I Am Crying All Inside : And Other Stories

Gleaners

He went sneaking past the door.

The lettering on the door said: Executive Vice President, Projects.

And down in the lower left corner, Hallock Spencer, in very modest type.

That was him. He was Hallock Spencer.

But he wasn’t going in that door. He had trouble enough already without going in. There’d be people waiting there for him. No one in particular—but people. And each of them with problems.

He ducked around the corner and went a step or two down the corridor until he came to another door that said Private on it.

It was unlocked. He went in.

A dowdy scarecrow in a faded, dusty toga sat tipped back in a chair, with his sandaled feet resting on Hallock Spencer’s desk top. He wore a mouse-gray woolen cap upon his hairless skull and his ears stuck out like wings. A short sword, hanging from the belt that snugged in the toga, stood canted with its point resting on the carpet. There was dirt beneath his rather longish toenails and he hadn’t shaved for days. He was a total slob.

“Hello, E.J.,” said Spencer.

The man in the toga didn’t take his feet off the desk. He didn’t move at all. He just sat there.

“Sneaking in again,” he said.

Spencer put down his briefcase and hung up his hat.

“The reception room’s a trap,” he said.

He sat down in the chair behind the desk and picked up the project schedule and had a look at it.

“What’s the trouble, E.J.?” he asked. “You back already?”

“Haven’t started yet. Not for another couple hours.”

“It says here,” said Spencer, flicking the schedule with a finger, “that you’re a Roman trader.”

“That’s what I am,” said E.J. “At least, Costumes says so. I hope to God they’re right.”

“But the sword—”

“Pardner,” said E.J., “back in Roman Britain, out on a Roman road, with a pack train loaded down with goods, a man has got to carry steel.”

He reached down and hoisted the sword into his lap. He regarded it with disfavor. “But I don’t mind telling you it’s no great shakes of a weapon.”

“I suppose you’d feel safer with a tommy gun.”

E.J. nodded glumly. “Yes, I would.”

“Lacking that,” said Spencer, “we do the best we can. You’ll pack the finest steel in the second century. If that is any comfort.”

E.J. just sat there with the sword across his lap. He was making up his mind to say something—it was written on his face. He was a silly-looking soul, with all those wiry whiskers and his ears way out to either side of him and the long black hairs that grew out of the lobes.

“Hal,” said E.J., finally making up his mind, “I want out of this.”

Spencer stiffened in his chair. “You can’t do that!” he yelled. “Time is your very life. You’ve been in it for a lot of years!”

“I don’t mean out of Time. I mean out of Family Tree. I am sick of it.”

“You don’t know what you’re saying,” Spencer protested. “Family Tree’s not tough. You’ve been on a lot of worse ones. Family Tree’s a snap. All you have to do is go back and talk to people or maybe check some records. You don’t have to snitch a thing.”

“It’s not the work,” said E.J. “Sure, the work is easy. I don’t mind the work. It’s after I get back.”

“You mean the Wrightson-Graves.”

“That is what I mean. After every trip, she has me up to that fancy place of hers and I have to tell her all about her venerable ancestors …”

Spencer said, “It’s a valuable account. We have to service it.”

“I can’t stand much more of it,” E.J. insisted, stubbornly.

Spencer nodded. He knew just what E.J. meant. He felt much the same.

Alma Wrightson-Graves was a formidable old dowager with a pouter-pigeon build and the erroneous conviction that she still retained much of her girlish charm. She was loaded down with cash, and also with jewels that were too costly and gaudy to be good taste. For years she’d shrieked down and bought off everyone around her until she firmly believed there was nothing in the world she couldn’t have—if she was willing to pay enough for it.

And she was paying plenty for this family tree of hers. Spencer had often asked himself just why she wanted it. Back to the Conquest, sure—that made at least some sense. But not back to the caves. Not that Past, Inc., couldn’t trace it that far for her if her cash continued to hold out. He thought, with a perverted satisfaction, that she couldn’t have been happy with the last report or two, for the family had sunk back to abject peasantry.

He said as much to E.J. “What does she want?” he asked. “What does she expect?”

“I have a hunch,” E.J. told him, “that she has some hopes we’ll find a connection back to Rome. God help us if we do. Then it could go on forever.”

Spencer grunted.

“Don’t be too sure,” warned E.J. “Roman officers being what they were I wouldn’t bet against it.”

“If that should happen,” Spencer told him. “I’ll take you off the project. Assign someone else to carry out the Roman research. I’ll tell the Wrightson-Graves you’re not so hot on Rome—have a mental block or a psychic allergy or something that rejects indoctrination.”

“Thanks a lot,” said E.J., without much enthusiasm.

One by one, he took his dirty feet off the shiny desk and rose out of the chair.

“E.J.?”

“Yes, Hal.”

“Just wondering. Have you ever hit a place where you felt that you should stay? Have you ever wondered if maybe you should stay?”

“Yeah, I guess so. Once or twice, perhaps. But I never did. You’re thinking about Garson.”

“Garson for one. And all the others.”

“Maybe something happened to him. You get into tight spots. It’s a simple matter to make a big mistake. Or the operator might have missed.”

“Our operators never miss,” snapped Spencer.

“Garson was a good man,” said E.J., a little sadly.

“Garson! It’s not only Garson. It’s all the …” Spencer stopped abruptly, for he’d run into it again. After all these years, he still kept running into it. No matter how he tried, it was something to which he could not reconcile himself—the disparity in time.

He saw that E.J. was staring at him, with just the slightest crinkle that was not quite a smile at the corner of his mouth.

“You can’t let it eat you,” said E.J. “You’re not responsible. We take our chances. If it wasn’t worth our while …”

“Oh, shut up!” said Spencer.

“Sure,” said E.J., “you lose one of us every now and then. But it’s no worse than any other business.”

“Not one every now and then,” said Spencer. “There have been three of them in the last ten days.”

“Well, now,” said E.J. “I lose track of them. There was Garson just the other day. And Taylor—how long ago was that?”

“Four days ago,” said Spencer.

“Four days,” said E.J., astonished. “Is that all it was?”

Spencer snapped, “For you it was three months or more. And do you remember Price? For you that was a year ago, but just ten days for me.”

E.J. put up a dirty paw and scrubbed at the bristle on his chin.

“How time does fly!”

“Look,” said Spencer, miserably, “this whole set-up is bad enough. Please don’t make jokes about it.”

“Garside been giving you a hard time, maybe? Losing too many of the men?”

“Hell, no,” said Spencer, bitterly. “You can always get more men. It’s the machines that bother him. He keeps reminding me they cost a quarter million.”

E.J. made a rude sound with his lips.

“Get out of here!” yelled Spencer. “And see that you come home!”

E.J. grinned and left. He gave the toga a girlish flirt as he went out the door.

Spencer told himself E.J. was wrong. For whatever anyone might say, he, Hallock Spencer, was responsible. He ran the stinking show. He made up the schedules. He assigned the travelers and he sent them out. When there were mistakes or hitches, he was the one who answered. To himself, if no one else.

He got up and paced the floor, hands locked behind his back.

Three men in the last ten days. And what had happened to them?

Possibly there was something to what Garside said, as well—Christopher Anson Garside, chief co-ordinator and a nasty man to handle, with his clipped, gray mustache and his clipped, gray voice and his clipped, gray business thinking.

For it was not men alone who did not come back. It was likewise the training and experience you had invested in those men. They lasted, Spencer told himself, a short time at the best without managing to get themselves killed off somewhere in the past, or deciding to squat down and settle in some other era they liked better than the present.

And the machines were something that could not be dismissed. Every time a man failed to return it meant another carrier lost. And the carriers did cost a quarter million—which wasn’t something you could utterly forget.

Spencer went back to his desk and had another look at the schedule for the day. There was E.J. bound for Roman Britain on the Family Tree project; Nickerson going back to the early Italian Renaissance to check up once again on the missing treasure in the Vatican; Hennessy off on his search once more for the lost documents in fifteenth-century Spain; Williams going out, he hoped, finally to snatch the mislaid Picasso, and a half dozen more. Not a massive schedule. But enough to spell out a fairly busy day.

He checked the men not on the projects list. A couple of them were on vacation. One was in Rehabilitation. Indoctrination had the rest of them.

He sat there, then, for the thousandth time, wondering what it would be like, really, to travel into time.

He’d heard hints of it from some of the travelers, but no more than hints, for they did not talk about it. Perhaps they did among themselves, when there were no outsiders present. Perhaps not even then. As if it were something that no man could quite describe. As if it were an experience that no man should discuss.

A haunting sense of unreality, the feeling that one was out of place, a hint of not quite belonging, of somehow standing, tip-toe, on the far edge of eternity.

It wore off after a time, of course, but apparently one was never entirely free of it. For the past, in some mysterious working of a principle yet unknown, was a world of wild enchantment.

Well, he had had his chance and flunked it.

But some day, he told himself, he would go into time. Not as a regular traveler, but as a vacationist—if he could snatch the necessary time to get ready for the trip. The trip, itself, of course, was no consideration so far as time might be concerned. It was Indoctrination and the briefing that was time-consuming.

He picked up the schedule again for another look. All of those who were going back this day were good men. There was no need to worry about any one of them.

He laid the schedule to one side and buzzed Miss Crane.

Miss Crane was a letter-perfect secretary, though she wasn’t much to look at. She was a leathery old maid. She had her own way of doing things, and she could act very disapproving.

No choice of his, Spencer had inherited her fifteen years before. She had been with Past, Inc., before there was even a projects office. And, despite her lack of looks, her snippy attitude and her generally pessimistic view of life, she was indispensable.

She knew the projects job as well as he did. At times she let him know it. But she never forgot, never mislaid, never erred; she ran an efficient office, always got her work done and it always was on time.

Spence, dreaming at times of a lusher young replacement, knew that he was no more than dreaming. He couldn’t do his job without Miss Crane in the outer office.

“You sneaked in again,” she accused him as soon as she’d closed the door.

“I suppose there’s someone waiting.”

“There’s a Dr. Aldous Ravenholt,” she said. “He’s from Foundation for Humanity.”

Spencer flinched. There was no one worse to start a morning with than some pompous functionary from Humanity. They almost always figured that you owed them something. They thought the whole world owed them something.

“And there’s a Mr. Stewart Cabell. He’s an applicant sent up by Personnel. Mr. Spencer, don’t you think …”

“No, I don’t,” Spencer snapped at her. “I know Personnel is sore. But I’ve been taking everyone they’ve been shoveling up here and see what happens. Three men gone in the last ten days. From now on, I’m taking a close look at everyone myself.”

She sniffed. It was a very nasty sniff.

“That’s all?” asked Spencer, figuring that he couldn’t be that lucky—just two of them.

“Also there’s a Mr. Boone Hudson. He’s an elderly man who looks rather ill and he seems impatient. Perhaps you should see him first.”

Spence might have, but not after she said that.

“I’ll see Ravenholt,” he said. “Any idea what he wants?”

“No, sir.”

“Well, send him in,” said Spencer. “He’ll probably want to chisel a slice of Time off me.”

Chiselers, he thought. I didn’t know there were so many chiselers!

Aldous Ravenholt was a pompous man, well satisfied and smug. You could have buttered bread with the crease in his trousers. His handshake was professional and he had an automatic smile. He sat down in the chair that Spencer offered him with a self-assurance that was highly irritating.

“I came to talk with you,” he said precisely, “about the pending proposal to investigate religious origins.”

Spencer winced mentally. It was a tender subject.

“Dr. Ravenholt,” he said, “that is a matter I have given a great deal of attention. Not myself alone, but my entire department.”

“That is what I’ve heard,” Ravenholt said drily. “That is why I’m here. I understand you have tentatively decided not to go ahead with it.”

“Not tentatively,” said Spencer. “Our decision has been made. I’m curious how you heard it.”

Ravenholt waved an airy hand, implying there was very little he did not know about. “I presume the matter still is open to discussion.”

Spencer shook his head.

Ravenholt said, icily, “I fail to see how you could summarily cut off an investigation so valid and so vital to all humanity.”

“Not summarily, Dr. Ravenholt. We spent a lot of time on it. We made opinion samplings. We had an extensive check by Psych. We considered all the factors.”

“And your findings, Mr. Spencer?”

“First of all,” said Spencer, just a little nettled, “it would be too time-consuming. As you know, our license specifies that we donate ten per cent of our operation time to public interest projects. This we are most meticulous in doing, although I don’t mind telling you there’s nothing that gives us greater headaches.”

“But that ten per cent …”

“If we took up this project you are urging, doctor, we’d use up all our public interest time for several years at least. That would mean no other programs at all.”

“But surely you’ll concede that no other proposal could be in a greater public interest.”

“That’s not our findings,” Spencer told him. “We took opinion samplings in every area of Earth, in all possible cross-sections. We came up with—sacrilege.”

“You’re joking, Mr. Spencer!”

“Not at all,” said Spencer. “Our opinion-taking showed quite conclusively that any attempt to investigate world-wide religious origins would be viewed by the general public in a sacrilegious light. You and I, perhaps, could look upon it as research. We could resolve all our questioning by saying we sought no more nor less than truth. But the people of the world—the simple, common people of every sect and faith in the entire world—do not want the truth. They are satisfied with things just as they are. They’re afraid we would upset a lot of the old, comfortable traditions. They call it sacrilege and it’s partly that, of course, but it’s likewise an instinctive defense reaction against upsetting their thinking. They have a faith to cling to. It has served them through the years and they don’t want anyone to fool around with it.”

“I simply can’t believe it,” said Ravenholt, aghast at such blind provincialism.

“I have the figures. I can show you.”

Dr. Ravenholt waved his hand condescendingly and gracefully.

“If you say you have them, I am sure you have.”

He wasn’t taking any chances of being proven wrong.

“Another thing,” said Spencer, “is objectivity. How do you select the men to send back to observe the facts?”

“I am sure that we could get them. There are many men of the cloth, of every creed and faith, who would be amply qualified …”

“Those are just the ones we would never think of sending,” said Spencer. “We need objectivity. Ideally, the kind of man we need is one who has no interest in religion, who has no formal training in it, one who is neither for it nor against it—and yet, we couldn’t use that sort of man even if we found him. For to understand what is going on, he’d have to have a rather thorough briefing on what he was to look for. Once you trained him, he’d be bound to lose his objectivity. There is something about religion that forces one to take positions on it.”

“Now,” said Ravenholt, “you are talking about the ideal investigative situation, not our own.”

“Well, all right, then,” conceded Spencer. “Let’s say we decide to do a slightly sloppy job. Who do we send then? Could any Christian, I ask you, no matter how poor a Christian he might be, safely be sent back to the days that Jesus spent on Earth? How could one be sure that even mediocre Christians would do no more than observe the facts? I tell you, Dr. Ravenholt, we could not take the chance. What would happen, do you think, if we suddenly should have thirteen instead of twelve disciples? What if someone should try to rescue Jesus from the Cross? Worse yet, what if He actually were rescued? Where would Christianity be then? Would there be Christianity? Without the Crucifixion, would it ever have survived?”

“Your problem has a simple answer,” Ravenholt said coldly. “Do not send a Christian.”

“Now we are really getting somewhere,” said Spencer. “Let’s send a Moslem to get the Christian facts and a Christian to track down the life of Buddha—and a Buddhist to investigate black magic in the Belgian Congo.”

“It could work,” said Ravenholt.

“It might work, but you wouldn’t get objectivity. You’d get bias and, worse yet, perfectly honest misunderstanding.”

Ravenholt drummed impatient fingers on his well-creased knee. “I can see your point,” he agreed, somewhat irritably, “but there is something you have overlooked. The findings need not be released in their entirety to the public.”

“But if it’s in the public interest? That’s what our license says.”

“Would it help,” asked Ravenholt, “if I should offer certain funds which could be used to help defray the costs?”

“In such a case,” said Spencer, blandly, “the requirement would not be met. It’s either in the public interest, without any charge at all, or it’s a commercial contract paid for at regular rates.”

“The obvious fact,” Ravenholt said flatly, “is that you do not want to do this job. You may as well admit it.”

“Most cheerfully,” said Spencer. “I willingly wouldn’t touch it with a ten-foot pole. What worries me right now is why you’re here.”

Ravenholt said, “I thought that with the project about to be rejected, I possibly could serve as a sort of mediator.”

“You mean you thought we could be bribed.”

“Not at all,” said Ravenholt wrathfully. “I was only recognizing that the project was perhaps a cut beyond what your license calls for.”

“It’s all of that,” said Spencer.

“I cannot fully understand your objection to it,” Ravenholt persisted.

“Dr. Ravenholt,” said Spencer gently, “how would you like to be responsible for the destruction of a faith?”

“But,” stammered Ravenholt, “there is no such possibility …”

“Are you certain?” Spencer asked him. “How certain are you, Dr. Ravenholt? Even the black magic of the Congo?”

“Well, I—well, since you put it that way …”

“You see what I mean?” asked Spencer.

“But even so,” argued Ravenholt, “there could be certain facts suppressed …”

“Come now! How long do you think you could keep it bottled up? Anyway, when Past, Inc., does a job,” Spencer told him firmly, “it goes gunning for the truth. And when we learn it, we report it. That is the one excuse we have for our continuing existence. We have a certain project here—a personal, full-rate contract—in which we have traced a family tree for almost two thousand years. We have been forced to tell our client some unpleasant things. But we told them.”

“That’s part of what I’m trying to convey to you,” shouted Ravenholt, shaken finally out of his ruthless calm. “You are willing to embark upon the tracing of a family tree, but you refuse this!”

“And you are confusing two utterly different operations! This investigation of religious origins is a public interest matter. Family Tree is a private account for which we’re being paid.”

Ravenholt rose angrily. “We’ll discuss this some other time, when we both can keep our temper.”

Spencer said wearily, “It won’t do any good. My mind is made up.”

“Mr. Spencer,” Ravenholt said, nastily, “I’m not without recourse.”

“Perhaps you’re not. You can go above my head. If that is what you’re thinking, I’ll tell you something else: You’ll carry out this project over my dead body. I will not, Dr. Ravenholt, betray the faith of any people in the world.”

“We’ll see,” said Ravenholt, still nasty.

“Now,” said Spencer, “you’re thinking that you can have me fired. Probably you could. Undoubtedly you know the very strings to pull. But it’s no solution.”

“I would think,” said Ravenholt, “it would be the perfect one.”

“I’d still fight you as a private citizen. I’d take it to the floor of the United Nations if I had to.”

They both were on their feet now, facing one another across the width of desk.

“I’m sorry,” Spencer said, “that it turned out this way. But I meant everything I said.”

“So did I,” said Ravenholt, stalking out the door.

Spencer sat down slowly in his chair.

A swell way to start a day, he told himself.

But the guy had burned him up.

Miss Crane came in the door with a sheaf of papers for his desk.

“Mr. Spencer,” shall I send in Mr. Hudson? He’s been waiting a long time.”

“Is Hudson the applicant?”

“No, that is Mr. Cabell.”

“Cabell is the man I want to see. Bring me his file.” She sniffed contemptuously and left.

Damn her, Spencer told himself, I’ll see who I want to see when I want to see them!

He was astounded at the violence of his thought. What was wrong with him? Nothing was going right. Couldn’t he get along with anyone any more?

Too tensed up, he thought. Too many things to do, too much to worry over.

Maybe what he ought to do was walk out into Operations and step into a carrier for a long vacation. Back to the Old Stone Age, which would require no indoctrination. There wouldn’t be too many people, perhaps none at all. But there’d be mosquitoes. And cave bears. And saber-tooths and perhaps a lot of other things equally obnoxious. And he’d have to get some camping stuff together and—oh, the hell with it!

But it was not a bad idea.

He’d thought about it often. Some day he would do it. Meanwhile, he picked up the sheaf of papers Miss Crane had dropped upon his desk.

They were the daily batch of future assignments dreamed up by the Dirty Tricks department. There was always trouble in them. He felt himself go tense as he picked them up.

The first one was a routine enough assignment—an investigation of some tributes paid the Goths by Rome. There was, it seemed, a legend that the treasure had been buried somewhere in the Alps. It might never have been recovered. That was S.O.P., checking up on buried treasure.

But the second paper—

“Miss Crane!” he yelled.

She was coming through the door, with a file clutched in her hand. Her face changed not a whit at his yelp of anguish; she was used to it.

“What is the matter, Mr. Spencer?” she inquired, at least three degrees too calmly.

Spencer banged his fist down on the pile of sheets. “They can’t do this to me! I won’t stand for it. Get Rogers on the phone!”

“Yes, sir.”

“No, wait a minute there,” Spencer interrupted grimly. “This I can do better personal. I’ll go up and see him. In fact, I’ll take him apart barehanded.”

“But there are those people waiting …”

“Let them wait for a while. It will make them humble.”

He snatched up the assignment sheet and went striding out the door. He shunned the elevator. He climbed two flights of stairs. He went in a door marked Evaluation.

Rogers was sitting tilted back, with his feet up on the desk top, staring at the ceiling.

He glanced at Spencer with a bland concern. He took his feet down off the desk and sat forward in his chair.

“Well? What’s the matter this time?”

“This!” said Spencer, throwing the sheet down in front of him.

Rogers poked it with a delicate finger. “Nothing difficult there. Just a little ingenuity …”

“Nothing difficult!” howled Spencer. “Movies of Nero’s fire in Rome!”

Rogers sighed. “This movie outfit will pay us plenty for it.”

“And there’s nothing to it. One of my men can just walk out into the burning streets of Rome and set up a movie camera in an age where the principle of the camera hasn’t yet been thought of.”

“Well, I said it would call for some ingenuity,” said Rogers. “Look, there’ll be a lot of people running, carrying stuff, trying to save themselves and anything they can. They won’t pay any attention to your man. He can cover the camera with something so that it will look …”

“It’ll be an ugly crowd,” insisted Spencer. “It won’t like the city being burned. There’ll be rumors that the Christians are the ones who set the fire. That crowd will be looking for suspicious characters.”

“There’s always an element of danger,” Rogers pointed out.

“Not as dangerous as this!” said Spencer, testily. “Not deliberately asking for it. And there is something else.”

“Like what?”

“Like introducing an advanced technology to the past. If that crowd beat up my man and busted the camera …”

Rogers shrugged. “What difference if they did? They could make nothing of it.”

“Maybe. But what I’m really worried about,” Spencer persisted, “is what the watchdog group would say when they audit our records. It would have to be worth an awful lot of money before I’d take a chance.”

“Believe me, it is worth a lot of money. And it would open up a new field for us. That’s why I liked it.”

“You guys in Dirty Tricks,” said Spencer, bitterly, “just don’t give a damn. You’ll hand us anything …”

“Not everything,” said Rogers. “Sales pushed us pretty hard on this one …”

“Sales!” spat Spencer, contempt in his voice.

“There was a woman in here the other day,” said Rogers. “She wanted to send her two children to their great-great-grandfather’s farm back in the nineteenth century. For a vacation, mind you. A summer in the country in another century. Said it would be educational and quite relaxing for them. Said the old folks would understand and be glad to have them once we had explained.”

Rogers sighed. “I had quite a session with her. She pooh-poohed our regulations. She said …”

“You passed up a good one there,” Spencer said sarcastically. “That would have opened up another field—vacations in the past. I can see it now. Family reunions with old friends and neighbors foregathering across the centuries.”

“You think you are the only one who has his troubles.”

“I am bleeding for you,” Spencer told him.

“There’s a TV outfit,” Rogers said, “that wants interviews with Napoleon and Caesar and Alexander and all the rest of those ancient big shots. There are hunters who want to go back into the primordial wilderness to get a spot of shooting. There are universities that want to send teams of investigators back …”

“You know that all of that is out,” said Spencer. “The only ones we can send back are travelers we have trained.”

“There’ve been times.”

“Oh, sure, a few. But only when we got a special dispensation. And we sent along so many travelers to guard them that it was an expedition instead of a simple little study group.”

Spencer got up from his chair. “Well, what about this latest brainstorm?”

Rogers picked up the offending assignment sheet and tossed it into an overflowing basket.

“I’ll go down to Sales, with tears streaming down my cheeks …”

“Thanks,” said Spencer and went out.

Back in his office, he sat down at the desk and picked up the file on Cabell.

The squawk box gibbered at him. He thumbed up the lever.

“What is it?”

“Operations, Hal. Williams just got back. Everything’s okay; he snagged the Picasso without any trouble. Only took six weeks.”

“Six weeks!” Spencer yelled. “He could have painted it himself in that time!”

“There were complications.”

“Is there any time there aren’t?”

“It’s a good one, Hal. Not damaged. Worth a hunk of dough.”

“Okay,” said Spencer, “take it down to Customs and let them run it through. The good old government must be paid its duty. And what about the others?”

“Nickerson will be leaving in just a little while.”

“And E.J.?”

“He’s fussy about the time fix. He is telling Doug …”

“Look,” yelled Spencer wrathfully, “you tell him for me that the fix is Doug’s job. Doug knows more about it than E.J. ever will. When Doug says it’s time to hop, E.J. hops, funny cap and all.”

He snapped down the lever and turned back to the Cabell file, sitting quietly for a moment to let his blood pressure simmer down.

He got worked up too easily, he told himself. He blew his top too much. But there never was a job with so many aggravations!

He opened the folder and ran through the Cabell file.

Stewart Belmont Cabell, 27, unmarried, excellent references, a doctorate in sociology from an ivy college. A uniformly high score in all the tests, including attitude, and an astonishing I.Q. Unqualifiedly recommended for employment as a traveler.

Spencer closed the file and pushed it to one side.

“Send Mr. Cabell in,” he told Miss Crane.

Cabell was a lanky man, awkward in his movements; he seemed younger than he was. There was a certain shyness in his manner when Spencer shook his hand and pointed out a chair.

Cabell sat and tried, without success, to make himself at ease.

“So you want to come in with us,” said Spencer. “I suppose you know what you are doing.”

“Yes, sir,” said young Cabell. “I know all about it. Or perhaps I’d better say …”

He stammered and stopped talking.

“It’s all right,” said Spencer. “I take it you want this very much.”

Cabell nodded.

“I know how it is. You almost have the feeling you’ll die if you can’t do it.”

And he remembered, sitting there, how it had been with him—the terrible, tearing heartache when he’d been rejected as a traveler, and how he had stuck on regardless of that hurt and disappointment. First as operator; then as operations superintendent; finally to this desk, with all its many headaches.

“Not,” he said, “that I have ever travelled.”

“I didn’t know that, sir.”

“I wasn’t good enough. My attitudes were wrong.”

And he saw the old hope and hunger in the eyes of the man across the desk—and something else besides. Something vaguely disturbing.

“It’s not all fun,” he said, a shade more harshly than he had meant to make it. “At first there’s the romance and the glitter, but that soon wears off. It becomes a job. Sometimes a bitter one.”

He paused and looked at Cabell and the queer, disturbing light still was shining in his eyes.

“You should know,” he said, deliberately harsh this time, “that if you come in with us you’ll probably be dead of advanced old age in five years.”

Cabell nodded unconcernedly. “I know that, sir. The people down in Personnel explained it all to me.”

“Good,” said Spencer. “I suspect at times that Personnel makes a rather shabby explanation. They tell you just enough to make it sound convincing, but they do not tell it all. They are far too anxious to keep us well supplied. We’re always short of travelers; we run through them too fast.”

He paused and looked at the man again. There was no change in him.

“We have certain regulations,” Spencer told him. “They aren’t made so much by Past, Inc., as by the job itself. You cannot have any settled sort of life. You live out your life in pieces, like a patchwork quilt, hopping from neighborhood to neighborhood, and those neighborhoods all many years apart. There is no actual rule against it, but none of our travelers has ever married. It would be impossible. In five years the man would die of old age and his wife would still be young.”

“I think I understand, sir.”

“Actually,” Spencer said, “it’s a very simple matter of simple economics. We cannot afford to have either our machines or men tied up for any length of time. So while a man may be gone a week, a month, or years, the machine comes back, with him inside of it, sixty seconds after he has left. That sixty seconds is an arbitrary period; it could be a single second, it could be an hour or day or anything we wanted. One minute has seemed a practical period.”

“And,” asked Cabell, “if it does not come back within that minute?”

“Then it never will.”

“It sometimes happens?”

“Of course it happens. Time travelling is no picnic. Every time a man goes back he is betting his life that he can get along in an environment which is as totally alien, in some instances, as another planet. We help him every way we can, of course. We make it our business to see that he is well briefed and Indoctrinated and as well equipped as it is possible to make him. He is taught the languages he is likely to require. He is clothed properly. But there are instances when we simply do not know the little vital details which mean survival. Sometimes we learn them later when our man comes back and tells us. Usually he is quite profane about it. And some we don’t find out about at all. The man does not come back.”

“One would think,” said Cabell, “that you would like to scare me out.”

“No! I tell you this because I want no misunderstanding. It costs a lot to train a traveler. We must get our costs back. We do not want a man who will stay with us just a little while. We don’t want a year or two from you; we want your entire life. We’ll take you and we’ll wring you dry of every minute …”

“I can assure you, sir …”

“We’ll send you where we want you,” Spencer said, “and although we have no control of you once you’ve left, we expect that you’ll not fool around. Not that you won’t come back inside of sixty seconds—naturally you will, if you come back at all. But we want you to come back as young as possible. Past, Inc., is a pure commercial venture. We’ll squeeze all the trips we possibly can out of you.”

“I understand all this,” said Cabell, “but Personnel explained it would be to my advantage, too.”

“That is true, of course, but it’ll not take you long to find that money is of slight moment to a traveler. Since you have no family, or we would hope you haven’t, what would you need it for? The only leisure time you’ll have is a six weeks’ annual leave and you can earn enough in a trip or two to spend that leave in utmost luxury or the deepest vice.

“Most of the men, however, don’t even bother to do that. They just wander off and get re-acquainted with the era they were born into. Vice and luxury in this present century has but slight appeal to them after all the hell they’ve raised in past centuries at the company’s expense.”

“You are kidding, sir.”

“Well, maybe just a little. But in certain cases that I have in mind, it is the honest truth.”

Spencer stared across at Cabell.

“None of this bothers you?” he asked.

“Not a thing so far.”

“There’s just one thing else, Mr. Cabell, that you should know about. That is the need—the imperative, crying need for objectivity. When you go into the past, you take no part in it. You do not interfere. You must not get involved.”

“That should not be hard.”

“I warn you, Mr. Cabell, that it requires moral stamina. The man who travels in time has terrible power. And there’s something about the feel of power that makes it almost compulsive for a man to use it. Hand in hand with that power is the temptation to take a hand in history. To wield a judicious knife, to say a word that needs saying very badly. To save a life that, given a few more years of time, might have pushed the human race an extra step toward greatness.”

“It might be hard,” admitted Cabell.

Spencer nodded. “So far as I know, Mr. Cabell, no one has ever succumbed to these temptations. But I live in terror of the day when someone does.”

And he wondered as he said it how much he might be talking through his hat, might be whistling past the graveyard. For surely there must by now have been some interference.

What about the men who had not come back?

Some of them undoubtedly had died. But surely some had stayed. And wasn’t staying back there the worst form of intervention? What were the implications, he wondered, of a child born out of time—a child that had not been born before, that should never have been born? The children of that child and the children of those children—they would be a thread of temporal interference reaching through the ages.

Cabell asked: “Is there something wrong, sir?”

“No. I was just thinking that the time will surely come, some day, when we work out a formula for safely interfering in the past. And when that happens, our responsibilities will be even greater than the ones that we face now. For then we’ll have license for intervening, but will in turn be placed under certain strictures to use that power of intervention only for the best. I can’t imagine what sort of principle it will be, you understand. But I am sure that soon or late we will arrive at it.

“And perhaps, too, we’ll work out another formula which will allow us to venture to the future.”

He shook his head and thought: How like an old man, to shake your head in resigned puzzlement. But he was not an old man—not very old, at least.

“At the moment,” he said, “we are little more than gleaners. We go into the past to pick up the gleanings—the things they lost or threw away. We have made up certain rules to make sure that we never touch the sheaves, but only the ear of wheat left lying on the ground.”

“Like the Alexandria manuscripts?”

“Well, yes, I would suppose so—although grabbing all those manuscripts and books was inspired entirely by a sordid profit motive. We could just as easily have copied them. Some of them we did; but the originals themselves represented a tremendous sum of money. I would hate to tell you what Harvard paid us for those manuscripts. Although, when you think of it,” Spencer said, reflectively, “I’m not sure they weren’t worth every cent of it. It called for the closest planning and split-second co-ordinating and we used every man we had. For, you see, we couldn’t grab the stuff until it was on the verge of burning. We couldn’t deprive even so much as a single person of the chance of even glancing at a single manuscript. We can’t lift a thing until it’s lost. That’s an iron-bound rule.

“Now, you take the Ely tapestry. We waited for years, going back and checking, until we were quite sure that it was finally lost. We knew it was going to be lost, you understand. But we couldn’t touch it until it was lost for good. Then we h’isted it.” He waved a hand. “I talk too much. I am boring you.”

“Mr. Spencer, sir,” protested Cabell, “talk like yours could never bore me. This is something I have dreamed of. I can’t tell you how happy …”

Spencer raised a hand to stop him. “Not so fast. You aren’t hired yet.”

“But Mr. Jensen down in Personnel …”

“I know what Jensen said. But the final word is mine.”

“What have I done wrong?” asked Cabell.

“You have done nothing wrong. Come back this afternoon.”

“But, Mr. Spencer, if only you could tell me …”

“I want to think about you. See me after lunch.”

Cabell unfolded upward from his chair and he was ill at ease.

“That man who was in ahead of me …”

“Yes. What about him?”

“He seemed quite angry, sir. As if he might be thinking of making trouble for you.”

Spencer said angrily. “And that’s none of your damn business!”

Cabell stood his ground. “I was only going to say, sir, that I recognized him.”

“So?”

“If he did try to cause you trouble, sir, it might be worth your while to investigate his association with a stripper down at the Golden Hour. Her name is Silver Starr.”

Spencer stared at Cabell without saying anything.

The man edged toward the door.

He put out his hand to grasp the knob, then turned back to Spencer. “Perhaps that’s not actually her name, but it’s fine for advertising—Silver Starr at the Golden Hour. The Golden Hour is located at …”

“Mr. Cabell,” Spencer said, “I’ve been at the Golden Hour.”

The impudent punk! What did he figure he was doing—buying his way in?

He sat quietly for a moment after Cabell had gone out, cooling down a bit, wondering about the man. There had been something about him that had been disturbing. That look in his eyes, for one thing. And the awkwardness and shyness didn’t ring quite true. As if it had been an act of some sort. But why, in the name of God, should anyone put on such an act when it would be quite clearly to his disadvantage?

You’re psycho, Spencer told himself. You’re getting so you jump at every shadow, sight a lurking figure behind every bush.

Two down, he thought, and another one to see—that is, if more had not piled into the office and were out there waiting for him.

He reached out his hand to press the buzzer. But before his finger touched it, the back door of the office suddenly burst open. A wild-eyed man came stumbling through it. He had something white and wriggly clutched within his arms. He dumped the white and wriggly thing on Hallock Spencer’s desk and unhappily stepped back.

It was a rabbit—a white rabbit with a great pink ribbon tied around its neck in a fancy bow.

Spencer glanced up, startled, at the man who’d brought the rabbit.

“Ackermann,” he shouted. “For Chrissake, Ackermann, what is the matter with you? It isn’t Easter yet!”

Ackermann worked his mouth in a painful manner and his Adam’s apple went bobbing up and down. But he made no words come out.

“Come on, man! What is it?”

Ackermann got his voice back. “It’s Nickerson!” he blurted.

“O.K., so Nickerson brought a rabbit back …”

“He didn’t bring it back, sir. It came all by itself!”

“And Nickerson?”

Ackermann shook his head. “There was just the rabbit.”

Spencer had started to get up from the chair. Now he sat back down again, harder than intended.

“There’s an envelope, sir, tied to the rabbit’s bow.”

“So I see,” said Spencer, absently. But he felt the coldness running through him.

The rabbit hoisted itself around until it was face to face with Spencer. It flapped an ear, wiggled its pink nose at him, put its head carefully to one side and lifted a deliberate hind leg to scratch a flea.

He pivoted in his chair and watched the operator sidle through the door. Three men lost in the last ten days. And now there was a fourth.

But this time, at least, he’d got back the carrier. The rabbit had brought back the carrier. Any living thing, once the mechanism had been rigged, by its very presence would have brought back the carrier. It need not be a man.

But Nickerson! Nickerson was one of the best there were. If a man could not depend on Nickerson, there was no one that he could.

He turned back to the desk and reached for the rabbit. It didn’t try to get away. He slipped out the folded sheet of paper and broke the blob of sealing wax. The paper was so stiff and heavy that it crackled as he smoothed it.

The ink was dead black and the script cramped. No fountain pen, thought Spencer—nothing but a goose quill.

The letter was addressed to him. It said:

Inadequate, thought Spencer, staring at the note, with the scrawly black more like a cabalistic pattern than a communication.

He had found a sense of springtime. What did he mean by that? A springtime of the heart? A springtime of the spirit? That might well be it, for Nickerson had gone to Italy in the early Renaissance. A springtime of the spirit and the sense of great beginnings. And perhaps that wasn’t all of it. Would there be as well a certain sense of spiritual security in that smaller world—a world that tinkered with no time, that reached toward no stars?

The buzzer sounded softly.

Spencer tipped up the lever on the intercom. “Yes, Miss Crane?”

“Mr. Garside on the phone.”

The rabbit was nibbling at the phone cord. Spencer pushed him to one side. “Yes, Chris.”

The gray, clipped voice said: “Hal, what’s with you and Ravenholt? He gave me a bad half hour.”

“It was Project God.”

“Yes, he told me that. He threatened to raise a howl about the ethics of our magazine project.”

“He can’t do that,” protested Spencer. “He’d have no grounds at all. That one is clean. It has the green light from Legal and from Ethics and the review board gave its blessing. It’s simply historical reporting. Eyewitness from the battle of Gettysburg, fashion notes on the spot from the time of Queen Victoria—it’s the biggest thing we’ve tackled. Its promotional value alone, aside from the money we’ll make …”

“Yes, I know,” said Garside, tiredly. “All of that is true. But I don’t want to get into a hassle with anyone—particularly not with Ravenholt. We have too many irons in the fire right now for anything unfavorable to pop. And Ravenholt can be a terribly dirty fighter.”

“Look, Chris. I can take care of Ravenholt.”

“I knew you would. What is more, you’d better.”

“And,” demanded Spencer, bristling, “what do you mean by that?”

“Well, frankly, Hal, your record doesn’t look too good. You’ve been having trouble …”

“You mean the men we’ve lost.”

“And the machines,” said Garside. “You’re all the time forgetting—a machine costs a quarter million.”

“And the men?” asked Spencer bitterly. “Perhaps you think they’re comparatively cheap.”

“I don’t suppose,” said Garside blandly, “That you can place an actual value on a human life.”

“We lost another one today,” said Spencer. “I imagine you’ll be happy to know that he was loyal behind the call of duty. He sent a rabbit back and the machine is safe and sound.”

“Hal,” said Garside, sternly, “this is something we can discuss at some later time. Right now I’m concerned with Ravenholt. If you’d go and apologize to him and try to fix things up …”

“Apologize!” exploded Spencer. “I know a better way than that. He’s been shacking with a stripper down at the Golden Hour. By the time I get through …”

“Hal!” yelled Garside. “You can’t do a thing like that! You can’t involve Past, Inc., in anything like that! Why, it isn’t decent!”

“You mean it’s dirty,” Spencer said. “No dirtier that Ravenholt. Who is he fronting for?”

“It makes no difference. Young man …”

“Don’t young man me,” yelled Spencer. “I’ve got troubles enough without being patronized.”

“Perhaps your troubles are too much for you,” said Garside, speaking very gray and clipped. “Perhaps we ought to find another man.”

“Do it then!” yelled Spencer. “Don’t just sit there shooting off your face. Come on down and fire me!”

He slammed the receiver down into its cradle and sat shivering with rage.

Damn Garside, he thought. To hell with Past, Inc. He’d taken all he could!

Still, it was a lousy way to end after fifteen years. It was a stinking thing to happen. Maybe he ought to have kept his mouth shut, kept his temper down, played it sweet and smooth.

Perhaps, he could have done it differently. He could have assured Garside he’d take care of Ravenholt without saying anything about Silver Starr. And why had he grabbed hold so trustfully of what Cabell had told him that moment before leaving? What could Cabell know about it? In just a little while now he’d have to check if there were anyone by the name of Silver Starr down at the Golden Hour.

Meanwhile there was work to do. Hudson now, he thought.

He reached for the buzzer.

But his finger never touched it. Once more the back door burst open with a smashing rattle and a man came tearing in. it was Douglas Marshall, operator for E.J.’s machine.

“Hal,” he gasped, “you’d better come. E.J.’s really tore it!”

Spencer didn’t ask a question. One look at Doug’s face was quite enough to tell him the news was very bad. He bounced out of his chair and rushed through the door, close on the operator’s heels.

They tore down the corridor and turned left into Operations, with the rows of bulgy, bulky carriers lined against the wall.

Down at the far end a small circle of operators and mechanics formed a ragged circle and from the center of the circle came the sound of ribald song. The words were not intelligible.

Spencer strode forward angrily and pushed through the circle. There, in the center of it, was E.J. and another person—a filthy, bearded, boisterous barbarian wrapped in a mangy bearskin and with a tremendous sword strapped about his middle.

The barbarian had a smallish keg tilted to his mouth. The keg was gurgling; he was drinking from it, but he was missing some as well, for steams of pale, brown liquid were running down his front.

“E.J.!” yelled Spencer.

At the shout, the barbarian jerked the keg down from his face and tucked it hurriedly underneath an arm. With a big and dirty hand, he mopped the whiskers adjacent to his mouth.

E.J. stumbled forward and threw his arms around Spencer’s neck, laughing all the while.

Spencer jerked E.J. loose and pushed him, stumbling, backwards.

“E.J.!” he yelled. “What is so damn funny?”

E.J. managed to stop stumbling backwards. He tried to pull himself together, but he couldn’t because he still was laughing hard.

The barbarian stepped forward and thrust the keg into Spencer’s hands, shouting something at him in a convivial tone of voice and pantomiming with his hands that the keg had stuff to drink.

E.J. made an exaggerated thumb at the gent in bearskin. “Hal, it wasn’t any Roman officer!” Then he went off into gales of laughter once again.

The barbarian started to laugh, too, uproariously, throwing back his head and bellowing in great peals of laughter that shook the very room.

E.J. staggered over and they fell into one another’s arms, guffawing happily and pounding one another on the back. Somehow they got tangled up. They lost their balance. They fell down on the floor and sat there, the two of them, looking up at the men around them.

“Now!” Spencer roared at E.J.

E.J. clapped the man in bearskin a resounding whack upon his hairy shoulder. “Just bringing back the Wrightson-Graves her far-removed grand-pappy. I can’t wait to see her face when I take him up there!”

“Oh, my God!” said Spencer. He turned around and thrust the dripping keg into someone’s hands.

He snapped, “Don’t let them get away. Put them someplace where they can sleep it off.”

A hand grabbed him by the arm and there was Douglas Marshall, sweating. “We got to send him back, Chief,” said Doug. “E.J.’s got to take him back.”

Spencer shook his head. “I don’t know if we can. I’ll put it up to Legal. Just keep them here, and tell the boys. Tell them if one of them so much as whispers …”

“I’ll do my best,” said Doug. “But I don’t know. They’re a bunch of blabbermouths.”

Spencer jerked away and sprinted for the corridor.

What a day, he thought. What a loused-up day!

He charged down the corridor and saw that the door marked Private was closed. He skidded almost to a halt, reaching for the knob, when the door flew open. Miss Crane came tearing out.

She slammed into him head-on. Both of the bounced back, Miss Crane’s spectacles knocked at a crazy angle by the impact.

“Mr. Spencer,” she wailed. “Mr. Spencer, something awful’s happened! Remember Mr. Hudson?”

She stepped back out of his way. He sprang inside and slammed the door behind him. “As if I ever could forget him,” he said bitterly.

Said Miss Crane, “Mr. Hudson’s dead!”

Spencer stood stricken.

Miss Crane raged, “If only you had seen him when I wanted you to! If you hadn’t kept him waiting out there …”

“Now, look here—”

“He got up finally,” said Miss Crane, “and his face was red. He was angry. I don’t blame him, Mr. Spencer.”

“You mean he died right here?”

“He said to me, ‘Tell your Mr. Spencer—’ and that’s as far as he ever got. He sort of lurched and caught with his hand at the edge of the desk to support himself, but his hand slipped off and he folded up and …”

Spencer waited for no more. He went in three quick steps across the office and out into the reception room.

There was Mr. Hudson, huddled on the carpet.

He looked startlingly like a limp ragdoll. One blue-veined hand was stretched out ahead of him. The portfolio that it had held lay just beyond the fingertips, as if even in his death Mr. Hudson might be stretching out his hand to it. His jacket was hunched across the shoulders. The collar of his white shirt, Spencer saw, was ragged.

Spencer went slowly across the floor and knelt down beside the man. He put his ear down on the body.

There was no sound at all.

“Mr. Spencer.” Miss Crane was standing in the doorway, still terrified but enjoying it a lot. Not in all her years of being secretary had anything like this happened. Not in all her life. It would keep her supplied with conversation for many, many years.

“Lock the door,” said Spencer, “so no one can come strolling in. Then phone the police.”

“The police!”

“Miss Crane,” said Spencer, sharply.

She walked around him and the body on the floor, edging close against the wall.

“Call Legal, too,” said Spencer.

He stayed squatting on the floor, staring at the man who lay there and wondering how it had happened. Heart attack, most likely. Miss Crane had said that he looked ill—and had urged that he see him first, ahead of the other two.

And if one were looking for a man to blame for what had happened here, Spencer told himself, they might have but little trouble fastening it on him.

If Hudson had not had to wait, growing angrier and more upset as the time slipped past, this might not have happened.

Hudson had waited in this room, a sick and impatient man, and finally an angry one—and what had he waited for?

Spencer studied the ragdoll of a man slumped upon the carpet, the thinning hair atop his head, the thick-lensed spectacles bent and twisted in the fall, the bony, blue-veined hands. He wondered what such a man might have expected from Past, Inc.

Spencer started to get up and lost his balance as he did, his left hand going out behind him to prop himself erect.

And beneath the spread-out palm there was something cool and smooth. Without looking, he knew what it was. Hudson’s portfolio!

The answer might be there!

Miss Crane was at the door, locking it. There was no one else.

With a swift sweep of his hand, Spencer skidded the portfolio in the direction of the doorway that led into his office.

He got smoothly to his feet and turned. The portfolio lay halfway through the doorway. In one quick stride he reached it and nudged it with his foot, inside and out of sight.

He heard the snick of the lock falling home and Miss Crane turned around.

“The police first, or Legal, Mr. Spencer?”

“The police, I’d think,” said Spencer.

He stepped within his office and swung the door so that it came within an inch of closing. Then he snatched the portfolio off the floor and hurried to his desk.

He put in on his desk and zipped it open and there were three sheafs of paper, each of the sheafs paper-clipped together.

The first bore the legend at the top of the first page: A Study of Ethics Involved in Traveling in Time. And after that page upon page of typescript, heavily underlined and edited with a neat red pencil.

And the second, a thin one, with no legend, and composed of sheets of unneatly scribbled notes.

And the third, once again typed, with carefully drawn diagrams and charts, and the heading: A New Concept of the Mechanics of Time Travel.

Spencer sucked in his breath and bent above the paper, his eyes trying to gallop along the lines of type, but forced to go too fast to really catch the meaning.

For he had to get the portfolio back where it had been and he had to do it without being seen. It was not his to touch. The police might become difficult if they found he’d rifled it. And when he put it back, it must have something in it. A man would hardly come to see him with an empty portfolio.

In the outer office, he heard Miss Crane talking. He made a quick decision.

He swept the second and third sheaf of papers into the top drawer of his desk. Leaving the first sheaf on time-travel ethics in the portfolio, he zipped it shut again.

That would satisfy the cops. He held the portfolio in his left hand, letting his arm hang along his side, and stepped to the doorway, shielding the left side of his body and the portfolio.

Miss Crane was on the phone, her face turned away from him.

He stopped the portfolio on the carpeting, just beyond the outstretched fingers of the dead man.

Miss Crane put down the phone and saw him standing there.

“The police will be right over,” she said. “Now I’ll call Mr. Hawkes in Legal.”

“Thanks,” said Spencer. “I’ll go through some papers while we’re waiting.”

Back at his desk, he took out the pile of papers that said: A New Concept of the Mechanics of Time Travel. The name on it was Boone Hudson.

He settled down to read, first with mounting wonderment, then with a strange, cold excitement—for here, at last, was the very thing that would at once erase the basic headache of Past, Inc.

No longer would one face the nightmare of good travelers wearing out in a few years’ time.

No longer would a man go into time a young man and return sixty seconds later with the beginning lines of age showing on his face. No longer would one watch one’s friends age visibly from month to month.

For they would no longer be dealing in men, but in the patterns of those men.

Matter transference, Spencer told himself. You could probably call it that, anyway. A man would be sent into the past; but the carrier would not move physically into time as it moved now. It would project a pattern of itself and the man within it, materializing at the target point. And within the carrier—the basic carrier, the prime carrier, the parent carrier which would remain in present time—there’d be another pattern, a duplicate pattern of the man sent into time.

When the man returned to present time, he would not return as he was at that moment in the past, but as the pattern within the waiting carrier said he had been when he’d traveled into time.

He’d step out of the carrier exactly as he had stepped into it, not older by a second—actually, a minute younger than he would have been! For he did not have to account for that sixty seconds between leaving and returning.

For years, Past, Inc.’s own research department had been seeking for the answer to the problem, without even coming close. And now a stranger had come unheralded and sat hunched in the reception room, with the portfolio cradled on his knee, and he had the answer, but he’d been forced to wait.

He’d waited and he’d waited and finally he had died.

There was a tapping at the door of the outer office. He heard Miss Crane cross the room to open it.

Spencer pulled out a desk drawer and hurriedly shoved the papers into it. Then he stood up from the desk and walked around it to go into the outer office.

Ross Hawkes, head of Past, Inc.’s legal department, was standing just beyond the body on the carpet, staring down at it.

“Hello, Ross,” said Spencer. “An unpleasant business here.”

Hawkes looked up at him, puzzled. His pale blue eyes glittered behind the neat and precise spectacles, his snow white hair matching the pallor of his face.

“But what was Dan’l doing here?” he asked.

“Dan’l?” Spencer demanded. “His name happened to be Boone Hudson.”

“Yes, I know,” said Hawkes. “But the boys all called him Dan’l—Dan’l Boone, you understand. Sometimes he didn’t like it. He worked in Research. We had to fire him, fifteen, sixteen years ago. The only reason that I recognized him was that we had some trouble. He had an idea he would like to sue us.”

Spencer nodded. “Thanks. I see,” he said.

He was halfway to his office door when he turned back.

“One thing, Ross. What did we fire him for?”

“I don’t recall, exactly. He disregarded his assignment, went off on some other tangent. Matter transference, I think.”

Spencer said, “That’s the way it goes.”

He went back into the office, locked his desk and went out the back way.

In the parking lot, he backed out his car and went slowly down the street. A police cruiser was parked in front of the building and two officers were getting out. An ambulance was pulling in behind the cruiser.

So, thought Spencer, they had fired Hudson fifteen years ago, because he had some sort of crazy idea about matter transference and wouldn’t stick to business. And to this very day, Research was going quietly mad trying to solve a problem that Hudson could have put into their laps years ago, if they had kept him on.

Spencer tried to imagine how those fifteen years must have been for Hudson, more than likely working all the time on this quiet insanity of his. And how, finally, he had gotten it and had made sure of it and then had gone down to Past, Inc., to rub their noses in it.

Exactly as he, Hallock Spencer, now would rub their noses in it.

Greenwich Street was a quiet residential street of genteel poverty, with small and older houses. Despite the smallness of the houses and their age, and in some cases their unkemptness, there was a certain solid pride and respectability about them.

The address on the manuscript was 241 Greenwich. It was a squat brown house surrounded by a crumbling picket fence. The yard was full of flowers. Even so, it had the look of a house that had no one living in it.

Spencer edged through the sagging gate and up the walk, made small by the flowers that encroached upon it. He went up the rickety stairs to the shaky porch and, since there was no bell, rapped on the closed front door.

There was no answer. He tried the knob and it turned. He pushed the door part way open and edged into the silent hall.

“Hello,” he called. “Anyone at home?”

He waited. There wasn’t.

He walked from the hall into the living room and stood to look around him at the Spartan, almost monklike existence of the man who’d lived there.

It was evident that Hudson had lived alone, for the room bore all the signs of a lone man’s camping. There was a cot against one wall, a dirty shirt flung across one end of it. Two pairs of shoes and a pair of slippers were lined up underneath the cot. An old-fashioned dresser stood opposite the cot. A handful of ties dangled raggedly from the bar that had been fastened on its side. A small kitchen table stood in the corner nearest to the kitchen. A box of crackers and a glass, still spotted with milk stains, stood upon the table. A massive desk stood a few feet from the table and the top of it was bare except for an old typewriter and a photograph in a stand-up frame.

Spencer walked over to the desk and began pulling out the drawers. They were almost empty. In one he found a pipe, a box of paper clips, a stapler and a single poker chip. The others yielded other odds and ends, but nothing of importance. In one was a half a ream of paper—but nowhere was there a single line of writing. In the bottom drawer on the left hand side, he found a squat bottle, half full of good Scotch.

And that was all.

He searched the dresser. Nothing but shirts and underwear and socks.

He prowled into the kitchen. Just the built-in stove and refrigerator and the cupboards. He found nothing in any of them but a small supply of food.

And the bedrooms—two of them—were empty, innocent of furniture, and with a fine and powdery dust coating floor and walls. Spencer stood in the doorway of each and looked and there was a sadness in each room. He didn’t go inside.

Back in the living room, he went to the desk and picked up the photograph. A woman with a tired, brave smile, with a halo of white hair, with an air of endless patience, looked out of it at him.

There was nothing to be found in this house, he told himself. Not unless one had the time to search every corner of it, every crack, to take it down, each board and stone. And even then, he doubted now, there’d be anything to find.

He left the house and drove back to the office.

“Your lunch didn’t take too long,” Miss Crane told him, sourly.

“Everything all right?” he asked.

“The police were very, very nice,” she said. “Both Mr. Hawkes and Mr. Snell are anxious to see you. And Mr. Garside called.”

“After a while,” said Spencer. “I’ve got work to do. I don’t want to be disturbed.”

He went into his office and shut the door with a gesture of finality.

From the drawer he took the Hudson papers and settled down to read.

He was no engineer, but he knew enough of it to make a ragged sort of sense, although at times he was forced to go back and read more carefully, or puzzle out a diagram that he’d skipped through too hurriedly. Finally he came to the end of it.

It was all there.

It would have to be checked by technicians and engineers, of course. There might be bugs that would take some ironing out, but the concept, complete both in theory and in the theory’s application, was all there in the paper.

Hudson had held nothing back—no vital point, no key.

And that was crazy, Spencer told himself. You had to leave yourself some sort of bargaining position. You could trust no other man, certainly no corporation, as implicitly as Hudson apparently had intended to. Especially you couldn’t trust an outfit that had fired you fifteen years before for working on this very concept.

It was ridiculous and tragic, Spencer told himself.

Past, Inc., could not have even guessed what Hudson might have been aiming at. And Hudson, in his turn, was gagged because he’d not as yet progressed to a point where he could have faith either in his concept or himself. Even if he had tried to tell them, they would have laughed at him, for he had no reputation to support such outrageous dreaming.

Spencer sat at his desk, remembering the house on Greenwich Street, the huddling in one room with the other rooms all bare and the entire house stripped of all evidence of comfort and good living. More than likely all the furniture in those rooms, all the accumulation of many years of living, had been sold, piece by precious piece, to keep groceries on the shelf.

A man who was dedicated to a dream, Spencer told himself, a man who had lived with that dream so long and intimately that it was his entire life. Perhaps he had known that he was about to die.

That might explain his impatience at being forced to wait.

Spencer shoved the Hudson papers to one side and picked up the notes. The pages were filled with cryptic penciled lines, with long strings of mathematical abstractions, roughly drawn sketches. They were no help.

And that other paper, Spencer wondered—the one he’d left in the portfolio, that one that had to do with ethics? Might it not also bear a close relationship to the Hudson concept? Might there not be in it something of importance bearing on this new approach?

Time travel perforce was hedged around with a pattern of ethics which consisted mainly of a formidable list of “thou shalt nots.”

Thou shalt not transport a human being from the past.

Thou shalt not snitch a thing until it has been lost.

Thou shalt not inform anyone in the past of the fact there is time travel.

Thou shalt not interfere in any way with the patterns of the past.

Thou shalt not try to go into the future—and don’t ask why, because that’s a dirty question.

The buzzer sounded. He flipped the switch.

“Yes, Miss Crane.”

“Mr. Garside is here to see you. Mr. Hawkes and Mr. Snell are with him.”

He thought he detected in her voice a sense of satisfaction.

“All right. Ask them to come in.”

He gathered the papers off his desk and put them in his briefcase, then settled back as they came in. “Well, gentlemen. It seems I am invaded.”

Even as he said it, he knew it had not been the proper thing to say. They did not even smile. And he knew that it was bad. Any time you got Legal and Public Relations together, it couldn’t be anything but bad.

They sat down. “We thought,” said Snell, in his most polished P.R. manner, “that if we got together and tried to talk things out …”

Hawkes cut him short. He said to Spencer, accusingly: “You have managed to place us in a most embarrassing position.”

“Yes, I know,” said Spencer. “Let’s tick off the items. One of my men brought back a human from the past. A man died in my office. I forgot to be polite to a stuffed shirt who came charging in to help us run our business.”

“You seem,” said Garside, “to take it all quite lightly.”

“Perhaps I do,” said Spencer. “Let’s put it slightly stronger. I just don’t give a damn. You cannot allow pressure groups to form your policy.”

“You are talking now, of course,” said Garside, “about the Ravenholt affair.”

“Chris,” said Snell, enthusiastically, “you hit it on the button. Here is a chance to really sell the public on us. I don’t believe we’ve really sold them. We are dealing in something which to the average man seems to smell of magic. Naturally he is stand-offish.”

“More to the point,” said Hawkes, impatiently, “if we turn down this project—this …”

“Project God,” said Spencer.

“I’m not sure I like your phrasing.”

“Think up a name yourself,” said Spencer calmly. “That is what we call it.”

“If we fail to go ahead with it, we’ll be accused of being atheists.”

“How would the public ever know that we turned it down?” asked Spencer.

“You can be sure,” Snell said bitterly, “that Ravenholt will make a point of making known our turning down of it.”

Spencer smashed his fist upon the desk in sudden anger. He yelled, “I told you how to handle Ravenholt!”

“Hal,” Garside told him quietly, “we simply cannot do it. We have our dignity.”

“No,” said Spencer, “I suppose you can’t. But you can sell out to Ravenholt and whoever’s backing him. You can rig the survey of religious origins. You can falsify reports.”

The three of them sat in stricken silence. Spencer felt a twinge of momentary wonder for having dared to say it. It was not the way one was supposed to talk to brass.

But he had to say one more thing. “Chris. You are going to disregard the report I made and go ahead with it, aren’t you?”

Garside answered with smooth urbanity: “I’m afraid I’ll have to.”

Spencer looked at Hawkes and Snell and he saw the secret smiles that lurked just behind their lips—the sneering contemptuous smile of authority ascendant.

He said slowly, “Yes, I guess you will. Well, it’s all in your laps now. You figure out the answers.”

“But it’s your department.”

“Not any more, it isn’t. I’ve just quit the job.”

“Now see here, Hal,” Garside was saying, “you can’t do a thing like that! Without any notice! Just flying off the handle! We may have our little differences, but that is no excuse …”

“I’ve decided,” Spencer told him, “that I somehow have to stop you. I cannot allow you to go ahead with Project God. I warn you, if you do, that I shall discredit you. I shall prove exactly and without question everything you’ve done. And meanwhile, I am planning to go into business for myself.”

“Time travel, perhaps.” They were mocking him.

“I had thought of it.”

Snell grinned contemptuously. “You can’t even get a license.”

“I think I can,” said Spencer.

And he knew he could. With a brand new concept, there’d be little trouble.

Garside got up from his chair. “Well,” he said to Spencer, “you’ve had your little tantrum. When you cool down a bit, come up and talk to me.”

Spencer shook his head.

“Goodbye, Chris,” he said.

He did not rise. He sat and watched them go.

Strangely, now that it was over—or just beginning—there was no tenseness in him. It had fallen all away and he felt abiding calm.

There was money to be raised, there were technicians and engineers to hire, there were travelers to be found and trained, and a whole lot more than that.

Thinking of it all, he had a momentary pang of doubt, but he shrugged it off. He got up from his chair and walked out into the office.

“Miss Crane,” he said, “Mr. Cabell was supposed to come back this afternoon.”

“I haven’t seen him, sir.”

“Of course not,” Spencer said.

For suddenly it all seemed to be coming clear, if he only could believe it.

There had been a look in young Cabell’s eyes that had been most disturbing. And now, all at once, he knew that look for exactly what it was.

It had been adulation!

The kind of look that was reserved for someone who had become a legend.

And he must be wrong, Spencer told himself, for he was not a legend—at least not at the moment.

There had been something else in young Cabell’s eyes. And once again he knew. Cabell had been a young man, but the eyes had been old eyes. They were eyes that had seen much more of life than a man of thirty had any right to see.

“What shall I say,” asked Miss Crane, “if he should come back?”

“Never mind,” said Spencer. “I am sure he won’t.”

For Cabell’s job was done, if it had been a job at all. It might have been, he told himself, a violation of the ethics, a pure piece of meddling, or it might have been a yielding to that temptation to play God.

Or, he thought, it might have been all planned.

Had they somewhere in the future worked out that formula he’d spoken of to Cabell—the formula that would allow legitimate manipulation of the past?

“Miss Crane,” he said, “would you be kind enough to type up a resignation for me? Effective immediately. Make it very formal. I am sore at Garside.”

Miss Crane did not bat an eyelash. She ran paper into her machine.

“Mr. Spencer, what reason shall I give?”

“You might say I’m going into business for myself.”

Had there been another time, he wondered, when it hadn’t gone this way? Had there been a time when Hudson had gotten in to see him and maybe had not died at all? Had there been a time when he’d handed over the Hudson concept to Past, Inc., instead of stealing it himself?

And if Cabell had not been here to take up the time, more than likely he would have gotten around to seeing Hudson before it was too late. And if he had seen the man, then it was more than likely that he would have passed the concept on through proper channels.

But even so, he wondered, how could they be sure (whoever they might be) that he’d not see Hudson first? He recalled distinctly that Miss Crane had urged that he see him first.

And that was it, he thought excitedly. That was exactly it! He might very well have seen Hudson first if Miss Crane had not been insistent that he should.

And standing there, he thought of all the years that Miss Crane must have worked at it—conditioning him to the point where he’d be sure to do exactly opposite to what she urged he do.

“Mr. Spencer,” said Miss Crane, “I have the letter finished. And there is something else. I almost forgot about it.”

She reached down into a drawer and took out something and laid it on the desk.

It was the portfolio that belonged to Hudson.

“The police,” said Miss Crane, “apparently overlooked it. It was very careless of them. I thought that you might like it.”

Spencer stood staring blankly at it.

“It would go so nicely,” said Miss Crane, “with the other stuff you have.”

There was a muted thumping on the floor and Spencer spun around. A white rabbit with long and droopy ears hopped across the carpet, looking for a carrot.

“Oh, how cute!” cried Miss Crane, very much unlike herself. “Is it the one that Mr. Nickerson sent back?”

“It’s the one,” said Spencer. “I had forgotten it.”

“Might I have it?”

“Miss Crane, I wonder …”

“Yes, Mr. Spencer?”

And what was he to say?

Could he blurt out that now he knew she was one of them?

It would take so much explanation and it could be so involved. And, besides, Miss Crane was not the sort of person that you blurted things out to.

He gulped. “I was wondering, Miss Crane, if you’d come and work for me. I’ll need a secretary.”

Miss Crane shook her head. “No, I’m getting old. I’m thinking of retiring. I think, now that you are leaving, I shall just disappear.”

“But, Miss Crane, I’ll need you desperately.”

“One of these days soon,” said Miss Crane, “when you need a secretary, there’ll be an applicant. She’ll wear a bright green dress and she’ll be wearing these new glasses and be carrying a snow-white rabbit with a bow around its neck. She may strike you as something of a hussy, but you hire her. Be sure you hire her.”

“I’ll remember,” Spencer said. “I’ll be looking for her. I’ll hire no one else.”

“She will not,” warned Miss Crane, “be a bit like me. She’ll be much nicer.”

“Thank you, Miss Crane,” said Spencer, just a bit inanely.

“And don’t forget this,” said Miss Crane, holding out the portfolio.

He took it and headed for the door.

At the door he stopped and turned back to her.

“I’ll be seeing you,” he said.

For the first time in fifteen years, Miss Crane smiled at him.