IV
That same queasy vertigo affected the staring crowd at the end of the road leading north from Fredericksburg. For perhaps a second they felt an unearthly illness, which even blurred their vision. Then they saw clearly again. And in an instant they were babbling in panic, starting their motor cars in terror, some of them fleeing on foot.
The sequoia forest had vanished. In its place was a dreary waste of glittering white; stumpy trees buried under snow; rolling ground covered with a powdery, glittering stuff.
In minutes dense fog shut off the view, as the warm air of a Virginia June morning was chilled by that frigid coating. But in minutes, too, the heavy snow began to melt. The cars fled away along the concrete road, and behind them an expanding belt of fog spread out—and the little streams and runlets filled with a sudden surplus of water, and ran more swiftly, and rose.
The eight riders were every one very pale. Even Minott seemed shaken but no less resolute when he drew rein.
“I imagine you will all be satisfied now,” he said composedly. “Blake, you’re the geologist of the party. Doesn’t the shore line there look familiar?”
Blake nodded. He was very white indeed. He pointed to the stream.
“Yes. The falls, too. This is the site of Fredericksburg, sir, where we were this morning. There is where the main bridge was—or will be. The main highway to Richmond should run”—he licked his lips—“it should run where that very big oak tree is standing. The Princess Anne Hotel should be on the side of that hill. I—I would say, sir, that somehow we’ve gone back in time or else forward into the future. It sounds insane, but I’ve been trying to figure it out ....”
Minott nodded coolly. “Very good! This is the site of Fredericksburg, to be sure. But we have not traveled forward or back in time. I hope that you noticed where we came out of the sequoia forest. There seems to be a sort of fault along that line, which it may be useful to remember.” He paused. “We’re not in the past or the future, Blake. We’ve traveled sidewise, in a sort of oscillation from one time path to another. We happen to be in a—well, in a part of time where Fredericksburg has never been built, just as a little while since we were where the Chinese occupy the American continent. I think we better have lunch.”
He dismounted. The four girls tended to huddle together. Lucy Blair’s teeth chattered.
Blake moved to their horses’ heads. “Don’t get rattied,” he said urgently. “We’re here, wherever it is. Professor Minott is going to explain things in a minute. Since he knows what’s what, we’re in no danger. Climb off your horses and let’s eat. I’m hungry as a bear. Come on, Maida!”
Maida Haynes dismounted. She managed a rather shaky smile. “I’m afraid of him,” she said in a whisper. “More than anything else. Stay close to me, please!”
Blake frowned.
Minott said dryly: “Look in your saddlebags and you’ll find sandwiches. Also you’ll find firearms. You young men had better arm yourselves. Since there’s now no conceivable hope of getting back to the world we know, I think you can be trusted with weapons.”
Blake stared at him, then silently investigated his own saddlebags. He found two revolvers, with what seemed an abnormally large supply of cartridges. He found a mass of paper, which turned out to be books with their cardboard backs torn off. He glanced professionally at the revolvers, and slipped them in his pockets. He put back the books.
“I appoint you second in command, Blake,” said Minott, more dryly than before. “You understand nothing, but you wait to understand. I made no mistake in choosing you despite my reasons for leaving you behind. Sit down and I’ll tell you what happened.”
With a grunt and a puffing noise, a small black bear broke cover and fled across a place where only that morning a highly elaborate filling station had stood. The party started, then relaxed. The girls suddenly started to giggle foolishly, almost hysterically. Minott bit calmly into a sandwich and said pleasantly:
“I shall have to talk mathematics to you, but I’ll try to make it more palatable than my classroom lectures have been. You see, everything that has happened can only be explained in terms of mathematics, and more especially certain concepts in mathematical physics. You young ladies and gentlemen being college men and women, I shall have to phrase things very simply, as for ten-year-old children. Hunter, you’re staring. If you, actually see something, such as an Indian, shoot at him and he’ll run away. The probabilities are that he never heard the report of a firearm. We’re not on the Chinese continent now.”
Hunter gasped, and fumbled at his saddlebags. While he got out the revolvers, Minott went on imperturbably:
“There has been an upheaval of nature, which still continues. But instead of a shaking and jumbling of earth and rocks, there has been a shaking and jumbling of space and time. I go back to first principles. Time is a dimension. The past is one extension of it, the future is the other, just as east is one extension of a more familiar dimension and west is its opposite.
“But we ordinarily think of time as a line, a sort of tunnel, perhaps. We do not make that error in the dimensions about which we think daily. For example, we know that Annapolis, King George courthouse, and—say—Norfolk are all to the eastward of us. But we know that in order to reach any of them, as a destination, we would have to go not only cast but north or south in addition. In imaginative travels into the future, however, we never think in such a commonsense fashion. We assume that the future is a line instead of a coordinate, a path instead of a direction. We assume that if we travel to futureward there is but one possible destination. And that is as absurd as it would be to ignore the possibility of traveling to eastward in any other line than due east, forgetting that there is northeast and, southeast and a large number of intermediate points.”
Young Blake said slowly: “I follow you, sir, but it doesn’t seem to bear ...”
“On our problem? But it does!” Minott smiled, showing his teeth. He bit into his sandwich again. “Imagine that I come to a fork in a road. I flip a coin to determine which fork I shall take. Whichever route I follow, I shall encounter certain landmarks and certain adventures. But they will not be the same, whether landmarks or adventures.
“In choosing between the forks of the road I choose not only between two sets of landmarks I could encounter, but between two sets of events. I choose between paths, not only on the surface of the earth, but in time. And as those paths upon earth may lead to two different cities, so those paths in the future may lead to two entirely different fates. On one of them may lie opportunities for riches. On the other may lie the most prosaic of hit-and-run accidents which will leave me a mangled corpse, not only upon one fork of a highway in the State of Virginia, but upon, one fork of a highway in time.”
“In short, I am pointing out that there is more than one future we can encounter, and with more or less absence of deliberation we choose among them. But the futures we fail to encounter, upon the roads we do not take, are just as real as the landmarks upon those roads. We never see them, but we freely admit their existence.”
Again it was Blake who protested: “All this is interesting enough, sir, but still I don’t see how it applies to our present situation.”
Minott said impatiently: “Don’t you see that if such a state of things exists in the future, that it must also have existed in the past? We talk of three dimensions and one present and one future. There is a theoretic necessity—a mathematical necessity—for assuming more than one future. There are an indefinite number of possible futures, any one of which we would encounter if we took the proper ‘forks’ in time.