Instantly, he was plunged into darkness.
When he opened his eyes, Eldridge found that he was standing ankle-deep in a pool of dirty water. He was in a field, twenty feet from a road. The air was warm and moist. The Time Traveler was clasped tightly under his arm.
He was in Sector Two of the future and it didn’t thrill him a bit.
He walked to the road. On either side of it were terraced fields, filled with the green stalks of rice plants.
Rice? In New York State? Eldridge remembered that in his own time sector, a climatic shift had been detected. It was predicted that someday the temperate zones would be hot, perhaps tropical. This future seemed to prove the theory. He was perspiring already. The ground was damp, as though from a recent rain, and the sky was an intense, unclouded blue. But where were the farmers? Squinting at the sun directly overhead, he had the answer. At siesta, of course.
Looking down the road, he could see buildings half a mile away. He scraped mud from his shoes and started walking. But what would he do when he reached the buildings? How could he discover what had happened to him in Sector One? He couldn’t walk up to someone and say, “Excuse me, sir. I’m from 1954, a year you may have heard about. It seems that in some way or —”
No, that would never do.
He would think of something. Eldridge continued walking, while the sun beat down fiercely upon him. He shifted the Traveler to his other arm, then looked at it closely. Since he was going to invent it – no, already had – he’d better find out how it worked.
On its face were buttons for the first three sectors of Civilized Time. There was a special dial for journeying past Sector Three, into the Uncivilized Sectors. In one corner was a metal plate, which read:
Caution: Allow at least one half-hour between time jumps, to avoid cancelation.
That didn’t tell him much. According to Viglin, it had taken Eldridge eight years – from 1954 to 1962 – to invent the Traveler. He would need more than a few minutes to understand it.
Eldridge reached the buildings and found that he was in a good-sized town. A few people were on the streets, walking slowly under the tropical sun. They were dressed entirely in white. He was pleased to see that styles in Section Two were so conservative that his suit could pass for a rustic version of their dress.
He passed a large adobe building. The sign in front read:
PUBLIC READERY.
A library. Eldridge stopped. Within would undoubtedly be the records of the past few hundred years. There would be an account of his crime – if any – and the circumstances under which he had committed it.
But would he be safe? Were there any circulars out for his arrest? Was there an extradition between Sectors One and Two?
He would have to chance it. Eldridge entered, walked quickly past the thin, gray-faced librarian, and into the stacks.
There was a large section on time, but the most thorough one-volume treatment was a book called Origins of Time Travel by Ricardo Alfredex. The first part told how the young genius Eldridge had, one fateful day in 1954, received the germ of the idea from the controversial Holstead equations. The formula was really absurdly simple – Alfredex quoted the main propositions – but no one ever had realized it before. Eldridge’s genius lay chiefly in perceiving the obvious.
Eldridge frowned at this disparagement. Obvious, was it? He still didn’t understand it. And he was the inventor!
By 1962, the machine had been built. It worked on the very first trial, catapulting its young inventor into what became known as Sector One.
Eldridge looked up and found that a bespectacled girl of nine or so was standing at the end of his row of books, staring at him. She ducked back out of sight. He read on.
The next chapter was entitled “Unparadox of Time.” Eldridge skimmed it rapidly. The author began with the classic paradox of Achilles and the tortoise, and demolished it with integral calculus. Using this as a logical foundation, he went on to the so-called time paradoxes – killing one’s great-great grandfather, meeting oneself, and the like. These held up no better than Zeno’s ancient paradox. Alfredex went on to explain that all temporal paradoxes were the inventions of authors with a gift for confusion.
Eldridge didn’t understand the intricate symbolic logic in this part, which was embarrassing, since he was cited as the leading authority.
The next chapter was called “Fall of the Mighty.” It told how Eldridge had met Viglin, the owner of a large sporting-goods store in Sector One. They became fast friends. The businessman took the shy young genius under his wing. He arranged lecture tours for him. Then —
“I beg your pardon, sir,” someone said. Eldridge looked up. The gray-faced librarian was standing in front of him. Beside her was the bespectacled little girl with a smug grin on her face.
“Yes?” Eldridge asked.
“Time Travelers are not allowed in the Readery,” the librarian said sternly.
That was understandable, Eldridge thought. Travelers could grab an armload of valuable books and disappear. They probably weren’t allowed in banks, either.
The trouble was, he didn’t dare surrender this book.
Eldridge smiled, tapped his ear, and hastily went on reading.
It seemed that the brilliant young Eldridge had allowed Viglin to arrange all his contracts and papers. One day he found, to his surprise, that he had signed over all rights in The Time Traveler to Viglin, for a small monetary consideration. Eldridge brought the case to court. The court found against him. The case was appealed. Penniless and embittered, Eldridge embarked on his career of crime, stealing from Viglin —
“Sir!” the librarian said. “Deaf or not, you must leave at once. Otherwise I will call a guard.”
Eldridge put down the book, muttered, “Tattletale,” to the little girl, and hurried out of the Readery.
Now he knew why Viglin was so eager to arrest him. With the case still pending, Eldridge would be in a very poor position behind bars.
But why had he stolen?
The theft of his invention was an understandable motive, but Eldridge felt certain it was not the right one. Stealing from Viglin would not make him feel any better nor would it right the wrong. His reaction would be either to fight or to withdraw, to retire from the whole mess. Anything except stealing.
Well, he would find out. He would hide in Sector Two, perhaps find work. Bit by bit, he would —
Two men seized his arms from either side. A third took the Traveler away from him. It was done so smoothly that Eldridge was still gasping when one of the men showed a badge.
“Police,” the man said. “You’ll have to come with us, Mr. Eldridge.”
“What for?” Eldridge asked.
“Robbery in Sectors One and Two.”
So he had stolen here, too.
He was taken to the police station and into the small, cluttered ofifce of the captain of police. The captain was a slim, balding, cheerful-faced man. He waved his subordinates out of the room, motioned Eldridge to a chair and gave him a cigarette.
“So you’re Eldridge,” he said.
Eldridge nodded morosely.
“Been reading about you ever since I was a little boy,” the captain said nostalgically. “You were one of my heroes.”
Eldridge guessed the captain to be a good fifteen years his senior, but he didn’t ask about it. After all, he was supposed to be the expert on time paradoxes.
“Always thought you got a rotten deal,” the captain said, toying with a large bronze paperweight. “Still, I couldn’t understand a man like you stealing. For a while, we thought it might have been temporary insanity.”
“Was it?” Eldridge asked hopefully.
“Not a chance. Checked your records. You just haven’t got the potentiality. And that makes it rather dififcult for me. For example, why did you steal those particular items?”