In re the family business, though, Professor Hadley struck an enthusiastic attitude. He made a speech, in which he said that his device would demonstrate the theoretically undemonstrable. Dramatically, he flipped the switch over.
He was right about demonstrating the undemonstrable, all right! He didn't know his own genius or his own gadget. When he flipped over the switch a spark leaped, tubes lighted, insulation smoked . . .
And Professor Hadley, beaming, turned a rather pretty luminous puce color, and with every appearance of satisfaction faded quietly into thin air. Smiling happily and glowing like an off-color neon sign, he vanished deliberately before our eyes.
We stared, our mouths open. We blinked. And after about three seconds there was a sharp, somehow conclusive "snap," and the gadget burned itself out with enthusiastic thoroughness. It spat sparks. Its insulation caught fire. It definitely ceased to work. And Professor Hadley remained among the missing.
Your attention span is short, Charles, so I will not tell you of the disturbance caused by this event. We five witnesses to his disappearance, of course, were flatly disbelieved. The police hinted darkly of a multiple indictment for murder, but were stymied by the well-known rule of corpus delicti. Then they looked into his papers and found he was corresponding with seventeen female members of Lonely Hearts clubs. He had represented himself to them as a young and wealthy bachelor, and they were liars, too. The police began to investigate them, announced that an arrest could be expected in the near future, and the five of us were mysteriously clear of suspicion. But a diversion, about that time, helped to take attention away from us, too. On Graduation Morning the Dean of Women was discovered atop the statue of the University's Founder, celebrating the end of the academic year. She was standing on her head on the Founder's bronze top hat, singing A Robin in the Merry Month of May in parts—no mean feat for one woman—and she was wearing the Art Department's one prized Picasso neatly made over into a leotard. This tended to draw public attention from Professor Hadley's less spectacular disappearance.
I may say that the mystery has never been solved. Nobody ever found out where he went. I think it possible, however, that his dentures may yet some day be found in some Upper Devonian fossil-bearing stratum. I say this because, while he was trying to prove the Lorenz-Fitzgerald hypothesis on purpose, I later found out that he had made a time-travel device by accident. And from my knowledge of Professor Hadley, I am sure he would have had it set up to run backward.
Here I have anticipated myself. I should say that I graduated some two weeks after the Professor disappeared, but with a commitment to jerk sodas during the summer session to pay up my senior-year bills. I remained in the small university town. Toothy schoolteachers swarmed in to absorb culture and get academic credits that would raise their pay if they didn't catch husbands. Time marched on.
Then Joe turned up. I call him Joe to spare him embarrassment. Joe was one of those scholastic triumphs nobody remembers. He was embracing a teaching career; he was magnificently learned; he was splendidly earnest. In his own way I am sure he was a perfectly swell guy—and nobody cared. He'd been grabbed in a hurry to teach Professor Hadley's subjects to the bespectacled summer students, and come fall he would be let go for somebody who knew less but counted more. It was too bad. I was brutal to Joe myself, finally, but—
Somebody told him what had happened to Professor Hadley. He thought it over. He came to me as a known witness. He said thoughtfully that Professor Hadley was a very able man, and, if he had thought he could prove the Lorenz-Fitzgerald theory, it was worth looking into. Would I help him reconstruct the burned-out gimmick and see what the trouble was? If he could find out, he could write a paper about it, and, if some scientific publication printed it, he might get a permanent instructorship. . . .
I felt sorry for him. Also, some of the schoolteachers were hanging around where I soda-jerked and happened to be walking my way when I quit.
I remembered the physics lab as a quiet place where one might peacefully drink a bottle of beer in the evenings. Or the mornings, for that matter. I agreed to help Joe. We began. And that is how fifty-two-times-removed-great-grandsons are born.
You are a result of all this, Charles.
Understand this, Charles, I have to tell my story as fiction in order to get it into print so Hari Vans will show it to you so you will yank on a piece of sash cord. . . . There is a paradox involved, Charles—if you haven't noticed. In my century and in my life, these things happened in June and July of a year ago. It's just about twenty-two months since Joe and I got Professor Hadley's gadget rebuilt and moved a safe distance away from it before we turned it on. But that device carried me into the thirty-fourth century, where Ginny was waiting interestedly to meet me because she'd read this letter. But twenty-two months ago I had not written it. Yet if you're to act in your typically impulsive way—and if Ginny is to regard me with the bright and fascinated eyes of a girl looking at the man she knows she's going to marry—I have to write it some time, don't I? So the things that have happened will take place?
Now let's talk about Professor Hadley's time-transporter instead. Shall we?
It was remarkably complicated to look at. There were coils and electron tubes. There were inductances, grid leaks and transistors, with dials, rheostats, feedbacks and assorted hardware. I didn't understand it, and even Joe grew more and more pained as we replaced one after another of the burned-out wires and condensers and whatnots, and it made progressively less sense to him. He knew his books, did Joe, but this was something else. Still, we got it rebuilt, and I could swear that it was exactly the way Professor Hadley'd had it put together, except with heavier wiring.
The Professor must have been pretty bright. He'd been absolutely sure the thing would demonstrate the Lorenz-Fitzgerald contraction, but it was much more remarkable than that. It was a time-transporter, moving objects from one temporal frame of reference to another.
Every scientist in history has said that can't be done. I hope the Professor, wherever he is—in the Upper Devonian or Jurassic or even the Lower Cretacious period—knows of his accidental triumph.
But Joe and I just sat and looked at it when it was done, Charles. We didn't know the next step to take. We had no idea what it would do, and neither of us was especially anxious to glow a luminous puce color and, however happily smiling, fade away into nothingness. We put a long extension-cord on the switch. From some distance away we turned the thing on. Nothing happened. We turned it off. I put an empty beer-bottle where Professor Hadley had stood and we turned the thing on. The beer-bottle glowed a pale pink and faded away. We turned the thing off. Nothing happened. The beer-bottle stayed gone.
We looked at each other. Joe looked very pained indeed. But then he muttered something about discovering the physical nature of the barrier. He tied a string to a beer-bottle. We vanished it. When we turned the gadget off it looked like the string was cut in half. But when Joe picked it up to look at the cut end, the beer-bottle came out of nowhere, still tied fast.
About that time I began to dither, Charles. I will be frank about it. There is much that I do not understand about Professor Hadley's time-transporter. It was the first one ever made, and I am quite sure there will never be another. If there is, it will be over my dead body. Right then, I opened a bottle of beer.