He took a hot shower and it made him feel much better. When he
finished and got into a pair of dungarees and a tee-shirt and lit a
cigarette, the bell rang. It was George.
"I ought to punch your nose, Eddie Amhurst."
_Don't let him talk that way, Eddie._ Until now the voice had been
silent since the ruined ceremony.
"Don't talk to me that way. Just because she was your cousin and just
because you introduced us on a blind date--"
_Splat!_ Something hit Eddie's nose, just as had been predicted and he
sat down on the floor.
_He_ hit _you! Get up and knock the stuffing out of him, Eddie._
Eddie's nose bled easily. It was bleeding now. He stood up and George
hit him again and then his nose was bleeding more than ever.
This time Eddie sat there and did not try to get up. He knew there were
about nine quarts of blood in his body and he must have lost at least a
quart by now.
George readjusted his high hat. He took a step towards the door but
never reached it. A big redwood bookend took off from an end-table and
thudded against the side of his head. His high hat fell off and he sat
down next to Eddie, muttering something about hitting him from behind.
The voice said, _I couldn't bear to let you take a beating. If you
can't defend yourself, then I've got to do it for you._
For the first time a concrete thought on all this came to
Eddie--perhaps it was a girl, just an ordinary girl, only she was
invisible. He had seen a movie once and while the invisible man in it
had remained invisible, if you put some clothing on him you could see
his shape.
Eddie ran around the room with George's high hat, trying to find an
invisible head. But after a time he felt silly. The hat kept falling to
the floor every time he tried to put it on something.
The voice giggled. _You're wasting your time, Eddie. I'm not invisible,
not in the way you mean. Now that you didn't marry that Judy-thing, you
have no ties. Right?_
"Umm."
_No parents?_
"Nope."
_No close relatives of any type?_
"A bunch of third cousins in Chicago I think."
_They don't matter. Any close friends?_
Eddie looked down at the floor, where George was trying to get up. "I
used to have one," he said.
_But not now--not any longer. Good! Then you can come with me, Eddie. I
had to make sure of that first. You ready?_
"Where are we going?"
_Just have some patience and you'll see for yourself._
"Maybe I won't like it."
"He's talking to himself again," George said. "Am I glad my cousin
didn't marry _him_! Lucky Judy."
_Ready, Eddie? Hah! A poet and don't know it!_
"Umm."
Eddie began to feel dizzy but he reasoned that was because George had
punched him in the nose not once but twice. Soon the floor came up to
meet him because he no longer could keep his balance and then, as he
sat there, everything began to grow hazy, foggy, unreal. Soon the room
was only a shadow of a room and he could not even tell that the rug was
blue. Less than a shadow, it seemed to dissolve in water--in very hot
water, because it dissolved quickly.
This Eddie did not know--but he dissolved with it....
* * * * *
"Edam Hurst! Wake up!"
Eddie sat up groggily. He was on a big comfortable couch and the voice
came out of a loudspeaker on the wall. There were the couch and the
loudspeaker, a closed door and Eddie--and outside of that the room, a
small one, was empty.
"You got it wrong," Eddie said. "Just a matter of pronouncing. Not Edam
Hurst. Ed Amhurst. Get the difference?"
"Subtle," the voice said. "It doesn't matter. There isn't another Edam
Hurst or Ed Amhurst here. No confusion."
"Well, where's the other voice? The woman."
"Early cultural trait," the voice mused. "High sex-identification. Eeb
did nothing to assert her femininity, yet he knew the voice for a
woman's. Interesting, extremely interesting."
"Of course she's a woman."
"The timbre isn't that much different for you to know it as a certainty
ever. High sex-identification in your time, young man. If I simply
heard Eeb's voice I'd never know her sex--not just from her voice."
"Well, she _is_ a woman."
"Certainly, certainly--and a mighty troublesome one. First time
something like this has happened in nearly a thousand years. What do
you think we ought to do?"
"How the heck should I know? I don't even know what happened."
"True, true. I'd forgotten you're no telepath. I wonder if telepathy
came in when high sex-identification began to wane. Umm, no--hardly
possible. Eeb is obviously a throwback and she has both. Intriguing."
The door opened and a woman entered the room. She was dressed in shorts
and some sort of negligible halter. She walked across the room to the
loudspeaker and Eddie, who had, armed with tape measure, once judged a
local beauty contest, was sure she was the most beautiful woman he had
ever seen.
She said, "I'd better shut that thing off before Rajuz lulls you to
sleep with all his scientific talk." She flicked a switch on the
loudspeaker. "Of course he can still speak through telepathy but your
mind won't get the impulses without that loudspeaker, Eddie. See? I
can hear him now but you can't."
Eddie had to take her word for it because he couldn't hear a thing. He
hardly cared. Of paramount importance was this fact--here was _the_
voice. Not any voice but the one that had brought him here, wherever
_here_ was.
Eddie tried to be patient. "You're Eeb," he said. "That much I know.
But where the hell are we?"
"You mean, in space?"
"Uh-huh."
"We're exactly where your room was. We haven't moved an inch."
"So where's my room? Where is it then?"
"It isn't. It _was_. Fifty thousand years ago it was, Eddie. Not now.
Now it's gone, with the building, with the city, with your whole
civilization. We've left your time and entered mine."
"Yeah," said Eddie. His voice sounded lame.
"You don't believe me."
"Nope, sorry--I don't." In truth Eddie was glad he hadn't married Judy
but as for the rest of this, well--he was from Missouri.
"It's simple. I'm a professor of history and my period of study was
yours, the second millennium of the Christian Era."
"Do you--ah--teach history in that outfit?" He pointed to the enticing
lines of her halter and shorts.
"Certainly. It's comfortable. Anyway we use no guesswork in history. We
use a time-scanner. That, of course, makes history the most accurate of
all the sciences. It's mental travel through time--not physical unless
you will it.
"Elementary stuff, Eddie. Just as they learned teleportation through
space ten thousand years ago, so they learned you can do the same
thing through time. Mental effort, applied properly, can move physical
objects. It was always latent in human beings through some unknown
ancestor--they just had to learn how to control the power."
Eddie was still skeptical. "So you studied history by actually going
back there?"
"Something like that. Then I found you, Edam Hurst."
"Ed Amhurst."
"What's the difference? I found you and once I did, purely by chance,
of course--that was the end of history. No more studying. They tell me
I'm a throwback--less psi-quotient, more sex identification than anyone
here. Maybe that explains it.
"Anyway I had to bring you back. People constantly teleport trophies
through time--but not in a thousand years has anyone brought back
a human being. I saw that you had no ties and I brought you.
Unfortunately there's a law against it, I think."
Eddie asked her why.
"It can cause a lot of trouble. You can change history by bringing
someone where he doesn't belong. But I had to. I'm a throwback. I
couldn't be satisfied...."
Slowly, almost imperceptibly, she had been walking closer and closer
to Eddie, ever since she had turned off the loudspeaker. Now, abruptly,
she was standing next to him--and then she was sitting on his lap. She
snuggled in close and then she began to kiss him and Eddie knew at once
that kissing had come a long way in fifty thousand years, even if the
psi quotient was greater and sex identification had diminished.
Three minutes later Eeb got up and Eddie knew quite suddenly that
while he had always known love at first sight to be ridiculous and
impossible, love at first kiss was a very different matter.
"Damn that Rajuz! He's the Dean, and he wants us in his office. So it
goes, Eddie--if it's not one thing it's another. We have no choice, of
course. We'll have to go."
* * * * *
They left the room and stood on a moving sidewalk with a lot of other
people and this first five-minute glimpse of the place was enough to
convince him that he had indeed been teleported through time. A lot of
what he saw could not even register in his brain simply because he had
no standards for comparison. But he did notice almost at the outset
that everything seemed simplified--possibly because telepathy and
teleportation were the reigning king and queen.
"You've seen enough of the city for now," Eeb told him. "All these
people are out walking for the exercise. Let's take the shorter way to
Rajuz's office."
One moment they stood there on the moving sidewalk, the next they were
in the presence of Rajuz.
Rajuz sat at what must have been a desk, a spherical desk, but he did
not look much like a dean. He could have been a technician or even a
truck-driver.
Eeb explained, "The trend has been away from differentiation since the
sex-identification patterns were decreased. But I'm fed up with it.
They all look the same, like that. You know something, Eddie? I like
you better."
Rajuz tuned in another of the loudspeakers on his desk, and Eeb
explained that it was necessary because the psi-quotient varied in
everyone.
"Eeb Lym, Edam Hurst, you have committed a misdemeanor."
"Not him," Eeb said. "It was all my fault."
"Motivation is above suspicion here, you know that. It is the law--if
someone does something it is because he wants to. Edam Hurst is as
guilty as you are."
He scowled at them for a time and then continued. "Frankly, I don't
know what to do. This is the first crime of this nature in a thousand
years and while it's merely a misdemeanor it will have to go punished."
"Yes," Eeb agreed. "I guess so. You name it and we'll oblige."
"You won't like it."
"Name it anyway."
"The punishment simply is this--you are to take Edam Hurst back where
he belongs."
"Oh, no! Not after I found him--"
"That is the punishment. Throwback or no you must learn that sex
identification is decidedly secondary to psi-quotient. When can you
take him?"
"Well, I--"
"Don't I have anything to say about this?" Eddie demanded.
"A feeble bit at best. Just sit still and listen, young man."
"--I suppose I can take him this afternoon if the scanner room is
vacant."
"It will be vacant, we'll see to that. I'm glad you're being sensible
about this whole unhappy affair, Eeb Lym."
* * * * *
"What are you so cheerful about?" Eddie said.
They stood in the scanner room and the girl was humming a little tune.
"Don't worry, Edam Hurst. Relax, Eddie. I'm cheerful because I know
what I'm doing, that's why. Just bear with me."
He had no choice. But now that suddenly, devastatingly, he felt about
Eeb the way she felt about him, he did not want to lose her. It was as
simple as that.
"Time is huge," Eeb told him. "You didn't think that once I found you
I'd let you go? Oh no, I found you and you're mine--that's all there
is to it. Even Jeeva, Lord of the City, couldn't do a thing about it.
Nossir. Time is big and while I said...."
She flicked a switch and kicked nonchalantly at a pedal with her foot.
"That ought to do it. Just don't be frightened, Eddie. The important
thing--"
"The important thing," he finished for her, "is that we want to be
together, right?"
"Right," she said, kissed him soundly and turned a little knob on the
wall. "_Now_ we're ready."
As before Eddie became dizzy and soon he was sitting on the floor
watching the room spin and fade, spin and fade.
By the time it dissolved, Eddie was whirling away into a giddy limbo....
* * * * *
He stood up and heard the wild nature sounds all around them. The bulk
of the time-machine was big at his side in a green wooded glen. Eeb
came dancing up to him with an armful of fruit. "Here, it's delicious.
Taste it--"
She held out her hand and he took a bite, then looked up sharply. With
a whirring sound, the machine faded, disappeared.
"I sent it back," the girl said. "I wanted to make it permanent, just
you and I. Time is big and they'll never find us. Besides, they'll
think this is punishment enough. We're exiled back here."
"Well, where is _here_?"
"Oh, I'm not exactly sure. Right around the time the human species
emerged. Should be a wonderful life, Eddie--"
Eddie began to sing a popular song. Popular? It had been popular--when?
This all was very confusing.
"Edam Hurst, you have positively the worst singing voice I've ever
heard."
He smiled and told her to be quiet, kissing her to put more force
behind the command. Then, hand in hand, Edam and Eeb walked through
their glen.
* * * * *
_The names of those congenital skeptics who insist that time-travel
is impossible, even in theory, are Legion. Nor is their stand
difficult to comprehend. They say that no man or woman has yet
traveled backward to meet a younger him or herself face to face.
They say this is immutable paradox. And by way of clincher they
add a query as to why, if time-travel is to come, has it never
happened? Why haven't we recorded instances of visitations from the
future?_
_However, those in favor of time-travel have answers ready and
waiting. These optimists (?) use the parallel universe theory to
meet the first question. Such return, they claim, would immediately
cause a forking of the Earthways, leaving our version of the
world untrodden by time-traveling feet. As to the clincher,
they counter-question with a How do we know we haven't had such
visitors? Time-travel, when it comes, will come in a far-distant
future. At such a distance the mere six thousand years of recorded
human history is a mere fly-speck on the annals of Earth. So why
should this tiny dot in the continuum have been favored?_