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I changed the subject and started talking about his "time machine." He didn't like the term. So far he'd discouraged all talk about his apparatus. With his vocal-cord problems it was easy for him to leave unwelcome questions unanswered. He avoided even the general subject of time-travel. He was pathologically suspicious, even of me, I sometimes thought. I tried again.
      Was that all it could do? Just give you poor flickering images without sound or color and capture old radio programs? I'd thought a time machine could transport you back and forth. I recalled H.G. Well's novel, no theoretical difficulties: a kind of nickel-plated bicycle with strategic crystals and the time-traveler zipped forward and back at will along the "time-continuum," from dinosaurs to the death of the planet, saving a nubile girl on the way.
      He said that chronoportation - what I called "time-travel" - was an impossibility, at least for objects of anything but minimal mass. A microbe maybe but not a man. And even this exception wasn't sure.
      Then you couldn't go back in the past? He replied, "Mentally it might be possible." Did he mean memory? I asked. You didn't need a machine for that. No, not memory, he said, scowling. Something else. He clammed up. "You wouldn't understand. You haven't got the mathematical basis," he said.
      I felt the old inferiority. To prove I knew a little of what was involved I trotted out the scraps I'd picked up from Wells and the gaudy-covered SF pulp magazines of the 40s. I said that in a sense whatever we see is the past and cited the example of the galaxy Andromeda. To see the two of us chatting here in this ex-garden right now, inhabitants of Andromeda would have to wait a million years.
      "Two point two million," he corrected. "Andromeda is roughly. Two point two million. Light years away."
      With the correction I remembered that he was the one who had told me the Andromeda business in the first place, long, long ago. To cover my confusion I gulped down the whiskey in my glass and poured out more. At an advanced age I was parroting what he had said at the age of thirteen and was getting it wrong.
      Forgetting he'd just told me that chronoportation was impossible I asked him about travel to the future rather than to the past. Did we really want to go back and live that sinister mess, collective and personal, all over again, without the power to change the course of things? Did we really want even to witness it? The history of mankind had its ups and downs. Couldn't he, Harvey, pinpoint one of the heights in the future, something pastoral but hygienic, and whisk us there, to a golden green time where people got on together, where they could heal what was ailing us in soul and body, no alimony, no time erosions, where you lived hale to the age of Methuselah or beyond? Or forever, why not forever? Something like a walking-over-God's-heaven time, gonna meet my mother there, ain't gonna study war no more, except it would be on earth. Couldn't that be done?
      He shook his head. He said the future was purely conceptual. It had no reality. "That's your pulp-magazines again. The future doesn't exist."
      I didn't put up much of a struggle. He didn't have to knock himself out to convince me. For decades I'd been believing in no future and now I had scientific confirmation.

The day we tested it out Harvey edicted a celebration. Strangely: before, not after. He was so sure of himself. He'd never heard of hubris ("overweening God-defiant pride," I'd defined the concept to my students). Suddenly after months and months he noticed the mess. He made Hanna clean up the living room, a very little bit. She banged all the furniture viciously with the vacuum cleaner. The dust-bag must have been full or the dirt encrusted because the machine's passage made no impression on the carpet. She did get rid of the dish with rice-crispies glued to the sides, actually took it into the kitchen. I'd seen it there on the table the first day I came. Now there was a wreath of dried milk as a memorial.
      He had her bring out a bottle of sweet white wine (Lord's Vineyards: the grower's name was Philip Lord) and three red cut-glass goblets. I vaguely remembered the goblets from thirty years back. They were dusty and chipped now. The white wine looked like coagulated blood in them. As I was sipping the sickening stuff he told me to smile. "Maybe you'll be seeing yourself. As you were now. In half an hour." The thought made me feel self-conscious in my movements. I smiled slightly. I wanted to be worthy of resurrection.
      Then we went down into the dim red light of the cellar.
      "Here we go," he whispered solemnly and the sound built up unbearably. "Look!" he commanded and pressed buttons.
      Tensely I stared and stared at the dark screen in the darkness.
      Time went by.
      Nothing came.
      Nothing at all.
      Hubris.
      I began to relax.

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