TWICE IN TIME

CHAPTER 1 The Time Reflector

This story, as unvarnished as I can make it, must begin where my twentieth-century life ends—in the sitting room of the suite taken by George Astley and myself at Tomasulo's inn, on a hill above the Arno. It is the clearest of all my clouded memories of that time. April was the month, still chilly for Tuscany, and we had a charcoal fire in the grate.

I knelt among my dismantled machinery, before the charcoal fire, testing the connections here and there.

"So that's your time-traveler, Thrasher?" said Astley. "Like the one H. G. Wells wrote about?"

"Not in the least like the one H. G. Wells wrote about," I said spiritedly, and not perhaps without a certain resentful pride. "He described a sort of century-hurdling mechanical horse. In its saddle you rode forward into the Judgment Day or back to the beginning. This thing of mine will work, but as a reflector."

I peered into the great cylindrical housing that held my lens, a carefully polished crystal of alum, more than two feet in diameter. I smiled with satisfaction.

"It won't carry me into time," I assured. "It'll throw me."

He leaned back in the easy chair that was too small for him.

"I don't understand, Leo," he confessed. "Tell me about it."

"All right—if I must," I said. I had told him so often before. It was a bore to have to repeat what a man seemed incapable of understanding. "The operation is comparable to that of a burning-glass," I explained patiently, "which involves a point of light and transfers its powers through space to another position. Here"—I waved toward the mass of mechanism—"is a device that will involve an object and transfer, or rather, reproduce it to another epoch in time."

"I've tried to read Einstein at least enough to think of time as an extra dimension," ventured Astley. "But, still, I don't follow your reasoning. You can't exist in two places at once. That's impossible in the face of it. Yet from what I gather you can exist, you have existed, in two separate and distinct times. For instance, you're a grown man now, but when you were a baby—"

"That's the fourth dimension of it," I broke in. "The baby Leo Thrasher was, in a way, only the original tip of the fourth-dimensional me. At ten, I was a cross-section. Now I'm another, six feet tall, eighteen inches wide, eight inches thick—and quite some more years deep." I began to tinker with my lights. "Do you see now?"

"A little." Astley had produced his oldest and most odorous pipe. "You mean that this present manifestation of you is a single corridorlike object, reaching in time from the place of your birth—Chicago, wasn't it?—to here in Florence."

"That's something of the truth," I granted, my head deep in the great boxlike container that housed the electrical part of the machine. "I exist, therefore, only once in time. But suppose this me is taken completely out of Twentieth Century existence— dematerialized, recreated in another epoch. That makes twice in time, doesn't it?" * * *

As I have many times before, I thrilled to the possibility. It was my father's fault, all this labor and dream. I had wanted to study art, had wanted to be a painter, and he had wanted me to be an engineer. But he could not direct my imagination. At the schools he selected, I found the wheels and belts and motors all singing to me a song both weird and compelling. The Machine Age was not enough of a wonder to me. I demanded of it other wonders—miracles.

"I've read Dunne's theory of corridors in time," Astley was musing. "And once I saw a play about them—by J. B. Priestly, wasn't it? What's your reaction to that stuff?"

"That's one of the things I hope to find out about," I told him. "Of course, I think that there's only the one corridor, and I'm gong to travel down it—or duck out at one point, I mean, and reenter farther along. What I'd like to do would be to reappear in Florence of another age, Florence of the Renaissance."

Astley nodded. He preferred the French Gothic period, because of the swords and the ballads, but he understood my enthusiasm for Renaissance Italy—to me, the age and home of the greatest painters, poets, philosophers of all times.

"Then what?" he encouraged me, gaining interest.

"I'll paint a picture—a good one, I hope. A picture that will properly grace a chapel or church or gallery, a picture that will be kept for four centuries or more. Preferably it will be a mural, that cannot be plundered or destroyed without tearing down a whole important building. When it's finished, I'll come back to this time, to this hour almost. Of course, I'll have to build myself a new time-reflector where I am, because it will be impossible to take this one with me.

"And we'll go together to the chapel or church or gallery, and look at your work of art?" asked Astley. He lighted his pipe. "It will be your footprint in the sands of another time. Isn't that what you mean?"

"Exactly. Evidence that I've been twice in time." I

sighed, with a feeling of rapture, because for a moment I fancied the adventure already accomplished. "If I'm not able to do a picture," I told him, "I'll make my mark—initials or a cross. Cut it in the plinth of a statue, scratch it on the boards at the back of the Mona Lisa or other paintings that I know will survive. It will be almost as good a proof." I smiled. "However, I daresay they'll let me paint. I have a gift that way."

"Perhaps because you're left-handed," Astley smiled at me through the blue smoke. "But one thing—in Renaissance Italy, won't your height and buttery hair be out of place?"

"Not among Fifteenth-Century Tuscans," I said confidently. "There were many with yellow hair and blue eyes. Look at the old Florentine portraits in any art gallery. Look at the streets of Florence today. Not all of those big tawny people are foreigners."

As I talked, I was reassembling my machinery that we had brought with great care from my native America to this spot that I had long since chosen as the obvious place for my experiment. The apparatus took shape under my hands. The open framework, six feet high, as many feet long, and a yard wide, was of metal rods painstakingly milled to micrometric proportion in Germany.

At one end, on a succession of racks, were arranged my ray-generator, with its light bulbs, specially made with vanadium filaments in America. My cameralike device which concentrated the time-reflection power had been assembled from parts made by English, German, and Swiss experts. And then there was the lens of alum with its housing, as big and heavy as a piece of water-main, which I now lifted carefully and clamped into place at the front of the camera. * * *

Astley stared, and drew on his pipe. It was plain enough that he looked tolerantly on all my labor as well as my talk, and that he believed the whole experiment was something of which I would quickly tire. Though he had been complaisant enough about coming with me and lending what aid he could to my secret experiment.

"That business you're setting up there looks like the kind of thing science fictionists write about, " he said.

"It's exactly the kind of thing they write about," I assured him. "As a matter of fact, science fiction has given me plenty of inspiration, and more than a little information, while I've been making it. But this is practical and material, Astley, not imaginary."

He had not long to wait to witness the truth of that, though his phlegmatic nature could never have understood the tenseness that was making my nerves taut as a spring trap. I knew, however, that nerve strain was to be expected, for I was nearing the actuality of the experiment to which I had long given my heart and soul. I said nothing more, because now, within the tick of seconds I would know whether my dream could be a reality or if, in fact, that was all I had toiled and anguished for—a dream!

I am not sure—how could I be certain?—whether my hands were steady when the great moment came. I know vaguely that my hands did reach out—

I pressed a switch. At the other end of the framework there sprang into view a paper-thin sheet of misty vapor, like a piece of fabric stretched between the rectangle of rods.

I could be excused for the theatricality of my gesture.

"Behold the curtain!" I said. "When I concentrate my rays upon it, all is ready. I need only walk through." I stepped back. "Five minutes for it to warm up, and I'm off into the past."

I began to take off my clothes, folding them carefully; the tweed suit, the necktie of wine-colored silk.

"I can be reflected through time," I said with a touch of whimsicality, "but my new clothes must stay here." And more seriously: "I can't count on molecules to approximate them at the other end of the

business."

"You can't count on molecules to approximate your body, either," challenged Astley.

I knew that he was not as stolid as he was trying to appear, for his pipe had gone out, and he was filling it, and I could see that his hands shook a trifle. He was beginning to wonder whether to take me seriously or not. Unimaginative Astley!

"All my diggings into old records at the Biblioteca Nazionale, yonder in town, have been to find those needed molecules," I told him. "Look at those notes on the table beside you."

He turned in his big arm-chair—it was none too big for him, at that—and picked up the jumble of papers that lay there. "You've written a date at the top of this one," he said as he shuffled them. " 'April Thirtieth, Fourteen-seventy.' And below it you've jotted down something I don't follow: 'Mithraic ceremony—rain prayer—ox on altar.' "

"Which sums up everything," I said, pulling off my shoes. "Right here—right at this inn, which I hunted up for the purpose of my experiment—a group of cultists gathered on April Thirtieth, Fourteen-seventy. Just four hundred and sixty-eight years ago today." I leaned over to look at the time-gauge on my camera. "I'm set for that, exactly."

"Cultists?" repeated Astley, whom I knew from of old is apt to clamp mentally upon a single word that interests him. "What sort of cultists?"

"Contemporaries called them sorcerers and Satanists," I told him. "But probably they had some sort of hand-me-down paganism from old Roman days. Some thing like the worship of Mithras.[1] At any rate, they were sacrificing an ox on that day, trying to bring rain down on their vineyards. I have figured it out like this—if they needed rain, then that particular April thirtieth must have been bright and sunny, ideal for my reflection apparatus. They had an ox on the altar, and from its substance I can reassemble my own tissues to house my personality again. The original molecules, have, of course, dissipated somewhere along the route of the process in time. Is that all clear?"* * *

Astley nodded slowly, and I stood up without a stitch of clothing. A pier-glass gave me back a tall pink image, lank but well muscled, crowned with ruffled hair of tawny gold.

"Well, old man," I said, with what nonchalance I could, though every nerve in me was tingling, "the machinery's humming. Here I step into the past."

My companion clamped his pipe between his teeth, but did not light it again. I could still see the disbelief in his eyes.

"I hope you know what you're about, and won't do yourself much damage with that thing," he grumbled. "Putting yourself into such a position isn't like experimenting with rats or guinea pigs, you know."

"I haven't experimented with rats or guinea pigs," I informed him, and stepped into the open framework.

I turned on another switch, and through the lens of alum flowed an icy-blue light, full of tiny flakes that did not warm my naked skin.

"As a matter of fact," I said in what I was sure was a parting message, "I've never experimented with anything. Astley, old boy, you are about to see the first operation of my time reflector upon any living organism."

Astley leaned forward, concern at last springing out all over his face.

"If anything happens," he protested quickly, "your family—"

"I have no family. All dead." With a lifted hand I forestalled what else he was going to say. "Goodbye, Astley. Tomorrow, at this time, have a fresh veal carcass, or a fat pig, brought here. That's for me to materialize myself back."

And I stepped two paces forward, into and through the misty veil.

At once I felt a helpless lightness, as though whisked off my feet by a great wave of the ocean. Glancing quickly behind me, momentarily I saw the room and all in it, but somehow vague and transparent—the fading image of the walls, the windows, my openwork reflector-apparatus, Astley starting to his feet from the armchair. Then all vanished into white light.

That white light beat upon me with an intensity that sickened. I tasted pungency, my fibres vibrated to a humming, bruising rhythm. There was a moment of hot pain, deafening noise, and a glare of blinding radiance.

Then peace, lassitude. Something seemed to materialize as a support under my feet. Again I saw the transparent ghost of a scene, this time full of human figures. That, too, thickened, and I heard many voices, chattering excitedly. Then all was color, life, reality.

One voice dominated the others, speaking in resonant Italian: "The miracle has come!"