A TRAVELER IN TIME by August Derleth
"Tell me what time is," said Harrigan one
late summer afternoon in a
Madison Street bar. "I'd like to know."
"A dimension," I answered. "Everybody knows
that."
"All right, granted. I know space is a dimension
and you can move
forward or back in space. And, of course,
you keep on aging all the
time."
"Elementary," I said.
"But what happens if you can move backward
or forward in time? Do you
age or get younger, or do you keep the status
quo?"
"I'm not an authority on time, Tex. Do you
know anyone who traveled in
time?"
Harrigan shrugged aside my question. "That
was the thing I couldn't get
out of Vanderkamp, either. He presumed to
know everything else."
"Vanderkamp?"
"He was another of those strange people a
reporter always runs into.
Lived in New York--downtown, near the Bowery.
Man of about forty, I'd
say, but a little on the old-fashioned side.
Dutch background, and
hipped on the subject of New Amsterdam, which,
in case you don't know,
was the original name of New York City."
"Don't mind my interrupting," I cut in. "But
I'm not quite straight on
what Vanderkamp has to do with time as dimension."
"Oh, he was touched on the subject. He claimed
to travel in it. The fact
is, he invented a time-traveling machine."
"You certainly meet the whacks, Tex!"
"Don't I!" He grinned appreciatively and leaned
reminiscently over the
bar. "But Vanderkamp had the wildest dreams
of the lot. And in the end
he managed the neatest conjuring trick of
them all. I was on the
Brooklyn Enterprise at that time; I spent
about a year there. Special
features, though I was on a reporter's salary.
Vanderkamp was something
of a local celebrity in a minor way; he wrote
articles on the early
Dutch in New York, the nomenclature of the
Dutch, the history of Dutch
place-names, and the like. He was handy with
a pen, and even handier
with tools. He was an amateur electrician,
carpenter, house-painter, and
claimed to be an expert in genealogy."
"And he built a time-traveling machine?"
"So he said. He gave me a rather hard time
of it. He was a glib talker
and half the time I didn't know whether I
was coming or going. He kept
me on my toes by taking for granted that I
accepted his basic premises.
I got next to him on a tip. He could be close-mouthed
as a clam, but his
sister let things slip from time to time,
and on this occasion she
passed the word to one of her friends in a
grocery store that her
brother had invented a machine that took him
off on trips into the past.
It seemed like routine whack stuff, but Blake,
who decided what went
into the Enterprise and what didn't, sent
me over to Manhattan to get
something for the paper, on the theory that
since Vanderkamp was
well-known in Brooklyn, it was good neighborhood
copy.
"Vanderkamp was a sharp-eyed little fellow,
about five feet or so in
height, and I hit him at a good time. His
sister said he had just come
back from a trip--she left me to draw my own
conclusions about what kind
of trip--and I found him in a mild fit of
temper. He was too upset, in
fact, to be truculent, which was more like
his nature.
"Was it true, I wanted to know, that he'd
invented a machine that
traveled in time?
"He didn't make any bones about it. 'Certainly,'
he said. 'I've been
using it for the last month, and if my sister
hadn't decided to blab
nobody would know about it yet. What about
it?'
"'You believe it can take you backwards or
forwards into the past or the
future?'
"'Do I look crazy? I said so, didn't I?'
"Now, as a matter of fact, he did look crazy.
Unlike most of the
candidates for my file of queer people, Vanderkamp
actually looked like
a nut. He had a wild eye and a constantly
working mouth; he blinked a
good deal and stammered when he was excited.
In features he was as Dutch
as his name implied. Well, we talked back
and forth for some time, but I
stuck with him and in the end he took me out
into a shed adjoining his
house and showed me the contraption he'd built.
"It looked like a top. The first thing I thought
of was Brick Bradford,
and before I could catch myself, I'd asked,
'Is that pure Brick
Bradford?'
"He didn't turn a hair. 'Not by a long shot,'
he answered. 'H. G. Wells
was there first. I owe it to Wells.'
"'I see,' I said.
"'The hell you do!' he shot back. 'You think
I'm as nutty as a
fruit-cake.'
"'The idea of time travel is a little hard
to swallow,' I said.
"'Sure it is. But me, I'm doing it. So that's
all there is to it.'
"'If you don't mind, Mr. Vanderkamp,' I said,
'I'm a dummy in scientific
matters. I have all I can do to tell a nut
from a bolt.'
"'That I believe,' he said.
"'So how do you time travel?'
"'Look,' he said, 'time is a dimension like
space. You can go up or down
this ruler,' he snatched a steel ruler and
waved it in front of me,
'from any given point. But you move. In the
dimension of time, you only
seem to move. You stand still; time moves.
Do you get it?'
"I had to confess that I didn't.
"He tried again, with obviously strained patience.
Judging by what I
could gather from what he said, it was possible
for him--so he
believed--to get into his machine, twirl a
few knobs, push a few
buttons, relax for any given period, and end
up just where he
liked--back in the past, or ahead in the future.
But wherever he ended
up, he was still in this same spot. In other
words, whether he was back
in 1492 or ahead in 2092, the place he got
out of his time machine was
still his present address.
"It was beyond me, frankly, but I figured
that as long as he was a
little touched, it wouldn't do any harm to
humor him. I intimated that I
understood and asked him where he'd been last.
"His face fell, his brow clouded, and he said,
'I've been ahead thirty
years.' He shook his head angrily. 'What a
time! I'll be seventy, and
you won't even be that, Mr. Harrigan. But
we'll be in the middle of the
worst atomic war you ever dreamed about.'
"Now this was before Hiroshima, quite a bit.
I didn't know what he was
talking about, but it gives me a queer feeling
now and then when I think
of what he said, especially since it's still
short of thirty years since
that time.
"'It's no time to be living here,' he went
on. 'Direct hits on the
entire area. What would you do?'
"'I'd get out,' I said.
"'That's what I thought,' he said. 'But that
kind of warfare carries a
long way. A long way. And I'm a man who loves
his comforts, reasonably.
I don't intend to set up housekeeping in equatorial
Africa or the
forests of Brazil.'
"'What did you see thirty years from now,
Mr. Vanderkamp?' I asked him.
"'Everything blown to hell,' he answered.
'Not a building in all
Manhattan.' He leered and added, 'And everybody
who'll be living here at
that time will be scattered into the atmosphere
in fragments no bigger
than an amoeba.'
"'You fill me with anticipation,' I said.
"So I went back to my desk and wrote the story.
You could guess what
kind it had to be. 'Time Travel Is Possible,
Says Amateur
Scientist!'--that kind of thing. You can see
it every week, in large
doses, in the feature sections of some of
the biggest chain papers. It
went over like an average feature about life
on the moon or prehistoric
animals surviving in remote mountain valleys,
or what have you. Just
what Vanderkamp went back to after I left,
I don't know, but I have an
idea that he gave his sister a devil of a
time."
Vanderkamp stalked into the house and confronted
his sister.
"You see, Julie--a reporter. Can't you learn
to hold your tongue?"
She threw him a scornful glance. "What difference
does it make?" she
cried. "You're gone all the time."
"Maybe I'll take you along sometime. Just
wait."
"Wait, wait! That's all I've been doing. Since
I was ten years old I've
been waiting on you!"
"Oh, the hell with it!" He turned on his heel
and left the house.
She followed him to the door and shouted after
him, "Where are you
going now?"
"To New Amsterdam for a little peace and quiet,"
he said testily.
He threw open the thick-walled door of his
time-machine and pulled it
shut behind him. He sat down before the controls
and began to chart his
course for 1650. If his calculations were
correct, he would shortly find
himself in the vicinity of that sturdy if
autocratic first citizen of
the Dutch colony of New Amsterdam, Peter Stuyvesant,
as well as Governor
Stuyvesant's friend and neighbor, Heinrich
Vanderkamp. He gave not even
a figurative glance over his shoulder before
he started out.
When he emerged at last from his machine,
he was in what appeared to be
the backyard of a modest residence on a street
which, though he did not
know it, he suspected might be the Bouwerie.
At the moment of his
emergence, a tall, angular woman stood viewing
him, open-mouthed and
aghast, from the wooden stoop at the back
door of her home. He looked at
her in astonishment himself. The resemblance
to his sister Julie was
uncanny.
With only the slightest hesitation, he addressed
her in fluent Dutch.
"Pray do not be disturbed, young lady."
"A fine way for a gentleman to call!" she
exclaimed in a voice
considerably more forceful than her appearance.
"I suppose my father
sent you. And where did you get that outlandish
costume?"
"I bought it," he answered, truthfully enough.
"A likely tale," she said. "And if my father
sent you, just go back and
tell him I'm satisfied the way I am. No woman
needs a man to manage
her."
"I don't have the honor of your father's acquaintance,"
he answered.
She gazed at him suspiciously from narrowed
eyes. "Everyone in New
Amsterdam knows Henrik Van Tromp. He's as
unloved as yonder bumblebee.
Stand where you are and say whence you came."
"I am a visitor in New Amsterdam," he said,
standing obediently still.
"I confess I don't know my way about very
well, and I chose to stop at
this attractive home."
"I know it's attractive," she said tartly.
"And it's plain to see
you're a stranger here, or you'd never be
wearing such clothes. Or is it
the fashion where you come from?" She gave
him no opportunity to answer,
but added, after a moment of indecision, "Well,
you look respectable
enough, though much like my rascally cousin
Pieter Vanderkamp. Do you
know him?"
"No."
"Well, no matter. He's much older than you--near
forty blessed years.
You're no more than twenty, I don't doubt."
Involuntarily Vanderkamp put his hand to his
cheek, and smiled as he
felt its smooth roundness. "You may be right,
at that," he said
cryptically.
"You might as well come in," she said grudgingly.
"What with the
traffic on the road outside, the Indians,
and people who come in such
flighty vehicles as yours, I might as well
live in the heart of the
colony."
He looked around. "And still," he said, "it
is a pleasant
spot--peaceful, comfortable. I'm sure a man
could live out his days here
in contentment."
"Oh, could he?" she said belligerently. "And
where would I be while
this went on?"
He gazed at her beetling nose, her jutting
chin. "A good question," he
muttered thoughtfully.
He followed her into the house. It was a treasury
of antiquities,
filling him with delight. Miss Anna Van Tromp
offered him a cup of milk,
which he accepted, thanking her profusely.
She talked volubly, eyeing
him all the while with the utmost curiosity,
and he gathered presently
that her father had made several attempts
to marry her off, disapproving
of her solitary residence so far from the
center of the city; but she
had frowned upon one and all of the suitors
he had encouraged to call on
her. She was undeniably impressive, almost
formidable, he conceded
privately, with a touch of the shrew and harridan.
Life with Miss Anna
Van Tromp would not be easy, he reflected.
But then, life with his
sister Julie was not easy, either. Miss Anna,
however, had not to face
atomic warfare; all she had to look forward
to in fourteen years was
surrender to the besieging British, which
she would have no trouble in
surviving.
He settled down to his ingratiating best and
succeeded in making a most
favorable impression on Miss Anna Van Tromp
before at last he took his
leave, carrying with him a fine, hand-wrought
bowl with which the lady
had presented him. He had a hunch he might
come back. Of all the times
he had visited since finishing the machine,
he knew that old New
Amsterdam in the 1650s was the one period
most likely to keep him
contented--provided Miss Van Tromp didn't
turn out to be a nuisance. So
he took careful note of the set of his controls,
jotting them down so
that he would not be likely to forget them.
It was late when he found himself back in
his own time.
His sister was waiting up for him. "Two o'clock
in the morning!" she
screamed at him. "What are you doing to me?
Oh, God, why didn't I marry
when I had the chance, instead of throwing
away my life on a worthless
brother!"
"Why don't you? It's not too late," he sighed
wearily.
"How can you say that?" she snapped bitterly.
"Here I am thirty nearly,
and worn out from working for you. Who would
marry me now? Oh, if only I
could have another chance! If I could be young
again, and do it all
over, I'd know how to have a better life!"
In spite of his boredom with her, Vanderkamp
felt the effect of this
cry from a lonely heart. He looked at her
pityingly; it was true, after
all, that she had worked faithfully for him,
without pay, since their
parents died. "Take a look at this," he said
gently, offering her the
bowl.
"Hah! Can we eat bowls?"
He raised his eyes heavenward and went wearily
to bed.
"I saw Vanderkamp again about a fortnight
later," Harrigan went on. "Ran
into him in a tavern on the Bowery. He recognized
me and came over.
"'That was some story you did,' he said.
"'Been bothered by cranks?' I asked.
"'Hell, yes! Not too badly, though. They want
to ride off somewhere just
to get away. I get that feeling myself sometimes.
But, tell me, have you
seen the morning papers?'
"Now, by coincidence, the papers that morning
had carried a story from
some local nuclear physicist about the increasing
probability that the
atom would be smashed. I told him I'd seen
it.
"'What did I tell you?' he said.
"I just smiled and asked where he'd been lately.
He didn't hesitate to
talk, perhaps because his sister had been
giving him a hard time with
her nagging. So I listened. It appeared, to
hear him tell it, that he
had been off visiting the Dutch in New Amsterdam.
You could almost
believe what he said, listening to him, except
for that wild look he
had. Anyway, he'd been in New Amsterdam about
1650, and he'd brought
back a few trifling souvenirs of the trips.
Would I like to see them? I
said I would.
"I figured he'd got his hands on some nice
antiques and wanted an
appreciative audience. His sister wasn't home;
so he took me around and
showed me his pieces, one by one--a bowl,
a pair of wooden candlesticks,
wooden shoes, and more, all in all a fine
collection. He even had a
chair that looked pretty authentic, and I
wondered where he'd dug up so
many nice things of the New Amsterdam period--though,
of course, I had
to take his word as to where they belonged
historically; I didn't know.
But I imagine he got them somewhere in the
city or perhaps up in the
Catskill country.
"Well, after a while I got another look at
his contraption. It didn't
appear to have been moved at all; it was still
sitting where it had been
before, without a sign to say that it had
been used to go anywhere,
least of all into past time.
"'Tell me,' I said to him at last, 'when you
go back in time do you get
younger?'
"'Yes and no,' he said. 'Obviously.'
"It wasn't obvious to me, but I couldn't get
any more than that out of
him. The thing I couldn't figure out was the
reason for his claim. He
wasn't trying to sell anything to anybody,
as far as I could see; he
wasn't anxious to tell the world about his
time-machine, either. He
didn't mind talking in his oblique fashion
about his trips. He did talk
about New Amsterdam as if he had a pretty
good acquaintance with the
place. But then, he was known as a minor authority
on the customs of the
Dutch colony.
"He was touched, obviously. Just the same,
he challenged me, in a way. I
wanted to know something more about him, how
his machine worked, how he
took off, and so on. I made up my mind the
next time I was in the
neighborhood to look him up, hoping he wouldn't
be home.
"When I made it, his sister was alone, and
in fine fettle, as
cantankerous as a flea-bitten mastiff.
"'He's gone again,' she complained bitterly.
"Clearly the two of them were at odds. I asked
her whether she had seen
him go. She hadn't; he had just marched out
to his shop and that was an
end to him as far as she was concerned.
"I haggled around quite a lot and finally
got her permission to go out
and see what I could see for myself. Of course,
the shop was locked. I
had counted on that and had brought along
a handy little skeleton key. I
was inside in no time. The machine wasn't
there. Not a sign of it, or of
Vanderkamp either.
"Now, I looked around all over, but I couldn't
for the life of me figure
out how he could have taken it out of that
place; it was too big for
doors or windows, and the walls and roof were
solid and immovable. I
figured that he couldn't have got such a large
machine away without his
sister's seeing him; so I locked the place
up and went back to the
house.
"But she was immovable; she hadn't seen a
thing. If he had taken
anything larger than pocket-size out of that
shop of his, she had missed
it. I could hardly doubt her sincerity. There
was nothing to be had from
that source; so I had no alternative but to
wait for him another time."
Anna Van Tromp, considerably chastened, watched
her strange suitor--she
looked upon all men as suitors, without exception;
for so her father had
conditioned her to do--as he reached into
his sack and brought out
another wonder.
"Now this," said Vanderkamp, "is an alarm
clock. You wind it up like
this, you see; set it, and off it goes. Listen
to it ring! That will
wake you up in the morning."
"More magic," she cried doubtfully.
"No, no," he explained patiently. "It is an
everyday thing in my
country. Perhaps some day you would like to
join me in a little visit
there, Anna?"
"Ja, maybe," she agreed, looking out the window
to his weird and
frightening carriage, which had no animal
to draw it and which vanished
so strangely, fading away into the air, whenever
Vanderkamp went into
it. "This clothes-washing machine you talk
about," she admitted. "This I
would like to see."
"I must go now," said Vanderkamp, gazing at
her with well-simulated
coyness. "I'll leave these things here with
you, and I'll just take
along that bench over there."
"Ja, ja," said Anna, blushing.
"Six of one and half a dozen of the other,"
muttered Vanderkamp,
comparing Anna with his sister.
He got into his time-machine and set out for
home in the twentieth
century. There was some reluctance in his
going. Here all was somnolent
peace and quiet, despite the rigors of living;
in his own time there
were wars and turmoil and the ultimate threat
of the greatest war of
all. New Amsterdam had one drawback, however--the
presence of Anna Von
Tromp. She had grown fond of him, undeniably,
perhaps because he was so
much more interested in her circumstances
than in herself. What was a
man to do? Julie at one end, Anna at the other.
But even getting rid of
Julie would not allow him to escape the warfare
to come.
He thought deeply of his problem all the way
home.
When he got back, he found his sister waiting
up, as usual, ready to
deliver the customary diatribe.
He forestalled her. "I've been thinking things
over, Julie. I believe
you'd be much happier if you were living with
brother Carl. I'll give
you as much money as you need, and you can
pack your things and I'll
take you down to Louisiana."
"Take me!" she exclaimed. "How? In that crazy
contraption of yours?"
"Precisely."
"Oh no!" she said. "You don't get me into
that machine! How do I know
what it will do to me? It's a time machine,
isn't it? It might make an
old hag of me--or a baby!"
"You said that you wanted to be young again,
didn't you?" he said
softly. "You said you'd like another chance...."
A faraway look came into her eyes. "Oh, if
I only could! If I only
could be a girl again, with a chance to get
married...."
"Pack your things," Vanderkamp said quietly.
"It must have been all of a month before I
saw Vanderkamp again,"
Harrigan continued, waving for another scotch
and soda. "I was down in
the vicinity on an assignment and I took a
run over to his place.
"He was home this time. He came to the door,
which he had chained on the
inside. He recognized me, and it was plain
at the same time that he had
no intention of letting me in.
"I came right out with the first question
I had in mind. 'The thing that
bothers me,' I said to him, 'is how you get
that time machine of yours
in and out of that shed.'
"'Mr. Harrigan,' he answered, 'newspaper reporters
ought to have at
least elementary scientific knowledge. You
don't. How in hell could even
a time machine be in two places at once, I
ask you? If I take that
machine back three centuries, that's where
it is--not here. And three
centuries ago that shop wasn't standing there.
So you don't go in or
out; you don't move at all, remember? It's
time that moves.'
"'I called the other day,' I went on. 'Your
sister spoke to me. Give her
my regards.'
"'My sister's left me,' he said shortly, 'to
stew, as you might say, in
my own time machine.'
"'Really?' I said. 'Just what do you have
in mind to do next?'
"'Let me ask you something, Mr. Harrigan,'
he answered. 'Would you sit
around here waiting for an atomic war if you
could get away?'
"'Certainly not,' I answered.
"'Well, then, I don't intend to, either.'
"All this while he was standing at the door,
refusing to open it any
wider or to let me in. He was making it pretty
plain that there wasn't
much he had to say to me. And he seemed to
be in a hurry.
"'Remember me to the inquiring public thirty
years hence, Mr. Harrigan,'
he said at last, and closed the door.
"That was the last I saw of him."
Harrigan finished his scotch and soda appreciatively
and looked around
for the bartender.
"Did he take off then?" I asked.
"Like a rocket," said Harrigan. "Queerest
thing was that there wasn't a
trace of him. The machine was gone, too--the
same way as the last time,
without a disturbance in the shop. He and
his machine had simply
vanished off the face of the earth and were
never heard from again.
"Matter of fact, though," Harrigan went on
thoughtfully, "Vanderkamp's
disappearance wasn't the really queer angle
on the pitch. The other
thing broke in the papers the week after he
left. The neighbors got
pretty worked up about it. They called the
police to tell them that
Vanderkamp's sister Julie was back, only she
was off her nut--and a good
deal changed in appearance, too.
"Gal going blarmy was no news, of course,
but that last bit about her
appearance--they said she looked about twenty
years older, all of a
sudden--sort of rang a bell. So I went over
there. It was Julie, all
right; at least, she looked a hell of a lot
like Julie had when I last
saw her--provided you could grant that a woman
could age twenty years in
the few weeks it had been. And she was off
her rocker, sure enough--or
hysterical. Or at least madder than a wet
hen. She made out like she
couldn't speak a word of English, and they
finally had to get an
interpreter to understand her. She wouldn't
speak anything but
Dutch--and an old-fashioned kind, too.
"She made a lot of extravagant claims and
kept insisting that she would
bring the whole matter up in a complaint before
Governor Stuyvesant.
Said she wasn't Julie Vanderkamp, by God,
but was named Anna Van
Tromp--which is an old Dutch name thereabouts--and
claimed that she had
been abducted from her home on the Bowery.
We pointed out the Third
Avenue El and told her that was the Bowery,
but she just sniffed and
looked at us as though we were crazy."
I toyed with my drink. "You mean you actually
listened to the poor
girl's story?" I asked.
"Sure," Harrigan said. "Maybe she was as crazy
as a bedbug, but I've
listened to whackier stories from supposedly
sane people. Sure, I
listened to her." He paused thoughtfully for
a moment, then went on.
"She claimed that this fellow Vanderkamp had
come to her house and
filled her with a lot of guff about the wonderful
country he lived in,
and how she ought to let him take her to see
it. Apparently he waxed
especially eloquent about an automatic washing-machine
and dryer, and
that had fascinated her, for some reason.
Then, she said, he'd brought a
ten-year-old girl along--though where in the
world old Vanderkamp could
have picked up a tot like that is beyond me--and
the kid had added her
blandishments to the plot. Between them, they
had managed to lure her
into the old guy's machine. From what she
said, it was obviously the
time machine she was talking about, and if
she was Julie there was no
reason why she shouldn't know about it. But
she talked as though it was
a complete mystery to her, as though she'd
no idea what the purpose of
it was. Well, anyway, here she was--and very
unhappy, too. Wanted to go
back to old New Amsterdam, but bad.
"It was a beautiful act, even if she was nuts.
The strange thing was,
though, that there were some things even a
gal going whacky couldn't
explain. For instance, the house was filled
with what the experts said
were priceless antiques from Dutch New Amsterdam,
of the period just
prior to the British siege. You'd think those
things would make poor
Julie feel more at home, seeing as she claimed
to belong in that period,
but apparently they just made her homesick.
And, curiously enough, all
the modern gadgets were gone. All those handy
little items that make the
twentieth century so livable had been taken
away--including the
washing-machine and dryer, by the way. Julie--or
Anna, as she called
herself--claimed that Vanderkamp had taken
it back with him, wherever
he'd gone to, after he'd brought her there."
"Poor woman," I said sympathetically. "They
toted her off to the booby
hatch, I suppose."
"No...." Harrigan said slowly. "They didn't,
as a matter of fact. Since
she was harmless, they let her stay in the
house a while. Which was a
mistake, it seems. Of course, she wasn't from
the seventeenth century.
That's impossible. All the same--." He broke
off abruptly and stared
moodily into his glass.
"What happened to her?" I asked.
"She was found one morning about two weeks
after she got there," he
said. "Dead. Electrocuted. It seems she'd
stuck her finger into a light
socket while standing in a bathtub full of
water. An accident,
obviously. As the Medical Examiner said, it
was an accident any
six-year-old child would have known enough
about electricity to avoid.
"That is," Harrigan added, "a Twentieth-Century
child."
