The Coils of Time

by A. Bertram Chandler

Genres: Science Fiction; Sci-fi Action & Adventure; Alien Contact

Synopsis

Dr. Henshaw had created what he thought was a time travel machine and he had sent guinea pigs through it. But now he needed a human guinea pig to test it with. Christopher Wilkinson thought the whole idea was absurd, until a book that had been sent through the machine came back with a thumb print on it, the fingerprint of Vanessa, his long lost sweetheart! So Wilkinson agreed to the experiment. He stood in the white circle facing the machine as it began to gleam and spin, pulling him down through the tortuous coils of time...

Release date: November 26, 2015

Publisher: Gateway

Print pages: 114

Sample

THERE WAS a scorching gale blowing, as usual, and the poisonous air was thick with the fine, abrasive dust. Christopher Wilkinson, struggling through the deep drifts in his borrowed Venus-suit, cursed at the dimness of his vision through the faceplate of his helmet.

Then he grinned sourly to himself; after all, the state of the helmet, as long as it did not leak, was of no real importance. Even had the armor glass been as clear as when the suit had left the hands of the maker, it would still have been impossible for him to see for more than a couple of feet through the swirling dust clouds. The fantastically expensive, radar-equipped, powered suits—spaceships in miniature, they had been called—were reserved for the top brass of Science City; lesser mortals and mere transients such as Wilkinson had to be content with gear that was little better than that used by Commodore Keel and his men on the occasion of the First Landing, almost a century in the past.

So Wilkinson struggled the relatively short distance between the Spaceport and the low huddle of domes that housed the Advanced Physics Laboratory, sweating profusely in spite of the suit’s air-conditioning unit, keeping one hand in its armored glove firmly on the guide wire. He realized now that he should have waited for the promised dust-sled, and regretted his insistence that the exercise of the walk would do him good. This, he told himself firmly, would be the last time that he would let the space-manlike desire for healthy exertion on a planetary surface get the better of him.

The dust clouds thinned and he saw before him the first of the domes, its curving wall gleaming dully in the diffused yellow glare from the perpetual overcast. He stumbled towards it, gratefully watched the circular outer valve of the airlock swing open. Then he was in the chamber and the door was shut behind him, and he was hearing the whine of the pumps as they evacuated the noxious atmosphere, and the hissing of the antiseptic spray that played over every square millimeter of the surface of his suit.

Then, with the air pressure in the chamber restored, the inner door opened. Wilkinson stood passively while two white-smocked girls stripped his armor from him. He inhaled deeply and appreciatively. The atmosphere of the dome had an artificial quality, held the taint of hot oil and metal, of chemicals, of electrical discharges—but it was deliciously cool and satisfying after the stale air that he had been breathing.

He was a tall man, slender in his well-fitting uniform of black and gold that, in spite of the cramped confinement of the Venus-suit, was still neat and sharply creased. His thick, sandy hair, rumpled and uncontrollable as always, took the curse off his uniform’s tailored appearance. Under the heavy brows his pale eyes, grey rather than blue, looked about him curiously. A faint smile softened the hard lines of his face.

He said, “So this is the A. P. Store, Science City branch … What are today’s specials? A cheap line in contra-terrene matter, in giant, economy-sized cartons? And what are mesons selling at today?”

“That’s not very funny, Mr. Wilkinson,” said one of the girls sharply.

“I suppose not,” he half apologized. “But I’m disappointed. Where are the super-cyclotrons? Where are the Mad Scientists?”

The other girl giggled as the first one said coldly, “Dr. Henshaw is waiting for you now.” She added humorlessly, “This is only the vestibule. There is no apparatus here, of course.”

“Of course,” agreed Wilkinson.

He followed the tall, competent brunette through a doorway and then along a featureless passageway. At the far end of this there was a door that opened as they approached, and beyond the door could be seen a mess of equipment that looked more like something cooked up by a Hollywood special-effects man than by a working physicist.

Henshaw was a little man, ruddy, rotund, and almost bald. He fussily pushed an accumulation of books and papers from a chair to the already littered floor, cleared a space on a table with a sweep of his forearm, and produced bottle and glasses from a filing cabinet. “Wilkinson, isn’t it?” he barked. “Must be, in that fancy dress. Welcome aboard, Admiral. Sit down, man, sit down.” Then, to the girl, “Don’t you dare touch those papers, Olga. I’ve my own filing system. I can always find anything I want, but I can’t if you start tidying up. Damn it all, woman, I’ve told you enough times. And that’s all—unless you want a drink.”

“No thank you, Dr. Henshaw,” she told him severely. “I never drink in working hours.”

“All the more for those that do,” chuckled the scientist.

Wilkinson seated himself. Henshaw cleared a chair on the other side of the table of its debris, sat down facing the spaceman. He splashed amber liquid into the two glasses, neither of which was very clean. Wilkinson looked at his dubiously. “Go on, drink up,” urged the other. “A drop of good Scotch won’t kill you.”

Wilkinson sipped. It was excellent liquor.

Henshaw gulped the contents of his own tumbler. He said abruptly, “I suppose you’re wondering why I asked you to come and see me. This is the way of it, Wilkinson. Everybody in Science City has his own pet project, and nobody has much time to spare to help anybody else. So, when I heard that there was a ship’s officer, who’d been landed sick from Venus Queen, staying at the Spaceport Hostel, and when I heard that this same officer had made a good recovery and was getting very bored while waiting for a ship …” A grin flickered over his broad face. “I said to myself, ‘Henshaw, here’s your made-to-order guinea pig.’”

“Thank you,” said Wilkinson drily. “But I’ll make my position quite clear. I’m not taking part in any medical experiments. My one session with the Purple Rot has given me a healthy respect for your local viruses.” He added, more to himself than to the scientist, “I should have stayed on the Earth-Mars run. Mars, outside the domes, is a dead world, but this hell-hole is a damn’ sight deader and has the viruses to make it worse.”

“Who said anything about medical experiments?” countered Henshaw. “I’m a physicist, not a physician. And I want a man of action, somebody who’s used to danger, physical danger. Even if any of my esteemed colleagues were willing to volunteer, very few of them are qualified. And, as you may have noticed, there’s any amount of useless popsies infesting this dump; but what I want you for is no job for a woman.”

“Go on,” said Wilkinson.

Henshaw absentmindedly refilled his own glass, and took a hearty gulp from it. He chuckled. “I am going on. As you should know, being a spaceman, Venus is the most valueless hunk of real estate in the Solar System. But—it’s an ideal site for Science City. You must know what’ the respectable research workers—the ones with their laboratories on Earth and the Moon and the Space Stations—call us …”

“I do,” said Wilkinson. “The Mad Scientists.”

Henshaw chuckled again. “Yes. That’s us. We’re all of us engaged on lines of research that could be extremely dangerous if anything went wrong. But as long as we’re here we’re safe enough—from the viewpoint of Central Government, that is. If we blow ourselves up, that’s all that we do blow up.”

“There might be a ship at the Spaceport,” said Wilkinson.

“What of it? You people are paid to take risks. Not that there’s any real risk. The very worst that we could ever do would be to initiate some sort of chain reaction that would cause the sun to go nova. After all, we’re only a stone’s throw from Sol here.”

“You could always move out to Pluto,” suggested the spaceman.

“I suppose we could—but it’s a long way out, and too bloody cold.” He replenished his glass and this time, as an afterthought, did the same for Wilkinson.

Wilkinson sipped slowly and appreciatively, allowing his gaze to wander around the cluttered laboratory. There was, he thought, some justification for the “Mad Scientist” label. His attention was caught and held by the complex piece of apparatus that occupied the full length of one wall. There were brightly gleaming wheels; there was something that resembled a metallic Moebius Strip mounted on a shaft; there were oddly twisted antennae, and convolution upon convolution of glass tubing. It reminded him vaguely of a mobile that he had seen in the Museum of Modern Art, in New York, during his last vacation on Earth.

But this was not mobile.

“Yes,” said Henshaw. “That’s it.”

“That’s what?” demanded Wilkinson.

“It!” snapped the physicist. “I haven’t a name for it yet, because the only possible name has been done to death by incompetent hacks writing pseudo-scientific fiction over the last two or three centuries. But it works. I’ve sent Rufus, the laboratory cat, through it, and got him back unharmed. And there were the white rats that I … er … borrowed from Titov in Biology. It wasn’t that apparatus that killed them; it was Rufus. But I want to send something—sorry, somebody—who’ll be able to tell me what he sees and experiences.”

“Send somebody where?” demanded the spaceman.

“Not where,” corrected Henshaw. “Not where—but when. Young man, you are looking at the first Time Machine ever to exist outside the pages of sensational fiction.”

“Count me out,” said Wilkinson firmly.

And the little voice at the back of his mind was whispering, but what if this charlatan can bring back yesterday?

Yesterday, and Vanessa Raymond, and the happy days with her that had flown by during each long stopover at the Marsala Spaceport on Mars, and the bright future that had stretched before them, the dream that had died, shockingly and tragically, when the liner Martian Maid, in which she had been traveling to Earth, had been utterly destroyed by a reactor explosion.

He had left the Martian Mail run when he had been told of the disaster, had applied for a transfer to the Venusian trade. He had run away from his memories.

But now the memories were back, and wit. . .