Or Darwin, if you prefer
Date: 2024-07-30T00:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Science fiction; Short stories; Time travel -- Fiction

The Project Gutenberg eBook of Or Darwin, if you prefer

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Title: Or Darwin, if you prefer

Author: Mel Hunter

Release date: July 31, 2024 [eBook #74161]

Language: English

Original publication: New York, NY: King-Size Publications, Inc, 1954

Credits: Greg Weeks, Mary Meehan and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK OR DARWIN, IF YOU PREFER ***

Or Darwin, If You Prefer

By Mel Hunter

Mr. Harbinger could not quite
believe in the Mouth. But poor
Mr. Harbinger—or Darwin, if you
prefer—are gone to other times.

[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Fantastic Universe September 1954.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]

Mr. Hunter's superb art work has appeared on a baker's dozen science fiction magazine covers during the past year, but incredible as it may seem with this story we introduce him to the reading public for the first time as a science fiction writer. We say incredible, because this is not a beginner's story. It is sparkling, sophisticated, erudite—the work of a craftsman.

Mr. Harbinger was tired of his job. In fact he was so tired of it he put down his pencil in the middle of a series of chemical notations. All noted, he realized with sudden clarity, in a disgustingly neat and orderly fashion.

"Mr. Cushman, sir," he said quietly to the small, prissy man at the desk near the wall, "why don't you take these titrations and jam them straight up the middle of you know where?"

And with that previously inconceivable remark Mr. Harbinger put on his hat, removed his spotless, starched smock and passed through the doors of the Cushman Chemical Co., Inc. for the last time and decidedly the most satisfactory time.

Upon arriving home to his ridiculously—he suddenly noted with even greater clarity than before—orderly, proper, drab room, Mr. Harbinger sighed. He removed his hat, pocketed his glasses, and sank in bleak defeat into the sole, uncomfortable easy chair which graced his room. There was another of those momentarily crystal-clear glimpses.

"I've trated my last ti," he said aloud with the depths of the Styx in his colorless voice.

Closing his mind as best he could to this very disconcerting habit that had acquired him, Mr. Harbinger continued to sit there, looking at the dingy wall he had examined minutely now, every evening, for the past thirteen years.

I would appreciate it if that wall would just go away, he thought, knowing that it wouldn't, and that he was probably condemned to stare at it, or one worse than it, every evening for the rest of his life.

It was while he was contemplating a particularly uninteresting spot in the fading design of the wallpaper which was intended to decorate his room that he noticed it wasn't a spot at all, but an eye. Of all things!

Reacting in exactly the same manner as he would when confronted with a line in a newspaper ad which defied his watery vision, he plucked his pince-nez from a vest pocket and placed them in their accustomed notch upon the bridge of his nose.

"Go away," he said to it, when he had assured himself that it was most decidedly an eye.

"Why?" returned a mouth, suddenly materializing out of the design below both eyes, the second of which had resolved itself in time to wink at him in a most disconcerting manner, almost rudely, one might say.

"Because," Mr. Harbinger faltered, at a loss as to how best to converse with a disembodied mouth and a pair of floating eyes which could not even remain on a line with each other, but kept drifting about over a small area of the wall, bumping together now and again.

"In a moment you'll commit a non-sequitur like 'Oh yeah?' and I will scream," the mouth promised.

Mr. Harbinger, after a moment's pause in which he frantically tried to swallow those very words, somehow risen to his lips for the first time in his life, grasped at a straw.

"Would a drink help make you go away?" he quavered. He was now beginning to feel that his mind was running down, and since he had never had a drink in his life, he possessed the abstainer's conception of alcohol as an instantaneous neural bombshell.

"A drink for which one of us?" was the reply, and it sent him off in a whole new wilderness of speculation.

"Which one of the three of you needs one?" he gulped, completely bemused.

"Three of who?" the mouth asked, in some consternation. Almost, Mr. Harbinger thought, in a trace of fright quickly concealed. "Oh, you mean those two eyes," it said laughing in obvious relief. "I'm sorry if their moving about that way upsets you, but I seem to have a bit of trouble with my control." The tone became somewhat rueful. "The mechanisms are not in very good condition these days."

"Listen," exclaimed Mr. Harbinger, "If I am going to have hallucinations, I want, no, I insist that they be of an ordinary garden variety, not cluttered with such feeble self-excuses as machinery being at fault." He was quite wrought up, and to be so shook him visibly, for he was accustomed to a most unruffled, detached manner of thought.

"The fault lies not with machinery, or, as I might like to tell myself, with this modern technical age running away too fast for us poor day-by-day mortals to keep up with it!" Mr. Harbinger took a deep breath, said, "That's not it at all. It's just that I have always had a romantic streak in me that is dying of malnutrition. I'm choked by the tedium, the huge, calibrated double-titrated BOREDOM of it all!"

He sat down limply, breathless, for this was a major oration for Mr. Harbinger to deliver all at once.

"Hell," said the mouth. "Me too."

"What?" Mr. Harbinger faltered, becoming somewhat surer by the instant that such a remark was out of character for a deranged hallucination. It seemed to him, though he admittedly was ceasing to be a reliable judge of such matters, that the particular hallucination in question should be taking more the part of the strangling Don Juan in him, the drowning Errol Flynn, the departing Da Vinci.

"I said, 'Me too,'" the mouth declared again, pausing then to retract a wandering left eye, which had developed a fondness for a repetition of the pattern a foot or two down the wall.

"Where I come from there is nothing but boredom, too," it went on. "All day, every day, I run test checks on various gadgets, finding flaws, and lacking the materials to put them in proper order, even if I had the knowledge, and even if anybody cared whether I did or not."

It pursed itself, as if remembering the pall of it all, and continued. "I had hoped to find a Time when people were lively; when there was zip and a dash to just getting up in the morning; when somebody would care what you did every day. Oh, not that they don't care if I should miss a day," it quickly qualified. "They care very much about that. Laws, you know, but just that and no more.

"Why, if I never succeeded in repairing a single machine my whole life long, no one would say a word. I only try out of boredom, and even that gets dull after a few years."

"I'm afraid I don't understand," Mr. Harbinger said, sitting back in his chair when he realized that it was silly to hang on the words of an hallucination from the depths of one's own mind. "Really!" he thought, "One should already know every word it said." But then he puzzled again over the content of the mouth's words.

"It's very simple," the mouth went on. "Should we really get a machine in absolutely perfect working order, it is immediately carted away to a warehouse and stored, all snug in an indestructible cocoon ... so it will never wear out again, you know." It sighed. "Really doesn't pay to get interested, or try to be a perfectionist, any more."

Mr. Harbinger felt an unaccountable twinge of sympathy at the truly apathetic tone of the mouth, which appeared to droop a bit at the corners, as though it could never again think of a thing to smile at. The eyes drooped too, if such a thing can be conceived, though he had an extraordinary disinclination to look at them, being continually unnerved by the way they insisted on drifting about.

"Cup of tea?" he asked nervously, offering this small irrelevancy as a means of changing a subject which so clearly depressed his parturated companion ... nor did the subtle development of his concept of the apparition on the wall escape his notice.

He now seemed to be of two minds over the whole thing. Either he was succumbing to the reality of his hallucination—and his sketchy remembrance of college Psych told him that meant he was either very sane or very insane; he couldn't recollect which—either that or he was having the scientific, or para-scientific, adventure of the age.

"Why, I'd love one!" answered the mouth, the corners undrooping noticeably. "I had no idea you Twentieth Centuryites were so civilized as all that.... Tea. Imagine!"

Mr. Harbinger fairly popped out of the chair, unstrung again at the reference, clearly made in deprecation, to his own century. However, he covered over admirably the mental abyss which yawned at his feet by clattering about among the few pieces of chipped china in his cupboard as though his sanity depended on the amount of distracting noise he could wring from the simple act of setting out a tea service for two. And indeed, for the moment, it did.

He accepted gratefully, to put it mildly, the few moments respite accorded him by the small, secure hum-drum of preparing the hot water, of fussing over just the minutely exact amount of tea leaves to be spooned into each cup.

Once again, as he invariably did each time he prepared the beverage, he silently congratulated himself on his one small talent ... but the dilute pleasure to be derived from such a trivia evaporated the instant he considered what would again confront him when he turned from the tiny Pullman kitchenette.

He grew faint at the thought of being forced once more to brave the wandering improbable eyes, and the completely unthinkable mouth.

A worse thought crossed his reeling mind as he started for the other side of the room, trying to walk the tea over with his eyes closed, but giving that up as impossible when he remembered the perilously threadbare condition of his rug.

"Will I have to"—pause—"help you drink it?" The cups clattered betrayingly in each hand, no matter how mightily he strove to control his nerves.

"Heavens no," laughed the mouth. One eye crinkled in apparent amusement, the other continued to contemplate what Mr. Harbinger referred to as "the W.C."

A hand shot out of the wall and tapped Mr. Harbinger on the shoulder from the side of his weakest eye.

At this completely unexpected assault, poor Mr. Harbinger gave a despairing little gasp, and would have dropped both cups smash on the floor had not a second hand materialized instantly, and snatched them both, more or less expertly, in mid-air, spilling hardly a drop or two.

"My!" Mr. Harbinger mumbled weakly, sinking like a wilting leaf into his patently uneasy easy chair. "I'm afraid the complications of this thing, be it lunacy or be it occult or whatever, are getting completely beyond me."

He sat there trembling and impotent, unable to do much of anything beyond refusing to observe the two bizarrely supported cups of steaming tea.

At last the mouth said in some reproach, "If you will be good enough to take one of these off my hands.... Oh, I say ... off my hands!... I'd very much like to have a bit of the other."

The left hand seemed to extend itself toward Mr. Harbinger a bit, and though he could not help but cower down in his chair, unhinged as he was by all this, he at last realized that it would be only common courtesy to do what the mouth had asked.

So realizing, he forced, literally forced, his trembling hand to take the cup from the proferring impossibility, and retract slowly enough to avoid catapulting the chattering china across the room. As it was there was a good deal of splashing before he managed to get it safe on the small table by the side of the chair.

The mouth made a creditable job of the tea-sipping, considering the handicaps it was forced to operate under; the wandering eyes and all. And at length, after performing a most peculiar contortion in obvious reluctance to further prostrate its host by asking for a napkin, it voiced a thought which caught Mr. Harbinger's attention in spite of his badly shattered composure.

"Doesn't it seem," it said musingly, almost to itself, "as though there ought to be some way we, that is to say you and I as we exist in our own Time, could right the wrongs of our respective situations."

It wasn't a question—more of a spoken dream thought, with all the drifting oddness of inflection that those occasionally voiced wisps of desire usually possess.

The very familiarity of that unmistakable kind of shading, its very humanness convinced, in a second, Mr. Harbinger of the reality of the thing which was occurring in his room, as all the fantastic things which had gone before had failed to do more than terrify him beyond enduring. He became, in that instant, a believer.

Accordingly he said the, to him, proper thing.

"I don't believe we've met."

They talked, thereafter, for hours ... long into the night; undisturbed by the passage of time, not distracted, at least not very badly distracted, by the recurrent pangs of the unsated supper appetite; exchanging small bits of unhappiness in their separate lots, and each sympathizing heartily and hopelessly with the misfortunes of the other like two long-lost souls—as indeed they were.

The upshot of it was that they resolved to meet again in the same manner when the conditions of their separate lives permitted, and to this end they set a series of future dates, calculated to find the disembodied man—whose name turned out to be Jones—at liberty to manipulate the forbidden Time mechanism of his age at an hour when his workshop was deserted, and when Harbinger might be expected to be at home after the day's job hunting—a prospect from which he shrank—or a day's work, if he should be fortunate enough to ever get another job.

A possibility he doubted, due to the precipitate, not to say frank, or even to say vulgar, now that he thought of it, manner in which he had informed his previous employer of his decision to resign.

But, meet they did, from time to time, and they had many good laughs over the pun in that one. When it came to puns, Jones was pretty adept and it was a puzzle to Mr. Harbinger how the language had changed so little in a hundred and fifty years.

Jones cleared that up by explaining that the status quo in everything from contraceptives to slang had been rigidly maintained and enforced for nearly all that time, beginning with the great Scholars' Debate in the U.N. in 1971.

Eventually, a night came when Jones greeted Mr. Harbinger with startling news. "I don't know whether it had occurred to you," he said slowly, "but I could arrange, I think, for you to get a job up here in good old Two Thousand and Ninety Four if you wanted me to."

Jones said it slowly, for he had found that such novel ideas were apt to throw Mr. Harbinger into an attack of jingling nerves by virtue of their very novelty; a commodity he found a very hot thing to handle.

"My word!" Mr. Harbinger said, at length. "What on Earth would I do up there? And how about identification, and all that?"

Now that he had somewhat assimilated the idea, details passed rapidly through his head, spinning as it was now with the mystery of the even suggested possibility of him ... HIM, Henry Harbinger, taking a jaunt in Time. Oh, the ideas, the details came, but, for a few moments he was too carried away with the ROMANCE of it all to grasp at them, to do more than allow the 'gasping Juan,' the 'sinking Flynn,' the 'distant Da Vinci' to reverse themselves for an instant and show small signs of inner life.

The mouth at length interrupted, though with courtesy, this reverie which showed signs of going on and on. "Oh, the details are simple enough," it said. "I've already taken the liberty of producing several dozen sets of fool-proof identity files which I can bribe a Civil Servant to slip into the Master Record Section. You would be listed as a research chemist, and given unlimited funds to experiment to your heart's content, and with no control exercised over the work you choose to do."

"Unbelievable," Mr. Harbinger whispered, all the while wanting desperately to believe such a miraculous thing could somehow come to pass.

The mouth smiled. The eyes crinkled. Then the mouth said, "Hmmm, pick a name. Smith, Ackerman, Evans, Daugherty ... all good solid names to fit your appearance."

Mr. Harbinger rose to the delicately extended bait at last. "I imagine, with a little chicanery, I could arrange for you to get into something here too, if you would want to."

He rose from his chair, fired and appalled at once by the notion of bringing a Civil Servant, or some such Romantic dastardy. Pacing the floor, he huffed and puffed to himself in contemplation of intrigue, looking for all the world like a small boy planning a daring raid on a neighbor's pear tree.

"Social Security ..." he mumbled. "Voter's registration ... Income Tax records ... hmmm."

As he paced, the eyes wandered alarmingly over the surface of the wall, but he didn't notice, having long since become more or less accustomed to that small absurdity.

At last he stopped dead, in possession of the solution, and relieved—though he would never admit it, least of all to himself—to see a way around the bribery and such things, Romantic though they doubtless were.

"You can take mine, if you don't mind the name, and all. My record is clean—never been arrested, except once for jay-walking ten years or so ago."

He paused to consider the ramifications of this infinitesimal aberration, but at length decided, with much humming and vacillation, that there was no chance of his fingerprints having been taken for that; and remembering that his state did not require them on a driver's license, either.

Finally they agreed to try it. There was a slight bit of trepidation on Jones's part, for he explained to Mr. Harbinger that it would be necessary to draw mightily on the power supply of the area surrounding his workshop. But that the exchange would be effected instantly by the Time Mechanism, as he always called it, and that, by the time anyone arrived at the workshop from Master Power to investigate, Mr. Harbinger—or Darwin, as he would be in his new Life and Time, he having taken great pleasure in the illustrious history of that appellation, and insisted on it—would be long gone in the streets and away, safe in his new identity.

They shook hands on it, and a queer gesture it must have been....

At last the appointed day arrived. Then the appointed hour, and at long last, the appointed minute and second. Jones had assured Mr. Harbinger—or Darwin, if you prefer—that he had taken extraordinary pains to make sure the Time Mechanism would be in perfect working order. But unfortunately the devil-may-care attitude of the technicians over at Master Power, was beyond his ability to rectify; indeed, had not occurred to him at all.

As a regrettable consequence, at the instant he threw the switch, at the precise second the Time Mechanism seemed to swell itself for the momentous event it was about to initiate, a cat-napping n'er-do-well of a technician over at Master Power, a recognized incompetent among his fellows and a braggart to boot, shifted his up-propped feet from one instrument bank to another more comfortable.

And in doing so, tripped a switch with a careless toe; robbed the great Time Mechanism of the last ounce of energy necessary for the task it was attempting, and so stranded poor Mr. Harbinger—or Darwin, if you prefer—and poor Mr. Jones in the constantly shifting anomalies and vicissitudes of Variable Time....

Perhaps you have seen them occasionally for an instant: an eye peering at you in pitiable entreaty from under a leaf of a tree as you pass. Of course, when you look closely, they—or whichever of them it was; poor Mr. Harbinger, or Darwin, if you prefer, or perhaps it was poor Mr. Jones—are gone on to other Times, and other crannies to peer out of for a moment.

Perhaps you have heard a voice call out to you on some unlikely occasion, or in some improbable place. I remember once hearing a voice distinctly cry out, "You there...."

But when I turned about I could catch only a fleeting glimpse of a mouth and one eye as they vanished from the side of a near-by church steeple, thirty feet or so in the air.

I suppose it was only the merest chance that I happened to glance directly at that spot as I turned, or else I should never have known who it was who called.

As it is I still wonder whether it was poor Mr. Jones, or poor Mr. Harbinger—or Darwin, if you prefer.

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