Murray Leinster Read Free Page B

which has no sensible effect has no sensible existence. When you shear away every anchor to the present, you’re leaving all baggage behind. In effect, you run to the back of the train, empty-handed and unhindered. When you slow down time and cut every tie with the present, you get ready to jump, to leave— And then you’ll be able to change your memory of an event a half-second ago to a perception of an event a half-second ago. And when you’ve done that, you’ve won! You’ve started to travel back in time!’
    He shook the bars of his cell, crying exultantly into the darkness. This was logic! This was reason! This was infallibly the experimental method he’d needed! His eyes gleamed.
    Limpy’s voice came quiedy:
    ‘An’ then what, guy?’
    ‘Then,’ cried Rodney, in exultation, l when you’re no longer anchored to the present by clinging to it, you go back to the last thing you do cling to! You’ll have to pick it out before you start! You won’t have a chance on the way! You’ll think of the moment before you - took the wrong train! You’ll stop there! You’ll have a chance to take the right train, if you’re quick! And then … then you’ll come back to present parallel time, to this day and hour, but in an alternate existence resulting from the different course you took! Another time track, Limpy! And that’s where I’m going to go!’
    A long silence. Then Limpy’s voice, rumbling soberly in the blackness.
    “Yeah … I see. Cut loose from now. From everything since the time you wish you’d done different— Yeah! That’s it! I didn’t realize. I got some cash cached away— All the time I’ been tryin’ this, I been rememberin’ that cache as a stake for me to get started on again. But if I go back to where I gotta go, that stuff won’t be on the track my train’ll be travelin’ on. I got it now—’
    Rodney’s hands closed tightly on the bars of his cell. He stared at the slowly creeping patch of moonlight. With a fierce satisfaction he listened to his own breathing, noting differences in every breath. He listened, in the monstrous stillness of the deathhouse, to the beating of his own heart.
    Limpy’s voice came; very grave and very sober.
    ‘ 1 ’ got to go a long way back. To when I was a kid, I guess. Yeah… a long way. All the way!’
    Silence. Rodney summoned all the resources of his brain. There were not many brains as good or as disciplined. He knew, and reveled in the knowledge, that all the events that had happened as the consequence of a certain specific instant would soon be unreal. They would be in another time track. They would be might-have-beens, to which no bond could fasten him. Knowing of their coming unreality, he could renounce them. They no longer mattered. They were merely imaginings which would presently have no meaning, and therefore had no meaning now. He viewed them with increasing remoteness, listening to his own breathing and his own heartbeat; watching the creeping patch of moonlight on the wall.
    Time slowed. There were intervals between his heartbeats. There were pauses between his breaths. He could distinguish different parts of the heartbeat cycle. He could distinguish parts of the parts— The patch of moonlight ceased to move.
    It did not mcrve! There were monstrous intervals between his heartbeats. Triumph filled him. The last instant that counted in his scheme of things was enormously vivid. Nothing was important but that. He clung to the thought of it with a fierce intensity, picturing vividly every detail of it.
    The moonlight patch receded a little. It moved with a vast deliberation - backward! Its rate of movement - backward -increased with a smooth acceleration.
    Suddenly there was confusion which was not confusion, and chaos was not chaos at all. It was night and it was day and it was day again. He moved here and there without volition and without effort, like a weightless object upon an insanely charted course at dizzying speed. He was