Man with a Past

"For The Person Asleep," Professor Pickering said, "time, in a sense, stands still. When he regains consciousness, he has jumped a certain interval into the future. Indeed, there have been cases of prolonged coma lasting many years, from which the patient has awakened to an entirely alien world."

"It would appear to be somewhat more difficult to leap into the past," Professor Dickson remarked dryly.

"Yet I have done it!" Professor Pickering said, his eyes flashing through his bifocals and his white goatee jutting forward. "I have done it and have come back! To state it simply, it was a matter of detecting the principles involved and building the instrument to apply them. The recent advances in electroencephalography were an immense help; I was fortunate enough to discover that the electrical impulses of brain action could be harnessed to the practical needs of time exploration."

Dickson could not keep the note of incredulity from his voice. "You are not trying to tell me, old friend, that you have visited the (continued on page 156) Man with a Past (continued from page 115) past with the help of some contrivance."

By way of answer, Professor Pickering went to the bookcase and took down a volume. "I was present at Lincoln's Gettysburg address," he said with dignity. "I appear in this book of Mathew Brady's Civil War photographs." He flipped open to the page in question and pointed to a figure in the audience. "It would be hard to mistake me," he said. "Please make use of this magnifying glass."

Professor Dickson laughed heartily. "Good Lord, man, I trust you will not be so ill-advised as to offer this to anyone but a close friend as evidence of anything whatsoever. Why, everyone in this picture looks like everyone else."

Professor Pickering took from his pocket a box about the size of a matchbox (large kitchen size). "With this dial," he said, "I register the number of years I wish to regress; with this one I select the longitude and latitude of my destination. I have long wished to visit Elizabethan England and have already ascertained the precise location of Sir Francis Bacon's estate in Gorhamburg, where he was in residence in 1622. I believe I will drop in on Sir Francis."

"No doubt he will find your accent rather bizarre," Professor Dickson said, "to say nothing of your dress."

"Yes, clothing is a problem, since I intend to visit several widely different cultures. I am wearing these slacks and this T-shirt in the hope that they will attract a minimum of attention. In any event, I am prepared to make a hasty departure from whatever times and places I visit." So saying, he made a final adjustment on his dials and pressed a button on the side of the box. Professor Dickson was dumfounded to see his friend disappear before his eyes – at the same instant that Sir Francis Bacon, taking the air in his garden, was no less surprised to see a stranger materialize in the rose bed.

"How now, varlet?" said Sir Francis.

"I'll only trouble you for a minute," Pickering said. "Just tell me one thing. Are you the author of the plays attributed to William Shakespeare?"

"Of course not," Sir Francis said testily. "What ever gave you that crazy idea? They were all written by Eddie de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford."

"Thank you," said the professor. "Several of my colleagues will be pained to hear it." And with that he adjusted his little box, pushed the button, and showed up on the steps of the Roman Senate on March 15, 44 B.C., just in time to witness the stabbing of Julius Caesar. It took place very much as Eddie de Vere had set it down.

Thereafter, he ricocheted around in ancient history; it is hardly necessary to detail his adventures. It was while he was watching the building of the Great Pyramid at Giza that he resolved to take the big plunge. How did things begin?The origins of man? The beginnings of life itself? He could always come back to these relatively modern times.

For his first stopover he set the machine to take him back 500,000 years, and to set him in the African Transvaal, where the most recent findings of paleoanthropology had placed the earliest traces of man's direct ancestors.

Professor Pickering pressed the button.

And that, for all practical purposes, was the end of Professor Pickering.

Did he tumble off a cliff? Fall prey to some prehistoric monster? Get his head knocked in by his xenophobic fellow man? No; he arrived safely and met with no physical mishap.

What he had not known, however, was that, as he moved farther and farther into the past, he was actually retracing the line of his forebears, backward through the generations, backward through the evolution of the race. So long as he had confined himself to historical times, his retreat down the evolutionary ladder was too slight to matter, and his personality, state of knowledge and memory remained intact; but when he took the half-million-year leap – –

Professor Pickering (emeritus now) scampered nimbly up the baobab tree, the only white-goateed Australopithecine ape in all Africa with bifocals, slacks and T-shirt – and a brain much too stupid to know what to do with that funny little box in his pocket.

Professor Pickering set the machine to take him back 500,000 years and to set him in the African Transvaal.