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Title: The Worlds of If
Author: Weinbaum, Stanley G. [Grauman] (1902-1935)
Date of first publication: August 1935
Edition used as base for this ebook:
   Wonder Stories, August 1935
   [New York: Continental Publications]
   [first edition]
Date first posted: 5 January 2017
Date last updated: 5 January 2017
Project Gutenberg Canada ebook #1388

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 WORLDS OF IF

By STANLEY G. WEINBAUM



    There are two types of stories that we can enjoy reading--those
    containing so many original conceptions that they do not need a
    masterful technique, and those which are so well written that a
    possible hackneyed plot is not even noticed.  In the metaphor,
    these two elements are easily worked by any good author, but are
    inert as far as combining them goes to most.

    We find in this story the inimitable literary style of Mr. Weinbaum
    which has made him the favorite of many of our readers with his
    first two stories, and original conceptions, such as we are seeking
    in our new policy.

    In other words, we have here everything you could ask for and a lot
    more.  If you have never read anything by this author before, you
    will be glad to make his acquaintance with "The Worlds of If"--and
    if you have read his "Twee!" stories, you have most likely skipped
    past this "blurb" entirely in order to get to the story more
    quickly.



I stopped on the way to the Staten Island Airport to call up, and that
was a mistake, doubtless, since I had a chance of making it otherwise.
But the office was affable.  "We'll hold the ship five minutes for
you," the clerk said.  "That's the best we can do."

So I rushed back to my taxi and we spun off to the third level and sped
across the Staten Bridge like a comet treading a steel rainbow.  I had
to be in Moscow by evening; by eight o'clock, in fact, for the opening
of bids on the Ural Tunnel.  The Government required the personal
presence of an agent of each bidder, but the firm should have known
better than to send me, Dixon Wells, even though the N. J. Wells
Corporation is, so to speak, my father.  I have a--well, an undeserved
reputation for being late to everything; something always comes up to
prevent me from getting anywhere on time.  It's never _my_ fault; this
time it was a chance encounter with my old physics professor, old
Haskel van Manderpootz.  I couldn't very well just say hello and
good-bye to him; I'd been a favorite of his back in the college days of
2014.

I missed the airliner, of course, I was still on the Staten Bridge when
I heard the roar of the catapult and the Soviet rocket _Baikal_ hummed
over us like a tracer bullet with a long tail of flame.

We got the contract anyway; the firm wired our man in Beirut and he
flew up to Moscow, but it didn't help my reputation.  However, I felt a
great deal better when I saw the evening papers; the _Baikal_, flying
at the north edge of the eastbound lane to avoid a storm, had locked
wings with a British fruitship and all but a hundred of her five
hundred passengers were lost.  I had almost become "the late Mr. Wells"
in a grimmer sense.

I'd made an engagement for the following week with old van Manderpootz.
It seems he'd transferred to N.Y.U. as head of the department of Newer
Physics--that is, of Relativity.  He deserved it; the old chap was a
genius if ever there was one, and even now, eight years out of college,
I remember more from his course than from half a dozen calculus, steam
and gas, mechanics, and other hazards on the path to an engineer's
education.  So on Tuesday night I dropped in an hour or so late, to
tell the truth, since I'd forgotten about the engagement until
mid-evening.

He was reading in a room as disorderly as ever.  "Humph!" he grunted.
"Time changes everything but habit, I see.  You were a good student,
Dick, but I seem to recall that you always arrived in class toward the
middle of the lecture."

"I had a course in East Hall just before," I explained.  "I couldn't
seem to make it in time."

"Well, it's time you learned to be on time," he growled.  Then his eyes
twinkled.  "Time!" he ejaculated.  "The most fascinating word in the
language.  Here we've used it five times (there goes the sixth
time--and the seventh!) in the first minute of conversation; each of us
understands the other, yet science is just beginning to learn its
meaning.  Science?  I mean that _I_ am beginning to learn."

I sat down.  "You and science are synonymous," I grinned.  "Aren't you
one of the world's outstanding physicists?"

"One of them!" he snorted.  "One of them, eh!  And who are the others?"

"Oh, Corveille and Hastings and Shrimski--"

"Bah!  Would you mention them in the same breath with the name of van
Manderpootz?  A pack of jackals, eating the crumbs of ideas that drop
from my feast of thoughts!  Had you gone back into the last century,
now--had you mentioned Einstein and de Sitter--there, perhaps, are
names worthy to rank with (or just below) van Manderpootz!"

I grinned again in amusement.  "Einstein _is_ considered pretty good,
isn't he?" I remarked.  "After all, he was the first to tie time and
space to the laboratory.  Before him they were just philosophical
concepts."

"He didn't!" rasped the professor.  "Perhaps, in a dim, primitive
fashion, he showed the way, but I--_I_, van Manderpootz--am the first
to seize time, drag it into my laboratory, and perform an experiment on
it."

"Indeed?  And what sort of experiment?"

"What experiment, other than simple measurement, is it possible to
perform?" he snapped.

"Why--I don't know.  To travel in it?"

"Exactly."

"Like these time-machines that are so popular in the current magazines?
To go into the future or the past?"

"Bah!  Many bahs!  The future or the past--pfui!  It needs no van
Manderpootz to see the fallacy in that.  Einstein showed us that much."

"How?  It's conceivable, isn't it?"

"Conceivable?  And you, Dixon Wells, studied under van Manderpootz!"
He grew red with emotion, then grimly calm.  "Listen to me.  You know
how time varies with the speed of a system--Einstein's relativity."

"Yes."

"Very well.  Now suppose then that the great engineer Dixon Wells
invents a machine capable of traveling very fast, enormously fast,
nine-tenths as fast as light.  Do you follow?  Good.  You then fuel
this miracle ship for a little jaunt of a half million miles, which,
since mass (and with it inertia) increases according to the Einstein
formula with increasing speed, takes all the fuel in the world.  But
you solve that.  You discover atomic energy.  Then, since at
nine-tenths light-speed, your ship weighs about as much as the sun, you
disintegrate North America to give you sufficient motive power.  You
start off at that speed, a hundred and sixty-eight thousand miles per
second, and you travel for two hundred and four thousand miles.  The
acceleration has now crushed you to death, but you have penetrated the
future."  He paused, grinning sardonically.  "Haven't you?"

"Yes."

"And how far?"

I hesitated.

"Use your Einstein formula!" he screeched.  "How far?  I'll tell you.
_One second!_"  He grinned triumphantly.  "That's how possible it is to
travel into the future.  And as for the past--in the first place, you'd
have to exceed light-speed, which immediately entails the use of more
than an infinite number of horsepowers.  We'll assume that the great
engineer Dixon Wells solves that little problem too, even though the
energy out-put of the whole universe is not an infinite number of
horsepowers.  Then he applies this more than infinite power to travel
at two hundred and four thousand miles per second for _ten_ seconds.
He has then penetrated the past.  How far?"



Again I hesitated.

"I'll tell you.  _One second!_"  He glared at me.  "Now all you have to
do is to design such a machine, and then van Manderpootz will admit the
possibility of traveling into the future--for a limited number of
seconds.  As for the past, I have just explained that all the energy in
the universe is insufficient for that."

"But," I stammered, "you just said that you--"

"I did _not_ say anything about traveling into either future or past,
which I have just demonstrated to you to be impossible--a practical
impossibility in the one case and an absolute one in the other."

"Then how _do_ you travel in time?"

"Not even van Manderpootz can perform the impossible," said the
professor, now faintly jovial.  He tapped a thick pad of typewriter
paper on the table beside him.  "See, Dick, this is the world, the
universe."  He swept a finger down it.  "It is long in time,
and"--sweeping his hand across--"it is broad in space, but"--now
jabbing his finger against its center--"it is very thin in the fourth
dimension.  Van Manderpootz takes always the shortest, the most logical
course.  I do not travel along time, into past or future.  No.  Me, I
travel across time, sideways!"

I gulped.  "Sideways into time!  What's there?"

"What would naturally be there?" he snorted.  "Ahead is the future;
behind is the past.  Those are real, the worlds of past and future.
What worlds are neither past nor future, but contemporary and
yet--extemporal--existing, as it were, in time parallel to our time?"

I shook my head.

"Idiot!" he snapped.  "The conditional worlds, of course!  The worlds
of 'if.'  Ahead are the worlds to be; behind are the worlds that were;
to either side are the worlds that might have been--the worlds of 'if'!"

"Eh?" I was puzzled.  "Do you mean that you can see what will happen if
I do such and such?"

"No!" he snorted.  "My machine does not reveal the past nor predict the
future.  It will show, as I told you, the conditional worlds.  You
might express it, by 'if I had done such and such, so and so would have
happened.'  The worlds of the subjunctive mode."

"Now how the devil does it do that?"

"Simple, for van Manderpootz!  I use polarized light, polarized not in
the horizontal or vertical planes, but in the direction of the fourth
dimension--an easy matter.  One uses Iceland spar under colossal
pressures, that is all.  And since the worlds are very thin in the
direction of the fourth dimension, the thickness of a single light
wave, though it be but millionths of an inch, is sufficient.  A
considerable improvement over time-traveling in past or future, with
its impossible velocities and ridiculous distances!"

"But--are those--worlds of 'if'--real?"

"Real?  What is real?  They are real, perhaps, in the sense that two is
a real number as opposed to [square root]-2, which is imaginary.  They
are the worlds that would have been _if_--Do you see?"

I nodded.  "Dimly.  You could see, for instance, what New York would
have been like if England had won the Revolution instead of the
Colonies."

"That's the principle, true enough, but you couldn't see that on the
machine.  Part of it, you see, is a Horsten psychomat (stolen from one
of _my_ ideas, by the way) and you, the user, become part of the
device.  Your own mind is necessary to furnish the background.  For
instance, if George Washington could have used the mechanism after the
signing of peace, he could have seen what you suggest.  We can't.  You
can't even see what would have happened if I hadn't invented the thing,
but _I_ can.  Do you understand?"

"Of course.  You mean the background has to rest in the past
experiences of the user."

"You're growing brilliant," he scoffed.  "Yes.  The device will show
ten hours of what would have happened if--condensed, of course, as in a
movie, to half an hour's actual time."

"Say, that sounds interesting!"

"You'd like to see it?  Is there anything you'd like to find out?--any
choice you'd alter?"

"I'll say!--a thousand of 'em.  I'd like to know what would have
happened if I'd sold out my stocks in 2009 instead of '10.  I was a
millionaire in my own right then, but I was a little--well, a little
late in liquidating."

"As usual," remarked van Manderpootz.  "Let's go over to the
laboratory, then."



The professor's quarters were but a block from the campus.  He ushered
me into the Physics Building, and thence into his own research
laboratory, much like the one I had visited during my courses under
him.  The device--he called it his "subjunctivisor," since it operated
in hypothetical worlds--occupied the entire center table.  Most of it
was merely a Horsten psychomat, but glittering crystalline and glassy
was the prism of Iceland spar, the polarizing agent that was the heart
of the instrument.

Van Manderpootz pointed to the headpiece.  "Put it on," he said, and I
sat staring at the screen of the psychomat.  I suppose everyone is
familiar with the Horsten psychomat; it was as much a fad a few years
ago as the ouija board a century back.  Yet it isn't just a toy;
sometimes, much as the ouija board, it's a real aid to memory.  A maze
of vague and colored shadows is caused to drift slowly across the
screen, and one watches them, meanwhile visualizing whatever scene or
circumstances he is trying to remember.  He turns a knob that alters
the arrangement of lights and shadows, and when, by chance, the design
corresponds to his mental picture--presto!  There is his scene
re-created under his eyes.  Of course his own mind adds the details.
All the screen actually shows are these tinted blobs of light and
shadow, but the thing can be amazingly real.  I've seen occasions when
I could have sworn the psychomat showed pictures almost as sharp and
detailed as reality itself; the illusion is sometimes as startling as
that.

Van Manderpootz switched on the light, and the play of shadows began.
"Now recall the circumstances of, say, a half-year after the market
crash.  Turn the knob until the picture clears, then stop.  At that
point I direct the light of the subjunctivisor upon the screen, and you
have nothing more to do than watch."

I did as directed.  Momentary pictures formed and vanished.  The
inchoate sounds of the device hummed like distant voices, but without
the added suggestion of the picture, they meant nothing.  My own face
flashed and dissolved, and then, finally, I had it.  There was a
picture of myself sitting in an ill-defined room; that was all.  I
released the knob and gestured.

A click followed.  The light dimmed, then brightened.  The picture
cleared, and amazingly, another figure emerged, a woman.  I recognized
her.  It was Whimsy White, erstwhile star of television and premiere of
the "Vision Varieties of '09."  She was changed on that picture, but I
recognized her.

I'll say I did!  I'd been trailing her all through the boom years of
'07 to '10, trying to marry her, while old N. J. raved and ranted and
threatened to leave everything to the Society for Rehabilitation of the
Gobi Desert.  I think those threats were what kept her from accepting
me, but after I took my own money and ran it up to a couple of million
in that crazy market of '08 and '09, she softened.

Temporarily, that is.  When the crash of the spring of '10 came and
bounced me back on my father and into the firm of N. J. Wells, her
favor dropped a dozen points to the market's one.  In February we were
engaged, in April we were hardly speaking.  In May they sold me out.
I'd been late again.

And now, there she was on the psychomat screen, obviously plumping out,
and not nearly so pretty as memory had pictured her.  She was staring
at me with an expression of enmity, and I was glaring back.  The buzzes
became voices.

"You nit-wit!" she snapped.  "You can't bury me out here.  I want to go
back to New York, where there's a little life.  I'm bored with you and
your golf."

"And I'm bored with you and your whole dizzy crowd."

"At least they're _alive_.  You're a walking corpse.  Just because you
were lucky enough to gamble yourself into the money, you think you're a
tin god."

"Well, I _don't_ think _you're_ Cleopatra!  Those friends of
yours--they trail after you because you give parties and spend
money--_my_ money."

"Better than spending it to knock a white walnut along a mountainside!"

"Indeed?  You ought to try it, Marie."  (That was her real name.)  "It
might help your figure--though I doubt if anything could!"

She glared in rage and--well, that was a painful half hour.  I won't
give all the details, but I was glad when the screen dissolved into
meaningless colored clouds.

"Whew!" I said, staring at van Manderpootz, who had been reading.

"You liked it?"

"Liked it!  Say, I guess I was lucky to be cleaned out.  I won't regret
it from now on."

"That," said the professor grandly, "is van Manderpootz's great
contribution to human happiness.  'Of all sad words of tongue or pen,
the saddest are these: It might have been!'  True no longer, my friend
Dick.  Van Manderpootz has shown that the proper reading is 'It might
have been--worse!'"



It was very late when I returned home, and as a result, very late when
I rose, and equally late when I got to the office.  My father was
unnecessarily worked up about it, but he exaggerated when he said I'd
never been on time.  He forgets the occasions when he's awakened me and
dragged me down with him.  Nor was it necessary to refer so
sarcastically to my missing the _Baikal_; I reminded him of the
wrecking of the liner, and he responded very heartlessly that if I'd
been aboard, the rocket would have been late, and so would have missed
colliding with the British fruitship.  It was likewise superfluous for
him to mention that when he and I had tried to snatch a few weeks of
golfing in the mountains, even the spring had been late.  I had nothing
to do with that.

"Dixon," he concluded, "you have no conception whatever of time.  None
whatever."

The conversation with van Manderpootz recurred to me.  I was impelled
to ask, "And have you, sir?"

"I have," he said grimly.  "I most assuredly have.  Time," he said
oracularly, "is money."

You can't argue with a viewpoint like that.

But those aspersions of his rankled, especially that about the
_Baikal_.  Tardy I might be, but it was hardly conceivable that my
presence aboard the rocket could have averted the catastrophe.  It
irritated me; in a way, it made me responsible for the deaths of those
unrescued hundreds among the passengers and crew, and I didn't like the
thought.

Of course, if they'd waited an extra five minutes for me, or if I'd
been on time and they'd left on schedule instead of five minutes late,
or if--if--_if_!

If!  The word called up van Manderpootz and his subjunctivisor--the
worlds of "if," the weird, unreal worlds that existed beside reality,
neither past nor future, but contemporary, yet extemporal.  Somewhere
among their ghostly infinities existed one that represented the world
that would have been had I made the liner.  I had only to call up
Haskel van Manderpootz, make an appointment, and then--find out.

Yet it wasn't an easy decision.  Suppose--just suppose that I found
myself responsible--not legally responsible, certainly; there'd be no
question of criminal negligence, or anything of that sort--not even
morally responsible, because I couldn't possibly have anticipated that
my presence or absence could weigh so heavily in the scales of life and
death, nor could I have known in which direction the scales would tip.
Just--responsible; that was all.  Yet I hated to find out.

I hated equally not finding out.  Uncertainty has its pangs too, quite
as painful as those of remorse.  It might be less nerve-racking to know
myself responsible than to wonder, to waste thoughts in vain doubts and
futile reproaches.  So I seized the visiphone, dialed the number of the
University, and at length gazed on the broad, humorous, intelligent
features of van Manderpootz, dragged from a morning lecture by my call.



I was all but prompt for the appointment the following evening, and
might have been actually on time but for an unreasonable traffic
officer who insisted on booking me for speeding.  At any rate, van
Manderpootz was impressed.

"Well!" he rumbled.  "I almost missed you, Dixon.  I was just going
over to the club, since I didn't expect you for an hour.  You're only
ten minutes late."

I ignored this.  "Professor, I want to use your--uh--your
subjunctivisor."

"Eh?  Oh, yes.  You're lucky, then.  I was just about to dismantle it."

"Dismantle it?  Why?"

"It has served its purpose.  It has given birth to an idea far more
important than itself.  I shall need the space it occupies."

"But what _is_ the idea, if it's not too presumptuous of me to ask?"

"It is not too presumptuous.  You and the world which awaits it so
eagerly may both know, but you hear it from the lips of the author.  It
is nothing less than the autobiography of van Manderpootz!"  He paused
impressively.

I gaped.  "Your autobiography?"

"Yes.  The world, though perhaps unaware, is crying for it.  I shall
detail my life, my work.  I shall reveal myself as the man responsible
for the three years' duration of the Pacific War of 2004."

"You?"

"None other.  Had I not been a loyal Netherlands subject at that time,
and therefore neutral, the forces of Asia would have been crushed in
three months instead of three years.  The subjunctivisor tells me so; I
would have invented a calculator to forecast the chances of every
engagement; van Manderpootz would have removed the hit or miss element
in the conduct of war."  He frowned solemnly.  "There is my idea.  The
autobiography of van Manderpootz.  What do you think of it?"

I recovered my thoughts.  "It's--uh--it's colossal!" I said vehemently.
"I'll buy a copy myself.  Several copies.  I'll send 'em to my friends."

"I," said van Manderpootz expansively, "shall autograph your copy for
you.  It will be priceless.  I shall write in some fitting phrase,
perhaps something like _Magnificus sed non superbus_.  'Great but not
proud!'  That well describes van Manderpootz, who despite his greatness
is simple, modest, and unassuming.  Don't you agree?"

"Perfectly!  A very apt description of you.  But--couldn't I see your
subjunctivisor before it's dismantled to make way for the greater work?"

"Ah!  You wish to find out something?"

"Yes, professor.  Do you remember the _Baikal_ disaster of a week or
two ago?  I was to have taken that liner to Moscow.  I just missed it."
I related the circumstances.

"Humph!" he grunted.  "You wish to discover what would have happened
had you caught it, eh?  Well, I see several possibilities.  Among the
worlds of 'if' is the one that would have been real if you had been on
time, the one that depended on the vessel waiting for your actual
arrival, and the one that hung on your arriving within the five minutes
they actually waited.  In which are you interested?"

"Oh--the last one."  That seemed the likeliest.  After all, it was too
much to expect that Dixon Wells could ever be on time, and as to the
second possibility--well, they _hadn't_ waited for me, and that, in a
way, removed the weight of responsibility.

"Come on," rumbled van Manderpootz.  I followed him across to the
Physics Building and into his littered laboratory.  The device still
stood on the table and I took my place before it, staring at the screen
of the Horsten psychomat.  The clouds wavered and shifted as I sought
to impress my memories on their suggestive shapes, to read into them
some picture of that vanished morning.

Then I had it.  I made out the vista from the Staten Bridge, and was
speeding across the giant span toward the airport.  I waved a signal to
van Manderpootz, the thing clicked, and the subjunctivisor was on.

The grassless clay of the field appeared.  It is a curious thing about
the psychomat that you see not only through your own eyes but also
through the eyes of your image on the screen.  It lends a strange
reality to the working of the toy; I suppose a sort of self-hypnosis is
partly responsible.

I was rushing over the ground toward the glittering, silver-winged
projectile that was the _Baikal_.  A glowering officer waved me on, and
I dashed up the slant of the gangplank and into the ship; the port
dropped and I heaved a long "Whew!" of relief.

"Sit down!" barked the officer, gesturing toward an unoccupied seat.  I
fell into it; the ship quivered under the thrust of the catapult,
grated harshly into motion, and then was flung bodily into the air.
The blasts roared instantly, then settled to a more muffled throbbing,
and I watched Staten Island drop down and slide back beneath me.  The
giant rocket was under way.

"Whew!" I breathed again.  "Made it!"

I caught an amused glance from my right.  I was in an aisle seat; there
was no one to my left, so I turned to the eyes that had flashed,
glanced, and froze staring.

It was a girl.  Perhaps she wasn't actually as lovely as she looked to
me; after all, I was seeing her through the half-visionary screen of a
psychomat.  I've told myself since that she _couldn't_ have been as
pretty as she seemed, that it was due to my own imagination filling in
the details.  I don't know; I remember only that I stared at curiously
lovely silver-blue eyes and velvety brown hair, and a small amused
mouth, and an impudent nose.  I kept staring until she flushed.

"I'm sorry," I said quickly.  "I--was startled."



There's a friendly atmosphere aboard a trans-oceanic rocket.  The
passengers are forced into a crowded intimacy for anywhere from seven
to twelve hours, and there isn't much room for moving about.
Generally, one strikes up an acquaintance with his neighbors;
introductions aren't at all necessary, and the custom is simply to
speak to anybody you choose--something like an all-day trip on the
railroad trains of the last century, I suppose.  You make friends for
the duration of the journey, and then, nine times out of ten, you never
hear of your traveling companions again.

The girl smiled.  "Are you the individual responsible for the delay in
starting?"

I admitted it.  "I seem to be chronically late.  Even watches lose time
as soon as I wear them."

She laughed.  "Your responsibilities can't be very heavy."

Well, they weren't, of course, though it's surprising how many clubs,
caddies, and chorus girls have depended on me at various times for
appreciable portions of their incomes.  But somehow I didn't feel like
mentioning those things to the silvery-eyed girl.

We talked.  Her name, it developed, was Joanna Caldwell, and she was
going as far as Paris.  She was an artist, or hoped to be one day, and
of course there is no place in the world that can supply both training
and inspiration like Paris.  So it was there she was bound for a year
of study, and despite her demurely humorous lips and laughing eyes, I
could see that the business was of vast importance to her.  I gathered
that she had worked hard for the year in Paris, had scraped and saved
for three years as fashion illustrator for some woman's magazine,
though she couldn't have been many months over twenty-one.  Her
painting meant a great deal to her, and I could understand it.  I'd
felt that way about polo once.

So you see, we were sympathetic spirits from the beginning.  I knew
that she liked me, and it was obvious that she didn't connect Dixon
Wells with the N. J. Wells Corporation.  And as for me--well, after
that first glance into her cool silver eyes, I simply didn't care to
look anywhere else.  The hours seemed to drip away like minutes while I
watched her.

You know how those things go.  Suddenly I was calling her Joanna and
she was calling me Dick, and it seemed as if we'd been doing just that
all our lives.  I'd decided to stop over in Paris on my way back from
Moscow, and I'd secured her promise to let me see her.  She was
different, I tell you; she was nothing like the calculating Whimsy
White, and still less like the dancing, simpering, giddy youngsters one
meets around at social affairs.  She was just Joanna, cool and
humorous, yet sympathetic and serious, and as pretty as a Majolica
figurine.

We could scarcely realize it when the steward passed along to take
orders for luncheon.  Four hours out?  It seemed like forty minutes.
And we had a pleasant feeling of intimacy in the discovery that both of
us liked lobster salad and detested oysters.  It was another bond; I
told her whimsically that it was an omen, nor did she object to
considering it so.

Afterwards we walked along the narrow aisle to the glassed-in
observation room up forward.  It was almost too crowded for entry, but
we didn't mind that at all, as it forced us to sit very close together.
We stayed long after both of us had begun to notice the stuffiness of
the air.

It was just after we had returned to our seats that the catastrophe
occurred.  There was no warning save a sudden lurch, the result, I
suppose, of the pilot's futile last-minute attempt to swerve--just that
and then a grinding crash and a terrible sensation of spinning, and
after that a chorus of shrieks that were like the sounds of battle.

It _was_ battle.  Five hundred people were picking themselves up from
the floor, were trampling each other, milling around, being cast
helplessly down as the great rocket-plane, its left wing but a broken
stub, circled downward toward the Atlantic.

The shouts of officers sounded and a loudspeaker blared.  "Be calm," it
kept repeating, and then, "There has been a collision.  We have
contacted a surface ship.  There is no danger--There is no danger--"

I struggled up from the debris of shattered seats.  Joanna was gone;
just as I found her crumpled between the rows, the ship struck the
water with a jar that set everything crashing again.  The speaker
blared, "Put on the cork belts under the seats.  The life-belts are
under the seats."

I dragged a belt loose and snapped it around Joanna, then donned one
myself.  The crowd was surging forward now, and the tail end of the
ship began to drop.  There was water behind us, sloshing in the
darkness as the tights went out.  An officer came sliding by, stooped,
and fastened a belt about an unconscious woman ahead of us.  "You all
right?" he yelled, and passed on without waiting for an answer.

The speaker must have been cut on to a battery circuit.  "And get as
far away as possible," it ordered suddenly.  "Jump from the forward
port and get as far away as possible.  A ship is standing by.  You will
be picked up.  Jump from the--"  It went dead again.

I got Joanna untangled from the wreckage.  She was pale; her
silvery-eyes were closed.  I started dragging her slowly and painfully
toward the forward port, and the slant of the floor increased until it
was like the slide of a ski-jump.  The officer passed again.  "Can you
handle her?" he asked, and again dashed away.

I was getting there.  The crowd around the port looked smaller, or was
it simply huddling closer?  Then suddenly, a wail of fear and despair
went up, and there was a roar of water.  The observation room walls had
given.  I saw the green surge of waves, and a billowing deluge rushed
down upon us.  I had been late again.

That was all.  I raised shocked and frightened eyes from the
subjunctivisor to face van Manderpootz, who was scribbling on the edge
of the table.

"Well?" he asked.

I shuddered.  "Horrible!" I murmured.  "We--I guess we wouldn't have
been among the survivors."

"We, eh?  _We?_"  His eyes twinkled,

I did not enlighten him.  I thanked him, bade him good-night, and went
dolorously home.



Even my father noticed something queer about me.  The day I got to the
office only five minutes late, he called me in for some anxious
questioning as to my health.  I couldn't tell him anything, of course.
How could I explain that I'd been late once too often, and had fallen
in love with a girl two weeks after she was dead?

The thought drove me nearly crazy.  Joanna!  Joanna with her
silvery-eyes now lay somewhere at the bottom of the Atlantic.  I went
around half dazed, scarcely speaking.  One night I actually lacked the
energy to go home and sat smoking in my father's big overstuffed chair
in his private office until I finally dozed off.  The next morning,
when old N. J. entered and found me there before him, he turned pale as
paper, staggered, and gasped, "My heart!"  It took a lot of explaining
to convince him that I wasn't early at the office, but just very late
going home.

At last I felt that I couldn't stand it.  I had to do
something--anything at all.  I thought finally of the subjunctivisor.
I could see--yes, I could see what would have transpired if the ship
hadn't been wrecked!  I could trace out that weird, unreal romance
hidden somewhere in the worlds of "if."  I could, perhaps, wring a
somber, vicarious joy from the things that might have been.  I could
see Joanna once more!

It was late afternoon when I rushed over to van Manderpootz's quarters.
He wasn't there; I encountered him finally in the hall of the Physics
Building.

"Dick!" he exclaimed.  "Are you sick?"

"Sick?  No.  Not physically.  Professor, I've got to use your
subjunctivisor again.  I've _got_ to!"

"Eh?  Oh--that toy.  You're too late, Dick.  I've dismantled it.  I
have a better use for the space."

I gave a miserable groan and was tempted to damn the autobiography of
the great van Manderpootz.  A gleam of sympathy showed in his eyes, and
he took my arm, dragging me into the little office adjoining his
laboratory.

"Tell me," he commanded.

I did.  I guess I made the tragedy plain enough, for his heavy brows
knit in a frown of pity.  "Not even van Manderpootz can bring back the
dead," he murmured.  "I'm sorry, Dick.  Take your mind from the affair.
Even were my subjunctivisor available, I wouldn't permit you to use it.
That would be but to turn the knife in the wound."  He paused.  "Find
something else to occupy your mind.  Do as van Manderpootz does.  Find
forgetfulness in work."

"Yes," I responded dully.  "But who'd want to read _my_ autobiography?
That's all right for you."

"Autobiography?  Oh!  I remember.  No, I have abandoned that.  History
itself will record the life and works of van Manderpootz.  Now I am
engaged on a far grander project."

"Indeed?"  I was utterly, gloomily disinterested.

"Yes.  Gogli has been here, Gogli the sculptor.  He is to make a bust
of me.  What better legacy can I leave to the world than a bust of van
Manderpootz, sculptured from life?  Perhaps I shall present it to the
city, perhaps to the university.  I would have given it to the Royal
Society if they had been a little more receptive, if they--if--_if_!"
This last in a shout.

"Huh?"

"_If!_" cried van Manderpootz.  "What you saw in the subjunctivisor was
what would have happened _if_ you had caught the ship!"

"I know that."

"But something quite different might have really happened!  Don't you
see?  She--she--Where are those old newspapers?"

He was pawing through a pile of them.  He flourished one finally.
"Here!  Here are the survivors!"

Like letters of flame, Joanna Caldwell's name leaped out at me.  There
was even a little paragraph about it, as I saw once my reeling brain
permitted me to read:


    "At least a score of survivors owe their lives to the bravery of
    twenty-eight year old Navigator Orris Hope, who patrolled both
    aisles during the panic, lacing lifebelts on the injured and
    helpless, and carrying many to the port.  He remained on the
    sinking liner until the last, finally fighting his way to the
    surface through the broken walls of the observation room.  Among
    those who owe their lives to the young officer are: Patrick
    Owensby, New York City; Mrs. Campbell Warren, Boston; Miss Joanna
    Caldwell, New York City----"


I suppose my shout of joy was heard over in the Administration
Building, blocks away.  I didn't care; if van Manderpootz hadn't been
armored in stubby whiskers, I'd have kissed him.  Perhaps I did anyway;
I can't be sure of my actions during those chaotic minutes in the
professor's tiny office.

At last I calmed.  "I can look her up!" I gloated.  "She must have
landed with the other survivors, and they were all on that British
tramp freighter, the _Osgood_, that docked here last week.  She must be
in New York--and if she's gone over to Paris, I'll find out and follow
her!"



Well, it's a queer ending.  She _was_ in New York, but--you see, Dixon
Wells had, so to speak, known Joanna Caldwell by means of the
professor's subjunctivisor, but Joanna had never known Dixon Wells.
What the ending might have been if--_if_--  But it wasn't; she had
married Orris Hope, the young officer who had rescued her.  I was late
again.



THE END






[End of The Worlds of If, by Stanley G. Weinbaum]
