A tall man with a grave face held a small black book and, in archaic English, he was reading, “I am the resurrection and the light...”
His voice droned on as the prisoner came out of the cell. He was a tall man with a strong face and a bitter mouth. His fists were clenched, the leg of his trousers slashed.
He stood, shoulders straight, the back of his head shaven bare, walked in the center of the group of men toward a door at the end of the corridor.
Gahn heard Luria’s heavy breathing. He glanced at her, saw in the dim glow from the instrument panel that she was leaning forward, her lips parted, a wisp of her golden hair unnoticed across her forehead.
He smiled tightly in the darkness. The little group walked to the door, and he kept the lens behind them, following them. The voice droned on, and they heard the muffled tread of the shoes against the concrete floor.
The chair was waiting. With a showman’s knack, Gahn, the younger, brought the lens to within a foot of John Homrik’s face, saw the writhing lips, the livid complexion, and then it was covered by the hood.
He moved the lens back, and then the man leaped against his bonds under the surge of current — and was still.
He darkened the screen, brightened the lights in the room. “Enough?” he asked.
Her pretty, almost animal, face twisted and she said, “No, Gahn. I... I liked the way he looked. He looked strong and... like a man. In these days there are no men like that.”
“No men that stupid,” he said cuttingly.
“Gahn, I understand that you Crime-seekers try to find where justice has miscarried. I want to see that man kill his wife.”
“You have seen enough.”
“In that case, you have seen enough of me, Gahn!”
He sighed. Having given in once before, it was easy to give in this time. With flying fingers he set the dial, found the year, the day, found Kingston. It took fifteen minutes of search before he found the proper street, the proper house.
When he focused on the house from a distance of one hundred feet in the air, he saw the white vehicles parked in front, and knew that he had to set his time back just a bit. The screen blurred, cleared, and the cars were still there. Further back. It was night. Rain fell. He moved the lens down into the house, but could see nothing in the darkness. Slowly he reversed the time until suddenly he saw light.
John Homrik, a different John Homrik, a laughing John Homrik, was teasing a sturdy young girl who stood at a mirror, combing long pale hair.
Suddenly she turned, and said, “You can say it’s all right a thousand times, but that doesn’t make it all right.”
He sobered instantly. “Anna, darling, I know you as well as I know myself. You’re not a cheat. You’re not dishonest. I love you. One day I’ll meet him. I want to hurt him, but not you, Anna.”
Her eyes were not laughing. “You hate me,” she said softly.
“I love you.”
“John, I’m not worthy of you. I... I spoiled everything for us. Everything!”
Tears rolled down her face. He went to her, held her tightly. “Nothing is spoiled,” he said.
Luria whispered, “He is not going to kill her.”
Gahn shrugged. He watched the screen, saw the man and woman of a thousand years before hold each other tightly, saw the devotion and intensity of their love. The bedroom light clicked out, and in the screen they could see only the glow of the dial of the alarm clock, but they could hear the whispered endearments. Gahn reached out, took Luria’s hand, held it tightly.
“He will soon kill her,” he whispered.
Cautiously he advanced the time dial, releasing it when a dim light filled the room. The woman, Anna, stepped out of the bed, stood very still, looking down at the sleeping face of her husband. Then she moved so quickly that for a moment Gahn lost her.
He found her again in another room, and the light was on. She held a leather thong in her hand, and tears streaked down her face. She moved a chair over under a steam pipe, knotted the leather thong around her smooth throat, tied it firmly to the pipe over her head. She stood for a moment and they heard her whisper, “Good-by, my darling!”
The chair thudded over, and she hung, writhing, twisting, her face contorted, blackening, her hand flailing the smooth plaster wall, until at last she hung quietly.
He moved the lens back to the bedroom. John Homrik stirred in his sleep, and flung one arm out across the empty space beside him. The light from the room shone across him. Suddenly he sat up, knuckling his eyes.
He walked out, stood transfixed, screamed, “Anna! Anna!”
As he cut her down, lowered her dead body tenderly to the floor, Gahn darkened the screen. He turned up the lights in the room.
Luria’s face was pale, and there were tears on her smooth cheeks. “He didn’t kill her! He didn’t kill her!” she said.
Gahn smiled. “You see? You are taking it too seriously. All that happened a long, long time ago.”
“But it happened! It happened to him! Don’t you see? He didn’t kill her, he tried to save her, and for that they... put him in that chair.”
“I’ve seen many such cases,” he said calmly.
She jumped up. “How can you be so cold? Couldn’t he be... warned, or something? If you could stop it, I’d think you’d have the decency to.”
Gahn felt smoothly superior. “Of course I could stop it. It would be very simple in this case. All I would have to do would be to move the lens down until it appeared to penetrate his skull. Actually at the vision point there is a mild electrical discharge, sufficient to awaken him abruptly. And then he would catch her in time and—”
“Let’s do it!” she said, her eyes glowing.
He laughed. “My dear girl, don’t be absurd! To alter the objective past would be like kicking out the bottom block of a tower.
“We are built on that past. As you saw, Homrik appears to have been a man of intelligence and determination. If he lived and his wife lived, some of their descendants would be alive today. And who knows what alterations they would have made? That’s why this whole procedure is limited to tenth-level mentalities. We can perceive the dangerous results of doing such a foolhardy thing. It is only theory that any interference with the past would result in a divergence plus a tendency to return to the norm. For all we know, there would be no tendency to return to the norm. How do we know this is a ‘norm’?”
She looked at him for long seconds, moved over to him, pushed the control panel aside and slid onto his lap, her warm arms around his neck. She daintily bit the lobe of his ear, and then whispered, “I want to look at it all again. I want to watch her hang herself.”
He laughed. “You’re a bloodthirsty minx, Luria. Well, there’s no harm in it.”
She went and sat in her own chair close to him, and he dimmed the room lights, turned it on again. This time he had no difficulty in locating the proper place and moment.
He watched carefully, thinking that Luria had hit on a very good case. He decided to mention it to Jellery and Blanz. They would enjoy it. The motives of the woman in the case were rather obscure; interesting. Sturdy little girl. Quite young. Guilt complex, apparently.
The light clicked on in the bedroom of a thousand years before. Anna slid her firm young legs out of the bed, stood up and looked down at her sleeping husband. She turned toward the bedroom door. Gahn, the younger, smiled and reached for the dial so as to follow her.
But instead of the dial, his fingers touched the warm flesh of Luria’s plump hand. He looked at the screen, saw the head of the sleeper growing so as to fill the whole screen, and he instantly realized that Luria had merely pretended to agree, that she was trying to awaken the sleeper, that she was attempting to make an objective change in their common past, in the heritage of small events that supported the world as they knew it.