“How far back? I mean exactly, not a guess.”
“The mathematicians are still working on that, Your Honor, and the best they can say now is that it was probably somewhere between the mid-Twentieth Century and the late Twenty-First. However, there is a strong possibility that none of the material reached any enclosed space which would attract it, and that it may all have been dissipated harmlessly in the form of incongruent molecules.”
“But those materials,” said the Chief grimly, “included what?”
“Flangs," said Representative Schemkov, “and tweedledums, and collapsed flooring, and argo paste—”
“And mangels," added the Chief. “Isn’t that correct?”
“Yes, Your Honor.”
“And you tell me that there is a possibility that these things did not suddenly appear in the homes and business places of persons of Blodgett’s own time—" he touched his forelock, and Schemkov automatically did the same—“causing Blodgett knows how many neuroses, how many psychoses, how many lost contracts, how many broken homes—”
“But, Your Honor—”
“—and do you realize that if these things do appear in that era, the total course of our civilization might be altered? That we might today become a world of many warring nations instead of one? Of many races instead of one blended humanity? That the great man to whom we owe all this, Blodgett himself, might be—” he lowered his voice in horror— “destroyed by your carelessness? Do you realize that, Representative?”
Even the Chief was stunned by his own frightening suggestion, while Schemkov felt terror climbing his spine.
“No Blodgett?” Schemkov whispered. “You’re—you’re just saying that to scare me. It isn’t—possible.”
The Chief’s face was rigid with fear. “It is. Blodgett was the greatest of our Sacred Ancestors, but he was superhuman in a human way, not supernatural. With all those ghastly things loose in his era, and—and mangels, especially . . .”
Destroying any of our other Sacred Ancestors would be unthinkable enough,” said Schemkov. “But Blodgett himself—!”
“This wonderful civilization he constructed entirely by the might of his incredible mind,” the Chief added bitterly. “Gone.”
“I’d have myself ritually beheaded,” said Schemkov, “rather than live in any civilization Blodgett did not create.”
“Representative, the men responsible for this catastrophe are going to be sorry they were ever born into the public service. We’re going to get to the bottom of this, and when we do—”
“Here’s what it boils down to,” said the square man in the gray diamond-dusted robe with a non-objective dragon. He made a triangle with his hands on the desk-top. “The kick went all the way upstairs and now it’s come all the way down again. Everybody in fifteen echelons has a sore tail, the blame has been passed around, and now you’re it. That’s all.”
Ronald Mae Jean-Jacques von Hochbein Mazurin wore a slightly stunned expression on his normally cheerful, pug-nosed face. The face, up to now, had been his fortune; it bore a slight but perceptible resemblance to that of Blodgett, the Father of the World, as he appeared in early prints and paintings. Mazurin had learned to emphasize the resemblance by assuming a soulful look, once he discovered that it usually earned him the juicier and less messy jobs in the Bureau.
He said, “Now wait a minute. How do they know they can get me to the right time line with this new gimmick of theirs? Isn’t that a contradiction in terms? If I’m in it, that’s a new line, isn’t it? I mean—”
“I know what you mean,” said the square man. “Every displacement moves the observer to a new time line. But remember, you’re not required to do anything once, you get there; all you have to do is see what happened. As I understand it, you won’t be attached to that time line at all; you’ll just be partially in it, the same way stuff in a transport tube is partially in this line. You can’t possibly affect anything that happens there. Therefore, from a mathematical point of view, you’re not in it at all. You’ll be able to see, because light quanta have binding extensions on either side of the plenum-line proper, but you can’t influence anything that happens there.”
Mazurin was feeling uncomfortable. “How do I get back?”
“Don’t worry,” said the square man impatiently. “You’ll get back all right. You’ll be at the end of a pencil of temporal energy all the time. That’s what will be holding you in the partly there state. After a few days, they’ll send an impulse along it to bring you back. You’ll have enough time to do the job properly, because if any of that stuff did come out where it would menace our Sacred Ancestors, it wouldn’t have come out all at the same time or the same place. A difference of micro-seconds here could mean hours or days there.”
“Then that’s why nothing happened to our civilization yet,” Mazurin said. “The things probably haven’t landed.”
“It could be,” the square man agreed worriedly. “Or it might not happen on this time line at all—the results of any change in the past could leave this one alone and affect only alternate futures.”
“Do you really think it might?” asked Mazurin hopefully.
“No. Or maybe. How in hell would I know? All I’m supposed to discuss with you is sending you back to the past, to the time of Blodgett”— they touched their forelocks reverently—“at the end of a pencil of temporal energy, and that it’ll bring you back okay in a few days.”
"Sounds like deep-sea diving at the end of a piece of string,” said Mazurin. “What happens if the power fails, or the contact is broken some other way?”
“Then I suppose you’d be stuck in that line—which would, of course, immediately become another line. Not that it matters. But you wouldn’t be too badly off if that did happen, I’d say. That was a pretty interesting period, not too uncivilized, and you’d see a lot of action.”
“Umm,” said Mazurin. He rapidly calculated his chances of getting another job if he were discharged and blacklisted by the ICS Intelligence Bureau—zero. “All right, I’m your boy.”
The square man came around the desk and patted his shoulder with a hand like a jeweled bunch of sausages. “Good man,” he said emotionally. “I knew you’d come through, the Bureau knows how to pick ’em. Get your affairs wound up and report to the Physics Bureau at twelve o’clock tomorrow.”
Mazurin turned up in the white-tiled laboratory ten minute late, with traces of lipstick still adhering to his right ear and exuding an enviable odor of good rice wine. In the interests of truth, it must be stated that he did not entirely absorb all the briefing he received before he was thrust unceremoniously into the temporal projection machine.
He retained a definite impression of the machine itself, which was of an unpleasant hollow-cube shape and emitted a disquieting hum, together with a sharp smell of ozone. He recollected that, once arrived at his destination, he would be able to walk about on any available surface, but unable to move any solid object or enter into any sort of communication with the inhabitants.
The breathing apparatus strapped over his mouth and nose was reminder enough that he was dependent upon his own air supply. He recalled being asked if he had been checked out in lip reading and Twentieth Century English, and of replying, with hurt dignity, that he most certainly had. Then there was some more talk, during which he had been distracted by a tendency of his knees to swivel sharply, and then he had been grasped by the nape of the neck and his heels and slung into the machine.