Spencer nodded. “Thanks. I see,” he said.
He was halfway to his office door when he turned back.
“One thing, Ross. What did we fire him for?”
“I don’t recall, exactly. He disregarded his assignment, went off on some other tangent. Matter transference, I think.”
Spencer said, “That’s the way it goes.”
He went back into the office, locked his desk and went out the back way.
In the parking lot, he backed out his car and went slowly down the street. A police cruiser was parked in front of the building and two officers were getting out. An ambulance was pulling in behind the cruiser.
So, thought Spencer, they had fired Hudson fifteen years ago, because he had some sort of crazy idea about matter transference and wouldn’t stick to business. And to this very day, Research was going quietly mad trying to solve a problem that Hudson could have put into their laps years ago, if they had kept him on.
Spencer tried to imagine how those fifteen years must have been for Hudson, more than likely working all the time on this quiet insanity of his. And how, finally, he had gotten it and had made sure of it and then had gone down to Past, Inc., to rub their noses in it.
Exactly as he, Hallock Spencer, now would rub their noses in it.
Greenwich Street was a quiet residential street of genteel poverty, with small and older houses. Despite the smallness of the houses and their age, and in some cases their unkemptness, there was a certain solid pride and respectability about them.
The address on the manuscript was 241 Greenwich. It was a squat brown house surrounded by a crumbling picket fence. The yard was full of flowers. Even so, it had the look of a house that had no one living in it.
Spencer edged through the sagging gate and up the walk, made small by the flowers that encroached upon it. He went up the rickety stairs to the shaky porch and, since there was no bell, rapped on the closed front door.
There was no answer. He tried the knob and it turned. He pushed the door part way open and edged into the silent hall.
“Hello,” he called. “Anyone at home?”
He waited. There wasn’t.
He walked from the hall into the living room and stood to look around him at the Spartan, almost monklike existence of the man who’d lived there.
It was evident that Hudson had lived alone, for the room bore all the signs of a lone man’s camping. There was a cot against one wall, a dirty shirt flung across one end of it. Two pairs of shoes and a pair of slippers were lined up underneath the cot. An old-fashioned dresser stood opposite the cot. A handful of ties dangled raggedly from the bar that had been fastened on its side. A small kitchen table stood in the corner nearest to the kitchen. A box of crackers and a glass, still spotted with milk stains, stood upon the table. A massive desk stood a few feet from the table and the top of it was bare except for an old typewriter and a photograph in a stand-up frame.
Spencer walked over to the desk and began pulling out the drawers. They were almost empty. In one he found a pipe, a box of paper clips, a stapler and a single poker chip. The others yielded other odds and ends, but nothing of importance. In one was a half a ream of paper—but nowhere was there a single line of writing. In the bottom drawer on the left hand side, he found a squat bottle, half full of good Scotch.
And that was all.
He searched the dresser. Nothing but shirts and underwear and socks.
He prowled into the kitchen. Just the built-in stove and refrigerator and the cupboards. He found nothing in any of them but a small supply of food.
And the bedrooms—two of them—were empty, innocent of furniture, and with a fine and powdery dust coating floor and walls. Spencer stood in the doorway of each and looked and there was a sadness in each room. He didn’t go inside.
Back in the living room, he went to the desk and picked up the photograph. A woman with a tired, brave smile, with a halo of white hair, with an air of endless patience, looked out of it at him.
There was nothing to be found in this house, he told himself. Not unless one had the time to search every corner of it, every crack, to take it down, each board and stone. And even then, he doubted now, there’d be anything to find.
He left the house and drove back to the office.
“Your lunch didn’t take too long,” Miss Crane told him, sourly.
“Everything all right?” he asked.
“The police were very, very nice,” she said. “Both Mr. Hawkes and Mr. Snell are anxious to see you. And Mr. Garside called.”
“After a while,” said Spencer. “I’ve got work to do. I don’t want to be disturbed.”
He went into his office and shut the door with a gesture of finality.
From the drawer he took the Hudson papers and settled down to read.
He was no engineer, but he knew enough of it to make a ragged sort of sense, although at times he was forced to go back and read more carefully, or puzzle out a diagram that he’d skipped through too hurriedly. Finally he came to the end of it.
It was all there.
It would have to be checked by technicians and engineers, of course. There might be bugs that would take some ironing out, but the concept, complete both in theory and in the theory’s application, was all there in the paper.
Hudson had held nothing back—no vital point, no key.
And that was crazy, Spencer told himself. You had to leave yourself some sort of bargaining position. You could trust no other man, certainly no corporation, as implicitly as Hudson apparently had intended to. Especially you couldn’t trust an outfit that had fired you fifteen years before for working on this very concept.
It was ridiculous and tragic, Spencer told himself.
Past, Inc., could not have even guessed what Hudson might have been aiming at. And Hudson, in his turn, was gagged because he’d not as yet progressed to a point where he could have faith either in his concept or himself. Even if he had tried to tell them, they would have laughed at him, for he had no reputation to support such outrageous dreaming.
Spencer sat at his desk, remembering the house on Greenwich Street, the huddling in one room with the other rooms all bare and the entire house stripped of all evidence of comfort and good living. More than likely all the furniture in those rooms, all the accumulation of many years of living, had been sold, piece by precious piece, to keep groceries on the shelf.
A man who was dedicated to a dream, Spencer told himself, a man who had lived with that dream so long and intimately that it was his entire life. Perhaps he had known that he was about to die.
That might explain his impatience at being forced to wait.
Spencer shoved the Hudson papers to one side and picked up the notes. The pages were filled with cryptic penciled lines, with long strings of mathematical abstractions, roughly drawn sketches. They were no help.
And that other paper, Spencer wondered—the one he’d left in the portfolio, that one that had to do with ethics? Might it not also bear a close relationship to the Hudson concept? Might there not be in it something of importance bearing on this new approach?
Time travel perforce was hedged around with a pattern of ethics which consisted mainly of a formidable list of “thou shalt nots.”
Thou shalt not transport a human being from the past.
Thou shalt not snitch a thing until it has been lost.
Thou shalt not inform anyone in the past of the fact there is time travel.