One thing about my uncle Otto. He"s not one of these fellows you have to argue and argue with before you can get him to see the light. You know in advance he"ll never see the light.

So I changed the subject. I said, "And the time machine?"

My uncle Otto is a foot taller than I am, thirty pounds heavier, and strong as an ox. When he puts his hands around my throat and shakes, I have to confine my own part in the conflict to turning blue.

I turned blue accordingly.

He said. "Ssh!" "Ssh!"

I got the idea.

He let go and said, "n.o.body knows about Project X." He repeated, heavily, "Project X. You understand?"

I nodded. I couldn"t speak anyway with a larynx that was only slowly healing.

He said, "I do not ask you to take my word for it. I will for you a demonstration make."

I tried to stay near the door.

He said, "Do you have a piece of paper with your own handwriting on it?"

I fumbled in my inner jacket pocket. I had notes for a possible brief for a possible client on some possible future day.

Uncle Otto said, "Don"t show it to me. Just tear it up. In little pieces tear it up and in this beaker the fragments put."

I tore it into one hundred and twenty-eight pieces.

He considered them thoughtfully and began adjusting k.n.o.bs on a well, on a machine. It had a thick opal-gla.s.s slab attached to it that looked like a dentist"s tray.

There was a wait. He kept adjusting.

Then he said, "Aha!" "Aha!" and I made a sort of queer sound that doesn"t translate into letters. and I made a sort of queer sound that doesn"t translate into letters.

About two inches above the gla.s.s tray there was what seemed to be a fuzzy piece of paper. It came into focus while I watched and oh, well, why make a big thing out of it? It was my notes. My handwriting. Perfectly legible. Perfectly legitimate.

"Is it all right to touch it?" I was a little hoa.r.s.e, partly out of astonishment and partly because of my uncle Otto"s gentle ways of enforcing secrecy.

"You can"t," he said, and pa.s.sed his hand through it. The paper remained behind, untouched. He said, "It"s only an image at one focus of a four-dimensional paraboloid. The other focus is at a point in time before you tore it up."

I put my hand through it, too. I didn"t feel a thing.

"Now watch," he said. He turned a k.n.o.b on the machine and the image of the paper vanished. Then he took out a pinch of paper from the pile of sc.r.a.p, dropped them in an ashtray, and set a match to it. He flushed the ash down the sink. He turned a k.n.o.b again and the paper appeared, but with a difference. Ragged patches in it were missing.

"The burned pieces?" I asked.

"Exactly. The machine must trace in time along the hypervectors of the molecules on which it is focused. If certain molecules are in the air dispersed pff-f-ft!" pff-f-ft!"

I had an idea. "Suppose you just had the ash of a doc.u.ment."

"Only those molecules would be traced back."

"But they"d be so well distributed," I pointed out, "that you could get a hazy picture of the entire doc.u.ment."

"Hmm. Maybe."

The idea became more exciting. "Well, then, look, Uncle Otto. Do you know how much police departments would pay for a machine like this. It would be a boon to the legal "

I stopped. I didn"t like the way he was stiffening. I said, politely, "You were saying, Uncle?"

He was remarkably calm about it. He spoke in scarcely more than a shout. "Once and for all, nephew. All my inventions I will myself from now on develop. First I must some initial capital obtain. Capital from some source other than my ideas selling. After that, I will for my flutes a factory to manufacture open. That comes first. Afterward, afterward, with my profits I can time-vector machinery manufacture. But first my flutes. Before anything, my flutes. Last night, I so swore.

"Through selfishness of a few the world of great music is being deprived. Shall my name in history as a murderer go down? Shall the Schlemmelmayer Effect a way to fry men"s brains he? Or shall it beautiful music to mind bring? Great, wonderful, enduring music?"

He had a hand raised oracularly and the other behind his hack. The windows gave out a shrill hum as they vibrated to his words.

I said quickly, "Uncle Otto, they"ll hear you."

"Then stop shouting," he retorted.

"But look," I protested, "how do you plan to get your initial capital, if you won"t exploit this machinery?"

"I haven"t told you. I can make an image real. What if the image is valuable?"

That did sound good. "You mean, like some lost doc.u.ment, ma.n.u.script, first edition things like that?"

"Well, no. There"s a catch. Two catches. Three catches."

I waited for him to stop counting, but three seemed the limit. "What are they?" I asked.

He said, "First, I must have the object in the present to focus on or I can"t locate it in the past."

"You mean you can"t get anything that doesn"t exist right now where you can see it?"

"Yes."

"In that case, catches two and three are purely academic. But what are they, anyway?"

"I can only remove about a gram of material from the past."

A gram! A thirtieth of an ounce!

"What"s the matter? Not enough power?"

My uncle Otto said impatiently, "It"s an inverse exponential relationship. All the power in the universe more than maybe two grams couldn"t bring."

This left things cloudy. I said, "The third catch?"

"Well." He hesitated. "The further the two foci separated are, the more flexible the bond. It must a certain length be before into the present it can he drawn. In other words, I must at least one hundred fifty years into the past go."

"I see," I said (not that I really did). "Let"s summarize."

I tried to sound like a lawyer. "You want to bring something from the past out of which you can coin a little capital. It"s got to he something that exists and which you can see, so it can"t be a lost object of historical or archaeological value. It"s got to weigh less than a thirtieth of an ounce, so it can"t he the Kullinan diamond or anything like that. It"s got to be at least one hundred and fifty years old, so it can"t be a rare stamp."

"Exactly," said my uncle Otto. "You"ve got it."

"Got what?" I thought two seconds. "Can"t think of a thing," I said. "Well, good-bye, Uncle Otto."

I didn"t think it would work, but I tried to go.

It didn"t work. My uncle Otto"s hands came down on my shoulders and I was standing tiptoe on an inch of air.

"You"ll wrinkle my jacket, Uncle Otto."

"Harold," he said. "As a lawyer to a client, you owe me more than a quick good-bye."

"I didn"t take a retainer," I managed to gargle. My shirt collar was beginning to fit very tightly about my neck. I tried to swallow and the top b.u.t.ton pinged off.

He reasoned, "Between relatives a retainer is a formality. As a client and as an uncle, you owe me absolute loyalty. And besides, if you do not help me out I will tie your legs behind your neck and dribble you like a basketball."

Well, as a lawyer, I am always susceptible to logic. I said, "I give up. I surrender. You win."

He let me drop. And then this is the part that seems most unbelievable to me when I look back at it all I got an idea.

It was a whale of an idea. A piperoo. The one in a lifetime that everyone gets once in a lifetime.

I didn"t tell Uncle Otto the whole thing at the time. I wanted a few days to think about it. But I told him what to do. I told him he would have to go to Washington. It wasn"t easy to argue him into it, but, on the other hand, if you know my uncle Otto, there are ways.

I found two ten-dollar bills lurking pitifully in my wallet and gave them to him.

I said, "I"ll make out a check for the train fare and you can keep the two tens if it turns out I"m being dishonest with you."

He considered. "A fool to risk twenty dollars for nothing you aren"t," he admitted. He was right, too....

He was back in two days and p.r.o.nounced the object focused. After all, it was on public view. It"s in a nitrogen-filled, air-tight case, but my uncle Otto said that didn"t matter. And back in the laboratory, four hundred miles away. the focusing remained accurate. My uncle Otto a.s.sured me of that, too.

I said, "Two things, Uncle Otto, before we do anything."

"What? What? What?" He went on at greater length, "What? What? What? What"

I gathered he was growing anxious. I said, "Are you sure that if we bring into the present a piece of something out of the past, that piece won"t disappear out of the object as it now exists?"

My uncle Otto cracked his large knuckles and said, "We are creating new matter, not stealing old. Why else should we enormous energy need?"

I pa.s.sed on to the second point. "What about my fee?" You may not believe this, but I hadn"t mentioned money till then. My uncle Otto hadn"t either, but then, that follows.

His mouth stretched in a bad imitation of an affectionate smile. "A fee?"

"Ten per cent of the take," I explained, "is what I"ll need."

His jowls drooped. "But how much is the take?"

"Maybe a hundred thousand dollars. That would leave you ninety."

"Ninety thousand Himmel! Then why do we wait?"

He leaped at his machine and in half a minute the s.p.a.ce above the dentist"s tray was agleam with an image of parchment.

It was covered with neat script, closely s.p.a.ced, looking like an entry for an old-fashioned penmanship prize. At the bottom of the sheet there were names: one large one and fifty-five small ones.

Funny thing! I choked up. I had seen many reproductions, but this was the real thing. The real Declaration of Independence!

I said, "I"ll be d.a.m.ned. You did it."

"And the hundred thousand?" asked my uncle Otto, getting to the point.

Now was the time to explain. "You see, Uncle, at the bottom of the doc.u.ment there are signatures. These are the names of great Americans, fathers of their country, whom we all reverence. Anything about them is of interest to all true Americans."

"All right," grumbled my uncle Otto, "I will accompany you by playing the "Stars and Stripes Forever" on my flute."

I laughed quickly to show that I took that remark as a joke. The alternative to a joke would not hear thinking of. Have you ever heard my uncle Otto playing the "Stars and Stripes Forever" on his flute?

I said, "But one of these signers, from the state of Georgia, died in 1777, the year after he signed the Declaration. He didn"t have much behind him and so authentic examples of his signature was about the most valuable in the world. His name was b.u.t.ton Gwinnett."

"And how does this help us cash in?" asked my uncle Otto, his mind still fixed grimly on the eternal verities of the universe.

"Here," I said, simply, "is an authentic, real-life signature of b.u.t.ton Gwinnett, right on the Declaration of Independence."

My uncle Otto was stunned into absolute silence, and to bring absolute silence out of my uncle Otto, he"s really got to be stunned!

I said, "Now you see him right here on the extreme left of the signature s.p.a.ce along with the two other signers for Georgia, Lyman Hall and George Walton. You"ll notice they crowded their names although there"s plenty of room above and below. In fact, the capital G of Gwinnett runs down into practical contact with Hall"s name. So we won"t try to separate them. We"ll get them all. Can you handle that?"

Have you ever seen a bloodhound that looked happy? Well, my uncle Otto managed it.

A spot of brighter light centered about the names of the three Georgian signers.

My uncle Otto said, a little breathlessly, "I have this never tried before."

"What!" I screamed. Now Now he told me. he told me.

"It would have too much energy required. I did not wish the university to inquire what was in here going on. But don"t worry! My mathematics cannot wrong be."

I prayed silently that his mathematics not wrong were.

The light grew brighter and there was a humming that filled the laboratory with raucous noise. My uncle Otto turned a k.n.o.b, then another, then a third.

Do you remember the time a few weeks back when all of upper Manhattan and the Bronx were without electricity for twelve hours because of the d.a.m.ndest overload cut-off in the main power house? I won"t say we did that, because I am in no mood to be sued for damages. But I will say this: The electricity went off when my uncle Otto turned the third k.n.o.b.

Inside the lab, all the lights went nut and I found my self on the floor with a terrific ringing in my ears. My uncle Otto was sprawled across me.