"Sam, this is you," a voice replied.
"Huh?" said Sam. "What's that?"
"This is you," the voice on the wire repeated. "You, Sam Yoder. Don't
you recognize your own voice? This is you, Sam Yoder, calling from the
twelfth of July. Don't hang up!"
* * * * *
Sam hadn't even thought of hanging up. He was annoyed. He was up a
telephone pole, trying to do some work, resting in his safety belt and
with his climbing irons safely fixed in the wood. Naturally, he thought
somebody was trying to joke with him, and when a man is working is no
time for jokes.
"I'm not hanging up," said Sam dourly, "but you'd better!"
The voice was familiar, though he couldn't quite place it. If it talked
a little more, he undoubtedly would. He knew it just about as well as he
knew his own, and it was irritating not to be able to call this joker by
name.
The voice said, "Sam, it's the second of July where you are, and you're
up a pole by Bridge's Run. The line's dead in two places, else I
couldn't talk to you. Lucky, ain't it?"
[Illustration]
"Whoever you are," Sam said formidably, "it ain't going to be lucky for
you if you ever need telephone service and you've kept wasting my time.
I'm busy!"
"But I'm you!" insisted the voice persuasively. "And you're me! We're
both the same Sam Yoder, only where I am, it's July twelfth. Where you
are, it's July second. You've heard of time-traveling. Well, this is
time-talking. You're talking to yourself--that's me--and I'm talking to
myself--that's you--and it looks like we've got a mighty good chance to
get rich."
Then something came into Sam's memory and every muscle in his body went
taut and tight, even as he was saying to himself, "It can't be!"
But he'd remembered that if a man stands in a corner and talks to the
wall, his voice will sound to him just the way it sounds to somebody
else. Being in the telephone business, he'd tried it and now he did
recognize the voice. It was his. His own. Talking to him. Which, of
course, was impossible.
"Look," said hoarsely, "I don't believe this!"
"Then listen," the voice said briskly. And Sam's face grew red. It
burned. His ears began to feel scorched. Because the voice--_his_
voice--was telling him strictly private matters that nobody else in the
world knew. Nobody but himself and Rosie.
"Quit it!" groaned Sam. "Somebody might be listening! Tell me what you
want and ring off!"
The voice told him what it wanted. His own voice. It sounded pleased. It
told him precisely what it wanted him to do. And then, very kindly, it
told him exactly where the two breaks in the line were. And then it rang
off.
* * * * *
He sweated when he looked at the first of the two places. A joining was
bad and he fixed that. It was where his voice had said it would be. And
that was as impossible as anything else.
When he'd fixed the second break, Sam called Central and told her he was
sick and was going home, and that if there were any other phones that
needed fixing today, people were probably better off without phone
service, anyhow.
He went home and washed his face, and made himself a brew of coffee and
drank it, and his memory turned out to be unimpaired. Presently he heard
himself muttering.
So he said defiantly, "There ain't any crazy people in my family, so it
ain't likely I've gone out of my head. But God knows nobody but Rosie
knows about me telling her sentimental that her nose is so cute, I
couldn't believe she ever had to blow it! Maybe it was me, talking to
myself!"
Talking to oneself is not abnormal. Lots of people do it. Sam missed out
the conclusion to be drawn from the fact that he'd answered himself
back.
He reasoned painfully, "If somebody drove over to Rappahannock, past
Dunnsville, and telephoned back that there was a brush fire at
Dunnsville, I wouldn't be surprised to get to Dunnsville and find a
brush fire there. So if somebody phones back from next Tuesday that Mr.
Broaddus broke his leg next Tuesday--why, I shouldn't be surprised to
get to next Tuesday and find he done it. Going to Rappahannock, past
Dunnsville, and going to next Thursday, past next Tuesday, ain't so much
difference. It's only the difference between a road-map and a calendar."
Then he began to see implications. He blinked.
"Yes, sir!" he said in awe. "I wouldn't've thought of it if I hadn't
told myself on the telephone, but there _is_ money to be made out of
this! I must be near as smart as Rosie thinks I am! I'd better get that
dinkus set up!"
He'd more or less half-heartedly worked out an idea of how a party-line
telephone conversation could be made private, and just out of instinct,
you might say, he'd accumulated around his house a lot of stuff that
should have been on the phone company's inventory. There were condensers
and transmitters and selective-ringing bells and resistances and the
like. He'd meant to put some of them together some day and see what
happened, but he'd been too busy courting Rosie to get at it.
* * * * *
Now he did get started. His own voice on the telephone had told him to.
It had warned him that one thing he had intended wouldn't work and
something else would. But it was essentially simple, after all. He
finished it and cut off his line from Central and hooked this gadget in.
He rang. Half a minute later, somebody rang back.
"Hello!" said Sam, quivering. He'd broken the line to Central, remember.
In theory, he shouldn't have gotten anybody anywhere. But a very
familiar voice said "Hello" back at him, and Sam swallowed and said,
"Hello, Sam. This is you in the second of July."
The voice at the other end said cordially that Sam had done pretty well
and now the two of them--Sam in the here and now and Sam in the middle
of the week after next--would proceed to get rich together. But the
voice from July twelfth sounded less absorbed in the conversation than
Sam thought quite right. It seemed even abstracted. And Sam was at once
sweating from the pure unreasonableness of the situation and conscious
that he rated congratulation for the highly technical device he had
built. After all, not everybody could build a time-talker!