Beyond Control Read online

  He ran “to the switches at the power leads. He flicked them on, one by one. He turned a resistor, adjusted other knobs, put out the cellar lights. “Wait. Let it warm up.” There was a small glow near the center of one wall. Potterley was gibbering incoherently, but Foster only cried again, “Look!”

  The light sharpened and brightened, broke up into a light-and-dark pattern. Men and women! Fuzzy. Features blurred. Arms and legs mere streaks. An old-fashioned ground car, unclear but recognizable as one of the kind that had once used gasoline-powered internal-combustion engines, sped by.

  Foster said, “Mid-twentieth century, somewhere. I can’t hook up an audio yet, so this is soundless. Eventually, we can add sound. Anyway, mid-twentieth is almost as far back as you can go. Believe me, that’s the best focusing that can be done.”

  Potterley said, “Build a larger machine, a stronger one. Improve your circuits.”

  “You can’t lick the Uncertainty Principle, man, any more than you can live on the sun. There are physical limits to what can be done.”

  “You’re lying. I won’t believe you. I—”

  A new voice sounded, raised shrilly to make itself heard.

  “Arnold! Dr. Foster!”

  The young physicist turned at once. Dr. Potterley froze for a long moment, then said, without turning, “What is it, Caroline? Leave us.”

  “No!” Mrs. Potterley descended the stairs. “I heard. I couldn’t help hearing. Do you have a-time viewer here, Dr. Foster? Here in the basement?”

  “Yes, I do, Mrs. Potterley. A kind of time viewer. Not a good one. I can’t get sound yet and the picture is darned blurry, but it works.”

  Mrs. Potterley clasped her hands and held them tightly against her breast. “How wonderful. How wonderful.”

  “It’s not at all wonderful,” snapped Potterley. “The young fool can’t reach farther back than—”

  “Now, look,” began Foster in exasperation . . .

  “Please!” cried Mrs. Potterley. “Listen to me. Arnold, don’t you see that as long as we can use it for twenty years back, we can see Laurel once again? What do we care about Carthage and ancient times? It’s Laurel we can see. She’ll be alive for us again. Leave the machine here, Dr. Foster. Show us how to work it.”

  Foster stared at her, then at her husband. Dr. Potterley’s face had gone white. Though his voice stayed low and even, its calmness was somehow gone. He said, “You’re a fool!”

  Caroline said weakly, “Arnold!”

  “You’re a fool, I say. What will you see? The past. The dead past. Will Laurel do one thing she did not do? Will you see one thing you haven’t seen? Will you live three years over and over again, watching a baby who’ll never grow up, no matter how you watch?”

  His voice came near to cracking, but held. He stopped closer to her, seized her shoulder and shook her roughly. “Do you know what will happen to you if you do that? They’ll come to take you away because you’ll go mad. Yes, mad. Do you want mental treatment? Do you want to be shut up, to undergo the psychic probe?”

  Mrs. Potterley tore away. There was no trace of softness or vagueness about her. She had twisted into a virago. “I want to see my child, Arnold. She’s in that machine and I want her.”

  “She’s not in the machine. An image is. Can’t you understand? An image! Something that’s not real!”

  “I want my child. Do you hear me?” She flew at him, screaming, fists beating. I want my child.”

  The historian retreated at the fury of the assault, crying out. Foster moved to step between, when Mrs. Potterley dropped, Sobbing wildly, to the floor.

  Potterley turned, eyes desperately seeking. With a sudden heave, he snatched at a Lando-rod, tearing it from its support, and whirling away before Foster, numbed by all that was taking place, could move to stop him.

  “Stand back!” gasped Potterley, “or I’ll kill you. I swear it.”

  He swung with force, and Foster jumped back.

  Potterley turned with fury on every part of the structure in the cellar, and Foster, after the first crash of glass, watched dazedly.

  Potterley spent his rage and then he was standing quietly amid shards and splinters, with a broken Lando-rod in his hand. He said to Foster in a whisper, “Now get out of here! Never come back! If any of this cost you anything, send me a bill and I’ll pay for it. I’ll pay double.”

  Foster shrugged, picked up his shirt and moved up the basement stairs. He could hear Mrs. Potterley sobbing loudly, and as he turned at the head of the stairs for a last look, he saw Dr. Potterley bending over her, his face convulsed with sorrow.

  Two days later, with the school day drawing to a close and Foster looking wearily about to see if there was any data on his newly approved projects that he wished to take home, Dr. Potterley appeared once more. He was standing at the open door of Foster’s office.

  The historian was neatly dressed as ever. He lifted his hand in a gesture that was too vague to be a greeting, too abortive to be a plea. Foster stared stonily.

  Potterley said, “I waited till five, till you were . . . May I come in?”

  Foster nodded.

  Potterley said, “I suppose I ought to apologize for my behavior. I was dreadfully disappointed; not quite master of myself. Still, it was inexcusable.”

  “I accept your apology,” said Foster. “Is that all?”

  “My wife called you, I think.”

  “Yes, she has.”

  “She has been quite hysterical. She told me she had, but I couldn’t be quite sure—”

  “Could you tell me—would you be so kind as to tell me what she wanted?”

  “She wanted a chronoscope. She said she had some money of her own. She was willing to pay.”

  “Did you—make any commitments?”

  “I said I wasn’t in the manufacturing business.”

  “Good,” breathed Potterley, his chest expanding with a sigh of relief. “Please don’t take any calls from her. She’s not—quite—”

  “Look, Dr. Potterley,” said Foster, “I’m not getting into any domestic quarrels, but you’d better be prepared for something. Chronoscopes can be built by anybody. Given a few simple parts that can be bought through some etherics sales center, it can be built in the home workshop. The video part, anyway.”

  “But no one else will think of it beside you, will they? No one has.”

  “I don’t intend to keep it secret.”

  “But you can’t publish. It’s illegal research.”

  “That doesn’t matter any more, Dr. Potterley. If I lose my grants, I lose them. If the university is displeased, I’ll resign. It just doesn’t matter.”

  “But you can’t do that!”

  “Till now,” said Foster, “you didn’t mind my risking loss of grants and position. Why do you turn so tender about it now? Now let me explain something to you. When you first came to me, I believed in organized and directed research; the situation as it existed, in other words. I considered you an intellectual anarchist, Dr. Potterley, and dangerous. But, for one reason or another, I’ve been an anarchist myself for months now and I have achieved great things.

  “Those things have been achieved not because I am a brilliant scientist. Not at all. It was just that scientific research had been directed from above and holes were left that could be filled in by anyone who looked in the right direction. And anyone might have if the government hadn’t actively tried to prevent it.

  “Now understand me. I still believe directed research can be useful. I’m not in favor of a retreat to total anarchy. But there must be a middle ground. Directed research can retain flexibility. A scientist must be allowed to follow his curiosity, at least in his spare time.”

  Potterley sat down. He said ingratiatingly, “Let’s discuss this, Foster. I appreciate your idealism. You’re young. You want the moon. But you can’t destroy yourself through fancy notions of what research must consist of. I got you into this. I am responsible and I blame myself bitterly. I was acting em
otionally. My interest in Carthage blinded me and I was a damned fool.”

  Foster broke in. “You mean you’ve changed completely in two days? Carthage is nothing? Government suppression of research is nothing?”

  “Even a damned fool like myself can learn, Foster. My wife taught me something. I understand the reason for government suppression of neutrinics now. I didn’t two days ago. And, understanding, I approve. You saw the way my wife reacted to the news of a chronoscope in the basement. I had envisioned a chronoscope used for research purposes. All she could see was the personal pleasure of returning neurotically to a personal past, a dead past. The pure researcher, Foster, is in the minority. People like my wife would outweigh us.

  “For the government to encourage chronoscopy would have meant that everyone’s past would be visible. The government officers would be subjected to blackmail and improper pressure, since who on Earth has a past that is absolutely clean? Organized government might become impossible.”

  Foster licked his lips. “Maybe. Maybe the government has some justification in its own eyes. Still, there’s an important principle involved here. Who knows what other scientific advances are being stymied because scientists are being stifled into walking a narrow path? If the chronoscope becomes the terror of a few politicians, it’s a price that must be paid. The public must realize that science must be free and there is no more dramatic way of doing it than to publish my discovery, one way or another, legally or illegally.”

  Potterley’s brow was damp with perspiration, but his voice remained even. “Oh, not just a few politicians, Dr. Foster. Don’t think that. It would be my terror, too. My wife would spend her time living with our dead daughter. She would retreat further from reality. She would go mad living the same scenes over and over. And not just my terror. There would be others like her. Children searching for their dead parents or their own youth. We’ll have a whole world living in the past. Midsummer madness.”

  Foster said, “Moral judgments can’t stand in the way. There isn’t one advance at any time in history that mankind hasn’t had the ingenuity to pervert. Mankind must also have the ingenuity to prevent. As for the chronoscope, your delvers into the dead past will get tired soon enough. They’ll catch their loved parents in some of the things their loved parents did and they’ll lose their enthusiasm for it all. But all this is trivial. With me, it’s a matter of important principle.”

  Potterley said, “Hang your principle. Can’t you understand men and women as well as principle? Don’t you understand that my wife will live through the fire that killed our baby? She won’t be able to help herself. I know her. She’ll follow through each step, trying to prevent it. She’ll live it over and over again, hoping each time that it won’t happen. How many times do you want to kill Laurel?” A huskiness had crept into his voice.

  A thought crossed Foster’s mind. “What are you really afraid she’ll find out, Dr. Potterley? What happened the night of the fire?”

  The historian’s hands went up quickly to cover his face and they shook with his dry sobs. Foster turned away and stared uncomfortably out the window.

  Potterley said after a while, “It’s a long time since I’ve had to think of it. Caroline was away. I was baby-sitting. I went into the baby’s bedroom mid-evening to see if she had kicked off the bedclothes. I had my cigarette with me . . . I smoked in those days. I must have stubbed it out before putting it in the ashtray on the chest of drawers. I was always careful. The baby was all right. I returned to the living room and fell asleep before the video. I awoke, choking, surrounded by fire. I don’t know how it started.”

  “But you think it may have been the cigarette, is that it?” said Foster. “A cigarette which, for once, you forgot to stub out?”

  “I don’t know. I tried to save her, but she was dead in my arms when I got out.”

  “You never told your wife about the cigarette, I suppose.”

  Potterley shook his head. “But I’ve lived with it.”

  “Only now, with a chronoscope, she’ll find out. Maybe it wasn’t the cigarette. Maybe you did stub it out. Isn’t that possible?”

  The scant tears had dried on Potterley’s face. The redness had subsided. He said, “I can’t take the chance . . .

  But it’s not just myself, Foster. The past has its terrors for most people. Don’t loose those terrors on the human race.”

  Foster paced the floor. Somehow, this explained the reason for Potterley’s rabid, irrational desire to boost the Carthaginians, deify them, most of all disprove the story of their fiery sacrifices to Moloch. By freeing them of the guilt of infanticide by fire, he symbolically freed himself of the same guilt.

  So the same fire that had driven him on to causing the construction of a chronoscope was now driving him on to the destruction.

  Foster looked sadly at the older man. “I see your position, Dr. Potterley, but this goes above personal feelings. I’ve got to smash this throttling hold on the throat of science.”

  Potterley said, savagely, “You mean you want the fame and wealth that goes with such a discovery.”

  “I don’t know about the wealth, but that, too, I suppose. I’m no more than human.”

  “You won’t suppress your knowledge?”

  “Not under any circumstances.”

  “Well, then—” And the historian got to his feet and stood for a moment, glaring.

  Foster had an odd moment of terror. The man was older than he, smaller, feebler, and he didn’t look armed. Still . . .

  Foster said, “If you’re thinking of killing me or anything insane like that, I’ve got the information in a safety-deposit vault where the proper people will find it in case of my disappearance or death.”

  Potterley said, “Don’t be a fool,” and stalked out.

  Foster closed the door, locked it and sat down to think. He felt silly. He had no information in any safety-deposit vault, of course. Such a melodramatic action would not have occurred to him ordinarily. But now it had.

  Feeling even sillier, he spent an hour writing out the equations of the application of pseudo-gravitic optics to neutrinic recording, and some diagrams for the engineering details of construction. He sealed it in an envelope and scrawled Ralph Nimmo’s name over the outside.

  He spent a rather restless night and the next morning, on the way to school, dropped the envelope off at the bank, with appropriate instructions to an official, who made him sign a paper permitting the box to be opened after his death.

  He called Nimmo to tell him of the existence of the envelope, refusing querulously to say anything about its contents.

  He had never felt so ridiculously self-conscious as at that moment.

  That night and the next, Foster spent in only fitful sleep, finding himself face to face with the highly practical problem of the publication of data unethically obtained.

  The Proceedings of the Society for Pseudo-Gravities, which was the journal with which he was best acquainted, would certainly not touch any paper that did not include the magic footnote: “The work described in this paper was made possible by Grant No. So-and-So from the Commission of Research of the United Nations.”

  Nor, doubly so, would the Journal of Physics.

  There were always the minor journals who might overlook the nature of the article for the sake of the sensation, but that would require a little financial negotiation on which he hesitated to embark. It might, on the whole, be better to pay the cost of publishing a small pamphlet for general distribution among scholars. In that case, he would even be able to dispense with the services of a science writer, sacrificing polish for speed. He would have to find a reliable printer. Uncle Ralph might know one.

  He walked down the corridor to his office and wondered anxiously if perhaps he ought to waste no further time, give himself no further chance to lapse into indecision and take the risk of calling Ralph from his office phone. He was so absorbed in his own heavy thoughts that he did not notice that his room was occupied until he tu
rned from the clothes closet and approached his desk.

  Dr. Potterley was there and a man whom Foster did not recognize.

  Foster stared at them. “What’s this?”

  Potterley said, “I’m sorry, but I had to stop you.”

  Foster continued staring. “What are you talking about?”

  The stranger said, “Let me introduce myself.” He had large teeth, a little uneven, and they showed prominently when he smiled. “I am Thaddeus Araman, Department Head of the Division of Chronoscopy. I am here to see you concerning information brought to me by Professor Arnold Potterley and confirmed by our own sources—” Potterley said breathlessly, “I took all the blame, Dr. Foster. I explained that it was I who persuaded you against your will into unethical practices. I have offered to accept full responsibility and punishment. I don’t wish you harmed in any way. It’s just that chronoscopy must not be permitted!”

  Araman nodded. “He had taken the blame as he says, Dr. Foster, but this thing is out of his hands now.”

  Foster said, “So? What are you going to do? Blackball me from all consideration for research grants?”

  “That is in my power,” said Araman.

  “Order the university to discharge me?”

  “That, too, is in my power.”

  “All right, go ahead. Consider it done. I’ll leave my office now, with you. I can send for my books later. If you insist. I’ll leave my books. Is that all?”

  “Not quite,” said Araman. “You must engage to do no further research in chronoscopy, to publish none of your findings in chronoscopy and, of course, to build no chronoscope. You will remain under surveillance indefinitely to make sure you keep that promise.”

  “Supposing I refuse to promise? What can you do? Doing research out of my field may be unethical, but it isn’t a criminal offense.”

  “In the case of chronoscopy, my young friend,” said Araman patiently, “it is a criminal offense. If necessary, you will be put in jail and kept there.”