Hall of Mirrors

By FREDRIC BROWN

For an instant you think
it is temporary blindness,
this sudden dark that
comes in the middle of a bright
afternoon.

It must be blindness, you
think; could the sun that was
tanning you have gone out instantaneously,
leaving you in utter
blackness?

Then the nerves of your body
tell you that you are standing,
whereas only a second ago you
were sitting comfortably, almost
reclining, in a canvas chair. In
the patio of a friend's house in
Beverly Hills. Talking to Barbara,
your fiancée. Looking at
Barbara—Barbara in a swim suit—her
skin golden tan in the brilliant
sunshine, beautiful.

You wore swimming trunks.
Now you do not feel them on
you; the slight pressure of the
elastic waistband is no longer
there against your waist. You
touch your hands to your hips.
You are naked. And standing.

Whatever has happened to you
is more than a change to sudden
darkness or to sudden blindness.

You raise your hands gropingly
before you. They touch a plain
smooth surface, a wall. You
spread them apart and each hand
reaches a corner. You pivot slowly.
A second wall, then a third,
then a door. You are in a closet
about four feet square.

Your hand finds the knob of
the door. It turns and you push
the door open.

There is light now. The door
has opened to a lighted room ...
a room that you have never seen
before.

It is not large, but it is pleasantly
furnished—although
the furniture is of a style that is
strange to you. Modesty makes
you open the door cautiously the
rest of the way. But the room is
empty of people.

You step into the room, turning
to look behind you into the
closet, which is now illuminated
by light from the room. The closet
is and is not a closet; it is the
size and shape of one, but it
contains nothing, not a single
hook, no rod for hanging clothes,
no shelf. It is an empty, blank-walled,
four-by-four-foot space.

You close the door to it and
stand looking around the room.
It is about twelve by sixteen feet.
There is one door, but it is closed.
There are no windows. Five
pieces of furniture. Four of them
you recognize—more or less. One
looks like a very functional desk.
One is obviously a chair ... a
comfortable-looking one. There
is a table, although its top is on
several levels instead of only one.
Another is a bed, or couch.
Something shimmering is lying
across it and you walk over and
pick the shimmering something
up and examine it. It is a garment.

You are naked, so you put it
on. Slippers are part way under
the bed (or couch) and you slide
your feet into them. They fit,
and they feel warm and comfortable
as nothing you have ever
worn on your feet has felt. Like
lamb's wool, but softer.

You are dressed now. You
look at the door—the only door
of the room except that of the
closet (closet?) from which you
entered it. You walk to the door
and before you try the knob, you
see the small typewritten sign
pasted just above it that reads:

It is not signed. You look at
the desk and see that there is
an envelope lying on it.

You do not yet go to take that
envelope from the desk and read
the letter that must be in it.

Why not? Because you are
frightened.

You see other things about the
room. The lighting has no source
that you can discover. It comes
from nowhere. It is not indirect
lighting; the ceiling and the walls
are not reflecting it at all.

Illustrated by VIDMER

They didn't have lighting like
that, back where you came from.
What did you mean by back
where you came from?

You close your eyes. You tell
yourself: I am Norman Hastings.
I am an associate professor of
mathematics at the University of
Southern California. I am twenty-five
years old, and this is the
year nineteen hundred and fifty-four.

You open your eyes and look
again.

They didn't use that style of
furniture in Los Angeles—or
anywhere else that you know of—in
1954. That thing over in the
corner—you can't even guess
what it is. So might your grandfather,
at your age, have looked
at a television set.

You look down at yourself, at
the shimmering garment that
you found waiting for you. With
thumb and forefinger you feel its
texture.

It's like nothing you've ever
touched before.

I am Norman Hastings. This
is nineteen hundred and fifty-four.

Suddenly you must know, and
at once.

You go to the desk and pick
up the envelope that lies upon it.
Your name is typed on the outside:
Norman Hastings.

Your hands shake a little as
you open it. Do you blame them?

There are several pages, typewritten.
Dear Norman, it starts.
You turn quickly to the end to
look for the signature. It is unsigned.

You turn back and start reading.

"Do not be afraid. There is
nothing to fear, but much to explain.
Much that you must understand
before the time lock
opens that door. Much that you
must accept and—obey.

"You have already guessed
that you are in the future—in
what, to you, seems to be the
future. The clothes and the room
must have told you that. I planned
it that way so the shock
would not be too sudden, so you
would realize it over the course
of several minutes rather than
read it here—and quite probably
disbelieve what you read.

"The 'closet' from which you
have just stepped is, as you have
by now realized, a time machine.
From it you stepped into the
world of 2004. The date is April
7th, just fifty years from the time
you last remember.

"You cannot return.

"I did this to you and you may
hate me for it; I do not know.
That is up to you to decide, but
it does not matter. What does
matter, and not to you alone, is
another decision which you must
make. I am incapable of making
it.

"Who is writing this to you? I
would rather not tell you just
yet. By the time you have finished
reading this, even though it is
not signed (for I knew you would
look first for a signature), I will
not need to tell you who I am.
You will know.

"I am seventy-five years of
age. I have, in this year 2004,
been studying 'time' for thirty
of those years. I have completed
the first time machine ever built—and
thus far, its construction,
even the fact that it has been
constructed, is my own secret.

"You have just participated in
the first major experiment. It
will be your responsibility to decide
whether there shall ever be
any more experiments with it,
whether it should be given to the
world, or whether it should be
destroyed and never used again."

End of the first page. You
look up for a moment, hesitating
to turn the next page. Already
you suspect what is coming.

You turn the page.

"I constructed the first time
machine a week ago. My calculations
had told me that it would
work, but not how it would work.
I had expected it to send an object
back in time—it works backward
in time only, not forward—physically
unchanged and intact.

"My first experiment showed
me my error. I placed a cube of
metal in the machine—it was a
miniature of the one you just
walked out of—and set the machine
to go backward ten years. I
flicked the switch and opened
the door, expecting to find the
cube vanished. Instead I found it
had crumbled to powder.

"I put in another cube and sent
it two years back. The second
cube came back unchanged, except
that it was newer, shinier.

"That gave me the answer. I
had been expecting the cubes to
go back in time, and they had
done so, but not in the sense I
had expected them to. Those
metal cubes had been fabricated
about three years previously. I
had sent the first one back years
before it had existed in its fabricated
form. Ten years ago it had
been ore. The machine returned it
to that state.

"Do you see how our previous
theories of time travel have been
wrong? We expected to be able
to step into a time machine in,
say, 2004, set it for fifty years
back, and then step out in the
year 1954 ... but it does not
work that way. The machine
does not move in time. Only
whatever is within the machine
is affected, and then just with
relation to itself and not to the
rest of the Universe.

"I confirmed this with guinea
pigs by sending one six weeks
old five weeks back and it came
out a baby.

"I need not outline all my experiments
here. You will find a
record of them in the desk and
you can study it later.

"Do you understand now what
has happened to you, Norman?"

You begin to understand. And
you begin to sweat.

The I who wrote that letter
you are now reading is you,
yourself at the age of seventy-five,
in this year of 2004. You
are that seventy-five-year-old
man, with your body returned to
what it had been fifty years ago,
with all the memories of fifty
years of living wiped out.

You invented the time machine.

And before you used it on
yourself, you made these arrangements
to help you orient yourself.
You wrote yourself the letter
which you are now reading.

But if those fifty years are—to
you—gone, what of all your
friends, those you loved? What
of your parents? What of the girl
you are going—were going—to
marry?

You read on:

"Yes, you will want to know
what has happened. Mom died in
1963, Dad in 1968. You married
Barbara in 1956. I am sorry to
tell you that she died only three
years later, in a plane crash. You
have one son. He is still living;
his name is Walter; he is now
forty-six years old and is an accountant
in Kansas City."

Tears come into your eyes and
for a moment you can no longer
read. Barbara dead—dead for
forty-five years. And only minutes
ago, in subjective time, you
were sitting next to her, sitting
in the bright sun in a Beverly
Hills patio ...

You force yourself to read
again.

"But back to the discovery.
You begin to see some of its
implications. You will need time
to think to see all of them.

"It does not permit time travel
as we have thought of time travel,
but it gives us immortality of
a sort. Immortality of the kind
I have temporarily given us.

"Is it good? Is it worth while to
lose the memory of fifty years of
one's life in order to return one's
body to relative youth? The only
way I can find out is to try, as
soon as I have finished writing
this and made my other preparations.

"You will know the answer.

"But before you decide, remember
that there is another
problem, more important than
the psychological one. I mean
overpopulation.

"If our discovery is given to
the world, if all who are old or
dying can make themselves
young again, the population will
almost double every generation.
Nor would the world—not even
our own relatively enlightened
country—be willing to accept
compulsory birth control as a
solution.

"Give this to the world, as the
world is today in 2004, and within
a generation there will be famine,
suffering, war. Perhaps a
complete collapse of civilization.

"Yes, we have reached other
planets, but they are not suitable
for colonizing. The stars may
be our answer, but we are a long
way from reaching them. When
we do, someday, the billions of
habitable planets that must be
out there will be our answer ...
our living room. But until then,
what is the answer?

"Destroy the machine? But
think of the countless lives it can
save, the suffering it can prevent.
Think of what it would
mean to a man dying of cancer.
Think ..."

Think. You finish the letter
and put it down.

You think of Barbara dead for
forty-five years. And of the fact
that you were married to her for
three years and that those years
are lost to you.

Fifty years lost. You damn the
old man of seventy-five whom
you became and who has done
this to you ... who has given you
this decision to make.

Bitterly, you know what the
decision must be. You think that
he knew, too, and realize that he
could safely leave it in your
hands. Damn him, he should
have known.

Too valuable to destroy, too
dangerous to give.

The other answer is painfully
obvious.

You must be custodian of this
discovery and keep it secret until
it is safe to give, until mankind
has expanded to the stars and
has new worlds to populate, or
until, even without that, he has
reached a state of civilization
where he can avoid overpopulation
by rationing births to the
number of accidental—or voluntary—deaths.

If neither of those things has
happened in another fifty years
(and are they likely so soon?),
then you, at seventy-five, will be
writing another letter like this
one. You will be undergoing another
experience similar to the
one you're going through now.
And making the same decision,
of course.

Why not? You'll be the same
person again.

Time and again, to preserve
this secret until Man is ready for
it.

How often will you again sit
at a desk like this one, thinking
the thoughts you are thinking
now, feeling the grief you now
feel?

There is a click at the door and
you know that the time lock has
opened, that you are now free
to leave this room, free to start
a new life for yourself in place of
the one you have already lived
and lost.

But you are in no hurry now to
walk directly through that door.

You sit there, staring straight
ahead of you blindly, seeing in
your mind's eye the vista of a set
of facing mirrors, like those in
an old-fashioned barber shop, reflecting
the same thing over and
over again, diminishing into far
distance.

—FREDRIC BROWN

Transcriber's Note:

This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction December 1953.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S.
copyright on this publication was renewed. Minor spelling and
typographical errors have been corrected without note.