Mists of Dawn Read Online Free Page A

is because you don’t understand it,” Doctor Nye told him. He pulled out his pipe again, filled it with tobacco, and lit it. He blew a smoke ring at the control panel and smiled. “We always fear what we do not understand, Mark,” he said. “I can’t, of course, make entirely clear to you the physics and mathematics involved, but I can explain it more fully than I have before. It is essential that you understand what we are doing before we start out.”
    Mark sat cross-legged. “Fire away,” he said.
    “The idea of traveling through time has fascinated mankind for centuries,” Doctor Nye began, puffing slowly on his pipe. His eyes had a faraway look in them, the way some men’s eyes seem when they look at the stars. “It is customary to say that it has never been done, but that isn’t true.”
    Mark looked at his uncle, wondering. Not true? But that could only mean—
    “The point most people forget is that we are all time travelers,” Doctor Nye explained. “Each and every one of us, every second of the day or night, travels through time. Even as I speak, I am moving forward in time, so to speak. When we came in out of the storm, it was seven-thirty. Now it is eight-fifteen. We have traveled forty-five minutes forward in time—into the future, if you care to look at it that way. In a sense, the world itself is a great time machine. We are all moving into the future, all the time.”
    “I never thought of it that way before,” Mark admitted, feeling the lead sphere all around him, waiting …
    “But to go back into the past—to go from eight-fifteen to seven-thirty—that is something else again,” his uncle continued. “That has never been done, as far as I know. But we’ll do it, you and I! I know we can, and I know that it will be safe, or I would not consider taking you along. You’re all I have in the world, Mark—all that matters to me. I would rather share this moment with you than with any friend I have, and I know you won’t let me down. You’ve worked hard, you’ve learned a lot, and I know I can depend on you to do as I say. Even science has its human side, you know, and this is one dream that I do not care to share with anyone else.”
    Mark did not speak. . . . There were no words.
    “Now then,” Doctor Nye went on, “you understand that it is incorrect to refer to this device as a time machine. It is a space-time machine. What does that mean? Well, simply, it means that it moves through space as it moves through time. This is nothing really new. You know, if you’ll stop and think about it, that space and time are hooked up together. They are both aspects of the same thing. You cannot move through space without moving through time as well—that is, you cannot go from New York to Washington in no time at all. In the same way, you cannot move through time without moving through space simultaneously. Even if you sit perfectly still in a chair and watch fifteen minutes tick off on a clock, you have moved many, many miles—for the earth is moving through space all the time, and our solar system and our galaxy are moving as well.”
    “I understand,” Mark said. “That is what makes it possible for us to go into the machine here in New Mexico and come out in Italy, isn’t it?”
    “That’s right,” Doctor Nye agreed. “I have determined the exact relationship between space and time with respect to this machine of ours, and it will be possible for us to go from New Mexico to Rome in space while we are going from a.d . 1953 to 46 b. c . in time. One day, it may even be possible to travel through interplanetary space by the same means. That is, we might be able to arrange things so that we could go back millions of years in time and all the way to Mars in space—which might put us on Mars at a time when that planet held a high civilization.”
    Mark Nye’s imagination ran wild at his uncle’s words. Mars!
    “Of course,” said Doctor Nye, “the way the rocket experiments