The Infinite Moment (23 page)

I held up my open hand to show that we had peaceful intentions. They looked puzzled. One said to another: "Funny thing, that. I thought Hitler died in 1945?"

I lowered my hand.

"Oh! You speak English!" I said.

"Of course," said the nearest man. "Why not?"

"WellerI thought" I began, and then gave it up. "My name is George Possing," I told him, introducing myself.

He frowned slightly. "It ought to be Julian Speckleton," he said.

I looked at him. "Really!" I said coldly. "Well, it's not it's George Possing."

"I don't understand this," he murmured, reflectively.

"It's quite easy. I'm Possing--and I've never even heard of anyone called Speckleton," I told him.

"And you're not on the subatomic drive?"

I suppose I looked blank.

"The subatomic drive that Solarian Rockets are developing," he said, with a touch of impatience.

"Never heard of itor them," I told him.

"H'm," he remarked "Something has gone wrong. Paladanov's going to be wild about this."

It occurred to me that I ought to introduce the others. But when I looked, I found it was unnecessary. They were all talking together already. The man with me asked who Doug was. I told him. He asked: "What's the date here?"

When he heard, he whistled.

"Thirty-five years out of register. Somebody's going to get a smack for this. Hey, fellers!"

They didn't notice him. One had taken Doug to the gap in the invisible wall, and was showing him something there. The other two were chatting with Sylvia and Rose. Very animatedly, too. Sylvia's eyes were shining brightly. They kept on flicking about the face of the man who was talking to her, not missing a movement of it. And she was blushing a little. I'd never seen her blush like that before or look quite that way. I didn't care for it a lot.

"Hey!" said my man, more loudly. The others broke off, and came round him. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Sylvia and Rose turn to one another. They giggled like a couple of schoolgirls, and then started whispering.

"Listen," said the man beside me. "Something's going haywire here. Neither of these guys is Speckleton."

They all regarded, us for a moment.

"Well, I don't know that I mind that a lot," said one, turning to look at Rose, who blushed.

"Nor me," agreed the other. "Just my climate around here." And Sylvia blushed even more than Rose had.

"Maybe," said my man. But the point is there's no work for us to do here. No Speckletonno drawings. These folks come from thirtyfive years before."

"I'm not worrying about that a bit," one of the others assured him. "Nice folks," he added. And the girls giggled.

"All the same. It's a washout. So what do we do?" 152 "Wait for instructions," one said promptly.

"That's so. Then we'll be right on hand when they correct the error," added the other.

"Okay. Then I'll put a report through." The man turned and walked back toward the vehicle. The man who had been talking to Doug went with him. Rose, still a little pink, and with a touch of that demureness which isn't meant to deceive anybody, said in a hostess way: "I'm sure you must be terribly thirsty after all that dust. Won't you have some coffee?"

They had no hesitation at all about accepting the offer. Doug and I were left to watch them push their way through the hedge which separated our gardens, and stroll up, laughing, to his house. We looked at one another.

"Well!" I said.

Maybe Doug's years had improved his philosophic outlook. He said, calmly: "I'll have to hand it to you, George. Your deductions were dead right."

"Huh," I said, watching the others go into the house.

"Yes. There has been time transposition someway. And apparently some kind of hitch in itso you were right, too, about it just being an accident for us that we're here."

"Huh," I said again. "It might help if I could understand what the hell goes on when there isn't a hitch."

"It's not so difficult. That fellow gave me the general idea. You see, in a few years" time the offices of the Solarian Rocket Corporation, Inc. will be standing on this site with a man called Julian Speckleton in charge of the drawing department. Okay? Well, the guys who operate this timelift dingum just whisk away a part of the block toerwhatever time it is out there. Just the way we were whisked."

"But what for?"

"Ah, that's where these chaps come in. They arrive and photograph all drawings and documents of interest."

"I don't see what for. They must be centuries ahead of us, anyway."

"Sure. But the way they work they've got a second timelift in operation someplace. Now that brings along some guy called Paladanov. They give him the photographic copies. Then they reverse the timelift, and put things back."

I thought that over. "I don't see" I began.

"There's a subtlety there," said Doug. "The office block goes back to the splitsecond it left, so that nothing ap153 pears to have been touched. But this Paladanov and his place don'tnot quite. It has to be missing from its proper place for a few minuteslong enough for him to collect the photographs so that they are in the house when it goes back."

"This is horribly bewildering."

"Well, if the Paladanov guy went back to the same splitsecond in which he left, he'd not have the photographsthey weren't in his house at that second, you see."

"I suppose not. But it's so involved. Why don't they just whisk up Paladanov here and tell him a few things that'll put him years or generations ahead of his competitors, anyway? Surely that'd be easier?"

"It would be. But would these guys get anything out of it? Somewhere in this there's a racket. There always is. It could be that Paladanov's employers put money on deposit, and leave it to accumulate, maybe? In that case the more slowly the information is dribbled out, the longer the racket would last. Or it could equally well be that they work the thing the other way round as well, and keep both sides plodding along neck and neck on one another's secrets. That'd be very nice smooth work." He paused to contemplate the idea admiringly. "I know one thing," he added. "If and when we get back, the first thing I do is to buy my house and ground."

"But, look here," I said. "It's crazyand unpatriotic."

"How? I don't see that an information office in timeif you can move about in timeis any more crazy than one in space. Properly operated, it could make big money. As for being unpatriotic, that depends on the distance, doesn't it? The way I see it, to give the Germans radar around 1938 would be bad, but to let the Trojans in on the wooden horse gag wouldn't matter a lot."

"There's no difference in the morals," I said coldly.

"Maybe they don't have those, anyway," suggested Doug.

"I've been wondering about just that," I admitted tineasily, looking up toward his house. I listened to the sounds coming from there. It seemed to me there was a pretty unnatural amount of highpitched giggling going on.

"Don't you think we'd better?" I asked, jerking my head in that direction.

Doug listened, too, for a moment.

"Maybe we had," he agreed. We turned, and walked up the garden. At the door he paused.

"Er--pretty big fellows, aren't theystronglooking?" he suggested.

I had to agree with that.

I shall have, I am afraid, to draw a veil over most of the three following days. I never would have believed that two decently brought up girls... and respectably married, too.

Mind you, I didn't take it all lying down. I told Sylvia what I thought about it one time when I did manage to get her alone. Her response wasn't amiable: "Will you please stop interfering in my affairs?" she demanded.

"But it's your affair that I'm complaining of," I pointed out, reasonably.

"If you don't like Alaric being a friend of mine, you'd better go and tell him soand see what he does," she said.

Alaric was, I think, slightly the tallest of the four.

"I don't mind him being a friend of anybody's," I said, "what I mean is"

"Well, what do you mean?" she asked, dangerously. "Are you accusing him of anything? Because maybe he ought to hear it."

"I'm not talking about him. I'm talking about you."

"Well?"

"When a married woman throws herself at another man's head" I began.

"I thought you said you weren't talking about him?"

"Hell, I'm not. I'm just pointing out"

"Now look here," she said. "You're having all the fun of one of your damn silly magazine stories coming true. So what right have you to interfere in mine?"

"It isn't at all the same sort of thing," I said shortly. "Anyway, I didn't ask for this. It just happened."

Sylvia softened unexpectedly.

"Yes," she said. "That's how love is for womenit just happens," she added gently.

"That's all very well in those fool stories" I began.

Her softness suddenly vanished.

"Fool stories," she said. "And from you, too!" She gave an exceedingly unnatural laugh.

"At least mine are harmless and clean," I replied.

"Well, mine always end up most morally. They have to," she countered.

"It's not so much the ending that I'm concerned about at the moment" I was pointing out when she snapped: "What are you going to do about it?"

She did not seem to understand somehow that the whole conversation was what I was doing about it.

Doug, I must admit, was more direct in his method of objectionthough no more decisive. As I understand it, he had taken Rose over his knee to whang the daylights out of her with a slipper, and the whole thing was going pretty successfully when her friend Damon came in, attracted by her howls. He quietly picked Doug up by his collar and the slack of his pants, and dropped him out of the window. Then, of course, Rose needed consoling, so the affair really backfired quite a bit.

After that Doug devoted most of his attention to deciding just how much of the land about us would be (or had been, depending how you look at it) occupied by the Solarian Rocket concern, and considering methods of raising capital.

It was on the afternoon of the third day that the man who had spoken to me first strode up the garden from their vehicle with a satisfied expression on his face.

"They've traced the error," he said. "There was a sticky point in one of the computers which made it run wild now and again. It'll be all okay now."

"I'm glad you think so," I said. It didn't seem to me that a corrected computer was going to set my domestic life to rights again.

"Sure, it will," he nodded. "They'll flip you back to where you came from, and then pull in Speckleton in the Solarian offices. I gather Paladanov's been raising hell. As if it mattered. That poor goop will never get it straight that this is time out for him. However long he has to stay here he can still be returned to within a few minutes of his lift. You, of course, will be returned to the thousandth of a secondpretty close tolerance, that."

"I suppose so," I said, without zest. "All the same, we've been here three days, and during that time my wife"

"Oh, you'll just have to count that as time out," he said easily.

"You think so," I remarked. I felt maybe I had better leave that angle. I looked over the neardesert surrounding us. "It'd be kind of nice to know where and when we spent this time out," I suggested. "How did the place get this way?"

"This?" he repeated, "I can't say exactly. It sure caught something, didn't it? That'd likely be during the Second Atomic War, I guess. Well, I gotta tell the boys we're pulling out. Where are they?"

"I wouldn't know, but I could make a goodish guess," I said bitterly.

Doug and I stood on the narrow terrace path beside his house. The scene at the end of my loppedoff garden was not edifying. Beyond the invisible wall the four men were now climbing into their vehicle. This side of the wall Sylvia and Rose stood clinging together, apparently for mutual support. They had handkerchiefs in their hands. Sometimes they fluttered them at the vehicle, sometimes they dabbed them at their faces. We watched the performance gloomily and in silence. We had already repeated all our comments on the situation to one another a good many times.

"Well, at least they're going," said Doug, "I'd begun to wonder if they'd get carried along with us."

"How much longer have we got?" I asked him.

He looked at his watch. "About five minutes," he said.

"Ought we to be doing anything special?"

"No. According to them it just happens."

The vehicle was drawing away now. Sylvia and Rose went on waving, and the men inside waved back. Presently, a couple of hundred yards away, the thing stopped. Apparently that was a safe distance. We could see the four heads under the transparent top turned to watch us. The girls were still clinging together, and still waving.

"Listen," I said to Doug, "I don't quite get this. If everything does go back to a thousandth of a second from where we were, how are we going to remember that it ever?"

My sentence was cut off and I had my answer in the same moment. I found myself sitting up in bed. The light was on, and the clock said three-fifteen. Beside my Sylvia was sobbing into her pillow.

I jumped out, and went over to the window. The night was still, and the moon nearly full. Layers of smoky air hung stratified over the valley. Here and there a few lights shone out. I had never before been so glad to see our not very picturesque landscape.

"We're back," I said.

Sylvia took no notice. She went on crying into her pillow as if she had not heard.

I decided to remove to the spare room for the rest of the night.

"I shall go and see Groves this afternoon," I announced at breakfast.

Sylvia looked up. She was not at her best this morning. Very puffy round the eyes, and rather forlornlookingbut I had made up my mind.

"I shall be seeing him about divorce proceedings," I amplified.

She stared at me. She rallied, and came back absolutely true to form.

"Is this some kind of a joke?" she enquired.

"Joke! Is that what you call your behavier?"

"I don't know what you're talking about," she said.