Time Travail Read Online Free PDF Page A

things.
They could go on forever. They want to take control. I have to stop
and select. The only way you can master it all is through selection
and when selection goes (as it’s been doing, alarmingly, more and
more often these last weeks) then you’re in real trouble.
    What I have to select for what I’m doing now
are the packs of dirty, ragged, wiry, hard-fisted, stinking,
expertly spitting kids, thirsting for Jewish blood that they were
quick to sniff out in the junk-heap.
    Once they burst in on us knocking apart a
brass bed. Harvey fled. He was awful at all sports but he could run
fast. It must have been atavistic. They caught me and pushed me
around, but not too hard. I expected them to beat me bloody.
    “Tell your clipcock pal we’ll beat the shit
out of him next time.”
    They implicitly placed me outside the
circumcised.
    “He ain’t no pal of mine,” I said in great
fear, purposefully imitating their grammar as my hair and eyes
involuntarily imitated theirs and their grandfathers’, those
drunken joyous participants in the pogroms my mother used to tell
me about, sparing me no details.
    Harvey was afraid of them but didn’t hate
them the way I did. He would dismiss them, echoing his father, as
“human garbage”. I can still hear their favorite expression:
“clip-cocked Christ-killers”: a throatful of phonetic ugliness,
like a choking with hatred, like preliminaries to spitting.
    Again I should stop because what you get
going back this way is not just the objects and people with the
original sharpness of vision but also the sharpness – sometimes
like a knife-blade – of the original emotion they aroused.
     
    One last thing about them. Periodically they
sallied forth across the tracks and ravaged our shack and also used
it as a mass latrine and left excremental misspelled anti-Semitic
slogans on the walls.
    Finally they were bested by Jewish cunning.
Even Hitler acknowledged this characteristic. His side had nobility
and courage but was a little short on brains. Harvey hooked up
wires from the Ruhmkorff coil to the brass doorknob. Twisting the
knob made the interrupter vibrate. It was set for five seconds.
Longer would have killed you. I know because one day I forgot and
tried to open the door. The amperage was low but it delivered about
40,000 volts. As I jigged about Harvey observed me with interest
until the five seconds were up and I was free although still
jerking like a spastic.
    One of them must have gotten the same
treatment. They didn’t try to break in any more. Instead, they
would stand at a safe distance and heave rocks like Neanderthals at
that shack of enlightenment. Eventually we gave up the shack and
fitted up the cellar of Harvey’s house as a serious lab. By this
time Harvey’s father was beginning to take seriously the things his
son’s teachers were saying about him.
     
    We didn’t limit ourselves to electricity and
chemistry. We’d sneak out after eleven when there was less
parasitic light in the sky from the town and scrutinize stars and
planets with a homemade Newton reflecting telescope made out of a
big cardboard shipping-tube. Harvey ground the four-inch mirror. We
split double stars and saw the four known moons of Jupiter.
    The rings of Saturn were a marvel.
    Venus was a big disappointment even at that
age: lovely at a distance but just a blank disk close up. I was
forewarned.
    Mars wasn’t much either: a rusty blur. We
couldn’t see the canals or the polar caps. Andromeda was another
disappointment. Even at X 200 it resolved into nothing more
spectacular than a faint smear of light.
    I remember what Harvey said as, teeth
chattering in the January cold (the seeing was best in winter), we
took turns peering at that nearest galaxy to ours. We were looking
at time past, he said, back at the galaxy as it had been 2.2
million years ago. He said that there were billions of stars in
that galaxy, some probably suns to planets, and you could imagine a
super-evolved race