to me.' He raised himself on tiptoe, eyes shining, as though he already saw the pedestal onto which he would be raised.
It had been my last hope of some personal shreds of happiness and a small one. I sighed.
I asked the undertaker that the body be allowed to remain in its coffin in the laboratories before burial in the Stebbins family plot on Long Island. I asked that it remain unembalmed, offering to keep it in a large refrigerated room with the temperature set at forty. I asked that it not be removed to the funeral home.
The undertaker brought the coffin to the laboratory in frigid disapproval. No doubt this was reflected in the eventual bill. My offered explanation that I wanted him near me for a last period of time and that I wanted his assistants to be given a chance to view the body was lame and sounded lame. Still, Lancelot had been most specific in what I was to say.
Once the dead body was laid out, with the coffin lid still open, I went to see Lancelot.
'Lancelot,' I said, 'the undertaker was quite displeased. I think he suspects that something odd is going on.'
'Good,' said Lancelot with satisfaction.
'But-'
'We need only wait one more day. Nothing will be brought to a head out of mere suspicion before then. Tomorrow morning the body will disappear, or should.'
'You mean it might not?' I knew it; I knew it.
There could be some delay, or some prematurity. I have never transported anything this heavy and I'm not certain how exactly my equations hold. To make the necessary observation is one reason I want the body here and not in a funeral parlor.'
'But in the funeral parlor it would disappear before witnesses.'
'And here you think they will suspect trickery?'
'Of course.'
He seemed amused. They will say: Why did he send his assistants away? Why did he run experiments himself that any child could perform and yet manage to kill himself running them? Why did the dead body happen to disappear without witnesses? They will say: There is nothing to this absurd story of time travel. He took drugs to throw himself in a cataleptic trance and doctors were hoodwinked.'
'Yes,' I said faintly. How did he come to understand all that?
'And,' he went on, 'when I continue to insist I have solved time travel and that I was indisputably pronounced dead and was not indisputably alive, orthodox scientists will heatedly denounce me as a fraud. Why, in one week, I will have become a household name to every man on Earth. They will talk of nothing else. I will offer to make a demonstration of time travel before any group of scientists who wish to see it. I will offer to make the demonstration on an intercontinental TV circuit. Public pressure will force scientists to attend, and the networks to give permission. It doesn't matter whether people will watch hoping for a miracle or for a lynching. They will watch! And the n I will succeed and who in science will ever have had a more transcendent climax to his life?'
I was dazzled for a moment, but something unmoved within me said: Too long, too complicated; something will go wrong.
That evening, his assistants arrived and tried to be respectfully grieving in the presence of the corpse.
Two more witness to swear they had seen Lancelot dead; two more witnesses to confuse the issue and help build events to their stratospheric peak.
By four the next morning, we were in the cold-room, bundled in overcoats and waiting for zero moment. Lancelot, in high excitement, kept checking his instruments and doing I-know-not-what with them. His desk computer was working constantly, though how he could make his cold fingers jiggle the keys so nimbly, I am at a loss to say.
I, myself, was quite miserable. There was the cold, the dead body in the coffin, the uncertainty of the future.
We had been there for what seemed an eternity and finally Lancelot said, 'It will work. It will work as predicted. At the most, disappearance will be five minutes late and this when seventy kilograms of mass are involved. My analysis of chronous forces is masterly indeed.' He smiled at me, but he also smiled at his own corpse with equal warmth.
I noticedthat his lab jacket, which he had been wearing constantly for three days now, sleeping in it I am certain, had become wrinkled and shabby. It was about as it had seemed upon the second Lancelot, the dead one,