“What do you know about science?” Claude asked.

  “More than you,” I said.

  He didn’t like that at all.

  I’ve got to admit I’m getting sick of all these personality conflicts. How are we ever going to establish socialism in this country when we can’t even agree on when to take a coffee break? They say every personality conflict is really a political conflict, but I’m starting to wonder.

  I haven’t told anyone in the League about my project. I’ve got to have some concrete proof first. Otherwise, they’re going to laugh in my face.

  February 24th, 198-

  Long letter from Sam Gold, replying to a letter of comment I wrote about an article on Heinlein which appeared in Space Potatoes. It’s so long since I wrote the letter I can’t even remember what I said, but I guess I was attacking Sam for attacking Heinlein’s Time Enough For Love, which I still think is a great book. I guess Sam is on a literary kick these days.

  Sam also asked if I was ever going to put out another issue of Klein-light. The truth of it is, ever since Ma smashed my Gestetner, I’ve sort of lost the urge. Also, I really don’t have the time anymore. Maybe that’s what growing up is all about.

  March 2nd, 198-

  Leafletted with Penny outside the local supermarket, in support of the union local. It rained the whole time, I’m probably going to get pneumonia. I was almost glad when the union goons chased us away, although you’d think they would know who their friends are. I’ve had it up to here with leafletting, anyway. There’s got to be a faster way to make a revolution.

  Coffee with Penny afterwards; she was wearing a green blouse, looked very pretty. She told me I should go back to college, maybe study pol-sci. That’s what she’s doing at Columbia. I guess she thinks I just fritter away most of my time. I almost told her about my machine, but then I got worried about what she would think.

  I thought about asking her to a movie, but I decided to go home and work on my project instead. There’ll be more time later. All the time in the world.

  March 7th 198-

  The hamster didn’t come back. I sat and watched the cage for two hours straight, and it didn’t come back. Then I crashed out, and when I woke up it was past noon, and still no hamster. Now I have to figure out where it went.

  March 10th 198-

  Another big blow-up with Ma. We’re back on my reading habits of all things. The stuff I read is ruining my mind, driving me crazy, making me blind, and like that. She should know how crazy. I almost felt like walking out of the house and never coming back. But I’m too close to success now to have to worry about finding a place to live, and a job and all that stuff.

  Why do I have to put up with this shit? I’m twenty-three years old.

  March 18th, 198-

  League meeting. Dick presented his paper on “Technology in a Socialist Society.” Against capital-intensive energy resources, in favor of small localized power units and an overall reduction in energy consumption. The usual hippy-dippy stuff.

  What kind of future, I asked, are we going to have with less energy?

  Nearly got kicked out on my ear.

  Walking to the subway, Penny told me that my position in the League is insecure, and urged me to keep quiet for awhile. Apparently Claude is looking to start a schism. Wants to expel me and a few others who have crossed him. I’m not even sure that I care, although I’m glad that she seems to.

  March 26th, 198-

  The hamster is back. Also my wristwatch, which I strapped on its back. The watch appears to have stopped at the moment the field was induced. The hamster seems fine, though a bit sleepy. Have begun follow-up observations.

  April 2nd, 198-

  Well, I got expelled from the League. Deviationism. Big surprise. I guess I’m more relieved than anything else. In fact I should have quit first. I’m only sorry because I think I was starting to get close to Penny and now she can’t be seen consorting with a deviationist.

  Of course, this changes everything concerning the project. I was almost ready to make my pitch, lay it all out for the League.

  “We can change the future,” I was going to tell them. “And fast.”

  Maybe I should have tried it anyway. Probably they would have dumped all over it, but I could have tried.

  Maybe I’m not such a principled type after all. Maybe I wanted to keep all this to myself all along. But now I really do have to think things through, decide where I go from here.

  April 3rd, 198-

  Went out to pick up some magazines, and when I came back I found that Ma had poisoned the hamster. Said she couldn’t stand the smell.

  Thomas Alva Edison never had to put up with this shit!

  Post-test follow-up incomplete. Should repeat the whole performance, make sure the hamster wouldn’t have eventually dropped dead. But I’m not sure I can wait that long.

  8.

  “So you built a time machine,” said the psychiatrist, whose name was Dr. Lawrence Segal.

  “That’s right,” Klein said.

  “Where is this machine?”

  “In my apartment,” Klein said. “But it doesn’t work anymore.”

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t know,” Klein said. “Maybe Ma tampered with it. Maybe something burned out. I can’t make it work anymore.”

  “But it did work at least once?”

  “Twice. Once for the hamster, and once for me.”

  “Tell me, Philip, what made you want to travel in time?”

  “I don’t know,” Klein said. “It’s something I thought about for years. I used to daydream about it, even back in high school. It came from reading all those stories about people travelling in time, into the future, into the past. People changing history. I used to wish I could do that too. Not change history, exactly. Just a few details here and there.”

  “What sort of details?”

  “I don’t know. It’s like people always say, if I could do it all again. Go back before things went wrong and make them right. Things I said and wished I hadn’t. Places I went to when I wanted to stay home, or go someplace else. Dumb, embarrassing scenes with girls. Like that. Go back and short-circuit all the pain.

  “And then I started to thinking about bigger things. Like maybe going back to Dallas and saving Kennedy. I used to think that the world would have been a much better place if only Kennedy had lived.

  “That was naive, of course. Saving Kennedy wouldn’t really have changed anything. That was something I realized when I got into being a socialist. It would all have been the same. The same misery, the same wars, same everything. Only the names of the presidents would have been different.

  “And then I thought about something my mother said. She used to point to this picture of Franklin Roosevelt, we always had a picture of him on the wall, and she would say, ‘Without that man, there would have been a revolution in this country.’ She thought that was great, of course, that old FDR stuck his finger in the dike. But I could see how Roosevelt had really been an obstacle to genuine social progress in this country.

  “So that was my plan. To build a time machine, and get the League to knock off Roosevelt. And if that didn’t help, we would try knocking off somebody else.

  “I don’t know if I was serious about all this. I don’t know if I could actually bring myself to kill anyone, let alone FDR, who was always revered in my family as something approaching a goddam saint. And I never even tried to win over the League. So I don’t know if I was ever really serious about all this political stuff. I think probably it was always personal, really.

  “So in the end, I decided to go forward rather than back. To try and find a place for myself somewhere in the future. Because I wasn’t happy here, that was for sure, and I don’t think that even a revolution would have changed that much.

  “I suppose my mother thought I was just beating off in there, all those months. But that was what I was doing. Building a time machine. And I did it. I really did it. I travelled in time.”

  “Except,” Dr. Segal said, “that you don’t remember a thing about it.”

  9.

  With Philip Klein’s consent, Dr. Segal scheduled a session using sodium pentathol in attempt to bring back his lost memory and lead him through and beyond whatever traumatic event or events might have precipitated his fugue.

  “Philip,” Dr. Segal said, once the drug had taken hold. “I want you to think back to the night of July 5th. Do you remember that night?”

  “Of course,” Philip said. “Tonight’s the night. The night I test my machine.”

  “How do you feel?”

  “Good,” Philip said. “Excited. I can hardly wait. Should have done this months ago. I was nervous, I guess. And then I wanted to wait for July 4th. For the fireworks. I always did like the fireworks.”

  “Where are you, Philip?”

  “I’m at home. In my room. I’m inducing the field.”

  “And then what?”

  “I’m…travelling. Into the future.”

  “Tell me about it. Tell me about the future.”

  Klein appeared agitated. He shifted in his seat.

  “What’s happening, Philip.?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t remember…”

  “Go with it, Philip. Don’t fight it. You remember the future. You’re there now. In the future now…”

  “The walls are high…”

  “Yes?”

  “Very high. And white, sheer white. Dazzling in the sun. The swollen sun. I see no one, no one at all. The air…the air is hard to breathe. Thin. Harsh.” Klein’s breathing became labored. “There’s something wrong with the air.”

  “Easy, Philip. Take it easy.”

  Klein’s expression changed. He became alert, jerked his head back.

  “I see something in the sky. Some kind of flying machine. It makes no noise, no noise at all. The shape is strange, I can’t describe the shape. The machine is getting closer. The machine is firing at me. Firing some sort of ray…”

  “And?”

  “Now I’m inside the machine. The walls are smooth. Dark. There is no one else inside the flying machine. I can see out the window. We are flying above the city. The city of the future. Glass, concrete. Stripped, massed, streamlined. Overhead roads link the towers. The golden towers. But the city is empty.”

  “Empty?”

  “There is no one, no sign of life.”

  “Then who guides the flying machine?”

  “Machines guide the flying machine. Nothing but machines. I am taken to the Hall of the Central Computer. The Computer speaks to me. It tells me that the people have gone now, all gone away to other worlds circling other stars. But the people will return. They have promised that they will return.”

  “And then?”

  “I move on. Onwards into the future. I travel on.”

  “And what do you see?”

  “I see the sun explode. The wind burns my skin. My hair is matted with a fine ash. I move back. I watch the children swim in the decaying flower gardens. I stoop down to smell the sweet green flowers. I pick a flower, I hold it in my hand…I move on, to visit the golden city. The buildings are crystal, so very high. And the people fly! Faces are yellow this year, this wonderful year.” Tears welled up in his eyes. “The ice! I see and will remember the ice! And the fire. I will not forget the fire.”

  10.

  “It was amazing the way it all came back,” Klein told Dr. Segal at the next session. “All came flooding back. In no coherent order. No pattern. But the future. The actual future.”

  Dr. Segal’s expression was noncommittal.

  “You think it’s a delusion, don’t you?” Klein asked. “A hallucination. From your perspective, that’s all it could be. You think this is some private fantasy. Like the guy in The Fifty-Minute Hour. The one who thought he travelled in time and space.”

  Dr. Segal raised his eyebrows.

  “You’ve read Lindner?”

  “Oh sure. And Freud, and Rogers, and Skinner. I liked Lindner’s book. But you know, I couldn’t help thinking. What if the guy was right?”

  11.

  Excerpt from the notebook of Dr. Lawrence Segal

  I had asked Philip Klein to bring in a selection of his favorite science fiction books, and have now spent the better part of a weekend in reading them. Most of the authors were unknown to me, although I had heard of, if not actually read, Kurt Vonnegut Jr. Somehow I am always suspicious of a man who calls himself “Jr.,” but it is hardly surprising that he should be so much better known than his contemporaries. He can, at least, manipulate the language.

  Leaving aside the question of literary quality, I was both fascinated and repelled by these materials. This is, in many ways, a literature steeped in pathology, and there would surely be an article here if I could find the time.

  Behind the veneer of reasoned “scientific” speculation, sometimes tiresomely detailed, more often as thin and perfunctory as the plot of some pornographic movie, one finds, almost inevitably, an enormous and overweening narcissism, luxuriating in the most joyously infantile fantasies of limitlessness and omnipotence.

  Machines are everywhere in this literature. Phallic and magical machines, powered only by our most secret wishes and fears, penetrating the thin webs of space and time.

  The most central and repetitious vision is one of escape, of mobility without limit, of a freedom never defined except by the absence of all civilized constraints. Characters rip themselves free of their proper place in the social and familial framework to achieve a personal transcendence.

  It should go without saying that this is a profoundly oedipal literature although typically these yearnings are at least somewhat masked. The parent or parent-figure is merely vilified, escaped, left behind.

  But, almost an embarrassment of riches, there are actually stories in which we see a complete return of the repressed. The incest drive itself breaks surface, like some great white whale billowing water. Here a spaceman who travels to far stars and returns to make love to his own great-granddaughter. And there, yes, a time traveller who goes back to kill the hated father figure, to seduce his unsuspecting mother, even to become his own father.

  Confronted even with such explicit material, Klein demonstrates absolutely no insight into his attachment to this literature.

  “It’s not a question of being for or against incest,” he told me, in reference to one such story. “It’s only a speculation. To provoke thought about the socio-cultural taboos surrounding the incest taboo.”

  “To provoke thought?” I said. “I see.”

  Klein places great importance on having his thoughts provoked. Contrary to the report of the psychiatric social worker, he is actually exceptionally well-read. He has been a voracious consumer of organized knowledge, has set himself upon a course of relentless self-education, seeking to understand intellectually a world in which he has always felt out of place. He has read physics, chemistry, biology, history, even psychology. On several occasions he has attempted to draw me into a discussion of Pepper’s critique of psychoanalysis. Yet his reading has been without discrimination, mixing relativity theory and kaballah, Mendel and the mail-order wisdom of the Rosicrucians.

  His idol is the English polymath and socialist H. G. Wells, perhaps best known as an early writer of these scientific romances. Klein, too, claims to be a “socialist,” despite a profound aversion for his fellow man. But essentially his philosophy is one of self-improvement. Not only must man evolve as a species, but each one of us must evolve as a person. “There must be progress,” he told me. “There must be.”

  Socially awkward, distanced from his peers, dominated always by his mother, Klein has set out deliberately to expand his mind the way that others might expand their muscle tissue, through exercise, training, and rigor. He has kept journals of his every waking thought, scraps of time and broken insights hoarded to chew over again and again, playing constantly with his own ideas, not so much stimulating his imagination as masturbating it.

  He is, in fact, exactly the sort of alienated individual to whom this literature of science fiction would most powerfully appeal. Passive and detached, he seeks refuge from the storm of life in these Faustian fantasies of superiority, of an understanding which transcends normal understanding. In reality, of course, Klein is only dizzied and intoxicated by these restless, pointless dreams.

  “What did you think the future would be like?” I asked him.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “Different. I thought things would be different. Like California, maybe. Only better.”

  He rambled on, then, about a world in which abundance has replaced scarcity, automation has removed the need to work, love has replaced greed, where individuals live their lives only to create. No doubt all this came from his reading of these utopian tales of magic kingdoms at the end of the warp, where one floats in sweetness and light, where generations merge and smear themselves immortally across all space and time and even death itself is defeated.

  And yet one must be careful not to accept these surface notions, these relatively simple and obvious yearnings of a desperately alienated individual, at face value. Far more real and urgent wishes, however unacknowledged, lay behind the construction of his supposed machine. His desire to travel forward in time, then, screens out his shameful and inexpressible wish to travel backwards in time and reunite with his own narcissistic vision of the pre-Oedipal mother. He toys with various rationalizations that might justify this voyage back, but in the end is unable to sustain them, for they bring him too close to recognizing his real desires. His fantasy of saving Kennedy, for example, shields his repressed wish to kill Kennedy, kill the primal father. Later disguised as a “scientific socialist” he actually permits himself partial expression of these aggressive impulses, in his extraordinary scheme for the assassination of Franklin Roosevelt. But this plan, too, is quickly repressed, discarded, thrown away.

  It is a truism, of course, that time does not exist in the unconscious. We may travel back there, at will, back to infancy, back to our primal paradise of infantile omnipotence, of unlimited control and unqualified love. Klein’s longing to return is not in itself unusual. Yet typically such wishes are displaced upon the social environment. The effort to recover lost infancy is channeled into the drive for economic or social transcendence, or else dissipated in nostalgic and romantic illusion. Klein, however, has become fixated on this matter of changing the very flow of time.