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I'd like to know what would have happened if I'd sold out my stocks in 2009 instead of '10. I was a millionaire in my own right then, but I was a little well, a little late in liquidating." "As usual," remarked van Manderpootz. "Let's go over to the laboratory then." The professor's quarters were but a block from the campus.
Most of it was merely a Horsten psychomat, but glittering crystalline and glassy was the prism of Iceland spar, the polarizing agent that was the heart of the instrument. Van Manderpootz pointed to the headpiece. "Put it on," he said, and I sat staring at the screen of the psychomat.
He glared at me. "Now all you have to do is to design such a machine, and then van Manderpootz will admit the possibility of traveling into the future for a limited number of seconds. As for the past, I have just explained that all the energy in the universe is insufficient for that." "But," I stammered, "you just said that you "
It has given birth to an idea far more important than itself. I shall need the space it occupies." "But what is the idea, if it's not too presumptuous of me to ask?" "It is not too presumptuous. You and the world which awaits it so eagerly may both know, but you hear it from the lips of the author. It is nothing less than the autobiography of van Manderpootz!" He paused impressively. I gaped.
However, I felt a great deal better when I saw the evening papers; the Baikal, flying at the north edge of the eastbound lane to avoid a storm, had locked wings with a British fruitship and all but a hundred of her five hundred passengers were lost. I had almost become "the late Mr. Wells" in a grimmer sense. I'd made an engagement for the following week with old van Manderpootz.
Say, I guess I was lucky to be cleaned out. I won't regret it from now on." "That," said the professor grandly, "is van Manderpootz's great contribution to human happiness. 'Of all sad words of tongue or pen, the saddest are these: It might have been! True no longer, my friend Dick. Van Manderpootz has shown that the proper reading is, 'It might have been worse!"
At any rate, van Manderpootz was impressed. "Well!" he rumbled. "I almost missed you, Dixon. I was just going over to the club, since I didn't expect you for an hour. You're only ten minutes late." I ignored this. "Professor, I want to use your uh your subjunctivisor." "Eh? Oh, yes. You're lucky, then. I was just about to dismantle it." "Dismantle it! Why?" "It has served its purpose.
That seemed the likeliest. After all, it was too much to expect that Dixon Wells could ever be on time, and as to the second possibility well, they hadn't waited for me, and that in a way removed the weight of responsibility. "Come on," rumbled van Manderpootz. I followed him across to the Physics Building and into his littered laboratory.
"I did not say anything about traveling into either future or past, which I have just demonstrated to you to be impossible a practical impossibility in the one case and an absolute one in the other." "Then how do you travel in time?" "Not even van Manderpootz can perform the impossible," said the professor, now faintly jovial. He tapped a thick pad of typewriter paper on the table beside him.
The word called up van Manderpootz and his subjunctivisor the worlds of "if," the weird, unreal worlds that existed beside reality, neither past nor future, but contemporary, yet extemporal. Somewhere among their ghostly infinities existed one that represented the world that would have been had I made the liner. I had only to call up Haskel van Manderpootz, make an appointment, and then find out.
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