“Not,” he said, “that I have ever travelled.”
“I didn’t know that, sir.”
“I wasn’t good enough. My attitudes were wrong.”
And he saw the old hope and hunger in the eyes of the man across the desk—and something else besides. Something vaguely disturbing.
“It’s not all fun,” he said, a shade more harshly than he had meant to make it. “At first there’s the romance and the glitter, but that soon wears off. It becomes a job. Sometimes a bitter one.”
He paused and looked at Cabell and the queer, disturbing light still was shining in his eyes.
“You should know,” he said, deliberately harsh this time, “that if you come in with us you’ll probably be dead of advanced old age in five years.”
Cabell nodded unconcernedly. “I know that, sir. The people down in Personnel explained it all to me.”
“Good,” said Spencer. “I suspect at times that Personnel makes a rather shabby explanation. They tell you just enough to make it sound convincing, but they do not tell it all. They are far too anxious to keep us well supplied. We’re always short of travelers; we run through them too fast.”
He paused and looked at the man again. There was no change in him.
“We have certain regulations,” Spencer told him. “They aren’t made so much by Past, Inc., as by the job itself. You cannot have any settled sort of life. You live out your life in pieces, like a patchwork quilt, hopping from neighborhood to neighborhood, and those neighborhoods all many years apart. There is no actual rule against it, but none of our travelers has ever married. It would be impossible. In five years the man would die of old age and his wife would still be young.”
“I think I understand, sir.”
“Actually,” Spencer said, “it’s a very simple matter of simple economics. We cannot afford to have either our machines or men tied up for any length of time. So while a man may be gone a week, a month, or years, the machine comes back, with him inside of it, sixty seconds after he has left. That sixty seconds is an arbitrary period; it could be a single second, it could be an hour or day or anything we wanted. One minute has seemed a practical period.”
“And,” asked Cabell, “if it does not come back within that minute?”
“Then it never will.”
“It sometimes happens?”
“Of course it happens. Time travelling is no picnic. Every time a man goes back he is betting his life that he can get along in an environment which is as totally alien, in some instances, as another planet. We help him every way we can, of course. We make it our business to see that he is well briefed and Indoctrinated and as well equipped as it is possible to make him. He is taught the languages he is likely to require. He is clothed properly. But there are instances when we simply do not know the little vital details which mean survival. Sometimes we learn them later when our man comes back and tells us. Usually he is quite profane about it. And some we don’t find out about at all. The man does not come back.”
“One would think,” said Cabell, “that you would like to scare me out.”
“No! I tell you this because I want no misunderstanding. It costs a lot to train a traveler. We must get our costs back. We do not want a man who will stay with us just a little while. We don’t want a year or two from you; we want your entire life. We’ll take you and we’ll wring you dry of every minute …”
“I can assure you, sir …”
“We’ll send you where we want you,” Spencer said, “and although we have no control of you once you’ve left, we expect that you’ll not fool around. Not that you won’t come back inside of sixty seconds—naturally you will, if you come back at all. But we want you to come back as young as possible. Past, Inc., is a pure commercial venture. We’ll squeeze all the trips we possibly can out of you.”
“I understand all this,” said Cabell, “but Personnel explained it would be to my advantage, too.”
“That is true, of course, but it’ll not take you long to find that money is of slight moment to a traveler. Since you have no family, or we would hope you haven’t, what would you need it for? The only leisure time you’ll have is a six weeks’ annual leave and you can earn enough in a trip or two to spend that leave in utmost luxury or the deepest vice.
“Most of the men, however, don’t even bother to do that. They just wander off and get re-acquainted with the era they were born into. Vice and luxury in this present century has but slight appeal to them after all the hell they’ve raised in past centuries at the company’s expense.”
“You are kidding, sir.”
“Well, maybe just a little. But in certain cases that I have in mind, it is the honest truth.”
Spencer stared across at Cabell.
“None of this bothers you?” he asked.
“Not a thing so far.”
“There’s just one thing else, Mr. Cabell, that you should know about. That is the need—the imperative, crying need for objectivity. When you go into the past, you take no part in it. You do not interfere. You must not get involved.”
“That should not be hard.”
“I warn you, Mr. Cabell, that it requires moral stamina. The man who travels in time has terrible power. And there’s something about the feel of power that makes it almost compulsive for a man to use it. Hand in hand with that power is the temptation to take a hand in history. To wield a judicious knife, to say a word that needs saying very badly. To save a life that, given a few more years of time, might have pushed the human race an extra step toward greatness.”
“It might be hard,” admitted Cabell.
Spencer nodded. “So far as I know, Mr. Cabell, no one has ever succumbed to these temptations. But I live in terror of the day when someone does.”
And he wondered as he said it how much he might be talking through his hat, might be whistling past the graveyard. For surely there must by now have been some interference.
What about the men who had not come back?
Some of them undoubtedly had died. But surely some had stayed. And wasn’t staying back there the worst form of intervention? What were the implications, he wondered, of a child born out of time—a child that had not been born before, that should never have been born? The children of that child and the children of those children—they would be a thread of temporal interference reaching through the ages.
Cabell asked: “Is there something wrong, sir?”
“No. I was just thinking that the time will surely come, some day, when we work out a formula for safely interfering in the past. And when that happens, our responsibilities will be even greater than the ones that we face now. For then we’ll have license for intervening, but will in turn be placed under certain strictures to use that power of intervention only for the best. I can’t imagine what sort of principle it will be, you understand. But I am sure that soon or late we will arrive at it.
“And perhaps, too, we’ll work out another formula which will allow us to venture to the future.”
He shook his head and thought: How like an old man, to shake your head in resigned puzzlement. But he was not an old man—not very old, at least.
“At the moment,” he said, “we are little more than gleaners. We go into the past to pick up the gleanings—the things they lost or threw away. We have made up certain rules to make sure that we never touch the sheaves, but only the ear of wheat left lying on the ground.”