The Seeds of Time

‘But we weren’t, I mean we didn’t …’

‘Night, and the figure two,’ I told her, ‘are plenty for our conventions. In fact, two is enough, anyway. You will recall that the animals simply went in two by two; their emotional relationships didn’t interest anyone. Two; and all is assumed.’

‘Oh, of course, I remember, there was no probative then - now, I mean. You have a sort of rigid, lucky-dip, take-it-or-leave-it system.’

There are other ways of expressing it, but-well, ostensibly at any rate, yes, I suppose.’

‘Rather crude, these old customs, when one sees them at close range-but fascinating,’ she remarked. Her eyes rested thoughtfully upon me for a second. ‘You ‘ she began.

‘You,’ I reminded her, ‘promised to give me a more explanatory explanation of all this than you achieved yesterday.’

‘You didn’t believe me.’

‘The first wallop took my breath,’ I admitted, ‘but you’ve given me enough evidence since. Nobody could keep up an act like that.’

She frowned.

‘I don’t think that’s very kind of you. I’ve studied the mid-Twentieth very thoroughly. It was my Special Period.’

‘So you told me, but that doesn’t get me far. All historical scholars have Special Periods, but that doesn’t mean that they suddenly turn up in them.’

She stared at me. ‘But of course they do-licensed historians. How else would they make close studies?’

“There’s too much of this “of course” business,’ I told her.

‘I suggest we just begin at the beginning. Now this letter of mine-no, we’ll skip the letter,’ I added hastily as I caught her expression. ‘Now, you went to work in your uncle’s laboratory with something called a history machine. What’s that-a kind of tape-recorder?’

‘Good gracious, no. It’s a kind of cupboard thing you get into to go to times and places.’

‘Oh,’ I said. ‘You-you mean you can walk into it in something, and walk out into something?’

‘Or any other past time,’ she said, nodding. ‘But, of course, not anybody can do it. You have to be qualified and licensed and all that kind of thing. There are only six permitted history machines in England, and only about a hundred in the whole world, and they’re very strict about them.

‘When the first ones were made they didn’t realize what trouble they might cause, but after a time historians began to check the trips made against the written records of the periods, and started to find funny things. There was Hero demonstrating a simple steam-turbine at Alexandria sometime B.C.; and Archimedes using a kind of napalm at the siege of Syracuse; and Leonardo da Vinci drawing parachutes when there wasn’t anything to parachute from; and Eric the Red discovering America in a sort of off-the-record way before Columbus got there; and Napoleon wondering about submarines; and lots of other suspicious things. So it was clear that some people had been careless when they used the machine, and had been causing chronoclasms.’

‘Causing-what?’

‘Chronoclasms-that’s when a thing goes and happens at the wrong time because somebody was careless, or talked rashly.

‘Well, most of these things had happened without causing very much harm-as far as we can tell-though it is possible that the natural course of history was altered several times, and people write very clever papers to show how. But everybody saw that the results might be extremely dangerous. Just suppose that somebody had carelessly given Napoleon the idea of the internal combustion engine to add to the idea of the submarine; there’s no telling what would have happened. So they decided that tampering must be stopped at once, and all history machines were forbidden except those licensed by the Historians’ Council.’

‘Just hold it a minute,’ I said. ‘Look, if a thing is done, it’s done. I mean, well, for example, I am here. I couldn’t suddenly cease to be, or to have been, if somebody were to go back and kill my grandfather when he was a boy.’

‘But you certainly couldn’t be here if they did, could you?’ she asked. ‘No, the fallacy that the past is unchangeable didn’t matter a bit as long as there was no means of changing it, but once there was, and the fallacy of the idea was shown, we had to be very careful indeed. That’s what a historian has to worry about; the other side-just how it happens-we leave to the higher-mathematicians.

‘Now, before you are allowed to use the history machine you have to have special courses, tests, permits, and give solemn undertakings, and then do several years on probation before you get your licence to practise. Only then are you allowed to visit and observe on your own. And that is all you may do, observe. The rule is very, very strict.’

I thought that over. ‘If it isn’t an unkind question-aren’t you breaking rather a lot of these rules every minute?’ I suggested.

‘Of course I am. That’s why they came after me,’ she said.

‘You’d have had your licence revoked, or something, if they’d caught you?’

‘Good gracious. I could never qualify for a licence. I’ve just sneaked my trips when the lab. has been empty sometimes. It being Uncle Donald’s lab. made things easier because unless I was actually caught at the machine I could always pretend I was doing something special for him. ‘I had to have the right clothes to come in, but I dared not go to the historians’ regular costume-makers, so I sketched some things in a museum and got them copied— they’re all right, aren’t they?’