It was a very rapid flicker. I wasn’t sure that I had observed it. It seemed to me that I had merely assumed it ought to flicker, if it returned to nearly the instant at which it left-and I saw what I was convinced I ought to see. I meant to ask the others if they, too, had seen a flicker, but I always hesitated to address them unless they spoke to me first. They were very important people, and I was merely-but I’ve said that. Then, too, in the excitement of questioning Archie, I forgot the matter of the flicker. It wasn’t at all important.
So brief an interval was there between leaving and returning that we might well have thought that he hadn’t left at all, but there was no question of that. The machine had definitely deteriorated. It had simply faded.
Nor was Archie, on emerging from the machine, much better off. He was not the same Archie that had entered that machine. There was a shopworn look about him, a dullness to his finish, a slight unevenness to his surface where he might have undergone collisions, an odd manner in the way he looked about as though he were re-experiencing an almost forgotten scene. I doubt that there was a single person there who felt for one moment that Archie had not been absent, as far as his own sensation of time was concerned, for a long interval.
In fact, the first question he was asked was, “How long have you been away?”
Archie said, “Five years, sir. It was a time interval that had been mentioned in my instructions and I wished to do a thorough job.”
“Come, that’s a hopeful fact,” said one Temporalist. “If the world were a mass of destruction, surely it would not have taken five years to gather that fact.“
And yet not one of them dared say: well, Archie, was the Earth a mass of destruction?
They waited for him to speak, and for a while, he also waited, with robotic politeness, for them to ask. After a while, however, Archie’s need to obey orders, by reporting his observations, overcame whatever there was in his positronic circuits that made it necessary for him to seem polite.
Archie said, “ All was well on the Earth of the future. The social structure was intact and working well.”
“Intact and working well?” said one Temporalist, acting as though he were shocked at so heretical a notion. “Everywhere?”
“The inhabitants of the world were most kind. They took me to every part of the globe. All was prosperous and peaceful.”
The Temporalists looked at each other. It seemed easier for them to believe that Archie was wrong, or mistaken, than that the Earth of the future was prosperous and peaceful. It had seemed to me always that, despite all optimistic statements to the contrary, it was taken almost as an article of faith, that Earth was on the point of social, economic, and, perhaps, even physical destruction.
They began to question him thoroughly. One shouted, “What about the forests? They’re almost gone.”
“There was a huge project,” said Archie, “for the reforestation of the land, sir. Wilderness has been restored where possible. Genetic engineering has been used imaginatively to restore wildlife where related species existed in zoos or as pets. Pollution is a thing of the past. The world of 2230 is a world of natural peace and beauty.”
“You are sure of all this?” asked a Temporalist.
“No spot on Earth was kept secret. I was shown all I asked to see.”
Another Temporalist said, with sudden severity, “ Archie, listen to me. It may be that you have seen a ruined Earth, but hesitate to tell us this for fear we will be driven to despair and suicide. In your eagerness to do us no harm, you may be lying to us. This must not happen, Archie. You must tell us the truth.”
Archie said, calmly, “I am telling the truth, sir. If I were lying, no matter what my motive for it might be, my positronic potentials would be in an abnormal state. That could be tested.”
“He’s right there,” muttered a Temporalist.
He was tested on the spot. He was not allowed to say another word while this was done. I watched with interest while the potentiometers recorded their findings, which were then analyzed by computer. There was no question about it. Archie was perfectly normal. He could not be lying.
He was then questioned again. “What about the cities?”
“There are no cities of our kind, sir. Life is much more decentralized in 2230 than with us, in the sense that there are no large and concentrated clumps of humanity. On the other hand, there is so intricate a communication network that humanity is all one loose clump, so to speak.”
“And space? Has space exploration been renewed?”
Archie said, “The Moon is quite well developed, sir. It is an inhabited world. There are space settlements in orbit about the Earth and about Mars. There are settlements being carved out in the asteroid belt.”
“You were told all this?” asked one Temporalist, suspiciously.
“This is not a matter of hearsay, sir. I have been in space. I remained on the Moon for two months. I lived on a space settlement about Mars for a month, and visited both Phobos and Mars itself. There is some hesitation about colonizing Mars. There are opinions that it should be seeded with lower forms of life and left to itself without the intervention of the Earthpeople. I did not actually visit the asteroid belt.”
One Temporalist said, “Why do you suppose they were so nice to you, Archie? So cooperative?”
“I received the impression, sir,” said Archie, “that they had some notion I might be arriving. A distant rumor. A vague belief. They seemed to have been waiting for me.
“Did they say they had expected you to arrive? Did they say there were records that we had sent you forward in time?”
“No, sir.”
“Did you ask them about it?”
“Yes, sir. It was impolite to do so but I had been ordered carefully to observe everything I could, so I had to ask them-but they refused to tell me.”
Another Temporalist put in, “Were there many other things they refused to tell you?”
“A number, sir.”
One Temporalist stroked his chin thoughtfully at this point and said, “Then there must be something wrong about all this. What is the population of the Earth in 2230, Archie? Did they tell you that?”
“Yes, sir. I asked. There are just under a billion people on Earth in 2230. There are 150 million in space. The numbers on Earth are stable. Those in space are growing.”
“Ah, “ said a Temporalist, “but there are nearly ten billion people on Earth now, with half of them in serious misery. How did these people of the future get rid of nearly nine billion?”
“I asked them that, sir. They said it was a sad time.”
“A sad time?”
“Yes, sir.”
“In what way?”
“They did not say, sir. They simply said it was a sad time and would say no more.”
One Temporalist who was of African origin said coldly, “What kind of people did you see in 2230?”
“What kind, sir?”
“Skin color? Shape of eyes?”
Archie said, “It was in 2230 as it is today, sir. There were different kinds; different shades of skin color, hair form, and so on. The average height seemed greater than it is today, though I did not study the statistics. The people seemed younger, stronger, healthier. In fact, I saw no undernourishment, no obesity, no illness-but there was a rich variety of appearances.”
“No genocide, then?”
“No signs of it, sir,” said Archie. He went on, “There were also no signs of crime or war or repression.”
“Well,” said one Temporalist, in a tone as though he were reconciling himself, with difficulty, to good news, “it seems like a happy ending.”
“A happy ending, perhaps,” said another, “but it’s almost too good to accept. It’s like a return of Eden. What was done, or will be done, to bring it about? I don’t like that ‘sad time.’ “
“Of course,” said a third, “there’s no need for us to sit about and speculate. We can send Archie one hundred years into the future, fifty years into the future. We can find out, for what it’s worth, just what happened; I mean, just what will happen.”