I was not nearly as disturbed the second time as I had been the first. In fact, I had been waiting, night after night, for it to happen again; disappointed when it hadn't.
I suppose I ought to have wondered it if were all the result of some mental disorder, but I didn't. I didn't even care whether it was or not. It had made sense and if that was disorder, then I wanted more of it.
And one night, finally, the time came when a dim light broke in on my uneasy sleep and began to grow brighter. I knew it was happening, of course, and I sat up.
He was there! Benjamin Franklin! It was just as it had been before.
"Mr. Franklin," I said, eagerly, "I've been waiting for two months for you to return."
Slowly, Benjamin Franklin, or his vision, put on his bifocal glasses and peered at me. "Two months, you say? It was only last night for me. The first day of the new year of 1790 is over, and at midnight it will be January 2--or was, for it is past midnight now by my time. Time goes differently for you and me, it would seem."
"I suppose so," I said.
"Rightly so. You are younger than I, and have many months to spare. I am old and perhaps have not." He looked at me closely for a while. "You are the same person that I saw before."
"Yes, I am."
He was too polite, perhaps, to look clearly disappointed and yet it seemed to me that he was masking just such a feeling. He said, "In the two months you have had, have you done anything about our discussion of, what was to me at least, last night?"
I said, "I have tried, sir. I have written of it, word for word, and it will be published."
"Written of it?" Franklin's aged fingers drummed briefly on his bedclothes. "Only that?"
"It is all I can do," I said. "I am not a member of the government."
He raised himself in his bed and leaned back against his plump pillows. "You read my mind," he said, frowning. "In this strange trance in which you and I find ourselves these nights, our communication does not seem to be by word alone."
I shrugged and felt the texture of the sheet that wrapped me. It seemed somehow faint to the touch as if it and I were not quite part of the same universe. I said, "Perhaps it is only a kind of dream, sir. That doesn't matter as long as we talk sense, does it?"
"What is your profession, sir?"
"I am a writer, Mr. Franklin."
"Like myself."
I spread out my hands. "I would not make that comparison."
"And what is it you write?"
"Many things. I am best known as a science fiction writer."
"That is an odd phrase. I am not familiar with it."
"I write romances based on science--or natural philosophy, to use the term familiar to you--as one imagines it to have developed in the future." I thought for examples that Franklin might know. "The third part of Swift's tales of Gulliver's travels," I said, "might be considered science fiction. Tales of flights to the moon, such as that written by the Frenchman, Cyrano de Bergerac, would be examples, also."
"Fantasies!" said Franklin, smiling broadly. "I see. A writer of such tales may say a great many things without being considered a dangerous madman. It is why I make contact with you, then; a certain madness is but to be expected of you."
I stiffened a bit, I think. "In the hands of a competent writer, these tales are disciplined fantasies."
"Ah, yes, you told me last night that men had indeed, and in sober truth, reached the moon. This statement of yours is not what you call science fiction now, eh?"
"No, sir. In truth and in fact, it is so. Even as I talk now, a man-made device is skirting the great planet, Jupiter, which is nearly two thousand times as far away from us as the moon. This device will take photographs of Jupiter--mechanically made portraits produced when light falls upon appropriate chemicals--that will be sent back to earth."
Franklin shook his head. "And your science fiction romances go beyond this unbelievable event?"
I said, "My world seems like a science fiction world even to those of us who have lived through the recent years to reach the present."
)
