The Circle of Zero - Stanley Grauman Weinbaum (uplifting novels txt) š
- Author: Stanley Grauman Weinbaum
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āWho, then?ā
āYou!ā He jabbed that long finger against me.
I was thoroughly startled. āMe? Oh, no! Not a chance of it!ā
āJack,ā he said querulously, ādidnāt you study hypnotism in my course? Didnāt you learn how harmless it is? You know what tommy-rot the idea is of one mind dominating another. You know the subject really hypnotizes himself, that no one can hypnotize an unwilling person. Then what are you afraid of?ā
āIāwell,ā I didnāt know what to answer.
Iām not afraid,ā I said grimly. āI just donāt like it.ā
āYouāre afraid!ā
āIām not!ā
āYou are!ā He was growing excited.
It was at that moment that Yvonneās footsteps sounded in the hall. His eyes glittered. He looked at me with a sinister hint of cunning.
āI dislike cowards,ā he whispered. His voice rose. āSo does Yvonne!ā
The girl entered, perceiving his excitement. āOh!ā she frowned. āWhy do you have to take these theories so to heart, father?ā
āTheories?ā he screeched. āYes! I have a theory that when you walk you stand still and the sidewalk moves back. Noāthen the sidewalk moves back. Noāthen the sidewalk would split if two people walked towards each otherāor maybe itās elastic. Of course itās elastic! Thatās why the last mile is the longest. Itās been stretched!ā
Yvonne got him to bed.
Well, he talked me into it. I donāt know how much was due to my own credulity and how much to Yvonneās solemn dark eyes. I half-believed the professor by the time heād spent another evening in argument but I think the clincher was his veiled threat to forbid Yvonne my company. Sheād have obeyed him if it killed her. She was from New Orleans too, you see, and of Creole blood.
I wonāt describe that troublesome course of training. One has to develop the hypnotic habit. Itās like any other habit, and must be formed slowly. Contrary to the popular opinion morons and people of low intelligence canāt ever do it. It takes real concentrationāthe whole knack of it is the ability to concentrate oneās attentionāand I donāt mean the hypnotist, either.
I mean the subject. The hypnotist hasnāt a thing to do with it except to furnish the necessary suggestion by murmuring, āSleepāsleepāsleepāsleep ā¦ā And even that isnāt necessary once you learn the trick of it.
I spent half-an-hour or more nearly every evening, learning that trick. It was tedious and a dozen times I became thoroughly disgusted and swore to have no more to do with the farce. But always, after the half-hourās humouring of de Neant, there was Yvonne, and boredom vanished. As a sort of reward, I suppose, the old man took to leaving us alone. And we used our time, Iāll wager, to better purpose than he used his.
But I began to learn, little by little. Came a time, after three weeks of tedium, when I was able to cast myself into a light somnambulistic state. I remember how the glitter of the cheap stone in Professor de Neantās ring grew until it filled the world and how his voice, mechanically dull, murmured like the waves in my ears. I remember everything that transpired during those minutes, even his query, āAre you sleeping?ā and my automatic reply, āYes.ā
By the end of November we had mastered the second state of lethargy and thenāI donāt know why, but a sort of enthusiasm for the madness took hold of me. Business was at a standstill. I grew tired of facing customers to whom I had sold bonds at a par that were now worth fifty or less and trying to explain why. After a while I began to drop in on the professor during the afternoon and we went through the insane routine again and again.
Yvonne comprehended only a part of the bizarre scheme. She was never in the room during our half-hour trials and knew only vaguely that we were involved in some sort of experiment which was to restore our lost money. I donāt suppose she had much faith in it but she always indulged her father.
It was early in December that I began to remember things. Dim and formless things at firstāsensations that utterly eluded the rigities of words. I tried to express them to de Neant but it was hopeless.
āA circular feeling,ā Iād say. āNoānot exactlyāa sense of spiralānot that, either. RoundnessāI canāt recall it now. It slips away.ā
He was jubilant. āIt comes!ā he whispered, grey beard awaggle and pale eyes glittering. āYou begin to remember!ā
āBut what good is a memory like that?ā
āWait! It will come clearer. Of course not all your memories will be of the sort we can use. They will be scattered. Through all the multifold eternities of the past-future circle you canāt have been always Jack Anders, securities salesman.
āThere will be fragmentary memories, recollections of times when your personality was partially existent, when the Laws of Chance had assembled a being who was not quite Jack Anders, in some period of the infinite worlds that must have risen and died in the span of eternities.
āBut somewhere, too, the same atoms, the same conditions, must have made you. Youāre the black grain among the trillions of white grains and, with all eternity to draw in from, you must have been drawn beforeāmany, many times.ā
āDo you suppose,ā I asked suddenly, āthat anyone exists twice on the same earth? Reincarnation in the sense of the Hindus?ā
He laughed scornfully. āThe age of the earth is somewhere between a thousand million and three thousand million years. What proportion of eternity is that?ā
āWhyāno proportion at all. Zero.ā
āExactly. And zero represents the chance of the same atoms combining to form the same person twice in one cycle of a planet. But I have shown that trillions, or trillions of trillions of years ago, there must have been another earth, another Jack Anders, andāāhis voice took on that whining noteāāanother crash that ruined Jack Anders and old de Neant. That is the time you must remember out of lethargy.ā
āCatalepsy!ā I said. āWhat would one remember in that?ā
āGod knows.ā
āWhat a mad scheme!ā I said suddenly. āWhat a crazy pair of fools we are!ā The adjectives were a mistake.
āMad? Crazy?ā His voice became a screech. āOld de Neant is mad, eh? Old Dawn of Nothingness is crazy! You think time doesnāt go in a circle, donāt you? Do you know what a circle represents? Iāll tell you!
āA circle is the mathematical symbol for zero! Time is zeroātime is a circle. I have a theory that the hands of a clock are really the noses, because theyāre on the clockās face, and since time is a circle they go round and round and round ā¦ā
Yvonne slipped quietly into the room and patted her fatherās furrowed forehead. She must have been listening.
Nightmare or Truth?āLook here,ā I said at a later time to de Neant. āIf the past and future are the same thing, then the futureās as unchangeable as the past. How, then, can we expect to change it by recovering our money?ā
āChange it?ā he snorted. āHow do you know weāre changing it? How do you know that this same thing wasnāt done by that Jack Anders and de Neant back on the other side of eternity? I say it was!ā
I subsided, and the weird business went on. My memoriesāif they were memoriesāwere becoming clearer now. Often and often I saw things out of my own immediate past of twenty-seven years, though of course de Neant assured me that these were visions from the past of that other self on the far side of time.
I saw other things too, incidents that I couldnāt place in my experience, though I couldnāt be quite sure they didnāt belong there. I might have forgotten, you see, since they were of no particular importance. I recounted everything dutifully to the old man immediately upon awakening and sometimes that was difficultālike trying to find words for a half-remembered dream.
There were other memories as wellābizarre, outlandish dreams that had little parallel in human history. These were always vague and sometimes very horrible and only their inchoate and formless character kept them from being utterly nerve-racking and terrifying.
At one time, I recall, I was gazing through a little crystalline window into a red fog through which moved indescribable facesānot human, not even associable with anything I had ever seen. On another occasion I was wandering, clad in furs, across a cold grey desert and at my side was a woman who was not quite Yvonne.
I remember calling her Pyroniva, and knowing that the name meant āSnowy-fireā. And here and there in the air about us floated fungoid things, bobbing around like potatoes in a water-bucket. And once we stood very quiet while a menacing form that was only remotely like the small fungi droned purposefully far overhead, toward some unknown objective.
At still another time I was peering, fascinated, into a spinning pool of mercury, watching an image therein of two wild winged figures playing in a roseate gladeānot at all human in form but transcendently beautiful, bright and iridescent.
I felt a strange kinship between these two creatures and myself and Yvonne but I had no inkling of what they were, nor upon what world, nor at what time in eternity, nor even of what nature was the room that held the spinning pool that pictured them.
Old Aurore de Neant listened carefully to the wild word-pictures I drew.
āFascinating!ā he muttered. āGlimpses of an infinitely distant future caught from a ten-fold infinitely remote past. These things you describe are not earthly; it means that somewhere, sometime, men are actually to burst the prison of space and visit other worlds. Some day ā¦ā
āIf these glimpses arenāt simply nightmares,ā I said.
Theyāre not nightmares,ā he snapped, ābut they might as well be for all the value they are to us.ā I could see him struggle to calm himself. āOur money is still gone. We must try, keep trying for years, for centuries, until we get the black grain of sand, because black sand is a sign of gold-bearing ore ā¦ā He paused. āWhat am I talking about?ā he said querously.
Well, we kept trying. Interspersed with the wild, all but indescribable visions came others almost rational. The thing became a fascinating game. I was neglecting my businessāthough that was small lossāto chase dreams with old Professor Aurore de Neant.
I spent evenings, afternoons and finally mornings, too, living in the slumber of the lethargic state or telling the old man what fantastic things I had dreamedāor, as he said, remembered. Reality became dim to me. I was living in an outlandish world of fancy and only the dark, tragic eyes of Yvonne tugged at me, pulled me back into the daylight world of sanity.
I have mentioned more nearly rational visions. I recall one a cityābut what a city! Sky-piercing, white and beautiful and the people of it were grave with the wisdom of gods, pale and lovely people, but solemn, wistful, sad. There was the aura of brilliance and wickedness that hovers about all great cities, that was born, I suppose, in Babylon and will remain until great cities are no more.
But that was something else, something intangible. I donāt know exactly what to call it but perhaps the word decadence is as close as any word we have. As I stood at the base of a colossal structure there was the whir of quiet machinery but it seemed to me, nevertheless, that the city was dying.
It might have been the moss that grew green on the north walls of the buildings. It might have been the grass that pierced here and there through
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