Nor would HX-1 work in reverse; the future remained closed. Also they discovered that time spent in the past consumed an equal amount of time in the present; they could not return to a point a minute after departure when they had been gone for an hour. As near as I could understand Barbara this was because of the limitations of HX-1: duration was set in the present. In order to come back to a time-point not in correspondence with the period actually spent, another engine—or at least another set of controls—would have to be taken into the past. Even then radical changes would have to be made since HX-1 didn’t work for the future.
Within these limits (and another, more inconvenient one: that they couldn’t visit the identical past moment twice; there was no possibility of meeting one’s time-traveling self) they roamed almost at will. Ace spent a full week in October 1896, walking as far as Philadelphia, enjoying the enthusiasm and fury of the presidential campaign. Knowing President Bryan was not only going to be elected, but would serve three terms, he found it hard indeed to obey Barbara’s stricture and not cover confident Whig bets on Major McKinley.
Though both sampled the war years they brought back nothing useful to me—no information or viewpoint I couldn’t have got from any of a score of books. Lacking historians’ training or interests, their tidbits were those of limited onlookers, not chroniclers.
I grew increasingly fretful. I held long colloquies with myself which invariably ended inconclusively. Why not? I asked myself. Surely this is the unique opportunity. Never before has it been possible for an historian to check back at will, to go over an event as often as he might please, to write of the past with the detachment of the present and the accuracy of an eye-witness knowing specifically what to look for. Why don’t you take advantage of HX-1 and see for yourself?
Against this reasoning I objected—what? Fear? Uneasiness? The superstition that I was tampering with a taboo, with matters forbidden to human limitations? “You mustn’t try any shortcuts. Promise me that, Hodge.” Well, Catty was a darling. She was my beloved wife, but she was neither scholar nor oracle. Woman’s intuition? A respectable phrase, but what did it mean? And didn’t Barbara, who first suggested my using HX-1, have womanly intuition also?
A half-dozen times I started to speak to Catty. Each time I repressed the words. What was the use of upsetting her? Promise me that, Hodge. But I had not promised. This was something I had to settle for myself.
What was I afraid of? Because I’d never grasped anything to do with the physical sciences did I attribute some anthropomorphism to their manifestations and, like a savage, fear the spirit imprisoned in what I didn’t understand? I had never thought of myself as hidebound, but I was acting like a 90-year-old professor asked to use a typewriter instead of a goose quill.
I recalled Tyss’s, “You are the spectator type, Hodgins.” And once I had called Tyss out of the depths of my memory I couldn’t escape his familiar, sardonic, interminable argument. Why are you fussing yourself, Hodgins? What is the point of all this introspective debate? Don’t you know your choice has already been made? And that you have acted according to that decision an infinite number of times and will do so an infinite number of times again? Relax, Hodgins; you have nothing to worry about. Free-will is an illusion; you cannot alter what you are about to decide under the impression that you have decided.
My reaction to this imagined interjection was frenzied, unreasonable. I cursed Tyss and his damnable philosophy. I cursed the insidiousness of his reasoning which had planted seed in my brain to sprout at a moment like this. Yet in spite of the violence of my rejection of the words I attributed to Tyss, I accepted one of them. I relaxed. The decision had been made. Not by mechanistic forces, not by blind response to stimulus, but by my own desire.
And now to my aid came the image of Tyss’s antithesis, Rene Enfandin. Be a skeptic, Hodge; be always the skeptic. Prove all things; hold fast to that which is true. Joking Pilate, asking, What is truth? was blind—but you can see more aspects of the absolute truth than any man has had a chance to see before. Can you use the chance well, Hodge?
Once I had answered the imaginary question with a wholehearted affirmative and so buttressed my determination to go, I was faced with the problem of telling Catty. I told myself I could not bear the thought of her anxiety; that she would worry despite the fact others had frequently used HX-1. I was sure she would be sick with apprehension while I was gone. No doubt this was all true, but I also remembered her, Promise me you won’t take any shortcuts, Hodge….
I finally took the weak, the ineffective course. I said I’d decided the only way to face my problem was to spend four or five days going over the actual field of Gettysburg. Here, I explained, unconvincingly, I thought I might at last come to the conclusion whether to scrap all my work and start afresh, or not.
She pretended to believe me and begged me to take her along. After all, we had spent our honeymoon on battlefields. I pleaded that her presence would distract me; my thoughts would go out to her rather than the problem. Her look was tragic with understanding.
I dressed in clothes I often used for walking trips, clothes which bore no mark of any fashion and might pass as current wear among the poorer classes in any era of the past hundred years. I put a packet of dried beef in my pocket and started for the workshop.
As soon as I left the cottage I laughed at my hypersensitivity, at all the to-do I’d made over lying to Catty. This was but the first excursion; I planned many more. There was no reason why she shouldn’t accompany me on them. I grew lighthearted as my conscience eased and I even congratulated myself on my skill in not having told a single technical falsehood to Catty. I began to whistle—never a habit of mine—as I made my way along the path to the workshop.
Barbara was alone. Her ginger hair gleamed in the light of a gas globe; her eyes were green as they were when she was exultant. “Well, Hodge?”
“Well, Barbara, I…”
“Have you told Catty?”
“Not exactly. How did you know?”
“I knew before you did, Hodge. All right. How long do you want to stay?”
“Four days.”
“That’s long for a first trip. Don’t you think you’d better try a few sample minutes?”
“Why? I’ve seen you and Ace go often enough and heard your accounts. I’ll take care of myself. Have you got it down fine enough yet so you can pick the hour of arrival?”
“Hour and minute,” she answered confidently. “What’ll it be?”
“About midnight of June 30, 1863,” I answered. “I want to come back on the night of July Fourth.”
“You’ll have to be more exact than that. For the return, I mean. The dials are set on seconds.”
“All right, make it midnight going and coming then.”
“Have you a watch that keeps perfect time?”
“Well, I don’t know about perfect—”
“Take this one. It’s synchronized with the master control clock.” She handed me a large, rather awkward timepiece, which had two independent faces side by side. “We had two made like this; the two dials were useful before we were able to control HX-1 so exactly. One shows 1952 Haggershaven time.”