He put his hands up to his head in anguish.
«But we don’t,» he said. «We never take such photographs.»
«Stefan took them.»
He choked in frustration. «How can I make you understand! Stefan was a freak, a throwback. He got kicks out of violence, out of blood. That’s why we kept him here. That was why he was never allowed to go out in the field. He sneaked out whenever he could and took what you call the photographs. There is a name for them …»
«Holographs,» I said.
«I guess that’s the word. A mechanism using the laser principle. It was a mistake to put him on our team. It meant we had to cover up for him. We couldn’t report or admit what he was doing. We had to consider the honor of the team. We talked with him, we pleaded with him, but he was beyond all shame. He was a psychopath. How he ever succeeded in covering up his condition so he could be appointed to the team—»
«Psychopaths,» I said, «are tricky.»
He pleaded with me, «Now you understand?»
«Not too well,» I said. «You stand aghast at violence. You are turned off by blood. And yet you study history and, more often than not, history turns on violence. It can be a bloody business.»
He shuddered. «We find enough of it. We are repelled by it, but it’s sometimes necessary to consider it. We do not enjoy it: Stefan did enjoy it. He knew how we felt about it. He hid away his photographs, afraid we would destroy them. We would have if we’d found them.»
«You hunted for them,» I said.
«Everywhere. We never found their hiding place.»
«So there are some around?»
«I suppose there are. But if you think they can be found, forget it. You said psychopaths are tricky.»
«Yes, I guess I did,» I said. «In such a case, there can’t be any deal.»
«You mean you’ll keep the capsule?»
I nodded and tucked it underneath my arm.
«But why?» he shouted. «Why?»
«If it’s valuable to you,» I told him, «it should be valuable to us.»
And I thought to myself, what in the name of Holy Christ am I doing here, hunkered down in a cave that was an olden mine, arguing with a man out of the human future about a silly cylinder out of the nonhuman past?
«You would have no way to come by the information that the capsule carries,» he said.
«How about yourself? How about your people?»
«They’d have a better chance. We can’t be entirely sure, of course, but we’d have a better chance.»
«I suppose,» I said, «that you expect to find some nonhuman knowledge, a cultural concept based on nonhuman values. You expect a lot of new ideas, a windfall of new concepts, some of which could be grafted on your culture, some of which could not.»
«That’s the whole point, Thornton. Even if you could extract the knowledge, how would your age put it to use? Don’t forget that some of it, perhaps much of it, might run counter to your present concepts. What if it said that human rights must take precedence, both in theory and in practice, over property rights? In practice as well as in theory—right now, of course, human rights do in certain aspects take precedence in theory, even in law, but how about in practice? What if you found something that condemned nationalism and gave a formula for its being done away with? What if it proved patriotism were so much utter hogwash? Not that we can expect the contents of this capsule to deal with such things as human rights and nationalism. The information in this capsule, I would suspect, will include a lot of things we’ve never even thought of. How do you think the present day, your present day, would take to such divergence from what you consider as the norm? I can tell you. It would be disregarded, it would be swept beneath the rug, it would be laughed and sneered to nothing. You might as well smash this capsule into bits as give it to your people.»
«How about yourselves?» I asked. «How can you be sure you’ll put it to good use?»
«We have to,» he said. «If you saw Earth as it is up in my time, you would know we’d have to. Sure, we can travel out in space. We can travel into time. But with all these things, we still are hanging on by our fingernails. We’ll use it; we’ll use anything at all to keep the human race in business. We are the end product of thousands of years of mismanagement and bungling—your mismanagement and bungling. Why do you think we spend our lives in coming back to study history? For the fun of it? The adventure? No, I tell you, no. We do it to find where and how the human race went wrong, hoping to glean some insight into how it might have gone right, but didn’t. To find an old lost knowledge that might be put to better use than you ever put it to. We are the lost race digging through the garbage of men who lived before us.»
«You’re sniveling,» I said. «You are feeling sorry for yourself.»
«I suppose so,» he said. «I’m sorry. We no longer are the frozen-faced realists of this time, afraid of emotion, any more than you are the rough, tough barbarian you’d meet if you went back a couple of thousand years. The human race has changed. We are the ones who were stripped naked. We decided long ago we could no longer afford the luxury of violence, of cutthroat economic competition, of national pride. We are not the same people you know. I don’t say we are better, only different and with different viewpoints. If we want to weep, we weep; if we want to sing, we sing.»
I didn’t say anything; I just kept looking at him.
«And if you keep the capsule,» he asked, «what will you do with it, you personally, not your culture? To whom would you give it, whom would you tell about it? Who would listen to your explanation? Could you survive the scarcely hidden disbelief and laughter? How could you, once you’d told your story, the story I have told you—how could you face your colleagues and your students?»
«I guess I couldn’t,» I said. «Here, take the goddamn thing.»
He reached out and took it. «I thank you very much,» he said. «You have earned our gratitude.»
I felt all cut up inside. I wasn’t sure of anything. To have something in one’s hand, I thought, that might change the world, then give it away, be forced to give it away because I knew that in my time it would not be used, that there could be no hope that it would be used—that was tough to take. I might have felt different about it, I knew, if I could have given the cylinder to someone else than this little twerp. I didn’t know why I disliked him; I had never even asked myself what there was to dislike about him. Then, suddenly, I knew; it all came to me. I disliked him because there were too many centuries between us. He was still a human, sure, but not the same kind of human as I was. Time had made a difference between us. I had no idea of how many years there might be between us—I hadn’t even asked him, and I wondered why I hadn’t. Times change and people change, and those cumulative changes had made us different kinds of humans.
«If you’ll come up to the house,» he said, «I could find a drink.»
«Go to hell,» I said.
He started to leave, then turned back to me. «I hate to leave like this,» he said. «I know how you must feel. You don’t like me, I am sure, and I can’t with all honesty say I care too much for you. But you have done a great, although unwitting, service for us, and I have a deep sense of gratitude. Aside from all of that, we are two human beings. Please don’t shame me, Thornton. Please accord me the luxury of being decent to you.»
I grunted boorishly at him, but I got up, picked up the tools and followed after him.
When we came into the Lodge, Angela was slumped in a chair. A whiskey bottle stood on the table beside her. She struggled to her feet and waved a half-filled glass at me, spilling liquor on the rug.