"Miss Fellowes will do," she said, trying not to sound too stuffy about it. -"What does a nuclear chemist have to do with trilobites, if you don't mind my asking?"
"Well, actually I'm not studying the trilobites per se," Dwayne said. "I'm studying the chemistry of the water that came here with them."
"Tom's taking isotope ratios on the oxygen contained in the water," said Hoskins.
"And why is that?"
Dwayne replied, "What we have here is primeval water, at least half a billion years old, maybe as much as six hundred million. The isotope ratio gives us the prevailing temperature of the ocean at that time-I could explain in detail, if you like-and when we know the ocean temperature, we can work out all sorts of other things about the ancient planetary climate. The world was mostly ocean at the time the trilobites flourished."
"So you see, Miss Fellowes, Tom doesn't really care about the trilobites at all. They're just ugly little annoyances, crawling around in his precious primeval water: The ones who study the trilobites themselves have a much easier time of it, because all they have to do is dissect the critters, and they don't need anything but a scalpel and a microscope for that. Whereas poor Tom has to set up a mass spectrograph in here each time he conducts an experiment."
"Why's that? Can't he-"
"No, he can't. He can't take anything out of its Stasis bubble and there's no way around that. It's a matter of maintaining the balance of temporal potential."
"The balance of temporal potential," Miss Fellowes repeated, as though Hoskins had said something in Latin.
"An energy-conservation problem. What comes across time is traveling across lines of temporal force. It builds up potential as it moves. We've got that neutralized inside Stasis and we need to keep it that way."
"Ah," said Miss Fellowes. Her scientific training had never included much physics. Its concepts were largely lost on her. It was a reaction, perhaps, to the unhappy memories of her marriage. Her former husband had liked to go on and on about the "poetry" inherent in physics, the mystery and magic and beauty of it. Maybe it actually had some. But anything that could be associated with her former husband was something that Miss Fellowes didn't care to think about very deeply.
Hoskins said, "Shall we move along and leave Tom here to his trilobites?"
There were samples of primordial plant life in sealed chambers-odd scaly little plants, eerie and unbeautiful- and chunks of rock formations, looking no different from twenty-first-century rocks so far as Miss Fellowes could see. Those were the vegetable and mineral parts of the collection. Animal, vegetable, mineral, yes, just as Hoskins had said-a comprehensive raid on the natural history of the past had been carried out here. And every specimen had its investigator. The place was like a museum: a museum that had been brought to life and was serving as a superactive center of research.
"And you have to supervise all of this, Dr. Hoskins?"
"Only indirectly, Miss Fellowes. I have subordinates, thank heaven. The general administrative work of running the corporation is enough to keep me busy three times over."
"But you aren't a businessman, really," she said, thinking of that vaunted Ph.D. in physics. "You're basically a scientist who has gradually drifted across into being a corporate executive, isn't that so?"
He nodded, looking wistful. " 'Drifted' is the right word. I began on the theoretical side. My doctorate dealt with the nature of time, the technique of mesonic inter-temporal detection, and so on. When we formed the company, I didn't have the slightest idea that I'd be anything otner than head of theoretical research. But then there were-well, problems. I don't mean technical ones. I mean the bankers came in and gave us a good talking-to about the way we were going about our business. After that there were personnel changes at the highest levels of the corporation and one thing led to another and next thing I knew they were turning to me and saying, 'You have to be C.E.O., Jerry, you're the only one who can steady the place down,' and I was fool enough to believe them, and then, well-well-" He grinned. "There I am with a fine mahogany desk and all. Shuffling papers, initialling reports, holding meetings. Telling people what to do. With maybe ten minutes left here and there in the day to think about anything like my own actual scientific research."
Miss Fellowes felt an unexpectedly powerful burst of sympathy. At last she understood why there was that "Ph.D." tag on the nameplate on Hoskins' desk. He wasn't boasting. He had it there simply to remind himself of who and what he really was. How sad, she thought.
"If you could step aside from the business end of things," she said, "what sort of research do you think you'd want to do?"
"Short-range temporal transfer problems. No question of it. I'd want to work on a method of detecting objects that lie closer to us in time than the present limit of 10,000 years. We've done some promising preliminary studies, but we haven't been able to get further than that. A matter of available resources-financial, technical-of priorities, of accepting the limitations of the moment. If we could manage to reach our scoop into historical times, Miss Fellowes-if we could make contact with the living Egypt of the pharaohs, or the people of Babylonia or ancient Rome or Greece or-"
He broke off in mid-sentence. Miss Fellowes could hear a commotion coming from one of the distant booths, a thin voice raised querulously. Hoskins frowned, muttered a hasty "Excuse me," and went rushing off.
Miss Fellowes followed as best she could without actually running. She didn't feel much like being left here by herself in the midst of all this hubbub of bygone ages. An elderly man in street clothes with a thin gray beard and an angry, reddened face was arguing with a much younger uniformed technician who wore the red and gold Stasis Technologies, Ltd. monogram on his lab coat. The irate older man was saying, "I had vital aspects of my investigations to complete. Don't you understand that?" "What's going on?" Hoskins asked, hastily coming between them.
The technician said, "Attempted removal of a specimen, Dr. Hoskins."
"Removal from Stasis?" Hoskins said, eyebrows rising. "Are you serious?" He turned to the older man. -"I can't believe this is true, Dr. Adamewski."
The older man pointed into the nearest Stasis bubble.
Miss Fellowes followed his pointing hand. All she saw was a small gray lab table on which a totally undistinguished sample of rock was sitting, along with some vials of what she supposed were testing reagents.
Adamewski said, "I still have extensive work to do in order to ascertain-"
The technician cut him off. "Dr. Hoskins, Professor Adamewski knew from the start that his chalcopyrite specimen could only stay here for a two-week period. And the time's up today."
"Two weeks!" Adamewski erupted. "Who can say in advance how long a research task is going to take? Did Roentgen work out the principles of X rays in two weeks? Did Rutherford solve the problem of the atomic nucleus in two weeks? Did-"
"But two weeks was the limitation imposed for this experiment," said the technician. "He knew that."
"What of it? I wasn't able to guarantee I'd be able to finish my work in so short a time. I can't see the future, Dr. Hoskins. Two weeks, three weeks, four-what matters is solving the problem, is it not?"
"The problem, professor," Hoskins said, "is that our facilities are limited here. We've got only so many Stasis bubbles and there's an infinite amount of work to be done. So we have to keep specimens rotating. That piece of chalcopyrite has to go back where it came from. There's a long list of people waiting to use this bubble."
"So let them use it," said Adamewski heatedly. "And I'll take the specimen out of there and finish working on it at my university. You can have it back whenever I'm done."
"You know that isn't possible."