Time and Again

She didn't ask me to look at the rest of the place, of course; not in New York. And I smiled and nodded to show I'd seen enough, thanked her, and left. I don't quite know why I went there; I just wanted to see it, that's all. I walked back to Twenty-third Street, and took a cab to the project.

In nearly every possible way the atmosphere at the project was different this time. The man at the door in the tiny street-level office was Harry, or so it said in red stitching over a breast pocket of his white-coverall Beekey uniform. He sent me up alone in the elevator to Doc Rossoff's office, as instructed, he said, if I should show up here. But there was only Oscar's nurse when I arrived, the big good-looking woman with the gray in her hair. She smiled and greeted me and asked the usual questions but I detected a lack of real interest, I thought; probably to be expected. She had me wait in Oscar's office; she'd phone him, she said, and he'd be here very quickly.

As he was, walking swiftly in four or five minutes later, his hand moving out to shake mine, greeting me just as he had done before, congratulating me, asking questions, his voice eager — except that it wasn't the same either. He was abstracted, I realized after I'd talked for a minute or so, only half listening to my answers, sometimes nodding absently before I'd finished a reply. I soon had the feeling that he wanted to get rid of me, anxious to hurry back to whatever he'd been doing. Because he hustled me off to the «debriefing» room without even an offer of coffee, which wasn't like him, and there'd been a Silex half full on his office hot-plate.

The differences continued. This time none of the others had come hurrying into Oscar's office to see me. And Oscar left me at the door of the debriefing room, asking me to dictate a brief but complete account of this last visit, gave me a clap on the shoulder, and hurried off. Inside the room there was only the technician who ran the recorder. He was threading in a new roll of tape, and he just said hi, and nodded. A moment or so later the girl who made the transcript on the electric typewriter came in, smiled at me meaninglessly, and I sat down and talked an account into the little microphone on my chest of what had happened with me during the previous two days, making it brief but omitting nothing. That done, I began reciting my random list of names, facts, and anything else that might be verifiable that came into my head.

After twenty minutes I asked where everyone was, and the guy who sat watching the recorder reels, occasionally fiddling with the dials, said they were having a big meeting; it had begun yesterday, and continued today. That both explained and did not explain, and I realized I was experiencing a childish feeling of neglect.

He kept me at the debriefing twice as long this time. After forty-five minutes or so I said I'd run dry but he said he'd been instructed to ask me to keep at it, if I could, for a couple of hours — an hour and a half at least. We all three got some lousy instant coffee from a machine just outside in the corridor, then stood around for a few minutes forcing it down, talking over the weather lately, about which I wasn't much help. I had the impression that they'd been told not to question me about this visit because they didn't mention it, and after five minutes we resumed the debriefing. I kept it up for over an hour and a half, though with longer and longer pauses. For as long as two or three minutes, after a while, I'd have to search my mind for something else to add. About every twenty minutes or so the tall bald man who'd done this before came in, and took away whatever the girl had typed.

Finally Oscar Rossoff came back. I was nearly finished, scraping the bottom of the barrel. When he opened the door I was just speaking the name of a boy I'd last known in seventh grade when he'd moved away and whom I hadn't thought of again till this moment. Oscar sat down — he looked tired, his shirt collar unbuttoned, his tie pulled down — and sat waiting, staring morosely into a corner of the room. I said that Arizona had been admitted to the Union as a state in 1912; then I stood up, stretching, and said I was finished absolutely.

The girl typed the last of what I'd just said, and pulled the sheet from her machine. The recording technician stopped the tape, snapped and broke the tape between the two reels, and took off my reel. Oscar said, "Tell Freddy to wait till he's completely finished before he reports, okay?" And they nodded, and left.

He gestured to a chair beside him, I sat down, and he said, "We're in a meeting, Si; a great big fat one. It looks as though we may wash out the whole project, I don't know yet. We want you in the meeting but I have to brief you first; no need to interrupt it for that. It's simple enough. We haven't bothered you with this, but other attempts have been going ahead, too, both during your own and before. The Vimy Ridge attempt failed. There's a section of battlefield there left untouched since World War One: Franklin Miller came out of a dugout where he'd waited in the mud with an infantry platoon through a four-day simulated artillery bombardment, and fighting body lice. Real ones. But what he came out onto was nothing but a great stretch of empty fields, the barbed wire rusted and the trenches caved in, half a century after Armistice Day. He's already back home in California.

"To everyone's surprise and even astonishment, the Notre Dame attempt may have succeeded. For something less than even a full minute, before he lost his mental grip on the situation and was instantly back in the here and now. But we think — I'll tell you all about this sometime — that during the space of maybe half a dozen deep excited breaths he was standing on the banks of the Seine at three o'clock one morning in the winter of 1451; Jesus. And the Denver attempt succeeded absolutely. Ted Brietel stood in the little corner grocery store drinking a bottle of pop he'd bought, chatting with the proprietor. Then he walked out into Denver, Colorado, 1901, no question about it; just like you. And he was debriefed like you after half a very careful day there. That's what the meeting is about, Si; we were at it till one thirty last night, and back at it by eight forty-five this morning." Oscar frowned, squeezed his eyes shut, and dug the heels of his hands into his eye sockets, trying to rub away a headache or a bad night's sleep or both.

He looked at me, blinking, then said, "Because there's something doesn't jibe, Si. In the debriefing, I mean. He named a friend he went to college with: Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois. Ted's seen him a few times since. He lives in Philadelphia where Ted does; listed in the phone book there. Except that now he isn't. No one ever heard of him at the place he worked. He is unlisted in Social Security records. There is no record of him at Knox. He doesn't exist, you see." Oscar kept his voice matter-of-fact. "Except in Ted's memory, and Ted's alone. Because whatever Ted did and saw and however circumspectly in Denver, Colorado, in midwinter of 1901, it affected an event or events there: Something changed, and therefore so did subsequent events deriving from it." Oscar shrugged a little. "So that now that particular guy was never born, that's all. As for what else may have changed, what else may be different about these times now, things Ted Brietel doesn't happen to know about — well, who can say? Maybe a lot, maybe nothing else at all." We sat staring at each other for a moment or so; then Oscar stood up abruptly. "That's what the meeting is all about; come on."

People glanced up at us when we entered the big conference room; it was crowded now, nearly every chair filled. Some nodded at me abstractedly, smiling a little, but immediately returning their attention to Dr. Danziger, who was speaking quietly. I watched him, too, as Oscar and I pulled out chairs and sat down. He looked at ease, which is more than most of the others did; most coats were off, most ties pulled down, people weren't bothering to try not looking tired, and there was a lot of smoking, a lot of doodling on scratch pads. But Danziger sat well back in his chair, his brown double-breasted suit coat open, his tan sweater-vest buttoned, legs crossed comfortably, one arm resting on his chair back, his big veined hand dangling limp and relaxed."…knowledge we now have susceptible of prolonged study," he was saying. "You don't have to bring up the entire bottom of the ocean and into the laboratory. To fully analyze the core from a single boring and consider the implications of that analysis takes months, even years. This is how we must treat the knowledge, the borings if you will, of our three successful attempts. They'll be studied and can yield new knowledge for years. But there can be no more of them" — his posture didn't change but his voice deepened into a tone of authority I wouldn't have cared to challenge — "because it is not true, it is simply not true, that we ought to continue doing something just because we've discovered we can. It is becoming more and more certain, as science uses an almost brand-new ability to pull apart the deepest puzzles of the universe, that we need not and should not necessarily do something only because we've learned how. In company such as this I don't have to spell out obvious examples and consequences of failing to understand that. The lesson is clear. And the danger of even one more attempt is just as clear. We dare not ever again step into the past. We dare not ever again interfere with it in any least possible way. Because we don't know what is the least possible way. We don't yet know the consequences of Mr. Morley's most recent visit, but if we should seem to have escaped any very serious consequences of the few cautious successes we've had, it's only blind good luck. A man of no apparent importance, though I'm sure he was important to himself, no longer exists. Never did exist, in a very strange yet true sense." The tall bald man came in, actually tiptoeing. Colonel Esterhazy saw him right away, raised his arm, and the man walked quickly to him, handed him a little sheaf of paper, murmured something into Esterhazy's ear, who nodded, and the man tiptoed out again. Danziger continued. "Otherwise our world seems essentially unchanged. But next time might be different; unimaginably, catastrophically different. To continue this project would be the grossest kind of utterly selfish and reckless irresponsibility. I think we had to have this meeting; we had to talk this out in absolutely full detail. But there can be no question of our decision; there is no choice to be made."