He looked around the table. Many of the men nodded their heads.
"He came to me," said Douglas, "and since then has phoned three or four times and we had lunch today. I suppose some of you know that we were roommates at Harvard and have been friends ever since. I suppose that's why he contacted me. On his first approach he proposed that he, himself, would take over the building of the tunnels, financing the cost with no federal funds involved. In return he would continue in ownership of them once the future people had been transported back to the Miocene and would be licensed to operate them. Since then…"
"Reilly," Williams interrupted, "I can't quite understand why anyone would want to own them. What in the world could be done with them? The time force, or whatever it is, as I understand it, operates in only one direction — into the past."
Douglas shook his head. "Clint won't buy that. He has talked with his research men — and the research staff he has is probably one of the best in the world — and they have assured him that if there is such a thing as time travel, it can be made to operate in two directions — both into the past and futureward. As a matter of fact, they told him it would seem easier to operate it futureward than into the past because time's natural flow is futureward."
Williams blew out a gusty breath. "I don't know," he said. "It has a dirty sound to it. Could we conscientiously turn over two-way time travel, if two-way time travel is possible, to any one man or any group of men? Think of the ways it could be used…"
"I talked to Clint about this at lunch," said Douglas. "I explained to him that any such operation, if it were possible, would have to be very strictly controlled. Commissions would have to be set up to formulate a time travel code, Congress would have to legislate. Not only that, but the code and the legislation would have to be worldwide; there would have to be some international agreement, and you can imagine how long that might take. Clint agreed to all of this, said he realized it would be necessary. The man is quite obsessed with the idea. As an old friend, I tried to talk him out of it, but he still insists he wants to go ahead. If he is allowed to do it, that is. At first he planned to finance it on his own, but apparently is beginning to realize the kind of money that would be involved. As I understand it, he is now very quietly trying to put together a consortium to take over the project."
Sandburg frowned. "I would say no on impulse. Time travel would have to be studied closely. It's something we've never thought seriously of before. We'd have to think it through."
"It could have military applications," said Williams. "I'm not just sure what they would be."
"International agreements, with appropriate safeguards, would have to be set up to keep it from being used militarily," said the President. "And if these agreements should fail at some time in the future, I can't see that it would make much difference who held the license for time travel. National needs would always take precedence. No matter how it goes, time travel is something that we're stuck with. It's something we have to face. We have to make the best of it."
"You favor Clint's proposal, Mr. President?" Douglas asked in some surprise. "When I talked with you…"
"I wouldn't go so far as to say I favored it," said the President. "But under the situation we face, it seems to me we should consider all possibilities or proposals. We are going to be hard pressed to find the kind of money or credit that is needed to build the tunnels. Not only us, but the world. Perhaps the rest of the world even more than us."
"That brings us to another point," said Williams, "I would suppose Chapman and his consortium are proposing only the tunnels in the United States."
"I can't say as to that," said Douglas. "I would imagine that if Chapman could put his consortium together it might include some foreign money, and agreements could be made with other nations. I can't see a country like the Congo or Portugal or Indonesia turning its back on someone who wants to build its tunnels. Other nations might be hesitant, but if we went along with the plan and a couple of the other major nations joined us, say Germany or France, then most of the others, I would think, would follow. After all, if everyone else were going ahead with the plan, no nation would want to be left out in the cold without a tunnel."
"This is going to cost a lot of money," said Manfred Franklin, Secretary of the Treasury. "Tunnels for the entire world would run into billions."
"There are a lot of gamblers in the financial world," observed Ben Cunningham, of Agriculture. "But mostly it is smart gambling, smart money. Chapman must be fairly certain of himself. Do you imagine he may know something that we don't know?"
Douglas shook his head. "I am inclined to think not. He has this assurance, you see, from his research people, principally the physicists, I understand that if time travel is possible it has to be a two-way street. By now it is apparent that it is possible. You see, this is the first new idea, the first really new idea that has real technological and engineering potential, that has come along in fifty years or more. Clint and his gang want to get in on the ground floor."
"The question," said Williams, "is should we let them."
"Much as we may regret to do so," said the President, "we may have to. If we refused, word would be leaked to the public and you can imagine what the public reaction would be. Oh, a few would oppose it, but they would be drowned out by those who would see it as allowing someone to pay a huge expenditure that otherwise would come out of the treasury and be paid by taxes. Frankly, gentlemen, we may find ourselves in a position where opposing the consortium would be political suicide."
"You don't seem to be too upset about it," said Williams somewhat acidly.
"When you have been in politics as long as I have been, Thornton, you don't gag too easily at anything that comes up. You learn to be practical. You weigh things in balance. I admit privately that I gag considerably at this, but I am politically practical to the point, where I can recognize it may not be possible to fight it. There are times when you simply cannot take pot shots at Santa Claus."
"I still don't like it," said Williams.
"Nor do I," said Sandburg.
"It would be a solution," said Franklin. "Labor is ready to go along with us in the emergency. If the financial interests of the world would go along with us, which is actually what would happen under this consortium setup, our basic problem would be solved. We still have to feed the people from the future, but I understand we can do that longer than we had thought at first. We'll have to supply the future folks with what they'll need to establish themselves in the past, but that can be done under normal manufacturing processes and at a fraction of the tunnel cost. Someone will have to do some rather rapid planning to calculate how much of our manufacturing processes and resources will have to be converted for a time to the making of wheelbarrows, hoes, axes, plows and other similar items, but that's simply a matter of mathematics. We'll have to face up for the next few years to considerable shortages of meat and dairy products and other agricultural items, I suppose, because we'll have to send breeding stock to the Miocene, but all of this we can do. It may pinch us a bit, but it can be done. The tunnels were the big job and Chapman's consortium will do the job there, if we let them."
"How about all those banner-carrying kids who say they want to go back in time?" asked Cunningham. "I say let them go. It would clear the streets of them and for a long time a lot of people have been yelling about population pressure. We may have the answer here."