A Traveler In Time
August Derleth
Orbit volume 1 number 2, 1953.
YOU CAN’T ALWAYS ESCAPE EVILS BY RUNNING AWAY FROM THEM...BUT IT MAY
HELP!
“Tell me what time is,” said
Harrigan one late summer afternoon in a Madison Street bar. “I’d like to know.”
“A dimension,” I answered. “Everybody
knows that.”
“All right, granted. I know space
is a dimension and you can move forward or back in space. And, of course, you
keep on aging all the time.”
“Elementary,” I said.
“But what happens if you can move
backward or forward in time? Do you age or get younger, or do you keep the
status quo?”
“I’m not an authority on time,
Tex. Do you know anyone who traveled in time?”
Harrigan shrugged aside my
question. “That was the thing I couldn’t get out of Vanderkamp, either. He
presumed to know everything else.”
“Vanderkamp?”
“He was another of those strange
people a reporter always runs into. Lived in New York—downtown, near the
Bowery. Man of about forty, I’d say, but a little on the old-fashioned side.
Dutch background, and hipped on the subject of New Amsterdam, which, in case
you don’t know, was the original name of New York City.”
“Don’t mind my interrupting,” I
cut in. “But I’m not quite straight on what Vanderkamp has to do with time as
dimension.”
“Oh, he was touched on the
subject. He claimed to travel in it. The fact is, he invented a time-traveling
machine.”
“You certainly meet the whacks,
Tex!”
“Don’t I!” He grinned
appreciatively and leaned reminiscently over the bar. “But Vanderkamp had the
wildest dreams of the lot. And in the end he managed the neatest conjuring
trick of them all. I was on the Brooklyn Enterprise
at that time; I spent about a year there. Special features, though I was on a
reporter’s salary. Vanderkamp was something of a local celebrity in a minor
way; he wrote articles on the early Dutch in New York, the nomenclature of the
Dutch, the history of Dutch place-names, and the like. He was handy with a pen,
and even handier with tools. He was an amateur electrician, carpenter,
house-painter, and claimed to be an expert in genealogy.”
“And he built a time-traveling
machine?”
“So he said. He gave me a rather
hard time of it. He was a glib talker and half the time I didn’t know whether I
was coming or going. He kept me on my toes by taking for granted that I
accepted his basic premises. I got next to him on a tip. He could be
close-mouthed as a clam, but his sister let things slip from time to time, and
on this occasion she passed the word to one of her friends in a grocery store
that her brother had invented a machine that took him off on trips into the
past. It seemed like routine whacko stuff, but Blake, who decided what went into
the Enterprise and what didn’t, sent
me over to Manhattan to get something for the paper, on the theory that since
Vanderkamp was well-known in Brooklyn, it was good neighborhood copy. Hmn.”
He drank, deeply.
“Vanderkamp was a sharp-eyed
little fellow, about five feet or so in height, and I hit him at a good time.
His sister said he had just come back from a trip—she left me to draw my own
conclusions about what kind of trip—and I found him in a mild fit of temper. He
was too upset, in fact, to be truculent, which was more like his nature. Was it
true, I wanted to know, that he’d invented a machine that traveled in time?”
He didn’t make any bones about
it.
“Certainly,” he said. “I’ve been using
it for the last month, and if my sister hadn’t decided to blab nobody would
know about it yet. What about it?”
“You believe it can take you
backwards or forwards into the past or the future?”
“Do I look crazy? I said so, didn’t
I?”
“Now, as a matter of fact, he did look crazy. Unlike most of the candidates
for my file of queer people, Vanderkamp actually looked like a nut. He had a
wild eye and a constantly working mouth; he blinked a good deal and stammered
when he was excited. In features he was as Dutch as his name implied. Well, we
talked back and forth for some time, but I stuck with him, and in the end he
took me out into a shed adjoining his house and showed me the contraption he’d
built. It looked like a top. The first thing I thought of was Brick Bradford, and
before I could catch myself, I’d asked, is that pure Brick Bradford?”
“He didn’t turn a hair. Not by a long shot, he answered. H. G. Wells was there first. I owe it to
Wells.”
“I see,” I said.
“The hell you do!” Vanderkamp
shot back. “You think I’m as nutty as a fruit-cake.”
“The idea of time travel is a
little hard to swallow,” I said.
“Sure it is. But me, I’m doing
it. So that’s all there is to it.”
“If you don’t mind, Mr.
Vanderkamp,” I said. “I’m a dummy in scientific matters. I have all I can do to
tell a nut from a bolt.”
“That I believe,” he said.
“So how do you time travel?”
“Look,” he said. “Time is a
dimension like space. You can go up or down this ruler,” he snatched a steel
ruler and waved it in front of me. “From any given point. But you move. In the
dimension of time, you only seem to move. You stand still; time moves. Do you
get it?”
“I had to confess that I didn’t.”
“He tried again, with obviously
strained patience. Judging by what I could gather from what he said, it was
possible for him—so he believed—to get into his machine, twirl a few knobs,
push a few buttons, relax for any given period, and end up just where he liked—back
in the past, or ahead in the future. But wherever he ended up, he was still in
this same spot. In other words, whether he was back in 1492 or ahead in 2092,
the place he got out of his time machine was still his present address. It was
beyond me, frankly, but I figured that as long as he was a little touched, it
wouldn’t do any harm to humor him. I intimated that I understood and asked him
where he’d been last. His face fell, his brow clouded.”
“I’ve been ahead thirty years,”
and he shook his head angrily. “What a time! I’ll be seventy, and you won’t
even be that, Mr. Harrigan. But we’ll be in the middle of the worst atomic war
you ever dreamed about.”
“Now this was before Hiroshima,
quite a bit. I didn’t know what he was talking about, but it gives me a queer
feeling now and then when I think of what he said, especially since it’s still
short of thirty years since that time.”
“It’s no time to be living here,”
he went on. ‘Direct hits on the entire area. What would you do?”
“I’d get out,”’ I said.
“That’s what I thought,” he said.
“But that kind of warfare carries a long way. A long way. And I’m a man who
loves his comforts, reasonably. I don’t intend to set up housekeeping in
equatorial Africa or the forests of Brazil.”
“What did you see thirty years
from now, Mr. Vanderkamp?” I asked him.
“Everything blown to hell,” he
answered. “Not a building in all Manhattan.”
He leered and added, “And
everybody who’ll be living here at that time will be scattered into the
atmosphere in fragments no bigger than an amoeba.”
“You fill me with anticipation,”
I said.
“So I went back to my desk and
wrote the story. You could guess what kind it had to be. Time Travel Is Possible, Says Amateur Scientist!—that kind of
thing. You can see it every week, in large doses, in the feature sections of
some of the biggest chain papers. It went over like an average feature about
life on the moon or prehistoric animals surviving in remote mountain valleys,
or what have you. Just what Vanderkamp went back to after I left, I don’t know,
but I have an idea that he gave his sister a devil of a time.”
***
Vanderkamp stalked into the house
and confronted his sister.
“You see, Julie—a reporter. Can’t
you learn to hold your tongue?”
She threw him a scornful glance. “What
difference does it make?” she cried. “You’re gone all the time.”
“Maybe I’ll take you along
sometime. Just wait.”
“Wait, wait! That’s all I’ve been
doing. Since I was ten years old I’ve been waiting on you!”
“Oh, the hell with it!” He turned
on his heel and left the house.
She followed him to the door and
shouted after him. “Where are you going now?”
“To New Amsterdam for a little
peace and quiet,” he said testily.
He threw open the thick-walled
door of his time-machine and pulled it shut behind him. He sat down before the
controls and began to chart his course for 1650. If his calculations were
correct, he would shortly find himself in the vicinity of that sturdy if
autocratic first citizen of the Dutch colony of New Amsterdam, Peter
Stuyvesant, as well as Governor Stuyvesant’s friend and neighbor, Heinrich
Vanderkamp. He gave not even a figurative glance over his shoulder before he
started out.
When he emerged at last from his
machine, he was in what appeared to be the backyard of a modest residence on a
street which, though he did not know it, he suspected might be the Bouwerie. At
the moment of his emergence, a tall, angular woman stood viewing him,
open-mouthed and aghast, from the wooden stoop at the back door of her home. He
looked at her in astonishment himself. The resemblance to his sister Julie was uncanny.
With only the slightest
hesitation, he addressed her in fluent Dutch.
“Pray do not be disturbed, young
lady.”
“A fine way for a gentleman to
call!” Her voice was considerably more forceful than her appearance. “I suppose
my father sent you. And where did you get that outlandish costume?”
“I bought it,” he answered,
truthfully enough.
“A likely tale,” she said. “And
if my father sent you, just go back and tell him I’m satisfied the way I am. No
woman needs a man to manage her.”
“I don’t have the honor of your
father’s acquaintance,” he answered.
She gazed at him suspiciously
from narrowed eyes. “Everyone in New Amsterdam knows Henrik Van Tromp. He’s as
unloved as yonder bumblebee. Stand where you are and say whence you came.”
“I am a visitor in New Amsterdam,”
he said, standing obediently still. “I confess I don’t know my way about very
well, and I chose to stop at this attractive home.”
“I know it’s attractive,” she
said tartly. “And it’s plain to see you’re a stranger here, or you’d never be
wearing such clothes. Or is it the fashion where you come from?” She gave him
no opportunity to answer, but added, after a moment of indecision, “Well, you
look respectable enough, though much like my rascally cousin Pieter Vanderkamp.
Do you know him?”
“No.”
”Well, no matter. He’s much older
than you—near forty blessed years. You’re no more than twenty, I don’t doubt.”
Involuntarily Vanderkamp put his
hand to his cheek, and smiled as he felt its smooth roundness. “You may be
right, at that,” he said cryptically.
“You might as well come in,” she
said grudgingly. “What with the traffic on the road outside, the Indians, and
people who come in such flighty vehicles as yours, I might as well live in the
heart of the colony.”
He looked around. “And still,” he
said. “It is a pleasant spot—peaceful, comfortable. I’m sure a man could live
out his days here in contentment.”
“Oh, could he?” she said
belligerently. “And where would I be while this went on?”
He gazed at her beetling nose,
her jutting chin. “A good question,” he muttered thoughtfully.
He followed her into the house.
It was a treasury of antiquities, filling him with delight.
Miss Anna Van Tromp offered him a
cup of milk, which he accepted, thanking her profusely. She talked volubly,
eyeing him all the while with the utmost curiosity, and he gathered presently that
her father had made several attempts to marry her off, disapproving of her
solitary residence so far from the center of the city; but she had frowned upon
one and all of the suitors he had encouraged to call on her. She was undeniably
impressive, almost formidable, he conceded privately, with a touch of the shrew
and harridan. Life with Miss Anna Van Tromp would not be easy, he reflected.
But then, life with his sister Julie was not easy, either. Miss Anna, however,
had not to face atomic warfare; all she had to look forward to in fourteen
years was surrender to the besieging British, which she would have no trouble
in surviving.
He settled down to his
ingratiating best and succeeded in making a most favorable impression on Miss
Anna Van Tromp before at last he took his leave, carrying with him a fine,
hand-wrought bowl with which the lady had presented him. He had a hunch he
might come back. Of all the times he had visited since finishing the machine,
he knew that old New Amsterdam in the 1650s was the one period most likely to
keep him contented—provided Miss Van Tromp didn’t turn out to be a nuisance. So
he took careful note of the set of his controls, jotting them down so that he
would not be likely to forget them.
It was late when he found himself
back in his own time.
His sister was waiting up for
him. “Two o’clock in the morning!” she screamed at him.
“What are you doing to me? Oh,
God, why didn’t I marry when I had the chance, instead of throwing away my life
on a worthless brother.”
“Why don’t you? It’s not too
late,” he sighed wearily.
“How can you say that?” she
snapped bitterly. “Here I am thirty nearly, and worn out from working for you.
Who would marry me now? Oh, if only I could have another chance! If I could be
young again, and do it all over, I’d know how to have a better life!”
In spite of his boredom with her,
Vanderkamp felt the effect of this cry from a lonely heart. He looked at her
pityingly; it was true, after all, that she had worked faithfully for him,
without pay, since their parents died. “Take a look at this,” he said gently,
offering her the bowl.
“Hah! Can we eat bowls?”
He raised his eyes heavenward and
went wearily to bed.
***
“I saw Vanderkamp again about a
fortnight later,” Harrigan went on. “Ran into him in a tavern on the Bowery. He
recognized me and came over. That was
some story you did, he said.”
“Been bothered by cranks?” I
asked.
“Hell, yes! Not too badly,
though. They want to ride off somewhere just to get away. I get that feeling
myself sometimes. But, tell me, have you seen the morning papers?”
“Now, by coincidence, the papers
that morning had carried a story from some local nuclear physicist about the
increasing probability that the atom would be smashed. I told him I’d seen it.
“What did I tell you?” he said.
“I just smiled and asked where he’d
been lately. He didn’t hesitate to talk, perhaps because his sister had been
giving him a hard time with her nagging. So I listened. It appeared, to hear
him tell it, that he had been off visiting the Dutch in New Amsterdam. You
could almost believe what he said, listening to him, except for that wild look
he had. Anyway, he’d been in New Amsterdam about 1650, and he’d brought back a
few trifling souvenirs of the trips. Would I like to see them? I said I would. I
figured he’d got his hands on some nice antiques and wanted an appreciative
audience. His sister wasn’t home; so he took me around and showed me his
pieces, one by one—a bowl, a pair of wooden candlesticks, wooden shoes, and
more, all in all a fine collection. He even had a chair that looked pretty
authentic, and I wondered where he’d dug up so many nice things of the New
Amsterdam period—though, of course, I had to take his word as to where they
belonged historically; I didn’t know. But I imagine he got them somewhere in
the city or perhaps up in the Catskill country.”
There was a pause while he
collected his thoughts.
“Well, after a while I got another
look at his contraption. It didn’t appear to have been moved at all; it was
still sitting where it had been before, without a sign to say that it had been
used to go anywhere, least of all into past time. Tell me, I said to him at
last, ‘when you go back in time do you get younger?”
“Yes and no,” Vanderkamp said. “Obviously.”
“It wasn’t obvious to me, but I
couldn’t get any more than that out of him. The thing I couldn’t figure out was
the reason for his claim. He wasn’t trying to sell anything to anybody, as far
as I could see; he wasn’t anxious to tell the world about his time-machine,
either. He didn’t mind talking in his oblique fashion about his trips. He did
talk about New Amsterdam as if he had a pretty good acquaintance with the place.
But then, he was known as a minor authority on the customs of the Dutch colony.
He was touched, obviously. Just the same, he challenged me, in a way. I wanted
to know something more about him, how his machine worked, how he took off, and
so on. I made up my mind the next time I was in the neighborhood to look him
up, hoping he wouldn’t be home. When I made it, his sister was alone, and in
fine fettle, as cantankerous as a flea-bitten mastiff.”
“He’s gone again,” she complained
bitterly.
“Clearly the two of them were at
odds. I asked her whether she had seen him go. She hadn’t; he had just marched
out to his shop and that was an end to him as far as she was concerned. I
haggled around quite a lot and finally got her permission to go out and see
what I could see for myself. Of course, the shop was locked. I had counted on
that and had brought along a handy little skeleton key. I was inside in no
time. The machine wasn’t there. Not a sign of it, or of Vanderkamp either.”
The teller shook his head,
marveling.
“Now, I looked around all over,
but I couldn’t for the life of me figure out how he could have taken it out of
that place; it was too big for doors or windows, and the walls and roof were
solid and immovable. I figured that he couldn’t have got such a large machine
away without his sister’s seeing him; so I locked the place up and went back to
the house. But she was immovable; she hadn’t seen a thing. If he had taken anything
larger than pocket-size out of that shop of his, she had missed it. I could
hardly doubt her sincerity. There was nothing to be had from that source; so I
had no alternative but to wait for him another time.”
***
Anna Van Tromp, considerably
chastened, watched her strange suitor—she looked upon all men as suitors,
without exception; for so her father had conditioned her to do--as he reached
into his sack and brought out another wonder.
“Now this,” said Vanderkamp. “Is
an alarm clock. You wind it up like this, you see; set it, and off it goes.
Listen to it ring! That will wake you up in the morning.”
“More magic,” she cried
doubtfully.
“No, no,” he explained patiently.
“It is an everyday thing in my country. Perhaps someday you would like to join
me in a little visit there, Anna?”
“Ja, maybe,” she agreed, looking
out the window to his weird and frightening carriage, which had no animal to
draw it and which vanished so strangely, fading away into the air, whenever
Vanderkamp went into it. “This clothes-washing machine you talk about,” she
admitted. “This I would like to see.”
“I must go now,” said Vanderkamp,
gazing at her with well-simulated coyness. “I’ll leave these things here with
you, and I’ll just take along that bench over there.”
“Ja, ja,” said Anna, blushing.
“Six of one and half a dozen of
the other,” muttered Vanderkamp, comparing Anna with his sister.
He got into his time-machine and set out for
home in the twentieth century. There was some reluctance in his going. Here all
was somnolent peace and quiet, despite the rigors of living; in his own time
there were wars and turmoil and the ultimate threat of the greatest war of all.
New Amsterdam had one drawback, however—the presence of Anna Von Tromp. She had
grown fond of him, undeniably, perhaps because he was so much more interested
in her circumstances than in herself. What was a man to do? Julie at one end,
Anna at the other. But even getting rid of Julie would not allow him to escape
the warfare to come.
He thought deeply of his problem all the way
home.
When he got back, he found his sister waiting
up, as usual, ready to deliver the customary diatribe.
He forestalled her. “I’ve been thinking things
over, Julie. I believe you’d be much happier if you were living with brother
Carl. I’ll give you as much money as you need, and you can pack your things and
I’ll take you down to Louisiana.”
“Take me!” she exclaimed. “How?
In that crazy contraption of yours?”
“Precisely.”
“Oh no!” she said. “You don’t get
me into that machine! How do I know what it will do to me? It’s a time machine,
isn’t it? It might make an old hag of me—or a baby!”
“You said that you wanted to be
young again, didn’t you?” he said softly. “You said you’d like another
chance...”
A faraway look came into her eyes. “Oh, if I
only could! If I only could be a girl again, with a chance to get married...”
“Pack your things,” Vanderkamp
said quietly.
***
“It must have been all of a month
before I saw Vanderkamp again,” Harrigan continued, waving for another scotch
and soda. “I was down in the vicinity on an assignment and I took a run over to
his place. He was home this time. He came to the door, which he had chained on
the inside. He recognized me, and it was plain at the same time that he had no
intention of letting me in. I came right out with the first question I had in
mind. The thing that bothers me, I said to him, is how you get that time
machine of yours in and out of that shed. Mr. Harrigan, he answered, newspaper
reporters ought to have at least elementary scientific knowledge. You don’t.
How in hell could even a time machine be in two places at once, I ask you? If I
take that machine back three centuries, that’s where it is—not here. And three centuries
ago that shop wasn’t standing there. So you don’t go in or out; you don’t move
at all, remember? It’s time that moves.”
“I called the other day,” I went
on. “Your sister spoke to me. Give her my regards.”
“My sister’s left me,” he said
shortly. “To stew, as you might say, in my own time machine.”
“Really”’ I said. “Just what do
you have in mind to do next?”
“Let me ask you something, Mr.
Harrigan,” he answered. ‘Would you sit around here waiting for an atomic war if
you could get away?”
“Certainly not,” I answered.
“Well, then, I don’t intend to,
either.”
“All this while he was standing
at the door, refusing to open it any wider or to let me in. He was making it
pretty plain that there wasn’t much he had to say to me. And he seemed to be in
a hurry. Remember me to the inquiring public thirty years hence, Mr. Harrigan,”
he said at last, and closed the door.
“That was the last I saw of him.”
Harrigan finished his scotch and
soda appreciatively and looked around for the bartender.
“Did he take off then?” I asked.
“Like a rocket,” said Harrigan. “Queerest
thing was that there wasn’t a trace of him. The machine was gone, too—the same
way as the last time, without a disturbance in the shop. He and his machine had
simply vanished off the face of the earth and were never heard from again. Matter
of fact, though,” Harrigan went on thoughtfully. “Vanderkamp’s disappearance
wasn’t the really queer angle on the pitch. The other thing broke in the papers
the week after he left. The neighbors got pretty worked up about it. They
called the police to tell them that Vanderkamp’s sister Julie was back, only
she was off her nut—and a good deal changed in appearance, too.”
His face was solemn in that
moment.
“Gal going blarmy was no news, of
course, but that last bit about her appearance—they said she looked about
twenty years older, all of a sudden—sort of rang a bell. So I went over there.
It was Julie, all right; at least, she looked a hell of a lot like Julie had
when I last saw her—provided you could grant that a woman could age twenty
years in the few weeks it had been. And she was off her rocker, sure enough—or hysterical.
Or at least madder than a wet hen. She made out like she couldn’t speak a word
of English, and they finally had to get an interpreter to understand her. She
wouldn’t speak anything but Dutch—and an old-fashioned kind, too. She made a
lot of extravagant claims and kept insisting that she would bring the whole
matter up in a complaint before Governor Stuyvesant. Said she wasn’t Julie
Vanderkamp, by God, but was named Anna Van Tromp—which is an old, Dutch name
thereabouts—and claimed that she had been abducted from her home on the Bowery.
We pointed out the Third Avenue El and told her it was the Bowery, but she just
sniffed and looked at us as though we were crazy.”
I toyed with my drink. “You mean
you actually listened to the poor girl’s story?” I asked.
“Sure,” Harrigan said. “Maybe she
was as crazy as a bedbug, but I’ve listened to whackier stories from supposedly
sane people. Sure, I listened to her.” He paused thoughtfully for a moment,
then went on.
“She claimed that this fellow
Vanderkamp had come to her house and filled her with a lot of guff about the
wonderful country he lived in, and how she ought to let him take her to see it.
Apparently he waxed especially eloquent about an automatic washing-machine and
dryer, and that had fascinated her, for some reason. Then, she said, he’d
brought a ten-year-old girl along—though where in the world old Vanderkamp
could have picked up a tot like that is beyond me--and the kid had added her blandishments
to the plot. Between them, they had managed to lure her into the old guy’s machine.
From what she said, it was obviously the time machine she was talking about,
and if she was Julie there was no reason why she shouldn’t know about it. But
she talked as though it was a complete mystery to her, as though she’d no idea
what the purpose of it was. Well, anyway, here she was—and very unhappy, too.
Wanted to go back to old New Amsterdam, but bad.”
The other patiently listened,
hearing him out.
“It was a beautiful act, even if
she was nuts. The strange thing was, though, that there were some things even a
gal going whacky couldn’t explain. For instance, the house was filled with what
the experts said were priceless antiques from Dutch New Amsterdam, of the
period just prior to the British siege. You’d think those things would make
poor Julie feel more at home, seeing as she claimed to belong in that period, but
apparently they just made her homesick. And, curiously enough, all the modern
gadgets were gone. All those handy little items that make the twentieth century
so livable had been taken away—including the washing-machine and dryer, by the
way. Julie—or Anna, as she called herself—claimed that Vanderkamp had taken it
back with him, wherever he’d gone to, after he’d brought her there.”
“Poor woman,” I said
sympathetically. “They toted her off to the booby hatch, I suppose.”
“No...” Harrigan said slowly. “They
didn’t, as a matter of fact. Since she was harmless, they let her stay in the
house a while. Which was a mistake, it seems. Of course, she wasn’t from the
seventeenth century. That’s impossible. All the same—” He broke off abruptly
and stared moodily into his glass.
“What happened to her?” I asked.
“She was found one morning about
two weeks after she got there,” he said. “Dead. Electrocuted. It seems she’d
stuck her finger into a light socket while standing in a bathtub full of water.
An accident, obviously. As the Medical Examiner said, it was an accident any six-year-old
child would have known enough about electricity to avoid.
“That is,” Harrigan added. “Any twentieth-century
child.”
End
