Fugitive of Time. John Russell Fearn
man, but I haven’t spoken to anybody for months, outside the servants. Been utterly absorbed. You get that way viewing the future.”
“Yes, I suppose you—” Gordon stared. “Doing what?”
Dr. Royd chuckled in high falsetto. “My apologies. Maybe I shouldn’t have sprung it on you like that! However, physically and mentally I think you will meet my requirements. What age are you?”
“Twenty-five.”
“Quite satisfactory. Ever had a serious illness?”
“Never. I’m fit, intelligent, and willing. My only trouble is lack of money.”
“And if you had money you wouldn’t be here?” Royd questioned. “Is that it? You are not just here because a scientific experiment appeals to you?”
“In a way it does appeal to me, yes. As an engineer it is bound to. I—er—look, sir, what do I have to do?”
“Well now, I’ll explain.” Royd sat back in his chair. “I am a scientific inventor, with all the money I need to follow that inclination. Unearned money by inheritance from my dear father, who considered science the invention of the devil. No matter. To put it briefly, I have found a way to view future time, but I cannot be sure whether it applies just to my own state of consciousness or whether it can be universal. I have nobody who is willing to help me out. Not even Blessington, my indispensable manservant, who is privately of the opinion that I am cracked.”
“Which makes two of us,” Gordon murmured to himself, endeavoring to look interested.
“Time,” Royd continued absently, hitching himself forward and jamming a bony knee against the desk edge, “is not something to be experienced as we progress: it is something into which we grow in the natural course of unending evolution.”
“Indeed?” Gordon asked, feeling he should say something.
Royd looked over his spectacles. “You haven’t the vaguest idea what I’m talking about, have you? I’ll try it another way.”
Gordon only nodded this time, trying to decide which head needed examining—his or Dr. Royd’s.
“Actually,” Royd said, “Time is not something which unfolds. The past, present, and future are here this very moment. But with every second our brains are shedding tissue that makes us capable of seeing what we think is advancing Time. In reality it has always been there: we are only just seeing it! The process is allied to the decay that brings senility, but we will not go into that now. After all, our bodies shed something every second that we live—hair, water, surface skin. So why shouldn’t the brain?”
For Gordon something dim stirred on the face of the deep and he made a grab at it.
“You mean, sir, that our brains actually have everything stored up in them—future time as well as present—and that this shedding business merely reveals more? Or rather makes us conscious of something which we believe has only just happened?”
Dr. Royd beamed. “My boy, you and I will get along fine! You have a ready grasp of the position. Yes, that is it exactly. By tomorrow our brains will have lost more of their covering and therefore more will be apparent to us—but we will say that Time has moved on. Which is quite erroneous. And, of course, the more shedding there is, the remoter becomes an earlier impression, hence memory fades with advancement.”
Gordon’s brows knitted. “How far does one see the future?”
“Only as far as one’s lifetime. That is obvious. The brain cannot contain impressions of a Time when the brain action itself is extinct.”
“In which case one might know when one is going to die?”
“Yes. I know exactly when I shall die—and how and where. In my laboratory, seven in the evening, at the age of ninety-three on the sixteenth of May.”
Gordon smiled weakly. “You’re very cheerful about it!”
“Why not? To know when you are going to die eliminates all fear of immediate decease. I have about thirty-three years left yet, so I can afford to be cheerful.”
“Then—then what exactly do you wish me to do?”
“I wish to see if it is possible to briefly strip your brain as I have my own, in order to view the future scenes of your life. The scenes are there, you understand, and only need uncovering. The process is painless and electrical. I know I can do it on myself, but as I say, I cannot lay this invention before the Institute of Scientists until I know it can be applied to anybody who desires it. If it is peculiar to me alone, then—” Royd spread his hands.
“And there’s no danger?” Gordon asked uneasily.
“You have my assurance on that. So much so I shall not even ask you to sign a document absolving me from blame if anything should happen to you. Nothing can. It is merely Nature’s process speeded up.”
“I—see.” Gordon could not keep the doubt out of his voice, at which Dr. Royd got to his feet.
“Come with me, Mr. Fryer. I’ll show you what I mean.”
Gordon followed the scientist as he toddled from the library, muttering unintelligible comments as he went. Leading the way across the great hall, he finally paused at a door and opened it. Beyond was a big laboratory, brilliantly sun-lit through high skylights. There was a vast array of gleaming equipment, but to Gordon, though he was an engineer, most of it was alien to him.
“Now,” Royd said, pausing at an object exactly like a gigantic enlarging camera poised over a screwed-down chair. “This is the Brain-Scanner, as I call it. When you are seated in the chair, the vibrations peculiar to that instrument are directed downwards into the brain, and according to the wavelength of the vibration used, higher or lower portions of the accumulated layer of brain-cells are penetrated. I have said that in the normal process they shed themselves, which is true. In this instance they are not shed, because that would create permanent injury and make you only capable of seeing the particular period that had been exposed. So, then, the vibration strikes through the top cell layers and photographs whatever image is in the cells below.”
“Photographs?” Gordon repeated, astonished.
“Just so. You don’t marvel at an X-ray photographing the inside of a body without harming the outside, do you? Why marvel at this striking through the upper layers of cells to photograph the scenes beneath?”
“The marvel to me, sir, is that anything can photograph what must really be only abstract! Surely you can’t get a picture of a future scene, or any scene at all, by just photographing a bunch of brain cells?”
“No, of course not.” Dr. Royd looked contrite. “Forgive me, young man, but I get in the habit of accepting things and not explaining the parts between. The point is: brain cells give forth vibrations which, when interpreted by the nervous system, form into pictures, sensations, sight, hearing, and so on. Correct?”
“I can gather that much, yes.”
“Then there is still hope. Very well; if you have an instrument which duplicates the system used by the human body for interpreting brain sensations, what do you get?”
“A similar effect as a body would, I suppose.”
“Exactly. And here is the main instrument.”
Royd moved across to a rotund tower of complicated apparatus.
To Gordon’s wondering eyes it even looked vaguely human in outline.
Royd said: “Duplicating the functions of a human body mechanically is one of the simplest things to science. I have done that and added inventions of my own. Summing up, when my vibrations penetrate the brain, it takes a reading of the cells being examined and their vibrations are transmitted to this machine. They interpret the vibrations as the body would, and produce the same result. But instead of a picture forming mentally, it is finally produced visibly by specially designed transformers,