It had been hard to maneuver the President into the earlier job, but in this present case, it wouldn't even have to know.
My first thought was to call the previous story "Death at the Tricentennial," but the dictionary assured me that "tercentenary" was a perfectly good way of referring to a three hundredth birthday, so I called it "Death at the Tercentenary."
Fred changed that name to THE TERCENTENARY INCIDENT, which was a great improvement in my opinion, and I adopted it with glad cries. I am not always pleased with his title changes and generally say so, as in my collection of mystery short stories Tales of the Black Widowers. It is only fair now that I give him credit for a good change.
- One more thing. Again, this story represents a return to a theme I handled in an earlier story.The earlier story in this case was EVIDENCE, first published in 1946, thirty years before this story was. There is, except for theme, no similarity between the two stories, and I leave it to the Gentle Reader, if he or she has read both, to decide whether I have improved or not in the interval. (Don't write, however, unless you think I have improved.)
Time flies. I myself am ever-youthful, but everything else is getting older. Do you realize that with the April 1976 issue, Amazing Stories, the oldest of the science fiction magazines, celebrated its Semicentennial?
The April 1926 issue of Amazing Stories was Volume I, Number 1. It was the very first issue of the first magazine ever to be devoted entirely to science fiction-and that was fifty years ago.
Hugo Gernsback had been born in Luxemburg in 1884 and had emigrated to the United States in 1904. He went on to write some excruciatingly bad science fiction with some excruciatingly good predictions in it, to edit a magazine, in which he included science fiction stories (or scientifiction, as be called it), and to begin thinking of publishing an all-science-fiction magazine for some time. A probing circular be sent out in 1924 brought in disappointing results, but then, in 1926, without any advance fanfare at all, he placed the new magazine on the stands.
Sol Cohen, the current publisher of the magazine, called me in the fall of 1975 to ask me if I could make some contribution in honor of the fiftieth anniversary of the magazine, and although, as usual, I was drowning in commitments, there was no way I could let that pass. On November 22, 1975, I sat down to write BIRTH OF A NOTION and so I was represented in the anniversary issue.
Birth of a Notion
That the first inventor of a workable time machine was a science fiction enthusiast is by no means a coincidence. It was inevitable. Why else should an otherwise sane physicist even dare track down the various out-of -the-way theories that seemed to point toward maneuverability in time in the very teeth of General Relativity?
It took energy, of course. Everything takes energy. But Simeon Weill was prepared to pay the price. Anything (well, almost anything) to make his hidden science-fictional dream come true.
The trouble was that there was no way of controlling either the direction or distance through which one was chronologically thrust. It was all the result of random temporal collisions of the harnessed tachyons. Weill could make mice and even rabbits disappear-but future or past, he couldn't say. One mouse reappeared, so he must have traveled but a short way into the past-and it seemed quite unharmed. The others? Who could tell?
He devised an automatic release for the machine. Theoretically, it would reverse the push (whatever the push might be) and bring back the object (from whichever direction and whatever distance it had gone). It didn't always work, but five rabbits were brought back unharmed.
If he could only make the release foolproof, Weill would have tried it himself. He was dying to try it-which was not the proper reaction of a theoretical physicist, but-was the absolute predictable emotion of a crazed s.f. fan who was particularly fond of the space-operish productions of some decades before the present year of 1976.
It was inevitable, then, that the accident should happen. On no account would he have stepped between the tempodes with conscious determination. He knew the chances were about two in five he would not return. On the other hand, he was dying to try it, so he tripped over his own big feet and went staggering between those tempodes as a result of total accident…But are there really accidents?
He might have been hurled into the past or into the future. As 1t happened, he was,hurled into the past.
He might have been hurled uncounted thousands of years into the past or one and a half days. As it happened, he was hurled fifty-one years into the past to a time when the Teapot Dome Scandal was burning brightly but the nation was keeping Cool with Coolidge and knew that nobody in the world could lick Jack Dempsey.
But there was something that his theories didn't tell Weill. He knew what could happen to the particles themselves, but there was no way of predicting what would happen to the relationships between the various particles. And where are relationships more complex than in the brain?
So what happened was that as Weill moved backward through time, his mind unreeled. Not all the way, fortunately, since Weill had not yet been conceived in the year before America's Sesquicentennial, and a brain with less than no development would have been a distinct handicap.
It unreeled haltingly, and partially, and clumsily, and when Weill found himself on a park bench not far from his 1976 home in lower Manhattan, where he experimented in dubious symbiosis with New York University, he found himself in the year 1925 with an abysmally aching head and no very clear idea as to what anything was all about.
He found himself staring at a man of about forty, hair slicked down, cheekbones prominent, beaky nose, who was sharing the same bench with him.
The man looked concerned. He said, "Where did you come from? You were not here a moment ago." He had a distinct Teutonic accent..
Weill wasn't sure. He couldn't remember. But one phrase seemed to stick through the chaos within his skull even though he wasn't sure what it meant.
"Time machine," he gasped.
The other man stiffened. He said, "Do you read pseudoscientific romances?"
"What?" said Weill.
"Have you read H. G. Wells's The Time Machine?"
The repetition of the phrase seemed to soothe Weill a bit. The pain in his head lessened. The name Wells seemed familiar, or was that his own name? No. his own name was Weill.
"Wells?" he said. "I am Weill."
The other man thrust out a hand. "I am Hugo Gernsback. I write pseudo-scientific romances at times, but of course, it is not right to say 'pseudo.' That makes it seem there is something fake about it. That is not so. It should be properly written and then it will be scientific fiction. I like to shorten that"-his dark eyes gleamed-"to scientifiction. "
"Yes," said Weill, trying desperately to collect shattered memories and unwound experiences and getting only moods and impressions. "Scientifiction. Better than pseudo. Still not quite-"
"If done well. Have you read my 'Ralph 124C41 +'?"
"Hugo Gernsback," said Weill, frowning, "Famous-"
"In a small way," said the other, nodding his head. "I have been publishing magazines on radio and on electrical inventions for years. Have you read 'Science and Invention'?"
Weill caught the word "invention" and somehow that left him on the edge of understanding what he had meant by "time machine." He grew eager and said, "Yes, yes."
"And what do you think of the scientifiction that I add in each issuer'
Scientifiction again. The word had a soothing effect on him and yet it was not quite right. Something more-Not quite-
He said it, "Something more. Not quite-"