I looked at it. “Doctor … push me back in time by a week.”
He stared angrily. “Out of the question!”
“Why not? Won’t it work with people?”
“Eh? Certainly it will work with people.”
“Then why not do it? I’m not afraid. And think what a wonderful thing it would be for the book. . . if I could testify of my own knowledge that the Twitchell time displacement works.”
“You can report it of your own knowledge. You just saw it.”
“Yes,” I admitted slowly, “but I won’t be believed. That business with the coins . . . I saw it and I believe it. But anyone simply reading an account of it would conclude that I was gullible, that you had hoaxed me with some simple legerdemain.”
“Damn it, sir!”
“That’s what they would say. They wouldn’t be able to believe that I actually had seen what I reported. But if you were to ship me back just a week, then I could report of my own knowledge-”
“Sit down. Listen to me.” He sat down, but there was no place for me to sit, although he did not seem aware of it. “I have experimented with human beings long ago. And for that reason I resolved never to do it again.”
“Why? Did it kill them?”
“What? Don’t talk nonsense.” He looked at me sharply, added, “You are not to put this in the book.”
“As you say, sir.”
“Some minor experiments showed that living subjects could make temporal displacements without harm. I had confided in a colleague, a young fellow who taught drawing and other matters in the school of architecture. Really more of an engineer than a scientist, but I liked him; his mind was alive. This young chap-it can’t hurt to tell you his name: Leonard Vincent-was wild to try it . . . really try it; he wanted to undergo major displacement, five hundred years. I was weak. I let him.”
“Then what happened?”
“How should I know? Five hundred years, man! I’ll never live to find out.”
“But you think he’s five hundred years in the future?”
“Or the past. He might have wound up in the fifteenth century. Or the twenty-fifth. The chances are precisely even. There’s an indeterminacy-symmetrical equations. I’ve sometimes thought no, just a chance similarity in names.”
I didn’t ask what he meant by this because I suddenly saw the similarity, too, and my hair stood on end. Then I pushed it out of my mind; I had other problems. Besides, chance similarity was all it could be-a man could not get from Colorado to Italy, not in the fifteenth century.
“But I resolved not to be tempted again. It wasn’t science, it added nothing to the data. If he was displaced forward, well and good. But if he was displaced backward . . – then possibly I sent my friend to be killed by savages. Or eaten by wild animals.”
Or even possibly, I thought, to become a “Great White God.” I kept the thought to myself. “But you needn’t use so long a displacement with me.”
“Let’s say no more about it, if you please, sir.”
“As you wish, Doctor.” But I couldn’t drop it. “Uh, may I make a suggestion?”
“Eh? Speak up.”
“We could get almost the same result by a rehearsal.”
“What do you mean?”
“A complete dry run, with everything done just exactly as if you were intending to displace a living subject-I’ll act out that part. We’ll do everything precisely as if you meant to displace me, right up to the point where you would push that button. Then I’ll understand the procedure . . . which I don’t quite, as yet.”
He grumbled a little but he really wanted to show off his toy. He weighed me and set aside metal weights just equal to my hundred and seventy pounds. “These are the same scales I used with poor Vincent.”
Between us we placed them on one side of the stage. “What temporal setting shall we make?” he asked. “This is your show.”
“Uh, you said that it could be set accurately?”
“I said so, sir. Do you doubt it?”