I chose the easier the noncommittal way. It seemed easier than trying to understand, so I told him it was doing just about as expected.
The Club, when in due course we reached it, turned out to be the Savage. I am not a member, but the porter greeted me by name, as though I were in the habit of dropping in every day.
“Just a quick one,” Martin suggested. “Then we’ll look in and see George about your cheque.”
I had misgivings over that, but it went off all right, and during lunch I did my best to keep my end up. I had the same troubles that I have now true it was from the other end, but the principle still holds: if things are too queer people will find it easier to think you are potty than to help you; so you keep up a front.
I am afraid I did not do very well. Several times I caught Martin glancing at me with a perplexed expression. Once he asked: “Quite sure you’re feeling all right, old man?”
But the climax did not come until, with cheese on his plate, he reached out his left hand for a stick of celery. And as he did so I noticed the gold signet ring on his little finger, and that jolted me right out of my caution for, you see, Martin doesn’t have a little finger on his left hand, or a third finger, either. He left both of them somewhere near the Rhine in 1945 “Good God!” I exclaimed. For some reason that pierced me more sharply than anything yet. He turned his face towards me.
“What on earth’s the matter, man? Wou’re as white as a sheet.”
“Your hand” I said.
He glanced at it curiously, and then back at me, even more curiously.
“Looks all right to me,” he said, eyes a little narrowed.
“But, but you lost the two last fingers in the war,” I exclaimed. His eyebrows rose, and then came down in an anxious frown. He said, with kind intention: “Got it a bit mixed, haven’t you, old man? Why, the war was over before I was born.”
Well, it goes a bit hazy just after that, and when it got coherent again I was lying back in a big chair, with Martin sitting close beside, saying: “So take my advice, old man. Just you trot along to the quack this afternoon. Must’ve taken a bit more of a knock than you thought, you know. Funny thing, the brain can’t be too careful. Well, I’ll have to go now I’m afraid. Appointment. But don’t you put it off. Risky. Let me know how it goes.” And then he was gone.
I lay back in the chair. Curiously enough I was feeling far more myself than I had since I came to on the pavement in Regent Street. It was as if the biggest jolt yet had shaken me out of the daze, and got the gears of my wits into mesh again… I was glad to be rid of Martin, and able to think I looked round the lounge. As I said, I am not a member, and did not know the place well enough to be sure of details, but I rather thought the arrangement was a little different, and the carpet, and some of the light fittings, from when I saw it last.
There were few people around. Two talking in a corner, three napping, two more reading papers; none taking any notice of me. I went over to the periodicals table, and brought back The New Statesman, dated 22 January 1954. The front page leader was advocating the nationalisation of transport as a first step towards putting the means of production into the hands of the people and so ending unemployment. There was a wave of nostalgia about that. I turned on, glancing at articles which baffled me for lack of context. I was glad to find Critic present, and I noticed that among the things that were currently causing him concern was some experimental work going on in Germany. His misgivings were, it seemed, shared by several eminent scientists, for, while there was little doubt now that nuclear fission was a theoretical possibility, the proposed methods of control were inadequate. There could well be a chain reaction resulting in a disaster of cosmic proportions. A consortium which included names famous in the Arts as well as many illustrious in the sciences was being formed to call upon the League of Nations to protest to the German government in the name of humanity against reckless research Well, well.
With returning confidence in myself I sat and pondered.
Gradually, and faintly at first, something began to glimmer… Not anything about the how, or the why I still have no useful theories about those but about what could conceivably have happened.
It was vague set off, perhaps, by the thought of that random neutron which I knew in one set of circumstances to have been captured by a uranium atom, but which, in another set of circumstances, apparently had not…
And there, of course, one was brought up against Einstein and relativity which, as you know, denies the possibility of determining motion absolutely and consequently leads into the idea of the four dimensional spacetime continuum. Well, then, since you cannot determine the motions of the factors in the continuum, any pattern of motion must be illusory, and there cannot be an determinable consequences. Nevertheless, where the factors are closely similar are composed of similar atoms in roughly the same relation to the continuum, so as to speak you may quite well get similar consequences. They can never be identical, of course, or determination of motion would be possible. But they could be very similar, and capable of consideration in terms of Einstein’s Special Theory, and they could be determined further by a set of closely similar factors. In other words although the infinite point which we may call a moment in 1954 must occur throughout the continuum, it exists only in relation to each observer, and appears to have similar existence in relation to certain close groups of observers. However, since no two observers can be identical that is, the same observer each must perceive a different past, present, and future from that perceived by any other; consequently, what he perceives arises only from the factors of his relationship to the continuum, and exists only for him.
Therefore I began to understand that what had happened must be this: in some way which I cannot begin to grasp I had somehow been translated to the position of a different observer one whose angle of view was in some respects very close to my own, and yet different enough to have relationships, and therefore realities, unperceived by me. In other words, he must have lived in a world real only to him, just as I had lived in a world real only to me until this very peculiar transposition had occurred to put me in the position of observing his world, with, of course, its relevant past and future, instead of the one I was accustomed to.
Mind you, simple as it is when you consider it, I certainly did not grasp the form of it all at once, but I did argue my way close enough to the observer existence relationship to decide that whatever might have gone amiss, my own mind was more or less all right. The trouble really seemed to be that it was in the wrong place, and getting messages not intended for me; a receiver somehow hooked into the wrong circuit.
Well, that’s not good, in fact, it’s bad; but it’s still a lot better than a faulty receiver. And it braced me a bit to realise that.
I sat there quite a time trying to get it clear, and wondering what I should do, until I came to the end of my packet of “Mariner” cigarettes. Then I went to the telephone.
First I dialled ElectroPhysical Industries. Nothing happened. I looked them up in the book. It was quite a different number, on a different exchange. So I dialled that.
“Extension one three three,” I told the girl on the desk, and then, on second thoughts, named my own department.