Mists of Dawn Read Online Free Page B

are shaping up it looks like we’ll get to Mars easily enough without the space-time machine, but it’s certainly something to think about.” He drew on his pipe steadily, turning the air hazy with blue smoke. “Now,” he continued, “what this machine actually does is to utilize the tremendous energies of the atom to warp space-time in such a manner that the machine can travel through them at will. But there are a few catches to all of this—a few conditions that you must remember. If you understand these, there is a great deal that would have seemed mysterious to you otherwise that will now be perfectly clear when we start out.”
    “I’m listening,” Mark assured him. His heart was still beating rapidly with excitement. Here he was, sitting in the lead sphere in the basement of his uncle’s home in New Mexico, in the year 1953. Vast energies were sleeping all around him, and yet at the touch of a hand, the flick of a switch, he would go where no man before him had ever gone—back, back past Columbus on his voyage to America, back past Marco Polo, back to ancient Rome two years before the death of Julius Caesar. Would they see him fall? Or could they perhaps prevent his death—warn him in advance of what was coming? What would happen then? What would the course of history have been if Julius Caesar had lived?
    “First of all,” his uncle said, “you must remember that this machine operates with atomic energy as a power source. The particular system that I have employed works on a principle of continuous nuclear reaction—that is, it is set to go a certain way before we start, and then once it is started it cannot be stopped until the space-time machine has reached its destination. There is no way to change the reaction once it has begun. It is like an automatic car that you have set to go to Detroit—once it starts out, you can’t change your mind and go to San Antonio instead. Understand?”
    “Clear so far.”
    “All right,” his uncle continued. “The next thing to remember is that, for all its power, this machine is a very delicately balanced mechanism. You know how long and how hard I’ve worked, and most of the work involved was not in the theory or in the power source, but in the mechanism itself. Everything must balance exactly. I have finally gotten what appears to be the right combination, and of course I have kept detailed records, but whether or not I could ever build a duplicate space-time machine again, I don’t know. Certainly, it would be the work of many years.”
    “I see,” said Mark. “In other words, as far as we know, this is a once-only proposition.”
    “That’s right. It isn’t as though we had a device that would enable us to go backward and forward in time whenever we pleased. It will take us back and bring us home—once. I have picked Rome partly because I have been interested in it all my life, but also because it is relatively close in time—not over several thousand years away. For the first trip I think it wise that we do not attempt too much. Then again, we know a great deal about Rome, which will make it possible for us to conduct ourselves intelligently when we get there. We know the language, the detailed history, and the society and culture we are going into. We will know how to behave and take care of ourselves. It would be sheer and utter folly to attempt to journey into a time that we knew nothing about. We couldn’t speak the language, we couldn’t adjust to the life, we would be dressed in the wrong sort of clothing—everything would be against us. We’d probably wind up dead or in prison or in an insane asylum—if they had them!”
    “How about the future?” Mark asked thoughtfully. “Could we go into the future?”
    “I frankly don’t know about the future,” Doctor Nye said, puffing slowly on his pipe. “It’s still an open question. Theoretically, I believe it could be done. But all the objections I have just raised would apply. We