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.”