‘I must warn you, in the first place, as soon as you’ve got it down
to shut your eyes, and open them very cautiously in a minute or so’s
time. One still sees. The sense of vision is a question of length of
vibration, and not of multitude of impacts; but there’s a kind of shock
to the retina, a nasty giddy confusion just at the time if the eyes are
open. Keep ’em shut.’
‘Shut,’ I said. ‘Good!’
‘And the next thing is, keep still. Don’t begin to whack about. You
may fetch something a nasty rap if you do. Remember you will be going
several thousand times faster than you ever did before, heart, lungs,
muscles, brain--everything--and you will hit hard without knowing it.
You won’t know it, you know. You’ll feel just as you do now. Only
everything in the world will seem to be going ever so many thousand
times slower than it ever went before. That’s what makes it so deuced
queer.’
‘Lor,’ I said. ‘And you mean----’
‘You’ll see,’ said he, and took up a little measure. He glanced at the
material on his desk. ‘Glasses,’ he said, ‘water. All here. Mustn’t
take too much for the first attempt.
The little phial glucked out its precious contents. ‘Don’t forget what
I told you,’ he said, turning the contents of the measure into a glass
in the manner of an Italian waiter measuring whisky. ‘Sit with the eyes
tightly shut and in absolute stillness for two minutes,’ he said. ‘Then
you will hear me speak.’
He added an inch or so of water to the little dose in each glass.
‘By-the-by,’ he said, ‘don’t put your glass down. Keep it in your hand
and rest your hand on your knee. Yes--so. And now----’
He raised his glass.
‘The New Accelerator,’ I said.
‘The New Accelerator,’ he answered, and we touched glasses and drank,
and instantly I closed my eyes.
You know that blank non-existence into which one drops when one has
taken ‘gas.’ For an indefinite interval it was like that. Then I heard
Gibberne telling me to wake up, and I stirred and opened my eyes. There
he stood as he had been standing, glass still in hand. It was empty,
that was all the difference.
‘Well?’ said I.
‘Nothing out of the way?’
‘Nothing. A slight feeling of exhilaration, perhaps. Nothing more.’
‘Sounds?’
‘Things are still,’ I said. ‘By Jove! yes! They _are_ still. Except the
sort of faint pat, patter, like rain falling on different things. What
is it?’
‘Analysed sounds,’ I think he said, but I am not sure. He glanced at
the window. ‘Have you ever seen a curtain before a window fixed in that
way before?’
I followed his eyes, and there was the end of the curtain, frozen, as
it were, corner high, in the act of flapping briskly in the breeze.
‘No,’ said I; ‘that’s odd.’
‘And here,’ he said, and opened the hand that held the glass. Naturally
I winced, expecting the glass to smash. But so far from smashing, it
did not even seem to stir; it hung in mid-air--motionless. ‘Roughly
speaking,’ said Gibberne, ‘an object in these latitudes falls 16 feet
in the first second. This glass is falling 16 feet in a second now.
Only, you see, it hasn’t been falling yet for the hundredth part of a
second. That gives you some idea of the pace of my Accelerator.’
And he waved his hand round and round, over and under the slowly
sinking glass. Finally he took it by the bottom, pulled it down and
placed it very carefully on the table. ‘Eh?’ he said to me, and laughed.
‘That seems all right,’ I said, and began very gingerly to raise myself
from my chair. I felt perfectly well, very light and comfortable, and
quite confident in my mind. I was going fast all over. My heart, for
example, was beating a thousand times a second, but that caused me no
discomfort at all. I looked out of the window. An immovable cyclist,
head down and with a frozen puff of dust behind his driving-wheel,
scorched to overtake a galloping _char-à-banc_ that did not stir. I
gaped in amazement at this incredible spectacle. ‘Gibberne,’ I cried,
‘how long will this confounded stuff last?’
‘Heaven knows!’ he answered. ‘Last time I took it I went to bed and
slept it off. I tell you, I was frightened. It must have lasted some
minutes, I think--it seemed like hours. But after a bit it slows down
rather suddenly, I believe.’
I was proud to observe that I did not feel frightened--I suppose
because there were two of us. ‘Why shouldn’t we go out?’ I asked.
‘Why not?’
‘They’ll see us.’
‘Not they. Goodness, no! Why, we shall be going a thousand times faster
than the quickest conjuring trick that was ever done. Come along! Which
way shall we go? Window, or door?’
And out by the window we went.
Assuredly of all the strange experiences that I have ever had, or
imagined, or read of other people having or imagining, that little raid
I made with Gibberne on the Folkestone Leas, under the influence of the
New Accelerator, was the strangest and maddest of all. We went out by
his gate into the road, and there we made a minute examination of the
statuesque passing traffic. The tops of the wheels and some of the
legs of the horses of this _char-à-banc_, the end of the whip-lash and
the lower jaw of the conductor--who was just beginning to yawn--were
perceptibly in motion, but all the rest of the lumbering conveyance
seemed still. And quite noiseless except for a faint rattling that came
from one man’s throat. And as parts of this frozen edifice there were
a driver, you know, and a conductor, and eleven people! The effect
as we walked about the thing began by being madly queer and ended by
being--disagreeable. There they were, people like ourselves and yet not
like ourselves, frozen in careless attitudes, caught in mid-gesture. A
girl and a man smiled at one another, a leering smile that threatened
to last for evermore; a woman in a floppy capelline rested her arm on
the rail and stared at Gibberne’s house with the unwinking stare of
eternity; a man stroked his moustache like a figure of wax, and another
stretched a tiresome stiff hand with extended fingers towards his
loosened hat. We stared at them, we laughed at them, we made faces at
them, and then a sort of disgust of them came upon us, and we turned
away and walked round in front of the cyclist towards the Leas.
‘Goodness!’ cried Gibberne, suddenly; ‘look there!’
He pointed, and there at the tip of his finger and sliding down the air
with wings flapping slowly and at the speed of an exceptionally languid
snail--was a bee.
And so we came out upon the Leas. There the thing seemed madder than
ever. The band was playing in the upper stand, though all the sound it
made for us was a low-pitched, wheezy rattle, a sort of prolonged last
sigh that passed at times into a sound like the slow, muffled ticking
of some monstrous clock. Frozen people stood erect, strange, silent,
self-conscious-looking dummies hung unstably in mid-stride, promenading
upon the grass. I passed close to a little poodle dog suspended in the
act of leaping, and watched the slow movement of his legs as he sank to
earth. ‘Lord, look _here_!’ cried Gibberne, and we halted for a moment
before a magnificent person in white faint-striped flannels, white
shoes, and a Panama hat, who turned back to wink at two gaily dressed
ladies he had passed. A wink, studied with such leisurely deliberation
as we could afford, is an unattractive thing. It loses any quality of
alert gaiety, and one remarks that the winking eye does not completely
close, that under its drooping lid appears the lower edge of an eyeball
and a little line of white. ‘Heaven give me memory,’ said I, ‘and I
will never wink again.’
‘Or smile,’ said Gibberne, with his eye on the lady’s answering teeth.
‘It’s infernally hot, somehow,’ said I, ‘Lets go slower.’
‘Oh, come along!’ said Gibberne.
We picked our way among the bath-chairs in the path. Many of the people
sitting in the chairs seemed almost natural in their passive poses, but
the contorted scarlet of the bandsmen was not a restful thing to see.
A purple-faced little gentleman was frozen in the midst of a violent
struggle to refold his newspaper against the wind; there were many
evidences that all these people in their sluggish way were exposed to
a considerable breeze, a breeze that had no existence so far as our
sensations went. We came out and walked a little way from the crowd,
and turned and regarded it. To see all that multitude changed to a
picture, smitten rigid, as it were, into the semblance of realistic
wax, was impossibly wonderful. It was absurd, of course; but it filled
me with an irrational, an exultant sense of superior advantage.
Consider the wonder of it! All that I had said, and thought, and done
since the stuff had begun to work in my veins had happened, so far as
those people, so far as the world in general went, in the twinkling of
an eye. ‘The New Accelerator----’ I began, but Gibberne interrupted me.
‘There’s that infernal old woman!’ he said.
‘What old woman?’
‘Lives next door to me,’ said Gibberne. ‘Has a lapdog that yaps. Gods!
The temptation is strong!’
There is something very boyish and impulsive about Gibberne at times.
Before I could expostulate with him he had dashed forward, snatched the
unfortunate animal out of visible existence, and was running violently
with it towards the cliff of the Leas. It was most extraordinary. The
little brute, you know, didn’t bark or wriggle or make the slightest
sign of vitality. It kept quite stiffly in an attitude of somnolent
repose, and Gibberne held it by the neck. It was like running about
with a dog of wood. ‘Gibberne,’ I cried, ‘put it down!’ Then I said
something else. ‘If you run like that, Gibberne,’ I cried, ‘you’ll set
your clothes on fire. Your linen trousers are going brown as it is!’
He clapped his hand on his thigh and stood hesitating on the verge.
‘Gibberne,’ I cried, coming up, ‘put it down. This heat is too much!
It’s our running so! Two or three miles a second! Friction of the air!’
‘What?’ he said, glancing at the dog.
‘Friction of the air,’ I shouted. ‘Friction of the air. Going too fast.
Like meteorites and things. Too hot. And, Gibberne! Gibberne! I’m all
over pricking and a sort of perspiration. You can see people stirring
slightly. I believe the stuff’s working off! Put that dog down.’
‘Eh?’ he said.
‘It’s working off,’ I repeated. ‘We’re too hot and the stuff’s working
off! I’m wet through.’
He stared at me, then at the band, the wheezy rattle of whose
performance was certainly going faster. Then with a tremendous sweep of
the arm he hurled the dog away from him and it went spinning upward,
still inanimate, and hung at last over the grouped parasols of a knot
of chattering people. Gibberne was gripping my elbow. ‘By Jove!’ he
cried, ‘I believe it is! A sort of hot pricking and--yes. That man’s
moving his pocket-handkerchief! Perceptibly. We must get out of this
sharp.’
But we could not get out of it sharply enough. Luckily, perhaps! For we
might have run, and if we had run we should, I believe, have burst into
flames! Almost certainly we should have burst into flames! You know we
had neither of us thought of that.... But before we could even begin to
run the action of the drug had ceased. It was the business of a minute
fraction of a second. The effect of the New Accelerator passed like
the drawing of a curtain, vanished in the movement of a hand. I heard
Gibberne’s voice in infinite alarm. ‘Sit down,’ he said, and flop,
down upon the turf at the edge of the Leas I sat--scorching as I sat.
There is a patch of burnt grass there still where I sat down. The whole
stagnation seemed to wake up as I did so, the disarticulated vibration
of the band rushed together into a blast of music, the promenaders
put their feet down and walked their ways, the papers and flags began
flapping, smiles passed into words, the winker finished his wink and
went on his way complacently, and all the seated people moved and spoke.
The whole world had come alive again, was going as fast as we were, or
rather we were going no faster than the rest of the world. It was like
slowing down as one comes into a railway station. Everything seemed to
spin round for a second or two, I had the most transient feeling of
nausea, and that was all. And the little dog, which had seemed to hang
for a moment when the force of Gibberne’s arm was expended, fell with
a swift acceleration clean through a lady’s parasol!
That was the saving of us. Unless it was for one corpulent old
gentleman in a bath-chair, who certainly did start at the sight of
us, and afterwards regarded us at intervals with a darkly suspicious
eye, and, finally, I believe, said something to his nurse about us,
I doubt if a solitary person remarked our sudden appearance among
them. Plop! We must have appeared abruptly. We ceased to smoulder
almost at once, though the turf beneath me was uncomfortably hot. The
attention of every one--including even the Amusements’ Association
band, which on this occasion, for the only time in its history, got out
of tune--was arrested by the amazing fact, and the still more amazing
yapping and uproar caused by the fact, that a respectable, over-fed
lapdog sleeping quietly to the east of the bandstand should suddenly
fall through the parasol of a lady on the west--in a slightly singed
condition due to the extreme velocity of its movements through the air.
In these absurd days, too, when we are all trying to be as psychic, and
silly, and superstitious as possible! People got up and trod on other
people, chairs were overturned, the Leas policeman ran. How the matter
settled itself I do not know--we were much too anxious to disentangle
ourselves from the affair and get out of range of the eye of the old
gentleman in the bath-chair to make minute inquiries. As soon as we
were sufficiently cool and sufficiently recovered from our giddiness
and nausea and confusion of mind to do so we stood up, and skirting
the crowd, directed our steps back along the road below the Metropole
towards Gibberne’s house. But amidst the din I heard very distinctly
the gentleman who had been sitting beside the lady of the ruptured
sunshade using quite unjustifiable threats and language to one of those
chair-attendants who had ‘Inspector’ written on their caps: ‘If you
didn’t throw the dog,’ he said, ‘who _did_?’
The sudden return of movement and familiar noises, and our natural
anxiety about ourselves (our clothes were still dreadfully hot, and
the fronts of the thighs of Gibberne’s white trousers were scorched a
drabbish brown), prevented the minute observations I should have liked
to make on all these things. Indeed, I really made no observations of
any scientific value on that return. The bee, of course, had gone.
I looked for that cyclist, but he was already out of sight as we
came into the Upper Sandgate Road or hidden from us by traffic; the
_char-à-banc_, however, with its people now all alive and stirring, was
clattering along at a spanking pace almost abreast of the nearer church.
We noted, however, that the window-sill on which we had stepped in
getting out of the house was slightly singed, and that the impressions
of our feet on the gravel on the path were unusually deep.
So it was I had my first experience of the New Accelerator. Practically
we had been running about and saying and doing all sorts of things in
the space of a second or so of time. We had lived half an hour while
the band had played, perhaps, two bars. But the effect it had upon us
was that the whole world had stopped for our convenient inspection.
Considering all things, and particularly considering our rashness
in venturing out of the house, the experience might certainly have
been much more disagreeable than it was. It showed, no doubt, that
Gibberne has still much to learn before his preparation is a manageable
convenience, but its practicability it certainly demonstrated beyond
all cavil.
Since that adventure he has been steadily bringing its use under
control, and I have several times, and without the slightest bad
result, taken measured doses under his direction; though I must
confess I have not yet ventured abroad again while under its influence.
I may mention, for example, that this story has been written at one
sitting and without interruption, except for the nibbling of some
chocolate, by its means. I began at 6.25, and my watch is now very
nearly at the minute past the half-hour. The convenience of securing
a long, uninterrupted spell of work in the midst of a day full of
engagements cannot be exaggerated. Gibberne is now working at the
quantitative handling of his preparation, with especial reference
to its distinctive effects upon different types of constitution.
He then hopes to find a Retarder, with which to dilute its present
rather excessive potency. The Retarder will, of course, have the
reverse effect to the Accelerator; used alone it should enable the
patient to spread a few seconds over many hours of ordinary time,
and so to maintain an apathetic inaction, a glacier-like absence of
alacrity, amidst the most animated or irritating surroundings. The
two things together must necessarily work an entire revolution in
civilised existence. It is the beginning of our escape from that Time
Garment of which Carlyle speaks. While this Accelerator will enable
us to concentrate ourselves with tremendous impact upon any moment or
occasion that demands our utmost sense and vigour, the Retarder will
enable us to pass in passive tranquillity through infinite hardship
and tedium. Perhaps I am a little optimistic about the Retarder, which
has indeed still to be discovered, but about the Accelerator there is
no possible sort of doubt whatever. Its appearance upon the market in
a convenient, controllable, and assimilable form is a matter of the
next few months. It will be obtainable of all chemists and druggists,
in small green bottles, at a high but, considering its extraordinary
qualities, by no means excessive price. Gibberne’s Nervous Accelerator
it will be called, and he hopes to be able to supply it in three
strengths: one in 200, one in 900, and one in 2000, distinguished by
yellow, pink, and white labels respectively.
No doubt its use renders a great number of very extraordinary things
possible; for, of course, the most remarkable and, possibly, even
criminal proceedings may be effected with impunity by thus dodging, as
it were, into the interstices of time. Like all potent preparations,
it will be liable to abuse. We have, however, discussed this aspect
of the question very thoroughly, and we have decided that this is
purely a matter of medical jurisprudence and altogether outside our
province. We shall manufacture and sell the Accelerator, and as for the
consequences--we shall see.