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"We got snuffed on reentry," Benz said. He was, really, the crudest of the three. Or at least the most blunt. "You see, Miss…"
"Hawkins," the girl whispered.
"Glad to meet you, Miss Hawkins." Benz surveyed her in his cold, lazy fashion. "You have a first name?"
"Merry Lou."
"Okay, Merry Lou," Benz said. To the other two men he observed, "Sounds like the name a waitress has stitched on her blouse. Merry Lou's my name and I'll be serving you di
"But there's nothing we could do," Crayne said.
"There's nothing anyone can do," Addison said to her, and put his arm around her. It felt like a deja vu thing but then it hit him. We're in a closed time loop, he thought, we keep going through this again and again, trying to solve the reentry problem, each time imagining it's the first time, the only time… and never succeeding. Which attempt is this? Maybe the millionth; we have sat here a million times, raking the same facts over and over again and getting nowhere. He felt bone-weary, thinking that. And he felt a sort of vast philosophical hate toward all other men, who did not have this enigma to deal with. We all go to one place, he thought, as the Bible says. But… for the three of us, we have been there already. Are lying there now. So it's wrong to ask us to stand around on the surface of Earth afterward and argue and worry about it and try to figure out what malfunctioned. That should be, rightly, for our heirs to do. We've had enough already.
He did not say this aloud, though – for their sake.
"Maybe you bumped into something," the girl said.
Glancing at the others, Benz said sardonically, "Maybe we 'bumped into something.' "
"The TV commentators kept saying that," Merry Lou said, "about the hazard in reentry of being out of phase spatially and colliding right down to the molecular level with tangent objects, any one of which -" She gestured. "You know. 'No two objects can occupy the same space at the same time.' So everything blew up, for that reason." She glanced around questioningly.
"That is the major risk factor," Crayne acknowledged. "At least theoretically, as Dr. Fein at Pla
Suddenly Benz said, "Do you realize that our next of kin are now rich? All our Federal and commercial life-insurance payoff. Our 'next of kin' – God forbid, that's us, I guess. We can apply for tens of thousands of dollars, cash on the line. Walk into our brokers' offices and say, 'I'm dead; lay the heavy bread on me.
Addison Doug was thinking, The public memorial services. That they have pla
"The ceremonies," he said aloud.
The others stared at him, angrily, not comprehending. And then, one by one, they understood; he saw it on their faces.
"No," Benz grated. "That's – impossible."
Crayne shook his head emphatically. "They'll order us to be there, and we will be. Obeying orders."
"Will we have to smile?" Addison said. "To fucking smile?"
"No," General Toad said slowly, his great wattled head shivering about on his broomstick neck, the color of his skin dirty and mottled, as if the mass of decorations on his stiff-board collar had started part of him decaying away. "You are not to smile, but on the contrary are to adopt a properly grief-stricken ma
"That'll be hard to do," Crayne said.
The Russian chrononaut showed no response; his thin beaked face, narrow within his translating earphones, remained strained with concern.
"The nation," General Toad said, "will become aware of your presence among us once more for this brief interval; cameras of all major TV networks will pan up to you without warning, and at the same time, the various commentators have been instructed to tell their audiences something like the following." He got out a piece of typed material, put on his glasses, cleared his throat and said, " 'We seem to be focusing on three figures riding together. Can't quite make them out. Can you?' " General Toad lowered the paper. "At this point they'll interrogate their colleagues extempore. Finally they'll exclaim, 'Why, Roger,' or Walter or Ned, as the case may be, according to the individual network -"
"Or Bill," Crayne said. "In case it's the Bufonidae network, down there in the swamp."
General Toad ignored him. "They will severally exclaim, 'Why Roger I believe we're seeing the three tempunauts themselves! Does this indeed mean that somehow the difficulty -?' And then the colleague commentator says in his somewhat more somber voice, 'What we're seeing at this time, I think, David,' or Henry or Pete or Ralph, whichever it is, 'consists of mankind's first verified glimpse of what the technical people refer to as Emergence Time Activity or ETA. Contrary to what might seem to be the case at first sight, these are not – repeat, not – our three valiant tempunauts as such, as we would ordinarily experience them, but more likely picked up by our cameras as the three of them are temporarily suspended in their voyage to the future, which we initially had reason to hope would take place in a time continuum roughly a hundred years from now… but it would seem that they somehow undershot and are here now, at this moment, which of course is, as we know, our present.' "
Addison Doug closed his eyes and thought, Crayne will ask him if he can be pa
I can't prove it, he thought wearily. But I know it's true. We've sat here, done this minuscule scrabbling, listened to and said all this crap, many times. He shuddered. Each rinky-dink word…
"What's the matter?" Benz said acutely.
The Soviet chrononaut spoke up for the first time. "What is the maximum interval of ETA possible to your three-man team? And how large a per cent has been exhausted by now?"
After a pause Crayne said, "They briefed us on that before we came in here today. We've consumed approximately one-half of our maximum total ETA interval."
"However," General Toad rumbled, "we have scheduled the Day of National Mourning to fall within the expected period remaining to them of ETA time. This required us to speed up the autopsy and other forensic findings, but in view of public sentiment, it was felt…"
The autopsy, Addison Doug thought, and again he shuddered; this time he could not keep his thoughts within himself and he said, "Why don't we adjourn this nonsense meeting and drop down to pathology and view a few tissue sections enlarged and in color, and maybe we'll brainstorm a couple of vital concepts that'll aid medical science in its quest for explanations? Explanations – that's what we need. Explanations for problems that don't exist yet; we can develop the problems later." He paused. "Who agrees?"