Part 1 (2/2)

”'Do I look crazy? I said so, didn't I?'

”Now, as a matter of fact, he _did_ look crazy. Unlike most of the candidates for my file of queer people, Vanderkamp actually looked like a nut. He had a wild eye and a constantly working mouth; he blinked a good deal and stammered when he was excited. In features he was as Dutch as his name implied. Well, we talked back and forth for some time, but I stuck with him and in the end he took me out into a shed adjoining his house and showed me the contraption he'd built.

”It looked like a top. The first thing I thought of was Brick Bradford, and before I could catch myself, I'd asked, 'Is that pure Brick Bradford?'

”He didn't turn a hair. 'Not by a long shot,' he answered. 'H. G. Wells was there first. I owe it to Wells.'

”'I see,' I said.

”'The h.e.l.l you do!' he shot back. 'You think I'm as nutty as a fruit-cake.'

”'The idea of time travel is a little hard to swallow,' I said.

”'Sure it is. But me, I'm doing it. So that's all there is to it.'

”'If you don't mind, Mr. Vanderkamp,' I said, 'I'm a dummy in scientific matters. I have all I can do to tell a nut from a bolt.'

”'That I believe,' he said.

”'So how do you time travel?'

”'Look,' he said, 'time is a dimension like s.p.a.ce. You can go up or down this ruler,' he s.n.a.t.c.hed a steel ruler and waved it in front of me, 'from any given point. But you move. In the dimension of time, you only seem to move. You stand still; time moves. Do you get it?'

”I had to confess that I didn't.

”He tried again, with obviously strained patience. Judging by what I could gather from what he said, it was possible for him--so he believed--to get into his machine, twirl a few k.n.o.bs, push a few b.u.t.tons, relax for any given period, and end up just where he liked--back in the past, or ahead in the future. But wherever he ended up, he was still in this same spot. In other words, whether he was back in 1492 or ahead in 2092, the place he got out of his time machine was still his present address.

”It was beyond me, frankly, but I figured that as long as he was a little touched, it wouldn't do any harm to humor him. I intimated that I understood and asked him where he'd been last.

”His face fell, his brow clouded, and he said, 'I've been ahead thirty years.' He shook his head angrily. 'What a time! I'll be seventy, and you won't even be that, Mr. Harrigan. But we'll be in the middle of the worst atomic war you ever dreamed about.'

”Now this was before Hiros.h.i.+ma, quite a bit. I didn't know what he was talking about, but it gives me a queer feeling now and then when I think of what he said, especially since it's still short of thirty years since that time.

”'It's no time to be living here,' he went on. 'Direct hits on the entire area. What would you do?'

”'I'd get out,' I said.

”'That's what I thought,' he said. 'But that kind of warfare carries a long way. A long way. And I'm a man who loves his comforts, reasonably.

I don't intend to set up housekeeping in equatorial Africa or the forests of Brazil.'

”'What did you see thirty years from now, Mr. Vanderkamp?' I asked him.

”'Everything blown to h.e.l.l,' he answered. 'Not a building in all Manhattan.' He leered and added, 'And everybody who'll be living here at that time will be scattered into the atmosphere in fragments no bigger than an amoeba.'

”'You fill me with antic.i.p.ation,' I said.

”So I went back to my desk and wrote the story. You could guess what kind it had to be. 'Time Travel Is Possible, Says Amateur Scientist!'--that kind of thing. You can see it every week, in large doses, in the feature sections of some of the biggest chain papers. It went over like an average feature about life on the moon or prehistoric animals surviving in remote mountain valleys, or what have you. Just what Vanderkamp went back to after I left, I don't know, but I have an idea that he gave his sister a devil of a time.”

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