I stopped on the way to the Staten Island Airport to call up, and that
was a mistake, doubtless, since I had a chance of making it otherwise.
But the office was affable. "We'll hold the ship five minutes for you,"
the clerk said. "That's the best we can do."
So I rushed back to my taxi and we spun off to the third level and sped
across the Staten bridge like a comet treading a steel rainbow. I had to
be in Moscow by evening, by eight o'clock, in fact, for the opening of
bids on the Ural Tunnel. The Government required the personal presence
of an agent of each bidder, but the firm should have known better than
to send me, Dixon Wells, even though the N. J. Wells Corporation is, so
to speak, my father. I have a--well, an undeserved reputation for being
late to everything; something always comes up to prevent me from getting
anywhere on time. It's never my fault; this time it was a chance
encounter with my old physics professor, old Haskel van Manderpootz. I
couldn't very well just say hello and good-bye to him; I'd been a
favorite of his back in the college days of 2014.
I missed the airliner, of course. I was still on the Staten Bridge when
I heard the roar of the catapult and the Soviet rocket _Baikal_ hummed
over us like a tracer bullet with a long tail of flame.
We got the contract anyway; the firm wired our man in Beirut and he flew
up to Moscow, but it didn't help my reputation. However, I felt a great
deal better when I saw the evening papers; the _Baikal_, flying at the
north edge of the eastbound lane to avoid a storm, had locked wings with
a British fruitship and all but a hundred of her five hundred
passengers were lost. I had almost become "the late Mr. Wells" in a
grimmer sense.
I'd made an engagement for the following week with old van Manderpootz.
It seems he'd transferred to N.Y.U. as head of the department of Newer
Physics--that is, of Relativity. He deserved it; the old chap was a
genius if ever there was one, and even now, eight years out of college,
I remember more from his course than from half a dozen calculus, steam
and gas, mechanics, and other hazards on the path to an engineer's
education. So on Tuesday night I dropped in an hour or so late, to tell
the truth, since I'd forgotten about the engagement until mid-evening.
He was reading in a room as disorderly as ever. "Humph!" he grunted.
"Time changes everything but habit, I see. You were a good student,
Dick, but I seem to recall that you always arrived in class toward the
middle of the lecture."
"I had a course in East Hall just before," I explained. "I couldn't seem
to make it in time."
"Well, it's time you learned to be on time," he growled. Then his eyes
twinkled. "Time!" he ejaculated. "The most fascinating word in the
language. Here we've used it five times (there goes the sixth time--and
the seventh!) in the first minute of conversation; each of us
understands the other, yet science is just beginning to learn its
meaning. Science? I mean that _I_ am beginning to learn."
I sat down. "You and science are synonymous," I grinned. "Aren't you one
of the world's outstanding physicists?"
"One of them!" he snorted. "One of them, eh! And who are the others?"
"Oh, Corveille and Hastings and Shrimski--"
"Bah! Would you mention them in the same breath with the name of van
Manderpootz? A pack of jackals, eating the crumbs of ideas that drop
from my feast of thoughts! Had you gone back into the last century,
now--had you mentioned Einstein and de Sitter--there, perhaps, are names
worthy to rank with (or just below) van Manderpootz!"
I grinned again in amusement. "Einstein was considered pretty good,
wasn't he?" I remarked. "After all, he was the first to tie time and
space to the laboratory. Before him they were just philosophical
concepts."
"He didn't!" rasped the professor. "Perhaps, in a dim, primitive
fashion, he showed the way, but I--_I_, van Manderpootz--am the first to
seize time, drag it into my laboratory, and perform an experiment on
it."
"Indeed? And what sort of experiment?"
"What experiment, other than simple measurement, is it possible to
perform?" he snapped.
"Why--I don't know. To travel in it?"
"Exactly."
"Like these time-machines that are so popular in the current magazines?
To go into the future or the past?"
"Bah! Many bahs! The future or the past--pfui! It needs no van
Manderpootz to see the fallacy in that. Einstein showed us that much."
"How? It's conceivable, isn't it?"
"Conceivable? And you, Dixon Wells, studied under van Manderpootz!" He
grew red with emotion, then grimly calm. "Listen to me. You know how
time varies with the speed of a system--Einstein's relativity."
"Yes."
"Very well. Now suppose then that the great engineer Dixon Wells invents
a machine capable of traveling very fast, enormously fast, nine-tenths
as fast as light. Do you follow? Good. You then fuel this miracle ship
for a little jaunt of a half million miles, which, since mass (and with
it inertia) increases according to the Einstein formula with increasing
speed, takes all the fuel in the world. But you solve that. You use
atomic energy. Then, since at nine-tenths light-speed, your ship weighs
about as much as the sun, you disintegrate North America to give you
sufficient motive power. You start off at that speed, a hundred and
sixty-eight thousand miles per second, and you travel for two hundred
and four thousand miles. The acceleration has now crushed you to death,
but you have penetrated the future." He paused, grinning sardonically.
"Haven't you?"
"Yes."
"And how far?"