He thought for a few seconds, and then said, “Well, picture time as a phonograph record. Circular, with grooves cut into the wax. You place your needle in the outermost groove and it works its way toward the center of the record. The picture clear?”
“Yeah,” Gardel said dubiously.
“All right, just take it a step further. Assume that the outermost groove of the record is the past. And the groove nearest the center is the present. When you play the record, the needle travels from past to present, right?” Owen glanced at his watch again. “I’d better hurry. We’ll be slipping soon.”
“I still don’t get it,” Masterson said.
“The point is simple. Most people erroneously feel that the past is dead and gone. But if we compare time to the record, we can see that the past is always there, coexistent with the present. For example, when we play the record, the first few bars of the song are over and done with as soon as the first groove is passed. But they are not dead and gone. All we have to do is move the needle back to the first groove and we’ll get the first few bars of the song all over again.”
“You trying to say that the past is going on right now, at the same time as the present?” Gardel asked.
“Exactly. All the Time Slip does is to move that needle, in effect. In other words, it slips the needle over the record, back from the innermost groove which
“How?”
“By shocking us back mostly,” Owen replied.
“What? What’d you say?”
“When you’re playing your phonograph, a sharp bump will cause the needle to slip over the record. Same principle here. We’ll be getting a series of sharp bumps, so sharp and so fast that we won’t even feel them. Each bump will actually suspend us in time, like the needle popping into the air over the record. Each time we come down, we’ll be slightly farther back in the past.” Owen looked at his watch again and said, “We’ll be going in about ten seconds. I’ll have to cut this short, I’m afraid.” A serious look crossed Owen’s face, and he kept his eyes glued to the moving sweep hand of his watch.
“Nine seconds,” he said. “Stand by.”
Chuck felt a tight hand clutch his throat. Up until now, he had succeeded in keeping a firm grip on his emotions. But now they were ready to go! All the way back, far back into the past, back to the dim beginnings.
“Eight seconds.”
His heart began to beat a little faster. He took his lower lip between his teeth, biting on it hard. He stared out at the grass, wondering what it would change to, wondering…
“Six, five…”
“Who’s handling all this?” Masterson asked.
“The control room,” Chuck blurted, surprised he could speak at all.
“Three, two…”
“God be with us,” Arthur whispered gently.
Chuck thought it was the beating of his own heart at first. All sound seemed to have stopped suddenly, the crickets, the faraway throb of an air-J plane motor, the shrill wail of a train whistle cutting across the afternoon. And then, quite abruptly, sound filtered back, but it came in waves-short, beating waves that rose and fell. Accompanying the sound was a faint flicker of light, on and off, on and off.
Chuck stood stockstill, not daring to move, hardly daring to breathe. The waves of sound assailed his ears in unintelligible succession. The area around the marked square was no longer visible through the flickering light. Chuck knew that each light-flick was actually part of the “bumping” process Owen had told them about earlier. And each “bump” was carrying them back farther into the past. A dancing array of colors greeted the eye, now green, now red, now a deep blue. Once or twice, Chuck thought he could distinguish shifting shapes in the flickering light. The colors swirled and danced, massing into a brilliant white, changing to gray, black, orange, yellow, one color blending with the next as they sped back over the years.
He felt no different than he had ten minutes ago. He was, in a small way, disappointed. He had expected something more glamorous, more dramatic. A giant machine, perhaps, with dials and gadgets and knife switches. A scientist in a white robe with a steaming flask in his fist. And the crackle of lightning from one terminal to another, the blue tingle of electricity. He had visualized an enormous screen upon which the colorful panorama of the past would parade. There he would see the Crusades or Columbus crossing the ocean with his small ships or the War Between the States or any and all of the wonderful things he’d only read about. Then the great dials would stop twirling, and the machine would cease its endless hum. He would open the knife switches, press the button which swung wide the glass doors of the big machine and step out into the past.
Instead, there was only the riot of colors and the confusing jumble of sound that beat against his ears.
Even that ended.