Time for Sale by Ralph Milne Farley
Amazing Stories, August, 1938
Time for Sale
by Ralph Milne Farley
CHAPTER I
hair. His face showed an annoyed red through
Two Weeks in a Day
his close-clipped Vandyke beard. On the door
was the name “Mr. Porter.”
HE beefy man sitting behind the ornate
“You
would come to bother me about
mahogany and chromium desk, ran his
money at a time like this, Tom,” he bitterly
T fingers through his rumpled graying remarked to the broad-shouldered
Amazing Stories
2
black-haired young man who stood facing him
flattened itself and slunk off down the street,
across the desk.
keeping close to the buildings. The match
“But, Dad,” his son remonstrated, flickered—and went out.
“wouldn’t it be worth two thousand dollars to
“Looks like the correct number—five
you for me to graduate from college? All that
one five,” the athletically built man with the
stands in the way of my Engineering degree is
match remarked in doubtful tones. “But this is
tomorrow’s exam in Physics, and I have a deal
a warehouse, not an office-building.”
which should get me through it. Only $500
His companion, a small and precise
down, and $1,500 more if I pass.”
person, rummaged in his pockets, produced a
“Why didn’t you pay attention to your
small card, tilted it at several different angles
lessons during the year?” growled his father,
in an endeavor to catch the rays of a distant
“instead of frittering away your time on street-lamp, and finally lit a match himself.
football and fraternities and dances! You’re
The card read:
licked, and you know it. At least it’s
something to know when one’s licked.”
ENTROPY, INC.
“Is it?” countered his husky son, 515 East 17th St., New York City raising his bushy eyebrows. “Well, there’s one
“Time for Sale”
thing which is even more worthwhile than
P. Lanford Hatch, Ph.D.
knowing when one’s licked.”
President.
“Yes? What is it?”
“Not knowing when one’s licked.
He threw away the match, lit another,
Perhaps I’m a stubborn optimistic fool, but
and ran it up and down the door-casing, until
I’m never willing to admit that I’m licked.
he found an obscure button, beneath the label
That’s why I still plan to pass tomorrow’s
“ENTROPY, INC.” This button he pushed.
exam, although I know that it’ll take at least a
After a long wait, a gate clanged
week and a half of cramming to do it.”
hollowly somewhere in the vast interior of the
The elder Porter heaved a sigh of lower floor of the warehouse, a dim light resignation. “So you’d make fun of your poor
flicked on, and then the door opened,
old man at a time like this. All right, have
disclosing a slim wiry white-coated man, with
your two thousand dollars! Perhaps, when sad eyes and a quizzical smile.
you’ve graduated, you may turn over a new
“Well?”
he
demanded.
leaf.”
The smaller of the two callers,
“Thank you, sir,” Tom Porter soberly
scholarly looking with domed forehead and
replied, but there was a twinkle in his dark
thick horn-rimmed glasses, replied, “I’m
eyes and a strange smile on his broad face, as
McGuire of the University tutoring service.
though he knew some joke which he was
Your brother sent us. This is Tom Porter, the
concealing from his father.
football captain, a Phi Gam.”[1]
“And I am Dr. Hatch,” announced the
Two men stopped questioningly in front of the
white-coated man in the doorway.
huge bulking building in the dimly lit
“I know you well by reputation,
waterfront street. One of them, who loomed
doctor,” said Porter. “You’re Lan Hatch, the
large and powerful, laid a fat briefcase on the
great quarterback of the twenties! If you are
sidewalk, lit a match, and held its feeble flare
half the physicist that you were football
close to the number beside the door. A startled
player, you can fix me up swell. And I’m
alley cat, with a fish-head in its mouth, darted
out from behind a group of garbage tins; then
1 Dr. Hatch was also a member of Phi Gamma Delta.
Time for Sale
3
certainly in need of help! My exam in Physics
“What can I do for you?” a bit icily.
is tomorrow morning, and Mac here says it
“Well, you can take dinner with me
will take at least a week and a half of tutoring
tomorrow evening.”
to get me by.”
“Sorry, but I’m engaged—”
The white-coated man sniffed, as
“Good! I was afraid you might be
though to indicate his supreme contempt for
married. I’ll phone you—”
anyone who found the least difficulty in
Her cool green eyes narrowed.
mastering Physics.
“Will you please be sensible!” she
“Step this way, gentlemen,” he invited
snapped. “I assume that you are here to try
crisply.
one of Dr. Hatch’s time-machines.” She took a
Porter picked up the brief-case, and he
five-by-eight card-form from a drawer, and
and McGuire entered the warehouse. Dr. opened her fountain pen. “Name please.”
Hatch led the way onto a freight elevator, and
“Thomas
Porter.”
pulled the cord. The elevator slowly ascended
A flicker of expression showed that
until it stopped at a brightly lighted upper
she had heard the name. Porter chuckled
floor.
inwardly. The girl, with a bit more respect,
Near the elevator-shaft stood a desk
asked for and wrote down the remaining data,
and some file-cabinets; and at the desk sat a
collected a preliminary fee of five hundred
girl with copper gold hair, a pink and white
dollars, and sent Porter to join his tutor and
complexion, and a provocative smile on her
Dr. Hatch.
very full, red lips. She wore some sort of
He found them in front of a glassed-in
green clothes, but all that Porter noticed was
cubicle about twenty feet square,
the exquisite figure to which they clung. He
encompassed by coils of shining copper wire,
raised his bushy black eyebrows in a gesture
and surrounded by searchlights,
mercury-vapor tubes, dynamos, and other
breath. Then noticed that Dr. Hatch was electric contraptions. Within the cubicle were speaking to him.
two cots, a desk, chairs, an ice-box, and toilet
“You make the arrangements at the
facilities. Dr. Hatch opened a glass door in the
desk,” said Hatch, “while I show Mr. McGuire
side of the cubicle.
the apparatus.”
“Step in, gentlemen,” he invited. “I
Hatch and McGuire strolled through an
shall have to lock you in, for it would be
open doorway to the electrical paraphernalia
disastrous for you to emerge while the coils
with which the room beyond was filled; while
are energized. Stay in there two weeks and
Porter walked up to the desk and set down his
tutor Mr. Porter for his exam. You will note
bulging briefcase. He grinned broadly at the
that the glass will become black and
beautiful copper-haired girl.
impervious to sight and light, as soon as the
“Well?” she asked, cocking her current is turned on. When the glass clears, flaming head on one side, and looking up at
you can come out. It will then be only seven
him out of a pair of jade-green eyes. Then
o’clock tomorrow morning.”
very ostentatiously she smoothed a stray lock
“Two weeks?” gasped the scholarly
of her copper-gold hair with a slim white hand
McGuire. “And it’ll be only seven o’clock
which displayed a solitaire diamond and a
tomorrow?”
platinum wedding band on its ring-finger.
“That’s
correct.”
“Old stuff,” Porter laughed, “but very
The scholarly McGuire faltered, and
effective. Keeps the predatory males from looked anxiously around; but his young tutee becoming annoying.”
seized his arm and pushed him—almost lifted
Amazing Stories
4
him—through the glass doorway.
other. Grinning wryly, Porter addressed his
“You a physicist, afraid of a little spectacled tutor, “All right, Mac, hop to it.
entropy!”[2
Eddington’s idea that our time-sense
And you might just as well begin with
is merely a sensory perception of entropy was further thermodynamics; it’s my weakest point. What,
outlined in “New Pathways in Science.” “Setting aside if anything, has entropy to do with time?”
the guidance of consciousness, we discover a signpost McGuire nervously cleared his throat,
for time in the physical world itself. The signpost is a rather peculiar one, and I would not venture to say that and passed one hand across his high forehead
the discovery of an objective ‘going on of time’ in the in a tired gesture.
universe. But at any rate, it provides a unique criterion
“Of course it’s all hooey,” he
for discriminating between past and future, whereas diffidently began. “And yet—And yet, if there
there is no corresponding absolute distinction between is a way of speeding up the general entropy of
right and left. The signpost depends on a certain
some shut-off portion of space—”
measurable physical quantity called entropy.”—Ed.]
Porter taunted.
“Such as this glass room?”
He flung his brief-case on the table;
“Exactly—Well, Eddington has shown
and the two men sat down uneasily on the two
that entropy, in its more general sense, is the
chairs, and stared out through the glass walls
running-down of the universe. Entropy is what
of the cage.
makes time irreversible—is what gives us the
Dr. Hatch strode with a bit of a feeling of the flow of time. And so if, as Dr.
swagger to a switch-panel, where he closed a
Hatch claims, he has found a way to speed up
large leaf-switch and gradually advanced the
the entropy in this glass cage, it should be
handle of a controller. Motor-generator sets
possible for two weeks to flow past us inside
began to hum and spark-gaps to snap. The
here while only a few hours are passing for the
glass walls of the cubicle gradually blurred,
world outside.”[3]
then clouded a pearly hue which deepened
His voice did not carry conviction; but
through gray to an impenetrable black, taking advantage of the evident interest of his completely cutting off all view of the outside
pupil, he proceeded to plunge into a detailed
world.
mathematical explanation of entropy, the
Gradually the two inmates relaxed subject most difficult to understand of all of their tenseness, and turned and looked at each
Physics.
So expertly did McGuire budget the
time which the time-cabinet created for them,
2* Dr. Hatch adopted the term “entropy” from his
that he completed a review of the six branches
research in Eddington, considered the greatest relativist of General Physics just short of the expiration
next to Einstein, now at Princeton.
of two weeks by his watch.
Eddington in his “The Nature of the Physical
World,” discussing the relation between time and
“Of course,” he said, his brow
entropy, says: “Objection has sometimes been felt to contorting with a frown, “this business of
the relativity theory because its four-dimensional picture of the world seems to overlook the directed character of time.... Without any mystic appeal to 3McGuire was not quite correct in his explanation to his consciousness it is possible to find a direction of time student. Eddington postulates that our time-sense is on the four-dimensional map, by a study of
based on a sensory perception of entropy; which term, organization.... Let us consider in detail how a random although usually associated with thermodynamics, is element brings the irrevocable into the world.... The more generically the measure of the “running-down” of practical measure of the random element which can
the universe. By isolating a portion of space and
increase in the universe but can never decrease is called changing the rate of entropy within that portion, we entropy.... The law that entropy always increases—the thereby change the rate of elapse of time within that second law of thermodynamics—holds, I think, the
portion. Undoubtedly this is what Dr. Hatch does within supreme position among the laws of nature.”
the entropy cabinets.—Ed.
Time for Sale
5
locking us up in a dark-walled glass room for
The
elder
Porter
sat at his desk,
two weeks is all hooey. I am very much afraid
looking even more tired than on the day
that we shall find that your exam was held
before.
thirteen days ago.”
“Well!” he snapped, as his son jauntily
Tom Porter shrugged his broad entered. “More trouble, and need more money, shoulders.
I suppose? Of course you flunked the exam.”
“I’d have flunked it anyway,” he said
“Good old dad,” chaffed the younger
philosophically. “Come on, let’s get out of
Porter. “In spite of all his worries, he
/>
here and see what day it is.” He got up from
remembers that his little boy had an exam this
his chair and approached the door.
morning. Well, dad, I bring you glad tidings. I
“Stop!” shouted McGuire. “The positively killed the exam! Knocked it for at sudden equalization of entropy might burn us
least a B!”
to a crisp!”
The tired old face brightened, and
“So
you
do place some stock in all this
relaxed somewhat.
‘hooey,’ as you call it!” A pause. Then,
“No? How did you manage?”
“Look! The glass is clearing!”
“There, that’s better.” Seating himself
The walls of the cubicle paled from
on one corner of the desk, Tom Porter
black to gray, became a swirl of pearly mist,
continued, “Last night, between midnight and
then translucent, and finally transparent. Dr.
seven a.m., I spent two weeks in an ‘entropy’
Hatch, tired and drawn advanced from the
cabinet in P. Lanford Hatch’s laboratories,
switch-panel, and unlocked and opened the
tutoring with McGuire.”
glass door.
The fleshy eyes of Mr. Porter
“Well,” he announced, “it’s seven a.m.
narrowed, and he jerked bolt upright in his
Just time enough for you to eat breakfast and
chair. Then settled back again and shook his
to get comfortably up to Morningside Heights
head judiciously.
for your examination. Fifteen hundred dollars
“No, you’re not drunk.” He chewed his
more please.”
moustache for a moment in silence. Then, “So
But Porter shook his black-maned that’s what that loony Dr. Hatch was after, head.