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Updated: June 23, 2025
"Einstein was considered pretty good, wasn't he?" I remarked. "After all, he was the first to tie time and space to the laboratory. Before him they were just philosophical concepts." "He didn't!" rasped the professor. "Perhaps, in a dim, primitive fashion, he showed the way, but I I, van Manderpootz am the first to seize time, drag it into my laboratory, and perform an experiment on it." "Indeed?
Then suddenly, a wail of fear and despair went up, and there was a roar of water. The observation room walls had given. I saw the green surge of waves, and a billowing deluge rushed down upon us. I had been late again. That was all. I raised shocked and frightened eyes from the subjunctivisor to face van Manderpootz, who was scribbling on the edge of the table. "Well?" he asked. I shuddered.
"See, Dick, this is the world, the universe." He swept a finger down it. "It is long in time, and" sweeping his hand across it "it is broad in space, but" now jabbing his finger against its center "it is very thin in the fourth dimension. Van Manderpootz takes always the shortest, the most logical course. I do not travel along time, into past or future. No. Me, I travel across time, sideways!"
You might express it, by 'if I had done such and such, so and so would have happened. The worlds of the subjunctive mode." "Now how the devil does it do that?" "Simple, for van Manderpootz! I use polarized light, polarized not in the horizontal or vertical planes, but in the direction of the fourth dimension an easy matter. One uses Iceland spar under colossal pressures, that is all.
I didn't care; if van Manderpootz hadn't been armored in stubby whiskers, I'd have kissed him. Perhaps I did anyway; I can't be sure of my actions during those chaotic minutes in the professor's tiny office. At last I calmed. "I can look her up!" I gloated. "She must have landed with the other survivors, and they were all on that British tramp freighter the Osgood, that docked here last week.
I have a better use for the space." I gave a miserable groan and was tempted to damn the autobiography of the great van Manderpootz. A gleam of sympathy showed in his eyes, and he took my arm, dragging me into the little office adjoining his laboratory. "Tell me," he commanded. I did. I guess I made the tragedy plain enough, for his heavy brows knit in a frown of pity.
"Aren't you one of the world's outstanding physicists?" "One of them!" he snorted. "One of them, eh! And who are the others?" "Oh, Corveille and Hastings and Shrimski " "Bah! Would you mention them in the same breath with the name of van Manderpootz? A pack of jackals, eating the crumbs of ideas that drop from my feast of thoughts! I grinned again in amusement.
I have a well, an undeserved reputation for being late to everything; something always comes up to prevent me from getting anywhere on time. It's never my fault; this time it was a chance encounter with my old physics professor, old Haskel van Manderpootz. I couldn't very well just say hello and good-bye to him; I'd been a favorite of his back in the college days of 2014.
I waved a signal to van Manderpootz, the thing clicked, and the subjunctivisor was on. The grassless clay of the field appeared. It is a curious thing about the psychomat that you see only through the eyes of your image on the screen. It lends a strange reality to the working of the toy; I suppose a sort of self-hypnosis is partly responsible.
"But who'd want to read my autobiography? That's all right for you." "Autobiography? Oh! I remember. No, I have abandoned that. History itself will record the life and works of van Manderpootz. Now I am engaged in a far grander project." "Indeed?" I was utterly, gloomily disinterested. "Yes. Gogli has been here, Gogli the sculptor. He is to make a bust of me.
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