand is often more versatile than the finest tool?”

“Trouble is,” said Leonard, “that however ingenious the tool may be, it is going to be awkward. You have to stand so far away, and you’re working at a dirty angle.”

“But we can’t do it by hand,” Old Prather protested. “There is the time effect.”

“On little things,” said Mary. “On books and tennis balls and boots. Never on a living thing. Never on anything with the mass of a human body.”

“I still wouldn’t want to try it,” said Leonard.

We tried it. We had to try it.

The tools the shop dreamed up wouldn’t work, and we simply couldn’t leave the time machine there in the clump of birch. It was still operating. While we watched, a battered wrist watch, a tattered notebook, an old felt hat appeared and disappeared. And momentarily the boat was upon the pond that had never known a boat.

“I spent last night with the mathematics text,” said Leonard, “hoping I might find something that might help us, but I didn’t find a thing. Some new and intriguing concepts, of course, but nothing that could be applied to time.”

“We could construct a good strong fence around it,” said Old Prather, “and leave it there until we know what to do with it.”

“Nonsense,” said Mary. “Why, for heaven’s sake, a fence? All we need to do is step in there—”

“No,” said Leonard. “No, I don’t think we should. We don’t know—”

“We know,” said Mary, “that it can move small objects. Nothing of any mass at all. And all of them are inanimate. Not a single living thing. Not a rabbit, not a squirrel. Not even a mouse.”

“Maybe there aren’t any mice,” said Old Prather.

“Fiddlesticks,” said Mary. “There are always mice.”

“The pagoda,” said Leonard. “Quite some distance from this place and a rather massive structure.”

“But inanimate,” said Mary.

“You mentioned mirages, I believe,” I said to Old Prather. “Buildings and people.”

“Yes,” he said, “but merely shadows. Very shadowy.”

“God. I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe Mary’s right. Maybe it has no real effect on anything that’s living.”

“We’d be gambling, you know,” said Leonard.

“Leonard, that is what is wrong with you,” said Mary. “I’ve been wondering all this time what was wrong with you. And now it seems I know. You never gamble, do you?”

“Never,” said Leonard. “There is no sense in gambling. It’s a sucker’s game.”

“Of course not,” said Mary. “A computer for a brain. A lot of little mathematical equations to spell out life for you. You’re different from the rest of us. I gamble; Charley, here, would gamble—”

“All right,” I said, “cut out the arguing. I’ll do the job. You say fingers are better than tools, so let us find out. All you have to tell me is which way I should turn it.”

Mary grabbed my arm. “No, you don’t,” she said. “I was the one who started this. I’m the one to do it.”

“Why don’t the two of you,” Leonard said in his nasty, twerpy way, “draw straws to determine which one of you it’ll be?”

“Now that is a good idea,” Mary said. “But not the two of us. It’ll be the three of us.”

Old Prather had been doing some twittering around, and now he blurted out, “I think this is the height of foolishness. Drawing straws, indeed! I do not approve of it. I approve it not at all. But if straws are being drawn, there must be four of them.”

“Not on your life,” I said. “If it should happen that the three of us are caught up in time and whisked very swiftly hence, someone must be left to explain it all. And you are the man to do that. You explain everything so well. You’ve been doing it for years.”

It was insane, of course. If we had taken all of thirty seconds to really talk it over, we would not have done it. But each of us had got caught up in the excitement and each of us had invested some ego in the project, and we couldn’t back away. Leonard could have, probably, but he’d got caught up in a sort of stubborn pride. If he had said, “No, I won’t go along with it,” that might have ended it. But if he’d done that he’d have confessed to cowardliness, and he couldn’t quite do that.

We didn’t draw straws. We put three pieces of paper in Old Prather’s hat, the pieces of paper marked, 1, 2, and 3.

Mary got the 1, Leonard the 2, and I came up with 3.

“Well, that settles it,” said Mary. “I’m the first to try it. Which is only right, since I suggested it.”

“The hell with that,” I said. “Just tell me which way it should be turned—if it can be turned, that is.”

“Charles,” said Mary, primly, “after all these years you are being chauvinistic, and you know very well I’ll insist upon my right.”

“Oh, for Christ sake,” said Leonard, “let her go ahead! She’s the one who’s sure.”

“I still do not approve,” said Old Prather, rather fussily, “but you did draw numbers. I wash my hands of the matter. I disassociate myself from it.”

“Bully for you,” I said.

“I shall turn it clockwise,” said Mary. “After all, that is the way—”

“You can’t be sure,” said Leonard. “Just because that is a human convention.”

Before I could reach out to stop her, she darted into the clump of birch and was bending over to reach the control circle. Fascinated, I watched in that split second when her fingers gripped and turned. I distinctly saw the control circle move. So she had been right, after all, I thought: fingers were better than a tool.

But even as I thought it, Mary disappeared, and around the cylinder there was a sudden flurry of many different articles dredged out of time and moved into the present from the past and future and—once arrived—shunted to the past or future, continuing the direction of their flow. There was a pocket radio, a brightly colored shirt, a knapsack, a couple of children’s blocks, a pair of spectacles, a woman’s purse and, so help me God, a rabbit.

“She turned it the wrong way!” I shouted. “It’s no longer idling.”

Leonard took a quick step forward, then paused, took another slow step. For an instant more I waited, and when he didn’t move, I reached out an arm and swept him to one side. Then I was in the clump of birch and reaching down. I felt my fingers on the circle, felt the flesh sink into the little nibs, and my brain roared at me: counterclockwise, counterclockwise, counterclockwise…

I don’t really remember turning the control circle, but suddenly the time debris that had been washing over and around my feet was no longer there, and neither was the cylinder.

Slowly I straightened up and backed out of the clump of birch. “What the hell happened to the engine?” I asked. And as I said it, I turned around to catch the response of the others, but there were no others.

I stood alone and shivered. Everything was the way it had been before. The day was still a sunny day, the birch clump looked the same as ever, and the pond was the same as well, although not quite the same, for now a small rowboat was pulled up on the shore.

I shivered at the sight of it, then held myself stiff and straight to forestall further shivering. My mind clicked over reluctantly and told me what I fought against believing.

Had I done the job? I wondered. Had I turned the engine off, or had Leonard had to go in and complete the job? Then I knew I must have done it, for neither Leonard nor Old Prather would have followed up.

The cylinder was gone and gone how long ago? I wondered. And where was Mary? And what about the boat?

I headed across the slope toward Cramden Hall, and as I went along I kept a sharp outlook for changes. But if there were changes, they were not pronounced enough for me to notice them. I remembered that through the years Coon Creek did not change. It stayed stodgy and a bit ramshackle and tried its humble best to seem of no account. It wore an ancient coat of protective coloration.

There were a few students about. As I came down to the sidewalk that led to the curving driveway, I met one face to face; but he paid no attention to me. He was carrying a clutch of books underneath his arm and seemed in something of a hurry.

I climbed the stairs in front of the hall and let myself into the hushed twilight of the foyer. There was no one around, although I heard the sound of footsteps going down a hall that was out of sight.

Standing there, I felt unaccountably an outsider, as if I had no right to be there. Just down the hall was Old Prather’s office. He would have the answer, and whether I belonged or not, I told myself, I was entitled to the answer.

But there was a chilliness in the place that I didn’t like, a chilliness and, now that the sound of distant footsteps had ceased, a silence that went with the chilliness.

I half turned to leave, then turned back, and as I turned, a man came out of the door of Old Prather’s office. He headed down the hall toward me, and I stayed standing there, not knowing what to do, not wanting to turn about and leave, wishing in a frantic moment that the man coming down the hall should fail to see me there, although I knew that undoubtedly he had seen me.

It was time displacement, I knew, a sense of time displacement. It was something we had often talked about in idle moments back at Time Research. If a man were moved in time, would he feel out of place? Would he sense a different time frame? Was man aware of time? Was a specific temporal bracket an unseen factor of personal environment?

The light in the hall was dim, and the face of the man who was approaching me was a very ordinary face—a stereotype, one of those faces that one sees on thousands of different people, with so little remarkable about them that there is nothing to remember, with the end result that all of these faces come to look alike.

The man slowed his pace as he came nearer to me. Then he said, “Is there any way I can help you? Are you looking for someone?”

“Prather,” I said.

A change came over his face, a sudden change that was at once fear and wonderment. He stopped and stared at me.

“Charley?” he asked, questioningly. “You are Charley Spencer?”

“That is who I am,” I said. “And now about Old Prather.”

“Old Prather’s dead,” he said.

“And you?”

“‘You should remember me. I am Kirby Winthrop. I took over Prather’s place.”

“Fast work,” I said. “I saw you just the other night.”

“Fifteen years ago,” said Kirby. “Our meeting on Observatory Hill was fifteen years ago.”

It staggered me a little, but I guess I was prepared for it. I hadn’t really thought about it; I had not allowed myself to think about it. If I had any real reaction, it would have been relief that it was not a hundred years.

“What about Mary?” I asked. “Has she shown up yet?”

“I think perhaps you could stand a drink,” said Kirby. “I know damn well I could. Let’s go and have a drink.”

He came up to me and linked his arm in mine, and we went marching down the hall to the room he’d left.

He said to the girl in the outer office, “Hold all calls. I’m in to no one.”

Then he hustled me into the inner office.

He almost pushed me into a deep, upholstered chair in one corner of the office and went to a small bar under the windows.

“Have you a preference, Charley?”

“If you have some scotch,” I said.

He came back with the glasses, handed one to me and sat down in an opposite chair.

“Now we can talk,” he said. “But get down a slug of liquor first. You know, all these years I’ve been sort of expecting you. Not wondering when you would show up, of course, but if you would.”

“Afraid I would,” I said.

“Well, maybe something of that, too. But not very much. Slightly embarrassing, of course, but—”

Kirby left the sentence hanging in the air. I took a snort of scotch. “I asked you about Mary.”

He shook his head. “She won’t be coming. She went the other way.”

“You mean into the past.”

“That’s right. We’ll talk about it later.”

“I see the time contraption’s gone. Did I shut it off?”

“You shut it off.”

“I wondered if maybe Leonard or Old Prather—”

He shrugged. “Not Leonard. He was a basket case. And Old Prather—well, you see, Old Prather never was a part of it. He never really was a part of anything at all. He stood outside of everything. Only an observer. That was his way of life, his function. He had people doing things for him—”

“I see,” I said. “So you got it out of there. Where is it now?”

“It? You mean the engine?”

“That’s right.”

“Right at the moment it’s up in the Astrophysics Building.”

“I don’t remember—”

“It’s new,” he said. “The first new building on the campus for more than fifty years. It and the spaceport.”

I came half out of my chair, then settled back again. “A spaceport—”

“Charley,” said Kirby, “we’ve been out to the Centauri system and 61 Cygni.”

“We?”

“Us. Right here. Coon Creek Institute.”

“Then it worked!”

“You’re damned right it worked.”

“The stars,” I said. “My God, we’re going to the stars! You know, that night when we met out on the hill… that night I wanted to shout to the stars, to tell them we were coming. What have you found out there?”

“Centauri, nothing. Just the three stars. Interesting, of course, but no planets. Not even space-debris. A planetary system never formed, never got started. Cygni has planets, twelve of them, but nothing one could land on. Methane giants, others that are in the process of forming crusts, one burned-out cinder close up to the sun.”

“Then there are planets.”

‘Yes, millions, billions of solar systems. Or at least that’s what we think.”

“You say us. How about the others? How about the government?”

“Charley,” he said, “you don’t understand. We are the only ones who have it. No one else.”

“But—”

“I know. They’ve tried. We’ve said no. Remember, we are a private institution. Not a dime of federal or state or any other kind of money—”

“Coon Creek,” I said, half choking at the ridiculous thought of it. “Good old Coon Creek, come into its own.”

“We’ve had to set up a security system,” Kirby said primly. “We have all sort of sensors and detectors and guards three deep around the place. It plays hell with the budget.”

“You say you have the engine here. That means you were able to build others.”

“No problem. We took the engine apart. We charted it, we measured its components, we photographed it. We have it down on tape to the last millimeter of it. We can build hundreds of them, but there is one thing—”

“Yes?”

“We don’t know what makes it work. We missed the principle.”

“Leonard?”

“Leonard’s dead. Has been for years. Committed suicide. I don’t think even if he’d lived—”

“There’s something else,” I said. “You wouldn’t have dared to tinker with the engine if you hadn’t had a way to damp the time effect. Old Prather and the three of us kicked that one around—”

“Intelligence,” said Kirby.

“What do you mean—intelligence?”

“You remember that night we talked. I told you I was building—”

“An intelligent machine!” I shouted. “You mean to tell me?”

“Yes, I mean to tell you. An intelligent machine. I almost had it that night I talked with you.”

“Mary was on the right track, then,” I said. “That night at dinner she said ‘thought.’ Telepathic thought aimed at the engine. You see, it had to be some immaterial thing. We beat our brains out and could come up with nothing. But we knew we had to have a damper.”

I sat silently, trying to get it all straight in my mind.

“The government suspects,” I said, “where you got the engine. There was that crashed spaceship.”

“There was a spaceship,” said Kirby. “They finally got enough of it to guess how it was built. Picked up some organic matter, too, but not enough to get a good idea of its passengers. They suspect, of course, that we got the engine, although they aren’t even sure there was an engine. We’ve never admitted we found anything at all. Our story is we invented it.”

“They must have known, even from the first, something funny was going on,” I pointed out. “Mary and I disappeared. That would have taken some explanation. Not myself, of course, but Mary was something of a celebrity.”

“I’m a bit ashamed to tell you this,” said Kirby, and he did look a bit ashamed. “We didn’t actually say so, but we made it seem that the two of you had run off together.”

“Mary wouldn’t have thanked you for that,” I told him.

“After all,” he said, defensively, “the two of you had some dates while you were students.”

“There’s one thing you’ve not been telling me,” I said. “You said Mary went into the past. How do you know that?”

He didn’t answer for a while, and then he finally asked a question. “You remember that night we talked out on the hill?”

I nodded. “We talked about your intelligent machine.”

“More than that. I told you there never was a man named Cramden, that the endowment money came from someone else but was credited to a non-existent Cramden.”

“So what does that have to do with it?”

“It was something that Old Prather remembered. He told me about the argument you had about the drawing of the straws or paper slips out of a hat or something of the sort. Leonard wanted none of it. Shutting off the engine the way you did it, he said, was a gamble. And Mary said sure it was a gamble and that she was willing to gamble.”

He stopped and looked at me. I shook my head. “I don’t get it,” I said. “Is all this supposed to have some meaning?”

“Well, it turned out later that she was a gambler—a most accomplished gambler. She’d racked up half a fortune in the stock market. No one knew too much about it until later. She did it rather quietly.”

“Wait a second, there,” I said. “She was interested in economics. She took some courses and did a lot of reading. Economics and music. I’ve always wondered why she was ever chosen for the institute—”

“Precisely,” he said. “Many times, in the dead of night, I’ve wondered that myself, and each time I have been somewhat frightened at how it all turned out. Can you imagine the sort of killing that someone like Mary, with her kind of background, could make if they were thrown a hundred years into the past? They’d know the pattern. They’d know what to buy, when to get in, when to get out. Not specifically, of course, but from their knowledge of history.”

“Are you just guessing or do you have some facts?”

“Some facts,” he said. “Not too many. A few. Enough for an educated guess.”

“So little Mary Holland is thrown into the past, makes herself a bundle, endows Coon Creek Institute—”

“More than that,” he said. “There was the initial endowment, of course, the one that got us started. And then, about fifteen years ago, about the time the time-engine business started, there was a supplementary endowment that had been in escrow in a New York bank for years, pegged to be paid off at a given time. A rather handsome sum. This time there was a name—a certain Genevieve Lansing. From the little I could find she had been an eccentric old character who was an accomplished pianist, although she never played in public. And the thing that made her so eccentric was that at a time when no one else ever even thought about it, she was utterly convinced that some day man would go out to the stars.”

I said nothing for a long time and neither did he. He got up and brought a bottle from the bar and splashed some more liquor in our glasses.

Finally I stirred in my chair. “She knew,” I said. “She knew you’d need that supplementary endowment to develop a spaceship and spaceport facilities.”

“That’s what we used it for,” he said. “We named the ship the Genevieve Lansing. I ached to call it the Mary Holland, but I didn’t dare.”

I finished off my liquor and put the glass down on a table. “I wonder, Kirby,” I said, “if you’d put me up for a day or two. Until I can get my feet under me. I don’t quite feel up to walking out immediately.”

“We couldn’t let you go in any case,” said Kirby. “We can’t have you turning up. Remember, you and Mary Holland ran off together fifteen years ago.”

“But I can’t just stay here. I’ll take a different name if you think I should. At this late date, no one would recognize me.”

“Charley,” he said, “you wouldn’t just be staying here. There’s work for you to do. You may be the one man alive who can do the job that’s waiting.”

“I can’t imagine…”

“I told you we can build time engines. We can use them to go out to the stars. But we don’t know why they work. We don’t know the principle. That’s an intolerable situation. The job’s less than half done, there’s still a lot to do.”

I got out of the chair slowly. “Coon Creek,” I said. “Tied forever to Coon Creek.”

He held out his hand to me. “Charley,” he said, “we’re glad to have you home.”

And standing there, shaking hands with him, I reminded myself it need not be Coon Creek forever. One of these days I might be going to the stars.