Chapter I: Front Matter

THE TIME ARMADA

By Fox B. Holden

Politics and science don't mix--except that
Congressman Blair had once been a physicist. This
was The Beginning--but The End was worlds away....

[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Imagination Stories of Science and Fantasy
October and November 1953
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]

_5:20 P. M., April 17, 1958_

Congressman Douglas Blair shivered a little, turned up his coat collar against the gray drizzle that had been falling like a finely-sifted fog all day. His head ached, his nose felt stuffy, and he was tired. It was good of Grayson to pick him up.

The front seat of the dark blue sedan was soft and reassuring, and the warm current of air from the heater beneath it felt good. He let his spare, barely six-foot body slump like a bag of wet wash and pushed his hat back with the half-formed thought that it might ease the dull pressure behind his eyes.

"Rough going today, eh, Congressman?"

Grayson twisted the blue sedan into outbound Washington traffic, turned the windshield wipers to a faster pace. Click-click, click-click, and Blair wished someone would invent windshield wipers for the brain, to be worn like a radio head-set, maybe with a hole in the top of the head.

"Hey, buddy! Republicans got your tongue?"

"No, sorry, Carl. Just tired. It's that damned McKenny bill."

"Off the record?"

"I'm afraid so for now, Carl. He can get the thing through--he's so damn clever he should've been a woman. Got the steel men eating out of his hand. Made no bones about telling the rest of us today that what the hell, the people never had anything to say about it, anyway. The work of government is up to the professionals. The sooner the people get their nose out of it, the better off they'll be. He said that, Carl, right in front of everybody. And nobody so much as blinked."

The drizzle started to develop into a dark blue rain as they headed toward the suburbs.

"What's going to happen, Carl?" Blair said after awhile.

"If I knew, believe me, I wouldn't be sitting here! I don't know, Doug. We'll all cook in Hell together I guess. Here, have a cigarette."

"Thanks. No, dammit. That's just it--if they'd take this going to Hell business and forget about it--sink it, scuttle it. Nobody goes to Hell, he makes his own if that's the way he lives, or he makes his own personal Heaven or Paradise or whatever you call it if that's the way he lives. Most of us are in between someplace, a little scared, mostly indifferent, and too mixed up to see the simple fact that the way of living we've got in this country isn't so bad but what just plain honesty and a little intelligence couldn't run it right side up."

"Sure, sure, I know and you're right, Doug. But take it easy.... Things aren't always as bad as they look."

* * * * *

Blair inhaled on the cigarette, laughed a little and felt better. Sometimes he knew he sounded like a college kid trying to tell his father what was wrong with the world, but that was why he liked Carl. Carl let him talk, knew it was his way of blowing off the pent-up steam.

"You know what, chum?" They were running smoothly along the highway now, the engine a reassuring hum of power, the interior of the sedan warm and relaxing. The rain was letting up a little, but dirty banks of fog had started gathering at the roadside like ghosts of all the work of the day, tenuous, without substance.

"What, Carl?"

"You should've stuck with the M.I.T. degree after all. Hell with your brain you'd've made that try for the Moon a success last month instead of another near-miss."

"Maybe you're right. Those boys know what they're doing though. I'll stick to puttering."

"Puttering the man calls it. 'He hath a lean and hungry look--such men are dangerous....' Myself, I think that gadget you 'putter' with in that cellar of yours is some kind of a gismo to hypnotize all the states-righters into doing something intelligent like dropping dead without being told!"

"With ingenuity such as yours, my friend, I think I could really accomplish something in that cellar of mine at that! That's the trouble. You writers and newsmen have all the good ideas--slide-rules don't think worth a damn! Instead of a wonderful creation such as you suggest, what have I got? A pile of junk that may, if it works in any degree at all, turn out to be a fairly good television set...."

"You wouldn't kid an old friend. That martini you were putting away the other night said that it was an experiment with something called tired light."

"Exactly. Television."

"Look, the quality of curiosity is not strained, it droppeth as a gentle ten-ton truck from twenty stories up! You said--or the martini said anyway--that if this little gimcrack of yours works, it'd be able to bring back pictures of things that happened in the past. You're guilty until proven innocent, Galileo. Start talking."

"Off the record--"

"I should broadcast it and get dunked in a witch's chair."

"Well--the martini had it a little balled up, but the essential idea's there I guess. Anyway, it isn't everybody who has a space-warp for a household pet."

"Or Einstein for a hobby."

"Blah, this is strictly Blair. That's why it won't work, and I'd be only sensationally nuts if I ever thought it would. But some men take Scotch for their nerves, and I take Scotch with electronics. More of a jolt that way."

"Yuk, yuk."

* * * * *

That was why it was good to have Carl for a friend. No matter how sorry you got to feeling for yourself, he could usually snap you out of it one way or another. Right now, Doug thought, Carl was diligently at work with that peculiar brand of psychology that all newspapermen strive ceaselessly to acquire that makes people blab when they ought to keep quiet. But why not--Carl wouldn't know what the hell it was all about and he wouldn't care, if he thought it would take some of the pressure off.

"Well, listen then. Ever look through an observatory telescope and have somebody tell you you were focused on some star or other a couple of thousand light years away? Maybe it was in the process of blowing up and becoming a nova or something like that. Anyhow, it would be explained to you that you were seeing that star as it was two thousand years ago. You were seeing, for instance, an explosion that happened twenty centuries in the past. Reason, of course, is that it took the light that long to get from the star to you. More simply, the light that strikes your back porch in the morning left the sun about nine minutes before."

"Very clear. Only how come, if the universe is a closed form of infinity like it says in all the new books, this light never doubles back on itself--gives you two or even a million images of the same star?"

"That's where the tired light comes in. After a certain length of time--unthinkable aeons of it--it, like all other forms of energy, peters out. Runs down. Quits. Kaput. They call it entropy. It constitutes, actually, a gradual running down, growing old of the universe. As far as anyone knows, this happens before it 'doubles back' on itself, as you put it. You can't catch it coming around the second time to see what you looked like umpteenillion ages ago. So, if you want a second look at yourself, you've got to go out and catch the light which you reflected in the past--"

"Oh brother. You mean anybody on a planet, say, forty light years from Earth with a supertelescope looking at us would be watching the battle of Chateau Thierry and Belleau Wood! A hundred and eighty light years away he'd see us slugging it out against King George III at Saratoga and Valley Forge!"

"You've got it. In other words, the light reflected from Earth then is somewhere deep in Space now. If you could haul it in on some kind of a receiver, you could see everything all over again--you could watch the land masses of Earth as they shifted to form the continents as we know them today."

"You'd need something faster than light to trap the light itself--and I thought that was against Fitzgerald or somebody."

"If you followed the same space warps the light did, it would be. But if it were possible to operate your receiver _through_ the fabric of space-time, instead of _along_ it--a kind of short-cut--you might turn up with what you're after."

"I am sorry I got into this."

Blair smiled tiredly. "Me too. Hell, I'm fooling around with things I don't pretend to know anything about. Just enough to putter. Just enough to keep my mind off all-day-long. God knows what I'll get when I turn the damn thing on. Probably not even snow so I'm not worried. Turn left at the next stop-light--they've got that new cut-off finished." He started buttoning his coat. Grayson turned left as ordered.

"But suppose it works?"

"Wow. Then the steam-fitters would envy me."

"Well it sure oughtta do something. You've been tinkering with it for--how long? Couple years?"

"About four I guess, off and on. Sometimes I get to wondering what it'll do if it does do anything."

"Show us Lillian Russell, maybe, or Little Egypt!"

"There's a million possible results when you go fooling around with the structure of the universe, Carl. I guess that's what fascinates me. A little learning is a dangerous thing, they say. Dot's afraid I'll blow us up."

"Well--she could have something there!"

"The thing probably won't even toast a piece of bread. But I'd rather fool with it than collect buttons or play bridge or some other damfool thing, so...."

The blue sedan sloshed up the puddled drive-way to the new nine-room bungalow and at the porch Doug Blair got out. A wind had sprung up and the dampness suddenly grasped his body, clung, as though he were naked.

"Time for a drink, supper?"

"No, thanks, Doug--gotta see a man. Now take it easy--let the state of the nation go bury its head for tonight and you have some fun blowing fuses!"

"Yeah, yeah! O.K. and thanks."

The blue sedan sloshed its way back to the highway, and Doug went into the house.

* * * * *

Douglas Blair kissed his wife and, as he did every time he kissed her, wondered how he'd been so lucky. He preferred to think as seldom as memory would permit of how close he'd come on a couple of occasions to marrying a country club, a bridge deck, a women's society, an Emily Post book. And when Dot had given him Terry and Mike, she'd topped off the miracle of herself with the added one of two healthy young minds that had already learned to say "prove it!" Some of the tiredness left him, a lot of the aching discouragement was brushed away.

"Tired, Doug?"

"I was."

There was a sudden thundering which grew quickly into the crashing noises often made by wild elephants getting exercise in a native village.

"The patter of little feet," Dorothy said.

"Oh. For a minute I thought it was termites. Hi, fellas! What kind of trouble did we almost keep out of today?"

"Hi, dad! Hey, Mike says you aren't ever going to try it out. You are, aren't you?"

"I didn't say not ever. I said _maybe_ not ever. Things like the Contraption take years to develop, don't they, dad?"

"Well," Doug said, doing what he could to stem the onslaught and still stay on his feet, "what's the source of all this wisdom, Mr. Scientist?"

"Some day I'll be a scientist. Mommy said so, didn't you, mom?"

Every so often Doug wondered where they got that solid healthy look, and if either of them would ever faintly resemble the Cassius after whom even Carl thought he should have been named. The red hair of course was Dorothy's. The blue eyes were Dorothy's. Even the brains were, he sometimes suspected, all Dorothy's. But the dormant challenge that grew, not yet quite fully awakened, somewhere behind the freckled, ten-year-old faces--that, if it matured well, would be his.

"If," Doug said then, "you three will let a hungry man eat his supper, he'll let you in on a little surprise before hand. That is, if anybody's interested--"

"Tell us!"

"Is it, Doug?"

"Your brilliant father has exactly three connections to solder on the Contraption, and then--well, after supper, we'll all see together." He laughed. Terry and Mike hooted. Dorothy looked a little worried, and told the boys to wash up.

* * * * *

It covered half the ten-foot workbench, its large screen a huge, lens-like square eye as it glinted beneath the glare of the cold-cathode lights that lined the ceiling of the laboratory-like cellar.

Doug put the cooling soldering-iron back in its place. Dorothy had her Christmas camera mounted on a tripod a few feet back, "Just in case," she said, "it does something before it blows up."

Terry and Mike were silent, eyes wide, not quite behind their mother.

"We shall now," Doug said, "see if we can get a look at Hopalong Cassidy the way he looked when I was a boy. Better yet, maybe Jack Benny when he was 39 ... and Valentino...."

He closed the switch, and the cathode lights flickered, went out. There was a humming sound that seemed to come from all sides of the cellar rather than from the Contraption, and the bluish glow emanated from the square convex eye. Directly before it, they watched.

The light shimmered, gave the illusion that the Contraption itself was shimmering, fading. The work bench became indistinct.

"Doug--"

And then the workbench and the Contraption were gone, the overhead cathode tubes were gone, and daylight was filtering through a cellar window that had moved about four feet along the wall--which was now made of glass brick instead of concrete.

Doug and his wife stood rooted. Terry and Mike were gone, too.