The Man Who Mastered Time 3 – Cummings · Verses Across
Literature · Adventure
The Man Who Mastered Time 3Chapter 3
18
Literature · Adventure
The Man Who Mastered Time 3
Chapter 3
CummingsEnglish
First I want you all to know, I'm quite safe and well. Mamita dear, please try not to worry about me. Remember, Father we anticipated I might decide it best to send you a message. I do hope I have calculated the space-and time-factors correctly, and that I've set the mechanisms of the cube so that it will come back to you within a day or two after my departure. I'm assuming that is so.
You will understand, of course, that as I have lived time, it has been far longer than that. Much has happened to me, and I want to tell you now what I can of it.
You recall that night when I left you--to me now it seems so long ago. I remember your solemn faces as I closed the door of the cabin after me. I was in the forward one of the three compartments--you saw it when you inspected the plane the night I started.
In this compartment are the controls for the Frazia motors and the flying controls. The controls of my own mechanism are there also. These are simple; merely a switch to regulate the proton current, as Father and I call it, and a series of small dials for recording the time-change. These dials are geared, with one for days, another for days in multiples of ten, one for years, and others for years in multiples of tens, hundreds, and thousands.
I took my seat behind the Frazia controls. I was not going to use them at once, because there was no immediate need to raise the plane into the air. But I wanted to be seated; I could not tell what the shock of starting might be. The dials and switch were on the wall at my right. I moved the lever of the switch over to the first intensity. There was a low hum. The floor seemed to rock under me. The humming increased; it roared in my ears. Everything was vibrating with an infinitely tiny, trembling quiver that penetrated into my body, into my bones, even coursed through my blood.
They were swift sensations, I suppose, lasting no more than a few seconds. I felt, as near as I can explain it, as though some force that holds my own body together, cell by cell, were being tampered with; as if, had the struggle continued, I might be shattered into a myriad of tiny fragments, like a puff of exploded powder.
The humming grew still louder, and I remember trying to stand up. A wild impulse to throw back the switch and stop the thing came to me, but I resisted it. Then I was conscious of a sensation of falling headlong; a dizzy, sickening reeling of the senses, rather than the body.
I lost consciousness--for only a moment or two, I think. I was sitting in my seat, uninjured. The humming was still in my ears, insistent. But it was not so loud as I had thought, and after a time I forgot it almost entirely.
My first impression now was that everything about me was glowing, radiating a phosphorescent light. I looked down at my knees; my clothes were glowing. I could no longer distinguish color; my hands and my shoes were the same--all that same glowing phosphorescence. It gave a sense of unreality to everything. And then I saw that everything was unreal; nothing had any substance. I could distinguish the side of the cabin through my hand, and beyond the cabin wall I could see the solidity of the board enclosure where the plane was resting. It was as though my body and the cabin interior were shimmering ghosts. But when I gripped my knee with my hand, I felt solid enough.
I have given you details of my sensations as I remember them now, but I do not suppose that more than a minute or two had elapsed since I had first pulled the switch. I glanced at the dial recording the passage of days but there was no movement.
I stood up, conscious of a nausea and a strong feeling of light-headedness. I peered through one of the side windows. Outside, everything looked at first glance as though I had not yet started. The walls of the enclosure were clear, solid and as distinct as before. Then I saw George staring directly at me, and I could tell by the expression of his face that he was looking, not at the plane, but at an empty space where the plane had been.
It was all as real outside as though I had been part of it myself--until I saw the others move across the enclosure. They were walking extremely fast and their gestures were rapid; two or three times more rapid than normal.
For what seemed like five or ten minutes I stood there watching you all. It was like a moving picture being run too fast--and being constantly accelerated. I saw you roll back the canvas roof, and then you went scurrying out through the door--the last of you so fast that the figure blurred in my sight.
I was left alone. For a while I sat there, a little dazed. There is a small clock on the side wall of the cabin. It might have been completely radium-painted, by the look of it at that moment, but even though it glowed as intangible as a ghost, I could make out the hands. I was sure they would be traveling through space at their accustomed speed and thus give me the time of the world I had left. I had started at about ten minutes of ten; the clock now showed about five minutes after ten. I had been gone fifteen minutes. Above the enclosure, to the east, I saw the moon. It was about an hour up, I judged. And that gave me a basis to compute my starting acceleration. The moon an hour up would have made your time ten minutes of two--four hours after I started. I had passed through those first four hours in fifteen minutes!
This was with my control at the weakest intensity of the current. There are twenty subdivisions of power. I pushed the handle around from one to the other of them quickly, pausing only an instant on each, and stopping at the tenth. There was no change of sensation, except that the humming seemed to grow, not louder exactly, but more powerful--more penetrating. The interior of the cabin and my own body lost visible density in appearance. You had switched off the electric lights outside, but in the moonlight I could still see the board walls, not only through the windows, but through the metallic sides of the cabin.
I was tingling all over, but the sensation, now that I was used to it, was pleasant rather than the reverse; a feeling of lightness, buoyancy and strength.
With the power increased tenfold, the acceleration of time-movement was enormous. The movement of the rising moon became visible; the heavens were turning over, the stars progressing from point to point with ever increasing speed.
About ten minutes after ten by the clock, the moon was near the zenith, and the sun rose an instant later. I was conscious of a flash of twilight, and the sun's disk shot up from the horizon. The world was plunged into daylight.
From my position inside the enclosure I could see nothing outside but the sky and one or two of the tallest buildings near at hand. There was no visible movement of anything but the sun. You can understand that, of course. Had any of you come into the enclosure, or had an airplane passed overhead, I would not have seen either one. The movement would have been too rapid for my vision.
In perhaps a minute or two the sun was directly overhead, and in another fraction of a minute it had set. Darkness was upon me. Then the moon rose again and flashed across the heavens. Clouds formed and disappeared so quickly I could hardly see them.
I glanced at the dial recording days. Its hand was moving. One day had passed, and the hand was traveling toward the next.
For ten minutes or so I sat there, while day succeeded night and night came again, only to be followed almost instantly by the day light. Soon I could distinguish only thin streaks of light as the sun and moon crossed above me--streaks that came closer together, merged into one, and separated again as the month passed. And then the days became so brief that they blurred with the nights. A grayness settled upon everything; the mingled twilight of light and darkness.
The hand of the day dial was sweeping around swiftly. I looked at the dial beside it, which recorded days in multiples of ten. Its pointer was also moving. Forty odd days were recorded and the movement was accelerating every instant.
I thought then I had better leave the rooftop. I started the Frazia 'copters, and rose about a thousand feet. Then I slowed them down until a balance with gravity was maintained, and I hung stationary. You may be surprised that the flying mechanism was effective while I was sweeping so swiftly through time. If our atmosphere did not persist in time, the propellers would have exerted no pressure against it. But the air does persist, and so does gravity.
There was apparently no wind. The transient winds and storms of a few hours were all blended. The result, however, must have been a slight influence to the north, for I found myself drifting very slowly in that direction. After a few moments my time-velocity had so increased that even that drift was averaged. I hung motionless.
From this height--a thousand feet above the southern boundary of Central Park--the scene below me was a strange one. At first glance, I might have been hanging in a balloon on a dull, soundless day very heavily overcast. Except that the sky, instead of showing dark clouds, was a queer, luminous gray blur that distinguished nothing.
The city below me lay clear cut but absolutely shadowless, which gave it a very extraordinary look of flatness--a vista of buildings painted upon a huge, concave canvas. Colors were distinguishable, but they were abnormally grayish and drab. Vague, unreal pencil points of light dotted the scene--electric lights that were on every night in the same spots, and off in the daytime--the blended effect of which was visible. There was no sound. Nor was there motion. It looked like a dead, empty city. The streets seemed deserted, with not even a blur to mark those millions of transitory movements of humans and vehicles that I knew were taking place.
I had been conscious of a brief period of chill, and for a moment or two the scene had assumed a whiter aspect, especially in the park. I conceived this as a blending of several heavy, lingering snowfalls of the winter.
The lowest dial, marking days, now showed only a blur as its pointer swept around. And the year-dial pointer was visibly moving. I had passed one year and was well into the second. The clock showed ten thirty. I had been gone forty minutes!
I said there was no visible movement in the scene beneath me. That was so, at first, but I soon began to see plenty of movement. The white look had come and gone again--far briefer this time--when my attention was caught by a building on Broadway, along in the Fifties somewhere. It was a broad but low building, no more than eight or ten stories high; the lowest in its immediate vicinity. It seemed now to be melting before my eyes! That is the only way I can describe it--melting. Parts of it were vanishing! It was dismembering, as though piece by piece it was being taken apart and carried away. Which, of course, is exactly what was happening.
Can you form a mental picture of that? I hope so, for it was characteristic of all the movement that now began to assume visibility throughout the silent city. This building that melted--I come back to that word because it seems the only one suitable--was gone in a moment or two. Try to conceive that I did not see actual movement--not the physical movement we are accustomed to. They were tearing down that building--doubtless over a period of weeks. But I could not see any specific thing being done, any part of the building come off and move away. All such details were too rapid--far too rapid. What I saw, rather, was the effect of movement; a change of aspect, not the movement itself. The building progressively looked smaller, until at last it was not there.
Then another building began rising in its place. It grew steadily. It was as if I were blinking, and between each blink, with an unseen movement, it had leaped upward another story. It seemed a skeleton at first, and then it was clothed. I watched it, ignoring others further away, until it stood complete--a full block in depth and thirty or forty stories high.
I began to realize now the tremendous acceleration of time velocity I was undergoing. The year-dial pointer very soon had moved to ten years; the pointer of the century-dial was stirring. Again I glanced at the clock. It was after eleven; I had been gone about an hour and a quarter.
There was nothing that I had to do, and I moved about the cabin, looking out of each of the windows in turn. The city was rising; not one building, but hundreds. As my time velocity increased, I could no longer see them come and go individually. They were there--and then they were were gone, and others always larger and higher were in their stead.
So I say the city was rising, coming up to meet me as I hung a thousand feet or more above it. Already one gigantic edifice to the south seemed to rear its spire far above me. The edges of the island stayed low, a fringe of the new and old mingled; but down the backbone, roughly following Broadway, great piles of steel and masonry were coming up.
To the southeast I could make out the bridges over the river. There were others now, extraordinarily broad and high, dwarfing the older ones that stood neglected beside them.
It was a period of tremendous activity. And suddenly I discovered that the southern half of Central Park was obliterated. I had drifted a little further north and was over it. A building was rising, coming up toward me so swiftly that its outlines were blurred and shadowy. I was gazing down through the window in the floor of the cabin, and caught a vague impression of a network of gigantic steel girders almost underneath the machine.
I was too low. I ascended perhaps another thousand feet. When I was again hanging stationary, I found beneath me a tremendous terraced building--a pyramid with its apex sliced off. To the north and south it connected with others of its kind; giant structures generally of pyramid shape, with streets running along their steplike terraces. Innumerable bridges connected these mammoth buildings, so that north and south, and for a few blocks east and west of the center, there were continuous aerial streets, in some places as many as ten or fifteen, one above the other.
I turned to the window facing the north. There was now nothing but buildings as far as my line of vision extended; buildings like a ridge down the center, shading off to the lower areas of the east and west. There were trees and parks in spots on the top, but the original ground was covered.
Some of the upper street levels--those alternate sections of terraces and bridges over courtyards whose ground was merely the rooftops of lower edifices--were laid with gleaming rails. And rearing itself above everything, a skeleton structure of monorails stretched north and south--eight or ten single rails paralleled at widths of some fifty feet, which I realized must be carrying some system of aerial railroad.
This towering pile was indeed the backbone of the city, extending roughly north and south like a mountain range that forms the backbone of a continent. The lower areas adjacent--five hundred feet above the ground, perhaps--were for the most part buildings with broad, flat roofs.
In New Jersey, on Long Island, and north of Manhattan as far as I could see, lesser cities had appeared, with occasional giants among buildings that were lower. The whole was now welded into one, for the rivers on each side of me were spanned by a bridge at almost every street; a network of bridges under which the water flowed almost unnoticed.
My time-velocity was still accelerating. I saw now, increasingly, many things about the city that were shadowy--structures that were erected and stood no more than twenty or thirty years, perhaps, which to my vision now was only a moment. I became aware, not only below me, but even above me, of occasional vague aerial structures; skeletons that reared themselves up a few thousand feet and dissipated into nothing before I could form a conception of their real nature.
There was, indeed, everywhere this shadowy aspect as to detail. Changes were taking place; things were being done even the effect of which was too fleeting for my vision to grasp.
I was constantly losing more details, but in general the growth of the city was outward and upward. Presently there came a pause, as though the city were resting. Occasional areas were blurred by their changing form; across the river in Jersey a tremendous tower was rising into the sky far above me. But as a whole the scene had quieted. My brain was confused by what I had tried to observe and comprehend. I found myself hungry and a little faint. I dropped into my seat.
The dials beside me caught my attention. The century-dial pointer had passed eighteen. Eighteen hundred years, and approaching two thousand even as I sat staring at it. The clock marked one forty. I had been gone almost four hours. I said the city was resting. That is true. The growth of two thousand years had carried it to splendors of mechanical perfection that I could only guess at. But now it seemed to have reached its height; the summit of human achievement had been attained.
I waited and watched through another period. There were changes, but they were minor. I suppose all the buildings and various structures decayed and were replenished. I do not know. The changes were too fleeting for me to see, and the general form remained the same.
I was at what seemed the pinnacle of civilization, where mankind was resting and enjoying the results of its labors. Decadence was bound to come, as truly as death followed birth.
The clock now recorded two fifty. I had been gone five hours. The century-dial was beyond thirty-seven hundred years. Two thousand years of growth upward from our own time-world, and only two thousand more of resting on the summit before the inevitable decline began. He who stands still, goes backward. And so it is with mankind as a whole. This triumphant city went down almost as quickly at it had come up. And through the windows of that cabin I watched it--neglected a little at first, then more and more as its softened masters, with nature turned against them, became unable to cope with it, until at last it broke up and sank back into ruin, decay and desolation.
