Sam Banth awakened with a great start. He jumped to his feet, knowing at once where he was, remembering what had happened. He was hungry. He went furtively to the alley mouth and saw the sunlit street still in its frozen state. He trotted hack to the cafeteria.
He stopped suddenly and sobbed aloud. The two men were still emerging. The man in front had turned his head so that he faced straight ahead and he had taken one more step. The fat woman was another step closer to the pile of trays and the slip was free of the machine.
Panting to suck the solid air into his lungs, he walked rapidly back to the street he had first seen. The pigeon had moved a full thirty feet and, feet outstretched, it was frozen in the act of landing on the pavement. The man he had struck had taken two steps backwards. His eyes bulged and his mouth was open and he had lifted his arms.
Sam walked back to the cafeteria. The streams of water that he had bitten off had replaced themselves and the same persons stood filling the water glasses. The forks be had emptied seemed not to have moved and be realized that they had been carried up to the lips and were now on the return journey to the plates.
He spent long hours satisfying thirst and hunger, and then he was face to face with the problem of finding some measuring stick to compare his time with outside time. He walked all the way down to Fortieth Street, seeking some method he could use. No motion was perceptible to his naked eye. He leaned in at the window of a cab and saw that according to the speedometer it was traveling at twenty-four miles an hour. He figured out that, in outside time, it would go thirty-five feet a second. He found that the left rear wheel was resting directly on a small crack in the asphalt. For a moment he thought he had a method of computation and then he realized that he had no certain way of keeping track of his own time. He could go only by “sleep times.” He memorized the license plate of the cab.
After he slept again, this time in the back seat of the empty cab after worming his way in at the open window, he climbed out and paced off the distance that had been traveled. He estimated it at thirty feet. He looked at the speedometer again. The cab was traveling twenty-eight miles an hour now. The variables had defeated him.
But after he ate another idea came to him. He found a penny arcade on Seventh. A young boy had a.22 rifle at his shoulder, the trigger depressed. Sam climbed over the counter and searched down the line of fire until he found the tiny slug, suspended in mid-air. He knew from the loads on the counter that the boy was firing a,22 short. The slug was a dozen feet from the muzzle and he estimated that it was traveling at a thousand feet per second according to outside time.
The most precious thing about it was that he could see the slug move. He could touch it very lightly with his finger and feel it move. He lined it up with an object on the side wall, shut his eyes and counted off a minute — “one thousand one, one thousand two, one thousand three, one thousand four...” He opened his eyes. The little lead pellet had moved what appeared to he a good two feet. He measured it more carefully. Less than two feet. He rechecked, using longer intervals. For a little time it ceased to be such an intensely personal matter and became an abstract problem.
He said, aloud, with satisfaction, “Close enough. One second outside time equals ten hours subjective time.” He carried it further. “Let me see. Five of my minutes equal one hundred twentieth of a second for Them. Conversely, thirty-six hundred seconds in an hour, eighty-six thousand, four hundred seconds in a twenty-four hour day, multiplied by ten to give the number of subjective hours — divided by twenty-four is thirty-six thousand days, or—”
He fell to his knees as the full import struck him. He beat his thighs with his fists. He shouted at the deathly stillness of the city and at the frozen people. He ran through the streets then, cursing them and the motionless sun and the unseeing, unknowing faces.
Those were the early years. The sunlit years, the years when his beard grew full and tangled and his belly was gaunt and his legs knotted and stringy from trotting through the city.
As he grew more adept at eating it took up less of his time, and he estimated that he cut it down to half his waking hours. He learned craft. If he saw someone in the act of pushing a door open, a heavy door, he knew that before the door swung shut again he could spend long hours inside the building. It became a dangerous game.
Once he barely slid through in time and he was afraid, because if ten objective seconds passed before the door was opened again, it would be one hundred hours for him. Thus he learned caution.
He got a childlike pleasure from the department stores.
He roamed all over the city. In the city were many women. He saw the fresh young faces, the skirts sculptured and frozen by the breeze, the legs striding. He found them in the dressing rooms of the department stores, on the rubbing tables, in the beauty salons, and their flesh was to him like the stone of a garden bench in the sun. He found one girl warm-eyed, smiling into the face of her beloved, and he returned to that girl many times to put his face in the line of her vision and imagine that she smiled at him rather than at the stone man behind him. But he tired of that.
Several years later, it seemed, he found himself in a neighborhood that looked vaguely familiar. A shattered man lay on the sidewalk, crumpled in death and the blood around him was like a dark red mirror. Tt took a long time to remember. He seemed to remember having struck that man a long time ago, and yet he did not know why. People stood around the fallen man. with horror fixed on their faces.
Once he heard a deep sustained sound. It took four “sleep times” before he found it. It was a subway train. A woman had fallen on the tracks in front of it. Frozen sparks fanned out from the steel wheels and it was from those wheels that the sound came. He listened to it with pleasure for a long time. He went back many days until the sound died away.
He discovered that If he went to enough bars he could find hard brown streams of liquor that could be bitten off. On those day he went singing through the streets, smiling and nodding at the thousands of statues.
For many years he slept in one of the department stores, one that had a door blocked open. The bed he found was like stone but he discovered that after what seemed like an hour or two of sleep he sank into it, into a hollow that made sleep more comfortable. Once, when he was very tired, he slept in that bed for a very long time.
He awakened and sat up to see a woman who had been looking toward the bed when he had climbed in. Her expression had changed to one of incredulous surprise. He knew that if he had slept for ten subjective hours, she would have had a whole second to see him there. It would look to her as though he had appeared by magic. This pleased him. He ate and returned to the bed. He lay very still and watched her. Over the long hours her face slowly turned brick red. Then he tired of the game.
But it gave rise to other experiments. He found a fire escape and climbed it one day to find a woman sunbathing on the flat roof. He lay beside her and went to sleep, directly within her line of vision. When he awakened, her mouth was wide in a scream he could not hear. He did not know how many days passed before he thought of her again. He went up and found her, eyes bulging, towels left behind, frozen in the act of running toward the small penthouse.
The dark years came. The sun faded slowly over a period of many sleeps and he saw the cloud that crept across it. It was during those years that he ceased his wandering. He went only as far as was necessary to find food that could be obtained without the danger of being trapped. He slept, when he was weary, on a pile of rags in a protected corner of an alley. He talked a great deal to himself. He measured the time of sleep by the people who walked by the alley mouth. One step, a step and a half, sometimes two steps.