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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Worlds of If, by Stanley Grauman Weinbaum
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Worlds of If
+
+Author: Stanley Grauman Weinbaum
+
+Release Date: October 5, 2007 [EBook #22890]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE WORLDS OF IF ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Greg Weeks, Stephen Blundell and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+Transcriber's Note:
+
+    This etext was produced from _A Martian Odyssey and Others_
+    published in 1949. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence
+    that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed. Minor
+    spelling and typographical errors have been corrected without note.
+    The square root symbol has been transcribed as [sq].
+
+
+
+
+THE WORLDS OF IF
+
+
+
+
+I stopped on the way to the Staten Island Airport to call up, and that
+was a mistake, doubtless, since I had a chance of making it otherwise.
+But the office was affable. "We'll hold the ship five minutes for you,"
+the clerk said. "That's the best we can do."
+
+So I rushed back to my taxi and we spun off to the third level and sped
+across the Staten bridge like a comet treading a steel rainbow. I had to
+be in Moscow by evening, by eight o'clock, in fact, for the opening of
+bids on the Ural Tunnel. The Government required the personal presence
+of an agent of each bidder, but the firm should have known better than
+to send me, Dixon Wells, even though the N. J. Wells Corporation is, so
+to speak, my father. 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 missed the airliner, of course. I was still on the Staten Bridge when
+I heard the roar of the catapult and the Soviet rocket _Baikal_ hummed
+over us like a tracer bullet with a long tail of flame.
+
+We got the contract anyway; the firm wired our man in Beirut and he flew
+up to Moscow, but it didn't help my reputation. 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.
+It seems he'd transferred to N.Y.U. as head of the department of Newer
+Physics--that is, of Relativity. He deserved it; the old chap was a
+genius if ever there was one, and even now, eight years out of college,
+I remember more from his course than from half a dozen calculus, steam
+and gas, mechanics, and other hazards on the path to an engineer's
+education. So on Tuesday night I dropped in an hour or so late, to tell
+the truth, since I'd forgotten about the engagement until mid-evening.
+
+He was reading in a room as disorderly as ever. "Humph!" he grunted.
+"Time changes everything but habit, I see. You were a good student,
+Dick, but I seem to recall that you always arrived in class toward the
+middle of the lecture."
+
+"I had a course in East Hall just before," I explained. "I couldn't seem
+to make it in time."
+
+"Well, it's time you learned to be on time," he growled. Then his eyes
+twinkled. "Time!" he ejaculated. "The most fascinating word in the
+language. Here we've used it five times (there goes the sixth time--and
+the seventh!) in the first minute of conversation; each of us
+understands the other, yet science is just beginning to learn its
+meaning. Science? I mean that _I_ am beginning to learn."
+
+I sat down. "You and science are synonymous," I grinned. "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! Had you gone back into the last century,
+now--had you mentioned Einstein and de Sitter--there, perhaps, are names
+worthy to rank with (or just below) van Manderpootz!"
+
+I grinned again in amusement. "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? And what sort of experiment?"
+
+"What experiment, other than simple measurement, is it possible to
+perform?" he snapped.
+
+"Why--I don't know. To travel in it?"
+
+"Exactly."
+
+"Like these time-machines that are so popular in the current magazines?
+To go into the future or the past?"
+
+"Bah! Many bahs! The future or the past--pfui! It needs no van
+Manderpootz to see the fallacy in that. Einstein showed us that much."
+
+"How? It's conceivable, isn't it?"
+
+"Conceivable? And you, Dixon Wells, studied under van Manderpootz!" He
+grew red with emotion, then grimly calm. "Listen to me. You know how
+time varies with the speed of a system--Einstein's relativity."
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Very well. Now suppose then that the great engineer Dixon Wells invents
+a machine capable of traveling very fast, enormously fast, nine-tenths
+as fast as light. Do you follow? Good. You then fuel this miracle ship
+for a little jaunt of a half million miles, which, since mass (and with
+it inertia) increases according to the Einstein formula with increasing
+speed, takes all the fuel in the world. But you solve that. You use
+atomic energy. Then, since at nine-tenths light-speed, your ship weighs
+about as much as the sun, you disintegrate North America to give you
+sufficient motive power. You start off at that speed, a hundred and
+sixty-eight thousand miles per second, and you travel for two hundred
+and four thousand miles. The acceleration has now crushed you to death,
+but you have penetrated the future." He paused, grinning sardonically.
+"Haven't you?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"And how far?"
+
+I hesitated.
+
+"Use your Einstein formula!" he screeched. "How far? I'll tell you. _One
+second!_" He grinned triumphantly. "That's how possible it is to travel
+into the future. And as for the past--in the first place, you'd have to
+exceed light-speed, which immediately entails the use of more than an
+infinite number of horsepowers. We'll assume that the great engineer
+Dixon Wells solves that little problem too, even though the energy
+out-put of the whole universe is not an infinite number of horsepowers.
+Then he applies this more than infinite power to travel at two hundred
+and four thousand miles per second for _ten_ seconds. He has then
+penetrated the past. How far?"
+
+Again I hesitated.
+
+"I'll tell you. _One second!_" 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--"
+
+"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. "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!"
+
+I gulped. "Sideways into time! What's there?"
+
+"What would naturally be there?" he snorted. "Ahead is the future;
+behind is the past. Those are real, the worlds of past and future. What
+worlds are neither past nor future, but contemporary and
+yet--extemporal--existing, as it were, in time parallel to our time?"
+
+I shook my head.
+
+"Idiot!" he snapped. "The conditional worlds, of course! The worlds of
+'if.' Ahead are the worlds to be; behind are the worlds that were; to
+either side are the worlds that might have been--the worlds of 'if!'"
+
+"Eh?" I was puzzled. "Do you mean that you can see what will happen if I
+do such and such?"
+
+"No!" he snorted. "My machine does not reveal the past nor predict the
+future. It will show, as I told you, the conditional worlds. 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. And since the worlds are very thin in the
+direction of the fourth dimension, the thickness of a single light wave,
+though it be but millionths of an inch, is sufficient. A considerable
+improvement over time-traveling in past or future, with its impossible
+velocities and ridiculous distances!"
+
+"But--are those--worlds of 'if'--real?"
+
+"Real? What is real? They are real, perhaps, in the sense that two is a
+real number as opposed to [sq]-2, which is imaginary. They are the
+worlds that would have been _if_-- Do you see?"
+
+I nodded. "Dimly. You could see, for instance, what New York would have
+been like if England had won the Revolution instead of the Colonies."
+
+"That's the principle, true enough, but you couldn't see that on the
+machine. Part of it, you see, is a Horsten psychomat (stolen from one of
+my ideas, by the way) and you, the user, become part of the device. Your
+own mind is necessary to furnish the background. For instance, if George
+Washington could have used the mechanism after the signing of peace, he
+could have seen what you suggest. We can't. You can't even see what
+would have happened if I hadn't invented the thing, but _I_ can. Do you
+understand?"
+
+"Of course. You mean the background has to rest in the past experiences
+of the user."
+
+"You're growing brilliant," he scoffed. "Yes. The device will show ten
+hours of what would have happened _if_--condensed, of course, as in a
+movie, to half an hour's actual time."
+
+"Say, that sounds interesting!"
+
+"You'd like to see it? Is there anything you'd like to find out? Any
+choice you'd alter?"
+
+"I'll say--a thousand of 'em. 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. He ushered me
+into the Physics Building, and thence into his own research laboratory,
+much like the one I had visited during my courses under him. The
+device--he called it his "subjunctivisor," since it operated in
+hypothetical worlds--occupied the entire center table. 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. I suppose everyone is
+familiar with the Horsten psychomat; it was as much a fad a few years
+ago as the ouija board a century back. Yet it isn't just a toy;
+sometimes, much as the ouija board, it's a real aid to memory. A maze of
+vague and colored shadows is caused to drift slowly across the screen,
+and one watches them, meanwhile visualizing whatever scene or
+circumstances he is trying to remember. He turns a knob that alters the
+arrangement of lights and shadows, and when, by chance, the design
+corresponds to his mental picture--presto! There is his scene re-created
+under his eyes. Of course his own mind adds the details. All the screen
+actually shows are these tinted blobs of light and shadow, but the thing
+can be amazingly real. I've seen occasions when I could have sworn the
+psychomat showed pictures almost as sharp and detailed as reality
+itself; the illusion is sometimes as startling as that.
+
+Van Manderpootz switched on the light, and the play of shadows began.
+"Now recall the circumstances of, say, a half-year after the market
+crash. Turn the knob until the picture clears, then stop. At that point
+I direct the light of the subjunctivisor upon the screen, and you have
+nothing to do but watch."
+
+I did as directed. Momentary pictures formed and vanished. The inchoate
+sounds of the device hummed like distant voices, but without the added
+suggestion of the picture, they meant nothing. My own face flashed and
+dissolved and then, finally, I had it. There was a picture of myself
+sitting in an ill-defined room; that was all. I released the knob and
+gestured.
+
+A click followed. The light dimmed, then brightened. The picture
+cleared, and amazingly, another figure emerged, a woman. I recognized
+her; it was Whimsy White, erstwhile star of television and premiere of
+the "Vision Varieties of '09." She was changed on that picture, but I
+recognized her.
+
+I'll say I did! I'd been trailing her all through the boom years of '07
+to '10, trying to marry her, while old N. J. raved and ranted and
+threatened to leave everything to the Society for Rehabilitation of the
+Gobi Desert. I think those threats were what kept her from accepting me,
+but after I took my own money and ran it up to a couple of million in
+that crazy market of '08 and '09, she softened.
+
+Temporarily, that is. When the crash of the spring of '10 came and
+bounced me back on my father and into the firm of N. J. Wells, her favor
+dropped a dozen points to the market's one. In February we were engaged,
+in April we were hardly speaking. In May they sold me out. I'd been late
+again.
+
+And now, there she was on the psychomat screen, obviously plumping out,
+and not nearly so pretty as memory had pictured her. She was staring at
+me with an expression of enmity, and I was glaring back. The buzzes
+became voices.
+
+"You nit-wit!" she snapped. "You can't bury me out here. I want to go
+back to New York, where there's a little life. I'm bored with you and
+your golf."
+
+"And I'm bored with you and your whole dizzy crowd."
+
+"At least they're _alive_. You're a walking corpse. Just because you
+were lucky enough to gamble yourself into the money, you think you're a
+tin god."
+
+"Well, I _don't_ think _you're_ Cleopatra! Those friends of yours--they
+trail after you because you give parties and spend money--_my_ money."
+
+"Better than spending it to knock a white walnut along a mountainside!"
+
+"Indeed? You ought to try it, Marie." (That was her real name.) "It
+might help your figure--though I doubt if anything could!"
+
+She glared in rage and--well, that was a painful half hour. I won't give
+all the details, but I was glad when the screen dissolved into
+meaningless colored clouds.
+
+"Whew!" I said, staring at Van Manderpootz, who had been reading.
+
+"You liked it?"
+
+"Liked it! 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!'"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It was very late when I returned home, and as a result, very late when I
+rose, and equally late when I got to the office. My father was
+unnecessarily worked up about it, but he exaggerated when he said I'd
+never been on time. He forgets the occasions when he's awakened me and
+dragged me down with him. Nor was it necessary to refer so sarcastically
+to my missing the _Baikal_; I reminded him of the wrecking of the liner,
+and he responded very heartlessly that if I'd been aboard, the rocket
+would have been late, and so would have missed colliding with the
+British fruitship. It was likewise superfluous for him to mention that
+when he and I had tried to snatch a few weeks of golfing in the
+mountains, even the spring had been late. I had nothing to do with that.
+
+"Dixon," he concluded, "you have no conception whatever of time. None
+whatever."
+
+The conversation with van Manderpootz recurred to me. I was impelled to
+ask, "And have you, sir?"
+
+"I have," he said grimly. "I most assuredly have. Time," he said
+oracularly, "is money."
+
+You can't argue with a viewpoint like that.
+
+But those aspersions of his rankled, especially that about the _Baikal_.
+Tardy I might be, but it was hardly conceivable that my presence aboard
+the rocket could have averted the catastrophe. It irritated me; in a
+way, it made me responsible for the deaths of those unrescued hundreds
+among the passengers and crew, and I didn't like the thought.
+
+Of course, if they'd waited an extra five minutes for me, or if I'd been
+on time and they'd left on schedule instead of five minutes late, or
+if--_if_!
+
+If! 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.
+
+Yet it wasn't an easy decision. Suppose--just suppose that I found
+myself responsible--not legally responsible, certainly; there'd be no
+question of criminal negligence, or anything of that sort--not even
+morally responsible, because I couldn't possibly have anticipated that
+my presence or absence could weigh so heavily in the scales of life and
+death, nor could I have known in which direction the scales would tip.
+Just--responsible; that was all. Yet I hated to find out.
+
+I hated equally not finding out. Uncertainty has its pangs too, quite as
+painful as those of remorse. It might be less nerve-racking to know
+myself responsible than to wonder, to waste thoughts in vain doubts and
+futile reproaches. So I seized the visiphone, dialed the number of the
+University, and at length gazed on the broad, humorous, intelligent
+features of van Manderpootz, dragged from a morning lecture by my call.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I was all but prompt for the appointment the following evening, and
+might actually have been on time but for an unreasonable traffic officer
+who insisted on booking me for speeding. 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. 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. "Your autobiography?"
+
+"Yes. The world, though perhaps unaware, is crying for it. I shall
+detail my life, my work. I shall reveal myself as the man responsible
+for the three years' duration of the Pacific War of 2004."
+
+"You?"
+
+"None other. Had I not been a loyal Netherlands subject at that time,
+and therefore neutral, the forces of Asia would have been crushed in
+three months instead of three years. The subjunctivisor tells me so; I
+would have invented a calculator to forecast the chances of every
+engagement; van Manderpootz would have removed the hit or miss element
+in the conduct of war." He frowned solemnly. "There is my idea. The
+autobiography of van Manderpootz. What do you think of it?"
+
+I recovered my thoughts. "It's--uh--it's colossal!" I said vehemently.
+"I'll buy a copy myself. Several copies. I'll send 'em to my friends."
+
+"I," said van Manderpootz expansively, "shall autograph your copy for
+you. It will be priceless. I shall write in some fitting phrase, perhaps
+something like _Magnificus sed non superbus_. 'Great but not proud!'
+That well described van Manderpootz, who despite his greatness is
+simple, modest, and unassuming. Don't you agree?"
+
+"Perfectly! A very apt description of you. But--couldn't I see your
+subjunctivisor before it's dismantled to make way for the greater work?"
+
+"Ah! You wish to find out something?"
+
+"Yes, professor. Do you remember the _Baikal_ disaster of a week or two
+ago? I was to have taken that liner to Moscow. I just missed it." I
+related the circumstances.
+
+"Humph!" he grunted. "You wish to discover what would have happened had
+you caught it, eh? Well, I see several possibilities. Among the world of
+'if' is the one that would have been real if you had been on time, the
+one that depended on the vessel waiting for your actual arrival, and the
+one that hung on your arriving within the five minutes they actually
+waited. In which are you interested?"
+
+"Oh--the last one." 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. The device still stood on the
+table and I took my place before it, staring at the screen of the
+Horsten psychomat. The clouds wavered and shifted as I sought to impress
+my memories on their suggestive shapes, to read into them some picture
+of that vanished morning.
+
+Then I had it. I made out the vista from the Staten Bridge, and was
+speeding across the giant span toward the airport. 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.
+
+I was rushing over the ground toward the glittering, silver-winged
+projectile that was the _Baikal_. A glowering officer waved me on, and I
+dashed up the slant of the gangplank and into the ship; the port dropped
+and I heard a long "Whew!" of relief.
+
+"Sit down!" barked the officer, gesturing toward an unoccupied seat. I
+fell into it; the ship quivered under the thrust of the catapult, grated
+harshly into motion, and then was flung bodily into the air. The blasts
+roared instantly, then settled to a more muffled throbbing, and I
+watched Staten Island drop down and slide back beneath me. The giant
+rocket was under way.
+
+"Whew!" I breathed again. "Made it!" I caught an amused glance from my
+right. I was in an aisle seat; there was no one to my left, so I turned
+to the eyes that had flashed, glanced, and froze staring.
+
+It was a girl. Perhaps she wasn't actually as lovely as she looked to
+me; after all, I was seeing her through the half-visionary screen of a
+psychomat. I've told myself since that she _couldn't_ have been as
+pretty as she seemed, that it was due to my own imagination filling in
+the details. I don't know; I remember only that I stared at curiously
+lovely silver-blue eyes and velvety brown hair, and a small amused
+mouth, and an impudent nose. I kept staring until she flushed.
+
+"I'm sorry," I said quickly. "I--was startled."
+
+There's a friendly atmosphere aboard a trans-oceanic rocket. The
+passengers are forced into a crowded intimacy for anywhere from seven to
+twelve hours, and there isn't much room for moving about. Generally, one
+strikes up an acquaintance with his neighbors; introductions aren't at
+all necessary, and the custom is simply to speak to anybody you
+choose--something like an all-day trip on the railroad trains of the
+last century, I suppose. You make friends for the duration of the
+journey, and then, nine times out of ten, you never hear of your
+traveling companions again.
+
+The girl smiled. "Are you the individual responsible for the delay in
+starting?"
+
+I admitted it. "I seem to be chronically late. Even watches lose time as
+soon as I wear them."
+
+She laughed. "Your responsibilities can't be very heavy."
+
+Well, they weren't of course, though it's surprising how many clubs,
+caddies, and chorus girls have depended on me at various times for
+appreciable portions of their incomes. But somehow I didn't feel like
+mentioning those things to the silvery-eyed girl.
+
+We talked. Her name, it developed, was Joanna Caldwell, and she was
+going as far as Paris. She was an artist, or hoped to be one day, and of
+course there is no place in the world that can supply both training and
+inspiration like Paris. So it was there she was bound for a year of
+study, and despite her demurely humorous lips and laughing eyes, I could
+see that the business was of vast importance to her. I gathered that she
+had worked hard for the year in Paris, had scraped and saved for three
+years as fashion illustrator for some woman's magazine, though she
+couldn't have been many months over twenty-one. Her painting meant a
+great deal to her, and I could understand it. I'd felt that way about
+polo once.
+
+So you see, we were sympathetic spirits from the beginning. I knew that
+she liked me, and it was obvious that she didn't connect Dixon Wells
+with the N. J. Wells Corporation. And as for me--well, after that first
+glance into her cool silver eyes, I simply didn't care to look anywhere
+else. The hours seemed to drip away like minutes while I watched her.
+
+You know how those things go. Suddenly I was calling her Joanna and she
+was calling me Dick, and it seemed as if we'd been doing just that all
+our lives. I'd decided to stop over in Paris on my way back from Moscow,
+and I'd secured her promise to let me see her. She was different, I tell
+you; she was nothing like the calculating Whimsy White, and still less
+like the dancing, simpering, giddy youngsters one meets around at social
+affairs. She was just Joanna, cool and humorous, yet sympathetic and
+serious, and as pretty as a Majolica figurine.
+
+We could scarcely realize it when the steward passed along to take
+orders for luncheon. Four hours out? It seemed like forty minutes. And
+we had a pleasant feeling of intimacy in the discovery that both of us
+liked lobster salad and detested oysters. It was another bond; I told
+her whimsically that it was an omen, nor did she object to considering
+it so.
+
+Afterwards we walked along the narrow aisle to the glassed-in
+observation room up forward. It was almost too crowded for entry, but we
+didn't mind that at all, as it forced us to sit very close together. We
+stayed long after both of us had begun to notice the stuffiness of the
+air.
+
+It was just after we had returned to our seats that the catastrophe
+occurred. There was no warning save a sudden lurch, the result, I
+suppose, of the pilot's futile last-minute attempt to swerve--just that
+and then a grinding crash and a terrible sensation of spinning, and
+after that a chorus of shrieks that were like the sounds of battle.
+
+It _was_ battle. Five hundred people were picking themselves up from the
+floor, were trampling each other, milling around, being cast helplessly
+down as the great rocket-plane, its left wing but a broken stub, circled
+downward toward the Atlantic.
+
+The shouts of officers sounded and a loudspeaker blared. "Be calm," it
+kept repeating, and then, "There has been a collision. We have contacted
+a surface ship. There is no danger-- There is no danger--"
+
+I struggled up from the debris of shattered seats. Joanna was gone; just
+as I found her crumpled between the rows, the ship struck the water with
+a jar that set everything crashing again. The speaker blared, "Put on
+the cork belts under the seats. The life-belts are under the seats."
+
+I dragged a belt loose and snapped it around Joanna, then donned one
+myself. The crowd was surging forward now, and the tail end of the ship
+began to drop. There was water behind us, sloshing in the darkness as
+the lights went out. An officer came sliding by, stooped, and fastened a
+belt about an unconscious woman ahead of us. "You all right?" he yelled,
+and passed on without waiting for an answer.
+
+The speaker must have been cut on to a battery circuit. "And get as far
+away as possible," it ordered suddenly. "Jump from the forward port and
+get as far away as possible. A ship is standing by. You will be picked
+up. Jump from the--". It went dead again.
+
+I got Joanna untangled from the wreckage. She was pale; her silvery eyes
+were closed. I started dragging her slowly and painfully toward the
+forward port, and the slant of the floor increased until it was like the
+slide of a ski-jump. The officer passed again. "Can you handle her?" he
+asked, and again dashed away.
+
+I was getting there. The crowd around the port looked smaller, or was it
+simply huddling closer? 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. "Horrible!" I murmured. "We--I guess we wouldn't have been
+among the survivors."
+
+"We, eh? _We?_" His eyes twinkled.
+
+I did not enlighten him. I thanked him, bade him good-night, and went
+dolorously home.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Even my father noticed something queer about me. The day I got to the
+office only five minutes late, he called me in for some anxious
+questioning as to my health. I couldn't tell him anything, of course.
+How could I explain that I'd been late once too often, and had fallen in
+love with a girl two weeks after she was dead?
+
+The thought drove me nearly crazy. Joanna! Joanna with her silvery eyes
+now lay somewhere at the bottom of the Atlantic. I went around half
+dazed, scarcely speaking. One night I actually lacked the energy to go
+home and sat smoking in my father's big overstuffed chair in his private
+office until I finally dozed off. The next morning, when old N. J.
+entered and found me there before him, he turned pale as paper,
+staggered, and gasped, "My heart!" It took a lot of explaining to
+convince him that I wasn't early at the office but just very late going
+home.
+
+At last I felt that I couldn't stand it. I had to do something--anything
+at all. I thought finally of the subjunctivisor. I could see--yes, I
+could see what would have transpired if the ship hadn't been wrecked! I
+could trace out that weird, unreal romance hidden somewhere in the
+worlds of "if". I could, perhaps, wring a somber, vicarious joy from the
+things that might have been. I could see Joanna once more!
+
+It was late afternoon when I rushed over to van Manderpootz's quarters.
+He wasn't there; I encountered him finally in the hall of the Physics
+Building.
+
+"Dick!" he exclaimed. "Are you sick?"
+
+"Sick? No. Not physically. Professor. I've got to use your
+subjunctivisor again. I've _got_ to!"
+
+"Eh? Oh--that toy. You're too late, Dick. I've dismantled it. 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. "Not even van Manderpootz can bring back the dead,"
+he murmured. "I'm sorry, Dick. Take your mind from the affair. Even were
+my subjunctivisor available, I wouldn't permit you to use it. That would
+be but to turn the knife in the wound." He paused. "Find something else
+to occupy your mind. Do as van Manderpootz does. Find forgetfulness in
+work."
+
+"Yes," I responded dully. "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. What better legacy can I leave to the world than a bust of van
+Manderpootz, sculptured from life? Perhaps I shall present it to the
+city, perhaps to the university. I would have given it to the Royal
+Society if they had been a little more receptive, if they--if--_if_!"
+The last in a shout.
+
+"Huh?"
+
+"_If!_" cried van Manderpootz. "What you saw in the subjunctivisor was
+what would have happened _if_ you had caught the ship!"
+
+"I know that."
+
+"But something quite different might really have happened! Don't you
+see? She--she-- Where are those old newspapers?"
+
+He was pawing through a pile of them. He flourished one finally. "Here!
+Here are the survivors!"
+
+Like letters of flame, Joanna Caldwell's name leaped out at me. There
+was even a little paragraph about it, as I saw once my reeling brain
+permitted me to read:
+
+    "At least a score of survivors owe their lives to the bravery of
+    twenty-eight-year-old Navigator Orris Hope, who patrolled both
+    aisles during the panic, lacing life-belts on the injured and
+    helpless, and carrying many to the port. He remained on the sinking
+    liner until the last, finally fighting his way to the surface
+    through the broken walls of the observation room. Among those who
+    owe their lives to the young officer are: Patrick Owensby, New York
+    City; Mrs. Campbell Warren, Boston; Miss Joanna Caldwell, New York
+    City--"
+
+I suppose my shout of joy was heard over in the Administration Building,
+blocks away. 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. She must be in New
+York--and if she's gone over to Paris, I'll find out and follow her!"
+
+Well, it's a queer ending. She was in New York, but--you see, Dixon
+Wells had, so to speak, known Joanna Caldwell by means of the
+professor's subjunctivisor, but Joanna had never known Dixon Wells. What
+the ending might have been if--_if_-- But it wasn't; she had married
+Orris Hope, the young officer who had rescued her. I was late again.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's The Worlds of If, by Stanley Grauman Weinbaum
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