“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.”
VII
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.
VIII
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.
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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.”