TWICE IN TIME
MEET THE AUTHOR — A Journey in Time
TO begin with, I defy anyone to prove that “Twice in Time” is NOT true.
Because every important character, save one (find him—or her—for yourself), is taken straight from history; the chief national and c o m -munity events dealt with happened substantially as here of the scenes and set forth; even most speeches are authentic.
I will say that you'll look hard before you find the Fortress of Santi Pelagrini on any map, and perhaps the Pazzi conspiracy is credited to another master mind by the textbooks; but otherwise things fell out just as I have them, and perhaps my scientific explanations are as believable as any alternates you can offer.
This is my most pretentious effort at a time-travel novel to date, and I will admit, in advance, all the obstacles that bob up in the path of such a story. In fact, the first chapter sets forth the biggest of these: the visualization of a person with three dimensions of space and one of time being a figure so many feet high, so many inches broad and thick and so many years deep.
If he travels in time, he must be two such figures—he must be twice in time.
But if one can achieve such a journey, where better could he go than to Florence in the Quatrecento, a city and age perhaps nowhere else equalled, unless in Athens of the Golden Age?
I have worked hard to make the place live again, and even at that I have barely flicked the fringes of it.
Mr. Virgil Finlay’s illustrations go far toward making the setting and action as real as they should be.
Foreword
The document herewith given publication was placed in the hands of the editors in 1939. Whether or not it explains satisfactorily the strange disappearance of Leo Thrasher near Florence, Italy, in the spring of 1938, we do not pretend to decide.
The manuscript came to America in the luggage of Father David Sutton, an American priest, at the time of the recent outbreak of war in Europe. Father Sutton was in Rome at the time, and elected to remain, in hope of helping war sufferers if his aid should be needed. But since Italy remained neutral, he sent back most of his luggage to America by a friend. Later he sent an urgent letter, asking that this manuscript be examined and published, if possible. It came, Father Sutton said, from the strongroom of an immemorial theological library in Florence, and was in the original casket that had apparently contained it for a long period of time.
The priest's friend brought us both Father Sutton's letter and the casket with the manuscript. This casket is of tarnished silver, elaborately worked in the Renaissance manner. A plate on the lid bears this legend, in Italian, French, and Latin:
Let no man open or dispose of this casket, on peril of his soul, before the year 1939.
Father Sutton's new York friends insist that if he actually wrote this letter and sent the casket, they
may be taken at face value. If it is a hoax perpetrated in his name, it is both elaborate and senseless. In any case, it is worth the study of those who love the curious.
Therefore, while neither affirming nor denying the truth of what appears, herewith is given in full the purported statement of the vanished Leo Thrasher.
CHAPTER 1 The Time Reflector
This story, as unvarnished as I can make it, must begin where my twentieth-century life ends—in the sitting room of the suite taken by George Astley and myself at Tomasulo's inn, on a hill above the Arno. It is the clearest of all my clouded memories of that time. April was the month, still chilly for Tuscany, and we had a charcoal fire in the grate.
I knelt among my dismantled machinery, before the charcoal fire, testing the connections here and there.
"So that's your time-traveler, Thrasher?" said Astley. "Like the one H. G. Wells wrote about?"
"Not in the least like the one H. G. Wells wrote about," I said spiritedly, and not perhaps without a certain resentful pride. "He described a sort of century-hurdling mechanical horse. In its saddle you rode forward into the Judgment Day or back to the beginning. This thing of mine will work, but as a reflector."
I peered into the great cylindrical housing that held my lens, a carefully polished crystal of alum, more than two feet in diameter. I smiled with satisfaction.
"It won't carry me into time," I assured. "It'll throw me."
He leaned back in the easy chair that was too small for him.
"I don't understand, Leo," he confessed. "Tell me about it."
"All right—if I must," I said. I had told him so often before. It was a bore to have to repeat what a man seemed incapable of understanding. "The operation is comparable to that of a burning-glass," I explained patiently, "which involves a point of light and transfers its powers through space to another position. Here"—I waved toward the mass of mechanism—"is a device that will involve an object and transfer, or rather, reproduce it to another epoch in time."
"I've tried to read Einstein at least enough to think of time as an extra dimension," ventured Astley. "But, still, I don't follow your reasoning. You can't exist in two places at once. That's impossible in the face of it. Yet from what I gather you can exist, you have existed, in two separate and distinct times. For instance, you're a grown man now, but when you were a baby—"
"That's the fourth dimension of it," I broke in. "The baby Leo Thrasher was, in a way, only the original tip of the fourth-dimensional me. At ten, I was a cross-section. Now I'm another, six feet tall, eighteen inches wide, eight inches thick—and quite some more years deep." I began to tinker with my lights. "Do you see now?"
"A little." Astley had produced his oldest and most odorous pipe. "You mean that this present manifestation of you is a single corridorlike object, reaching in time from the place of your birth—Chicago, wasn't it?—to here in Florence."
"That's something of the truth," I granted, my head deep in the great boxlike container that housed the electrical part of the machine. "I exist, therefore, only once in time. But suppose this me is taken completely out of Twentieth Century existence— dematerialized, recreated in another epoch. That makes twice in time, doesn't it?"
As I have many times before, I thrilled to the possibility. It was my father's fault, all this labor and dream. I had wanted to study art, had wanted to be a painter, and he had wanted me to be an engineer. But he could not direct my imagination. At the schools he selected, I found the wheels and belts and motors all singing to me a song both weird and compelling. The Machine Age was not enough of a wonder to me. I demanded of it other wonders—miracles.
"I've read Dunne's theory of corridors in time," Astley was musing. "And once I saw a play about them—by J. B. Priestly, wasn't it? What's your reaction to that stuff?"
"That's one of the things I hope to find out about," I told him. "Of course, I think that there's only the one corridor, and I'm gong to travel down it—or duck out at one point, I mean, and reenter farther along. What I'd like to do would be to reappear in Florence of another age, Florence of the Renaissance."