Time Travail Read Online Free PDF

equipped with telescopes able to view the earth.
Right now they would see the earth as it was before the appearance
of man. In 2.2 million years they would see the two of us as we had
been, now, talking about them.
     
    It sometimes happened that I guided Harvey
to new fields of study in unorthodox ways. The starting-point was
the preposterously bogus ads I came across in SF pulp-mags
( Amazing and Astounding Stories ) and answered. Not the miracle cures for piles, eczema and
impotence or correspondence courses for would-be detectives but the
promised exercise of marvelous powers. Even after prolonged contact
with Harvey’s brilliant rational mind I remained a sucker for the
marvelous.
    There was the “magic X-ray tube.” The
incompetent illustration showed a cloth-capped young man gazing
through it at his hand. The bones of his hand were visible. Another
cloth-capped young man – maybe the same one – was shown peering
through it at a young woman. There was a crude (artistically
speaking) hint of a petticoat beneath her long dress. You could
guess the apparatus penetrated to more essential things that
couldn’t be shown in the magazine-ad. At only thirteen my mind was
already turned that way.
    The magic X-ray tube set me back $2.50. It
turned out to be a tube with a feather pasted to a celluloid disk
inside. When you looked through it the feather vaguely broke up the
object. My hand and girls were broken up but remained opaque.
    Harvey whooped and jeered. He tried to
explain the principles of X-rays to me but he must have been
dissatisfied with his explanation because he started studying the
phenomenon. He decided that we would construct a Roentgen
apparatus.
    The tube was expensive. To get the money I
mowed lawns till I was dizzy and swiped coins from newsstands.
Finally it was set up, the Coolidge tube and the screen coated with
zinc sulfate (ZnSO 4 ). “OK,
here we go,” he said, not moving. He expected me to stick an
experimental hand in the ray. I had the rare sense to
refuse.
    So he did it himself. He saw his own bones on
the screen. I was scared to. Even then I was afraid of revelation.
Harvey wanted to go further. It was his basic and fatal
characteristic. He wanted to see his own skull. He did. After, he
suffered fits of dizziness, vomited and an ugly red rash appeared
and spread on his right temple.
    A couple of months later I came across an ad
for hypnotism in the SF pulp. Again the same old theme. The crude
drawing showed a strong-chinned man with rays streaming from his
eyes fixing a girl meant by the artist to be pretty and subjugated.
I sent the $1.75. Again I got stung. The seven-page booklet was
full of anecdotes. The last three paragraphs dealt in general terms
with operational techniques: magnetic passes, masterful gazes,
soothing invitations to slumber.
    I tried it on Harvey, both of us seated
facing each other.
    “You’re feeling sleepy, sleeepee sleeepeee
…”
    I said that over and over again and woke up
frightened in my chair I didn’t know how much later. Harvey was
still in his chair but now reading a popularization of the theory
of relativity and taking notes. He wasn’t paying any attention to
me. I hammed it up. I got up goggle-eyed with my arms stuck out
like a sleepwalker and barged into him. He ended up believing that
it had all been an act. But it hadn’t been and I was scared.
     
    None of this involvement with applied science
helped me at school. I was disastrously bad at math. Physics was a
closed book to me. Even in chemistry I got no more than C+ because
of the arithmetic involved in the reaction formulas. I longed for a
scientific career but basically I didn’t have a scientific bent of
mind. I couldn’t get beneath the surface of phenomena.
    With me it was superficial aesthetic
pleasure: those light-blue crackling sparks, the swaying
pearl-necklaces of hydrogen bubbles arising from an electrode, the
pulsing green glow of white phosphorus. I remember the bulb