I answered, and he asked, “What was the Thirteenth Amendment to the US Constitution? What coach introduced the forward pass? When was the World’s Fair in St. Louis? Who won the Second Canadian War?”
Some of the questions, like the St. Louis World’s Fair, referred to things I had never heard of—the city had never been rebuilt after the great earthquake of 1885 because the rivers no longer ran by it. Some were insanely trivial and easy. Every so often one of the questions would be completely unintelligible on first hearing, and after hearing it again slowly I would realize it was rooted in assumptions that were so different from mine that I had to think about it a couple of times. I pointed this out to the shrink, and he nodded vigorously the way all shrinks do. Also the way they all do, he asked me, “How does it make you feel when a question is so far off base that you can’t figure out how to answer it?”
“A little tense, I guess. Not worse than that.”
“When was the last time you saw an article in a professional journal by an American astronomer? Not an expat or dual citizen, like yourself, but someone living and working in the American Reich?”
“Oh, well, that would be—” My mind went blank.
“Do you see?”
“See what?”
“My session was just the same,” Helen said at lunch. We were eating in a company cafeteria, but since we knew no one, no one had said hello, and we were left very much by ourselves, a long way from any other group of workers. ConTech was always full of surprises, and this time the surprise was that the food was exceptionally good and the furniture and silverware would not have been out of place in a good restaurant. I sat back in my chair, sipped my coffee, and tried to think about everything that had happened so far.
“Why do you suppose Iphwin is so focused on these attacks on ConTech?” Helen asked. “From what he’s described, and from what’s in the folders, the whole thing isn’t costing him very much, at least not yet.”
“Well, my guess is that he’s alarmed because he has no idea who is doing it, or for what reason, and he doesn’t know how they’re doing it. It’s one thing to be robbed in broad daylight by someone who wants your money. It’s another thing to get up in the morning and find your furniture was rearranged while you slept. The objective harm may be smaller but the mystery is more threatening.”
“I suppose.” She pushed her brown bangs up her forehead and said, “I wonder if there’s a hair salon anywhere in the Big Sapphire. I suppose there must be, since there’s a good five thousand people living in here.” We watched the waves roll by, half a mile below, in the bright equatorial sunlight outside the big windows; even with the dark blue tint, it was still uncomfortably bright and the glare was dazzling. “Even granting what you say, it still doesn’t make sense for Iphwin to be taking a personal interest in these matters, not to this extent. Iphwin controls more economic resources than most independent nations; he’s probably bigger than the Scandinavian and the Hungarian Reichs put together. That’s a huge quantity of money and power. And yet he wants us to believe that he’s worried about these pinprick attacks on his periphery, some of which could be just pure coincidence. ConTech is so big that they could be draining him for fifty years and he’d never feel it. He doesn’t seem like a miser type, and his security forces are supposed to be really good— even if they’re not, he could hire good ones in a heartbeat—so why is he fretting about this? Why doesn’t he just delegate it to some security types and just read their report when they’ve caught the bad guys? This is as bizarre as mopping his own floors or working in his own ticket booths would be. And haven’t you noticed how much of this whole huge business empire seems to run entirely on his personal whim? How can he possibly be making so many small day-to-day decisions, and have time to meet with us for hours, apparently just to shoot the breeze? Lyle, the whole thing looks as if somehow all of the vast resources of ConTech—more than you can find in most nations—are being used solely to support this little peripheral project.” She was staring me as if she really expected me to know the answer.
I thought. I knew nothing. “Put that way, it does seem pretty strange—a panic over a pinprick. I wonder how Iphwin thinks that anyone could seriously knock him down with anything on the scale we’ve been looking at? Isn’t he too big to worry?”
“Maybe you’re never too big to worry,” she said, taking a sip of her coffee. “Or it could be that the effects he’s getting— mutually incompatible events, effects happening before their causes—in small affairs out in the periphery, are more threatening because he doesn’t know if they can scale them up. Look at the case of that warehouse in Buenos Aires. They sent out a railcar of crates of ball bearings, bound for Valparaiso, and the minute the train was out of sight, another train pulled in returning the shipment. And when they checked the electronic mail, they found they had gotten a message the day before complaining about having the same shipment sent twice. Now, so far, ConTech effectively lost one customer but gained a whole carload of ball bearings; but what if it had gone the other way, and with every shipment instead of just one? What if the time travel or duplication or whatever it is starts to happen when they send out electronic funds transfers? You could drain a bank account pretty fast that way. I suppose the more of nature you own, the more you have to worry about keeping the laws of nature working—and who’s ever had to worry about that before?”
That afternoon, back in our office, we tried to figure out how to investigate the phenomenon we’d been assigned. Supposedly our shrinks were going to confer with each other and write a report for us, but we would not see that for at least a day. “Why do you suppose they asked us all those trivial questions, anyway?” Helen asked.
“Trivial or nonsensical. Though I suppose it might be they were just asking a wide range of questions about all the possible things that some people remember. And I wonder which ones we each thought were nonsensical?”
“Good point.” She glanced at her monitor screen, and then said, “Hey, there’s a task list for this afternoon. It starts with making a bunch of phone calls.”
I looked over her shoulder; for some reason it was a task for both of us. “Does that mean we each call all those people and record what they tell us, or does it mean we call them together in a conference call?”
“Since I have no idea what it’s about or what is supposed to happen,” she said, “my vote is that one of us calls and the other one watches the one making the call, just in case anything too crazy starts to happen.”
First on the list was Clarence Babbit, of Chicago, Illinois. I lost the coin flip, so I dialed. I heard the phone ring, and then I was sitting there with my hand on the hung-up phone. “Did I make the call?” I asked Helen.
“You dialed and then hung up, and you’ve been sitting perfectly still for almost a full minute. Well, it did say to note anything unusual that happened, so I guess we should write that down.” She took a long moment, and did. “You have no memory of the call?”
“Nope. Should I try Mr. Babbit, again, or do we go on to the next one?”
“Try Babbit again.”
I dialed, got the phone ring at the other end, and a moment later, I was sitting there with my hand on the receiver.
The list was entirely numbers within the American Reich, so we dialed our way through, taking turns. When Helen would dial, I’d watch her hit the buttons, hear the ring start at the other end, and hang up, then remain perfectly stationary for the better part of a minute before waking up with no memory of what had happened. When I’d dial, she’d observe the same thing. We used the computer’s camera to film it, so we could watch ourselves going through the whole strange procedure, and by doing that we confirmed that our behavior was identical.