“Have any of these men been found yet? Any evidence of such men?”
A little wait, and his hand reached for the cigar box. He stared at the cigar and turned it end for end. Just a little wait more. I was patient.
Then he put it down decisively without lighting it. “
“No,” he said.
He looked at me, and clear through me, and said: “Then, you still don’t go for that?”
I shrugged, “Well-It doesn’t sound right.”
“Do you have a notion of your own?”
“Yes. But I can’t bring myself to talk about it. If I’m wrong, I’m the wrongest man that ever was; but if I’m right, I’m the rightest.”
“I’ll listen,” he said, and he put his hand under the desk.
That was the pay-off. The room was armored, sound-proof, and radiation-proof to anything short of a nuclear explosion. And with that little signal showing on his secretary’s desk, the President of the United States couldn’t have interrupted us.
I leaned back and said: “Chief, do you happen to remember how you met your wife? Was it a little thing?”
He must have thought it a non sequitur. What else could he have thought? But he was giving me my head now; having his own reasons, I suppose.
He just smiled and said: “I sneezed and she turned around. It was at a street comer.”
“What made you be on that street corner just then? What made her be? Do you remember just why you sneezed? Where you caught the cold? Or where the speck of dust came from? Imagine how many factors had to intersect in just the right place at just the right time for you to meet your wife.”
“I suppose we would have met some other time, if not then?”
“But you can’t know that. How do you know whom you didn’t meet, because once when you might have turned around. you didn’t; because once when you might have been late, you weren’t. Your life forks at every instant, and you go down one of the forks almost at random, and so does everyone else. Start twenty years ago, and the forks diverge further and further with time.
“You sneezed, and met a girl, and not another. As a consequence, you made certain decisions, and so did the girl, and so did the girl you didn’t meet, and the man who did meet her, and the people you all met thereafter. And your family, her family, their family-and your children.
“Because you sneezed twenty years ago, five people, or fifty, or five hundred, might be dead now who would have been alive, or might be alive who would have been dead. Move it two hundred years ago: two thousand years ago, and a sneeze-even by someone no history ever heard of-might have meant that no one now alive would have been alive…
The Boss rubbed the back of his head: “Widening ripples. I read a story once-”
“So did I. It’s not a new idea-but I want you to think about it for a while, because I want to read to you from an article by Professor Elmer Tywood in a magazine twenty years old. It was just before the last war…
I had copies of the film in my pocket and the white wall made a beautiful screen, which was what it was meant to do. The boss made a motion to turn about, but I waved him back.
“No, sir,” I said. “I want to read this to you. And I want you to listen to it.”
He leaned back.
“The article,… I went on, is entitled: ‘Man’s First Great Failure!’ Remember, this was just before the war, when the bitter disappointment at the final failure of the United Nations was at its height. What I will read are some excerpts from the first part of the article. It goes like this:
“’…That Man, with his technical perfection, has failed to solve the great sociological problems of today is only the second immense tragedy that has come to the race. The first, and perhaps the greater, was that, once, these same great sociological problems were solved; and yet these solutions were not permanent, because the technical perfection we have today did not then exist
“‘It was a case of having bread without butter, or butter without bread. N ever both together…
“‘Consider the Hellenic world, from which our philosophy, our mathematics, our ethics, our art, our literature-our entire culture, in fact-stem…In the days of Pericles, Greece, like our own world in microcosm, was a surprisingly modem potpourri of conflicting ideologies and ways of life. But then Rome came, adopting the culture, but bestowing, and enforcing, peace. To be sure, the Pax Romana lasted only two hundred years, but no like period has existed since…
“‘War was abolished. Nationalism did not exist. The Roman citizen was Empire-wide. Paul of Tarsus and Flavius Josephus were Roman citizens. Spaniards, North Africans, Illyrians assumed the purple. Slavery existed, but it was an indiscriminate slavery, imposed as a punishment, incurred as the price of economic failure, brought on by the fortunes of war. No man was a natural slave-because of the color of his skin or the place of his birth.
“‘Religious toleration was complete. If an exception was made early in the case of the Christians, it was because they refused to accept the principle of toleration; because they insisted that only they themselves knew truth-a principle abhorrent to the civilized Roman…
“‘With all of Western culture under a single polis, with the cancer of religious and national particularism and exclusivism absent; with a high civilization in existence-why could not Man hold his gains?
“‘It was because, technologically, ancient Hellenism remained backward. It was because without a machine civilization, the price of leisure-and hence civilization and culture-for the few, was slavery for the many. Because the civilization could not find the means to bring comfort and ease to all the population.
“‘Therefore, the depressed classes turned to the other world, and to religions which spurned the material benefits of this world-so that science was made impossible in any true sense for over a millennium. And further, as the initial impetus of Hellenism waned, the Empire lacked the technological powers to beat back the barbarians. In fact, it was not till after 1500 A.D. that war became sufficiently a function of the industrial resources of a nation to enable the settled people to defeat invading tribesmen and nomads with ease…
“‘Imagine, then, if somehow the ancient Greeks had learned just a hint of modem chemistry and physics. Imagine if the growth of the Empire had been accompanied by the growth of science, technology and industry. Imagine an Empire in which machinery replaced slaves, in which all men had a decent share of the world’s goods, in which the legion became the armored column against which no barbarians could stand. Imagine an Empire which would therefore spread all over the world, without religious or national prejudices
“’ An Empire of all men-all brothers-eventually all free…
“ ‘If history could be changed. If that first great failure could have been prevented-’ “
And I stopped at that point.
“Well?” said the Boss.
“Well,” I said, “I think it isn’t difficult to connect all that with the fact that Tywood blew an entire power plant in his anxiety to send something back to the past, while in his office safe we found sections of a chemistry textbook translated into Greek.”
His face changed, while he considered.
Then he said heavily: “But nothing’s happened.”
“I know. But then I’ve been told by Tywood’s student that it takes a day to move back a century in time. Assuming that ancient Greece was the target area, we have twenty centuries, hence twenty days.”
“But can it be stopped?”
“ I wouldn’t know. Tywood might, but he’s dead.”
The enormity of it all hit me at once, deeper than it had the night before-
All humanity was virtually under sentence of death. And while that was merely horrible abstraction, the fact that reduced it to a thoroughly unbearable reality was that I was, too. And my wife, and my kid.