Produced by Greg Weeks, Stephen Blundell and the OnlineDistributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net
Transcriber's Note:
This etext was produced from _A Martian Odyssey and Others_ published in 1949. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed. Minor spelling and typographical errors have been corrected without note. The square root symbol has been transcribed as [sq].
THE WORLDS OF IF
I stopped on the way to the Staten Island Airport to call up, and thatwas a mistake, doubtless, since I had a chance of making it otherwise.But the office was affable. "We'll hold the ship five minutes for you,"the clerk said. "That's the best we can do."
So I rushed back to my taxi and we spun off to the third level and spedacross the Staten bridge like a comet treading a steel rainbow. I had tobe in Moscow by evening, by eight o'clock, in fact, for the opening ofbids on the Ural Tunnel. The Government required the personal presenceof an agent of each bidder, but the firm should have known better thanto send me, Dixon Wells, even though the N. J. Wells Corporation is, soto speak, my father. I have a--well, an undeserved reputation for beinglate to everything; something always comes up to prevent me from gettinganywhere on time. It's never my fault; this time it was a chanceencounter with my old physics professor, old Haskel van Manderpootz. Icouldn't very well just say hello and good-bye to him; I'd been afavorite of his back in the college days of 2014.
I missed the airliner, of course. I was still on the Staten Bridge whenI heard the roar of the catapult and the Soviet rocket _Baikal_ hummedover us like a tracer bullet with a long tail of flame.
We got the contract anyway; the firm wired our man in Beirut and he flewup to Moscow, but it didn't help my reputation. However, I felt a greatdeal better when I saw the evening papers; the _Baikal_, flying at thenorth edge of the eastbound lane to avoid a storm, had locked wings witha British fruitship and all but a hundred of her five hundredpassengers were lost. I had almost become "the late Mr. Wells" in agrimmer sense.
I'd made an engagement for the following week with old van Manderpootz.It seems he'd transferred to N.Y.U. as head of the department of NewerPhysics--that is, of Relativity. He deserved it; the old chap was agenius if ever there was one, and even now, eight years out of college,I remember more from his course than from half a dozen calculus, steamand gas, mechanics, and other hazards on the path to an engineer'seducation. So on Tuesday night I dropped in an hour or so late, to tellthe truth, since I'd forgotten about the engagement until mid-evening.
He was reading in a room as disorderly as ever. "Humph!" he grunted."Time changes everything but habit, I see. You were a good student,Dick, but I seem to recall that you always arrived in class toward themiddle of the lecture."
"I had a course in East Hall just before," I explained. "I couldn't seemto make it in time."
"Well, it's time you learned to be on time," he growled. Then his eyestwinkled. "Time!" he ejaculated. "The most fascinating word in thelanguage. Here we've used it five times (there goes the sixth time--andthe seventh!) in the first minute of conversation; each of usunderstands the other, yet science is just beginning to learn itsmeaning. Science? I mean that _I_ am beginning to learn."
I sat down. "You and science are synonymous," I grinned. "Aren't you oneof the world's outstanding physicists?"
"One of them!" he snorted. "One of them, eh! And who are the others?"
"Oh, Corveille and Hastings and Shrimski--"
"Bah! Would you mention them in the same breath with the name of vanManderpootz? A pack of jackals, eating the crumbs of ideas that dropfrom my feast of thoughts! Had you gone back into the last century,now--had you mentioned Einstein and de Sitter--there, perhaps, are namesworthy to rank with (or just below) van Manderpootz!"
I grinned again in amusement. "Einstein was considered pretty good,wasn't he?" I remarked. "After all, he was the first to tie time andspace to the laboratory. Before him they were just philosophicalconcepts."
"He didn't!" rasped the professor. "Perhaps, in a dim, primitivefashion, he showed the way, but I--_I_, van Manderpootz--am the first toseize time, drag it into my laboratory, and perform an experiment onit."
"Indeed? And what sort of experiment?"
"What experiment, other than simple measurement, is it possible toperform?" he snapped.
"Why--I don't know. To travel in it?"
"Exactly."
"Like these time-machines that are so popular in the current magazines?To go into the future or the past?"
"Bah! Many bahs! The future or the past--pfui! It needs no vanManderpootz to see the fallacy in that. Einstein showed us that much."
"How? It's conceivable, isn't it?"
"Conceivable? And you, Dixon Wells, studied under van Manderpootz!" Hegrew red with emotion, then grimly calm. "Listen to me. You know howtime varies with the speed of a system--Einstein's relativity."
"Yes."
"Very well. Now suppose then that the great engineer Dixon Wells inventsa machine capable of traveling very fast, enormously fast, nine-tenthsas fast as light. Do you follow? Good. You then fuel this miracle shipfor a little jaunt of a half million miles, which, since mass (and withit inertia) increases according to the Einstein formula with increasingspeed, takes all the fuel in the world. But you solve that. You useatomic energy. Then, since at nine-tenths light-speed, your ship weighsabout as much as the sun, you disintegrate North America to give yousufficient motive power. You start off at that speed, a hundred andsixty-eight thousand miles per second, and you travel for two hundredand four thousand miles. The acceleration has now crushed you to death,but you have penetrated the future." He paused, grinning sardonically."Haven't you?"
"Yes."
"And how far?"
I hesitated.
"Use your Einstein formula!" he screeched. "How far? I'll tell you. _Onesecond!_" He grinned triumphantly. "That's how possible it is to travelinto the future. And as for the past--in the first place, you'd have toexceed light-speed, which immediately entails the use of more than aninfinite number of horsepowers. We'll assume that the great engineerDixon Wells solves that little problem too, even though the energyout-put of the whole universe is not an infinite number of horsepowers.Then he applies this more than infinite power to travel at two hundredand four thousand miles per second for _ten_ seconds. He has thenpenetrated the past. How far?"
Again I hesitated.
"I'll tell you. _One second!_" He glared at me. "Now all you have to dois to design such a machine, and then van Manderpootz will admit thepossibility of traveling into the future--for a limited number ofseconds. As for the past, I have just explained that all the energy inthe universe is insufficient for that."
"But," I stammered, "you just said that you--"
"I did _not_ say anything about traveling into either future or past,which I have just demonstrated to you to be impossible--a practicalimpossibility in the one case and an absolute one in the other."
"Then how _do_ you travel in time?"
"Not even van Manderpootz can perform the impossible," said theprofessor, now faintly jovial. He tapped a thick pad of typewriter paperon the table beside him. "See, Dick, this is the world, the universe."He swept a finger down it. "It is long in time, and"--sweeping his handacross it--"it is broad in space, but"--now jabbing his finger againstits center--"it is very thin in the fourth dimension. Van Manderpootztakes always the shortest, the most logical course. I do not travelalong time, into past or future. No. Me, I travel across time,sideways!"
I gulped. "Sideways into time! What's there?"
"What would naturally be there?" he snorted. "Ahead is the future;behind is the past. Those are real, the worlds of past and future. Whatworlds
are neither past nor future, but contemporary andyet--extemporal--existing, as it were, in time parallel to our time?"
I shook my head.
"Idiot!" he snapped. "The conditional worlds, of course! The worlds of'if.' Ahead are the worlds to be; behind are the worlds that were; toeither side are the worlds that might have been--the worlds of 'if!'"
"Eh?" I was puzzled. "Do you mean that you can see what will happen if Ido such and such?"
"No!" he snorted. "My machine