THE ANCESTRAL THREAD, by Emil Petaja

Originally publshed in Amazing Stories, May 1947.

“How about taking in the baseball game out at Poinsettia Playground, Sydney, old kidney?”

I twirled my natty straw hat, and looked down at Susie May’s eleven year old nephew hopefully.

She had sent me over to take care of him this beautiful Sunday afternoon. His pa and ma had left town and were afraid to leave him alone. He had been acting peculiar lately. They were worried.

He ignored me.

He only stared out of the window of their big, ancient, atrocious Alvarado Street house, his mind a million miles away.

“Maybe the movies?” I tried again, with a playful jab in the ribs. “There’s a killer-diller at the Westlake.”

No answer.

Sydney sat on the window seat in the front hall. His little hand was propped under his chin; his sandy hair drooped carelessly almost over his heavy horn-rimmed spectacles; his boyish lips were a grim thoughtful line.

Rodin’s “Thinker” popped into my mind. A young Thinker, that hadn’t grown up yet.

“Hmmm,” I said, reading the title of the book Syd had been reading and which was lying open nearby. “Prof. Albert Einstein’s Theory of Relativity. Hmmm… You do pick ’em deep, don’t you, Syd, old kid!”

At this he turned his head. He eyed me frowningly. His eyes were blue, cold blue. I felt abashed under their penetrating scrutiny. And Sydney’s thick specs made them look twice as big, and sort of uncanny. Especially on an eleven year old boy.

“Who are you?” Susie May’s nephew asked. “And what do you want?”

Well! Right then you could have knocked me down with a fender. I’d given up my only free day in the week to entertain this brat of a nephew, and had stood there ten minutes twirling my straw hat and making suggestion after suggestion for a gay and carefree afternoon.

“Come out of the clouds, kiddo. You know me!” I tried to sound gruff.

“Oh, Uncle Lemuel Mason. To be sure.” He gave off a slow grave smile. “You must forgive my seeming discourtesy in permitting my mental preoccupation to prelude prepension while you were—”

“It’s all right,” I grinned, ruffling his sandy hair. “Think nothing of it.”

I rubbed my chin thoughtfully. So this was part of his odd behavior—talking like a pint-size Thesaurus.

“Well, Syd,” I added, in a moment. “What’s the verdict? Baseball, movies, or—?”

He shook his head.

“They have no appeal for me,” he smiled. “I’d be much better occupied in perusing Einstein further, or—”

“Or what?” I asked in astonishment, as he hesitated.

“Or working in my laboratory. Mentally I’ve been mulling over a furtherance of my own Theory of Mental Progression, which even in its present embryonic stages may well change the whole course of my highly significant experimentations.”

And he never cracked a smile when he said it!

I sat down. I had to, I was that dumbfounded.

“Er… Tell me about it,” I gasped uneasily, when I caught my breath.

“Afraid you wouldn’t understand, Uncle Lem.” Syd shook his head and again emitted that grave professorial smile. “It is far too involved. Even I—”

Even he…

I had to laugh then. It was too much.

Sydney and I weren’t what you’d call bosom pals, but in the few times I’d talked with him before he had struck me as a perfectly normal though bright young fellow. A little given to imaginative reading maybe. But nothing like this!

“Come on outside in the fresh air, Syd. You’ve had your little joke.” I took his hand, and tugged him off his perch. “We’ll take a nice walk around the park, and decide what we want to do.”

“You—you don’t believe me—either?” His boyish treble accused, as he pulled his hand out of mine. His big eyes held an unhappy vexed look.

I had better humor him, I determined. These little mental quirks can develop into pure unadulterated buggyness if not handled delicately.

“Sure I do.” I essayed a smile, and again urged him toward the sunlight that blinked through the green leaves outside the open door.

“Wait a minute!”

Sydney’s face reddened with anger and excitement.

“I’m getting sick and tired of all this small-minded treatment!” he went on, his boy’s voice quivering. “Heretofore I’ve kept my experiments to myself, but now it’s high time I told somebody. Uncle Lem Mason,” he ended on a note of high command. “You follow me upstairs—to my laboratory in the attic!”

What else could I do?

He leaped up the stairs like a gazelle, and I trotted after, more like a pack mule.

Sydney shut the attic door behind us, and switched on some lights.

I rubbered around me.

The attic was one whopping big room. Over in one corner was a long porcelain topped work bench that appeared to have known long usage. It was littered with motley junk, both tools for working with metals, as well as scientific chemistry apparati.

Opposite this versatile work bench was a gargantuan machine. That’s all I could call it. It might have been a threshing machine or a Rube Goldberg salad mixer, for all the sense it made to me. But it was, I could see, equipped with dials, levers, and gauges, and in front of it was a curious metal chair that faced two metal handles.

Most of the attic was dusty and cob-webbed, as though it hadn’t been used for many years, but the machine and the work bench were spic and span. The metal gleamed, and the glass showed evidence of recent polishing.

“Don’t tell me you built all this!” I exclaimed incredulously, as Syd busied himself about the place in a proprietary manner.

“Certainly not,” he denied.

“Who did?”

“Professor Maximillian Leyton.”

Syd began. “He owned and lived in this old house for over twenty years. Until he disappeared very mysteriously some fifteen years back.

“His heirs, who lived in the East and had had little or nothing to do with the old scientist in many decades, got the property off their hands as soon as they legally could. They sold it to my father, sight unseen.

“Old Leyton had conducted a lot of unprecedented experiments in his laboratory at one of the big California colleges, and was considered a little wacky. This led to his dismissal. He became very misanthropic, and worked up here in this attic all alone, allowing no one up here, not even his housekeeper.

“Apparently Leyton hadn’t a friend or confidante in the whole world. Occasionally he was in the habit of making trips to various parts of the country, and when he vanished nobody cared much, thinking he had disappeared by preference. The attic was boarded up, and his efforts here dismissed as so much junk…”

“No!” I grinned.

Syd’s young-old eyes gave me an icy massage.

“The machine was so bulky that my father didn’t bother to have it moved, so it was left here. We didn’t use the attic anyway.

“But one rainy afternoon last April I was wandering around the old dark halls up here, playing Daniel Boone stalking a bear.” Syd smiled crookedly. “You see, I was only a child then, with a child’s mental limitations—”

“What do you think you—”

“Quiet!” Syd snapped, like a grand-pop at a seven-year-old. “In my play, I kicked loose one of the boards over the attic door, managed to work the lock open, and squeezed my way in.

“I discovered the machine, all covered with dust. And this machine has changed everything for me. Everything.”

“How?” I ventured.

He was so in earnest I didn’t feel like laughing any more.

Syd’s exaggerated optics burned into mine, like cold blue flames, radiant with knowledge.

“The machine has shown me all there is to know about myself,” the wonder boy said. “From the furthest roots of my pre-human ancestry, to the high-point in the life of my great grand-son!”

All I could do was give out a shrill whistle, and sit myself down on an old apple box.

Sydney paid me little heed. He walked briskly over to the huge machine, and started the thing to humming by twisting various dials, and throwing a switch.

For a few minutes he was absorbed in his amazing child’s play, then he perched himself on the work bench and went on with his story:

“I have always been possessed of an overwhelming curiosity, even as a boy of eleven,” the boy of eleven said serenely. “So I poked about this machine after wiping the dust off, and twisted dials, and pulled levers, wondering what on earth its purpose might be. Nothing happened.

“Then it occurred to me to hunt for an explanation in the drawers of the work bench. I wiped away more dust, and kept searching around, day after day.

“You see, I was getting over the mumps, and wasn’t allowed to go to school. I had all day to spend up here in the attic, and try to solve this perplexing mystery.

Finally, one day, I discovered a notebook, filled with almost illegible writing. I couldn’t make much out of the writing, since Professor Leyton was anything but methodical. He seems to have worked pell-mell. Everything indicates that. I doubt that anybody could successfully build another machine like this one from his insufficient notes.

“But there was a diagram of the machine in the notebook, and some instructions for its operation noted thereon. Or course it took my child-mind days to make any headway in my attempts to read it and comprehend these instructions. But somehow I did.

“Mostly it was by accident.

“I hadn’t the foggiest notion of what would happen to me when I tried the machine, but I was all for plunging ahead. So one bright Spring day I sat down on that metal chair, after taking a capsule from the box I found with the notebook as directed in the diagram, and turned dials, then threw the switch, and waited excitedly for what might occur…”

“So what did happen?”

Sydney smiled.

“First nothing. So I tried again. And again. Then little by little I discovered what I’d been doing wrong, and revised my attempts accordingly.

“For instance, I discovered that my hands were to keep holding on the two bright metal handles directly in front of the chair until the machine had made contact with my mind. A series of wave-like shocks passed up my little arms and into my body.

“I was frightened. I tried to let go of the handles, but they stuck as if glued.

“I felt I couldn’t bear it much longer. A terrifying vertigo seemed to be sweeping me on and out of my body. I swooped through time and space, as though on a cosmic roller-coaster.”

“What happened? I panted, rocking on my apple box.

“I passed out…”

* * * *

“‘When I came out of it,” Syd continued in his boyish treble, “the vertigo had passed. My hands still gripped the handles, but my mind was clear, very clear. And it was filled with phantasmagoric bits of new knowledge, as if it had been dipped in some cosmic mind-pool.

“For instance, I knew which dial I should turn now, and that the lever on my extreme right would automatically shut the whole machine off, should that be necessary.

“But I didn’t want the machine off. I wanted to test its full powers.

“I found that now I could lift one hand off the handle and still maintain contact. So I twisted one of the two large dials directly above the handles. The one clumsily marked ‘Back’. I turned it two notches only.

“Immediately I wasn’t in the attic any longer…

“I was in an old-fashioned office, sitting behind a big desk, with a cigar in my mouth, and my feet propped up on a waste basket. I was grown up, and dressed in a funny tight-trousered suit of loud checks. I wore a black mustache that curled up at the ends. I stroked it from time to time, very proudly.

“I was talking, dictating a letter to a pretty girl whose chestnut hair was wrapped into a weird bun at the back of her neck. She was dressed in a prim white shirt-waist and ankle-length skirt that fell over high button shoes.

“You must understand, that while suddenly I was this old-time gentleman, seeing what he saw through his eyes, hearing what he heard, and feeling what he felt; at the same time I was powerless to direct his movements. I played the role of a mental kibitzer.

“The girl kept saying, ‘Yes, Mister Rayson.’

“My own mind was able to wonder about this. I am Sydney Rayson. My father is Mister Rayson. My grandfather was Mister—

“I was on the point of solving this riddle, when the man that was me for the moment got up, tossed his cigar into a nearby cuspidor, and took the girl in his arms. She didn’t seem to mind. She blushed even prettier when he kissed her.

“‘Not Mister Rayson,’ he admonished. ‘Malcolm.’

“Just then the door behind them opened. A large, over-dressed woman blew in. She was full of dangerous curves, but it seemed to me that three pigeons on her hat was just a little too many.

“‘Well!’ she cried. ‘So this is how you behave behind your fiancée’s back, you cad. Take that! And that!’

“The first that was a hefty clout on the ear. The second was a ring which she removed from her fat finger and flung in his face, nearly knocking an eye out.

“The door banged behind her, smashing the glass. Malcolm Rayson sighed, a relieved sort of sigh, and continued where he had left off when so violently interrupted…”

“Who was this guy Malcolm?” I, Lem Mason, asked this precocious nephew.

“My grandfather, of course!” Syd proclaimed. “His name was Malcolm, and he married his secretary, although at one time he was engaged to his boss’s voluptuous daughter.”

“How come you lived in his mind? What’s this machine for?” I quizzed. “And why that particular moment?”

“If you’ll allow me to finish!” Syd growled, falsetto. “So after this little incident was over I found myself slowly fading out of Malcolm Rayson’s mind, and returning to my own body here in the attic.

“I pulled down the lever that shut the machine off, and called it a day…

“Now, to answer your questions,” said this amazing quiz kid. “I lived in my grandfather’s mind for a while because that is the function of this machine—to open up unused portions of the mind where ancestral memories are stored, and to let you relive these memories as in a three-dimensional motion picture. I turned the dial two notches—thus, two generations back.

“And the reason I relived that particular moment is because that memory is the strongest in grandfather’s portion of the ancestral thread of memory. In grandfather’s mind that memory stood out ahead of all others. It was transmitted in the genes, or inheritable elements, to my father, who in turn transmitted it to me.

“In subsequent experiments, I found that it was always the high-point in each ancestor’s life that the machine was able to pick up and recreate.”

I found an apple on the work bench, and nibbled on it thoughtfully. As I nibbled and thought I stared at Professor Leyton’s ancestral juke-box, that Syd had prodded into action.

“Do tell,” I murmured, still, incredulous. “And did you relive any more high-points in your ancestors’ lives? Further back?”

“Certainly,” Syd retorted calmly. “Many of them.”

“Tell me about ’em.”

“I can’t. It would take days, there were so many, some of them so very complex…

“For instance, there was Abigail Georgie Rayson, my great-great grandmother, who was subjected to the ducking stool back in Colonial days, for talking in church. That was the most vivid, embarrassing moment of her life.

“There was an English ancestor, Sir Hamilton Fiske-Rayeson, who died in the War of the Roses; there was Agnes Rurrson, who was forcibly wedded to a tyrannical Roman general; there was Caracalla, the blood-lusty Roman Emperor, whose appearance in the family ancestral thread springs from no pretty scene; there was Latoto, a slave in ancient Babylon.

“And further back—dwellers in cities that have crumbled into dust, and are now not even listed in the archives of archeology.

“Back, back, back—to ancestors that cowered in cliff caves, conversing in grunts and growls, shivering with terror when the hooves of the mastodons trampled above their heads like thunder.

“And even further back…”

I blinked.

“Further back? What could be further back than the cavemen?”

Syd’s big eyes seemed to be seeing it all again, as he spoke:

“Back to midnight shapes that swung from tree to tree with hairy agile arms; back to things that lumbered over steaming hills and made outlandish unhuman noises; back to things that slithered on their loathesome bellies through primordial slimes…”

“My goodness,” I hissed. “You did go back!”

My tone seemed to irritate Susie May’s nephew. He turned on me sharply.

“You don’t believe me!” he accused, pointing a little smutty finger at me.

“Well,” I admitted. “It’s a lot to swallow all in one lump. And here’s another thing, I seem to remember you making a crack about your great-grandson. Just where does he come into the three-dimensional motion picture?”

“Ah,” Syd sighed, with some satisfaction. “Then at least I know you were listening, not daydreaming. But you seem to have forgotten one little detail—the second big dial, the one marked ‘Ahead’!”

“What about it?”

“That dial brought my mind in contact with high-points in my future generations’ lives!”

* * * *

“Are you kidding?” That was all I could think to snort.

He ignored my flippancy. He talked on as though to himself. I champed on my apple, and listened, squinting over at him in righteous doubt.

“You see, lame-brain, Professor Leyton’s astonishing purpose seems to have been to accumulate all the knowledge he could, both past and present. Unfortunately for him, his very greed for knowledge was his own undoing. He didn’t realize the danger he was putting himself in.

“Nor did I…”

“Having plumbed the depths of the past, I was all for venturing into the undiscovered realms of the future.

“First—my son. The episode which I—”

“Hold on a minute!” I roared, in protest. “How could any memory from your son’s mind be inherited backwards?”

Syd smiled gravely.

“I thought you’d catch that obvious flaw,” he sighed. “But tell me this, Uncle Lem—how did you know it couldn’t? How do you, or I, for that matter, know what Time is. If Time is accepted as another dimension, then obviously Time exists all at once in some way that our three-dimensional minds are incapable of grasping. Such a theory being accepted, there is no ‘backward’ or ‘forward’ actually. Only now. Now! NOW!

“Does that hint at some explanation?”

I frowned horribly. “Not much.” Although the whole thing was beginning to give me a headache, I let him go on with his story.

“Professor Leyton’s machine transcends this three-dimensional fallacy regarding Time, and continues the ancestral thread to its ultimate end.

“My glimpses of the future were far briefer, more blurred and difficult than any past images. In this it may be said that Professor Leyton’s machine was defective.

“My moment in my son’s mind occurred in a lecture room of a large University. He was propounding a new and revolutionary theory, the very theory that I have since been completing, proving. And he was being ridiculed, scoffed at, laughed out of the auditorium.

“This was the result, I guessed, of his lifetime of arduous effort in science. It is my belief that he died a broken and unhappy man. Will die, you might say!

“He left a daughter, a weakly creature who lived only long enough to give birth to a son who carried on the ancestral thread…

“It was my great-grandson whose mind gave me a glorious thrilling glimpse that was the high-point of high-points in my travels up and down the ancestral thread of memory.

“He was an old, old man. He stood, still strong and tall and beautiful, on a glass-like precipice that lipped a skyscraper cliff of the radiant and incredible city of the world of Tomorrow. He stood gazing introspectively down at the leisurely flow of life, both above and below him.

Aircraft of feather lightness and breathtaking design sailed smoothly and silently on their accurate designated courses. Far below, on gardened streets, pedestrians strolled on marbled ramps, while on other levels ground vehicles moved, like the aircraft, swiftly, silently, smoothly.

“It was dusk, and the miraculous city began to take on a warm colorful glow. The air was soft, clean, sweet. From somewhere came music, strange but thrilling.

“My great grandson mused over this paradise world, and over his own small part in its being. He was an old man, but vigorous, and with many happy years ahead of him thanks to supermedical science.

“This was the world that had fought its way out of blood and chaos, in spite of Hitlers and Tojos, as a wonderful flower fights its way toward the sun, out of fog and dung and noisome weeds…

* * * *

“You spoke of danger,” I said gently, breaking into Syd’s reverie.

“Yes.” He broke out of his ecstatic mood. “The danger that lurked in the machine’s shortcomings, and in Leyton’s insatiable curiosity.

“The world of my great grandson was so beautiful to me that I couldn’t resist the desire to see even further into the future. I snapped the ‘Ahead’ dial ahead—

“Then it happened! My mind whirled, as if caught in some tremendous cosmic vortex. I almost lost consciousness. My head throbbed. Then it was as if a million sharp needles were plunged into it.

“Warned of impending disaster, I grabbed hold of the lever at my right, and pulled it down, shutting off the machine.

“When I was able to think clearly again, I found that something amazing had happened to my mind…”

I nodded my head sadly at that. I could well believe it!

“My mind,” Syd went on, eyeing me sternly, “had developed into a supermind. Knowledge from future generations had leaked into it. I found myself able to solve profound mental problems with ease.

“I was, in point of fact, mentally over a hundred years old—not eleven!”

“Well, I swan!” I exclaimed.

“You goose.” Syd quipped dryly. “And so the defectiveness of Professor Leyton’s machine proved of colossal benefit to me. He wasn’t so lucky, however.”

“What do you mean by that?” I queried.

“Understand, I’m only guessing. But all the evidence points to this…

“Professor Leyton managed to get his machine to bring his mind in contact with the far distant future. He voyaged mentally millions of years into what we call future time, along the ancestral thread.

“He didn’t give a tinker’s dam about the world of his day and didn’t breathe a word of his discovery to anyone. He just stayed up here alone, plunging further and further.

“He was insatiable. He trekked the furthest reaches of his future ancestors’ mind-lives; and then to ancestors that no longer were men at all! What gigantic secrets he learned will never be known. Then, at last, at the very end of time itself—”

Syd broke off with a strangely gruff sigh.

“What happened to him?” I breathed, feeling my skin crawl at the thought of anyone seeing the very end of Time.

Syd got up from where he’d been sitting on the edge of the work bench, and motioned me to come over to the machine. I tossed my apple core away, and walked over.

Syd pointed down under the metal chair that fronted the weird machine, at a large roundish stain. It was an unpleasant blotch, green and brown, soaked indelibly into the unpainted floor-wood of the attic.

“That, I think,” said Syd dramatically, “is Professor Leyton!”

I leaped back a step, uttering a squawk. Then, gulping, I went back to my apple box.

“Now what?” I said, anxious to shake the attic’s dust off my heels. “We can still make the baseball game if—”

“Baseball!” Syd snorted. “You, Lem Mason, are going to sit down on the metal chair. You don’t believe anything I’ve told you, so I’m going to prove it to you! I’m going to send your mind back into the past, along your ancestral thread!”

I bounded up.

“Me?” I squeaked. “I should say not! Why, Syd, I-I-I believe you. Sure I-I-I do.”

I made for the attic door.

“No you-you-you don’t. Come back here, you coward!” His voice was scornful. His arms were crossed, like a gestapo leader’s.

“Who’s a coward?” I protested weakly. “But, Syd, how about Professor Leyton—he’s only a blob on the barroom, I mean attic, floor. I don’t relish the thought of being a blob on—”

“It happened because he tried to delve too far into the future,” Syd snapped. “Besides—you don’t believe any of my story! You think I’m wacky! How could a machine that an eleven-year-old boy whipped up out of tin cans and old bottle caps hurt you?”

He sounded very contemptuous and sarcastic.

I didn’t say a word, but I was thinking lots. Maybe that machine was made by Professor Leyton, like Syd said. But maybe working with it had unhinged his mind, made him a bit pixilated. Gosh, I didn’t want to rush home to Susie May talking like a man from the Moon!

Still and all, the last thing I remembered Susie May saying to me was, “Humor him, Lem, dear. Play any kind of games he wants you to. He’s a sensitive child. All he needs is to be understood.”

Understood! How could I understand all his high-falutin’ double-talk about ancestral threads? Gosh, I’m only a humble bookkeeper down at Mammoth Cement.

I sniffed uncomfortably, then turned and shuffled slowly back to the machine. Syd stood there with his arms crossed, like a Spanish inquisitor.

“Okay,” I muttered unhappily. I sat down gingerly on the metal seat. “Only not too fast. I can’t stand to go too fast.” My own words made me giggle nervously.

“Take this capsule,” Syd ordered, handing me an ominous green pill.

I tried to swallow it, choked over it, coughed, sputtered, and slapped my knee. The capsule stuck in my throat, poised, then dropped. I looked at Syd with reproachful tear-filled eyes.

“How far back would you like to go, Uncle Lem?” he asked, kindly.

“Lemme see,” I pondered, half-believing I could. “Oh, yes—two notches back, please. Grandpop was supposed to be a rootin’ tootin’ bad man in some old Western town. He was a real tough guy called Fearless Murgatroyd, with a blazing six-gun in each hand, and everybody scared to death when he swaggered through town. Be nice to visit him, huh?”

* * * *

“Certainly,” Syd agreed gravely.

So I grabbed hold of the two metal handles in front of me, while Syd managed the dials and levers. And then suddenly I was whirling, dipping, sliding, falling—as if I was riding all the concessions down at the beach at once.

“Yeow!” I yelled, trying to let go. But I couldn’t. The handles stuck as if glued to me.

Blurredly I saw Syd adjust dials.

Then all was blackness for a while.

Somebody had hold of me from the back, and swung me through the air and bounced me onto the hard ground.

I squirmed and struggled, and gurgled and guggled. The person who had hold of me by the top of my britches laughed. It was a rasping, sneery laugh.

And that laugh was echoed on all sides.

Everything was still black. Then, my eyes were opened.

I blinked.

A bright golden light blinded me. The sun. The hot noonday sun of the desert.

I was talking, jabbering at a terrific pace. Or at least the body I had intruded into was jabbering. It was ranting, begging, pleading.

“Don’t do it!” grandpop (I supposed it to be he) kept screaming in deathly terror. “Don’t hang me!”

“Heh, heh,” chuckled the geezer who dandled grandpop up and down by the top of his dusty blue pants. “Nah, we won’t string him up, will we, fellers? Heh, heh!”

That heh-heh was an evil heh-heh. And the words only served to scare grandpop worse.

I gandered around me, through grandpop’s eyes.

Where was I? I wondered. And what was the reason for all this stringing up of grandfathers?

Fearless Murgatroyd, alias grandpop, was the central figure of a little knot of evilly heh-hehing miners and cattlemen in loud shirts, dusty overall pants, and greasy hats. Fearless Murgatroyd was a little runt, with a wisp of a straw mustache that quivered like an aspen leaf, right now.

The group of men and their horses stood under a huge dead, though staunch, oak tree that had a heavy low-hanging branch. That branch was significant.

Half a mile back along the horse-trail was a drowsy little desert town, sleeping in the sun.

It was plain as a pikestaff that grandpop had been jogged along that trail from town, yanked off his horse by the big galoot under this tree ceremoniously; and it was obvious to the veriest dunce that Fearless Murgatroyd was the unhappy nucleus of an old-fashioned necktie party.

Some high-point in my ancestral thread I had picked out!

Had I been master of my soul at that moment, I would have joyously winged my way back to my original Lem Mason body and thanked my lucky stars that the “good old days” were gone forever. But that, alas, was not in my power.

Meanwhile Fearless Murgatroyd kept on begging and pleading in a steady incoherent babble, his bony knees failing under him every now and then. The big galoot kept him from sinking to the ground in a miserable heap.

“Don’t ha-ha-hang me!” he bleated.

Over and over and over. I wanted finally to yell out, your point is made, pass on to something else!

I could see that these brown-skinned, horny-handed, dirty-booted blockheads were getting a great big bang out of the fuss grandpop was kicking up. It was quite a picnic.

They laughed and laughed. The big galoot laughed loudest of all.

The horses champed dispiritedly at the straggly clumps of grass that spotted the desert’s edge, flecking flies off their rumps with their tails and eyeing the proceedings with great disinterest.

I had solved the problem of where I was, more or less, and what was up. But the question of why still worried me. What had Fearless Murgatroyd done to deserve such an ignominious fate?

“Grandpop, you old fraud!” I wanted to yell. “What are you doing here, when you should be shooting up towns and scaring people to death, instead of shivering like a licked pup?”

“Karp,” the galoot who was holding Fearless Murgatroyd up, uncomfortably, wanted to know. “Yu got the rope ready?”

“Yep,” a bleary-eyed critter with two front teeth missing replied, with a grin. He held up a lasso that he had transformed into a knotted strangler.

“Toss it up over thet branch, Karp. An’ tie it tuh one of the horses.” The galoot was evidently in charge.

“Shore nuff, Sampson.”

Fearless Murgatroyd’s fascinated eyes watched the rope swing over the branch that was ideal for their purpose, and watched Karp tie it deftly to the saddle of his horse.

“Think it’ll hold him?” somebody in the back row speculated.

“This yere runt?” Sampson scoffed, bouncing grandpop up and down like a puppet. “Sakes! It held thet two-twenty pound outlaw Eagle-beak Larmont last week, didn’t it?”

“Real purty hangin’ it was,” somebody else reminisced. “Not quite so hot as ’tis today.”

There was but one word for it, and that was—ghoulish.

I shivered, longing to be back in the attic, back in my own body. Horrible thoughts plagued me. Thoughts about Professor Leyton, the smear on the attic floor.

And there was little Syd’s mental transformation, too. What sinister thing might happen to me? When grandpop died, wouldn’t I die too?

Fearless Murgatroyd bawled like a newly born doggie when Sampson swung him over into position for the kill.

Grandpop wriggled and twisted helplessly as he dropped the noose over his head. Then, carefully, as if he was trimming a birthday cake, Sampson tightened the knot in place and got everything in apple-pie order.

“I ain’t had no proper trial!” Fearless bawled, tears streaming down his dirty face, into his mustache.

“Ain’t we just giv yu a trial?” Karp retorted. “An’ didn’t yu admit yu stole them hosses offa Pete Morrison?”

“I stole ’em. Yu can tell thet from the brand.” Fearless was repentant and anxious to save his hide any possible way. “He can take ’em back, and mine too. Only, leave me go this time fellas. I won’t do it again, honest.”

He ended off in a doleful blubbering.

“Sorry, Murg,” Sampson said, with a wink at the others. “F’it was only one hoss we maybe could see our way clear to let yu go. But three hosses is too many!”

“We cain’t do it!”

And then they were silent. Ominously silent.

Grandpop Fearless shut his eyes tight, as he had on the horse ride to his doom. As for me, I was as good as dead already.

But the death jolt didn’t come. Apparently the audience hadn’t enjoyed the suspense quite to its furthest stretching point yet. They wanted to prolong their fun.

“Yu see, Murg, yu ol’ coyote,” Sampson broke the silence, poking Fearless in the ribs until he opened his eyes. “It ain’t only the hosses. It’s the lies yu go spreading around these hyar parts. Lies thet yur such a tough hombre, and how the rest of us is allus crawlin’ tu yu on our bellies. We don’t hanker much for thet kind of talk, Murg.”

“I won’t do it any more! Honest!” Fearless whined.

“I’ll say yu won’t!”

Fearless shivered violently. His cracked lips emitted a weird moan.

“Now say, just say fur instance, Murg—if we did let yu go—would you stop all this year swell-headed braggin’ and boastin’. An’ quit callin’ yourself Fearless Murgatroyd?”

Fearless could hardly believe his ears. Nor could I hardly believe his ears. “W-W-What?” he squeaked.

Sampson repeated. A guffaw was unleashed from back of them.

“Yessir. Yessir. Yessir!” Fearless bobbed his head up and down until he all but strangled himself with the noose that circled his neck. “I—I—I’d go far away! I wouldn’t call myself nuthin’. I—I—I wouldn’t brag about nuthin’. I wouldn’t hardly even say nuthin’!”

Sampson seemed to weigh this in his mind.

“What say, fellers,” he said at last. Shall we let Murg off if he promises to behave himself, an’ go away, an’ not brag about hisself any more?”

Grandpop’s eyes searched the mob’s anxiously.

“Shore,” Karp spoke up. “Put Murg onto his hoss, and tell him to high-tail it out of these parts for good!”

Several voices affirmed this suggestion.

So Sampson lifted the rope from around Fearless Murgatrayd’s throat, and allowed him to wipe the tears and sweat off his face with his blue bandana.

Then the burly leader swung grand-pop up on his horse.

“Thanks, fellas,” Fearless muttered weakly.

Sampson’s riding whip touched the horse’s flank, and away rode Fearless.

Away into the desert. Away from the tree of evil fruit. Away like the wind, in a cloud of desert dust…

* * * *

“Aaahhhh!” I sighed, coming out of the past.

It had seemed hours, but in reality had all taken place in a few minutes. A very crucial few minutes.

“Now do you believe me?” Syd demanded, as I tottered up from the metal chair.

I felt of my arms and my legs, and my neck. Especially my neck. They were okay. I was back safe and sound, just as I had been before, except for the knowledge of that awful experience back in the days of the wild and woolly west.

“Yes,” I had to say. “I believe you, Syd. But you’ll never get me to sit in that chair again! No, sir!”

I started to tell Syd what had happened to me, but he didn’t seem much interested. He was fussing with test tubes full of chemicals, pouring them into different glass parts of the machine.

“Shut up, Uncle Lem,” he told me. “I’m concentrating. Yes. Yes.”

He went on muttering and working this way for some time, ignoring my existence.

“It’s done!” he yelled at last.

“What’s done?”

“Listen, Uncle Lem,” Syd cried, his eyes glowing excitedly. “I’ve managed to repair the damage Professor Leyton did to the machine when he went into the future too far.”

“I’ve refueled it, so to speak. Now I think that I can go further into the future myself, further than just three generations. That’s nothing to the wonders I’ll see now!”

“Now?” I repeated.

“I’m ready to try it right now!”

“No, Syd,” I said, taking hold of his arm. “Too much is really enough. Don’t tempt Fate. I mean, let well enough alone, and come downstairs with me. I’ll buy us some ice cream. No. No, Syd. Remember Professor Leyton, the smear on the—”

“Quiet!” Syd snapped. He swallowed a capsule, and sat down in the metal chair, grabbing the handles. “You stand by, Uncle Lem. Watch out for any trouble that might develop.”

“But I don’t know anything about—” I protested.

Syd didn’t even hear me. He was already under the spell of the machine—traveling up that ancestral thread.

I stood by Syd, whose body became stiff as a board. His eyes became glassy. He looked like a youthful corpse.

I felt very helpless.

I got scared, too, and wanted to do something. But I didn’t know what to do, and was afraid I might do the wrong thing.

So I just stood there, waiting and biting my fingernails.

All of a sudden Syd’s hand moved stiffly up to the “Ahead” dial, and slowly, mechanically, began to turn it.

Click…click…click…

I chewed my nails, and kept my eyes glued on that dial.

* * * *

For quite some time I kept my anxious vigil. My legs prickled, and my hands got stiff. I remembered Professor Leyton’s dreadful fate, and was scared for Syd. He was venturing into that dangerous future territory, where Leyton had met his doom!

And what about me?

Suppose something did happen to Sydney? What would Susie May say? What would the world say? Who would believe my fantastic story?

Likely as not, the papers would refer to me as “The Attic Fiend.”

How would they realize that Syd wasn’t a boy of eleven mentally, but a giant brain who read Einstein, and concocted outlandish theories of his own as well!

Then, suddenly, something went wrong. I could feel it, even before it happened. The machine was acting up!

Syd’s body began to writhe. His lips gave out a rasping sound. He seemed in terrible agony.

Then, visibly, his head began to shrink!

Good Lord! In a few minutes he, too, would be nothing but a blotch on the attic floor!

“Moses on the mountain!” I moaned, waving my arms about helplessly.

Something horrible was occurring. I had to do something. But quick!

But what?

I turned my eyes to the machine. That labyrinth of knobs, dials, levers, switches, bulbs and gauges. Shouldn’t I maybe turn some of them?

In my trembling perplexity I seemed to recall dimly something Syd had said—about a certain lever. The lever that shut the whole machine off…

“My sainted Aunt!”

The machine was growling ominously. And the metal parts were getting red hot. And beginning to sizzle!

Which lever was it? Which one?

Oh yes yes yes. This one over here on the right.

I seized it with both hands, and yanked it down.

Then I grabbed Syd off the metal chair, carried him over to the other side of the room, and set him down gently on the dusty floor.

Not a split-second too soon!

A cacophonic explosion rent the air.

I whirled.

Professor Leyton’s machine was now only a tangled mess of smoking debris. The glass was shattered. The metal middle had burst open, pieces had flown about that side of room pell-mell. The bowels of the machine protruded grotesquely.

I gaped at it imbecilicly.

“Eeeek!” someone screamed shrilly behind me.

I turned sharply.

It was Susie May, framed in the attic doorway, wearing that cockeyed waste basket hat she bought on our honeymoon in Las Vegas.

“Hello, Susie May,” I said. I felt guilty, for some unknown reason.

“Lemuel Mason!” she cried, her eyes popping out of her head almost, at what she saw. “What on earth have you been up to!”

“Nothing,” I said weakly. I waved an arm in protest.

Then Susie May saw Sydney, lying on the dusty floor. She gave out another shriek, and ran to him. She lifted his head and began to stroke his forehead.

“Poor Sydney! He might have been killed by you, and your infernal monkey shines!”

“Me?”

“Get some water, Quick!”

I got some water, quick. But I was speechless. It would be sheer folly to attempt to tell Susie May the truth. All I could do was wait for Sydney to come out of his trance, I hoped, and explain the whole thing. That would prove my innocence of alleged monkey shines.

I looked down at the boy anxiously, while Susie May put her Red Cross nurse’s training to good use. As she bathed his head she heaped a pile of imprecations on mine.

Pretty soon Syd groaned, and opened his eyes.

“Hyah, Aunt Susie May,” he greeted. “Hyah, Uncle Lem.”

“Well, Syd, old kid,” I grinned, lifting him up, and starting to carry him downstairs. “Looks like when you put all those chemicals in the machine you over-juiced it, and made it blow up. Thank goodness it didn’t blow you up!” I was much relieved to see that Syd’s head was normal size again. Maybe I had only imagined it shrinking.

“Anyway,” I went on, “we can go downstairs and read some more Einstein, eh, Syd?”

Syd leaped to the floor.

“Einstein? Machine? What the dickens are you talking so funny for, Uncle Lem?” His eyes became large, furious. “And do you mean to tell me you kept me cooped up in that hot attic all afternoon, fooling around, and missing the Sunday baseball game?”