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Title: The Circle of Zero
Author: Weinbaum, Stanley G. [Grauman] (1902-1935)
Date of first publication: August 1936
Edition used as base for this ebook:
   Thrilling Wonder Stories, August 1936
   [New York: Beacon Magazines]
   [first edition]
Date first posted: 7 December 2016
Date last updated: 7 December 2016
Project Gutenberg Canada ebook #1380

This ebook was produced by Al Haines


PUBLISHER'S NOTE

Italics in the original printed edition are indicated _thus_.

As part of the conversion of the book to its new digital
format, we have made certain minor adjustments in its layout.






  The CIRCLE
  of ZERO

  Old Professor de Nant Probes
  Into the Bottomless Well
  of Infinity!



  One of the Last Stories Written by
  STANLEY G. WEINBAUM
  Author of "The Worlds of If,"
  "A Martian Odyssey," etc.

  A Complete Novelette



  Contents

  I. The Law of Chance
  II. Experiments in Hypnotism
  III. Into the Future
  IV. A Prophecy




CHAPTER I

_The Law of Chance_

If there were a mountain a thousand miles high, and every thousand
years a bird flew over it, just brushing the peak with the tip of its
wing, in the course of inconceivable eons the mountain would be worn
away.  Yet all those ages would not be one second to the length of
eternity....


I don't know what philosophical mind penned the foregoing, but the
words keep recurring to me since last I saw old Aurore de Nant,
erstwhile professor of psychology at Tulane.  When, back in '24, I took
that course in Morbid Psychology from him, I think the only reason for
taking it at all was that I needed an eleven o'clock on Tuesdays and
Thursdays to round out a lazy program.

I was gay Jack Anders; twenty-two years old, and the reason seemed
sufficient.  At least, I'm sure that dark and lovely Yvonne de Nant
had nothing to do with it; she was but a slim child of sixteen.

Old de Nant liked me, Lord knows why, for I was a poor enough student.
Perhaps it was because I never, to his knowledge, punned on his name.
Aurore de Nant translates to Dawn of Nothingness, you see; you can
imagine what students did to such a name.  "Rising Zero"--"Empty
Morning"--those were two of the milder sobriquets.

That was in '24.  Five years later I was a bond salesman in New York,
and Professor Aurora de Nant was fired.  I learned about it when he
called me up; I had drifted quite out of touch with University days.

He was a thrifty sort.  He had saved a comfortable sum, and had moved
to New York, and that's when I started seeing Yvonne again, now darkly
beautiful as a Tanagra figurine.  I was doing pretty well, and was
piling up a surplus against the day when Yvonne and I...

At least, that was the situation in August, 1929.  In October of the
same year, I was as clean as a gnawed bone and old de Nant had but
little more meat.  I was young, and could afford to laugh; he was old,
and he turned bitter.  And indeed, Yvonne and I did little enough
laughing when we thought of our own future; but we didn't brood like
the professor.



I remember the evening he broached the subject of the Circle of Zero.
It was a rainy, blustering fall night, and his beard waggled in the dim
lamplight like a wisp of grey mist.  Yvonne and I had been staying in
evenings of late; shows cost money, and I felt that she appreciated my
talking to her father, and--after all--he retired early.

She was sitting on the davenport at his side when he suddenly stabbed a
gnarled finger at me and snapped, "Happiness depends on money!"

I was startled.  "Well, it helps," I agreed.

His pale blue eyes glittered.  "We must recover ours!" he rasped.

"How?"

"I know how.  Yes, I know how!"  He grinned thinly.  "They think I'm
mad.  _You_ think I'm mad; even Yvonne thinks so."

The girl said softly, reproachfully, "Father!"

"But I'm not," he continued.  "You and Yvonne, and all the fools
holding chairs at universities--yes!  But not me."

"I will be, all right, if conditions don't get better soon," I
murmured.  I was used to the old man's outbursts.

"They will be better for us," he said, calming.  "Money!  We will do
anything for money, won't we, Anders?"

"Anything honest."

"Yes, anything honest.  Time is honest, isn't it?  An honest cheat,
because it takes everything human and turns it into dust."  He peered
at my puzzled face.  "I will explain," he said, "how we can cheat time."

"Cheat--"

"Yes.  Listen, Jack.  Have you ever stood in a strange place and felt a
sense of having been there before?  Have you ever taken a trip and
sensed that sometime, somehow, you had done exactly the same
thing--when you know you hadn't?"

"Of course.  Everyone has.  A memory of the present, Bergson calls it--"

"Bergson is a fool!  Philosophy without science.  Listen to me."  He
leaned forward.  "Did you ever hear of the Law of Chance?"

I laughed.  "My business is stocks and bonds.  I _ought_ to know of it."

"Ah," he said, "but not enough of it.  Suppose I have a barrel with a
million trillion white grains of sand in it, and one black grain.  You
stand and draw a single grain, one after the other, look at it, and
throw it back into the barrel.  What are the odds against drawing the
black grain?"

"A million trillion to one, on each draw.".

"And if you draw half of the million trillion grains?"

"Then the odds are even."

"So!" he said.  "In other words, if you draw long enough, even though
you return each grain to the barrel and draw again, some day you will
draw the black one--_if you try long enough_!"

"Yes," I said.

"Suppose now you tried for eternity?"

"Eh?"

"Don't you see, Jack?  In eternity, the Law of Chance functions
perfectly.  In eternity, sooner or later, every possible combination of
things and events must happen.  _Must_ happen, _if_ it's a possible
combination.  I say, therefore, that in eternity, _whatever can happen
will happen_!"  His blue eyes blazed in pale fire.

I was a trifle dazed.  "I guess you're right," I muttered.

"Right!  Of course I'm right.  Mathematics is infallible.  Now do you
see the conclusion?"

"Why--that sooner or later everything will happen."

"Bah!  It is true that there is eternity in the future; we cannot
imagine time ending.  But Flammarion, before he died, pointed out that
there is also an eternity in the past.  Since in eternity everything
possible must happen, it follows that everything _must already have
happened_!"



I gasped.  "Wait a minute!  I don't see--"

"Stupidity!" he hissed.  "It is but to say with Einstein that not only
space is curved, but time.  To say that after untold eons of
millenniums, the same things repeat themselves because they must!  The
Law of Chance says they must, given time enough.  The past and the
future are the same thing, because everything that will happen must
already have happened.  Can't you follow so simple a chain of logic?"

"Why--yes.  But where does it lead?"

"To our money!  To our money!"

"What?"

"Listen.  Do not interrupt.  In the past, all possible combinations of
atoms and circumstances must have occurred."  He paused, then stabbed
that bony finger of his at me.  "Jack Anders, _you_ are a possible
combination of atoms and circumstances!  Possible because you exist at
this moment!"

"You mean--that _I_ have happened before?"

He sneered.  "How apt you are!  Yes, you have happened before, and will
again."

"Transmigration!" I gulped.  "That's unscientific."

"Indeed?"  He frowned as if in effort to gather his thoughts.  "The
poet Robert Burns was buried under an apple tree.  When, years after
his death, he was to be removed to rest among the great men of
Westminster Abbey, do you know what they found?  Do you
know?"--shouting.

"I'm sorry, but I don't."

"They found a root!  A root with a bulge for a head, branch roots for
arms and legs, and little rootlets for fingers and toes.  The apple
tree had eaten Bobby Burns--but who had eaten the apples?"

"Who--what?"

"Exactly.  Who and what?  The substance that had been Burns was in the
bodies of Scotch countrymen and children, in the bodies of caterpillars
who had eaten the leaves and become butterflies and been eaten by
birds, in the wood of the tree.  Where is Bobby Burns?  Transmigration,
I tell you!  Isn't that transmigration?"

"Yes--but not what you meant about me.  His body may be living, but in
a thousand different forms."

"Ah!  And when some day, eons and eternities in the future, the Laws of
Chance form another nebula that will cool to another sun and another
earth, is there not the same chance that those scattered atoms may
reassemble another Bobby Burns?"

"But what a chance!  Trillions and trillions to one!"

"But eternity, Jack!  In eternity that one chance out of all those
trillions must happen--_must_ happen!"

I was floored.  I stared at Yvonne's pale and lovely features, then at
the glistening old eyes of Aurore de Nant.

"You win," I said with a long sigh.  "But what of it?  This is still
nineteen twenty-nine, and our money's still sunk in a very sick
securities market."

"Money!" he groaned.  "Don't you see?  That memory we started
from--that sense of having done a thing before--that's a memory but of
the infinitely dead past--or, which is the same, the infinitely remote
future.  If only--if only one could remember clearly!  But I have a
way."  His voice rose suddenly to a shrill scream.  "Yes, I have a way!"

Wild eyes glared at me.  I said, "A way to remember our former
incarnations?"  One had to humor the old professor.  "To remember--the
future?"

"Yes!  Reincarnation!"  His voice crackled wildly.
"_Re-in-carnatione_, which is Latin for 'by the thing in the
carnation', but it wasn't a carnation--it was an apple tree.  The
carnation is _dianthus carophyllus_, which proves that the Hottentots
plant carnations on the graves of their ancestors, whence the
expression 'nipped in the bud.'  If carnations grow on apple trees--"

"Father!" cut in Yvonne sharply.  "You're tired!"  Her voice softened,
"Come.  You're going to bed."

"Yes," he cackled.  "To a bed of carnations."




CHAPTER II

_Experiments in Hypnotism_

Some evenings later, Aurore de Nant reverted to the same topic.  He
was clear enough as to where he had left off.

"So in this millennially dead past," he began suddenly, "there was a
year nineteen twenty-nine, and two fools named Anders and de Nant, who
invested their money in what are sarcastically called securities.
There was a clown's panic, and their money vanished."  He leered
fantastically at me.  "Wouldn't it be nice if they could remember what
happened in, say, the months from December, nineteen twenty-nine, to
June, nineteen thirty--next year?"  His voice was suddenly whining.
"They could get their money back then!"

I humored him.  "If they could remember."

"They can!" he blazed.  "They can!"

"How?"

His voice dropped to a confidential softness.  "Hypnotism!  You studied
Morbid Psychology under me, didn't you, Jack?  Yes--I remember."

"But, hypnotism!" I objected.  "Every psychiatrist uses that in his
treatments, and no one has remembered a previous incarnation, or
anything like it."

"No.  They're fools, these doctors and psychiatrists.  Listen--do you
remember the three stages of the hypnotic state, as you learned them?"

"Yes.  Somnambulism, lethargy, catalepsy."

"Right.  In the first, the subject speaks, answers questions.  In the
second, he sleeps deeply.  In the third, catalepsy, he is rigid, stiff,
so that he can be laid across two chairs, sat on--all that nonsense."

"I remember.  What of it?"

He grinned bleakly.  "In the first stage the subject remembers
everything that ever happened during his life.  His subconscious mind
is dominant, and that never forgets.  Correct?"

"So we were taught."

He leaned tensely forward.  "In the second stage, lethargy, my theory
is that he remembers everything that happened in his other lives!  He
remembers the future!"

"Huh?  Why doesn't someone do it, then?"

"He remembers while he sleeps; he forgets when he wakes.  That's why.
But I believe that with proper training he can learn to remember."

"And you're going to try?"

"Not I.  I know too little of finance.  I wouldn't know how to
interpret my memories."

"Who, then?"

"You!"  He jabbed that long finger against me.

I was thoroughly startled.  "Me?  Oh, no!  Not a chance of it!"

"Jack," he said querulously, "didn't you study hypnotism in my course?
Didn't you learn how harmless it is?  You know what tommyrot the idea
is of one mind dominating another.  You know the subject really
hypnotizes himself, and that no one can hypnotize an unwilling person.
Then what are you afraid of?"

I--well, I didn't know what to answer.  "I'm not afraid," I said
grimly.  "I just don't like it."

"You're afraid!"

"I'm not!"

"You are!"  He was growing excited.

It was at that moment that Yvonne's footsteps sounded in the hall.  His
eyes glittered; he looked at me with a sinister hint of cunning.

"I dislike cowards," he whispered.  His voice rose.  "So does Yvonne!"

The girl entered, perceiving his excitement.  "Oh!" she frowned.  "Why
do you have to take these theories so to heart, father?"

"Theories?" he screeched.  "Yes!  I have a theory that when you walk
you stand still and the sidewalk moves back.  No--then the sidewalk
would split if two people walked toward each other--or maybe it's
elastic.  Of course it's elastic!  That's why the last mile is the
longest; it's been stretched!"

Yvonne got him to bed.



Well, he talked me into it.  I don't know how much was due to my own
credulity and how much to Yvonne's solemn dark eyes.  I half-believed
the professor by the time he'd spent another evening in argument, but I
think the clincher was his veiled threat to forbid Yvonne my company.
She'd have obeyed him if it killed her; she was from New Orleans too,
you see, and of Creole blood.

I won't describe that troublesome course of training.  One has to
develop the hypnotic habit; it's like any other habit, and must be
formed slowly.  Contrary to the popular opinion, morons and people of
low intelligence can't ever do it.  It takes real concentration; the
whole knack of it is in the ability to concentrate one's attention--and
I don't mean the hypnotist, either.

I mean the subject.  The hypnotist hasn't a thing to do with it except
to furnish the necessary suggestion by murmuring,
"Sleep--sleep--sleep--sleep--"  And even that isn't 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-hour's humoring of de Nant, there was Yvonne, and the boredom
vanished.  As a sort of reward, I suppose, the old man took to leaving
us alone; and we used our time, I'll 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
Nant's ring grew until it filled the world, and how his voice,
mechanically dull, murmured like the waves of sleep in my ears.  I
remember everything that transpired during those minutes, even his
query, "Are you sleeping?" and my automatic reply, "Yes."

By the end of November we had mastered the second state of lethargy,
and then--I don't 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 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 that was to restore our lost
money.  I don't 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 first--sensations that utterly eluded the rigidities
of words.  I tried to express them to de Nant, but it was hopeless.

"A circular feeling," I'd say.  "No--not exactly--a sense of
spiral--not that, either.  Roundness--I can't recall it now.  It slips
away."

He was jubilant.  "It comes!" he whispered, grey beard a-waggle and
pale eyes glittering.  "You begin to remember!"

"But what good is a memory like that?"

"Wait!  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
multi-fold eternities of the past-future circle you can't have been
always Jack Anders, securities salesman.  There 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.  But somewhere, too, the same
atoms, the same conditions, must have made _you_.  You're the black
grain among the trillions of white grains, and with all eternity to
draw in, you _must_ have been drawn before--many, many times."

"Do you suppose," I asked suddenly; "that anyone exists twice on the
same earth?  Reincarnation in the sense of the Hindus?"

He laughed scornfully.  "The age of the earth is somewhere between a
thousand million and three thousand million years.  What proportion of
eternity is that?"

"Why--no proportion at all.  Zero.



"Exactly, 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, and"--his voice took on that
whining note---"another crash that ruined Jack Anders and old de Nant.
That is the time you must remember out of lethargy."

"Catalepsy!" I said.  "What would one remember in that?"

"God knows."

"What a mad scheme!" I said suddenly.  "What a crazy pair of fools we
are!"  The adjectives were a mistake.

"Mad?  Crazy?"  His voice became a screech.  "Old de Nant is mad, eh?
Old Dawn of Nothingness is crazy!  You think time doesn't go in a
circle, don't you?  Do you know what a circle represents?   I'll tell
you!  A circle is the mathematical symbol for zero!  Time is zero--time
is a circle.  I have a theory that the hands of a clock are really the
noses, because they're on the clock's face, and since time is a circle
they, go round and round and round and round--"

Yvonne slipped quietly into the room, and patted her father's furrowed
forehead.  She must have been listening.




CHAPTER III

_Into the Future_

"Look here," I said at a later time to de Nant.  "If the past and
future are the same thing, then the future's as unchangeable as the
past.  How, then, can we expect to change it by recovering our money?"

"Change it?" he snorted.  "How do you know we're changing it?  How do
you know that this same thing wasn't done by that Jack Anders and de
Nant back on the other side of eternity?  I say it _was_!"

I subsided, and the weird business went on.  My memories--if they were
memories--were coming clearer now.  Often and often I saw things out of
my own immediate past of twenty-seven years, though of course de Nant
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 couldn't place in my
experience, though I couldn't be quite sure they didn't 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 difficult, like
trying to find words for a half-remembered dream.

There were other memories as well--bizarre, 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 faces--not 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 even that the name meant
"Snowy-fire."  And here and there in the air about us floated queer
little bloated 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 glade--not 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 Nant listened carefully to the wild word-pictures I drew.

"Fascinating!" he muttered.  "Glimpses 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--"

"If these glimpses aren't simply nightmares," I said.

"They're not nightmares," he snapped, "but they might as well be, for
all the value they are to us."  I could see him struggle to calm
himself.  "Our 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--"  He paused.  "What am I
talking about?" he said querulously.

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 business--though that was small
loss--to chase dreams with old Professor Aurore de Nant.  I spent
evenings, afternoons, and finally mornings, too, lying in the slumber
of the lethargic state, or telling the old man what fantastic things I
had dreamed--or, 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 city,
but 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 there was something else, something rather intangible; I don't 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 the cracks of the marble pavements; or it might have been only
the grave and sad demeanor of the pale inhabitants.  There was
something that hinted of a doomed city and a dying race.

A strange thing happened when I tried to describe this particular
memory to old de Nant.  I stumbled over the details, of course; these
visions from the unplumbed depths of eternity were curiously hard to
fix between the rigid walls of words.  They tended to grow vague, to
elude the waking memory.  Thus, in this description, I had forgotten
the name of the city.

"It was called," I said hesitatingly, "Termis or Termolia, or--"

"Termopolis!" hissed de Nant impatiently.  "City of the End!"

I stared amazed.  "That's it!  But how did you know?"  In the sleep of
lethargy, I was sure, one never speaks.

A queer, cunning look flashed in his pale eyes.  "I knew," he muttered.
"I knew."  He would say no more.

But I think I saw that city once again.  It was when I wandered over a
brown and treeless plain, not like that cold grey desert, But
apparently an arid and barren region of the earth.  Dim on the western
horizon was the circle of a great cool, reddish sun; it had always been
there, I remembered, and knew with some other part of my mind that the
vast brake of the tides had at last slowed the earth's rotation to a
stop, and day and night no longer chased each other around the planet.

The air was biting cold, and my companions and I--there were half a
dozen of us--moved in a huddled, group, as if to lend each other warmth
from our half-naked bodies.  We were all of us thin-legged, skinny
creatures, with oddly deep chests and enormous, luminous eyes, and the
one nearest me was again a woman who had something of Yvonne in her,
but very little.  And I was not quite Jack Anders, either; but some
remote fragment of me survived in that barbaric brain.

Beyond a hill was the surge of an oily sea.  We crept circling about
the mound, and suddenly I perceived that sometime in the infinite past
that hill had been a city.  A few Gargantuan blocks of stone lay
crumbling on it, and one lonely fragment of a ruined wall rose-gauntly
to four or five times a man's height.  It was at this spectral remnant
that the leader of our miserable crew gestured, then spoke in somber
tones--not English words, but I understood.

"The gods," he said--"the gods who piled stones upon stones are dead,
and harm not us who pass the place of their dwelling."

I knew what that was meant to be.  It was an incantation, a ritual; to
protect us from the spirits that lurked among the ruins--the ruins, I
believe, of a city built by our own ancestors thousands of generations
before.

As we passed the wall I looked back at a flicker of movement, and saw
something hideously like a black rubber doormat flop itself around the
angle of the wall.  I drew closer to the woman beside me and we crept
on down to the sea for water--yes, water, for with the cessation of the
planet's rotation rainfall had vanished also, and all life huddled near
the edge of the undying sea and learned to drink its bitter brine.  I
didn't glance again at the hill which had been Termopolis, the City of
the End; but I knew that some chance-born, fragment of Jack Anders had
been--or will be; what difference, if time is a circle?--witness of an
age close to the day of humanity's doom.



It was early in December that I had the first memory of something that
might have been suggestive of success.  It was a simple and very sweet
memory, just Yvonne and I in a garden that I knew was the inner grounds
on one of the New Orleans' old homes--one of those built, in the
Continental fashion, about a court.

We sat on a stone bench beneath the oleanders, and, I slipped my arm
very tenderly about her and murmured, "Are you happy, Yvonne?"

She looked at me with those tragic eyes of hers and smiled, and then
answered, "As happy as I have ever been."

And I kissed her.

That was all, but it was important; It was vastly important, because it
was definitely not a memory out of my own personal past.  You see, I
had never sat beside Yvonne in a garden sweet with oleanders in the Old
Town of New Orleans, and I had never kissed her until we met again in
New York.

Aurore de Nant was elated when I described this vision.

"You see!" he gloated.  "There is evidence.  You have remembered the
future!  Not your own future, of course, but that of another ghostly
Jack Anders, who died trillions and quadrillions of years ago."

"But it doesn't help us, does it?" I asked.

"Oh, it will come now!  You wait.  The thing we want will come."

And it did, within a week.  This memory was curiously bright and clear,
and familiar in every detail.  I remember the day.  It was the eighth
of December, 1929, and I had wandered aimlessly about in search of
business during the morning.  In the grip of that fascination I
mentioned I drifted to de Nant's apartment after lunch.  Yvonne left
us to ourselves, as was her custom, and we began.

This was, as I said, a sharply outlined memory--or dream.  I was
leaning over my desk in the company's office, that too-seldom-visited
office.  One of the other salesmen--Summers was his name--was leaning
over my shoulder, and we were engaged in the quite customary pastime of
scanning the final market reports in the evening paper.  The print
stood out clear as reality itself; I glanced without surprise at the
date-line.  It was Thursday, April 27th, 1930--almost five months in
the future!

Not that I realized that during the vision, of course.  The day was
merely the present to me; I was simply looking over the list of the
day's trading.  Figures--familiar names.  Telephone, 210 3/8; U.S.
Steel, 161; Paramount, 68 1/2.

I jabbed a finger at Steel.  "I bought that at 72," I said over my
shoulder to Summers.  "I sold out everything today.  Every stock I own.
I'm getting out before there's a secondary crack."

"Lucky stiff!" he murmured.  "Buy at the December lows and sell out
now!  Wish I'd had money to do it."  He paused.  "What you gonna do?
Stay with the company?"

"No.  I've enough to live on.  I'm going to stick it in Governments and
paid-up insurance, and live on the income.  I've had enough of
gambling."

"You lucky stiff!" he said again.  "I'm sick of the Street too.
Staying in New York?"

"For a while.  Just till I get my stuff invested properly.  Yvonne and
I are going to New Orleans for the winter."  I paused.  "She's had a
tough time of it.  I'm glad we're where we are."

"Who wouldn't be?" asked Summers, and then again, "You lucky stiff!"

De Nant was frantically excited when I described this to him.  "That's
it!" he screamed.  "We buy!  We buy tomorrow!  We sell on the
twenty-seventh of May, and then--New Orleans!"

Of course I was nearly equally enthusiastic, "By heaven!" I said.
"It's worth the risk!  We'll do it!"  And then a sudden hopeless
thought.  "Do it?  Do it with what?  I have less than a hundred dollars
to my name.  And you--"

The old man groaned.  "I have nothing," he said in abrupt gloom.  "Only
the annuity we live on.  One can't borrow on that."  Again a gleam of
hope.  "The banks.  We'll borrow from them!"

I had to laugh, though it was a bitter laugh.  "What bank would lend us
money oh a story like this?  They wouldn't lend Rockefeller himself
money to play this sick market, not without security.  We're sunk,
that's all."

I looked at his pale, worried eyes.  "Sunk," he echoed dully.  Then
again that wild gleam.  "_Not_ sunk!" he yelled.  "How can we be?  We
_did_ do it!  You remembered our doing it!  We _must_ have found the
way!"



I gazed, speechless.  Suddenly a queer, mad thought flashed over me.
This other Jack Anders, this ghost of quadrillions of centuries
past--or future--he too must be watching, or had watched, or yet would
watch, me--the Jack Anders of this cycle of eternity.  He must be
watching as anxiously as I to discover the means.  Each of us watching
the other; neither of us knowing the answer.  The blind leading the
blind!  I laughed at the irony.

But old de Nant was not laughing.  The strangest expression I have
ever seen in a man's eyes was in his as he repeated very softly, "We
must have found the way, because it was done.  At least you and Yvonne
found the way."

"Then all of us must," I answered sourly.

"Yes.  Oh, yes.  Listen to me, Jack.  I am an old man, old Aurore de
Nant.  I am old Dawn of Nothingness, and my mind is cracking.  Don't
shake your head!" he snapped.  "I am not mad.  I am simply
misunderstood.  None of you understand.  Why, I have a theory that
trees, grass, and people do not grow taller at all; they grow by
pushing the earth away from them, which is why you keep hearing that
the world is getting smaller every day.  But you don't understand;
Yvonne doesn't understand--"

The girl must have been listening.  Without my seeing her, she had
slipped into the room and put her arms gently about her father's
shoulders, while she gazed across at me with anxious eyes.




CHAPTER IV

_A Prophecy_

There was one more vision, irrelevant in a way, yet vitally important
in another way.  It was the next evening.  An early December snowfall
was dropping its silent white beyond the windows, and the ill-heated
apartment of the de Nants was draughty and chill.  I saw Yvonne shiver
as she greeted me, and again as she left the room, and I noticed that
old de Nant followed her to the door with his thin, arms about her,
and that he returned with very worried eyes.

"She is New Orleans born," he murmured.  "This dreadful arctic climate
will destroy her.  We must find a way at once."

That vision was a somber one.  I stood on a cold, wet, snowy ground;
just myself and Yvonne and one who stood beside an open grave.  Behind
us; stretched rows of crosses and white tombstones, but in our corner
the place was ragged, untended, unconsecrated.  The priest was saying,
"And these are things that only God understands."

I slipped a comforting arm about Yvonne.  She raised her dark, tragic
eyes and whispered: "It was yesterday, Jack--just yesterday that he
said to me, 'Next winter you shall spend in New Orleans, Yvonne.'  Just
yesterday!"

I tried a wretched smile, but I could only stare mournfully at her
forlorn face, watching a tear that rolled slowly down her right cheek,
hung glistening there a moment, then was joined, by another and
splashed unregarded on the black bosom of her dress.

That was all, but how could I describe that vision to old de Nant?  I
tried to evade; he kept insisting.

"There wasn't any hint of the way," I told him.  Useless; at last I had
to tell anyway.

He was very silent for a full minute.  "Jack," he said finally, "do you
know when I said that to her about New Orleans?  This morning when we
watched the snow.  This morning!"

I didn't know what to do.  Suddenly this whole concept of remembering
the future seemed mad, insane; in all my memories there had been not a
single spark of real proof, not a single hint of prophecy.  So I did
nothing at all, but simply gazed silently as old Aurore de Nant walked
out of the room.  And when, two hours later, while Yvonne and I talked,
he finished writing a certain letter and then shot himself through the
heart--why, that proved nothing either.

So it was the following day that Yvonne and I, his only mourners,
followed old Dawn of Nothingness to his suicide's grave.  I stood
beside her and tried as best I could to console her, and roused from a
dark reverie to hear her words: "Just yesterday that he said to me,
'Next winter you shall spend in New Orleans, Yvonne.'  Just yesterday!"

I watched the tear that rolled slowly down her right cheek, hung
glistening there a moment, then was joined by another and splashed on
the black bosom of her dress.

But it was later, during the evening, that the most ironic revelation
of all occurred.  I was gloomily blaming myself for the weakness of
indulging old de Nant in the mad experiment that had led, in a way, to
his death.  It was as if Yvonne read my thoughts, for she said
suddenly, "He was breaking, Jack.  His mind was going.  I heard all
those strange things he kept murmuring to you."

"What?"

"I listened, of  course, behind the door there.  I never left him
alone.  I heard him whisper the queerest things--faces in a red fog,
words about a cold grey desert, the name Pyroniva, the word Termopolis.
He leaned over you as you sat with closed eyes, and he whispered,
whispered all the time."

Irony of ironies!  It was old de Nant's mad mind that had suggested
the visions!  He had described them to me as I sat in the sleep of
lethargy!

Later we found the letter he had written, and again I was deeply moved.
The old man had carried a little insurance; just a week before he had
borrowed on one of the policies to pay the premiums on it and the
others.  But the letter--well, he had made me beneficiary of half the
amount!  And the instructions were:

"You, Jack Anders, will take both your money and Yvonne's and carry out
the plan as you know I wish."



Lunacy!  De Nant had found the way to provide the money, but--I
couldn't gamble Yvonne's last dollar on the scheme of a disordered mind.

"What will we do?" I asked her.  "Of course the money's all yours.  I
won't touch it."

"Mine?" she echoed.  "Why, no.  We'll do as he wished.  Do you think
I'd not respect his last request?"

Well, we did.  I took those miserable few thousands and spread it
around in that sick December market.  You remember what happened, how
during the spring the prices skyrocketed as if they were heading back
toward 1929, when actually the depression was just gathering breath.  I
rode that market like a circus performer; I took profits and pyramided
them back, and on April 27th, with our money multiplied fifty times, I
sold out and watched the market slide back.

Coincidence?  Very likely.  After all, Aurore de Nant's mind was clear
enough most of the time.  Other economists predicted that spring rise;
perhaps he foresaw it too.  Perhaps he staged this whole affair just to
trick us into the gamble, one which we'd never have dared otherwise.
And then when he saw we were going to fail from lack of money, he took
the only means he had of providing it.

Perhaps.  That's the rational explanation, and yet--that vision of
ruined Termopolis keeps haunting me.  I see again the grey cold desert
of the floating fungi.  I wonder often about the immutable Laws of
Chance, and about a ghostly Jack Anders somewhere beyond eternity.

For perhaps he does--did--will exist.  Otherwise, how to explain that
final vision?  What of Yvonne's words beside her father's grave?  Could
he have foreseen those words and whispered them to me?  Possibly.  But
what, then, of those two tears that hung glistening, merged, and
dropped from her cheeks?

_What of them?_






[End of The Circle of Zero, by Stanley G. Weinbaum]
