Your name is Rogers, is it not? Very well, Rogers, you are a space-time
event having duration four ways. You are not quite six feet tall, you are
about twenty inches wide and perhaps ten inches thick. In time, there
stretches behind you more of this space-time event, reaching to, perhaps,
1905, of which we see a cross section here at right angles to the time
axis, and as thick as the present. At the far end is a baby, smelling of
sour milk and drooling its breakfast on its bib. At the other end lies,
perhaps, an old man some place in the 1980s. Imagine this space-time event,
which we call Rogers, as a long pink worm, continuous through the years. It
stretches past us here in 1939, and the cross section we see appears as a
single, discreet body. But that is illusion. There is physical continuity
to this pink worm, enduring through the years. As a matter of fact, there
is physical continuity in this concept to the entire race, for these pink
worms branch off from other pink worms. In this fashion the race is like a
vine whose branches intertwine and send out shoots. Only by taking a cross
section of the vine would we fall into the error of believing that the
shootlets were discreet individuals.”
He paused and looked around at their faces. One of them, a dour,
hard-bitten chap, put in a word.
“That’s all very pretty, Pinero, if true, but where does that get you?”
Pinero favored him with an unresentful smile. “Patience, my friend. I asked
you to think of life as electrical. Now think of our long, pink worm as a
conductor of electricity. You have heard, perhaps, of the fact that
electrical engineers can, by certain measurements, predict the exact
location of a break in a transatlantic cable without ever leaving the
shore. I do the same with our pink worms. By applying my instruments to the
cross section here in this room I can tell where the break occurs; that is
to say, where death takes place. Or, if you like, I can reverse the
connections and tell you the date of your birth. But that is uninteresting;
you already know it.”
The dour individual sneered. “I’ve caught you, doc. If what you say about
the race being like a vine of pink worms is true, you can’t tell birthdays,
because the connection with the race is continuous at birth. Your
electrical conductor reaches on back through the mother into a man’s
remotest ancestors.”
Pinero beamed. “True, and clever, my friend. But you have pushed analogy
too far. It is not done in the precise manner in which one measures the
length of an electrical conductor. In some ways it is more like measuring
the length of a long corridor by bouncing an echo off the far end. At birth
there is a sort of twist in the corridor, and, by proper calibration, I can
detect the echo from that twist.”
“Let’s see you prove it!”
“Certainly, my dear friend. Will you be a subject?”
One of the others spoke up. “He’s called your bluff, Luke. Put up or shut
up.”
“I’m game. What do I do?”
“First write the date of your birth on a sheet of paper, and hand it to one
of your colleagues.”
Luke complied. “Now what?”
“Remove your outer clothing and step upon these scales. Now tell me, were
you ever very much thinner, or very much fatter, than you are now? No? What
did you weigh at birth? Ten pounds? A fine bouncing baby boy. They don’t
come so big anymore.”
“What is all this flubdubbery?”
“I am trying to approximate the average cross section of our long pink
conductor, my dear Luke. Now will you seat yourself here? Then place this
electrode in your mouth. No, it will not hurt you; the voltage is quite
low, less than one micro-volt, but I must have a good connection.” The
doctor left him and went behind his apparatus, where he lowered a hood over
his head before touching his controls. Some of the exposed dials came to
life and a low humming came from the machine. It stopped and the doctor