"Go on," Hoskins said.
"You can reach out only so far; that seems sensible. Things get dimmer the farther you go. It takes more energy, and ultimately you run up against absolute limits of energy-I don't have any problem comprehending that. -But then, apparently you can reach out only so near, also. That's what I find the puzzling part. And not only me. I mean, if you can go out and grab something from 100 million years ago, you ought to be able to bring something back from last Tuesday with a whole lot less effort. And yet you tell me you can't reach last Tuesday at all, or anything else that's at all close to us in time. Why is that?"
Hoskins said, "I can make it seem less paradoxical, Deveney, if you will allow me to use an analogy."
(He calls him "Deveney"! Miss Fellowes thought. Like a college professor casually explaining something to a student!)
"By all means use an analogy," Deveney said. "Whatever you think will help."
"Well, then: you can't read a book with ordinary-sized print if it's held six feet from your eyes, can you? But you can read it quite easily if you hold it, say, one root away. So far, the closer the better. If you bring the book to within an inch of your eyes, though, you've lost it again. The human eye simply can't focus on anything that close. So distance is a determining factor in more than one way. Too close is just as bad as too far, at least where vision is involved."
"Hmm," said Deveney.
"Or take another example. Your right shoulder is about thirty inches from the tip of your right forefinger and you can place your right forefinger on your right shoulder without any difficulty whatsoever. Well, now. Your right elbow is only half as far from the tip of your right forefinger as your shoulder is. By all ordinary logic it ought to be a lot easier to touch it with your finger than your shoulder. Go on, then: put your right forefinger on your right elbow. Again, there's such a thing as being too close."
Deveney said, "I can use these analogies of yours in my story, can't I?"
"Well, of course. Use whatever you like. You know you've got free access. For this one we want the whole world looking over our shoulder. There's going to be plenty here to see."
(Miss Fellowes found herself admiring Hoskins' calm certainty despite herself. There was strength there.)
Deveney said, "How far out are you planning to reach tonight?"
"Forty thousand years."
Miss Fellowes drew in her breath sharply.
Forty thousand years?
She had never considered that possibility. She had been too busy with other things, things like breaking off her professional ties with the hospital and getting settled in here. She became aware now, suddenly, that there was a good deal of fundamental thinking about this project dial she had never taken the trouble to do.
She knew, of course, that they were going to be bringing a child from the past into die modern world. She understood-although she wasn't certain exactly where she had picked up the information-that the child would be taken from the prehistoric era.
But "prehistoric" could mean almost anything. Most of Europe could have been considered "prehistoric" only diree thousand years ago. There were a few parts of the world still living a sort of prehistoric existence today. Miss Fellowes had assumed, in so far as she had given the matter any real consideration at all, that the child would be drawn from some nomadic pre-agricultural era, possibly going back five or at most ten thousand years.
But forty thousand?
She wasn't prepared for that. Would die child they were going to hand her be recognizable at all as human? Had diere even been such a thing as Homo sapiens forty thousand years ago?
Miss Fellowes found herself wishing she could remember a little of her college anthropology courses of long ago, but right at this moment only the merest shreds of information came to the surface of her mind, and those, Miss Fellowes feared, were hopelessly garbled and distorted. Before true human beings had evolved, there had been the Neanderthal people, yes? Primitive brutish creatures. And the even more primitive Pithecandiropus people had roamed die world before them, and something else with an equally intricate name, and probably some odier kinds of pre-men or sub-men, too, shaggy little naked ape-creatures that could more or less be ccjn-sidered to be our distant ancestors. But how far back in time had all these ancestral people lived? Twenty thousand years ago? Fifty? A hundred thousand? She really knew nothing useful about the time-frame of all this.
Great God in heaven, am I going to be taking care of an ape-child?
She began to tremble. Here she was, fussing over incubators and sterile chambers, and they were preparing to toss something very much like a chimpanzee into her lap, weren't they? Weren't they? Some fierce hairy little wild thing with claws and teeth, something that really belonged in a zoo, if anywhere, not in the care of a specialist
Well, maybe not. Maybe the Neanderthals and the Pithecanthropuses and all those other early forms of human-like life had lived a million years ago and more, and what she'd be getting would be nothing more than a wild little boy. She had coped with wild little boys before.
Still, it sounded like such an enormous span of time, forty thousand years. The vastness of it dizzied her.
Forty thousand years?
Forty thousand years?
There was tension in the air. Now the chaotic ballet in die pit below had ceased, and the technicians at die controls were scarcely moving at all. They communicated with one another by means of signals so subtle that it was almost impossible to detect diem-a flick of an eyebrow, the tapping of a ringer on die back of a wrist.
One man at a microphone spoke into it in a soft monotone, saying things in short phrases that made no sense to Miss Fellowes-numbers, mostly, punctuated by what sounded like phrases in code, cryptic and impenetrable.
Deveney had taken a seat just next to her. Hoskins was on the other side. Leaning over the balcony railing with an intent stare, the scientific reporter said, "Is there going to be anything for us to see, Dr. Hoskins? Visual effects, I mean."
"What? No. Nothing till the job is done. We detect indirectly, something on the principle of radar, except that we use mesons rather than radiation. We've been running the meson scans for weeks, tuning and retuning. Mesons reach backward-under the proper conditions. Some are reflected and we have to analyze the reflections, and we feed them back in and use them as guides for the next probe, fining it down until we start approximating the desired level of accuracy."
"That sounds like a tough job. How can you be sure you've reached the right level?"
Hoskins smiled, his usual quick one, a cool on-off flash. "We've been at work on this for fifteen years, now. Closer to twenty-five, if you count the work of our 'predecessor company, which developed a lot of the basic principles but wasn't able to break through to real reliability. -Yes, it's tough, Deveney. Very tough. And scary."
The man at the microphone raised his hand.
"Scary?" Deveney said.
"We don't like to fail. I definitely don't. And failure's an ever-present default mode in our operation. We're working in probabilistic areas here. Quantum effects, you understand. The best we can hope for is likeliness, never certainty. That's not good enough, really. But it's the best we can hope for."
"Still, you seem pretty confident."
"Yes," Hoskins said. "We've had the fix on this one particular moment in time for weeks-breaking it, remaking it after factoring in our own temporal movements, checking parallaxes, looking for every imaginable relativistic distortion, constantly seeking assurance that we can handle time flow with sufficient precision. And we think we can do it. I'd almost be willing to say that we know we can."
But his forehead was glistening.
There was a sudden terrible silence in the room, broken only by the sound of uneasy breathing. Edith Fellowes found herself rising from her seat, leaning forward, gripping the balcony railing.