Professor Figwort Comes to an Understanding
by Jacob Edwards
P |
rofessor Figwort made the last of his great discoveries at gunpoint.
By life’s clock he was now a reclusive but sprightly octogenarian. Fort Figwort echoed with the sounds of grey matter as he hopped from peak to peak. Leaps of genius, made with abandon. Nothing could disturb the good Professor here atop his mountain retreat.
Or so he thought.
Then one night, during a temporal thunderstorm that would have had even Doctor Frankenstein raising an eyebrow or two, the air around him warbled and a shadowy figure appeared. Figwort regarded it with myopic interest.
“Figwort,” a voice whispered, its timbre as of a fluttering kite. “Professor Phileas Figwort. I come to you on your night of triumph. I come from the stagnant waters of the future. Everything changes after tonight. Here, now, the hour of deliverance. So understand this, Professor: I cannot let you live.”
Figwort pulled in his chin and blinked several times, slowly. Wild tufts of hair poked out through the holes in his skullcap, lit green by the phosphorescent discharges outside. He looked like a tortoise.
“I recognise your intellect,” the shadowy figure continued. “I acknowledge your good intentions. But you walk the road to ruin.” The voice flapped and swooped. Figwort ducked. “In the future there will be no more food for thought. The brains of humanity will feed off each other like piranha fish in an ever-shrinking ecosystem. So understand this, Professor Figwort: your great work must be undone.”
Phileas Figwort cocked his head to one side, carapace gleaming, his brain on a wispy hair-trigger. Outside, the storm raged with thumping vehemence. A bolt struck down from on high.
“Here, now.” the voice sparked. “Understand this.”
Life flashed.
In the course of a career that planted him firmly amongst the Giant Sequoias of science, Phileas Figwort made three great discoveries, all of which went unrecorded.
Bearing in mind its ending, Figwort’s is thus a cautionary tale. Hope need not beget the child of expectation. Time contraceives and, in this case, the good Professor performed his magnum opus as a soliloquised swan song—three fading notes in the unwritten annals of history.
It all began at university when a titivated young Figwort inferred the existence of molecular sexuality. His inspiration at the time was Miss Prunella Bonsoir, a human movements student with whom he was enamoured. He wrote a rather soppy paper on the subject and slipped it under her door.
Not being of mind to tiptoe through the black tulips of scientific speculation, Miss Prunella perhaps did not appreciate the finer points of Figwort’s treatise. She leafed through it with brow daintily furrowed, her wide, discerning eyes picking out only two words. “Phileas Figwort?” she murmured, passing the foolscap to her best friend. “Does that have something to do with athlete’s foot?”
“It’s a love letter!” her friend shrieked. (She must have noticed that the flow of the handwriting perfectly mirrored the EKG of a pounding heart.) “To you, from Figgy Figwort!”
Mirth spread through the dormitory as if on the back of a collapsing domino chain. The letter was passed around and was even published in the student newspaper. Everyone who read it fell over laughing, except for Prunella Bonsoir and, of course, a mortified young Figwort, who vowed his revenge.
The resulting demonstration of molecular sexuality kept the newsmen titillated for several days.
UNDERGRADUATE MOLECULES AGITATED IN DORMITORY DELIGHT!
“BONSOIR, MISS BONSOIR!” COLLEGE QUEEN REVEALS ALL!
Amidst the scandal and the official investigations, people largely overlooked the genius that underlay Figwort’s discovery. In fact, young Figgy was driven so far as to point the cold metal finger at himself; but, having inexplicably misplaced his gun, found no outlet for this resolve and so turned pell-mell to a hot and hastily infused cup of something not entirely unlike tea.
It was then that he divined a solution to his new-found problems: he would travel back in time and stop himself from disturbing Miss Bonsoir in the first place—on any level, molecular or otherwise. Yes, that ought to do it. While he was there, he might even return those now-overdue library books.
Time travel itself posed no difficulties for a brain lashed by tannins. Figwort sat back, lips puckering. The idea popped out in a styrofoam cup. “All I have to do is break my temporal anchor,” he murmured. “Yes, and link my physical body to the intangible essence of memory.” He ruminated for a moment. “Of course. The limits are conceptual, not physical; and as the fourth dimension runs wild within the confines of my three, the whole process should be self-powered. Yes, just flip the switch.”
So saying, he made a face like a constipated owl and hopped back in time. “Oh, Prunella,” he exclaimed, ambushing his earlier self outside Miss Bonsoir’s dormitory and landing a featherweight punch on his own nose. “It was for thee.” He then grabbed the billet doux on molecular sexuality and made a run for it, grimacing as a new memory brought his former self’s pain flooding back.
With a reproving glare at his own retreating shoulder blades, pre-Prunella Figwort dabbed a handkerchief at his bloodied nose and muttered something uncomplimentary.
Suddenly remembering precisely what that something was, post-Prunella Figwort turned his head to make a riposte, but tripped, flapped his scrawny arms and with a startled hoot vanished back into the future.
Where and when he found that Phileas Figwort remained an anathema and molecular sexuality was still very much in the public domain.
Nothing had changed.
So what had become of his attempted hack job on history? Why had his life, having turned turtle, somehow managed not to right itself again? Figwort puzzled over this for a few seconds and then, like a burst of water from a re-pressurised tap, his brain was doused with newly created memories that had been carried forward in time from pre-Prunella Figwort. Suddenly, he recalled seeing his latter self trip and disappear; watching the now unattached sheaves of paper flutter poetically to the ground; reclaiming them and hotfooting it back to Prunella’s dormitory, thence nervously to flatten out his beating heart and disclose his feelings for the lovely Miss Bonsoir.
From his newfound vantage point in the present, Figwort massaged a bruise on his head and gnashed his teeth around a handful of aspirin. Unbelievable. Causality had humbugged him.
And this turned out to be a recurring sore point, for—try as he might—Figwort just could not deter his pre-Prunella self or change the disastrous outcome of his unrequited love for Miss Bonsoir. (Who, incidentally, remained bat-eyed oblivious to the temporal battle being waged for her by Figworts past, present and future.) Something always went wrong and, despite many valiant attempts, Figwort never managed to triumph in his tussle with history. He could save neither himself from Miss Prunella nor Miss Prunella from himself. Bonsoir sera sera, he eventually concluded. He couldn’t even take his library books back.
But in the end that didn’t matter. Time travel was quite notable in its own right, and as the world turned one way, opinions turned the other. Soon, most people were willing to gloss over young Figgy’s undergraduate faux pas. All that was necessary, in fact, was for Phileas to overcome that first great obsession—which he did, thanks to an accidental encounter between him, his earlier self and a discerning if slightly tipsy fellow from the history department. “One of you is from the future,” the man observed after watching the bickering Figworts for a few minutes. “Do come and see me later on.”
In terms of linear time, the lure of Prunella Bonsoir at first distracted Figwort and delayed his acceptance of this invitation; but the post-Prunella Figwort showed no such hesitation. He slipped back to the future and immediately knocked on the man’s door.
“Come in,” said the history fellow. “Oh, it’s you—Figwort, isn’t it? Go away.”
“But you asked me here.”
“I was drunk; and besides, that was weeks ago, before you came out with all that molecular sexuality nonsense.”
“Before and after, actually. You weren’t just seeing double.”
“Hmmm. Can you prove that? Tell me what I had for breakfast this morning.”
Figwort went toowit-toowoo and returned with a verdict of Eggs Benedict, his molecular indiscretions quickly forgotten. History bowed to the brilliant young Professor. Even the lovely Miss Bonsoir was relegated to a glossy insert in his biography, captioned:
Figwort’s Helen of Troy—the face that launched a thousand trips through time.
In truth, Prunella Bonsoir was the prettier of the two—Figwort could attest to that; but still he chose to move on, leaving Prunella behind in that timeless moment where molecular sexuality blossomed and Figwort’s own future was spawned.
Professor Phileas Figwort thus entered history as the pioneer and undisputed master of time travel. Having done so, he proceeded to make the first of his three great discoveries.
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