A neat young salesman came up and politely asked me if he could do
anything for me. I sounded stupid even to myself, but I said, "No,
thanks, I'd just like to do a little browsing," and gave a silly
nervous laugh. Me, an actor, behaving like a frightened yokel! I felt
ashamed of myself.
He tried not to look surprised, but he didn't really succeed. Somebody
else came in, though, for which I was grateful, and he left me alone
to look around.
I don't know if I can get my feelings across to you. It's a situation
that nobody would ever expect to find himself in, so it isn't easy to
tell what it's like. But I've got to try.
Let's stick with the ancient Egyptian I mentioned a while back, the
one ordered to sneak a mummy out of the Metropolitan Museum. Maybe
that'll make it clearer.
The poor guy has no money he can use, naturally, and no idea of what
New York's transportation system is like, where the museum is, how to
get there, what visitors to a museum do and say, the regulations he
might unwittingly break, how much an ordinary citizen is supposed to
know about which customs and such. Now add the possible danger that he
might be slapped into jail or an insane asylum if he makes a mistake
and you've got a rough notion of the spot I felt I was in. Being able
to speak English doesn't make much difference; not knowing what's
regarded as right and wrong, and the unknown consequences, are enough
to panic anybody.
That doesn't make it clear enough.
Well, look, take the electrical appliances in that store; that might
give you an idea of the situation and the way it affected me.
The appliances must have been as familiar to the people of that time
as toasters and TV sets and lamps are to us. But the things didn't
make a bit of sense to me ... any more than our appliances would to
the ancient Egyptian. Can you imagine him trying to figure out what
those items are for and how they work?
* * * * *
Here are some gadgets you can puzzle over:
There was a light fixture that you put against any part of a wall--no
screws, no cement, no wires, even--and it held there and lit up, and
it stayed lit no matter where you moved it on the wall. Talk about
pin-up lamps ... this was really it!
Then I came across something that looked like an ashtray with a blue
electric shimmer obscuring the bottom of the bowl. I lit my
pipe--others I'd passed had been smoking, so I knew it was safe to do
the same--and flicked in the match. It disappeared. I don't mean it
was swirled into some hidden compartment. _It vanished._ I emptied the
pipe into the ashtray and that went, too. Looking around to make sure
nobody was watching, I dredged some coins out of my pocket and let
them drop into the tray. They were gone. Not a particle of them was
left. A disintegrator? I haven't got the slightest idea.
There were little mirror boxes with three tiny dials on the front of
each. I turned the dials on one--it was like using three dial
telephones at the same time--and a pretty girl's face popped onto the
mirror surface and looked expectantly at me.
"Yes?" she said, and waited for me to answer.
"I--uh--wrong number, I guess," I answered, putting the box down in a
hurry and going to the other side of the shop because I didn't have
even a dim notion how to turn it off.
The thing I was looking for was on a counter--a tinted metal box no
bigger than a suitcase, with a lipped hole on top and small
undisguised verniers in front. I didn't know I'd found it, actually,
until I twisted a vernier and every light in the store suddenly glared
and the salesman came rushing over and politely moved me aside to shut
it off.
"We don't want to burn out every appliance in the place, do we?" he
asked quietly.
"I just wanted to see if it worked all right," I said, still shaking
slightly. It could have blown up or electrocuted me, for all I knew.
"But they always work," he said.
"Ah--always?"
"Of course. The principle is simple and there are no parts to get worn
out, so they last indefinitely." He suddenly smiled as if he'd just
caught the gist. "Oh, you were joking! Naturally--everybody learns
about the Dynapack in primary education. You were interested in
acquiring one?"
"No, no. The--the old one is good enough. I was just--well, you know,
interested in knowing if the new models are much different or better
than the old ones."
"But there haven't been any new models since 2073," he said. "Can you
think of any reason why there should be?"
"I--guess not," I stammered. "But you never can tell."
"You can with Dynapacks," he said, and he would have gone on if I
hadn't lost my nerve and mumbled my way out of the store as fast as I
could.
* * * * *
You want to know why? He'd asked me if I wanted to "acquire" a
Dynapack, not _buy_ one. I didn't know what "acquire" meant in that
society. It could be anything from saving up coupons to winning
whatever you wanted at some kind of lottery, or maybe working up the
right number of labor units on the job--in which case he'd want to
know where I was employed and the equivalent of social security and
similar information, which I naturally didn't have--or it could just
be fancy sales talk for buying.
I couldn't guess, and I didn't care to expose myself any more than I
had already. And my blunder about the Dynapack working and the new
models was nothing to make me feel at all easier.
Lord, the uncertainties and hazards of being in a world you don't know
anything about! Daydreaming about visiting another age may be
pleasant, but the reality is something else again.
"Wait a minute, friend!" I heard the salesman call out behind me.
* * * * *
I looked back as casually, I hoped, as the pedestrians who heard him.
He was walking quickly toward me with a very worried expression on his
face. I stepped up my own pace as unobtrusively as possible, trying to
keep a lot of people between us, meanwhile praying that they'd think I
was just somebody who was late for an appointment. The salesman didn't
break into a run or yell for the cops, but I couldn't be sure he
wouldn't.
As soon as I came to a corner, I turned it and ran like hell. There
was a sort of alley down the block. I jumped into it, found a basement
door and stayed inside, pressed against the wall, quivering with
tension and sucking air like a swimmer who'd stayed underwater too
long.
Even after I got my wind back, I wasn't anxious to go out. The place
could have been cordoned off, with the police, the army and the navy
all cooperating to nab me.
What made me think so? Not a thing except remembering how puzzled our
ancient Egyptian would have been if he got arrested in the subway for
something everybody did casually and without punishment in his own
time--spitting! I could have done something just as innocent, as far
as you and I are concerned, that this era would consider a misdemeanor
or a major crime. And in what age was ignorance of the law ever an
excuse?
Instead of going back out, I prowled carefully into the building. It
was strangely silent and deserted. I couldn't understand why until I
came to a lavatory. There were little commodes and wash basins that
came up to barely above my knees. The place was a school. Naturally it
was deserted--the kids were through for the day.
I could feel the tension dissolve in me like a ramrod of ice melting,
no longer keeping my back and neck stiff and taut. There probably
wasn't a better place in the city for me to hide.
_A primary school!_
The salesman had said to me, "Everybody learns about the Dynapack in
primary education."
* * * * *
Going through the school was eerie, like visiting a familiar childhood
scene that had been distorted by time into something almost totally
unrecognizable.
There were no blackboards, teacher's big desk, children's little
desks, inkwells, pointers, globes or books. Yet it was a school. The
small fixtures in the lavatory downstairs had told me that, and so did
the miniature chairs drawn neatly under the low, vividly painted
tables in the various schoolrooms. A large comfortable chair was
evidently where the teacher sat when not wandering around among the
pupils.
In front of each chair, firmly attached to the table, was a box with a
screen, and both sides of the box held spools of wire on blunt little
spindles. The spools had large, clear numbers on them. Near the
teacher's chair was a compact case with more spools on spindles, and
there was a large screen on the inside wall, opposite the enormous
windows.
I went into one of the rooms and sat down in the teacher's chair,
wondering how I was going to find out about the Dynapack. I felt like
an archaeologist guessing at the functions of strange relics he'd
found in a dead city.
Sitting in the chair was like sitting on a column of air that let me
sit upright or slump as I chose. One of the arms had a row of buttons.
I pressed one and waited nervously to find out if I'd done something
that would get me into trouble.
Concealed lights in the ceiling and walls began glowing, getting
brighter, while the room gradually turned dark. I glanced around
bewilderedly to see why, because it was still daylight.
The windows seemed to be sliding slightly, very slowly, and as they
slid, the sunlight was damped out. I grinned, thinking of what my
ancient Egyptian would make of that. I knew there were two sheets of
polarizing glass, probably with a vacuum between to keep out the cold
and the heat, and the lights in the room were beautifully synchronized
with the polarized sliding glass.
I wasn't doing so badly. The rest of the objects might not be too hard
to figure out.
The spools in the case alongside the teacher's chair could be wire
recordings. I looked for something to play them with, but there was no
sign of a playback machine. I tried to lift a spool off a spindle. It
wouldn't come off.
Hah! The wire led down the spindle to the base of the box, holding the
spool in place. That meant the spools could be played right in that
position. But what started them playing?
* * * * *
I hunted over the box minutely. Every part of it was featureless--no
dials, switches or any unfamiliar counterparts. I even tried moving my
hands over it, figuring it might be like a theramin, and spoke to it
in different shades of command, because it could have been built to
respond to vocal orders. Nothing happened.
Remember the Poe story that shows the best place to hide something is
right out in the open, which is the last place anyone would look?
Well, these things weren't manufactured to baffle people, any more
than our devices generally are. But it's only by trying everything
that somebody who didn't know what a switch is would start up a vacuum
cleaner, say, or light a big chandelier from a wall clear across the
room.
I'd pressed every inch of the box, hoping some part of it might act as
a switch, and I finally touched one of the spindles. The spool
immediately began spinning at a very low speed and the screen on the
wall opposite the window glowed into life.
"The history of the exploration of the Solar System," said an
announcer's deep voice, "is one of the most adventuresome in
mankind's long list of achievements. Beginning with the crude rockets
developed during World War II...."
There were newsreel shots of V-1 and V-2 being blasted from their
takeoff ramps and a montage of later experimental models. I wished I
could see how it all turned out, but I was afraid to waste the time
watching. At any moment, I might hear the footsteps of a guard or
janitor or whoever tended buildings then.
I pushed the spindle again. It checked the spool, which rewound
swiftly and silently, and stopped itself when the rewinding was
finished. I tried another. A nightmare underwater scene appeared.
"With the aid of energy screens," said another voice, "the oceans of
the world were completely charted by the year 2027...."
I turned it off, then another on developments in medicine, one on
architecture, one on history, the geography of such places as the
interior of South America and Africa that were--or are--unknown today,
and I was getting frantic, starting the wonderful wire films that held
full-frequency sound and pictures in absolutely faithful color, and
shutting them off hastily when I discovered they didn't have what I
was looking for.
[Illustration]
They were courses for children, but they all contained information
that our scientists are still groping for ... and I couldn't chance
watching one all the way through!
I was frustratedly switching off a film on psychology when a female
voice said from the door, "May I help you?"
* * * * *
I snapped around to face her in sudden fright. She was young and slim
and slight, but she could scream loud enough to get help. Judging by
the way she was looking at me, outwardly polite and yet visibly
nervous, that scream would be coming at any second.
"I must have wandered in here by mistake," I said, and pushed past her
to the corridor, where I began running back the way I had come.
"But you don't understand!" she cried after me. "I really want to
help--"
Yeah, help, I thought, pounding toward the street door. A gag right
out of that psychology film, probably--get the patient to hold still,
humor him, until you can get somebody to put him where he belongs.
That's what one of our teachers would do, provided she wasn't too
scared to think straight, if she found an old-looking guy thumbing
frenziedly through the textbooks in a grammar school classroom.
When I came to the outside door, I stopped. I had no way of knowing
whether she'd given out an alarm, or how she might have done it, but
the obvious place to find me would be out on the street, dodging for
cover somewhere.
I pushed the door open and let it slam shut, hoping she'd hear it
upstairs. Then I found a door, sneaked it open and went silently down
the steps.
In the basement, I looked for a furnace or a coal bin or a fuel tank
to hide behind, but there weren't any. I don't know how they got their
heat in the winter or cooled the building in the summer. Probably some
central atomic plant that took care of the whole city, piping in the
heat or coolant in underground conduits that were led up through the
walls, because there weren't even any pipes visible.
I hunched into the darkest corner I could find and hoped they wouldn't
look for me there.
* * * * *
By the time night came, hunger drove me out of the school, but I did
it warily, making sure nobody was in sight.
The streets of the shopping center were more or less deserted. There
was no sign of a restaurant. I was so empty that I felt dizzy as I
hunted for one. But then a shocking realization made me halt on the
sidewalk and sweat with horror.
Even if there had been a restaurant, what would I have used for money?
Now I got the whole foul picture. She had sent old people back through
time on errands like mine ... and they'd starved to death because they
couldn't buy food!
No, that wasn't right. I remembered what I had told Lou Pape: anybody
who gets hungry enough can always find a truck garden or a food store
to rob.
Only ... I hadn't seen a truck garden or food store anywhere in this
city.
And ... I thought about people in the past having their hands cut off
for stealing a loaf of bread.
This civilization didn't look as if it went in for such drastic
punishments, assuming I could find a loaf of bread to steal. But
neither did most of the civilizations that practiced those barbarisms.
I was more tired, hungry and scared than I'd ever believed a human
being could get. Lost, completely lost in a totally alien world, but
one in which I could still be killed or starve to death ... and God
knew what was waiting for me in my own time in case I came back
without the information she wanted.
Or maybe even if I came back with it!
That suspicion made up my mind for me. Whatever happened to me now
couldn't be worse than what she might do. At least I didn't have to
starve.
I stopped a man in the street. I let several others go by before
picking him deliberately because he was middle-aged, had a kindly
face, and was smaller than me, so I could slug him and run if he
raised a row.
"Look, friend," I told him, "I'm just passing through town--"
"Ah?" he said pleasantly.
"--And I seem to have mislaid--" No, that was dangerous. I'd been
about to say I'd mislaid my wallet, but I still didn't know whether
they used money in this era. He waited with a patient, friendly smile
while I decided just how to put it. "The fact is that I haven't eaten
all day and I wonder if you could help me get a meal."
He said in the most neighborly voice imaginable, "I'll be glad to do
anything I can, Mr. Weldon."
* * * * *