And Norton, the laboratory cat, came gloomily into the room. He was gaunt and seedy and with his usual hangover. I regret to tell you, Charles, that in my day some of the lower animals sank to near-human depths. Norton was notorious at Collins University for his intemperate habits. Believe it or not, he would pass up a sardine for a cocktail any day, and on the morning after a wet night he was frequently to be seen prowling about empty beer-cans trying to get a hair of the dog that bit him. Not that any dog would dare bite Norton, no! Norton was a mighty warrior, in his cups. One Christmas he got tanked up on egg-nog.
But that has nothing to do with you, Charles. This morning Norton came loping over to me with an imploring air, as one who would say feverishly: "Fella, give me one drink to straighten me out, and so help me I'm gonna join AA!" I gave him the drink. He lapped it up, broodingly. Then he burped, rolled over and went to sleep.
The same idea struck Joe and myself simultaneously.
You've guessed it. We waked Norton and tied a string to his collar, put him in the place from which the beer-bottle had gone into the wild blue yonder, and threw on the time-transporter switch. Norton was in the act of yawning as the current went on. His yawn continued undisturbed. He glowed, to be sure. Brilliantly. But he faded to invisibility in a sort of brownish-purple mist. The last we saw of him was his teeth just beginning to close in the insouciant manner so typical of him.
We turned off the time-transporter. Norton stayed gone. We discussed the matter at length. I went and pulled on the string. And Norton, tied to it, yielded to my tugging. He came protestingly out of nowhere, blinking reproachfully. He had every appearance of having been interrupted in a nap. He was unharmed and undisturbed save by our waking him. We put him down, and he curled up and went back to sleep.
Perhaps we were not conservative, Charles. After only one experiment with an animal, we probably should not have gone on immediately to a human subject. But we were enthusiastic. That is, I was enthusiastic, and Joe was pallidly grim. We solemnly matched to see who would fade out. I lost. Therefore I met your great-great-etc.-grandmother, through the help you are going to give me.
I rather like your numerously-great-grandmother, Charles. She's quite nice to have around. She's cuddly. We've been married for practically two years and I still approve of her. But of course in your time we haven't yet met. I know, though, that you will not fail me, my dear great-great-great-and-so-on-grandson!
As I understand the matter, Charles, your friend Harl will show you this letter in the book in which it is reprinted. You will read it and be enraged. You will profanely declare it nonsense. Harl will thereupon show it to your friends Stan and Laki—and of course to Ginny. And they will gang up on you. They will demand clamorously that you see if it is true. Ginny, in particular, will coax you—stamping her foot from time to time—and no descendant of mine—or of hers, if you can possibly grasp the idea—could possibly refuse Ginny anything.
Anyhow, on the morning after somebody named Dorlig wins the Lunar ground-to-ground race (your great-etc.-grandmother has dated it for me that way, Charles) your friends will descend upon you chanting demands for action. Stan will have bet his shirt on Dorlig on the authority of this fiction-tale. He will have won himself a nice piece of change. Harl will have bet more conservatively, but he'll be feeling pretty good too. Only you will have been too obstinate to wager a single coin on the winning of that race. And Ginny, knowing from the story what is to come next and halfway believing it, will be most especially irresistible. They will arrive in a group, creating a tumult and demanding to be introduced to your fifty-two-times-removed-great-grandfather. And you will growl at them and take them furiously down into the rumpus-room to prove to them that they are half-wits. Which they are not.
I would like to draw a dramatic picture of two concurrent scenes, here, of the events taking place at two so-widely-separated spots. In the physics lab of Collins University, away back in the twentieth century, I sat. Joe had gone plodding over to a hardware store to buy a hank of sash cord. I wouldn't trust to the string that had sufficed for Norton. I sat in the dusty, hot laboratory, listening to the buzzing of a fly, and Norton, snoring off in the corner, and the gay laughter of bespectacled schoolteachers being charming and girlish out on the campus. All was peace. All was tranquility. I was genuinely thrilled by what had happened to Norton and was about to happen to me, but I didn't know Ginny was in my immediate future. If I had, I'd have been in a hurry.
And far, far away in time, you, Charles, scowlingly led a gay party down into your family's rumpus-room. Its walls glowed faintly with the changing forms and movements of the dynamic decorations. You picked out those decorations, and they are pretty corny. That sequence in which a spacesuited figure with your face slaughters grymvals —the batlike things with jet propulsion—while a rather sappy-looking blonde watches admiringly. That smacks of vainglory, but let it go.
You showed them the rumpus-room, conspicuously bereft of me. Laki—a nice girl, Laki, if you go for brunettes—giggled excitedly.
Stan poured coins cheerfully from one hand to another to show you how dumb you were not to be on a sure thing straight from your great-etc.-grandfather's own lips. Hari jingled coins, a bit rueful for not having bet with more nerve. And Ginny waited radiantly to see the man whom she knew from this letter was going to take her back to the strange, remote, primitive days when pictures were two-dimensional and all the food that people ate was grown in fields right here on Earth.
Ginny wore green, with a necklace of glittering synthetic stones—not valuable, only carbon crystals—about her neck. Her tiny feet—but why should I describe Ginny to you, Charles? You've seen her, and you probably have a hard enough time following these ideas without being disconcerted by Ginny. The marvelous thing about Ginny was her superb confidence of knowing exactly how I was going to feel about her (indirectly, in my own clever way, I'm telling her now) plus the satisfaction that I did not know anything about it yet. Because, of course, when all this happens, none of it will have taken place so far as I am concerned—if you grasp my meaning—and I'm going to write this letter afterward, but Ginny is going to read it ahead of time. I tenderly hope this doesn't make you dizzy, Charles. You will need to be your usual, absent-minded self. A tense pause occurred.
Back in the physics laboratory Joe returned with the sash cord. There were more cries of merry laughter out on the campus. Flies buzzed on and Norton dreamed of cocktails and sardine canapes. All was peace. The world trundled on, unaware of the unparalleled and never-to-be-duplicated event about to take place.
It was a tense moment indeed. We prepared for my splendid journey. I cut off a length of sash cord. Then I felt Joe hauling at my belt. He was tying the other end of the sash cord to it. He'd accomplished it when I realized. But I objected. I would trust my pants to a belt, but not my life. I hadn't lost my nerve, but I wasn't going to take any unnecessary chances, either. I tied my end of the sash cord around my ankle with a firm, double-knotted diamond hitch.
Then I said, "Tie the other end to something, Joe."
I watched him tie the cord's end firmly to a steam-radiator.
I felt prickles down my spine, but I said, "I will not let Norton lead where I dare not follow! Let'er go, Joe!"
And Joe retreated to the extension-cord switch. He gulped, and looked unhappy, and threw the switch over.
He and the laboratory, the floor, the ceiling, the steam-radiator and all the world I knew, vanished in a luminous puce-colored mist. I stood still. Nothing happened. There I was. Apparently, that was all there was to it. About me there was merely a brownish-purple nothing-in-particular. There was no sound or movement of any sort. True, I no longer heard the glad cries of the summer-session school-teachers on the campus, but aside from a feeling that I'd crawled into a puce-colored hole and pulled it in after me, there was no sensation at all. I thought to look for the beer-bottle that had vanished permanently. I did not see it. I did not see anything. I might as well be nowhere. I very probably was.