By His Bootstraps by Robert A. Heinlein
The man on the floor groaned, but did not open his eyes.
Wilson, the Diktor, bent over him but made no effort to revive him. That the man was not seriously injured he had reason to be certain. He did not wish him to wake up until he had had time to get his own thoughts entirely in order.
For he had work to do, work which must be done meticulously, without mistake. Everyone, he thought with a wry smile, makes plans to provide for their future.
He was about to provide for his past.
There was the matter of the setting of the Time Gate when he got around to sending his early self back. When he had tuned in on the scene in his room a few minutes ago, he had picked up the action just before his early self had been knocked through. In sending him back he must make a slight readjustment in the time setting to an instant around two o’clock of that particular afternoon. That would be simple enough; he need only search a short sector until he found his early self alone and working at his desk.
But the Time Gate had appeared in that room at a later hour; he had just caused it to do so. He felt confused.
Wait a minute, now—if he changed the setting of the time control, the Gate would appear in his room at the earlier time, remain there, and simply blend into its “reappearance” an hour or so later. Yes, that was right. To a person in the room it would simply be as if the Time Gate had been there all along, from about two o’clock.
Which it had been. He would see to that.
Experienced as he was with the phenomena exhibited by the Time Gate, it nevertheless required a strong and subtle intellectual effort to think other than in durational terms, to take an eternal viewpoint.
And there was the hat. He picked it up and tried it on. It did not fit very well, no doubt because he was wearing his hair longer now. The hat must be placed where it would be found—Oh, yes, in the control booth. And the notebook, too.
The notebook, the notebook—Mm-m-m—Something funny, there. When the notebook he had stolen had become dog-eared and tattered almost to illegibility some four years back, he had carefully recopied its contents in a new notebook—to refresh his memory of English rather than from any need for it as a guide. The worn-out notebook he had destroyed; it was the new one he intended to obtain, and leave to be found.
In that case, there never had been two notebooks. The one he had now would become, after being taken through the Gate to a point ten years in the past, the notebook from which he had copied it. They were simply different segments of the same physical process, manipulated by means of the Gate to run concurrently, side by side, for a certain length of time.
As he had himself—one afternoon.
He wished that he had not thrown away the worn-out notebook. If he had it at hand, he could compare them and convince himself that they were identical save for the wear and tear of increasing entropy.
But when had he learned the language, in order that he might prepare such a vocabulary? To be sure, when he copied it he then knew the language—copying had not actually been necessary.
But he had copied it.
The physical process he had all straightened out in his mind, but the intellectual process it represented was completely circular. His older self had taught his younger self a language which the older self knew because the younger self, after being taught, grew up to be the older self and was, therefore, capable of teaching.
But where had it started?
Which comes first, the hen or the egg?
You feed the rats to the cats, skin the cats, and feed the carcasses of the cats to the rats who are in turn fed to the cats. The perpetual motion fur farm.
If God created the world, who created God?
Who wrote the notebook? Who started the chain?
He felt the intellectual desperation of any honest philosopher. He knew that he had about as much chance of understanding such problems as a collie has of understanding how dog food gets into cans. Applied psychology was more his size—which reminded him that there were certain books which his early self would find very useful in learning how to deal with the political affairs of the country he was to run. He made a mental note to make a list.
The man on the floor stirred again, sat up. Wilson knew that the time had come when he must insure his past. He was not worried; he felt the sure confidence of the gambler who is “hot,” who knows what the next roll of the dice will show.
He bent over his alter ego. “Are you all right?” he asked.
“I guess so,” the younger man mumbled. He put his hand to his bloody face. “My head hurts.”
“I should think it would,” Wilson agreed. “You came through head over heels. I think you hit your head when you landed.”
His younger self did not appear fully to comprehend the words at first. He looked around dazedly, as if to get his bearings. Presently he said, “Came through? Came through what?”
“The Gate, of course,” Wilson told him. He nodded his head toward the Gate, feeling that the sight of it would orient the still groggy younger Bob.
Young Wilson looked over his shoulder in the direction indicated, sat up with a jerk, shuddered and closed his eyes. He opened them again after what seemed to be a short period of prayer, looked again, and said, “Did I come through that?”
“Yes,” Wilson assured him.
“Where am I?”
“In the Hall of the Gate in the High Palace of Norkaal. But what is more important,” Wilson added, “is when you are. You have gone forward a little more than thirty thousand years.”
The knowledge did not seem to reassure him. He got up and stumbled toward the Gate. Wilson put a restraining hand on his shoulder. “Where are you going?”
“Back!”
“Not so fast.” He did not dare let him go back yet, not until the Gate had been reset. Besides he was still drunk—his breath was staggering. “You will go back all right—I give you my word on that. But let me dress your wounds first. And you should rest. I have some explanations to make to you, and there is an errand you can do for me when you get back—to our mutual advantage. There is a great future in store for you and me, my boy—a great future!”
A great future!
The End
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Notes and proofing history
Scanned with preliminary proofing by ANN/A
January 5th, 2008—v1.0
from the original source: Astounding, October, 1941
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Robert A. Heinlein, By His Bootstraps
(Series: # )