"Yes."
"Maybe a couple of years?"
"What of it? You said we had a thousand."
"I didn't mean you to take me seriously, Dr. Yarr."
The small pneumatic at Yarr's desk whirred and clicked. Out popped a
cartridge. Yarr opened it and withdrew a list of figures, and they were
appalling. Something like two hundred thousand FitzJohns on the Earth
alone. It would take a decade to check the entire series through the
Integrator. Yarr threw the figures to the floor in disgust and swiveled
around to face us.
"Well?" he asked.
I said: "Seems hopeless to check FitzJohn back second by second. At
that rate we might just as well go through all the names on the list."
"What else is there to do?"
I said: "Look, the Prognosticator flirted twice with something
interesting when we were conning FitzJohn's career. It was something
mentioned all through the future, too."
"I don't recall--" the C-S began.
"It was a lecture, sir," I explained. "FitzJohn's first big lecture
when he set out to refute criticism. I think we ought to pick that up
and go through it with a fine comb. Something is bound to come out of
it."
"Very well."
* * * * *
Images blurred across the spinning crystal as Yarr hunted for the
scene. I caught fuzzy fragments of a demolished Manhattan City with
giant crablike creatures mashing helpless humans, their scarlet
chiton glittering. Then an even blurrier series of images. A city of
a single stupendous building towering like Babel into the heavens; a
catastrophic fire roaring along the Atlantic seaboard; then a sylvan
civilization of odd, naked creatures flitting from one giant flower to
another. But they were all so far off focus they made my eyes ache. The
sound was even worse.