The Six Fingers of Time Read online

the unliked fighter; to blue-shot down the hockey ice,skating at fifteen hundred miles an hour and scoring dozens ofgoals at either end while the people only know that something oddis happening.

  There was pleasure in being able to shatter windows by chantinglittle songs, for the voice (when in the state) will be to theworld at sixty times its regular pitch, though normal to oneself.And for this reason also he was inaudible to others.

  There was fun in petty thieving and tricks. He would take awallet from a man's pocket and be two blocks away when the victimturned at the feel. He would come back and stuff it into theman's mouth as he bleated to a policeman.

  He would come into the home of a lady writing a letter, snatchup the paper and write three lines and vanish before the screamgot out of her throat.

  He would take food off forks, put baby turtles and live fish intobowls of soup between spoonfuls of the eater.

  He would lash the hands of handshakers tightly together withstout cord. He unzippered persons of both sexes when they were attheir most pompous. He changed cards from one player's hand toanother's. He removed golf balls from tees during the backswingand left notes written large "YOU MISSED ME" pinned to the groundwith the tee.

  Or he shaved mustaches and heads. Returning repeatedly to onewoman he disliked, he gradually clipped her bald and finallygilded her pate.

  With tellers counting their money, he interfered outrageously andenriched himself. He snipped cigarettes in two with a scissorsand blew out matches, so that one frustrated man broke down andcried at his inability to get a light.

  He removed the weapons from the holsters of policemen and put cappistols and water guns in their places. He unclipped the leashesof dogs and substituted little toy dogs rolling on wheels.

  He put frogs in water glasses and left lighted firecrackers onbridge tables.

  He reset wrist watches on wrists, and played pranks in men'srooms.

  "I was always a boy at heart," said Charles Vincent.

  Also during those first few days of the controlled new state, heestablished himself materially, acquiring wealth by devious ways,and opening bank accounts in various cities under various names,against a time of possible need.

  Nor did he ever feel any shame for the tricks he played onunaccelerated humanity. For the people, when he was in the state,were as statues to him, hardly living, barely moving, unseeing,unhearing. And it is no shame to show disrespect to such comicalstatues.

  And also, and again because he was a boy at heart, he had funwith the girls.

  "I am one mass of black and blue marks," said Jenny one day. "Mylips are sore and my front teeth feel loosened. I don't know whatin the world is the matter with me."

  Yet he had not meant to bruise or harm her. He was rather fond ofher and he resolved to be much more careful. Yet it was fun, whenhe was in the state and invisible to her because of his speed, tokiss her here and there in out-of-the-way places. She made anice statue and it was good sport. And there were others.

  "You look older," said one of his co-workers one day. "Are youtaking care of yourself? Are you worried?"

  "I am not," said Vincent. "I never felt better or happier in mylife."

  But now there was time for so many things--time, in fact, foreverything. There was no reason why he could not master anythingin the world, when he could take off for fifteen minutes and gainfifteen hours. Vincent was a rapid but careful reader. He couldnow read from a hundred and twenty to two hundred books in anevening and night; and he slept in the accelerated state andcould get a full night's sleep in eight minutes.

  He first acquired a knowledge of languages. A quite extensivereading knowledge of a language can be acquired in three hundredhours world time, or three hundred minutes (five hours)accelerated time. And if one takes the tongues in order, from themost familiar to the most remote, there is no real difficulty. Heacquired fifty for a starter, and could always add any other anyevening that he found he had a need for it. And at the same timehe began to assemble and consolidate knowledge. Of literature,properly speaking, there are no more than ten thousand books thatare really worth reading and falling in love with. These weregone through with high pleasure, and two or three thousand ofthem were important enough to be reserved for future rereading.

  History, however, is very uneven; and it is necessary to readtexts and sources that for form are not worth reading. And thesame with philosophy. Mathematics and science, pure or physical,could not, of course, be covered with the same speed. Yet, withtime available, all could be mastered. There is no concept everexpressed by any human mind that cannot be comprehended by anyother normal human mind, if time is available and it is taken inthe proper order and context and with the proper preparatorywork.

  And often, and now more often, Vincent felt that he was touchingthe fingers of the secret; and always, when he came near it, ithad a little bit the smell of the pit.

  For he had pegged out all the main points of the history of man;or rather most of the tenable, or at least possible, theories ofthe history of man. It was hard to hold the main line of it, thatdouble road of rationality and revelation that should lead alwaysto a fuller and fuller development (not the fetish of progress,that toy word used only by toy people), to an unfolding andgrowth and perfectibility.

  But the main line was often obscure and all but obliterated, andtraced through fog and miasma. He had accepted the Fall of Manand the Redemption as the cardinal points of history. But heunderstood now that neither happened only once, that both were ofconstant occurrence; that there was a hand reaching up from thatold pit with its shadow over man. And he had come to picture thathand in his dreams (for his dreams were especially vivid when inthe state) as a six-digited monster reaching out. He began torealize that the thing he was caught in was dangerous and deadly.

  Very dangerous.

  Very deadly.

  One of the weird books that he often returned to and whichcontinually puzzled him was the Relationship of Extradigitalismto Genius, written by the man whose face he had never seen, inone of his manifestations.

  It promised more than it delivered, and it intimated more than itsaid. Its theory was tedious and tenuous, bolstered withundigested mountains of doubtful data. It left him unconvincedthat persons of genius (even if it could be agreed who or whatthey were) had often the oddity of extra fingers and toes, or thevestiges of them. And it puzzled him what possible difference itcould make.

  Yet there were hints here of a Corsican who commonly kept a handhidden, or an earlier and more bizarre commander who wore alwaysa mailed glove, of another man with a glove between the two;hints that the multiplex-adept, Leonardo himself, who sometimesdrew the hands of men and often those of monsters with sixfingers, may himself have had the touch. There was a comment ofCaesar, not conclusive, to the same effect. It is known thatAlexander had a minor peculiarity; it is not known what it was;this man made it seem that this was it. And it was averred ofGregory and Augustine, of Benedict and Albert and Acquinas. Yet aman with a deformity could not enter the priesthood; if they hadit, it must have been in vestigial form.

  There were cases for Charles Magnut and Mahmud, for Saladin theHorseman and for Akhnaton the King; for Homer (a Seleuciad-Greekstatuette shows him with six fingers strumming an unidentifiedinstrument while reciting); for Pythagoras, for Buonarroti,Santi, Theotokopolous, van Rijn, Robusti.

  Zurbarin catalogued eight thousand names. He maintained that theywere geniuses. And that they were extradigitals.

  Charles Vincent grinned and looked down at his misshapen ordouble thumb.

  "At least I am in good though monotonous company. But what in thename of triple time is he driving at?"

  And it was not long afterward that Vincent was examiningcuneiform tablets in the State Museum. These were a broken andnot continuous series on the theory of numbers, tolerably legibleto the now encyclopedic Charles Vincent. And the series read inpart:

  "On the divergence of the basis itself and the confusioncaused--for it is five, or it is six, or ten or twel
ve, or sixtyor a hundred, or three hundred and sixty or the double hundred,the thousand. The reason, not clearly understood by the people,is that Six and the Dozen are first, and Sixty is a compromise incondescending to the people. For the five, the ten are late, andare no older than the people themselves. It is said, andcredited, that people began to count by fives and tens from thenumber of fingers on their hands. But before the people the--bythe reason that they had--counted by sixes and twelves. But Sixtyis the number of time, divisible by both, for both must livetogether in time, though not on the same plane of time--" Much ofthe rest was scattered. And it was while trying to set thehundreds of unordered clay tablets in proper sequence thatCharles Vincent created the legend of the ghost in the museum.

  For he spent his multi-hundred-hour nights there studying andclassifying. Naturally he could not work without light, andnaturally he could be seen when he sat still at his studies. Butas the slow-moving guards attempted to close in on him, he