Sixteen
Did I get it right? Communication with him, even two-way, had never been easy. Now one-way, and the wrong way at that, it was practically impossible. There were his usual emission difficulties, aggravated by a monologue that lasted hours with no possible recourse to the written word on his part. He lost his voice on and off for minutes and I had nothing but lip-movements to go by.
The contents of his account didn’t make things easier. They were notes to himself. A good deal of his hoarse whispering had to do with incomprehensible technical matters. I soon gave up trying to record them. I often nodded off during those arid stretches. He’d ball up sheets of paper and throw them in my face saying he didn’t pay me to sleep.
What I did understand I didn’t believe (except in brief moments of weakness) or didn’t want to believe. Disbelief weakened my attention. Lots of things probably got past me.
He began with an analysis of the preliminaries to voyage, the preconditions concerning machine and mind. As soon as he started in on the machine my pencil gave up. It went back to work when he began discussing mental preparatives.
On the brink of sleep was the most favorable state. At least twenty hours of sleep-deprivation was indicated. As expected, the trips had steadily improved since ray treatment and chemotherapy had come to an end. The total blockage they’d induced soon wore off. Salt and aspirin proved fatal to trip-receptivity. Cough syrup favorable. Codeine? Strong liquor disastrous, with the notable exception of gin (alkaloid of juniper-berry? Investigate). Sweet California white wine effective in sharpening perception. Note to me: any more bottles in house? If not, find brand (Lord’s Vineyards) and buy two dozen more bottles. But real receptivity breakthrough came from hospital marijuana.
At this point I almost laughed at the crazy idea of a hospital peddling joints. Later I learned from Hanna that hospitals did issue doses of marijuana to patients suffering from what he had in that stage. He’d smoked three joints in the fifty-three minutes preceding the trip, he said. Here Harvey paused and added a note that he instructed me to underline twice. Hanna should contact the hospital immediately and get more marijuana. Find precise concentration of THC, tetrahydrocannabinol, the psychoactive ingredient of cannabis sativa. He’d used up half of the monthly ration in preparation for the trip.
Now the trip itself.
Subject pinpointed and activated: Mrs Morgenstern and Mrs Weizman in conversation.
Approximate date: mid-July 1952. Error-latitude of twenty days, ten days either way.
July 1952. She’d died five months later.
All the old pain came back again. It worsened at the confused thought that somehow he’d revived her and that she’d die again. There may also have been longing to see her myself. It was one of the instants of belief, the contagion of craziness.
I immediately understood this and broke free of the pain and longing. I rejected his imminent account and its foreseen terrors as mental derangement aggravated by drugs and alcohol. He’d spent weeks on the sofa of the dead room. I’d been away for only two days. How could he possibly have attempted ten trips in that brief time? Or tested all that alcohol, whiskey, rum, vodka, gin, etc? Inevitably it would have ended in a titanic binge, fatal in his condition.
It was all another manifestation of his mental state. I knew I should feel sorry for him but I couldn’t forgive him for involving my mother in his ravings.
He went on, now analyzing the quality of the image. (Why didn’t he say something about my mother?) This had had been excellent. The one difference with normal perception was a slight accentuation of the three-dimensional effect, similar to what an old-fashioned stereoscope gave you. Expected but oppressive for the first few minutes was an absolute silence unmatchable in here-time. There was little chance this audio deficiency would ever be remedied. Here Harvey went into more technical considerations and I was awakened by the first of the paper-balls.
The two women had been seated there in the living room chatting in that absolute silence. After a while he’d been able to do a little lip-reading. For his mother it was easy. He saw his name on her lips constantly and although he couldn’t make out exactly what she was saying about him the facial expressions he remembered so well guided him. So he knew when she was talking about his scholastic and professional achievements, about his hush-hush Government project, about his health. He could almost resurrect it all verbatim from memory. He saw her dabbing at her eyes and that could only be Rachel.
It had been harder to read Mrs Weizman’s lips with the exception of that one phrase about her son.
What phrase? I couldn’t help asking, pencil poised, in a quick return to semi-belief. He ignored my question.
A major disappointment was the partial failure of image-stabilization, something he’d only gradually realized. The temporal sequence accessible to visit proved to be only a few minutes long and not the hour he’d activated on the screen and which included the arrival of women friends with cakes and an ensuing bridge-game. He’d never witnessed it in then-time. There was only that preliminary chat.
If the trip lasted as long as it had (measured in here-time: four hours and two minutes) it was because the scene was repeated over and over, something not too easy to detect when the subject was two middle-aged women chatting statically in armchairs. It was only slowly that he realized they were saying the same things over and over to a degree that surpassed remembered reality at least for Mrs Weizman.
She couldn’t have said as often as she had, “I’m so worried about Jerry.” He’d had great leisure in that month of subjective there-time to read their lips and see Mrs Weizman say it perhaps a hundred times.
Worried about what? I almost blurted it out, although I could guess her reasons. I badly wanted to reassure her, tell her it had ended with just a suspended sentence a day before her death, that I’d given up the book-business, had been watching my step ever since, didn’t so much as jay-walk any more, had finally, years later, landed a university job and had lived far longer than she had and was in reasonably good health, physically speaking.
Compensating for the limitation on objective duration was the radical modification of time-perception, a confirmation of conjecture and the justification of forty years of research. Then-time relived proved to be closer to titmouse-time than to human time. Just what the ratio of difference between objective now-time and subjective then-time was couldn’t be determined. Subjective time was by definition not measurable. He judged the ratio to have been somewhere in a margin of 1: 25-50. Meaning that one second of our objective now-time expanded to approximately half a minute or a whole minute. On emergence, that idiotic brutal emergence, (why had I let Hanna do that?) he’d had the impression of having spent weeks, perhaps a month in the living room.
Time slowdown more than offset random spatial selection. The visitor wasn’t in control of the images. They didn’t obey his will. The person you wanted to see and approach was there of course because you’d selected that scene with her there. But once you were transported (“projected” would be a more accurate term) everything had equal value, things and people. You would contemplate a curtain-fold for a day of subjective then-time before the two women returned, still chatting. But that curtain-fold, or carpet pattern or table-edge or whatever gave you the same indescribable feeling as the view of the people.
Here Harvey broke off and his eyes closed. I could imagine them white and brain-directed again beneath the lids. Maybe a minute went by. I was on the brink of dozing off myself. But he wasn’t sleeping. He was searching for the word. Finally he opened his eyes and pronounced a word I’d never heard on his lips. “Joy,” he said. Not even a whole day’s contemplation of a flowerpot was a deprivation. The joy was just a little muted. You knew she was there behind you in that room. You knew Momma was there in the flowered armchair chatting with Mrs Weizman in the striped armchair. The joy couldn’t be described. Deep and lasting as it couldn’t be here. When had he last felt such joy? Maybe never before in his lif
e. And she was there to be revisited whenever he liked. And maybe the subjective time-ratio could be indefinitely extended. Couldn’t a second of “here-time” be expanded to an hour of “there-time”?
He invited me, mathematical wizard, to figure it out, how long if the trip lasted twenty-four hours of objective here-time? He leaned forward stiffly and stared into my eyes. How long? Quick! And quickly I said, “A couple of days short of five years.” Strangely I had no trouble doing that. It came out as on a calculator-screen at the touch of a finger.
Later, in bed, I laboriously went through the calculations and reached 43,000 hours. Divided by 24 that gave you 1791 days: four years, 331 days, nearly five years as I’d said spontaneously.
He went on and on. It went past me. I did get what turned out to be the final observation. Control of the trip-experience was of course necessary. There might well be personal variables. How much of the experience derived from subjectivity? Would another mind have experienced the same time-differential, the feeling of joy? There would have to be another time-traveler.
He stopped.
There was silence in the cellar where we were seated facing each other. I finished scribbling what he’d said and stared down at it. The silence went on. I imagined he’d fallen asleep again. I looked up into his blood-shot eyes staring into mine.
After a while I looked down at the pad again, underlined certain things, distributed punctuation marks and then I fell asleep for I don’t know how long. What awakened me was the slap of the pad and clatter of the pencil on the cement floor. They’d slipped off my lap. Harvey was asleep. I bent down to pick up the pad and pencil.
Near his feet I saw joint-butts and a second bottle of Lord’s Vineyards. It was empty. I also noticed that the tinkered permanent-wave helmet was unplugged. Of course it might have happened when Hanna bear-hugged him and the helmet fell off his skull. But that wasn’t likely.
It had been a good trip, all right. Stewed and stoned the way he was he could have visited the moons of Jupiter and dictated all the details to me. He probably would have said he saw my mother sitting there in an icy crater, worrying about me. Or even the girl I’d shown those moons to. I remembered their names: Io and Europa. What was the girl’s name again? I was very tired. I went to bed.