Our Children's Children

19

The press conference had gone well. Arrangements had been made for the President's TV appearance. The clock on the wall ticked over to 6 PM. The teletypes went on clacking softly to themselves.

Wilson said to Judy, "You'd better call it a day. It's time to close up shop."

"How about yourself?"

"I'll hang on for a while. Take my car. I'll call a cab and pick it up at your place."

He reached into his pocket, pulled out the keys and tossed them to her.

"When you get there," Judy said, "come up for a drink. I'll be up and waiting."

"It may be late."

"If it's too late, why bother going home? You left your toothbrush last time."

"Pajamas," he said.

"When did you ever need pajamas?"

He grinned at her lazily. "OK," he said. "Toothbrush, no pajamas."

"Maybe," said Judy, "it'll make up for this afternoon."

"What this afternoon?"

"I told you, remember. What I planned to do."

"Oh, that."

"Yes, oh, that. I've never done it that way."

"You're a shameless child. Now, run along."

"The kitchen will be sending coffee and sandwiches to the press lounge. Ask them nice and they'll throw a crust to you."

He sat and watched her go. She walked surely, but with a daintiness that always intrigued and puzzled him, as if she were a sprite who was consciously trying to make an earth creature of herself.

He shuffled the loose papers on the desk into a pile and stacked them to one side.

He sat quietly once that was done and listened to the strange mutterings of the place. Somewhere, far off, a phone rang. There was the distant sound of someone walking. Out in the lounge someone was typing and against the wall the wire machines went on with their clacking.

It was all insane, he told himself. The entire business was stark, staring crazy. No one in their right mind would believe a word of it. Time tunnels and aliens out of space were the sort of junk the high school crowd watched on television. Could it all, he wondered, be a matter of delusion, of mass hysteria? When the sun rose tomorrow, would it all be gone and the world back on the old familiar footing?

He shoved back the chair and got up. Judy's deserted console had a couple of lights flashing and he let them flicker. He went into the corridor and down it to the outer door. Out in the garden the heat of the summer day was cooling off, and long shadows thrown by the trees stretched across the lawn. The flower beds lay in all their glory-roses, heliotrope, geraniums, nicotiana, columbines and daisies. He stood, looking across the park to where the Washington Monument reared its classic whiteness.

Behind him he heard a footstep and swung around. A woman stood just a little distance off, dressed in a white robe that came down to her sandaled feet.

"Miss Gale," he said, a little startled. "What a pleasant surprise."

"I hope," she said, "I have done nothing wrong. No one stopped me. Is it all right to be here?"

"Certainly. As a guest…"

"I had to see the garden. I had read so much of it."

"You have never been here, then?"

She hesitated. "Yes, I have. But it was not the same. It was nothing like this,"

"Well," he said, "I suppose that things do change."

"Yes," she said, "they do."

"Is there something wrong?"

"No, I guess not." She hesitated again. "I see you don't understand. I can't imagine there is any reason why I shouldn't tell you."

"Tell me what? Something about this place?"

"It's this," she said. "Up in my time, up five hundred years ahead, there isn't any garden. There isn't any White House."

He stared at her.

"See," she said, "you don't believe it. You won't believe me. We have no nations there — we just have one big nation, although that's not exactly right. There aren't any nations and there isn't any White House. A few ragged, broken walls is all, a piece of rusted fence sticking from the ground that you stub your toe upon. There isn't any park and there aren't any flower beds. Now can you understand? Can you know what all this means to me?"

"But how? When?"

"Not right away," she said. "Not for a century or more. And now it may never happen. You're on a different time track now."

She stood there, a thin slip of a girl, in her chaste white robe, belted at the waist, talking of different time tracks and of a future when there would be no White House. He shook his head, bewildered. "How much do you understand?" he asked. "Of this time track business? I know your father mentioned it, but there was so much else…"

"There are equations that you have to know to understand it all," she said. "There are, I suppose, only a few men who really understand it. But basically it's quite simple. It's a cause-and-effect situation and once you change the cause or, more likely, many causes, as we must have done in coming here…"

He made a motion of futility with his hand. "I still can't believe it," he said. "Not just the time track, but all the rest of it. I woke up this morning and I was going on a picnic. You know what a picnic is?"

"No," she said, "I don't know what a picnic is. So we are even now."

"Someday I'll take you on a picnic."

"I wish you would," she said, "Is it something nice?"