“But you stayed on in Israel under fire.”
“I did, but I was scared witless all the while.”
Seabrooke turned. “Do you believe Israel will be defeated? Do you believe this will end at Armageddon?”
Flatly: “No.”
“You don’t find it suggestive — ?”
“No. That land has been a battleground for something like five thousand years — ever since the first Egyptian army marching north met the first Sumerian army marching south. Doom-criers marched with them, but don’t fall into that trap.”
“But those old biblical prophets are rather severe, rather disturbing.”
“Those old prophets lived in a hard age and a hard land; they almost always lived under the boot of an invader. Those old prophets owed allegiance to a government and a religion which were at odds with every other nation within marching distance; they invited punishment by demanding independence.” He repeated the warning. “Don’t fall into that trap. Don’t try to take those prophets out of their age and fit them into the twentieth century. They are obsolete.”
Seabrooke said: “I suppose you’re right.”
“I can predict the downfall of the United States, of every government on the North American continent. Will you hang a medal on me for that?”
Seabrooke was startled. “What do you mean?”
“I mean that all this will be dust in ten thousand years. Name a single government, a single nation which has endured since the birth of civilization — say, five or six thousand years ago.”
Slowly: “Yes. I see the point.”
“Nothing endures. The United States will not. If we are fortunate we may endure at least as long as Jericho.”
“I know the name, of course.”
Chaney doubted it. “Jericho is the oldest town in the world, the city half as old as time. It was built in the Natufian period, but has been razed or burned and then rebuilt so many times that only an archeologist can tell the number. But the town is still there and has been continuously inhabited for at least six thousand years. The United States should be as lucky. We may endure.”
“I fervently hope so!” Seabrooke declared.
Chaney braced him. “Then drop this Eschatos nonsense and worry about something worthwhile. Worry about our violent swing to the extreme right; worry about these hippy-hunts; worry about a President who can’t control his own party, much less the country.”
Seabrooke made no comment.
Brian Chaney had pivoted in his chair and was again watching Kathryn van Hise playing in the water. Her tanned flesh, only partially enclosed in a topless swim suit, was the target of many eyes. Those transparent plastic cups some women now wore in place of a bra or a halter was only one of the many little jolts he’d known on his return to the States. Israeli styles were much more conservative and he had half forgotten the American trend after three years’ absence. Chaney looked at the woman’s wet body and felt something more than a twinge of jealousy; he wasn’t entirely sure the cups were decent. The swing to the ultra-conservative right was bound to catch up with feminine clothing sooner or later, and then he supposed legs would be covered to the ankle and the transparent cups and blouses would be museum pieces.
There would likely be other reactions in the coming years which would make some of his forecasts obsolete; the failure to anticipate a weak Administration was already throwing parts of the Indic report open to question. His recommendation for a renewable term trial marriage would probably be ignored — the program itself might be repealed before it got started if the howls frightened Congress. The vociferous minority might easily swell to a majority.
To move off an uncomfortable spot of dead silence, he asked casually: “The TDV is operational?”
“Oh, yes. It has been operational since an early hour this morning. The years of planning and building and testing are done. We are ready to forge ahead.”
“What took you so long?”
Seabrooke turned heavily to look at him. Blue-green eyes were hard. “Chaney, nine men have already died by that vehicle. Would you have cared to be the tenth?”
Shock. “No.”
“No. Nor would anyone else. The engineers had to test again and again until every last doubt was erased. If any doubt had remained, the project would have been canceled and the vehicle dismantled. We would have burned the blueprints, the studies, the cuff-notes, everything. We would have wiped away every trace of the vehicle. You know the rule: two objects cannot occupy the same space at the same time.”
“That’s elementary.”
A curt nod. “It is so elementary that our engineers overlooked it, and nine men died when the vehicle returned to its point of origin, its precise second of launch, and attempted to occupy the same space.” His voice dropped. “Chaney, the most dreadful sight I have ever seen was the crash of an airliner on a Dakota hillside. I was with a hunting party less than a mile away and watched it fall. I was among the first to reach the wreckage. There was no possibility of anyone surviving — none.” Hesitation. “The explosion in our laboratory was the second worst sight. I was not there — I was in another building — but when I reached the laboratory I found a terrible repetition of that hillside catastrophe. No man, no single piece of equipment was left intact. The room was shattered. We lost the engineer traveling with the vehicle and eight others on duty in the laboratory. The vehicle returned to the exact moment, the exact millisecond of its departure and destroyed itself. It was an incredible disaster, an incredible oversight — but it happened. Once.”
After a space, Seabrooke picked up the thread of his recital. “We learned a bitter lesson. We rebuilt the laboratory with thicker, reinforced walls and we rebuilt the vehicle; we programmed a new line of research accenting the safety factor. That factor settled itself at just sixty-one seconds, and we were satisfied.”
Chaney said: “They’ve been counted for me, again and again. I’ll lose a minute on every trip.”
“A passenger embarking for any distant point, you, will leave at twelve o’clock, let us say, and return not sooner than sixty-one seconds after twelve. The amount of elapsed time in the field will not affect the return; if you stayed there ten years you would return sixty-one seconds after you launched. If we could not be absolutely certain of that we would close shop and admit defeat.”
“Thank you,” Chaney said soberly. “I like my skin. How are you protecting those men now?”
“By reinforced walls and remote observation. The engineers work in an adjoining room but five feet of steel and concrete will separate you. They operate and observe the TDV by closed circuit television; indeed, they observe not only the operations room itself but the corridor to it and the storeroom and fallout shelter: everything on that level of basement.”
Curiously: “How do you really know the vehicle is moving? Is it displacing anything?”
“It does not move, does not travel in the sense of passing through space. The vehicle will always remain in its original location, unless we choose to move it elsewhere. But it does operate, and in operation it displaces temporal strata just as surely as those people in the pool are displacing water by plunging into it.”
“How did you prove that?”
“A camera was mounted in the fore of the vehicle, looking through a port into the operations room. A clock and a day-calendar hang on a wall in direct line of sight of that camera. The camera has not only photographed past hours and dates but has taken pictures of the wall before the clock was placed there. We know the TDV has probed at least twelve months into the past.”
“Any effect on the monkeys?”
“None. They are quite healthy.”
“What have you done to prevent another accident — a different kind of an accident?”