«Mr. Gale wanted to see you as soon as you arrived.»
«You mean you were expecting me?»
«Well, we couldn’t be absolutely sure,» said the other. «We are glad you made it.»
Latimer got off the bench and the two of them walked together to the front entrance, climbed the steps, and went through the door. They walked through a deserted lounge, then into a hallway flanked by numbered doors with no names upon them. Halfway down the hall, the man with Latimer knocked at one of the doors.
«Come in,» a voice said.
The man opened the door and stuck his head in. «Mr. Latimer is here,» he said. «He made it.»
«That is fine,» said the voice. «I am glad he did. Please show him in.»
The man stepped aside to allow Latimer to enter, then stepped back into the hall and closed the door. Latimer stood alone, facing the man across the room.
«I’m Donovan Gale,» said the man, rising from his desk and coming across the room. He held out his hand and Latimer took it. Gale’s grasp was a friendly corporate handshake.
«Let’s sit over here,» he said, indicating a davenport. «It seems to me we may have a lot to talk about.»
«I’m interested in hearing what you have to say,» said Latimer.
«I guess both of us are,» said Gale. «Interested in what the other has to say, I mean.»
They sat down on opposite ends of the davenport, turning to face one another.
«So you are David Latimer,» said Gale. «The famous painter.»
«Not famous,» said Latimer. «Not yet. And it appears now that I may never be. But what I don’t understand is how you were expecting me.»
«We knew you’d left Auk House.»
«So that is what you call it. Auk House.»
«And we suspected you would show up here. We didn’t know exactly where, although we hoped that it would be nearby. Otherwise you never would have made it. There are monsters in those hills. Although, of course, we could not be really sure that you would wind up here. Would you mind telling us how you did it?»
Latimer shook his head. «I don’t believe I will. Not right now, at least. Maybe later on when I know more about your operation. And now a question for you. Why me? Why an inoffensive painter who was doing no more than trying to make a living and a reputation that might enable him to make a better living?»
«I see,» said Gale, «that you have it figured out.»
«Not all of it,» said Latimer. «And, perhaps, not all of it correctly. But I resent being treated as a bad guy, as a potential threat of some sort. I haven’t got the guts or the motive to be a bad guy. And Enid, for Christ’s sake. Enid is a poet. And Alice. All Alice does is play a good piano.»
«You’re talking to the wrong man,» Gale told him. «Breen could tell you that, if you can get him to tell you. I’m only personnel.»
«Who is Breen?»
«He’s head of the evaluation team.»
«Those are the ones who figure out who is going to be picked up and tossed into time.»
«Yes, that is the idea, crudely. There’s a lot more to it than that. There is a lot of work done here. Thousands of newspapers and other periodicals to be read to spot potential subjects. Preliminary psychological determinations. Then it’s necessary to do further study back on prime world. Further investigation of potential subjects. But no one back there really knows what is going on. They’re just hired to do jobs now and then. The real work goes on here.»
«Prime world is present time? Your old world and mine?»
«Yes. If you think, however, of prime world as present time, that’s wrong. That’s not the way it is. We’re not dealing with time, but with alternate worlds. The one you just came from is a world where everything else took place exactly as it did in prime world, with one exception—man never evolved. There are no men there and never will be. Here, where we are now, something more drastic occurred. Here the reptiles did not become extinct. The Cretaceous never came to an end, the Cenozoic never got started. The reptiles are still the dominant species and the mammals still are secondary.»
«You’re taking a chance, aren’t you, in telling me all this.»
«I don’t think so,» said Gale. «You’re not going anywhere. There are none of us going anywhere. Once we sign up for this post, we know there’s not any going back. We’re stuck here. Unless you have a system …»
«No system. I was just lucky.»
«You’re something of an embarrassment to us,» said Gale. «In the years since the program has been in operation, nothing like this has happened at any of the stations. We don’t know what to make of it and we don’t quite know what to do with you. For the moment, you’ll stay on as a guest. Later on, if it is your wish, we could find a place for you. You could become a member of the team.»
«Right at the moment,» said Latimer, «that holds no great attraction for me.»
«That’s because you aren’t aware of the facts, nor of the dangers. Under the economic and social systems that have been developed in prime world, the great mass of mankind has never had it so good. There are ideological differences, of course, but there is some hope that they eventually can be ironed out. There are underprivileged areas; this cannot be denied. But one must also concede that their only hope lies in their development by free-world business interests. So-called big-business interests are the world’s one hope. With the present economic structure gone, the entire world would go down into another Dark Age, from which it would require a thousand years or more to recover, if recovery, in fact, were possible at all.»
«So to protect your precious economic structure, you place a painter, a poet, a musician into limbo.»
Gale made a despairing gesture with his hands. «I have told you I can’t supply the rationale on that. You’ll have to see Breen if he has the time to see you. He’s a very busy man.»
«I would imagine that he might be.»
«He might even dig out the files and tell you,» said Gale. «As I say, you’re not going anywhere. You can pose no problem now. You are stuck with us and we with you. I suppose that we could send you back to Auk House, but that would be undesirable, I think. It would only upset the people who are there. As it is, they’ll probably figure that you simply wandered off and got killed by a bear or bitten by a rattlesnake, or drowned in a swamp. They’ll look for you and when they don’t find you, that will be it. You only got lost; they’ll never consider for a moment that you escaped. I think we had better leave it at that. Since you are here and, given time, would nose out the greater part of our operation, we have no choice but to be frank with you. Understandably, however, we’d prefer that no one outside this headquarters knew.»
«Back at Auk House, there was a painting of mine hanging in my room.»
«We thought it was a nice touch,» said Gale. «A sort of friendly thing to do. We could bring it here.»
«That wasn’t why I asked,» said Latimer. «I was wondering—did the painting’s subject have something to do with what you did to me? Were you afraid that I would go on painting pictures pointing up the failures of your precious economic structure?»
Gale was uncomfortable. «I couldn’t say,» he said.
«I was about to say that if such is the case, you stand on very flimsy ground and carry a deep guilt complex.»
«Such things are beyond me,» said Gale. «I can’t even make a comment.»
«And this is all you want of me? To stand in place? To simply be a guest of all these big-hearted corporations?»
«Unless you want to tell us how you got here.»
«I have told you that I won’t do that. Not now. I suppose if you put me to the torture …»
«We wouldn’t torture you,» said Gale. «We are civilized. We regret some of the things that we must do, but we do not flinch from duty. And not the duty to what you call big-hearted corporations, but to all humankind. Man has a good thing going; we can’t allow it to be undermined. We’re not taking any chances. And now, perhaps I should call someone to show you to your room. I take it you got little sleep last night.»