"If I don't miss my bet," said the principal, "that's heroin!" He
jerked his head towards the windows. "And somebody threw it out of
this classroom!"
"Oh, I don't think it's heroin, Mr. Lightstone," Dax said. "Heroin has
a distinct glitter, and this seems--"
"I had the impression you were a physicist, not a chemist," the
principal said. "Besides, the police told us last week that they
believe a gang of narcotics pushers--I think they called them--are
operating in the neighborhood! What else could it be? I've been on the
lookout for something of this sort."
There was a silence. Dax didn't know what to say.
He himself was very tired, he had been working late every evening. He
had three different tasks that occupied every minute of his waking
hours: his job as teacher being the least important although the most
essential. The other two were perhaps visionary, but they might lead to
something more exciting than retiring on a pension.
"Well?" Mr. Lightstone was impatient--his usual condition. "Have you
any ideas? It has been my experience that drug-taking and juvenile
delinquency go together." This was not strictly true as Mr. Lightstone
had never knowingly seen a drug-taker, but he did read the papers.
"I suppose there is a certain amount of delinquency here," Howard Dax
said uncertainly, "but _narcotics_...."
"Wake up, man!" the principal said. "You look half asleep! This is a
serious matter. I found the stuff right outside these windows! You must
have some idea of who might be involved. Which are the unruly ones? Who
sits next the windows?"
Dax glanced at the desk recently left by Mallison. Mallison? One
couldn't exactly call him unruly.... Yet he had the earmarks of a type
he detested and instinctively mistrusted. He even feared him a little,
though not perhaps for reasons of which he was quite aware.
"Who was that boy that just left?" The principal had noticed the
direction of Dax's glance. "Mallison, wasn't it?"
"Yes, but the packet might just as well have been thrown from one of
the paths outside."
"There's no path near here. You know that perfectly well," said the
principal. "There's a wide stretch of grass beyond the flower bed and
no one's allowed to walk on it! I've had my eye on that boy...."
* * * * *
Howard Dax thought this over. Come to think of it, he wouldn't put
such a thing past the young smart-alec. Hoodlumism doesn't necessarily
advertise itself in the classroom.
He looked at the principal. The man had a nerve to accuse _him_ of
seeming half asleep! Working in his private lab after dinner and then
at his desk until all hours, struggling to learn Middle English--or
rather, transitional Anglo-Saxon. He had done well at English lit at
college, even though majoring in science, and Chaucer had come fairly
easy to him. But Twelfth Century speech--and that was what he had
to learn--was something else again. Chaucer himself couldn't have
understood it. He wondered what young Mallison and his hipster friends
would think if they knew his secret occupations. He could just imagine
the sneering.
"Well, you _could_ be right, I suppose," he said. "He's not my--shall
I say?--favorite pupil."
"I'm glad you think I could be right," Mr. Lightstone said. "I intend
to hold an investigation. At the first possible opportunity. This very
evening, in fact. At my office, and I shall have young Mallison brought
before us. I shall expect you." He got up and strutted out of the class
room.
After a few moments Howard Dax followed him. Outside, on his way to the
gate, he passed Mallison, who was standing talking to another boy who
had a similar haircut, but was unfamiliar to the physics teacher. He
thought he was not a pupil of this school. They both became silent as
he drew near them, looking at him without any expression. Dax wondered
if narcotics could be responsible for Mallison's pallor.
After dinner Dax went into his little lab, which was actually the
kitchenette he never used. On the table and sink was some chemical
apparatus. The principal's remark had been ill-chosen since Dax at
college had started with chemistry as his major and had only switched
to physics in his senior year. He had also become interested in
genetics, and it was this all-around interest in the sciences that had
perhaps militated against him. Nowadays one ought to specialize.
Well, he was specializing now.
In an evaporating dish in the sink were some dark brown crystals
that his landlady would have taken for Damerara sugar, but which had
a considerably more complex formula. They would have lent a rather
odd flavor to Indian pudding. The logic which had given rise to this
formula was not merely complex but revolutionary. It involved the
concept of reversibility of entropy--the application of which was
itself unprecedented.
There were, Howard Dax was aware, certain aspects of germ chemistry
that defied description in terms of classical and mechanistic theory;
details that seemed to require the inversion of Time's arrow. To say
that a physical process was "non-reversible" usually implied the
presence of the probability factor. But that didn't seem to be the
case here. There was the suggestion of prophecy. Or else that time was
flowing backwards. Or ... was it that something flowed backward through
time?
Then there was the fact that the germ plasm was immortal. Not
indestructible, for the overwhelming majority of zygotes and gametes
died; but if one disregarded the soma, all living germ cells had been
alive since the beginning of life. After terrific work, none of which
would have seemed quite orthodox to his colleagues, Dax had arrived at
the end of theory and the beginning of practical application--at the
taking-off point--the countdown.
* * * * *
Lying on the drainboard near the evaporating dish was a hypodermic
syringe.
If he were to dissolve the dark brown crystals and inject the solution
into his veins, Dax believed that whatever it was that impeded this
time-reversal would be neutralized. His consciousness--not his body,
his somatic cells--would travel back along the unbroken line of his
identity as a germinal continuity. Back to the extent that the effect
of the chemical would allow.
He would then be in the body of one of his ancestors. Not spread among
them all, but following the line of greatest genetic valence to one
individual: living in the Twelfth Century A. D. Probably, but not
certainly, somewhere in England, since most of his ancestors came from
there.
Of course the time might be wrong. He had no way of making a precise
determination. He had experimented with a rabbit, but after the soft
little beast's eyes glazed over in unconsciousness it had immediately
come to. The time taken during its visit to the purlieus of its remote
and unknown forebears was of no duration in the present. And it had at
once attacked him and bitten him savagely.
It seemed curious that an ancestral rabbit at a period not so very far
back from a biological point of view should have a spirit so foreign to
the rabbits of today. Perhaps the drug had overshot its mark....
What if that were to happen in his case? Wouldn't it perhaps take him
to some earlier, non-human form and then, as it were, rebound to the
precise moment in history that the strength of the drug indicated? A
man is not a rabbit. But suppose he found himself not in the body of a
Twelfth Century Englishman--a risky enough situation--but hanging by
his tail from a tree in Java? How long before the hypothetical rebound
to the time of the Plantagenets?
Howard Dax was too tired to concentrate on the problem: it was probably
moonshine. The rabbit had been frightened, not atavistic.
The cumulative effect of overwork and irritation at the boy Mallison
and the principal's manner had made him reckless and impatient. He
made a sudden decision to stop worrying about precautions and take the
plunge ... now.
He had plenty of time before the meeting. The trip to the past would
have no duration in the present. He measured out an amount of distilled
water and stirred the brown crystals into it with a glass rod. Then he
filled the hypodermic and went into his bed-sittingroom.
He went to his desk and took a last look at a list of early English
irregular verbs and lay down on his sofa, rolling up his sleeve.
He hardly felt the prick of the needle but he realized that the rather
painful bump on his forehead had distracted his attention from it.
He looked at the thing he had bumped against. It was wooden and round
in section, about as thick as his neck, and rose at a slight deviation
from the vertical to a circular platform that was supported at other
places by two more wooden uprights. Beyond and above was an immensely
lofty roof of dark timbers. Far to the sides were stone walls.
He looked down to discover that the cold floor under him was also of
stone, covered here and there with dry yellowish reeds. Then he saw
that he was on all fours.
Instead of hands he had black, furry paws.