_Time Stands Still_
For Dave Miller, the world was now a planet of death on which he alone
lived and moved and spoke. Staggered, utterly beaten, he made no attempt
to break into his home. But he did stumble around to the kitchen window
and try to peer in, anxious to see if there was a body on the floor. The
room was in semi-darkness, however, and his straining eyes made out
nothing.
He returned to the front of the house, shambling like a somnambulist.
Seated on the porch steps, head in hands, he slipped into a hell of
regrets. He knew now that his suicide had been no hallucination. He was
dead, all right; and this must be hell or purgatory.
Bitterly he cursed his drinking, that had led him to such a mad thing as
suicide. Suicide! He--Dave Miller--a coward who had taken his own life!
Miller's whole being crawled with revulsion. If he just had the last
year to live over again, he thought fervently.
And yet, through it all, some inner strain kept trying to tell him he
was not dead. This was his own world, all right, and essentially
unchanged. What had happened to it was beyond the pale of mere
guesswork. But this one thing began to be clear: This was a world in
which change or motion of any kind was a foreigner.
* * * * *
Fire would not burn and smoke did not rise. Doors would not open,
liquids were solid. Miller's stubbing toe could not move a pebble, and a
blade of grass easily supported his weight without bending. In other
words, Miller began to understand, change had been stopped as surely as
if a master hand had put a finger on the world's balance wheel.
Miller's ramblings were terminated by the consciousness that he had an
acute headache. His mouth tasted, as Herman used to say after a big
night, as if an army had camped in it. Coffee and a bromo were what he
needed.
But it was a great awakening to him when he found a restaurant and
learned that he could neither drink the coffee nor get the lid off the
bromo bottle. Fragrant coffee-steam hung over the glass percolator, but
even this steam was as a brick wall to his probing touch. Miller started
gloomily to thread his way through the waiters in back of the counter
again.
Moments later he stood in the street and there were tears swimming in
his eyes.
"Helen!" His voice was a pleading whisper. "Helen, honey, where are
you?"
There was no answer but the pitiful palpitation of utter silence. And
then, there was movement at Dave Miller's right!
Something shot from between the parked cars and crashed against him;
something brown and hairy and soft. It knocked him down. Before he could
get his breath, a red, wet tongue was licking his face and hands, and he
was looking up into the face of a police dog!
Frantic with joy at seeing another in this city of death, the dog would
scarcely let Miller rise. It stood up to plant big paws on his shoulders
and try to lick his face. Miller laughed out loud, a laugh with a
throaty catch in it.
"Where'd you come from, boy?" he asked. "Won't they talk to you, either?
What's your name, boy?"
There was a heavy, brass-studded collar about the animal's neck, and
Dave Miller read on its little nameplate: "Major."
"Well, Major, at least we've got company now," was Miller's sigh of
relief.
For a long time he was too busy with the dog to bother about the sobbing
noises. Apparently the dog failed to hear them, for he gave no sign.
Miller scratched him behind the ear.
"What shall we do now, Major? Walk? Maybe your nose can smell out
another friend for us."
They had gone hardly two blocks when it came to him that there was a
more useful way of spending their time. The library! Half convinced that
the whole trouble stemmed from his suicide shot in the head--which was
conspicuously absent now--he decided that a perusal of the surgery books
in the public library might yield something he could use.
* * * * *
That way they bent their steps, and were soon mounting the broad cement
stairs of the building. As they went beneath the brass turnstile, the
librarian caught Miller's attention with a smiling glance. He smiled
back.
"I'm trying to find something on brain surgery," he explained. "I--"
With a shock, then, he realized he had been talking to himself.
In the next instant, Dave Miller whirled. A voice from the bookcases
chuckled:
"If you find anything, I wish you'd let me know. I'm stumped myself!"
* * * * *
From a corner of the room came an elderly, half-bald man with tangled
gray brows and a rueful smile. A pencil was balanced over his ear, and a
note-book was clutched in his hand.
"You, too!" he said. "I had hoped I was the only one--"
Miller went forward hurriedly to grip his hand.
"I'm afraid I'm not so unselfish," he admitted. "I've been hoping for
two hours that I'd run into some other poor soul."
"Quite understandable," the stranger murmured sympathetically. "But in
my case it is different. You see--I am responsible for this whole tragic
business!"
"You!" Dave Miller gulped the word. "I--I thought--"
The man wagged his head, staring at his note pad, which was littered
with jumbled calculations. Miller had a chance to study him. He was
tall, heavily built, with wide, sturdy shoulders despite his sixty
years. Oddly, he wore a gray-green smock. His eyes, narrowed and intent,
looked gimlet-sharp beneath those toothbrush brows of his, as he stared
at the pad.
"There's the trouble, right there," he muttered. "I provided only three
stages of amplification, whereas four would have been barely enough. No
wonder the phase didn't carry through!"
"I guess I don't follow you," Miller faltered. "You mean--something you
did--"
"I should think it was something I did!" The baldish stranger scratched
his head with the tip of his pencil. "I'm John Erickson--you know, the
Wanamaker Institute."
Miller said: "Oh!" in an understanding voice. Erickson was head of
Wanamaker Institute, first laboratory of them all when it came to
exploding atoms and blazing trails into the wildernesses of science.
* * * * *
Erickson's piercing eyes were suddenly boring into the younger man.
"You've been sick, haven't you?" he demanded.
"Well--no--not really sick." The druggist colored. "I'll have to admit
to being drunk a few hours ago, though."
"Drunk--" Erickson stuck his tongue in his cheek, shook his head,
scowled. "No, that would hardly do it. There must have been something
else. The impulsor isn't _that_ powerful. I can understand about the
dog, poor fellow. He must have been run over, and I caught him just at
the instant of passing from life to death."
"Oh!" Dave Miller lifted his head, knowing now what Erickson was driving
at. "Well, I may as well be frank. I'm--I committed suicide. That's how
drunk I was. There hasn't been a suicide in the Miller family in
centuries. It took a skinful of liquor to set the precedent."
Erickson nodded wisely. "Perhaps we will find the precedent hasn't
really been set! But no matter--" His lifted hand stopped Miller's
eager, wondering exclamation. "The point is, young man, we three are in
a tough spot, and it's up to us to get out of it. And not only we, but
heaven knows how many others the world over!"
"Would you--maybe you can explain to my lay mind what's happened,"
Miller suggested.
"Of course. Forgive me. You see, Mr.--"
"Miller. Dave Miller."
"Dave it is. I have a feeling we're going to be pretty well acquainted
before this is over. You see, Dave, I'm a nut on so-called 'time
theories.' I've seen time compared to everything from an entity to a
long, pink worm. But I disagree with them all, because they postulate
the idea that time is constantly being manufactured. Such reasoning is
fantastic!
"Time exists. Not as an ever-growing chain of links, because such a
chain would have to have a tail end, if it has a front end; and who can
imagine the period when time did not exist? So I think time is like a
circular train-track. Unending. We who live and die merely travel around
on it. The future exists simultaneously with the past, for one instant
when they meet."
* * * * *
Miller's brain was humming. Erickson shot the words at him
staccato-fashion, as if they were things known from Great Primer days.
The young druggist scratched his head.
"You've got me licked," he admitted. "I'm a stranger here, myself."
"Naturally you can't be expected to understand things I've been all my
life puzzling about. Simplest way I can explain it is that we are on a
train following this immense circular railway.
"When the train reaches the point where it started, it is about to
plunge into the past; but this is impossible, because the point where it
started is simply the caboose of the train! And that point is always
ahead--and behind--the time-train.
"Now, my idea was that with the proper stimulus a man could be thrust
across the diameter of this circular railway to a point in his past.
Because of the nature of time, he could neither go ahead of the train to
meet the future nor could he stand still and let the caboose catch up
with him. But--he could detour across the circle and land farther back
on the train! And that, my dear Dave, is what you and I and Major have
done--almost."
"Almost?" Miller said hoarsely.
Erickson pursed his lips. "We are somewhere partway across the space
between present and past. We are living in an instant that can move
neither forward nor back. You and I, Dave, and Major--and the Lord knows
how many others the world over--have been thrust by my time impulsor
onto a timeless beach of eternity. We have been caught in time's
backwash. Castaways, you might say."
An objection clamored for attention in Miller's mind.
"But if this is so, where are the rest of them? Where is my wife?"
"They are right here," Erickson explained. "No doubt you could see your
wife if you could find her. But we see them as statues, because, for us,
time no longer exists. But there was something I did not count on. I did
not know that it would be possible to live in one small instant of time,
as we are doing. And I did not know that only those who are hovering
between life and death can deviate from the normal process of time!"
"You mean--we're dead!" Miller's voice was a bitter monotone.
"Obviously not. We're talking and moving, aren't we? But--we are on the
fence. When I gave my impulsor the jolt of high power, it went wrong and
I think something must have happened to me. At the same instant, you had
shot yourself.
"Perhaps, Dave, you are dying. The only way for us to find out is to try
to get the machine working and topple ourselves one way or the other. If
we fall back, we will all live. If we fall into the present--we may
die."
"Either way, it's better than this!" Miller said fervently.
"I came to the library here, hoping to find out the things I must know.
My own books are locked in my study. And these--they might be cemented
in their places, for all their use to me. I suppose we might as well go
back to the lab."
Miller nodded, murmuring: "Maybe you'll get an idea when you look at the
machine again."
"Let's hope so," said Erickson grimly. "God knows I've failed so far!"