At least, that was Potterley’s way of rationalizing this ultimate disaster. Others had different views, of course. Nimmo went to the outback. Foster went insane.
I have been asked to write a history of the world after the chronoscope. This is a great honor, of course. I am being honored in that request. It is not so long that I have been writing, after all, first numbers and then for a long time the alphabet, until at last I began to feel more secure with words and phrases and then whole sentences; still this is a big leap for me. “If you do not do it, Jorg, who will do it?” I have been told, rather asked, but this does not honor so much as it frightens me. Many things frighten me of course; the chronoscope taught us to be afraid of everything. The chronoscope taught us common sense. The chronoscope taught us the true way of the world. “ Jorg” is not real, is my nom, as they say, de plumay.
Caroline Potterley waited for months after she could have done it to finally bring the machine into her home, seek her dead daughter, Laurel. To see her again, to know the little girl as she had been had constituted the final passion of her life and yet when it was possible at last, when Arnold had insisted and Foster had made that thing and the time-viewer, for reasons she had never understood had escaped to the entire world…when that opportunity was, at last, hers, Caroline found herself in thrall, held back, locked against her own desire. She knew that once she brought in the machine and everyone was doing it now, Arnold refused but how could he have stopped her?, once she used the controls and instructions and found her dead daughter she would fall and fall, plunge into something, some quality of emotion which she had never known…and it was the need to fight against this stricture, to fight against that last and terrible plunge which caused her to hold back but there came finally that point at which she could no longer resist.
“I can’t hold back any longer, Arnold,” she would have said if they had still been talking in these months, but they were not. Arnold was never home except to sleep and sometimes even not at night, he wandered around in grief and shock, pulling at the pockets of his suit jackets and finishing the small bottles of wine which case by case he brought in and bottle by bottle he drained. So she did not say this to him, merely made the necessary arrangements which were easy to do in this strange and terrible world which had evolved, and opened the viewer to her history, to that time before the fire when
—When she had had a little girl laughing and tumbling in the corridors of her life, when she and Laurel had told one another secrets which now she could not, somehow, remember.
This is my partial history of the world after the chronoscope, then. No one can write the full history, who has the time? Who has the tools? It was the criminal, the necessary part of our lives. I am making some of this up. I am imagining some of this as the way it should have been. No one who was there at the time bothered to write it down or to put it in final form, it is left to me to make it up as best I can. That is what was said to me, “Make it up as best you can. If it seems to fit, then make it fit. There are no truths. What is truth? What can truth be? Set it down as you see fit. “ And so on and so forth in this difficult and imperfect time. I was talking about who used it first. Who is to say who used it first? All of them did, everyone did. But I think it must have been the thieves and lowlifes who perceived its lesser possibilities, those dedicated to the transcendent and the bravest view of matters who would have adapted the chronoscope first, not the leaders of nations but those who toiled in the outskirts of the nations. For them the chronoscope would yield a kind of eternal present through which they could scamper gratefully, thoughtfully, seeking grander device. Who else could it have been? It was these visionaries of course, who first made use of the device. This is no surprise, those like Potterley are always ahead of the herd in their willingness to try new and different means.
Of course everyone, theoretically, who used the timeviewer was a criminal by fiat; we are talking (notice how easily I slide into the voice of authority and generalization, that pontifical “we,” but I have been reading many of the old texts in preparation for this assignment and in order to find the proper approach) rather of professionals, those who considered it already an occupation. Secret combinations, long-buried hiding places, crevices containing the untaxed unconverted profits…all of these were easily available to a patient and understanding scan.
Crimes of violence and passion, surprisingly, diminished; the chronoscope made passion and violence vicariously available to the widest, most eager audience and the pre-chronoscope sex lives of the famous and desired were-well, they were most famous and desired.
In the viewer, then, in that narrow and focused tube of memory, Laurel waved at her, skipped to the bottom of the slide and began her tumbling ascent, in the shafts of indifferent late afternoon light (it must have been that first October they had the slide, Laurel’s teeth were uneven and the dress she wore had been somehow lost after one season, Caroline remembered this, she remembered everything) she seemed ever more vulnerable as she rose and yet somehow, mixed with the vulnerability, there was a toughness, a security of effort, a determination which would have fifteen years later, maybe less, made her a fearsome young woman. Caroline could see that strength, could take it for the moment into herself and knowing that, knowing that the twenty-year-old Laurel would have been able to direct circumstance as Caroline never could, gave her a sudden and shuddering moment of insight, of possibility, which in the thin gray light cast from the viewer seemed to cast her up very much as Laurel herself seemed to rise, seemed to lock them into some passionate and savage assertion which could, in that moment, reach out from the constricted space of the viewer and become, almost become, the world.
One year after the particulars of chronoscopy appeared on a popular science program any dummy could have figured out, your Tiffany, who thought of herself still as lost in the darkness of crime, walked into the home of Paul Taber, owner of half the casinos in Miami. There was no need to fear the presence of Taber or anyone else; she had cleared that. She had watched Taber and his fifth wife leave and, furthermore, she had watched them take a last look, another little security peek for them at the jewels and cash that a careful scan through the years had shown them so industriously accumulating right up to that point, twelve hours earlier, where they had secured the house (no problem for Tiffany) and left on a long, sudden, necessary trip.
On the way to the safe with the real stuff, humming a little song of accomplishment, Tiffany picked up a few bangles here and a few baubles over there, working from the map of the premises she had sketched out so carefully, so industriously, put them into her little sack. Just as she scampered toward the safe, she saw the shadows against the window and then a rough, clumsy but manifestly accomplished thug came into the light and stared at her. He seemed to be holding a sack of his own.
“I hadn’t thought of this,” Tiffany said.
“Who are you?” the thug asked.
“But I should have thought of it,” Tiffany said. “I mean, it doesn’t show the future, right?”
“What future?” the thug said. “This is the future. Okay, hand over the stuff.”
“It’s mine,” she said stupidly. “I worked for it.”
The thug pulled out a gun and pointed it with easy accomplishment at a dangerous area of Tiffany’s chest. “You didn’t work hard enough,” he said.
“Protestant ethic,” Tiffany said pointlessly. “I was here first, anyway. “
“But I’m here now. And I can open that safe as easy as you. Easier. I know the combination.”
“So do I.”
“The viewer,” he said. Understanding flooded the thug’s features; he appeared, suddenly, years younger and more alert. It did wonders for his complexion, too. “You have one of those things, too. You can look at the past.”
“I’m also patient and careful,” Tiffany said. “If you had done any real research at all instead of grabbing one of those ten-cent viewers and spinning the dials, you would have seen that there’s a spot in this place which has an alarm hooked up directly to headquarter, five minutes away. And you’re standing on it, dummy.”
“You’re just trying to get me to leave. “
“Would I try to scare you for no reason? A colleague? We’d better get out of here, pal.”
“You mean, like me first,” the thug said. “ And leave you to clean out the place on your own. No, not without that stuff I’m not going.” He brandished the gun.
Tiffany shrugged; Baubles and bangles, yes, but the supply was infinite. It was as infinite as time. Didn’t he understand this? The arena had become vastly more open; the walls had been taken down. “Take them,” she said generously, passing handfuls. She walked toward a window. “I’ve got three other places on the list and that’s just for tonight.”