Squatting there upon the beach, he remembered the clump of birch and now, suddenly and without thinking of it, he knew what had attracted his attention to it—an aberration of perspective that his painter’s eye had caught. Knitting his brow, he tried to remember exactly what it was that had made the perspective wrong, but whatever it had been quite escaped him now.
He glimpsed another agate and went to pick it up, and a little farther down the beach he found yet another one. This, he told himself, was an unworked, unpicked rock-hunters paradise. He put the agates in his pocket and continued down the beach. Spotting other agates, he did not pick them up.
Later, at some other time, if need be, he could find hours of amusement hunting them.
When he climbed the beach and started up the slope, he saw that Jonathon was sitting in a chair on the veranda that ran across the back of the house.
He climbed up to where he sat and settled down in another chair.
«Did you see an auk?» asked Jonathon.
«I saw four of them,» said Latimer.
«There are times,» said Jonathon, «that the beach is crowded with them. Other times, you won’t see one for days. Underwood and Charlie are off hunting woodcock. I suppose you heard them shooting. If they get back in time, we’ll have woodcock for dinner. Have you ever eaten woodcock?»
«Only once. Some years ago. A friend and I went up to Nova Scotia to catch the early flight.»
«I guess that is right. Nova Scotia and a few other places now. Here I imagine you can find hunting of them wherever you can find alder swamps.»
«Where was everyone?» asked Latimer. «When I got out of the sack and had something to eat, there was no one around.»
«The girls went out blackberrying,» said Jonathon. «They do that often. Gives them something to do. It’s getting a little late for blackberries, but there are some around. They got back in time to have blackberry pie tonight.» He smacked his lips. «Woodcock and blackberry pie. I hope you are hungry.»
«Don’t you ever think of anything but eating?»
«Lots of other things,» said Jonathon. «Thing is, here you grab onto anything you can think about. It keeps you occupied. And I might ask you, are you feeling easier than you were last night? Got all the immediate questions answered?»
«One thing still bothers me,» said Latimer. «I left my car parked outside the house. Someone is going to find it parked there and will wonder what has happened.»
«I think that’s something you don’t need to worry over,» said Jonathon. «Whoever is engineering this business would have seen to it. I don’t know, mind you, but I would guess that before morning your car was out of there and will be found, abandoned, some other place, perhaps a hundred miles away. The people we are dealing with would automatically take care of such small details. It wouldn’t do to have too many incidents clustered about this house or in any other place. Your car will be found and you’ll be missing and a hunt will be made for you. When you aren’t found, you’ll become just another one of the dozens of people who turn up missing every year.»
«Which leaves me to wonder,» said Latimer, «how many of these missing people wind up in places such as this. It is probable this is not the only place where some of them are being trapped.»
«There is no way to know,» said Jonathon. «People drop out for very many reasons.»
They sat silent for a time, looking out across the sweep of lawn. A squirrel went scampering down the slope. Far off, birds were calling. The distant surf was a hollow booming.
Finally, Latimer spoke. «Last night, you told me we needed a new philosophy, that the old ones were no longer valid.»
«That I did,» said Jonathon. «We are faced today with a managed society. We live by restrictive rules, we have been reduced to numbers—our Social Security numbers, our Internal Revenue Service numbers, the numbers on our credit cards, on our checking and savings accounts, on any number of other things. We are being dehumanized and, in most cases, willingly, because this numbers game may seem to make life easier, but most often because no one wants to bother to make a fuss about it. We have come to believe that a man who makes a fuss is antisocial. We are a flock of senseless chickens, fluttering and scurrying, cackling and squawking, but being shooed along in the way that others want us to go. The advertising agencies tell us what to buy, the public relations people tell us what to think, and even knowing this, we do not resent it. We sometimes damn the government when we work up the courage to damn anyone at all. But I am certain it is not the government we should be damning, but, rather, the world’s business managers. We have seen the rise of multinational complexes that owe no loyalty to any government, that think and plan in global terms, that view the human populations as a joint labor corps and consumer group, some of which also may have investment potential. This is a threat, as I see it, against human free will and human dignity, and we need a philosophical approach that will enable us to deal with it.»
«And if you should write this philosophy,» said Latimer, «it would pose a potential threat against the managers.»
«Not at first,» said Jonathon. «Perhaps never. But it might have some influence over the years. It might start a trend of thinking. To break the grip the managers now hold would require something like a social revolution …»
«These men, these managers you are talking about—they would be cautious men, would they not, farseeing men? They would take no chances. They’d have too much at stake to take any chances at all.»
«You aren’t saying …»
«Yes, I think I am. It is, at least, a thought.»
Jonathon said, «I have thought of it myself but rejected it because I couldn’t trust myself. It follows my bias too closely. And it doesn’t make sense. If there were people they wanted to get out of the way, there’d be other ways to do it.»
«Not as safely,» said Latimer. «Here there is no way we could be found. Dead, we would be found …»
«I wasn’t thinking of killing.»
«Oh, well,» said Latimer, «it was only a thought. Another guess.»
«There’s one theory no one has told you, or I don’t think they have. An experiment in sociology. Putting various groups of people together in unusual situations and measuring their reactions. Isolating them so there is no present-world influence to modify the impact of the situation.»
Latimer shook his head. «It sounds like a lot of trouble and expense. More than the experiment would be worth.»
«I think so, too,» said Jonathon.
He rose from his chair. «I wonder if you’d excuse me. I have the habit of stretching out for an hour or so before dinner. Sometimes I doze, other times I sleep, often I just lie there. But it is relaxing.»
«Go ahead,» said Latimer. «We’ll have plenty of time later to talk.»
For half an hour or more after Jonathon had left, he remained sitting in the chair, staring down across the lawn, but scarcely seeing it.
That idea about the managers being responsible for the situation, he told himself, made a ragged sort of sense. Managers, he thought with a smile—how easy it is to pick up someone else’s lingo.
For one thing, the idea, if it worked, would be foolproof. Pick up the people you wanted out of the way and pop them into time, and after you popped them into time still keep track of them to be sure there were no slipups. And, at the same time, do them no real injustice, harm them as little as possible, keep a light load on your conscience, still be civilized.
There were two flaws, he told himself. The staff changed from time to time. That meant they must be rotated from here back to present time and they could be a threat. Some way would have had to be worked out to be sure they never talked, and given human nature, that would be a problem.