“Bah,” said Roger. He advanced to the door and stood looking at it. There was no knob, but there was a depression in the surface, at waist-height, near the right edge. Roger touched the depression and pushed, and nothing happened. He tried to pull, and nothing happened. Then he pushed to the left, and the door slid back into the wall.
Roger stood looking into the next room. It was exactly like the one he was now standing in, except that there was another door in the opposite wall, rather than a window. Otherwise, everything was the same, the color scheme, the bed, the bedside table and the calendar-clock.
Roger sourly surveyed the room, and a dirty suspicion came to him. “Is there another room like this beyond that next door?” he asked.
Two voices answered, one from each room, and both of them said, “Yes.”
“And another one beyond that?”
“Yes,” said the voices.
“The window, then,” said Roger. He pushed the door closed again, and strode to the window. Experimental prodding and pushing and pulling demonstrated to him that the window wouldn’t open. And he already knew it wouldn’t break.
He was a prisoner. The door and window had made it seem less like a prison, but they had turned out to be frauds. He could go nowhere.
“I want to go home!” he shouted all at once. “I’m sick of this!”
No answer.
“Seventeen people,” muttered Roger. “They all failed. Why should you expect me to succeed? It just isn’t fair. Besides, what could I possibly know that the people of this time don’t know?”
“Restricted,” said the voice.
“Oh, shut up! Here. Look at this window, look at this floor. We couldn’t build anything like this in my time. Look at that city out there. The New York in my time is greasy and grimy and dirty, not like this at all. And we could never make a bed that hovers eighteen inches off the floor.”
He picked up the calendar-clock, to put it back on the table where it belonged, and noticed that it bore no marks as a result of being tossed around by Roger and the window. “Fluoryl plastic, I suppose,” he mumbled. “Looks brand new, but it might be twenty or thirty years old, the way it takes punishment.” He looked up. “How old is this?”
“One hundred and twelve years,” said the voice.
“A hundred and twelve years old?”
“Yes.”
“That’s fantastic.” Roger looked at the calendar-clock, which seemed so brand new, and set it down on the bedside table. “How about the bed?” he asked. “How old is that?”
“Ninety-seven years,” said the voice.
“That old? What, have you given me nothing but antiques?”
“Yes,” said the voice.
“Why?”
“Restricted,” said the voice. “Restricted? Now, why on earth should that be restricted?”
“Restricted,” said the voice.
“Oh, do be quiet a minute. Sometimes, I’m asking myself questions, and you don’t have to answer. In fact, I wish you wouldn’t answer.” Roger frowned. “Now,” he said, “the answer must lie somewhere in this stuff that you call restricted. So the thing to do is ask you lots of questions, and whenever you say, ‘restricted’, write down that question, and pretty soon all the questions will add up to an answer. I hope.”
He looked over at the wall. “May I have paper and pencil?” he asked “Yes,” said the voice.
Roger waited, but nothing happened. “Oh,” he said. “I see. Were on an Easter-egg hunt. Is there pencil and paper in this room?”
“Yes,” said the voice.
“Under the bed?”
“No.”
Roger looked around, spied the bedside table, and said, “Ah hah!” He fingered the table until he found the drawer he knew must be in there, and took out the pen and notebook. He sat down on the edge of the bed, opened the notebook, and wrote “Antiques.” Then he looked up at the wall. “What about the room?” he asked. “Is that an antique, too?”
“Yes,” said the voice.
“How old is this building?”
“One hundred and twenty-one years,” said the voice.
“Is it the oldest building in New York?”
“No.”
“The youngest?”
“No.”
“How old is the youngest building In New York?”
The voice hesitated, as though checking the facts, and said, “Ninety-eight years.”
Roger blinked. “Ninety-eight years!” He was suddenly excited, sure that he was on the trail. “You’ve forgotten how to build things,” he shouted. “That’s it, that’s it! Everything here was built or manufactured generations ago, and now you’ve all forgotten how, and you want me to tell you how. Isn’t that it?”
“No,” said the voice.
Roger, about to go into an impromptu dance, faltered and sagged. “No?” he echoed hollowly.
“No,” said the voice.
Roger said four unprintable words, at the top of his voice, and kicked the bed. That hurt, so he sat down, calmed himself, picked up the pen and notebook and decided to try some other line of questioning.
What about the seventeen people? He could ask questions about them, maybe. “Were the other seventeen all from 1960?” he asked.
“No,” said the voice.
“Oh. Well, were they all from New York?”
“No.”
“Were they all from the United States?”
“No.”
“Oh, balderdash! No, no, no, all the time no, its enough to drive a body to distraction! Were they all from the Twentieth Century, at least, for pity’s sake?”
“Yes,” said the imperturbable voice.
“Well! At last. Why were they all from the Twentieth Century?”
“Restricted,” said the voice.
“Hah,” said Roger, and made a quick notation. “What you’ve lost or forgotten,” he said. “Can I assume it was something that was discovered in the Twentieth Century?”
“No,” said the voice.
“Well, perfected in the Twentieth Century?”
“Yes,” said the voice.
“Hm-m-m,” said Roger, making another notation. “Something perfected in the Twentieth Century. You mean a machine, or something like that?”
“No”
“Not a machine. Hm-m-m.” Roger stroked his chin, where he had never successfully grown a beard. “Something perfected in the Twentieth Century,” he murmured thoughtfully. “Not a machine.” He had always liked charades and guessing games and word games of all sorts, and was now in the swing of it, the unusual circumstances and the hinted-at dire consequences of failure alike forgotten.
“A lot of politics in the Twentieth Century,” he told himself. “Maybe one of the political theories.” He looked over at the wall. “One of the political theories, is that what you’re looking for?”
“No,” said the voice.
“Nothing political,” reflected Roger. “I wish I knew the categories. Let’s see, it must have something to do with the fact that all the buildings are old. And are all the machines and manufactured things old, too? Like the bed and clock?”
“Yes,” said the voice.
“That has something to do with it,” said Roger assuredly. “And, come to think of it, so has this question-answer business, one way or another. By the way, how old is the time machine that brought me here?”
“Just one hundred years old exactly,” said the voice.
“And how long ago did you start kidnaping people from the Twentieth Century?”
“Eight years ago.”
“And I’m the absolute first one who’s been put through this Twenty Questions routine?”
“Yes.”
“I take it that with the other seventeen, you asked the questions and they gave the answers, and the answere weren’t the right ones, so you’ve decided to turn it around and see if it works better this way. Is that right?”