“Yes,” said the voice.
“I don’t see why you have to murder people for failing,” said Roger. “Why do you?”
“It gives them incentive,” said the voice.
“Incentive,” repeated. Roger, and his eyes suddenly widened. “Incentive!” he cried. “But it didn’t give them incentive enough, did it?”
“No.”
“It wasn’t the right kind of problem for a Twentieth Century man, isn’t that it?”
“Yes.”
“And that’s why you’re trying this different method with me. You’re looking for a problem that suits Twentieth Century man. Right?”
“Yes,” said the voice.
Roger nodded emphatically. “Of course. That’s the whole point. You want to see a Twentieth Century man solving a problem. Why? Because that’s what you’ve forgotten.” He beamed, smacked his right fist into his left palm, and strode up and down the room like a successful pirate on the top deck of a freshly-captured brig. “Now listen,” he said briskly. “This is a question, and a complicated one, and I don’t want you to answer till I’m finished. Do you understand me?”
“Yes,” said the voice.
“For thousands of years,” said Roger, “people lived lives almost totally devoid of change. Major changes, in politics or economics or society or whatever, took tens or hundreds of years. Changes in knowledge took as long or longer. Beginning in the Eighteenth Century, though, things were suddenly speeded up. Changes came more rapidly, knowledge increased by leaps and bounds, age-old problems in almost every field were solved. By the Twentieth Century, Man was even going out looking for problems to solve. From a creature which resisted change, which believed that its own order of things was the only possible order — like Aristotle convinced that the city state was the last word in government — Man became a creature searching for change, driving after change, to the point where sometimes he was shouting, ‘Change for change’s sake!’ Right so far?”
“Yes,” said the voice.
“All right,” said Roger. He couldn’t keep still, he was pacing back and forth, waving his arms and nodding his head vigorously as he spoke, feeling more powerful and confident than he had ever felt before in his life. He was, after all, a representative of the Twentieth Century. And, if his guess was right, the Twentieth Century had turned out to be Man’s Golden Age after all. It was enough to make anyone feel strong and proud.
“Mankind,” declaimed Roger, “is like a pool of water. For thousands of years, it lies placid, changed only by the slow unnoticeable effects of rain and evaporation. Then something — the scientific method or the Industrial Revolution or the opening of the Western Hemisphere or whatever — something dropped a pebble into the pool, and it rippled and changed all over its surface. Political ideologies came up from everywhere. Scientific theories sprang into life. Diseases were conquered, machines invented, philosophies coined.”
Roger stopped, struck a pose, and raised one emphatic finger. “But,” he said firmly, “it could not last. The ripples would have to die down. The energy for change would have to burn itself out. By the Twentieth Century, that energy was at its peak. A hundred years later, the energy was gone.”
He whirled to face the wall. “Am I right?” he demanded.
“You are right,” said the voice.
“There is a difference between a field lying fallow,” said Roger, suddenly full of allegory,” and a field burned-out and overrun with weeds. Man could not go back to what he had been before the stone was cast into the pool, because now he had the example of the Twentieth Century to show him what he could and should be. We in my time had expected Man to have seeded the stars by now, to have finished the conquering of disease and old age, to have perfected his science and his politics and his human relations.” He pointed an accusing finger at the wall. “But you haven’t You’ve run down, you’ve stagnated. Mankind got only so far, and then stopped like an unwound watch. That’s it, isn’t it? You’ve stagnated.”
“Yes,” said the voice.
“A different kind of stagnation from that of the centuries preceding the Eighteenth. You’ve learned nothing new in the last hundred years, have you?”
“No,” said the voice.
“You haven’t gone out to the stars, have you? You haven’t solved the problems of sound government, you haven’t progressed in science or human relations. No. You’ve stopped, and now you’re sliding downhill. The peoples of the Southern Hemisphere are moving across the equator to conquer you, aren’t they? And ancient diseases, once wiped out, are reappearing. Population is growing smaller every year, with fewer and fewer births and more and more suicides, because life has become so essentially meaningless. You can no longer move forward, but it is no longer sufficient to stand still. Am l right?”
“Yes,” said the voice.
“Of course I am,” said Roger. He couldn’t remember when he’d felt so completely sure of himself, so totally in control. “And that’s why you steal people from the Twentieth Century. Because they still have the energy for change, and you want to find out how to get it for yourself. You’ve asked them straight out, and they couldn’t give you any answer that would satisfy you. You’ve probably tortured one or two of them, and still got nowhere. You’ve undoubtedly vivisected a couple, looking for the progress-spark the way the ancient doctors searched for the soul, and you haven’t found a thing. So this time you gave your Twentieth Century man a problem to solve, and told yourselves that you’d learn how to do it by watching me. Is that right?”
“Yes,” said the voice.
“And have you learned anything?”
“No,” said the voice. “The process of your thinking is not understandable.”
“Still,” said Roger, “I’d’ve solved the problem. So now you can send me back to my own time. Right?”
“No,” said the voice.
Roger frowned. “Why not? Oh, wait, never mind. I see. You won’t let me go home until I’ve also solved your problem. That’s it, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” said the voice.
“Simplicity itself,” said Roger. He bestowed upon the wall a superior smirk. “Stop running to the Twentieth Century for help,” he said, “and stand on your own two feet. It’s the only way. Now send me home.” And he lay down on the bed.
“Same answer,” said the voice, “given by the other seventeen. Answer unsatisfactory.”
Roger sat bolt upright. “Unsatisfactory? But it’s the only answer!” The silence following that statement was suddenly ominous, and Roger remembered the voice’s laconic answer concerning the fate of the previous seventeen: “They died.”
“Wait… wait… wait a minute now,” said Roger hastily. He jumped from the bed and backed away toward the window. “Don’t do anything, now,” he told the wall.
He waited, looking apprehensively from wall to door and back. As the seconds collected into minutes and the voice didn’t do anything, and nothing came through the door, he gradually calmed. “That isn’t the answer,” he whispered to himself. “There must be another one. There must be another one.” With sudden doubt, he squinted at the wall. “Is there another one?”
“It is assumed,” said the voice, “that there is an answer, and that the progress of the Twentieth Century is based upon it.”