COPYRIGHT INFORMATION
Copyright © 1938 by S. Fowler Wright
Copyright © 2009, 2013 by the Estate of S. Fowler Wright
Originally published as The Adventure of Wyndham Smith.
Published by Wildside Press LLC
www.wildsidebooks.com
CHAPTER ONE
Wyndham Smith was at Guy’s Hospital at the time he had his experience, a medical student in his second year.
He looked round a room floored and walled and furnished in the same substance, which was strange to him—“ebonied glass” came to his mind—and across at a man who was strangely dresses—Oriental?—no, not exactly that—and with an aspect of age with in the grave dignity of his face, and of youth in the smooth freshness of his skin, who was saying in a distant and yet not unfriendly way: “I suppose you are puzzled as to where you have come?”
“Once before,” he replied, “I had a dream something like this. I mean, I knew I was dreaming the while I dreamed. I remember hoping I should not wake till the end came; but this is the most vivid dream that I even had.”
The man’s lips moved to a slight smile. “You need have no fear about that.”
“No? I feel as though I were awake now.”
“So you are.”
Wyndham Smith looked round. He considered the polished shadows of the walls, and the brighter opaqueness of the ceiling which gave a diffused light to the room. He was not convinced.
“Then, perhaps,” he said, “You will explain how I got here.”
It was a reasonable request, though he saw that a dream might invent an answer of no reliable value.
“That,” the protagonist of his dream replied, “is what I propose to do. It is a courtesy which I might have extended freely to a young man of your profession, but it is necessary apart from that. It is important here from the early part of the twentieth century. You are now—by an extension of your system of reckoning—in the later part of the forty-fifth.”
“You can’t expect me to swallow that.”
“No? I wonder why. Has the idea of such transmigration, either voluntary or enforced, never entered your mind? Even so, you have had some years of training which should make you receptive to new ideas. I thought that yours was a time when the implications of relativity began to be understood.”
“I am afraid,” Wyndham Smith said honestly, “that I am one of those to whom the implications of relativity are not clear. I am willing to believe that time is the fourth dimension which has a plausible sound. But I don’t go far beyond that. As to people being able to jump about in time, from one age to another, even if it were shown in theory that they could—which would be hard to believe—observation tells us definitely that it doesn’t occur.”
“May I ask how you have been able to observe that?”
“If it did, people would appear suddenly among us from nowhere, and others would disappear in the same way. You couldn’t even take a census.”
“You are half right and half wrong. Your year was nineteen thirty-seven, was it not, in the reckoning of your day?”
“Yes, that’s what it is now.”
“Ye-es. No man has gone back to that period, or is likely to do so. Having known it, you can’t be surprised. But they have been fetched away in large numbers, English people in your century being a favourite selection for many purposes. I learned your language from one of them.”
“I know that isn’t true. If it were, we should notice they had disappeared.”
The older man was unmoved by the bluntness of this contradiction. “If you think,” he said, with a quiet certainty, “you will know that it is…did you never hear of the number of people who disappeared in England at that time—even in London alone—every month? What do you suppose had become of them?”
“I suppose that they had changed their names, or wandered away.”
“Do you know the proportion of them that were never found?”
“Not exactly. I know it was a large number.”
Wyndham Smith remembered reading a newspaper account of such disappearances a few days before. (Was it that which had given him this most vivid dream?) He could not recall the figures, but he knew that the number who were never traced had been described as very large—“inexplicably large” had been the expression used. He was frank about that, both to himself and the stranger to whom he spoke. He added, “But, at most, that doesn’t prove that they disappeared into futurity: it only fails to disprove that anyone did.”
“Yes. But, at least, it proves that you were wrong in the reason you gave for discrediting such a possibility.”
“I must admit that,” he answered with the same frankness as before, and with a growing disposition not to contest the possibility further. After all, why not let a dream have its way?
The stranger seemed to perceive without further words that it was accepted as a hypothesis on which the conversation could be continued. He went on: “It is necessary that you should be informed as to where you are, owing to the experience which is before you, the nature of which will naturally be grasped more readily by one who has had some training in medical science, however elementary, than it would be by most others of the period from which you come.
“It was partially understood in your own time, though the idea itself was less clearly perceived than were its implications and consequences, that the individual man is of dual personality. The seat of the ego—the man himself, as distinguished from the physical body which had been formed from ancestral cell—was vaguely located in the hinder part of the brain, and that location has since been more exactly fixed.
“With the advance of surgery, the grafting or exchange of the major organs of the body naturally led to the consideration of the possibility that the ego itself might be transferred. But that which was simple in theory was found to be difficult in practice, owing to the fact that the cell—if that word be allowed—of which the ego consists was found to be so small that its minuteness is beyond human comprehension, if not measurement; and that, for the operation to be successfully performed, it must be transferred without the remotest trace of surrounding matter,”
“I remember,” Wyndham remarked, accepting the initial improbability to which he had been introduced in his interest in this explanation, “in…in my own time that an American scientist calculated that if the germs from which every Englishman had originated since the Norman conquest were heaped together, they would never cover a needle’s point.”
“That,” the stranger answered, after a moment’s pause, “must have been, by an extremely large margin, within the truth; but the germ-cells of which you speak are themselves as much larger than the essential ego as the space occupied by our planetary system exceeds the size of its central sun.”
“But you say that these difficulties have been overcome?” Wyndham asked.
Since he had decided to abandon himself without resistance to the course of this vivid dream, the quiet authority and assurance of the stranger’s words were bringing conviction to a mind which had been trained to learn and accept surprising facts from the lecturers of his own profession. He had a vague but pleasing vision of himself as being sent back to his own time by this courteous and able stranger after learning such things as would place him in the forefront of the scientists of his time.
Was it—his mind wandered to ask—by this method that the great “discoveries” of past generations had been communicated to those who had given them to the world, without revealing a source of knowledge which would have discounted their own eminence, if it had not been received with derision, or introduced them to a sorcerer’s stake? Was it such an experience that had come to the friend of Paul when, in his own words, “he was caught