The Seeds of Time

‘But I’m not Mrs Tallboy,’ she said. ‘I’m Mrs Peter Ruddle.’

‘I suppose you find that amusing,’ I told her, bitterly, ‘but to me it isn’t very funny,’ I added. And it was not: there had been a time when what I hoped for above all else was to hear Jean call herself Mrs Peter Ruddle. I looked at her steadily.

‘Jean,’ I said. ‘This is not your kind of joke-it’s a cruel kind.’

She looked as steadily back at me for some seconds. Then I saw her eyes change; they glistened a little.

‘Oh!’ she said, as if she had seen something there. ‘Oh, this is dreadful!… Oh, dear! … I-Oh, Peter, help me,’ she said-but the appeal was to the other man, not to me. I turned to him, too.

‘Look here,’ I said. ‘I don’t know who you are, or what’s going on, but ‘

‘Oh,’ he said, as if suddenly enlightened. ‘No, of course you don’t. I’m Peter Ruddle.’

There was a longish pause. I decided I had had enough of being made to look a fool, and started to turn away. He said:

‘Isn’t there somewhere we can go and talk? You see, we’re both of us Peter Ruddle, that’s what’s making it all so difficult.’

‘I look on “difficult” as an understatement,’ I said, coldly, and started to walk off.

‘But you don’t see,’ said his voice behind me. ‘It’s old Whetstone’s machine, man. It works!’

My own house was evidently barred to us, and the only nearby place that I could think of at the moment was the upstairs room of the Jubilee Cafe. Most of the people who worked at the Institute would be knocking off about now, and still trickling out for an hour to come. I had no desire to confirm the impression of my private affairs that had already reached the Director, so I went ahead to the cafe, found there was no one in the upstairs room, and beckoned through the window to them. The girl who brought us tea was not a bright type. If she noticed our likeness at all, it made no perceptible impression on her. When she had left, Jean poured out, and we started to get down to things.

‘You’ll remember,’ said my double, leaning forward earnestly, ‘you’ll remember old Whetstone’s concept of time? He used to give that rough analogy about the sea freezing. The present was represented by the leading edge of the ice, gradually building up and advancing. Behind it was the solid ice that represented the past: in front, the still fluid water represented the future. You could tell that a given number of the moving molecules which represented the future would become frozen in a given space of time, but you couldn’t predict which, nor in what relationship they would be to one another.

‘About the solid stuff behind, the past, he thought you could probably do nothing; but he reckoned that somehow or other you ought to be able to find a way of pushing out a little ahead of the main freezing line, which is the present. If you could do that, you would be creating little advanced bridgeheads of frozen-that is to say, factualized-matter. This must, in due course, be overtaken by, and thus become part of, the advancing present. In other words, by going a little ahead you would create a bit of future which would have to come true. You couldn’t choose which molecules you would bind together, but those that you found would be solidified by your finding them, and therefore become inevitable.’

‘Yes, I remember that well,’ I told him. ‘It was cockeyed.’

‘Certainly it was cockeyed,’ he agreed promptly. ‘Everyone who ever tried to give him a hand came to that conclusion sooner or later, and cleared out. But he wouldn’t see it. Obstinate as a mule over that, he was.’ He glanced at Jean.

‘It’s all right. I know,’ she said, sadly. He went on: ‘He would keep on trying to make that machine of his support his theory-which, of course, it couldn’t possibly do with a theory that was all up the pole. And because of that he wouldn’t follow up the leads that the thing did give. Nothing would loosen him up on that theory, with the result that he overworked and worried himself by trying to pin down the impossible.

‘And so he died-sooner than he need have done-and his stuff just stayed there, with no one quite liking to disturb it.

‘Now, shortly after Jean and I got married ‘

I felt the fog beginning to come down on me again.

‘But Jean didn’t marry you. She married Freddie,’ I objected.

‘Wait a minute. I’m just coming to that. As I said, not long after we were married I had an idea, quite a different idea about this time business. Jean agreed that I should use her father’s apparatus-as much of it as could be useful to see if I could work the idea out, if possible. To some extent I have succeeded, and this is the result.’ He paused.