A Death in the House : And Other Stories

Nine Lives

Gilchrist Wolfe went to the shelf and took down the journal. On a clean, blank page he wrote: Goff closed the Henderson case today. There is no explanation for the man’s disappearance.

After he had made that last entry he leafed through the pages backwards, slowly, pretending to himself that he was just browsing through them. But he came at last, as surely as if he’d planned it, to that tragic, earlier entry of thirty years before.

The date was Oct. 16, 2334, and the statement began: Antony Tuckerman disappeared today. …

He did not read the rest of it. There was no necessity for him to read it. He could have recited it, letter perfectly, if he had been called upon to do so.

And now there were other comments and statements of fact—today’s, the one he’d just made, and the one which he had made ten days previously. And he hoped he’d made his concluding comment as dispassionate, and as scientific as Wilfred Soames’ original entry of thirty years before.

He turned forward again to his final summing up, and was somewhat astonished—although he should not have been—to find that except for the names he had written almost the same words which Soames had put down on that October day so long ago—July 23, 2364—Sartwell Henderson disappeared last night. …

And why not, he asked himself. Both of them had written of identical incidents, although the men involved had not been the same.

Wolfe wondered vaguely if Henderson and Tuckerman might not have known each other. He decided that they might have. But that did not mean that the coincidence had the slightest bearing on their fate. Probably, he concluded, that aspect of the mystery had no significance whatever. Goff would have checked into such a relationship if he had thought it in any way vital, for Goff was as good a security officer as anyone could wish.

Wolfe turned back to the Tuckerman entry and read it again, despite the fact that he already knew it by heart. He wondered if there might be some clue until now unnoticed—some lurking, hidden hint. But he quickly realized there was nothing of the sort—nothing new at all. It was as terse and as unimaginative as it had always been, because it had been written by a man who had not dared allow himself to entertain the slightest hope. It was a barren recital of a positive fact, and nothing more. And that, thought Wolfe, was entirely understandable. In each of the incidents there was one great central fact: A man had disappeared. He had not run away, and he had not been kidnapped. He had simply vanished. In the here and now one instant, gone out of it the next.

Slowly he let the pages slide beneath the slight pressure of his thumb, a gray, fluttering blur of written entries, accumulated through the years—accounts of minor triumphs, of imagined breakthroughs, of recurring failures and ancient disappointments.

Only in the instances of Tuckerman and Henderson, Wolfe reminded himself, was the word “failure” open to doubt. Of all the thousands who had worked on Hourglass through the years, those two alone may have escaped from the present into another past or another future, remote from the here and now.

He got up and put the journal back on the shelf again.

And if there were triumph in Tuckerman and Henderson, he told himself, if there were solution and success, even though it might be lost—then there still was hope.

He crossed the room and went down the central hall. At the outer door the guard saluted him with sleek military poise, as he and others like him had come briskly to attention for so many years in this dooryard area flecked with mottled sunshine filtering through the maples.

“Did you know, sir,” asked the guard, “that Old Molly had her kittens early this morning?”

Wolfe felt his face relax a bit, but he did not smile. “No. How many this time?”

“Four,” said the guard. “One is white and one is gray and the other two are black.”

“Well, that is fine,” said Wolfe. “Thanks for telling me.”

He proceeded along the brick walk, beneath the maple shade, heading for the laboratory-workshops which in the old days, when Hourglass was still in the blueprint stage, had served as barns and stables and other farm outbuildings. Even now, he thought, it was a good place for old mother cats to bring forth their kittens.

In this pleasant land, he thought, the dreams of men and cats—and what would cats dream of? Perhaps of meadow mice and great bowls of yellow cream and a cozy chair set in a magic window through which a gentle, mellow sun would shine forever and forever. Surely not for cats the dreams of inspired madness which scurried like frightened monsters in the minds of men. There was only one reservation which he felt compelled to make. In men the dreams were not entirely madness, for nothing which could be translated into reality and put to practical use could be termed entirely mad.

Here in this quietness of ancient, sun-bleached buildings, of old fields overgrown with briar patches and overrun with rabbits, of lazy meadow stream, and distant hills blue in the tide of noon, Man threw the high, bright impudence of his argument and dreaming straight into the face of Time.

And through the years of setback and of failure Man by his daring had gained a few precarious advances, the rude beginnings of some as yet uncharted science which would someday, perhaps, transform the world.

But more than that: Two men had disappeared!

The path came to an end and Wolfe strode swiftly across the sun-drenched, hard-packed ground of the one-time barnyard. Just inside the first of the barns he halted for an instant, while his eyes adjusted to the soft, cool shadows. As he stood there blinking he heard Joel Strang coming toward him.

“Is that you, Gil?” the young man asked.

“Yes, Joel,” said Wolfe. “How are your pets today?”

“Twelve here. Five gone. I’ve been watching them.”

“You are always watching them.”

“I wonder what they are.”

“I don’t care what they are,” Wolfe told him. “What I want to know is where they go—and how.”

“Not why?”

“For God’s sake, Joel, why should I care why?”

“Because there just might be some connection. If we knew their purpose and their motive—why they go away, and why they come back again—then perhaps we’d be a little closer to the how of it. If I could only talk with them!”

“You can’t talk with them,” snapped Wolfe. “They’re animals. That’s all. Just alien animals.”

He clamped his mouth so tight that he could feel the muscles knot along his cheek. This was a silly business, he reminded himself, this senseless bickering with Joel Strang about the Whitherers. If the fool thought he could talk with them, let him go ahead and think it. It was no more fantastic than a hundred other things which had been tried in Hourglass.

Not until that moment had Wolfe realized the tension he was laboring under, a tension which he shared with every man on the project. And it could not be attributed solely to Henderson’s disappearance. It was far more than that. It was inseparable from the work itself. It was something that grew and swelled and ballooned inside a man until it almost choked him.

Perhaps, he thought, it had to do with the strange, long-range urgency associated with the project—not a matter of days or months or years, but of centuries. Even more, perhaps, it had to do with the sense of utter doom which would foreshadow the centuries’ end—unless Hourglass could provide an answer, and send Project Paradox into fine-honed action at last.

The urgency of the swiftly passing months and years was something that was personal and understandable—something that any one man could equate with his being. With such an urgency it was win or lose and let’s have it over with. It was a challenge that stirred the blood and sent the breath whistling from a man’s nostrils, and it was accompanied by a feeling of personal and immediate necessity.

But about the longer-range urgency of the centuries there was nothing quite so immediate. The problem was almost an academic one, even though the doom was inexorable. For that very reason a man fought all the time to keep within his mind this feeling of urgency. He woke in the night to scare himself with it. He tried to conjure up the exact, terrifying shape of future doom as a spur to drive himself. And so he fought not one good fight, but two.

Wolfe saw that Strang was looking at him with a perplexed expression.

“I was just thinking, Joel,” he said. “The project has been going on for almost two hundred years and we still haven’t made much progress. We have only the Whitherers, the Telmont Evidence, and the Munn equations. And now two men have disappeared.”

“When it comes,” said Joel, “it will come like that.” He snapped his fingers, rather clumsily.

“Why do you think that?”

“I don’t know,” said Strang.

Wolfe moved toward the cages that housed the Whitherers, Strang falling into step beside him.

Standing in front of a glass-paneled cage, Wolfe wondered if he’d ever be able to look at its denizens without feeling his soul shriveling up inside him. Their hideousness one could understand. But why must they also be so pugnaciously revolting and outrageous. They were no bigger than large rats, with an aspect of having been flayed alive—so swiftly and so recently that they had not had time to bleed.

Wolfe watched them, fascinated, waiting for the blood to ooze, and they stared back at him, impudently. Not quite hatefully, perhaps, but the look in their eyes was not far from hate and it was linked with a sort of arrogant pride that was more than unnerving.

“I know now why I said it would come all at once,” Strang murmured. “I sometimes get the feeling, standing here and watching them, that in just a little while I’ll know what it’s all about.”

“I thought you said there were twelve of them,” said Wolfe. “There are eleven now.”

Strang sighed. “That’s the way it goes all the blessed time. A man can’t keep tab on them.”

Now, Wolfe saw, there were thirteen of them. Out in a blank space of the cage floor, where there had been no Whitherers before, there were now two of them.

“Joel, where do they go? Do you think they move in time?”

“Sometimes I think they do,” said Strang. “If I could only talk with them. …”

“I know you’ve checked, but invisibility can be a pretty elusive attribute.”

Strang shook his head. “We know, we absolutely know, that it’s not invisibility. They go somewhere. They move, in either time or space. If only I could find why they go, I might be able to work out the ‘where.’”

“You like these critters, Joel?”

“Perhaps. Let’s say I’ve become accustomed to them. I think sometimes they may be beginning to accept me as well. But I can’t be sure. If there could be some understanding. …”

“I know,” said Wolfe. “I know.”

He turned from the cage and began to walk away. Strang walked with him for a short distance.

“No sign of Henderson?” he asked.

“Henderson is gone,” Wolfe told him.

“Like Tuckerman?”

“I’m sure, like Tuckerman.”

“Gil, will we ever know?”

“I can’t answer that question,” said Wolfe. “You realize, of course, how ridiculous our position is—how ridiculous it has been from the very start of Hourglass. It’s as if someone had asked us to find out how to halt the sun, or make it stand still. Except that in the case of Hourglass they expect us to find out how to move through time. It was taken for granted that we needed time travel. They said, ‘Well, let’s get it, then.’ So they set up a project and they called it Hourglass and they said to Hourglass: ‘In another three hundred years or so we’ll expect you to be traveling in time.’”

“We’ll get it, Gil.”

Wolfe reached out and clapped Strang on the shoulder.

“Thanks a lot,” he said.

Wolfe walked out into the barnyard, into the sudden blast of sunlight that left him blinking, able to see only through the narrow slits of half-closed lids.

He smelled the hot dryness of summer, the combined smells of sleeping dust, of too-green leaves, of uncut hayfield, of old and peeling paint. He heard far off the cooing of a dove and from near at hand the dry rustle of sparrows’ wings and realized that the cooing and the rustle did little more than emphasize the silence which lay across vast acres—acres cut off by security fence and security guards and deep official silence.

So they had set up Hourglass and they had kept it secret. They had insisted that no one must know what Hourglass was seeking, and when, and if, discovery came it must be kept under wraps. Beyond everything else, no one must know what time travel would be used for.

And for once they had played it smart. Hourglass had been set up on this ancient farm, set up quietly without the usual fanfare of brand new, gleaming buildings, or the sudden influx of a great army of governmental functionaries. It had started in low gear without rousing more than passing wonderment among the country folk, and since nothing of importance had leaked out workers on the project had been spared the necessity of furious denials.

That it had been done with so much imagination almost two centuries in the past, he thought, only served to underline the vast importance which had been attached to it from the first and the equally stubborn determination that it remain a closely guarded official secret.

Wolfe saw the flicker of a white dress coming down the pathway from the house and knew that it was Nancy Foster, his secretary, come in search of him. Nancy was pretty and efficient and conscientious, and no matter where he went she always managed to run him down, and keep him sedulously at the job.

Nancy, he was certain, was an undercover agent for Security. But that was all right with him. He was just a slob doing as well as he could manage in a job that was too big for any one man, and Security could look him over with tests and charts any time Nancy gave the word.

He walked across the barnyard and saw that Nancy had stopped at the end of the brick walk, and was waiting for him. She was staying in the shade, and her face looked strained.

“Goff’s up at the house,” she said. “He has someone with him.”

“Thanks, Nancy,” said Wolfe. “I’ll go right up.”

“Is there something wrong, Gil?”

“I don’t think so, Nancy. Why?”

“This man with Goff. I’m almost sure he’s from Central.”

Wolfe forced himself to laugh. “We don’t pull them quite so big, Nancy. We’re not that important.”

“His name is Hughes,” said Nancy. “Sidney Wadsworth Hughes.” She giggled a little at the name.

“It almost rhymes,” said Wolfe.

The sentry at the door was still standing stiff and straight, but his affability had not diminished. “Did you see the kittens, sir?” he asked.

“No,” said Wolfe. “I didn’t get around to it. I’ll look in on them tomorrow.”

“They’re worth your while,” the sentry told him without a quiver of expression.

Goff and Hughes were waiting for him in the office. Hughes, Wolfe saw, was a big man—definitely a polished sort of customer. Hardly the sort of person, Wolfe told himself, who could be easily worsted in an argument. Goff introduced them. “Hughes is from Central Security,” he said.

Wolfe shook hands with Hughes, thinking—Nancy’s a pretty damned good judge of character.

“I’ll run along,” said Goff. “I’ve got some work to do. When you’re ready, give me a call, and I’ll send around a car for you.”

“Thank you, Goff,” said Hughes. It was definitely a dismissal.

“Could I rustle up a drink for you?” asked Wolfe.

“Later, perhaps,” said Hughes. “Right now you and I have a great deal to talk about.”

There was something a little off-key about the start of the interview. It was too urgent, too taut to be dramatic, although there was a sense of drama in it. No good would come of it, thought Wolfe.

He wondered if it might be about Henderson. Henderson’s disappearance was the only subject he could think of that could have brought a man from Central to his office. But Henderson was a closed book. Goff had done the kind of job that left no doubt of that. Every fact, every facet of the disappearance had been covered and investigated. The entire story—or as much of it as was ever likely to be known—was down in official black and white.

Hughes sat down ponderously in a chair, and placed his briefcase beside him.

“I understand that a man has disappeared,” he said.

Wolfe nodded.

“Goff was telling me about it,” said Hughes. “It checks with the Tuckerman affair.”

“Goff is a good man,” said Wolfe. It was skirting the edge of heresy, he knew, for a project head to praise his own security chief. But he just didn’t give a damn. Hughes was turning out to be a shade too pompous.

“I didn’t come here to talk about Henderson, however,” said Hughes. “I came to tell you that we’ve found Tuckerman.”

Wolfe straightened in his chair. He sat momentarily frozen, half by involuntary self-control—an almost innate determination not to show emotion—and half by the steel-cold realization that if what Hughes said was true a large segment of Hourglass’ hope had just gone down the drain.

“But that’s impossible,” he said at last. “It doesn’t make—“ He was stopped by the half-smile on the face of the man opposite him.

“I shall qualify that,” Hughes told him. “We didn’t find Tuckerman himself. But we have his fingerprints, and we can reconstruct what must have happened. Some of it, at least.”

Hughes paused for some reaction, but Wolfe remained rigidly silent. Finally Wolfe said. “Go ahead. You were talking about some fingerprints.”

“We found his fingerprints on a hospital record,” said Hughes, “dating from the year nineteen fifty-eight.”

Wolfe sat hunched inside himself, feeling elation beginning to seep into his soul. He saw that Hughes was watching him, with the half-smile still on his lips—an expression of inner amusement that was not quite condescending, but very close to it.

“You are sure?” asked Wolfe. “Sure beyond any possibility of doubt?”

“We have satisfied ourselves.”

Wolfe nodded. It seemed good enough. If Central was satisfied, it usually meant that any battle, any struggle to overcome difficulties, was nine-tenths won.

“He was taken to a hospital,” continued Hughes, “because he’d been in some sort of brawl. He was badly cut up and for a time, according to the records, it seemed most unlikely that he would pull through.”

“He did, however?”

“We can’t be sure. He disappeared again.” Hughes wasn’t smiling now. “I’m afraid that Tuckerman must have given them some bad moments. He came in with no identity, and absolutely no recollection of a previous existence. So they tagged him John Doe, and waited. Even when he improved, and they could talk to him, he could remember nothing. They attributed the memory block to a crack in the head he’d received in the fight. There were no previous records of the man they could consult and it must have seemed incomprehensible to them that anyone his age—he was forty, wasn’t he?”

“Yes,” said Wolfe.

“It must have been hard for them to understand how a man of that time could have lived for forty years without being fingerprinted, or, at the very least, leaving some record of himself somewhere by which his identity could be traced. Then, on top of that, to have him disappear—straight out of a hospital bed without any warning at all.”

“He moved through time again,” said Wolfe. “He didn’t like it there, so he just moved back. Have you looked for him again?”

Hughes shook his head. “What would be the use? We weren’t looking for him this time—we just stumbled on him by accident. He time-jumped four hundred years, remember. How far would he go the second time? Fingerprints are the only really sure means of identification available to us in the past and the time range involving fingerprints is narrow. If he traveled even fifty years from nineteen fifty-eight he’d be lost to us irremediably.”

“But he traveled in time,” said Wolfe. “That’s the important thing. We know now it can be done.”

“You haven’t known before?”

“We had certain evidences,” Wolfe told him. “We had certain working theories. But we have been shooting in the dark. We could not be completely sure.”

“Even after two hundred years?”

“It hasn’t been two hundred years.”

“Well, all right, then. Almost two hundred years. For people who have been so unsure of themselves your reports, I must remark, have seemed extremely hopeful.”

He looked steadily at Wolfe.

Wolfe experienced a sudden surge of anger and fought to hold it in check.

“You’re forgetting,” he said, “that Central assigned us a task that virtually everyone looked upon as almost a lost cause from the first. We went into Hourglass cold. We had nothing to go on beyond a few abstract philosophic concepts that didn’t really mean a thing. We started on this project from scratch. Central should be satisfied if the job is done in a thousand years.”

Hughes’ manner had changed. There was more than a trace of anger in him, too, now—anger and unconcealed impatience.

“Much sooner than a thousand years,” he said. “We must have it in a hundred—fifty would be better. I’m aware that it’s a long-range program, but the time is running short. Our calculators tell us that. Plain common sense comes up with the same warning. The diplomatic situation is getting rather thick.”

He paused for a moment as if he might be considering whether he should say what he had in mind. He leaned slightly forward, a deepening flush mounting up over his cheekbones.

“I can’t stress this too strongly,” he said, slowly. “You are the only people who can avert a war. I don’t think I need to remind you how horrible such a war would be.”

Wolfe closed his eyes and saw it in a flare of agony. It was mostly all bright and blinding light but there were a few tiny darker spots, the molten cores of planets exploding in destruction.

“The Pleiadean System is pressing us hard,” said Hughes. “But they won’t attack unless they can do so from a position of calculated strength. If we can hold our alliances, and gain new strength, there will be peace. After that, in another thousand years, we will have outstripped them and the danger will be past.”

He ran his fingers through his thinning hair. “It’s a matter of ethics and of morality,” he said. “Early in our expansion we made a few mistakes. We know better now. We feel—”

“I know exactly what you feel,” Wolfe told him, bitterly. “You feel that Earth can’t be held accountable for its earlier mistakes. You feel that we’ve outgrown them. You feel we have a perfect right to go back in time to erase and patch them up.”

His lips tightened. “Paradox has it all figured out just how it can be done in complete secrecy. You want to put hindsight to work, and there’s only one really effective way you can do that. So—you throw it in our laps. You say to Hourglass: ‘Now it’s up to you. If you fail the entire federation goes down to utter defeat.’ No—not just defeat. Total annihilation.”

He rose slowly from his chair. “Hughes,” he said, “it’s a burden Hourglass won’t assume. We’ll do everything we can to give you time travel. We’ll strain every nerve and use our every resource. But we can’t accept the broader implication of our failure. We’ll not even accept the full responsibility for possible failure. In other words, Hughes, don’t talk to me in that tone of voice.”

Hughes also rose. “I don’t know if I like your attitude,” he said.

Wolfe shrugged. “You can have it as you wish. You can like it or lump it. It’s immaterial to me. But don’t try to put extra pressure on us. Don’t try to jack us up. We have all the pressure that we need right here.”

He reached for the phone. “I’ll ask Goff to send up the car,” he said.

He was throwing the man out and it wasn’t a smart thing to do. But somehow, it didn’t seem to matter.

The security phone answered. Without hesitation he put through his request for the car.

“Now how about that drink?” he asked.

Hughes was furious. He took a folder out of his briefcase and laid it on the desk. “There’s the data on Tuckerman,” he said to Wolfe. “I’ll wait for the car outside.”

Wolfe watched the man stalk out.

Wolfe had made an enemy, and gained no immediate advantage and his behavior had been foolish in the extreme. But he was determined to make Central understand that Hourglass did not need to be reminded of its purpose.

Hourglass knew its purpose and for almost two hundred years had tried to implement it in every possible way—running down blind alleys, barking up wrong trees, but never pausing for an instant in its search, never losing sight of its ultimate goal. Hourglass needed no pompous fool like Hughes to prod it on its way.

Central might be getting impatient, but there was nothing he could do about that. Central had waited for a long time but it would have to wait still longer.

Not very much longer, perhaps. Paradox had been completed almost fifty years ago and now everything was ready. Once time travel became more than a theoretical possibility Project Paradox could go into operation. But until that day came it couldn’t move an inch.

And that’s just too damn bad, said Wolfe, talking to himself. He sat down behind his desk and put his hands in front of him and clenched them tight together. Nerves, he told himself. We’re all a bunch of nerves.

Although he had denied it vehemently in his reply to Hughes, the urgency dominated and frightened him—the frantic urgency to head off the first galactic war in which Earth would be disastrously involved, and in all probability destroyed.

He tried to envision the outcome of such a war and failed. It would be far-ranging and fought out on a grand strategy, and was beyond the scientific comprehension of a man untrained in the military. Planets would take the place of cities in the old and now obsolete and outmoded concept of global war and would be blasted into nothingness as a mere tactical maneuver by one side or the other.

And it could be stopped. It could be made to never happen. Once time travel had been achieved, Paradox would proceed to implement the plan that it had all worked out and ready, could travel back through time to undo those things which were a dark and tragic blot upon Earth’s diplomatic record. For the ideological struggle which was now in progress was a battle for the minds of many different planets. And that, Wolfe thought, must be a dilly of a job. For what might be considered correct thinking on one planet might be treason on another.

Wolfe suddenly found himself going over the Hourglass record of accomplishment point by point. It had the Telmont Evidences—the records found on an abandoned, long-dead planet out in the Sower System. Those invaluable tablets seemed to indicate that the race which had once occupied Sower III had made use of time travel to enrich and enlarge their daily lives. But there was a catch to it. Time travel had apparently been so much a matter of course with them that they had neglected to mention what kind of time travel it was.

Wolfe swore quietly to himself—remembering how frantically Hourglass had worked to break the written language of the Telmont people. And how, once the key had been found, the great abundance of existing inscriptions had been searched to no avail.

They had it, Wolfe thought, pounding his fist upon the desk top. What was it that they had? Mechanical process? Natural ability? Mental exercise? Or what?

And the Whitherers, brought back twenty years before from the Jigsaw area—what about the Whitherers? And the Munn equations—the work of a little shriveled gnome of a man who persisted in the insane, old-fashioned belief that everything in the universe could be explained by simple mathematics.

And now two men had disappeared!

There was work to do, he told himself. He should be up and at it, instead of sitting here speculating in bitter anger and frustration. But he didn’t want to work.

He wanted to go fishing.

He sat and thought of the green slide of water, the darkness of the pools, the languor of the sunshine and the fascination of the bobbing float. There were sunnies and bluegills waiting for him and as quarry they were poor indeed. But they had therapeutic value and he wanted to go fishing.

By God, he thought, I’ll go. I’ll sneak away from Nancy and all the rest of them and catch me a mess of fish.

He got to his feet and put out his hand to pick up the file that Hughes had flung upon the desk. Tuckerman, he thought. How had it been with Antony Tuckerman on that October day of thirty years before.

Had he meant to leave, or had he met with some unforeseen, wholly inexplicable accident? What had he done to send himself tumbling back into the past? What had he done or seen or felt or thought? And what had happened to Sartwell Henderson just ten short days ago? What had Tuckerman and Henderson done that was unique, different? Why should something have happened to them that had happened to no one else on Earth?

And yet that wasn’t exactly right!

How long, he wondered, can a man stay blind? He laid the folder back on the desk and was surprised and outraged to find that his hand was shaking.

He stood tensed for a moment, to give his hand a chance, and when it had stopped its shaking he picked up the phone and said to the operator, “Get me Central Information.”

He waited and the voice came on.

“Wolfe, Hourglass,” he said. “I shall want all the vital breakdown data that you have in your files on missing persons. Over the last ten years, let’s say.”

“It will take a little time, sir.”

“Okay. Call me back when you’ve got it.”

“You don’t want the actual cases? Just the statistics and the distribution and the few more simple breakdowns?”

“Yes, naturally. It would take a dozen men a month to go over every report completely.”

“Any detail you want us to pay particular attention to? If we knew your reason. …”

“No reason,” said Wolfe. “Call it a passing whim.”

“But, sir—”

“Damn it, can’t you do just a simple research job without jacking it up into a priority production? Get me that data, and call me back when you have it.”

He slammed down the phone and stamped out of the room.

When he reached the central hall he could hear Nancy quarreling with the cook. Good Lord, he thought, can’t she even keep her nose out of the kitchen? That’s a first-rate cook she’s insulting. If she runs him off with her bossiness—

He went out behind the barn that housed the Whitherers, and took down the long cane pole from its place beneath the eaves. But when he looked for the spade he couldn’t find it. He cursed fluently and, still grumbling, found an old soup can and headed for the orchard. Driven to it, he told himself he could dig enough worms for an hour or two of fishing with his bare hands and, perhaps, a handy stick.

Under the favorite apple tree he found the missing spade. It was attached to a little gnome-like man who had leaned a fishing pole against the tree and was now strenuously engaged in digging worms.

“Hello, Doc,” said Wolfe.

Dr. Oscar Munn took one indignant look at him and flung down the spade.

“I quit,” cried Munn. “I’m resigning from the project right here and now.”

He started to walk back toward the barns, but Wolfe stepped quickly in front of him. Munn halted inches away, with his bristling, ridiculous little beard pointed directly at Wolfe’s chest.

“What’s eating you, Doc?” Wolfe demanded.

“The figures,” said Munn fiercely. “They simply would not march. They refused to stay in straight lines. They went around in circles. So I decided to go fishing for a while and clear away the cobwebs. But the minute I get there the place is crowded.”

“You’d rather I didn’t go fishing today, Doc?”

“You can do anything you want,” said Munn, “just so long as you don’t insist on doing it with me.”

“You’re a man of great discernment,” Wolfe told him, “and I admire you for it. I’m no fit companion. I’ve been snapping at everyone all day.”

“So have I,” conceded Munn.

“What’s the matter with us, Doc?”

“We don’t go fishing half enough,” said Munn. “Not nearly half enough. Let’s get at those worms.”

“You’ve dug your share,” said Wolfe. “I will do the rest.”

“I’ll pick them up,” Munn offered. “It takes an agile angleworm to get away from me.”

Wolfe picked up the spade and plunged it in the ground. “I just had a brainstorm, Doc.”

“So,” said Munn.

“I called up Central Information and asked for a missing persons breakdown.”

Munn grunted. “How long have you been here, Gil?”

“I don’t see what that’s got to do with it? Five years, if you must know.”

Munn chuckled. “It’s been done before,” he said. “About every five years or so someone gets a brainstorm. You just missed the last one.”

Wolfe turned over a spade full of dirt and Munn dived into it like a wrathful terrier. He garnered four large worms, two small ones and one that had been sliced in half.

“So I was a fool to do it,” said Wolfe.

“Not a fool,” Munn told him.

“Maybe I should call back and stop them.”

“Would you break their hearts?” asked Munn. “Would you show disrespect for that great encyclopedic setup with all the lovely push-buttons and all the files arranged so neatly?”

“I suppose I should let them have their fun,” decided Wolfe.

“Turn the ground again,” said Munn. “Let us get on with our worm gathering. And no more talk of shop.”

“I was just going to tell you. They found Tuckerman.”

Munn looked up quickly from where he squatted by the shovel full of earth. “They found him! Then that means—”

“It means exactly what we had hoped. They found his fingerprints, dating back to the year nineteen fifty-eight.”

Munn picked up a handful of dirt and let it trickle through his fingers.

“Someday,” he said. “Someday we’ll get it. It will happen to someone else—to you, perhaps, or to me. And when it does we will be quick-witted enough to leave a clue behind for Joel, or some other bright young lad to follow.”

He squatted, musing. “We approach it from so many different angles largely because we are not sure—because we do not know exactly what we are searching for. I wonder if Tuckerman or Henderson. …” Munn made a gesture of impatience. “Turn the shovel, please.”

The sun had disappeared behind the trees on the hill across the meadow when Dr. Munn and Wolfe called it a day. They wound the lines around the poles, stuck the hooks into the floats and started for the house.

Munn’s eyes kept returning to the catch. “Best day all summer,” he said. “Now we can go back, and the figures and our thinking will be straight.”

They sneaked around to the back of the house and left the fish with the cook, who cursed mightily because he could see at a glance that a one-hour cleaning job lay ahead of him.

Nancy was waiting for them in the living room, her cheeks flushed, her eyes angry and accusing.

“Where have you been all afternoon?” she demanded. “Central Information has been calling you.”

Wolfe gave a guilty start. He’d forgotten all about Central Information. “Thanks,” he said, deciding there was no need to give her a detailed explanation.

He went into the office and closed the door, leaving Munn to Nancy’s seldom completely tender mercy.

Central Information made no attempt to disguise its exasperation. “We’ve been trying to get you all afternoon,” a reproachful voice said.

“I got tied up,” Wolfe explained.

“We have the information which you requested. Could we put it on the screen?”

Wolfe pushed the button for the vision plate, and the square lit up. A graph appeared upon it, neatly executed.

“We became intensely interested once we got into it,” Information told him. “You asked for a ten-year breakdown, but we went back fifty years. You will note the steady rise in disappearances, year by year. It is significant.”

“Significant of what?” asked Wolfe.

“Why, I wouldn’t know exactly. But there must be some significance. You will note the …”

“Thanks for calling it to my attention,” said Wolfe, grinning at having caught a busybody completely off base.

“There was something else,” said Information. “We just stumbled on it by accident. But it was so striking that we made up a graph for it as well.”

The first graph with its steadily ascending curve disappeared and was replaced by another which showed a steadily declining curve.

“This,” said Information, “shows the decrease in insanity over the same period of time. There probably is no relation between the two graphs, but if you will kindly note…”

The screen changed again and showed the two charts side by side.

“…if you will kindly note, the ascending and descending lines match almost perfectly.”

“I am extremely pleased,” said Wolfe, irritated beyond all reason, “to have my request supplemented by this astounding example of your enthusiastic research.”

“Thank you,” said the fatuous voice. “We felt you might be interested in such an unusual situation.”

“And what would you deduce from it, precisely? That persons who become insane run off immediately and lose themselves or—well, perhaps you have something even more startling to suggest.”

“We made no deduction, sir,” said the voice. “Our sole purpose is to provide requested data.”

“Which you have done most nobly,” said Wolfe, “far beyond the call of duty.”

But even as he mocked, he felt the first stir of excitement rising in his brain.

“We will send you all the data,” said Information, “by mail immediately. By special messenger, if you wish.”

“Special messenger, by all means,” said Wolfe, “and thank you very much.”

He replaced the receiver and sat stiffly in the dim light of the room.

Could the fatuous fools have stumbled onto something? Could there be some connection between the disappearances and insanity? Was there some significance in the fact that while the disappearances had steadily increased, insanity had waned? The two charts showed a direct relationship—but could the charts be trusted?

He sat there, thinking back across the years—his years on the project and all the other years before—when it had seemed that all reason and all human experience was against the project, that it would come to nothing and finally perish in the dust alongside the other vanities of Man. The long hard years of nothing and, at times, of worse than nothing—when hope itself seemed dead. And the lean years of frustration when the Telmont Evidences seemed to suggest that the project’s aim was far from hopeless, but did not point the way.

And finally, the years of fitful wonder, with the Whitherers watching impudently with their staring, sphinx-like eyes, while they did perhaps the very thing that man had tried and failed for two centuries to do—did it with no more thought or effort than a human might take in walking through a door from one room to another.

Was it then a natural ability rather than a formula which could be reduced to mathematics—a philosophic concept, the clever manipulation of universal factors? Was it something that might hide within Man’s brain, a latent ability late in developing, even unsuspected?

Suppose, Wolfe thought, just suppose—

Suppose that the disappearances were a safety valve precisely as insanity was a safety valve. Suppose that Man, after many centuries, had finally developed a better safety valve. Suppose that instead of going insane, a man, tormented beyond endurance by his problems, sought escape by going back through time. And suppose he discovered then that his problems had ceased to exist, since the circumstances which had created them had been swept away, and no longer had any real existence in time.

If that were true, then you’d have exactly what the graphs had shown—fewer cases of insanity, and more disappearance cases. And it made considerable sense, too, Wolfe told himself. It certainly made as much sense as insanity could ever make. Perhaps more sense, for insanity was a total waste, while a person who disappeared in time would still retain his own unique personality and his humanity.

Survival, he thought. It could be a survival factor. It could be something that was developing, under the press of circumstance, when the human race needed it desperately.

And if he was on the right track at last it would open up new avenues of research. You couldn’t, on the face of it, drive a man insane in order to push him into time, but there would be other means. And if it proved to be an ability innate within the mind, it was something that would eventually belong to the entire human race and would be the exact opposite of a piece of property that could be auctioned off to the highest bidder.

He felt shaken, but he was no longer tense. He got up from his desk and walked toward the door. But before he had taken five steps the portal burst open and Goff plunged into the room, gripping a frightened, elderly man by both elbows and propelling him forward. Goff had lost his cap and his hair was rumpled, his face convulsed with rage.

Behind Goff and the stranger were Munn, Nancy and the cook, with a look of scared wonder on their faces.

Goff gave the stranger a shove that sent him reeling out into the center of the room.

“I found him skulking by the barns,” he said, his voice shaking with anger. “He won’t answer questions. He pretends he doesn’t know how he got here. He keeps mumbling all the time about how bright everything is.”

The man turned slowly around to face them and for the first time Wolfe saw that his lips were ashen, his eyes glazed, filmed over with what appeared to be fright.

“It was all bright,” he stammered. “The sky—like the sun!”

Wolfe said calmly, “Won’t you have a chair, please?”

The man hesitated, the dazed look deepening in his eyes.

“That one over there,” said Wolfe.

The man shambled to Wolfe’s desk, and sat down.

“He’s either crazy,” said Goff, “or he’s putting on an act.”

Nancy had shut the door and was standing with her back against it, her eyes very wide. “That’s a funny suit he’s wearing,” she said.

“He’s a funny man,” said Goff, disgusted.

Wolfe walked toward the chair and the man cringed away from him. “You needn’t be afraid,” Wolfe told him. “I am glad that you are here.”

“How could he have gotten in?” Goff asked angrily. “No one could have climbed that fence—and the radar hasn’t shown a thing.”

“I think I know,” said Wolfe. “I think I know exactly how he did it.”

And if what he believed was true, he told himself, Hourglass was a failure.

“So it was bright,” Wolfe said.

The man nodded. His jaw muscles had begun to twitch spasmodically. “We weren’t soon enough,” he muttered. “I’m sorry.”

“What year was it, friend?” asked Wolfe.

The man seemed not to hear.

“What year was it, man? We’ve got to know. What date did the Pleiadeans attack?”

“Just a minute or so ago,” said the man. “December twenty-ninth, twenty five, ninety-five.”

“There’s your answer, Goff,” said Wolfe, without turning, still looking at the man.

Goff protested angrily. “He doesn’t know what he’s saying.”

“Yes, he does,” said Wolfe. “Hourglass was a failure. We never found time travel. Not the way we meant to find it. The people found it, but we didn’t—”

“It was white bright,” wailed the man. “It was far off and bright, and it moved so fast it covered all the sky. Then I—found myself here.”

Wolfe stood stiffly by the chair, imagining once again what it would be like—the sudden blaze of brightness and the darker masses that were fragments of a shattered planet suddenly turned molten.

But there would be an instant, just before the terror hit and death closed down when there might be time enough—time enough to trigger within the brains of men this new, developing, last-minute safety valve.

A survival factor, he had told himself, and here was evidence, proof, of its existence—a survival factor against the day when there would be no time to run and no place to hide.

And Hourglass was a failure, he thought. What would happen now?

As if aware of his thoughts, Nancy crossed and stood beside him, looking at the man huddled in the chair.

“We’d better get him into bed,” she said. “He’s close to shock. Cook, have you got some soup?”

“Right away,” said the cook, ducking out the door.

“Give me a hand, Doc,” said Goff.

Wolfe stepped to one side and watched the two of them help the man to his feet and walk him down the hall.

Nancy tugged at his sleeve. “What does it all mean, Gil?”

“It means we’ve failed,” said Wolfe. “It means we have as an innate faculty within us the ability to travel in time, but have failed to develop, soon enough, techniques for controlling it. We can go tumbling past-ward, perhaps even future-ward, but all we shall ever do is tumble. We can’t ourselves determine when or where. It’s still purely a random manifestation of what is perhaps the most powerful force in the physical universe.”

“Then there will be war!”

“There is war now,” Wolfe told her, grimly. “Some two hundred years in the future Earth has been blasted into a glowing cinder by a total conversion bomb.”

“Meow,” said Molly, the cat.

Wolfe jerked up his head. Molly stood in the doorway, as disreputable as ever, politely waiting to be invited in.

“Hello, Molly,” Nancy greeted her. “How is the family?”

Molly waltzed across the floor, her proud tail erect and waving. Muttering little conversational purrs and yowls, she rubbed against Wolfe’s trouser-leg.

“You shouldn’t roam about all night,” he told her, stroking her chin. “Do you want that big rabbit in the woodpile to sneak up, and grab you?”

Molly didn’t seem disturbed by the thought. She closed her eyes and purred.

“She should start being careful soon,” said Nancy. “She has only four lives left.”

“Four lives left?” asked Wolfe. “Oh, sure, I forgot. A cat has nine.”

He stared at Nancy for a moment, then down at Molly. “Good Lord,” he said. “I never thought of it.”

“Of Molly’s lives?” asked Nancy.

“No, not that at all. Don’t you see—we have the same situation here. We went ahead and we failed. But now at least one person from the final hours of Hourglass and the Earth has come back to us and he may not be the last. So we start again, with the help of those returning men and women, and we go ahead once more. This time, because of our increased knowledge, we may make it. But even if we fail again, there’ll be others returning after every setback, and Hourglass can make a fresh start and eventually a time will come…”

He rubbed a hand hard against his face. “I don’t know. I don’t know. Doc will have to check it. I’m not completely sure, by any means. There are so many questions still to be answered. Are there many alternative futures, or must our one future be correct, precisely as we planned to correct the past?”

“But you really believe,” said Nancy, “that we shall have a second chance.”

“And a third, a fourth and a fifth,” said Wolfe. “More—if we should need them. If it holds true the first time, it should hold true again and again.”

The phone was ringing now. Wolfe stepped to the desk and picked it up.

“This is Hughes,” an angry voice said.

“How are you, Mr. Hughes?”

“What’s going on?” demanded Hughes. “We’re being flooded with reports from all parts of the world about strangers showing up. There are thousands of them. They say they’re from the future!”

“They’re refugees,” said Wolfe.

“This is one you’re pegged with,” Hughes raged at him. “This is squarely in your lap.”

Wolfe slammed the receiver down so forcefully that it bounced.

The guard had quitted his post, and was fidgeting at the door.

“There are three men out here, sir,” he said. “They seem to be confused.’

“Send them in,” said Wolfe. “I’ve been expecting them.”

The guard was hesitant.

Wolfe lost his temper then.

“Get them in!” he almost shouted. “We have work to do!”

The guard turned and went down the hall.

It was all right, Wolfe thought.

He was tied up in knots again.