Time and Again

Danziger was gri

"But I agree with the decision: What I want you to do is what we all want you to do; there's no conflict. And what we want you to do reminds me in a way of our first space capsule." Again he sat back. "The first tiny one weighing — what? A few pounds. Everyone wanted space on it, remember? The biologists wanted a few mice aboard to see the effects of cosmic radiation. The botanists had some seeds; the geographers, weathermen and military wanted space for a camera; the broadcasters, the entire communications industry, and Lord knows who and what-all had then-requests and even demands. So they worked up a package, or tried to, that would give them all a little something, at least in token.

"It's the same with us, Si. That's why the board decided to let you have a look at your man with the envelope. In some sort of way he is apparently co

"So this is what we want, Si. Still observing, still very cautiously — as much as possible the mouse in the corner, the fly on the wall — we want you to observe him. Learn what you can; the purpose being to discover what's possible in this line. It increases, certainly, your interference with old events, but" — he hesitated, then shrugged — "minimize that all you can. Well? You know where he lives: Can you return and find a way to do that for us?"

I started to nod, but before I could reply Rube said quietly, voice perfectly friendly but without smiling, "Alone. This time alone. This time friend Kate is to stay where she damn well belongs."

My mouth opened but I didn't have any words ready. I just sat there with my mouth open for a moment, and now Rube did smile a little. He said, "Don't bother to answer; I'm fairly sure I can guess how it was, and you can't really be blamed, I suppose. And apparently no harm was done. But we've got enough to worry about without adding sightseers."

I nodded. "All right. I'd have told Dr. Danziger, and you can believe that. But how did you know?"

"We know. There's a lot to this project beside you, a lot of drudgery and detail. You've got the glamour part, and we don't bother you with the nuts and bolts. But we're watching out for the project in every way we can, and nothing else and nobody else matters but that. Okay?"

It was a warning and maybe a threat, and I accepted it because it was deserved. "Okay."

He gri

12

This time, walking out of the Dakota onto Seventy-second Street, carpetbag in hand, I knew. I turned left immediately, toward Central Park just across the street ahead, and there was no difference in the park that I could see, but — I knew. And a moment later when a wagon full of baled hay, drawn by two horses, crossed the intersection just ahead, I felt no surprise. But I'd remembered something, and at the corner I didn't cross the street into the park; I turned north. I remembered the incredible open space I had stared across from the balcony outside my apartment window several nights ago: the dark emptiness I'd seen between the Dakota and the Museum of Natural History five blocks ahead to the north. Now I wanted to see it in daylight, and thirty seconds later when I'd walked the block along the face of the Dakota, I suddenly saw it and stopped, staring and flabbergasted; then I began to laugh.

I don't know what I'd expected — anything but this — and still smiling, shaking my head, I dug a small sketch pad out of my carpetbag as I walked along. Then I made a rough but detailed and accurate sketch, which I finished up later. The opposite page shows it. Standing a dozen yards off the sidewalk and facing the Dakota, just south of the corner at Seventy fourth Street and Central Park West, this is what I saw, except that I've given the trees a few leaves so that you can see them. Those people werefarming — I mean it — raising actual crops and livestock, living in shanties and sheds that they'd obviously made themselves.

Here they are — the farmers and livestock raisers beside the elegant Dakota doing their chores, the kids playing, the animals foraging for whatever they could find among patches of half-melted snow.

I could hardly believe it, and when my rough was done, I walked on a block or so toward the Museum — now, in daylight, I could see that it was only a single building — and I stared out over a strange astonishing view of farm after tiny farm clear to the Hudson. Even stranger, the streets were all here; in places they were a great raised gridiron of block after block of new streets all graded up to uniform level, the land between the streets lying far below. And down in those uniformly rectangular block-square hollows lay hundreds of acres of farmlands. From here at street level I could see the regular lines of old cultivations under the thin layer of snow. On a few of these miniature farms, people were desultorily scratching at the wet ground with hoes, I don't know why. I sketched that scene, too, of course: That's Seventy-fifth Street there at the left, and you can see the Ninth Avenue El in the background, and as I stood sketching I heard the lowing of cows, the baaing of sheep, heard pigs squeal, geese honk, and at the same time the distant, familiar, incongruous clatter of the El. Then I left, to cross Central Park toward the Third Avenue El, then on downtown to Gu