Damon Knight - Anachron
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ANACHRON
by DAMON KNIGHT
First published in 'If' Januar '54
THE BODY was never found. And for that reason alone, there was no body to find.
It sounds like inverted logic -- which, in a sense, it is -- but there's no paradox involved.
It was a perfectly orderly and explicable event, even though it could only have happened to a
Castellare.
Odd fish, the Castellare brothers. Sons of a Scots-Englishwoman and an expatriate Italian,
born in England, educated on the Continent, they were at ease anywhere in the world and at home
nowhere.
Nevertheless, in their middle years, they had become settled men. Expatriates like their
father, they lived on the island of Ischia, off the Neapolitan coast, in a palace -- quattrocento,
very fine, with peeling cupids on the walls, a multitude of rats, no central heating and no
neighbors.
They went nowhere, no one except their agents and their lawyers came to them. Neither had
ever married. Each, at about the age of thirty, had given up the world of people for an inner
world of more precise and more enduring pleasures. Each was an amateur -- a fanatical, compulsive
amateur.
They had been born out of their time.
Peter's passion was virtu. He collected relentlessly, it would not be too much to say
savagely; he collected as some men hunt big game. His taste was catholic, and his acquisitions
filled the huge rooms of the palace and half the vaults under them -- paintings, statuary,
enamels, porcelain, glass, crystal, metalwork. At fifty, he was a round little man with small,
sardonic eyes and a careless patch of pinkish goatee.
Harold Castellare, Peter's talented brother, was a scientist. An amateur scientist. He
belonged in the nineteenth century, as Peter was a throwback to a still earlier epoch. Modern
science is largely a matter of teamwork and drudgery, both impossible concepts to a Castellare.
But Harold's intelligence was in its own way as penetrating and original as a Newton's or a
Franklin's. He had done respectable work in physics and electronics, and had even, at his lawyer's
insistence, taken out a few patents. The income from these, when his own purchases of instruments
and equipment did not consume it, he gave to his brother, who accepted it without gratitude or
rancor.
Harold, at fifty-three, was spare and shrunken, sallow and spotted, with a bloodless,
melancholy countenance; on his upper lip grew a neat hedge of pink-and-salt mustache, the
companion piece and antithesis of his brother's goatee.
On a certain May morning, Harold had an accident.
Goodyear dropped rubber on a hot stove; Archimedes took a bath; Becquerel left a piece of
uranium ore in a drawer with a photographic plate. Harold Castallare, working patiently with an
apparatus which had so far consumed a great deal of current without producing anything more
spectacular than some rather unusual corona effects, sneezed convulsively and dropped an ordinary
bar magnet across two charged terminals.
Above the apparatus a huge, cloudy bubble sprang into being.
Harold, getting up from his instinctive crouch, blinked at it in profound astonishment. As he
watched, the cloudiness abruptly disappeared and he was looking through the bubble at a section of
tesselated flooring that seemed to be about three feet above the real floor. He could also see the
corner of a carved wooden bench, and on the bench a small, oddly shaped stringed instrument.
Harold swore fervently to himself, made agitated notes, and then began to experiment. He
tested the sphere cautiously with an electroscope, with a magnet, with a Geiger counter. Negative.
He tore a tiny bit of paper from his notepad and dropped it toward the sphere. The paper
disappeared; he couldn't see where it went.
Speechless, Harold picked up a meter stick and thrust it delicately forward. There was no
feeling of contact; the rule went into and through the bubble as if the latter did not exist. Then
it touched the stringed instrument, with a solid click. Harold pushed. The instrument slid over
the edge of the bench and struck the floor with a hollow thump and jangle.
Staring at it, Harold suddenly recognized its tantalizingly familiar shape.
Recklessly he let go the meter stick, reached in and picked the fragile thing out of the
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bubble. It was solid and cool in his fingers. The varnish was clear, the color of the wood glowing
through it. It looked as if it might have been made yesterday.
Peter owned one almost exactly like it, except for preservation -- a viola d'amore of the
seventeenth century.
Harold stooped to look through the bubble horizontally. Gold and rust tapestries hid the
wall, fifty feet away, except for an ornate door in the center. The door began to open; Harold saw
a flicker of umber.
Then the sphere went cloudy again. His hands were empty; the viola d'amore was gone. And the
meter stick, which he had dropped inside the sphere, lay on the floor at his feet.
"Look at that," said Harold simply.
Peter's eyebrows went up slightly. "What is it, a new kind of television?"
"No, no. Look here." The viola d'amore lay on the bench, precisely where it had been before.
Harold reached into the sphere and drew it out.
Peter started. "Give me that." He took it in his hands, rubbed the smoothly finished wood. He
stared at his brother. "By God and all the saints," he said. "Time travel."
Harold snorted impatiently. "My dear Peter, 'time' is a meaningless word taken by itself,
just as 'space' is."
"But, barring that, time travel."
"If you like, yes."
"You'll be quite famous."
"I expect so."
Peter looked down at the instrument in his hands. "I'd like to keep this, if I may."
"I'd be very happy to let you, but you can't."
As he spoke, the bubble went cloudy; the viola d'amore was gone like smoke.
"There, you see?"
"What sort of devil's trick is that?"
"It goes back... Later you'll see. I had that thing out once before, and this happened. When
the sphere became transparent again, the viol was where I had found it."
"And your explanation for this?"
Harold hesitated. "None. Until I can work out the appropriate mathematics--"
"Which may take you some time. Meanwhile, in layman's language--"
Harold's face creased with the effort and interest of translation. "Very roughly, then -- I
should say it means that events are conserved. Two or three centuries ago--"
"Three. Notice the sound holes."
"Three centuries ago, then, at this particular time of day, someone was in that room. If the
viola were gone, he or she would have noticed the fact. That would constitute an alteration of
events already fixed; therefore it doesn't happen. For the same reason, I conjecture, we can't see
into the sphere, or--" he probed at it with a fountain pen -- "I thought not -- or reach into it
to touch anything; that would also constitute an alteration. And anything we put into the sphere
while it is transparent comes out again when it becomes opaque. To put it very crudely, we cannot
alter the past."
"But it seems to me that we did alter it, just now, when you took the viol out, even if no
one of that time saw it happen."
"This," said Harold, "is the difficulty of using language as a means of exact communication.
If you had not forgotten all your calculus... However. It may be postulated (remembering of course
that everything I say is a lie, because I say it in English) that an event which doesn't influence
other events is not an event. In other words--"
"That, since no one saw you take it, it doesn't matter whether you took it or not. A rather
dangerous precept, Harold; you would have been burned at the stake for that at one time."
"Very likely. But it can be stated in another way or, indeed, in an infinity of ways which
only seem to be different. If someone, let us say God, were to remove the moon as I am talking to
you, using zero duration, and substitute an exact replica made of concrete and plaster of Paris,
with the same mass, albedo and so on as the genuine moon, it would make no measurable difference
in the universe as we perceive it -- and therefore we cannot certainly say that it hasn't
happened. Nor, I may add, does it make any difference whether it has or not."
"'When there's no one about on the quad, '" said Peter.
"Yes. A basic and, as a natural consequence, a meaningless problem of philosophy. Except," he
added, "in this one particular manifestation."
He stared at the cloudy sphere. "You'll excuse me, won't you, Peter? I've got to work on
this."
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"When will you publish, do you suppose?"
"Immediately. That's to say, in a week or two."
"Don't do it till you've talked it over with me, will you? I have a notion about it."
Harold looked at him sharply. "Commercial?"
"In a way."
"No," said Harold. "This is not the sort of thing one patents or keeps secret, Peter."
"Of course. I'll see you at dinner, I hope?"
"I think so. If I forget, knock on the door, will you?"
"Yes. Until then."
"Until then."
At dinner, Peter asked only two questions. "Have you found any possibility of changing the
time your thing reaches -- from the seventeenth century to the eighteenth, for example, or from
Monday to Tuesday?"
"Yes, as a matter of fact. Amazing. It's lucky that I had a rheostat already in the circuit;
I wouldn't dare turn the current off. Varying the amperage varies the time set. I've had it up to
what I think was Wednesday of last week -- at any rate, my smock was lying over the workbench
where I left it, I remember, Wednesday afternoon. I pulled it out. A curious sensation, Peter -- I
was wearing the same smock at the time. And then the sphere went opaque and of course the smock
vanished. That must have been myself, coming into the room."
"And the future?"
"Yes. Another funny thing, I've had it forward to various times in the near future, and the
machine itself is still there, but nothing's been done to it -- none of the things I'm thinking I
might do. That might be because of the conservation of events, again, but I rather think not.
Still farther forward there are cloudy areas, blanks; I can't see anything that isn't in existence
now, apparently, but here, in the next few days, there's nothing of that.
"It's as if I were going away. Where do you suppose I'm going?"
Harold's abrupt departure took place between midnight and morning. He packed his own grip, it
would seem, left unattended, and was seen no more. It was extraordinary, of course, that he should
have left at all, but the details were in no way odd. Harold had always detested what he called
"the tyranny of the valet." He was, as everyone knew, a most independent man.
On the following day Peter made some trifling experiments with the time-sphere. From the
sixteenth century he picked up a scent bottle of Venetian glass; from the eighteenth, a crucifix
of carved rosewood; from the nineteenth, when the palace had been the residence of an Austrian
count and his Italian mistress, a hand-illuminated copy of De Sade's La Nouvelle Justine, very
curiously bound in human skin.
They all vanished, naturally, within minutes or hours -- all but the scent bottle. This gave
Peter matter for reflection. There had been half a dozen flickers of cloudiness in the sphere just
futureward of the bottle; it ought to have vanished, but it hadn't. But then, he had found it on
the floor near a wall with quite a large rat hole in it.
When objects disappeared unaccountably, he asked himself, was it because they had rolled into
rat holes, or because some time fisher had picked them up when they were in a position to do so?
He did not make any attempt to explore the future. That afternoon he telephoned his lawyers
in Naples and gave them instructions for a new will. His estate, including his half of the jointly
owned Ischia property, was to go to the Italian government on two conditions: (1) that Harold
Castellare should make a similar bequest of the remaining half of the property and (2) that the
Italian government should turn the palace into a national museum to house Peter's collection,
using the income from his estate for its administration and for further acquisitions. His
surviving relatives -- two cousins in Scotland -- he cut off with a shilling each.
He did nothing more until after the document had been brought out to him, signed and
witnessed. Only then did he venture to look into his own future.
Events were conserved, Harold had said -- meaning, Peter very well understood, events of the
present and future as well as of the past. But was there only one pattern in which the future
could be fixed? Could a result exist before its cause had occurred?
The Castellare motto was Audentes fortuna juvat -- into which Peter, at the age of fourteen,
had interpolated the word "prudentesque": "Fortune favors the bold -- and the prudent."
Tomorrow: no change; the room he was looking at was so exactly like this one that the time
sphere seemed to vanish. The next day: a cloudy blur. And the next, and the next...
Opacity, straight through to what Peter judged, by the distance he had moved the rheostat
handle, to be ten years ahead. Then, suddenly, the room was a long marble hall filled with display
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cases.
Peter smiled wryly. If you were Harold, obviously you could not look ahead and see Peter
working in your laboratory. And if you were Peter, equally obviously, you could not look ahead and
know whether the room you saw was an improvement you yourself were going to make, or part of a
museum established after your death, eight or nine years from now, or...
No. Eight years was little enough, but he could not even be sure of that. It would, after
all, be seven years before Harold could be declared legally dead....
Peter turned the vernier knob slowly forward. A flicker, another, a long series. Forward
faster. Now the flickering melted into a grayness; objects winked out of existence and were
replaced by others in the showcases; the marble darkened and lightened again, darkened and
lightened, darkened and remained dark. He was, Peter judged, looking at the hall as it would be
some five hundred years in the future. There was a thick film of dust on every exposed surface;
rubbish and the carcass of some small animal had been swept carelessly into a corner.
The sphere clouded.
When it cleared, there was an intricate trail of footprints in the dust, and two of the
showcases were empty.
The footprints were splayed, trifurcate, and thirty inches long.
After a moment's deliberation Peter walked around the workbench and leaned down to look
through the sphere from the opposite direction. Framed in the nearest of the four tall windows was
a scene of picture-postcard banality: the sun-silvered bay and the foreshortened arc of the city,
with Vesuvio faintly fuming in the background. But there was something wrong about the colors,
even grayed as they were by distance.
Peter went and got his binoculars.
The trouble was, of course, that Naples was green. Where the city ought to have been, a
rankness had sprouted. Between the clumps of foliage he could catch occasional glimpses of gray-
white that might equally well have been boulders or the wreckage of buildings. There was no
movement. There was no shipping in the harbor.
But something rather odd was crawling up the side of the volcano. A rust-orange pipe, it
appeared to be, supported on hairline struts like the legs of a centipede, and ending without
rhyme or reason just short of the top.
While Peter watched, it turned slowly blue.
One day further forward: now all the display cases had been looted; the museum, it would
seem, was empty.
Given, that in five centuries the world, or at any rate the department of Campania, has been
overrun by a race of Somethings, the human population being killed or driven out in the process;
and that the conquerors take an interest in the museum's contents, which they have accordingly
removed.
Removed where, and why?
This question, Peter conceded, might have a thousand answers, nine hundred and ninety-nine of
which would mean that he had lost his gamble. The remaining answer was: to the vaults, for safety.
With his own hands Peter built a hood to cover the apparatus on the workbench and the sphere
above it. It was unaccustomed labor; it took him the better part of two days. Then he called in
workmen to break a hole in the stone flooring next to the interior wall, rig a hoist, and cut the
power cable that supplied the time-sphere loose from its supports all the way back to the fuse
box, leaving him a single flexible length of cable more than a hundred feet long. They unbolted
the workbench from the floor, attached casters to its legs, lowered it into the empty vault below,
and went away.
Peter unfastened and removed the hood. He looked into the sphere.
Treasure.
Crates, large and small, racked in rows into dimness.
With pudgy fingers that did not tremble, he advanced the rheostat. A cloudy flicker, another,
a leaping blur of them as he moved the vernier faster -- and then there were no more, to the limit
of the time-sphere's range.
Two hundred years, Peter guessed -- A. D. 2700 to 2900 or thereabout -- in which no one would
enter the vault. Two hundred years of "unliquidated time."
He put the rheostat back to the beginning of that uninterrupted period. He drew out a small
crate and prized it open.
Chessmen, ivory with gold inlay, Florentine, fourteenth century. Superb.
Another, from the opposite rack.
T'ang figurines, horses and men, ten to fourteen inches high. Priceless.
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The crates would not burn, Tomaso told him. He went down to the kitchen to see, and it was
true. The pieces lay in the roaring stove untouched. He fished one out with a poker, even the
feathery splinters of the unplaned wood had not ignited.
It made a certain extraordinary kind of sense. When the moment came for the crates to go
back, any physical scrambling that had occurred in the meantime would have no effect; they would
simply put themselves together as they had been before, like Thor's goats. But burning was another
matter; burning would have released energy which could not be replaced.
That settled one paradox, at any rate. There was another that nagged at Peter's orderly mind.
If the things he took out of that vault, seven hundred-odd years in the future, were to become
part of the collection bequeathed by him to the museum, preserved by it, and eventually stored in
the vault for him to find -- then precisely where had they come from in the first place?
It worried him. Peter had learned in life, as his brother had in physics, that one never gets
anything for nothing.
Moreover, this riddle was only one of his perplexities, and that not among the greatest. For
another example, there was the obstinate opacity of the time-sphere whenever he attempted to
examine the immediate future. However often he tried it, the result was always the same: a cloudy
blank, all the way forward to the sudden unveiling of the marble gallery.
It was reasonable to expect the sphere to show nothing at times when he himself was going to
be in the vault, but this accounted for only five or six hours out of every twenty-four. Again,
presumably, it would show him no changes to be made by himself, since foreknowledge would make it
possible for him to alter his actions. But he laboriously cleared one end of the vault, put up a
screen to hide the rest and made a vow -- which he kept -- not to alter the clear space or move
the screen for a week. Then he tried again -- with the same result.
The only remaining explanation was that sometime during the next ten years something was
going to happen which he would prevent if he could; and the clue to it was there, buried in that
frustrating, unbroken blankness.
As a corollary, it was going to be something which he could prevent if only he knew what it
was... or even when it was supposed to happen.
The event in question, in all probability, was his own death. Peter therefore hired nine men
to guard him, three to a shift -- because one man alone could not be trusted, two might conspire
against him, whereas three, with the very minimum of effort, could be kept in a state of mutual
suspicion. He also underwent a thorough medical examination, had new locks installed on every door
and window, and took every other precaution ingenuity could suggest. When he had done all these
things, the next ten years were as blank as before.
Peter had more than half expected it. He checked through his list of safeguards once more,
found it good, and thereafter let the matter rest. He had done all he could; either he would
survive the crisis or he would not. In either case, events were conserved; the time-sphere could
give him no forewarning.
Another man might have found his pleasure blunted by guilt and fear; Peter's was whetted to a
keener edge. If he had been a recluse before, now he was an eremite; he grudged every hour that
was not given to his work. Mornings he spent in the vault, unpacking his acquisitions; afternoons
and evenings, sorting, cataloguing, examining and -- the word is not too strong -- gloating. When
three weeks bad passed in this way, the shelves were bare as far as the power cable would allow
him to reach in every direction, except for crates whose contents were undoubtedly too large to
pass through the sphere. These, with heroic self-control, Peter had left untouched.
And still he had looted only a hundredth part of that incredible treasure house. With
grappling hooks he could have extended his reach by perhaps three or four yards, but at the risk
of damaging his prizes; and in any case this would have been no solution but only a postponement
of the problem. There was nothing for it but to go through the sphere himself and unpack the
crates while on the other "side" of it.
Peter thought about it in a fury of concentration for the rest of the day. So far as he was
concerned, there was no question that the gain would be worth any calculated risk; the problem was
how to measure the risk and if possible reduce it.
Item: He felt a definite uneasiness at the thought of venturing through that insubstantial
bubble. Intuition was supported, if not by logic, at least by a sense of the dramatically
appropriate. Now, if ever, would be the time for his crisis.
Item: Common sense did not concur. The uneasiness had two symbols. One was the white face of
his brother Harold just before the water closed over it; the other was a phantasm born of those
gigantic, splayed footprints in the dust of the gallery. In spite of himself, Peter had often
found himself trying to imagine what the creatures that made them must look like, until his
visualization was so clear that he could almost swear he had seen them.
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Towering monsters they were, with crested ophidian heads and great unwinking eyes; and they
moved in a strutting glide, nodding their heads, like fantastic barnyard fowl.
But, taking these premonitory images in turn: first, it was impossible that he should ever be
seriously inconvenienced by Harold's death. There were no witnesses, he was sure; he had struck
the blow with a stone, stones also were the weights that had dragged the body down, and the rope
was an odd length Peter had picked up on the shore. Second, the three-toed Somethings might be as
fearful as all the world's bogies put together; it made no difference, he could never meet them.
Nevertheless, the uneasiness persisted. Peter was not satisfied; he wanted a lifeline. When
he found it, he wondered that he had not thought of it before.
He would set the time-sphere for a period just before one of the intervals of blankness. That
would take care of accidents, sudden illnesses, and other unforeseeable contingencies. It would
also insure him against one very real and not at all irrational dread: the fear that the mechanism
which generated the time-sphere might fail while he was on the other side. For the conservation of
events was not a condition created by the sphere but one which limited its operation. No matter
what happened, it was impossible for him to occupy the same place-time as any future or past
observer; therefore, when the monster entered that vault, Peter would not be there any more.
There was, of course, the scent bottle to remember. Every rule has its exception; but in this
case, Peter thought, the example did not apply. A scent bottle could roll into a rat hole; a man
could not.
He turned the rheostat carefully back to the last flicker of grayness; past that to the next,
still more carefully. The interval between the two, he judged, was something under an hour:
excellent.
His pulse seemed a trifle rapid, but his brain was clear and cool. He thrust his head into
the sphere and sniffed cautiously. The air was stale and had a faint, unpleasant odor, but it was
breathable.
Using a crate as a stepping stool, he climbed to the top of the workbench. He arranged
another crate close to the sphere to make a platform level with its equator. And seven and a half
centuries in the future, a third crate stood on the floor directly under the sphere.
Peter stepped into the sphere, dropped, and landed easily, legs bending to take the shock.
When he straightened, he was standing in what to all appearances was a large circular hole in the
workbench; his chin was just above the top of the sphere.
He lowered himself, half squatting, until he had drawn his head through and stepped down from
the crate.
He was in the future vault. The sphere was a brightly luminous thing that hung unsupported in
the air behind him, its midpoint just higher than his head. The shadows it cast spread black and
wedge-shaped in every direction, melting into obscurity.
Peter's heart was pounding miserably. He had an illusory stifling sensation, coupled with the
idiotic notion that he ought to be wearing a diver's helmet. The silence was like the pause before
a shout.
But down the aisles marched the crated treasures in their hundreds. Peter set to work. It was
difficult, exacting labor, opening the crates where they lay, removing the contents and nailing
the crates up again, all without disturbing the positions of the crates themselves, but it was the
price he had to pay for his lifeline. Each crate was in a sense a microcosm, like the vault itself
-- a capsule of unliquidated time. But the vault's term would end some fifty minutes from now,
when crested heads nodded down these aisles; those of the crates' interiors, for all that Peter
knew to the contrary, went on forever.
The first crate contained lacework porcelain; the second, shakudo sword hilts; the third, an
exquisite fourth-century Greek ornament in repoussé bronze, the equal in every way of the Siris
bronzes.
Peter found it almost physically difficult to set the thing down, but he did so; standing on
his platform crate in the future with his head projecting above the sphere in the present -- like
(again the absurd thought!) a diver rising from the ocean -- he laid it carefully beside the
others on the workbench.
Then down again, into the fragile silence and the gloom. The next crates were too large, and
those just beyond were doubtful. Peter followed his shadow down the aisle. He had almost twenty
minutes left: enough for one more crate, chosen with care, and an ample margin.
Glancing to his right at the end of the row, he saw a door. It was a heavy door, rivet-
studded, with a single iron step below it. There had been no door there in Peter's time; the whole
plan of the building must have been altered. Of course! he realized suddenly. If it had not, if so
much as a single tile or lintel had remained of the palace as he knew it, then the sphere could
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never have let him see or enter this particular here-and-now, this -- what would Harold have
called it? -- this nexus in space-time.
For if you saw any now-existing thing as it was going to appear in the future, you could
alter it in the present -- carve your initials in it, break it apart, chop it down -- which was
manifestly impossible, and therefore...
And therefore the first ten years were necessarily blank when he looked into the sphere, not
because anything unpleasant was going to happen to him, but because in that time the last traces
of the old palace had not yet been eradicated.
There was no crisis.
Wait a moment, though! Harold had been able to look into the near future.... But -- of course
-- Harold had been about to die.
In the dimness between himself and the door he saw a rack of crates that looked promising.
The way was uneven; one of the untidy accumulations of refuse that seemed to be characteristic of
the Somethings lay in windrows across the floor. Peter stepped forward carefully, but not
carefully enough.
Harold Castellare had had another accident -- and again, if you choose to look at it in that
way, a lucky one. The blow stunned him; the old rope slipped from the stones; flaccid, he floated
where a struggling man might have drowned. A fishing boat nearly ran him down, and picked him up
instead. He was suffering from a concussion, shock, exposure, asphyxiation and was more than three
quarters dead. But he was still alive when he was delivered, an hour later, to a hospital in
Naples.
There were, of course, no identifying papers, labels or monograms in his clothing -- Peter
had seen to that -- and for the first week after his rescue Harold was quite genuinely unable to
give any account of himself. During the second week he was mending but uncommunicative, and at the
end of the third, finding that there was some difficulty about gaining his release in spite of his
physical recovery, he affected to regain his memory, gave a circumstantial but entirely fictitious
identification and was discharged.
To understand this as well as all his subsequent actions, it is only necessary to remember
that Harold was a Castellare. In Naples, not wishing to give Peter any unnecessary anxiety, he did
not approach his bank for funds but cashed a check with an incurious acquaintance, and predated it
by four weeks. With part of the money so acquired he paid his hospital bill and rewarded his
rescuers. Another part went for new clothing and for four days' residence in an inconspicuous
hotel, while he grew used to walking and dressing himself again. The rest, on his last day, he
spent in the purchase of a discreetly small revolver and a box of cartridges.
He took the last boat to Ischia and arrived at his own front door a few minutes before
eleven. It was a cool evening, and a most cheerful fire was burning in the central hall.
"Signor Peter is well, I suppose," said Harold, removing his coat.
"Yes, Signor Harold. He is very well, very busy with his collection."
"Where is he? I should like to speak to him."
"He is in the vaults, Signor Harold. But..."
"Yes?"
"Signor Peter sees no one when he is in the vaults. He has given strict orders that no one is
to bother him, Signor Harold, when he is in the vaults."
"Oh, well," said Harold. "I daresay he'll see me."
It was a thing something like a bear trap, apparently, except that instead of two
semicircular jaws it had four segments that snapped together in the middle, each with a shallow,
sharp tooth. The pain was quite unendurable.
Each segment moved at the end of a thin arm, cunningly hinged so that the ghastly thing would
close over whichever of the four triggers you stepped on. Each arm had a spring too powerful for
Peter's muscles. The whole affair was connected by a chain to a staple solidly embedded in the
concrete floor; it left Peter free to move some ten inches in any direction. Short of gnawing off
his own leg, he thought sickly, there was very little he could do about it.
The riddle was, what could the thing possibly be doing here? There were rats in the vaults,
no doubt, now as in his own time, but surely nothing larger. Was it conceivable that even the
three-toed Somethings would set an engine like this to catch a rat?
Lost inventions, Peter thought irrelevantly, had a way of being rediscovered. Even if he
suppressed the time-sphere during his lifetime and it did not happen to survive him, still there
might be other time-fishers in the remote future -- not here, perhaps, but in other treasure
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houses of the world. And that might account for the existence of this metal-jawed horror. Indeed,
it might account for the vault itself -- a better man-trap -- except that it was all nonsense; the
trap could only be full until the trapper came to look at it. Events, and the lives of prudent
time-travelers, were conserved.
And he had been in the vault for almost forty minutes. Twenty minutes to go, twenty-five,
thirty at the most, then the Somethings would enter and their entrance would free him. He had his
lifeline; the knowledge was the only thing that made it possible to live with the pain that was
the center of his universe just now. It was like going to the dentist, in the bad old days before
procaine; it was very bad, sometimes, but you knew that it would end.
He cocked his head toward the door, holding his breath. A distant thud, another, then a
curiously unpleasant squeaking, then silence.
But he had heard them. He knew they were there. It couldn't be much longer now.
Three men, two stocky, one lean, were playing cards in the passageway in front of the closed
door that led to the vault staircase. They got up slowly.
"Who is he?" demanded the shortest one.
Tomaso clattered at him in furious Sicilian; the man's face darkened, but he looked at Harold
with respect.
"I am now," stated Harold, "going down to see my brother."
"No, Signor," said the shortest one positively.
"You are impertinent," Harold told him.
"Yes, Signor."
Harold frowned. "You will not let me pass?"
"No, Signor."
"Then go and tell my brother I am here."
The shortest one said apologetically but firmly that there were strict orders against this
also; it would have astonished Harold very much if he had said anything else.
"Well, at least I suppose you can tell me how long it will be before he comes out?"
"Not long, Signor. One hour, no more."
"Oh, very well, then," said Harold pettishly, turning half away. He paused. "One thing more,"
he said, taking the gun out of his pocket as he turned, "put your hands up and stand against the
wall there, will you?"
The first two complied slowly. The third, the lean one, fired through his coat pocket, just
like the gangsters in the American movies.
It was not a sharp sensation at all, Harold was surprised to find; it was more as if someone
had hit him in the side with a cricket bat. The racket seemed to bounce interminably from the
walls. He felt the gun jolt in his hand as he fired back, but couldn't tell if he had hit anybody.
Everything seemed to be happening very slowly, and yet it was astonishingly hard to keep his
balance. As he swung around he saw the two stocky ones with their hands half inside their jackets,
and the lean one with his mouth open, and Tomaso with bulging eyes. Then the wall came at him and
he began to swim along it, paying particular attention to the problem of not dropping one's gun.
As he weathered the first turn in the passageway the roar broke out afresh. A fountain of
plaster stung his eyes; then he was running clumsily, and there was a bedlam of shouting behind
him.
Without thinking about it he seemed to have selected the laboratory as his destination; it
was an instinctive choice, without much to recommend it logically. In any case, he realized
halfway across the central hall, he was not going to get there.
He turned and squinted at the passageway entrance; saw a blur move and fired at it. It
disappeared. He turned again awkwardly, and had taken two steps nearer an armchair which offered
the nearest shelter, when something clubbed him between the shoulderblades. One step more, knees
buckling, and the wall struck him a second, softer blow. He toppled, clutching at the tapestry
that hung near the fireplace.
When the three guards, whose names were Enrico, Alberto and Luca, emerged cautiously from the
passage and approached Harold's body, it was already flaming like a Viking's in its impromptu
shroud; the dim horses and men and falcons of the tapestry were writhing and crisping into
brilliance. A moment later an uncertain ring of fire wavered toward them across the carpet.
Although the servants came with fire extinguishers and with buckets of water from the
kitchen, and although the fire department was called, it was all quite useless. In five minutes
the whole room was ablaze; in ten, as windows burst and walls buckled, the fire engulfed the
second story. In twenty a mass of flaming timbers dropped into the vault through the hole Peter
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had made in the floor of the laboratory, utterly destroying the time-sphere apparatus and reaching
shortly thereafter, as the authorities concerned were later to agree, an intensity of heat
entirely sufficient to consume a human body without leaving any identifiable trace. For that
reason alone, there was no trace of Peter's body to be found.
The sounds had just begun again when Peter saw the light from the time-sphere turn ruddy and
then wink out like a snuffed candle.
In the darkness, he heard the door open.
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Damon Knight - Anachron
This book was written by"Damon Knight".Damon Francis Knight (September 19, 1922–April 15, 2002) was an American science fiction author, editor, critic and fan. His forte was short stories and he is widely acknowledged as having been a master of the genre.Download it
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Damon Knight - Anachron
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