«It seems kinda funny to talk about the international situation,» remarked Carver. «Hell, there won’t be any international situation for several geological periods.»
«The inertial effect makes simultaneity a valid approximational concept,» declared Symonds pedantically. His habit of lecturing scientists and engineers on their professions had not endeared him to them. «If we spend a year in the past, we must necessarily return to our own era to find a year gone, since the main projector operates only at the point of its own existence which—»
«Oh, stow it,» said Greenstein. «I read the orientation manual too.» He waited until everyone had cards, then shoved a few chips forward and added: «druther spend my time a little nearer home. Say with Cleopatra.»
«Impossible,» Symonds told him. «Inertial effect again. In order to send a body into the past at all, the projector must energize it so much that the minimal time-distance we can cover becomes precisely the one we have covered to arrive here, one hundred and one million, three hundred twenty-seven thousand, et cetera, years.»
«But why not time-hop into the future? You don’t buck entropy in that direction. I mean, I suppose there is an inertial effect there, too, but it would be much smaller, so you could go into the future—»
«—about a hundred years at a hop, according to the handbook,» supplied Polansky.
«So why don’t they look at the twenty-first century?» asked Greenstein.
«I understand that that is classified information,» Symonds said. His tone implied that Greenstein had skirted some unimaginably gross obscenity.
Herries put his head out of the shower. «Sure it’s classified,» he said. «They’d classify the wheel if they could. But use your reason and you’ll see why travel into the future isn’t practical. Suppose you jump a hundred years ahead. How do you get home to report what you’ve seen? The projector will yank you a hundred million years back, less the distance you went forward.»
Symonds dove back into his book. Somehow, he gave an impression of lying there rigid with shock that men dared think after he had spoken the phrase of taboo.
«Uh… yes. I get it.» Greenstein nodded. He had only been recruited a month ago, to replace a man drowned in a grass-veiled bog. Before then, like nearly all the world, he had had no idea time travel existed. So far he had been too busy to examine its implications.
To Herries it was an old, worn-thin story.
«I daresay they did send an expedition a hundred million years up, so it could come back to the same week as it left,» he said. «Don’t ask me what was found. Classified: Tip-top Secret, Burn Before Reading.»
«You know, though,» said Polansky in a thoughtful tone, «I been thinking some myself. Why are we here at all? I mean, oil is necessary to defense and all that, but it seems to me it’d make more sense for the U.S. Army to come through, cross the ocean, and establish itself where all the enemy nations are going to be. Then we’d have a gun pointed at their heads!»
«Nice theory,» said Herries. «I’ve daydreamed myself. But there’s only one main projector, to energize all the subsidiary ones. Building it took almost the whole world supply of certain rare earths. Its capacity is limited. If we started sending military units into the past, it’d be a slow and cumbersome operation—and not being a Security officer, I’m not required to kid myself that Moscow doesn’t know we’ve got time travel. They’ve probably even given Washington a secret ultimatum: ‘Start sending back war material in any quantity, and we’ll hit you with everything we’ve got.’ But evidently they don’t feel strongly enough about our pumping oil on our own territory—or what will one day be our own territory—to make it a, uh, casus belli.»
«Just as we don’t feel their satellite base in the twentieth century is dangerous enough for us to fight about,» said Greenstein, «but I suspect we’re the reason they agreed to make the Moon a neutral zone. Same old standoff.»
«I wonder how long it can last?» murmured Polansky.
«Not much longer,» said Olson. «Read your history. I’ll see you, Greenstein, boy, and raise you two.»
Herries let the shower run about him. At least there was no shortage of hot water. Transoco had sent back a complete atomic pile. But civilization and war still ran on oil, he thought, and oil was desperately short up there.
Time, he reflected, was a paradoxical thing. The scientists had told him it was utterly rigid. Perhaps, though of course it would be a graveyard secret, the cloak-and-dagger boys had tested that theory the hard way, going back into the historical past (it could be done after all, Herries suspected, though by a roundabout route which consumed fabulous amounts of energy) in an attempt to head off the Bolshevik Revolution. It would have failed. Neither past nor future could be changed—they could only be discovered. Some of Transoco’s men had discovered death, an eon before they were born… But there would not be such a shortage of oil up in the future if Transoco had not gone back and drained it in the past. A self-causing future—
Primordial stuff, petroleum. Hoyle’s idea seemed to be right, it had not been formed by rotting dinosaurs but was present from the beginning. It was the stuff which had stuck the planets together.
And, Herries thought, was sticking to him now. He reached for the soap.
Earth spun gloomily through hours, and morning crept over wide brown waters. There was no real day as men understood day—the heavens were a leaden sheet with dirty black rainclouds scudding below the permanent fog layers.
Herries was up early, for there was a shipment scheduled. He came out of the bosses’ messhall and stood for a moment looking over the mud beach and the few square miles of cleared land, sleazy buildings and gaunt derricks inside an electric mesh fence. Automation replaced thousands of workers, so that five hundred men were enough to handle everything, but still the compound was the merest scratch and the jungle remained a terrifying black wall. Not that the trees were so utterly alien—besides the archaic grotesqueries, like ferns and mosses of gruesome size, there were cycad, redwood, and gingko, scattered prototypes of oak and willow and birch. But Herries missed wild flowers.
A working party with its machines was repairing the fence the brontosaur had smashed through yesterday, the well it had wrecked, the viciously persistent inroads of grass and vine. A caterpillar tractor hauled a string of loaded wagons across raw red earth. A helicopter buzzed overhead, on watch for dinosaurs. It was the only flying thing. There had been a nearby pterodactyl rookery, but the men had cleaned that out months ago. When you got right down to facts, the most sinister animal of all was man.
Greenstein joined Herries. The new assistant was tall, slender, with curly brown hair and the defenseless face of youth. Above boots and dungarees he wore a blue sports shirt; it offered a kind of defiance to this sullen world. «Smoke?» he invited.
«Thanks.» Herries accepted the cigarette. His eyes still dwelt on the derricks. Their walking beams went up and down, up and down, like a joyless copulation. Perhaps a man could get used to the Jurassic rain forest and eventually see some dark beauty there, for it was at least life; but this field would always remain hideous, being dead and pumping up the death of men.
«How’s it going, Sam?» he asked when the tobacco had soothed his palate.
«All right,» said Greenstein. «I’m shaking down. But God, it’s good to know today is mail call!»
They stepped off the porch and walked toward the transceiving station. Mud squelched under their feet. A tuft of something, too pale and fleshy to be grass, stood near Herries’ path. The yard crew had better uproot that soon, or in a week it might claim the entire compound.