XVII.
HX-1
I could not bring myself to follow the promptings of my conscience and Catty's advice, nor could I use my notes as though Dr. Polk's letter had never come to shatter my complacency. As a consequence--without deliberately committing myself to abandon the book--I worked not at all, thus adding to my feelings of guilt and unworthiness. The tasks assigned by the fellows for the general welfare of the Haven were not designed to take a major part of my time, and though I produced all sorts of revolutions in the stables and barns, I still managed to wander about, fretful and irritable, keeping Catty from her work, interrupting the Agatis and Midbin--I could not bring myself to discuss my problems with him--and generally making myself a nuisance. Inevitably I found my way into Barbara's workshop.
She and Ace had done a thorough job on the old barn. I thought I recognized Kimi's touch in the structural changes of the walls, the strong beams, and the rows of slanted-in windows which admitted light and shut out glare, but the rest must have been shaped by Barbara's needs.
Iron beams held up a catwalk running in a circle about ten feet overhead. On the catwalk there were at intervals what appeared to be batteries of telescopes, all pointed inward and downward at the center of the floor. Just inside the columns was a continuous ring of clear glass, perhaps four inches in diameter, fastened to the beams with glass hooks. Closer inspection proved the ring not to be in one piece but in sections, ingeniously held together with glass couplings. Back from this circle, around the walls, were various engines, all enclosed except for dial faces and regulators and all dwarfed by a mammoth one towering in one corner. From the roof was suspended a large, polished reflector.
There was no one in the barn, and I wandered about, cautiously avoiding the mysterious apparatus. For a moment I meditated, basely perhaps, that all this had been paid for with my wife's money. Then I berated myself, for Catty owed all to the Haven, as I did. The money might have been put to better use, but there was no guarantee it would have been more productive allotted to astronomy or zoology. During eight years I'd seen many promising schemes come to nothing.
"Like it, Hodge?"
Barbara had come up, unheard, behind me. This was the first time we had been alone together since our break, two years before.
"It looks like a tremendous amount of work," I evaded.
"It was a tremendous amount of work." For the first time I noticed that her cheeks were flushed. She had lost weight, and there were deep hollows beneath her eyes. "This construction has been the least of it. Now it's done. Or has begun. Depending how you look at it."
"All done?"
She nodded, triumph accenting the strained look on her face. "First test today."
"Oh well . . . in that case--"
"Don't go, Hodge. Please. I meant to ask you and Catty to the more formal trial, but now you're here for the preliminary I'm glad. Ace and Father and Oliver will be along in a minute."
"Midbin?"
The familiar arrogance showed briefly. "I insisted. It'll be nice to show him the mind can produce something besides fantasies and hysterical hallucinations."
I started to speak, then swallowed my words. The dig at Catty was insignificant compared with the supreme confidence, the abnormal assurance prompting invitations to witness a test which could only reveal the impossibility of applying her cherished theories. I felt an overwhelming pity. "Surely," I said at last, seeking to make some preparation for the disillusionment certain to come, "surely you don't expect it to work the first time?"
"Why not? There are sure to be adjustments to be made, allowances for erratic chronology caused by phenomena like the pull of comets and so forth. There might even have to be major alterations, though I doubt it. It may be some time before Ace can set me down at the exact year, month, day, hour, and minute agreed upon. But the fact of space-time-energy-matter correspondence can just as well be established this afternoon as next year."
She was unbelievably at ease for someone whose lifework was about to be weighed. I have shown more nervousness discussing a disputed date with the honorary secretary of a local historical society.
"Sit down," she invited; "there's nothing to do or see till Ace comes. I've missed you, Hodge."
I felt this was a dangerous remark and wished I'd stayed far away from the workshop. I hooked my leg over a stool--there were no chairs--and coughed to hide the fact I was afraid to answer, I've missed you, too; and afraid not to.
"Tell me about your own work, Hodge. Catty says you're having difficulties."
I was faintly annoyed with Catty, but whether for confiding in Barbara at all or specifically for revealing something unheroic I didn't stop to consider. At any rate this annoyance diluted my feeling of disloyalty for conversing with Barbara at all. Or it may be the old, long-established bond--I almost wrote, of sympathy, but it was so much more complex than the word indicates--was reawakened by proximity and put me in the mood to tell my troubles. It is even possible I had the altruistic purpose of fortifying Barbara against inevitable disappointment on a miseryloves-company basis. Be that as it may, I found myself pouring out the whole story.
She jumped up and took my hands in hers. Her eyes were gray and warm. "Hodge! It's wonderful--don't you see?"
"Oh . . ." I was completely confused. "I . . . uh . . ."
"The solution. The answer. The means. Look, now you can go back, back to the past in your own person. You can see everything with your own eyes instead of relying on accounts of what other people said happened."
"But . . . but--"
"You can verify every fact, study every move, every actor. You can write history as no one ever did before, for you'll be writing as a witness, yet with the perspective of a different period. You'll be taking the mind of the present, with its judgment and its knowledge of the patterns, back to receive the impressions of the past. It almost seems HX-1 was devised especially for this."
There was no doubt she believed, that she was really and unselfishly glad her work could aid mine. I was overcome by pity, helpless to soften the disillusionment so soon to come, and filled with an irrational hatred of the thing she had built and which was about to destroy her.
I was saved from having to mask my emotions by the arrival of her father, Ace, and Midbin. Thomas Haggerwells began tensely, "Barbara, Ace tells me you intend to try out this--this machine on yourself. I can't believe you would be so foolhardy."
Midbin didn't wait for her to reply. I thought with something of a shock, Midbin has gotten old; I never noticed it. "Listen to me. There's no point now in saying part of your mind realizes the impossibility of this demonstration and that it's willing for you to annihilate yourself in the attempt and so escape from conflicts which have no resolution. Although it's something you must be at least partly aware of. But consider objectively the danger involved in meddling with unknown natural laws--"
Ace Dorn, who looked as strained as they in contrast to Barbara's ease, growled, "Let's go."
She smiled reassuringly at us. "Please, Father, don't worry; there's no danger. And Oliver. .
Her smile was almost mischievous and very unlike the Barbara I had known. "Oliver, HX-1 owes more to you than you will ever know."
She ducked under the transparent ring and walked to the center of the floor, glancing up at the reflector, moving an inch or two to stand directly beneath it. "The controls are already adjusted to minus fifty-two years and a hundred and fifty-three days," she informed us conversationally. "Purely arbitrary. One date is as good as another, but January 1, 1900, is an almost automatic choice. I'll be gone sixty seconds. Ready, Ace?"
"Ready." He had been slowly circling the engines, checking the dials. He took his place before the largest, the monster in the corner, holding a watch in his hand. "Three forty-three and ten," he announced.
Barbara was consulting her own watch. "Three fortythree and ten," she confirmed. "Make it at three forty-three and twenty."
"Okay. Good luck."
"You might at least try it on an animal first," burst out Midbin, as Ace twirled the valve under his hand. The transparent ring glowed; the metal reflector threw back a dazzling light. I blinked. When I opened my eyes the light was gone and the center of the workshop was empty.
No one moved. Ace frowned over his watch. I stared at the spot where Barbara had stood. I don't think my mind was working; I had the feeling my lungs and heart certainly were not. I was a true spectator, with all faculties save sight and hearing suspended.
". . . on an animal first." Midbin's voice was querulous.
"Oh, God . . ." muttered Thomas Haggerwells.
Ace said casually--too casually, "The return is automatic. Set beforehand for the duration. Thirty more seconds."
Midbin said, "She is . . . this is. . ." He sat down on a stool and bent his head almost to his knees.
Mr. Haggerwells groaned. "Ace, Ace--you should have stopped her."
"Ten seconds," said Ace firmly.
Still I couldn't think with any clarity. She had stood there; then she was gone. What . . . ? Midbin was right: we had let her go to destruction. Certainly more than a minute had passed by now.
The ring glowed and the brilliant light was reflected. "It did, oh, it did!" Barbara cried. "It did!"
She stood perfectly still, overwhelmed. Then she came out of the circle and kissed Ace, who patted her gently on the back. I suddenly noticed the pain of holding my breath and released a tremendous sigh. Barbara kissed her father and Midbin--who was still shaking his head--and, after the faintest hesitation, me. Her lips were ice-cold.
The shock of triumph made her voluble. Striding up and down, she spoke with extraordinary rapidity, without pause, almost a little drunkenly. In her excitement her words cluttered her tongue; from time to time she had to go back and repeat a phrase or sentence to make it intelligible.
When the light flashed she, too, involuntarily closed her eyes. She had felt a strange, terrifying weightlessness, an awful disembodiment, for which she had been unprepared. She thought she had not actually been unconscious, even for an instant, though she had an impression of ceasing to exist as a unique collection of memories and of being somehow dissolved. Then she had opened her eyes.
At first she was shocked to find the barn as it had been all her life, abandoned and dusty. Then she realized she had indeed moved through time; the disappearance of the engines and reflector showed she had gone back to the unremodeled workshop.
Now she saw the barn was not quite as she had known it, even in her childhood, for while it was unquestionably abandoned, it had evidently not long been so. The thick dust was not so thick as she remembered, the sagging cobwebs not so dense. Straw was still scattered on the floor; it had not yet been entirely carried away by mice or inquisitive birds. Alongside the door hung bits of harness beyond repair, some broken bridles, and a faded calendar on which the ink of the numerals 1897 was still bright.
The minute she had allotted this first voyage seemed fantastically short and incredibly long. All the paradoxes she had brushed aside as of no immediate concern now confronted her. Since she had gone back to a time before she was born, she must have existed as a visitor prior to her own conception; she could presumably be present during her own childhood and growth, and by making a second and third visit, multiply herself as though in facing mirrors, so that an infinite number of Barbara Haggerwells could occupy a single segment of time.
A hundred other parallel speculations raced through her mind without interfering with her rapid and insatiable survey of the commonplace features of the barn, features which could never really be commonplace to her since they proved all her speculations so victoriously right.
Suddenly she shivered with the bitter cold and burst into teeth-chattering laughter. She had made such careful plans to visit on the First of January--and had never thought to take along a warm coat.
She looked at her watch; only twenty seconds had passed. The temptation to defy her agreement with Ace not to step outside the tiny circle of HX-1's operating field on the initial experiment was almost irresistible. She longed to touch the fabric of the past, to feel the worn boards of the barn, to handle as well as look. Again her thoughts whirled with speculation; again the petty moment stretched and contracted. She spent eternity and instantaneity at once.
Suppose ... But she had a thousand suppositions and questions. Was she really herself in the flesh, or in some mental projection? A pinch would do no good; that might be projection also. Would she be visible to the people of the time, or was she a ghost from the future? Oh, there was so much to learn, so much to encounter!
When the moment of return came, she again experienced the feeling of dissolution, followed immediately by the light. When she opened her eyes she was back.
Midbin rubbed his belly and then his thinning hair. "Hallucination," he propounded at last, "a logical, consistent hallucination. Answer to an overriding wish."
"You mean Barbara was never gone?" asked Ace. "Was she visible to you--or Mr. H. or Hodge--during that minute?"
"Illusion," said Midbin, "group illusion brought on by suggestion and anxiety."
"Nonsense," exclaimed Barbara. "Unless you're accusing Ace and me of faking you'll have to account for what you just called the logical consistency of it. Your group illusion and my individual hallucination fitting so neatly together."
Midbin recovered some of his poise. "The two phenomena are separate, connected only by some sort of emotional hypnosis. Certainly your daydream of having been back in 1900 is an emotionally induced aberration."
"And your daydream that I wasn't here for a minute?"
"The eyes are quickly affected by the feelings. Note tears, 'seeing red,' and so forth."
"Very well, Oliver. The only thing to do is to let you try HX- 1 yourself."
"Hey, my turn's supposed to be next," protested Ace.
"Of course. But no one is going to use it again today. Tomorrow morning. Bring Catty, Hodge, if she wants to come, but please don't say anything to anyone else till we've made further demonstrations, otherwise we'll be besieged by fellows wanting to take short jaunts into popular years."
I had little inclination to discuss what had happened with anyone, even Catty. Not that I shared Midbin's theory of nothing material having taken place; I knew I'd not seen Barbara for sixty seconds, and I was convinced her account of them was accurate. What confused me was the shock to my preconceptions involved in her proof. If time and space, matter and energy were the same, as fog and ice and water are the same, then I--the physical I at least--and Catty, the world and the universe must be, as Enfandin had insisted, mere illusion. In that sense Midbin had been right.
I went furtively to the workshop next day without telling Catty, as though we were all engaged in some dark necromancy, some sacrilegious rite. Apparently I was the only one who had spent an anxious night; Mr. Haggerwells looked proud, Barbara looked satisfied, Ace cocky, and even Midbin, for no understandable reason, benign.
"All here?" inquired Ace. "I'm eager as a fox in a henhouse. Three minutes in 1885. Why 1885? I don't know; a year when nothing much happened, I suppose. Ready, Barbara?"
He returned to report he had found the barn well occupied by both cattle and fowl, and been scared stiff of discovery when the dogs set up a furious barking.
"That pretty well settles the question of corporeal presence," I remarked.
"Not at all," said Mr. Haggerwells unexpectedly. "Dogs are notoriously psychic."
"Ah," cried Ace, bringing his hands from behind his back, "look at this. I could hardly have picked it up with psychic feelers."
"This" was a new-laid egg, sixty-seven years old. Or was it? Trips in time are confusing that way.
Barbara was upset, more than I thought warranted. "Oh, Ace, how could you be so foolish? We daren't be anything but spectators, as unseen as possible."
"Why? I've a notion to court my grandmother and wind up as my own grandfather."
"Don't be stupid. The faintest indication of our presence, the slightest impingement on the past, may change the whole course of events. We have no way of knowing what actions have no consequences--if there can be any. Goodness knows what your idiocy with the egg has done. It's absolutely essential not to betray ourselves in any way. Please remember this in future."
"You mean, 'Remember this in past,' don't you?"
"Ace, this isn't a joke."
"It isn't a wake either. I can't see the harm in bringing back tangible proof. Loss of one egg isn't going to send the prices up for 1885 and cause retroactive inflation. You're making a mountain out of a molehill--or an omelette out of a single egg."
She shrugged helplessly. "Oliver, I hope you won't be so foolish."
"Since I don't expect to arrive in, say, 1820, I can safely promise neither to steal eggs nor court Ace's female ancestors."
He was gone for five minutes. The barn had apparently not yet been built in 1820, and he found himself on a slight rise in a field of wild hay. The faint snick of scythes, and voices not too far off, indicated mowers. He dropped to the ground. His view of the past was restricted to tall grass and some persistent ants who explored his face and hands until the time was up and he returned with broken spears of ripe hay clinging to his clothes.
"At least that's what I imagined I saw," he concluded.
"Did you imagine these?" asked Ace, pointing to the straws.
"Probably. It's at least as likely as time travel."
"But what about corroboration? Your experience, and Barbara's, and Ace's confirm each other. Doesn't that mean anything?"
"Certainly. Only I'm not prepared to say what. The mind can do anything; anything at all. Create boils and cancers. Why not ants and grass? I don't know. I don't know. . . ."
After more fruitless argument, he and I left the workshop. I was again reminded of Enfandin--Why should I believe my eyes? I felt though that Midbin was carrying skepticism beyond rational limits; Barbara's case was proved.
"Yes, yes," he answered when I said this. "Why not?"
I puzzled over his reply. Then he added abruptly, "No one can help her now."
XVIII. THE WOMAN TEMPTED ME
Gently, Catty said, "I've never understood why you cut yourself off from the past the way you have, Hodge."
"Ay? What do you mean?"
"Well, you've not communicated with your father or mother since you left home fourteen years ago. You say you had a dear friend in the man from Haiti, yet you've never tried to find out whether he lived or died."
"Oh, that way. I thought you meant. . . something different." By not taking advantage of Barbara's offer I certainly was cutting myself off from the past.
"Yes?"
"Well, I guess more or less everyone at the Haven has done the same thing. Let outside ties grow weak, I mean. You for one--"
"But I have no parents, no friends anywhere else. All my life is here."
"Well, so is mine."
"Ah, dear Hodge, it is unlike you to be so indifferent."
"Catty darling, you were brought up comfortably in an atmosphere knowing nothing of indenting or sharecropping, of realizing the only escape from wretchedness was in a miracle--usually translated as a winning number in the lottery. I can't convey to you the meaning of utterly loveless surroundings, I can only say that affection was a luxury my mother and father couldn't afford."
"Perhaps not, but you can afford it. Now. And nothing of what you have said applies to Enfandin."
I squirmed shamefacedly. My ingratitude and callousness must be apparent to everyone; even Barbara, I remembered, had once asked me much the same questions Catty asked now. How could I explain, even to my own satisfaction, how procrastination and guilt made it impossible for me to take the simple steps to discover what had happened to my friend? By a tremendous effort I might have broken through the inertia years ago, just after Enfandin had been wounded, but each day and month between confirmed the impossibility more strongly. "Let the past take care of itself," I muttered.
"Oh Hodge! What a thing for a historian to say."
"Catty, I can't."
The conversation made me nervous and fidgety. It also made me remember much I preferred to let fade: the Grand Army, Sprovis, the counterfeit pesetas . . . All the evil I had unwillingly abetted. If a man did nothing, literally nothing, all his life, then he might be free of culpability. Manichaeanism, said Enfandin. No absolution.
My idleness, I knew very well, heightened all these feelings of degradation. Were I able to continue in the happy, cocksure way I had gone about my note gathering and the writing of volume one, I would have neither the time nor susceptibility to be plagued by this disquiet. As it was I seemed to be able to do nothing but act as audience for what was going on in the workshop.
With childish eagerness Barbara and Ace explored HX-1's possibilities for the next two months. They quickly learned that its range was limited to little more than a century, though this limit was subject to slight variations. When they tried to operate beyond this range the translation simply didn't take place, though the same feeling of dissolution occurred. When the light faded they were still in the present. Midbin's venture into the hay field had been a freak, possibly due to peculiar weather conditions at both ends of the journey. They set 1850 as a safe limit, with an undefined marginal zone further back which was not to be hazarded lest conditions change during the journey and the traveler be lost.
Why this limit existed at all was a matter of dispute between them, a dispute of which I must admit I understood little. Barbara spoke of subjective factors which seemed to mean that HX-1 worked slightly differently in the case of each person it transported; Ace of magnetic fields and power relays, which didn't mean anything to me at all. The only thing they agreed on was that the barrier was not immutable; HX-2 or 3 or 20, if they were ever built, would undoubtedly overcome it.
Nor would HX-1 work in reverse; the future remained closed, probably for similar reasons, whatever they were. Here again they disputed; Ace holding an HX could be built for this purpose, Barbara insisting that new equations would have to be worked out.
They confirmed their tentative theory that time spent in the past consumed an equal amount of time in the present; they could not return to a point a minute after departure when they had been gone for an hour. As near as I could understand, this was because duration was set in the present. In order to come back to a timepoint not in correspondence with the period actually spent, another HX, or at least another set of controls, would have to be taken into the past. And then they would not work since HX-1 could not penetrate the future.
The most inconvenient circumscription was the inability of one person to visit the same past moment twice. When the attempt was made the feeling of dissolution did not occur, the light went on and off with no effect upon the would-be traveler standing beneath it. Here Barbara's "subjective factor" was triumphant, but why or how it worked, they did not know. Nor did they know what would happen to a traveler who attempted to overlap by being already on the spot prior to a previous visit; it was too dangerous to try.
Within these limits they roamed almost at will. Ace spent a full week in October 1896, walking as far as Philadelphia, enjoying the enthusiasm and fury of the presidential campaign. Knowing President Bryan was not only going to be elected, but would serve three terms, he found it hard indeed to obey Barbara's stricture and not cover confident Whig bets on Major McKinley.
Though both sampled the war years they brought back nothing useful to me, no information or viewpoint I couldn't have got from any of a score of books. Lacking historians' interests or training, their tidbits were those of curious onlookers, not probing chroniclers. It was tantalizing to know that Barbara had seen Secretary Stanton at the York depot or that Ace had overheard a farmer say casually that Southron scouts had stopped at his place the day before and they had thought neither incident worth investigating further.
I grew increasingly fretful. I held long colloquies with myself which always ended inconclusively. _Why not?_ I asked. _Surely this is the unique opportunity. Never before has it been possible for a historian to check back at will, to select a particular moment for personal scrutiny, to write of the past with the detachment of the present and the accuracy of an eyewitness knowing specifically what to look for. Why don't you take advantage of HX-1 and see for yourself?_
Against this I objected--what? Fear? Uneasiness? The "subjective factor" in HX-1? The superstitious notion that I might be tampering with a taboo, with matters forbidden to human shortcomings? _You mustn't try any shortcuts. Promise me that, Hodge_. Well, Catty was a darling. She was my beloved wife, but she was neither scholar nor oracle. On what grounds did she protest? Woman's intuition? A respectable phrase, but what did it mean? And didn't Barbara, who first suggested my using HX-1, have womanly intuition also?
A half dozen times I tried to steer our talk in the direction of my thoughts; each time I allowed the words to drift to another topic. What was the use of upsetting her? _Promise me that, Hodge_. But I had not promised. This was something I had to settle for myself.
What was I afraid of? Because I'd never grasped anything to do with the physical sciences did I attribute some anthropomorphism to their manifestations and like a savage fear the spirit imprisoned in what I didn't understand? (But HX-1 _did_ have subjective factors.) I had never thought of myself as hidebound, but I was acting like a ninety-year-old professor asked to use a typewriter instead of a goose quill.
I recalled Tyss's, "You are the spectator type, Hodgins." And once I had called him out of my memory I couldn't escape his familiar, sardonic, interminable argument. _Why are you fussing yourself, Hodgins? What is the point of all this introspective debate? Don't you know your choice has already been made? And that you have acted according to it an infinite number of times and will do so an infinite number of times again? Relax, Hodgins, you have nothing to worry about. Free will is an illusion; you cannot alter what you are about to decide under the impression that you have decided_.
My reaction to this imagined interjection was frenzied, unreasonable. I cursed Tyss and his damnable philosophy. I cursed the insidiousness of his reasoning which had planted seed in my brain to sprout at a moment like this.
Yet in spite of the violence of my rejection of the words I attributed to Tyss, I accepted one of them. I relaxed. The decision had been made. Not by mechanistic forces, nor by blind response to stimulus, but by my own desire.
And now to my aid came the image of Tyss's antithesis, Ren? Enfandin. _Be a skeptic, Hodge; be always the skeptic. Prove all things; hold fast to that which is true. Joking Pilate, asking, "What is truth?" was blind. But you can see more aspects of the absolute truth than any man has had a chance to see before. Can you use the chance well, Hodge? That is the only question_.
Once I could answer it with a vigorous affirmative, and so buttress the determination to go, I was faced with the problem of telling Catty. I could not shut her out of so important a move. I told myself I could not bear the thought of her anxiety; that she would worry despite the fact others had frequently used HX-1, for my object could not be accomplished in a matter of minutes or hours. I was sure she would be sick with apprehension during the days I would be gone. No doubt this was all true, but I also remembered, _Promise me, Hodge_ . . .
I finally took the weak, the ineffective course. I said I'd decided the only way to face my problem was to go to Gettysburg and spend three or four days going over the actual field. Here, I explained unconvincingly, I thought I might at last come to the conclusion whether to scrap all my work and start afresh or not.
Her faintly oblique eyes were inscrutable. She pretended to believe me and begged me to take her along. After all, we had spent our honeymoon on battlefields.
Would it be possible? Two people had never stood under the reflector together, but surely it would work? I was tempted, but I could not subject Catty to the risk, however slight. Besides, how could I explain?
"But, Catty, with you there I'd be thinking of you instead of the problem."
"Ah, Hodge, have we already been married so long you must get away from me to think?"
"No matter how long, that time will never come. Perhaps I'm wrong, Catty. It's just a feeling I have."
Her look was tragic with understanding. "You must do as you think right. Don't .. don't be gone too long, my dear."
I dressed in clothes I often used for walking trips, clothes which bore no mark of any fashion and might pass as current wear among the poorer classes in any era of the past hundred years. I put a packet of dried beef in my pocket and started for the workshop.
As soon as I left the cottage I laughed at my hypersensitivity, at all the to-do I'd made over lying to Catty. This was but the first excursion; I planned others for the months after Gettysburg. There was no reason why she shouldn't accompany me on them. I grew lighthearted as my conscience eased, and I even congratulated myself on my skill in not having told a single technical falsehood to Catty. I began to whistle, never a habit of mine, as I made my way along the path to the workshop.
Barbara was alone. Her ginger hair gleamed in the light of a gas globe; her eyes were green as they always were when she was exultant. "Well, Hodge?"
"Well, Barbara, I . . ."
"Have you told Catty?"
"Not exactly. How did you know?" "I knew before you did, Hodge. After all, we're not strangers. All right. How long do you want to stay?"
"Four days."
"That's long for a first trip. Don't you think you'd better try a few sample minutes?"
"Why? I've seen you and Ace go often enough and heard your accounts. I'll take care of myself. Have you got it down fine enough yet so you can invariably pick the hour of arrival?"
"Hour and minute," she answered confidently. "What'li it be?"
"About midnight of June 30, 1863," I answered. "I want to come back on the night of July 4."
"You'll have to be more exact than that. For the return, I mean. The dials are set on seconds."
"All right, make it midnight going and coming then."
"Have you a watch that keeps perfect time?"
"I don't know about perfect--"
"Take this one. It's synchronized with the master control clock." She handed me a large, rather awkward timepiece which had two independent faces side by side. "We had a couple made like this; the duplicate dials were useful before we were able to control HX-1 so exactly. One shows 1952 Haggershaven time."
"Ten thirty-three and fourteen seconds," I said.
"Yes. The other will show 1863 time. You won't be able to reset the first dial--but for goodness sake remember to keep it wound--and set the second for - . - 11:54, zero. That means in six minutes you'll leave, to arrive at midnight. Remember to keep that one wound, too, for you'll go by that regardless of variations in local clocks. Whatever else happens, be in the center of the barn at midnight--allow yourself some leeway--by midnight, July 4. I don't want to have to go wandering around 1863 looking for you."
"You won't. I'll be here."
"Five minutes. Now then, food."
"I have some," I answered, slapping my pocket.
"Not enough. Take this concentrated chocolate along. I suppose it won't hurt to drink the water if you're not observed, but avoid their food. One never knows what chain might be started by the casual theft--or purchase, if you had enough old coins--of a loaf of bread. The possibilities are limitless and frightening. Listen: how can I impress on you the importance of doing nothing that could possibly change the future--our present? I'm sure to this day Ace doesn't understand, and I tremble every moment he spends in the past. The most trivial action may begin a series of disastrous consequences. Don't be seen, don't be heard. Make your trip as a ghost."
"Barbara, I promise I'll neither assassinate General Lee nor give the North the idea of a modern six-barreled cannon."
"Four minutes. It's not a joke, Hodge."
"Believe me," I said, "I understand."
She looked at me searchingly. Then she shook her head and began making her round of the engines, adjusting the dials. I slid under the glass ring as I'd so often seen her do and stood casually under the reflector. I was not in the least nervous. I don't think I was even particularly excited.
"Three minutes," said Barbara.
I patted my breast pocket. Notebook, pencils. I nodded.
She ducked under the ring and came toward me. "Hodge . . ."
"Yes?"
She put her arms on my shoulders, leaning forward. I kissed her, a little absently. "Clod!"
I looked at her closely, but there were none of the familiar signs of anger. "A minute to go, it says here," I told her.
She drew away and went back. "All set. Ready?"
"Ready," I answered cheerfully. "See you midnight, July 4, 1863."
"Right. Good-bye, Hodge. Glad you didn't tell Catty." The expression on her face was the strangest I'd ever seen her wear. I could not, then or now, quite interpret it. Doubt, malice, suffering, vindictiveness, entreaty, love, were all there as her hand moved the switch. I began to answer something, perhaps to bid her wait--then the light made me blink and I, too, experienced the shattering feeling of transition. My bones seemed to fly from each other; every cell in my body exploded to the ends of space.
The instant of translation was so brief it is hard to believe all the multitude of impressions occurred simultaneously. I was sure my veins were drained of blood, my brain and eyeballs dropped into a bottomless void, my thoughts pressed to the finest powder and blown a universe away. Most of all, I knew the awful sensation of being, for that tiny fragment of time, not Hodgins McCormick Backmaker, but part of an _I_ in which the I that was me merged all identity.
Then I opened my eyes. I was emotionally shaken; my knees and wrists were watery points of helplessness, but I was alive and functioning, with my individuality unimpaired. The light had vanished. I was in darkness save for faint moonlight coming through the cracks in the barn. The sweetish smell of cattle was in my nostrils, and the slow, ponderous stamp of hooves in my ears. I had gone back through time.