"How ja get the pix Grain says prove I'm descended from that King Harold?"
"We flew the parachron in one of the whaling helicopters down to the middle of the Atlantic, between fifty and fifty-five North, and fifty and fifty-five West. The whole life-history of King Harold and his immediate descendants is there. It is quite a job, because if you start shooting on a stormy day the wind makes the helicopter—how would you say—wobble about, so the pictures wobble too."
"Look, Dr. Bruun. I'm no scientist, just a dumb actor, but I know a little about probability, and it sure doesn't stack up that I should be the guy to get—uh—involved with the Princess Karen, and at the same time to be the eldest whatsit descendant of this old king. That's too much like drawing two pat royal flushes in a row."
Bruun smiled faintly. "You cannot argue with facts, my friend. Would you like to see the parachron in operation?"
'You bet!"
Bruun turned to the machine. "Karl, put the quintode tube back in. You see, Mr. Godwin, you can't see much right here, except the neighborhood of Bergen about the year 420 A.D., or the Oslo region about 320. And they are not very impressive."
Karl Bruun replaced the tube that had been taken out of the machine, the windows became opaque and the room dark except for the faint glow of vacuum-tubes inside the jungle of rods and wires and condensers. Viggo Bruun twirled knobs until a ghostly light appeared on the viewing screen; then a blizzard of flickers and. flashes like a television set out of tune.
The image cleared. Godwin found himself looking at a rugged landscape with a body of water in the distance.
"Bergen Fjord," said the elder Bruun.
As the scientist turned more knobs, the antenna on top revolved, and the image on the screen swept around, in a panorama. The image was black-and white, surprising to Godwin who had been brought up on color in photography, cinematography, and television.
Bruun said: "We are about the tenth of June, 421 A.D. As I remember, there is a man who goes close by here ..." The image jerked as he made an adjustment, "'There he is! Take a good look."
A MAN WAS walking across the view. Though Godwin could not judge his size well without familiar objects to compare him with, he got the impression of a short man. He was dark and shaggy, clad in rough woolens: a kind of kilt wrapped around him under the armpits and reaching to his knees and a shawl over his shoulders. He bore a bag on his back and gripped a staff in his free hand. As Godwin watched, the man passed out of sight.
"Very few people in Norway and Sweden at that time," said Bruun. "You have to hunt hard to find one. Mostly they were a miserable lot of Lapp-like folk living along the shores and digging clams. The big migration of Nordics from Jutland had not yet started."
"How far back can you go? To the age of the dinosaurs?"
"Oh, my, no! In the theory you can go back twelve thousand years, the time required for the matrix to precess clear around the earth. In practice the image gets fuzzy when you try to go back more than five thousand. There is one nice view a little older than that ..."
The scene shifted, and Godwin was looking at a huge herd of bison drifting through snow-covered woodland.
"That is near modern Upsala," said Bruun. "If we go on back and eastward all we see is Russian and Siberian forest—hundreds of years and thousands of miles of it."
Godwin asked, "How about those movies of my ancestors? Got any here?"
"Yes."
Viggo Bruun spoke in Danish to his son. The parachron was switched off. There were clicks and whirrings in the dark, and a motion-picture image sprang into life on one concrete wall.
"This," said Viggo Bruun, "is the first reel of the Harold of Wessex series. That is King Harold marrying Aldyth. It wobbles a little because of the wind the day we photographed it."
The scene—black-and-white like the direct view, and badly lighted— showed a man and woman in early-medieval costume standing before a man in ecclesiastical garb. The first man was a tall, broad-shouldered clean-shaven fellow with a crown on his square-cut blond hair.
"Those are Earls Edwin and Morcar, who made all the trouble," said Bruun. "The little fellow at the right of the scene ..."
"Say," said Godwin, "that Harold guy looked all right; he'd have made a good actor."
"Quite a heroic character, but you ought to see the other Harold he fought against, King Harold Sigurdson of Norway. There was a legendary character in real life! Now the wedding is over and they are going in to the wedding-feast ..."
As the film ground on, Godwin remarked: "It just occurs to me this'll put the costume-movie out of business. You could dub in the sound. Who'll pay to see an actor playing Lincoln when he can see Lincoln himself?... Say, this damn thing doesn't give a guy any privacy at all!"
"That is right. With the parachron you can really find out who is descended from whom." After a further pause Bruun said, "Here are a few sequences of the Battle of Hastings, to give continuity."
Looking at the confused and dust-obscured scene, Godwin said, "We could put on a better battle in Hollywood. Look at those extras just standing around! Half of 'em aren't earning their pay."
"Let me remind you that this is the real thing, my friend."
"Well, then your King Harold needed a good director. Maybe the costume-movie has a future after all, if this is what the real thing looks like. But I'll say one thing: the censors wouldn't let us show guys' guts and gore spilled all over the place tha way this does. Oh-oh, there's your King Harold all haggled up!"
"He is dead. Now," said Bruun, "we come to the birth of Harold Haroldson ..."
It occurred to Godwin that now was the time to secrete the chocolate-bar in the parachron. But he could not do it, even if he could get away with it. Though he was not a scientist, the thought of destroying a valuable scientific discovery, the life-work of this nice old bird Bruun, was repugnant to him. He would even rather marry Karen.
The reel came to its end. Bruun threw the switch that let daylight into the room again, saying, "We have all the rest, showing the birth of Harold Haroldson's eldest son Stigand Haroldson, and his eldest son Godwin Stigandson, and so on. We can establish that the senior branch is the Godwin family of York and follow them down to the nineteenth century when birth-records became general and genealogists preserved the pedigree of your family. Shall we have lunch now?"
GODWIN was surprised at the speed with which time had flown. After lunch the Bruuns excused themselves and Godwin asked Malling, "What do we do now?"
"Whatever you like, so long as I get you to the palace by seventeen hundred. You must be there in time for the bethrothal banquet tonight."
"The what?"
"Has nobody told you? The king is giving a party, your engashment to Princess Karen to announce; all the bigwigs will be there."
"Well, how about, visiting that oyster-bug or whatever you called it?"
"The Oster-Bygt? Sure, we got time enough." Malling gave directions to the taxi-driver, who drove them out of Julianehaab along a narrow winding road.
Godwin wished people would leave him alone long enough to think. Despite the assurances of the Bruuns, he was still not convinced that the British throne was kosher; those movies could have been faked.
Then he realized that he still carried the so-called chocolate-bar in his pants pocket. If the thing were a time-bomb, it might go off any minute and splatter him and Malling all over southern Greenland.