Time and Time Again | Page 7

you?" He switched languages and spoke at some length in good
conversational slang-spiced Parisian. "Too bad you don't speak Spanish, too," he added,
reverting to English. "Except for a Mexican accent you could cut with a machete, I'm
even better there than in French. And I know some German, and a little Russian."
* * * * *
Blake Hartley was staring at his son, stunned. It was some time before he could make
himself speak.
"I could barely keep up with you, in French," he admitted. "I can swear that in the last
thirteen years of your life, you had absolutely no chance to learn it. All right; you lived
till 1975, you say. Then, all of a sudden, you found yourself back here, thirteen years old,
in 1945. I suppose you remember everything in between?" he asked. "Did you ever read
James Branch Cabell? Remember Florian de Puysange, in 'The High Place'?"
"Yes. You find the same idea in 'Jurgen' too," Allan said. "You know, I'm beginning to
wonder if Cabell mightn't have known something he didn't want to write."
"But it's impossible!" Blake Hartley hit the table with his hand, so hard that the heavy

pistol bounced. The loose round he had ejected from the chamber toppled over and
started to roll, falling off the edge. He stooped and picked it up. "How can you go back,
against time? And the time you claim you came from doesn't exist, now; it hasn't
happened yet." He reached for the pistol magazine, to insert the cartridge, and as he did,
he saw the books in front of his son. "Dunne's 'Experiment with Time,'" he commented.
"And J. N. M. Tyrrell's 'Science and Psychical Phenomena.' Are you trying to work out a
theory?"
"Yes." It encouraged Allan to see that his father had unconsciously adopted an
adult-to-adult manner. "I think I'm getting somewhere, too. You've read these books?
Well, look, Dad; what's your attitude on precognition? The ability of the human mind to
exhibit real knowledge, apart from logical inference, of future events? You think Dunne
is telling the truth about his experiences? Or that the cases in Tyrrell's book are properly
verified, and can't be explained away on the basis of chance?"
Blake Hartley frowned. "I don't know," he confessed. "The evidence is the sort that any
court in the world would accept, if it concerned ordinary, normal events. Especially the
cases investigated by the Society for Psychical Research: they have been verified. But
how can anybody know of something that hasn't happened yet? If it hasn't happened yet,
it doesn't exist, and you can't have real knowledge of something that has no real
existence."
"Tyrrell discusses that dilemma, and doesn't dispose of it. I think I can. If somebody has
real knowledge of the future, then the future must be available to the present mind. And if
any moment other than the bare present exists, then all time must be totally present; every
moment must be perpetually coexistent with every other moment," Allan said.
[Illustration]
"Yes. I think I see what you mean. That was Dunne's idea, wasn't it?"
"No. Dunne postulated an infinite series of time dimensions, the entire extent of each
being the bare present moment of the next. What I'm postulating is the perpetual
coexistence of every moment of time in this dimension, just as every graduation on a
yardstick exists equally with every other graduation, but each at a different point in
space."
"Well, as far as duration and sequence go, that's all right," the father agreed. "But how
about the 'Passage of Time'?"
"Well, time does appear to pass. So does the landscape you see from a moving car
window. I'll suggest that both are illusions of the same kind. We imagine time to be
dynamic, because we've never viewed it from a fixed point, but if it is totally present,
then it must be static, and in that case, we're moving through time."
"That seems all right. But what's your car window?"
"If all time is totally present, then you must exist simultaneously at every moment along

your individual life span," Allan said. "Your physical body, and your mind, and all the
thoughts contained in your mind, each at its appropriate moment in sequence. But what is
it that exists only at the bare moment we think of as now?"
* * * * *
Blake Hartley grinned. Already, he was accepting his small son as an intellectual equal.
"Please, teacher; what?"
"Your consciousness. And don't say, 'What's that?' Teacher doesn't know. But we're only
conscious of one moment; the illusory now. This is 'now,' and it was 'now' when you
asked that question, and it'll be 'now' when I stop talking, but each is a different moment.
We imagine that all those nows