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    Haskel Van Manderpootz & Dixon Wells' Adventures: The Worlds of If, The Ideal & The Point of View
    Haskel Van Manderpootz & Dixon Wells' Adventures: The Worlds of If, The Ideal & The Point of View
    Haskel Van Manderpootz & Dixon Wells' Adventures: The Worlds of If, The Ideal & The Point of View
    Ebook78 pages1 hour

    Haskel Van Manderpootz & Dixon Wells' Adventures: The Worlds of If, The Ideal & The Point of View

    By Stanley G. Weinbaum

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    This eBook has been formatted to the highest digital standards and adjusted for readability on all devices. These three stories deal with Dixon Wells, a perpetually late playboy who runs afoul of the inventions of his friend and former instructor in "Newer Physics", Professor Haskel van Manderpootz, a supremely immodest genius who rates Einstein as his equal.Contents: The Worlds of IfThe IdealThe Point of View
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMusaicum Books
    Release dateDec 21, 2018
    ISBN9788027247837
    Haskel Van Manderpootz & Dixon Wells' Adventures: The Worlds of If, The Ideal & The Point of View
    Author

    Stanley G. Weinbaum

    Né dans le Kentucky en 1902, Stanley G. Weinbaum étudie le génie chimique à l'université du Wisconsin à Milwaukee, mais n'en sort pas diplômé, non plus que Charles A. Lindbergh, qu’il y côtoie. À la suite d'un pari, Weinbaum passe un examen à la place d'un ami et est découvert ; il refuse de réintégrer l'université en 1923. À Milwaukee, il participe aux réunions des Milwaukee Fictioneers, un groupe d'écrivains parmi lesquels Robert Bloch, Ralph Milne Farley, Raymond Palmer, qui fut plus tard rédacteur en chef d'Amazing. Sa carrière littéraire est courte, mais influente. La plupart de ses nouvelles sont publiées dans les années trente par Astounding, Wonder Stories Magazine, ou le fanzine Fantasy Magazine. Il écrit également plusieurs romans de science-fiction ou de fantastique : La Flamme Noire (publié en 1939), Le Nouvel Adam, et Le Cerveau Fou, ainsi que plusieurs romances dont une seule, The Lady Dances, fut jamais publiée. Il meurt d’un cancer du poumon le 14 décembre 1935, âgé de 33 ans.

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      Haskel Van Manderpootz & Dixon Wells' Adventures - Stanley G. Weinbaum

      The Worlds of If

      Table of Contents

       I stopped on the way to the Staten Island Airport to call up, and that was a mistake, doubtless, since I had a chance of making it otherwise. But the office was affable. We'll hold the ship five minutes for you, the clerk said. "That's the best we can do.

      So I rushed back to my taxi and we spun off to the third level and sped across the Staten bridge like a comet treading a steel rainbow. I had to be in Moscow by evening, by eight o'clock, in fact, for the opening of bids on the Ural Tunnel. The Government required the personal presence of an agent of each bidder, but the firm should have known better than to send me, Dixon Wells, even though the N. J. Wells Corporation is, so to speak, my father. I have a—well, an undeserved reputation for being late to everything; something always comes up to prevent me from getting anywhere on time. It's never my fault; this time it was a chance encounter with my old physics professor, old Haskel van Manderpootz. I couldn't very well just say hello and good-bye to him; I'd been a favorite of his back in the college days of 2014.

      I missed the airliner, of course. I was still on the Staten Bridge when I heard the roar of the catapult and the Soviet rocket Baikal hummed over us like a tracer bullet with a long tail of flame.

      We got the contract anyway; the firm wired our man in Beirut and he flew up to Moscow, but it didn't help my reputation. However, I felt a great deal better when I saw the evening papers; the Baikal, flying at the north edge of the eastbound lane to avoid a storm, had locked wings with a British fruitship and all but a hundred of her five hundred passengers were lost. I had almost become the late Mr. Wells in a grimmer sense.

      I'd made an engagement for the following week with old van Manderpootz. It seems he'd transferred to N.Y.U. as head of the department of Newer Physics—that is, of Relativity. He deserved it; the old chap was a genius if ever there was one, and even now, eight years out of college, I remember more from his course than from half a dozen calculus, steam and gas, mechanics, and other hazards on the path to an engineer's education. So on Tuesday night I dropped in an hour or so late, to tell the truth, since I'd forgotten about the engagement until mid-evening.

      He was reading in a room as disorderly as ever. Humph! he grunted. Time changes everything but habit, I see. You were a good student, Dick, but I seem to recall that you always arrived in class toward the middle of the lecture.

      I had a course in East Hall just before, I explained. I couldn't seem to make it in time.

      Well, it's time you learned to be on time, he growled. Then his eyes twinkled. Time! he ejaculated. "The most fascinating word in the language. Here we've used it five times (there goes the sixth time—and the seventh!) in the first minute of conversation; each of us understands the other, yet science is just beginning to learn its meaning. Science? I mean that I am beginning to learn."

      I sat down. You and science are synonymous, I grinned. Aren't you one of the world's outstanding physicists?

      One of them! he snorted. One of them, eh! And who are the others?

      Oh, Corveille and Hastings and Shrimski—

      Bah! Would you mention them in the same breath with the name of van Manderpootz? A pack of jackals, eating the crumbs of ideas that drop from my feast of thoughts! Had you gone back into the last century, now—had you mentioned Einstein and de Sitter—there, perhaps, are names worthy to rank with (or just below) van Manderpootz!

      I grinned again in amusement. Einstein was considered pretty good, wasn't he? I remarked. After all, he was the first to tie time and space to the laboratory. Before him they were just philosophical concepts.

      He didn't! rasped the professor. "Perhaps, in a dim, primitive fashion, he showed the way, but I—I, van Manderpootz—am the first to seize time, drag it into my laboratory, and perform an experiment on it."

      Indeed? And what sort of experiment?

      What experiment, other than simple measurement, is it possible to perform? he snapped.

      Why—I don't know. To travel in it?

      Exactly.

      Like these time-machines that are so popular in the current magazines? To go into the future or the past?

      Bah! Many bahs! The future or the past—pfui! It needs no van Manderpootz to see the fallacy in that. Einstein showed us that much.

      How? It's conceivable, isn't it?

      Conceivable? And you, Dixon Wells, studied under van Manderpootz! He grew red with emotion, then grimly calm. Listen to me. You know how time varies with the speed of a system—Einstein's relativity.

      Yes.

      Very well. Now suppose then that the great engineer Dixon Wells invents a machine capable of traveling very fast, enormously fast, nine-tenths as fast as light. Do you follow? Good. You then fuel this miracle ship for a little jaunt of a half million miles, which, since mass (and with it inertia) increases according to the Einstein formula with increasing speed, takes all the fuel in the world. But you solve that. You use atomic energy. Then, since at nine-tenths light-speed, your ship weighs about as much as the sun, you disintegrate North America to give you sufficient motive power. You start off at that speed, a hundred and sixty-eight thousand miles per second, and you travel for two hundred and four thousand miles. The acceleration has now crushed you to death, but you have penetrated the future. He paused, grinning sardonically. Haven't you?

      Yes.

      And how far?

      I hesitated.

      Use your Einstein formula! he screeched. "How far? I'll tell you. One second! He grinned triumphantly. That's how possible it is to travel into the future. And as for the past—in the first place, you'd have to exceed light-speed, which immediately entails

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