TWICE IN TIME

TWICE IN TIME

by MANLY WADE WELLMAN

To Richard McKenna

"Let every man be master of his time…"

"… whoever has sufficiently considered the present state of things might certainly conclude as to both the future and the past."

Montaigne, Book II, Chapter 12

WHEN THE FUTURE MEETS THE PAST

During a writing career that spanned six decades, Manly Wade Wellman published over eighty books and more than three hundred short stories. He was an author as versatile as prolific, whose output included science fiction and Civil War biographies, fantasy and novels for young adults, mysteries and regional histories, mainstream novels and nonfiction studies. A Civil War history, Rebel Boast, was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. Wellman didn't win, but he did win a number of other awards, including the World Fantasy Award, the British Fantasy Award, and the Mystery Writers of America Award.

Most readers will best remember Wellman as a writer of haunting fantasies rich with Southern folklore—particularly those stories concerning John, a wandering minstrel whose guitar was strung with silver strings, and who battled strange evils in the mountains of North Carolina. These stories were collected in John the Balladeer (Baen Books: 1988). Before concentrating on regional fantasy stories, Wellman was one of the most popular writers for the science fiction pulps. He wrote for most of these magazines, beginning with "When Planets Clashed" in the Spring 1931 issue of Wonder Stories Quarterly, until he left the field in the late 1940s, as science fiction became more sophisticated and the pulps began to die out.

Born May 21, 1903, in the village of Kamundongo in Portuguese West Africa, Manly Wade Wellman moved to the United States as a child and grew up in Kansas. Working in Wichita as a newspaper reporter, he quit his job just as the Depression was getting started. Struggling as a freelance writer, in 1934 Wellman moved to New York City in order to be closer to the pulp markets. By mutual good luck, top science fiction agent Julius Schwartz took Wellman on as a client, and from the late 1930s until the close of World War II Wellman was a star in this genre. Wellman's flair for headlong action and rousing melodrama was pure space opera and well suited to the pulp-formula science fiction of the day, whose readers were mostly adolescents whose understanding of science was frequently even less than that of those writing it. While most of Wellman's science fiction has aged not at all well, he did leave a certain core of superior work which can hold its own with the best science fiction of the pulp era.

Unquestionably Wellman's finest work of science fiction is Twice in Time. Wellman was an omnivorous reader and a dilettante scholar with many areas of interest. One of his chief studies was Renaissance history and culture, and this formed the basis for Twice in Time and for "The Timeless Tomorrow"—presented here together for the first time.

(Those of you who insist on surprise endings, please stop reading this introduction now and proceed directly to Twice in Time.

Actually it isn't much of a surprise, and I'm reasonably certain most readers will have stumbled onto it after a chapter or two. Stilname = "note" Fair warning.)

Picking up where I left off, then. As I said, Wellman was a keen history buff, and one of his special interests was the Renaissance. Once Wellman became interested in some particular fixation, he researched it tirelessly, ruminated upon it, and eventually would incorporate it into his writing. Leonardo da Vinci was one such obsession.

Among the many science fiction pulps for which Wellman wrote was Astounding Stories (later Astounding Science Fiction), where his cover novelette, "Outlaws on Callisto," in the April 1936 issue secured his career as a professional writer. When editor F. Orlin Tremaine was replaced in an office coup d'etat by John W. Campbell, Wellman continued to sell to Astounding, although he and Campbell never really got along—to put it mildly. The final break came over Twice in Time. The novel was a labor of love, carefully researched and painstakingly written—as opposed to Wellman's usual slap-dash space opera—and reflected Wellman's fascination with Leonardo da Vinci. Campbell turned down the novel on the grounds that Leonardo's character was all wrong. Campbell, an engineer, could view Leonardo only as a fellow engineer, rejecting any artistic or romantic sides to his personality. Campbell suggested that Wellman revise the novel according to Campbell's theories on Leonardo, Wellman suggested that Campbell seek much warmer climes, and that was that for Wellman at Astounding.

Fortunately the novel was snapped up by Startling Stories, where it led off the May 1940 issue and was showcased with striking Virgil Finlay illustrations. It drew considerable acclaim at the moment and was reprinted in Wonder Stories Annual for 1951. In 1957 a new edition of Twice in Time was published in hardcover by Avalon Books, and this version appeared in paperback the following year from Galaxy Novels. Unfortunately this later edition was revised and massively abridged by Wellman, all to the considerable detriment to the novel. This abridgment was necessary to bring it down to Avalon's wordage requirements, and Wellman later disgruntledly protested that there had been no abridgment at all. Considering a comparison of the two texts, this was rather like the captain of the Titanic insisting that the iceberg was never there.

Now, for the first time, the complete version of Twice in Time appears in book form. This text is that of its original appearance in Startling Stories for May 1940.

Included in this edition is a previously unpublished poem by Leah Bodine Drake (whose volume of poetry, A Hornbook for Witches, is the rarest Arkham House book). Wellman sent Drake a copy of the Avalon Twice in Time in 1957, and Drake responded with a poem, "Leonardo Before His Canvas," which she dedicated to Wellman. The typewritten poem was recently discovered tucked into Wellman's personal copy of Twice in Time.

Also reprinted here for the first time is a companion Renaissance novelette, "The Timeless Tomorrow," originally published in the December 1947 issue of Thrilling Wonder Stories. This time Wellman's story centers upon the enigmatic French astrologer and prophet, Nostradamus. Again Wellman's knowledge of the period and concern for historical detail make this story stand out. "The Timeless Tomorrow" was also one of the last stories he wrote for the science fiction pulps. Wellman could always spin a good adventure yarn, and when he was able to write about a subject he knew something about, he was hard to beat.

Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) spent his last years in the French court of Francis I. Nostradamus (1503-1566) would have been about 16 years old when Leonardo died. One wonders whether they might ever have met and talked. Perhaps therein might lie the source of Nostradamus' prophecies? Only Manly Wade Wellman, who died at his home in Chapel Hill on April 5, 1986, could have told us the story.

—Karl Edward Wagner Chapel Hill, North Carolina

LEONARDO BEFORE HIS CANVAS

"When setting to work in paint, it was as if he were mastered by fear… he could finish nothing which he had begun." (Giovanni Paolo Lomazzo) Within my brain lies, pure and clear, A land of unfabled rocks and screes, Crags cut from jasper rising sheer From the slow waves of sunken seas, Mountainous isles like dragons' spines Cloisoned on glacial waters, and deep Grottoes of hollowed tourmalines Where the unloving sirens sleep. There cities domed, unpeopled, plunge Down spiraling stairways to the shore. There, like a kestral, thought can range; And at that country's secret core. Her feet upon shards of agate rent By iris and brooding columbine, Sits my Enigma, innocent And, like her flowers, androgyne. Closed in a cone of emerald light Is Leda, Narcissus, Anne the Blest— Saint, ephebus and water-sprite— Synthesis of my soul's unrest! The light, the perilous visions fade, The emerald is unbroken stilname = "note" The god in me yet hands betrayed By the old Judas of my will. Leah Bodine Drake

TWICE IN TIME

MEET THE AUTHOR — A Journey in Time

TO begin with, I defy anyone to prove that “Twice in Time” is NOT true.

Because every important character, save one (find him—or her—for yourself), is taken straight from history; the chief national and c o m -munity events dealt with happened substantially as here of the scenes and set forth; even most speeches are authentic.

I will say that you'll look hard before you find the Fortress of Santi Pelagrini on any map, and perhaps the Pazzi conspiracy is credited to another master mind by the textbooks; but otherwise things fell out just as I have them, and perhaps my scientific explanations are as believable as any alternates you can offer.

This is my most pretentious effort at a time-travel novel to date, and I will admit, in advance, all the obstacles that bob up in the path of such a story. In fact, the first chapter sets forth the biggest of these: the visualization of a person with three dimensions of space and one of time being a figure so many feet high, so many inches broad and thick and so many years deep.

If he travels in time, he must be two such figures—he must be twice in time.

But if one can achieve such a journey, where better could he go than to Florence in the Quatrecento, a city and age perhaps nowhere else equalled, unless in Athens of the Golden Age?

I have worked hard to make the place live again, and even at that I have barely flicked the fringes of it.

Mr. Virgil Finlay’s illustrations go far toward making the setting and action as real as they should be.

Foreword

The document herewith given publication was placed in the hands of the editors in 1939. Whether or not it explains satisfactorily the strange disappearance of Leo Thrasher near Florence, Italy, in the spring of 1938, we do not pretend to decide.

The manuscript came to America in the luggage of Father David Sutton, an American priest, at the time of the recent outbreak of war in Europe. Father Sutton was in Rome at the time, and elected to remain, in hope of helping war sufferers if his aid should be needed. But since Italy remained neutral, he sent back most of his luggage to America by a friend. Later he sent an urgent letter, asking that this manuscript be examined and published, if possible. It came, Father Sutton said, from the strongroom of an immemorial theological library in Florence, and was in the original casket that had apparently contained it for a long period of time.

The priest's friend brought us both Father Sutton's letter and the casket with the manuscript. This casket is of tarnished silver, elaborately worked in the Renaissance manner. A plate on the lid bears this legend, in Italian, French, and Latin:

Let no man open or dispose of this casket, on peril of his soul, before the year 1939.

Father Sutton's new York friends insist that if he actually wrote this letter and sent the casket, they

may be taken at face value. If it is a hoax perpetrated in his name, it is both elaborate and senseless. In any case, it is worth the study of those who love the curious.

Therefore, while neither affirming nor denying the truth of what appears, herewith is given in full the purported statement of the vanished Leo Thrasher.

CHAPTER 1 The Time Reflector

This story, as unvarnished as I can make it, must begin where my twentieth-century life ends—in the sitting room of the suite taken by George Astley and myself at Tomasulo's inn, on a hill above the Arno. It is the clearest of all my clouded memories of that time. April was the month, still chilly for Tuscany, and we had a charcoal fire in the grate.

I knelt among my dismantled machinery, before the charcoal fire, testing the connections here and there.

"So that's your time-traveler, Thrasher?" said Astley. "Like the one H. G. Wells wrote about?"

"Not in the least like the one H. G. Wells wrote about," I said spiritedly, and not perhaps without a certain resentful pride. "He described a sort of century-hurdling mechanical horse. In its saddle you rode forward into the Judgment Day or back to the beginning. This thing of mine will work, but as a reflector."

I peered into the great cylindrical housing that held my lens, a carefully polished crystal of alum, more than two feet in diameter. I smiled with satisfaction.

"It won't carry me into time," I assured. "It'll throw me."

He leaned back in the easy chair that was too small for him.

"I don't understand, Leo," he confessed. "Tell me about it."

"All right—if I must," I said. I had told him so often before. It was a bore to have to repeat what a man seemed incapable of understanding. "The operation is comparable to that of a burning-glass," I explained patiently, "which involves a point of light and transfers its powers through space to another position. Here"—I waved toward the mass of mechanism—"is a device that will involve an object and transfer, or rather, reproduce it to another epoch in time."

"I've tried to read Einstein at least enough to think of time as an extra dimension," ventured Astley. "But, still, I don't follow your reasoning. You can't exist in two places at once. That's impossible in the face of it. Yet from what I gather you can exist, you have existed, in two separate and distinct times. For instance, you're a grown man now, but when you were a baby—"

"That's the fourth dimension of it," I broke in. "The baby Leo Thrasher was, in a way, only the original tip of the fourth-dimensional me. At ten, I was a cross-section. Now I'm another, six feet tall, eighteen inches wide, eight inches thick—and quite some more years deep." I began to tinker with my lights. "Do you see now?"

"A little." Astley had produced his oldest and most odorous pipe. "You mean that this present manifestation of you is a single corridorlike object, reaching in time from the place of your birth—Chicago, wasn't it?—to here in Florence."

"That's something of the truth," I granted, my head deep in the great boxlike container that housed the electrical part of the machine. "I exist, therefore, only once in time. But suppose this me is taken completely out of Twentieth Century existence— dematerialized, recreated in another epoch. That makes twice in time, doesn't it?"

* * *

As I have many times before, I thrilled to the possibility. It was my father's fault, all this labor and dream. I had wanted to study art, had wanted to be a painter, and he had wanted me to be an engineer. But he could not direct my imagination. At the schools he selected, I found the wheels and belts and motors all singing to me a song both weird and compelling. The Machine Age was not enough of a wonder to me. I demanded of it other wonders—miracles.

"I've read Dunne's theory of corridors in time," Astley was musing. "And once I saw a play about them—by J. B. Priestly, wasn't it? What's your reaction to that stuff?"

"That's one of the things I hope to find out about," I told him. "Of course, I think that there's only the one corridor, and I'm gong to travel down it—or duck out at one point, I mean, and reenter farther along. What I'd like to do would be to reappear in Florence of another age, Florence of the Renaissance."

Astley nodded. He preferred the French Gothic period, because of the swords and the ballads, but he understood my enthusiasm for Renaissance Italy—to me, the age and home of the greatest painters, poets, philosophers of all times.

"Then what?" he encouraged me, gaining interest.

"I'll paint a picture—a good one, I hope. A picture that will properly grace a chapel or church or gallery, a picture that will be kept for four centuries or more. Preferably it will be a mural, that cannot be plundered or destroyed without tearing down a whole important building. When it's finished, I'll come back to this time, to this hour almost. Of course, I'll have to build myself a new time-reflector where I am, because it will be impossible to take this one with me.

"And we'll go together to the chapel or church or gallery, and look at your work of art?" asked Astley. He lighted his pipe. "It will be your footprint in the sands of another time. Isn't that what you mean?"

"Exactly. Evidence that I've been twice in time." I

sighed, with a feeling of rapture, because for a moment I fancied the adventure already accomplished. "If I'm not able to do a picture," I told him, "I'll make my mark—initials or a cross. Cut it in the plinth of a statue, scratch it on the boards at the back of the Mona Lisa or other paintings that I know will survive. It will be almost as good a proof." I smiled. "However, I daresay they'll let me paint. I have a gift that way."

"Perhaps because you're left-handed," Astley smiled at me through the blue smoke. "But one thing—in Renaissance Italy, won't your height and buttery hair be out of place?"

"Not among Fifteenth-Century Tuscans," I said confidently. "There were many with yellow hair and blue eyes. Look at the old Florentine portraits in any art gallery. Look at the streets of Florence today. Not all of those big tawny people are foreigners."

As I talked, I was reassembling my machinery that we had brought with great care from my native America to this spot that I had long since chosen as the obvious place for my experiment. The apparatus took shape under my hands. The open framework, six feet high, as many feet long, and a yard wide, was of metal rods painstakingly milled to micrometric proportion in Germany.

At one end, on a succession of racks, were arranged my ray-generator, with its light bulbs, specially made with vanadium filaments in America. My cameralike device which concentrated the time-reflection power had been assembled from parts made by English, German, and Swiss experts. And then there was the lens of alum with its housing, as big and heavy as a piece of water-main, which I now lifted carefully and clamped into place at the front of the camera.

* * *

Astley stared, and drew on his pipe. It was plain enough that he looked tolerantly on all my labor as well as my talk, and that he believed the whole experiment was something of which I would quickly tire. Though he had been complaisant enough about coming with me and lending what aid he could to my secret experiment.

"That business you're setting up there looks like the kind of thing science fictionists write about, " he said.

"It's exactly the kind of thing they write about," I assured him. "As a matter of fact, science fiction has given me plenty of inspiration, and more than a little information, while I've been making it. But this is practical and material, Astley, not imaginary."

He had not long to wait to witness the truth of that, though his phlegmatic nature could never have understood the tenseness that was making my nerves taut as a spring trap. I knew, however, that nerve strain was to be expected, for I was nearing the actuality of the experiment to which I had long given my heart and soul. I said nothing more, because now, within the tick of seconds I would know whether my dream could be a reality or if, in fact, that was all I had toiled and anguished for—a dream!

I am not sure—how could I be certain?—whether my hands were steady when the great moment came. I know vaguely that my hands did reach out—

I pressed a switch. At the other end of the framework there sprang into view a paper-thin sheet of misty vapor, like a piece of fabric stretched between the rectangle of rods.

I could be excused for the theatricality of my gesture.

"Behold the curtain!" I said. "When I concentrate my rays upon it, all is ready. I need only walk through." I stepped back. "Five minutes for it to warm up, and I'm off into the past."

I began to take off my clothes, folding them carefully; the tweed suit, the necktie of wine-colored silk.

"I can be reflected through time," I said with a touch of whimsicality, "but my new clothes must stay here." And more seriously: "I can't count on molecules to approximate them at the other end of the

business."

"You can't count on molecules to approximate your body, either," challenged Astley.

I knew that he was not as stolid as he was trying to appear, for his pipe had gone out, and he was filling it, and I could see that his hands shook a trifle. He was beginning to wonder whether to take me seriously or not. Unimaginative Astley!

"All my diggings into old records at the Biblioteca Nazionale, yonder in town, have been to find those needed molecules," I told him. "Look at those notes on the table beside you."

He turned in his big arm-chair—it was none too big for him, at that—and picked up the jumble of papers that lay there. "You've written a date at the top of this one," he said as he shuffled them. " 'April Thirtieth, Fourteen-seventy.' And below it you've jotted down something I don't follow: 'Mithraic ceremony—rain prayer—ox on altar.' "

"Which sums up everything," I said, pulling off my shoes. "Right here—right at this inn, which I hunted up for the purpose of my experiment—a group of cultists gathered on April Thirtieth, Fourteen-seventy. Just four hundred and sixty-eight years ago today." I leaned over to look at the time-gauge on my camera. "I'm set for that, exactly."

"Cultists?" repeated Astley, whom I knew from of old is apt to clamp mentally upon a single word that interests him. "What sort of cultists?"

"Contemporaries called them sorcerers and Satanists," I told him. "But probably they had some sort of hand-me-down paganism from old Roman days. Some thing like the worship of Mithras.[1] At any rate, they were sacrificing an ox on that day, trying to bring rain down on their vineyards. I have figured it out like this—if they needed rain, then that particular April thirtieth must have been bright and sunny, ideal for my reflection apparatus. They had an ox on the altar, and from its substance I can reassemble my own tissues to house my personality again. The original molecules, have, of course, dissipated somewhere along the route of the process in time. Is that all clear?"

* * *

Astley nodded slowly, and I stood up without a stitch of clothing. A pier-glass gave me back a tall pink image, lank but well muscled, crowned with ruffled hair of tawny gold.

"Well, old man," I said, with what nonchalance I could, though every nerve in me was tingling, "the machinery's humming. Here I step into the past."

My companion clamped his pipe between his teeth, but did not light it again. I could still see the disbelief in his eyes.

"I hope you know what you're about, and won't do yourself much damage with that thing," he grumbled. "Putting yourself into such a position isn't like experimenting with rats or guinea pigs, you know."

"I haven't experimented with rats or guinea pigs," I informed him, and stepped into the open framework.

I turned on another switch, and through the lens of alum flowed an icy-blue light, full of tiny flakes that did not warm my naked skin.

"As a matter of fact," I said in what I was sure was a parting message, "I've never experimented with anything. Astley, old boy, you are about to see the first operation of my time reflector upon any living organism."

Astley leaned forward, concern at last springing out all over his face.

"If anything happens," he protested quickly, "your family—"

"I have no family. All dead." With a lifted hand I forestalled what else he was going to say. "Goodbye, Astley. Tomorrow, at this time, have a fresh veal carcass, or a fat pig, brought here. That's for me to materialize myself back."