The D.A. said that Stein had not lived through the limit.
Defense stated that Stein was seven years older now than at the time of the crime and had therefore lived through the limit.
The D.A. challenged the statement and the defense produced Stein’s birth certificate. He was born in 2973. At the time of the crime 3004 he was thirty-one. Now, in 3011, he was thirty-eight.
The D.A. shouted that Stein was not physiologically thirty-eight, but thirty-one.
Defense pointed out freezingly that the law, once the individual was granted to be menta ly competent, recognized solely chronological age, which could be obtamed only by subtracting the date of birth from the date of now.
The D.A., growing impassioned, swore that if Stein were allowed to go free, half the laws on the books would be useless.
Then change the laws, said Defense, to take time travel into account but until the laws are changed, let them be enforced as written.
Judge Neville Preston took a week to consider and then handed down his decision. It was a turning point in the history of law. It is almosta pity’. then, that some people suspect Judge Preston to have been swayed in his way of thmkmg by the irresistible impulse to phrase his decision as he did.
For that decision, in full, was:
‘A niche in time saves Stein.’
A Statue for Father
First time? Really? But of course you have heard of it. Yes, I was sure you had.
If you’re really interested in the discovery, believe me, I’ll be delighted to tell you. It’s a story I’ve always liked to tell, but not many people give me the chance. I’ve even been advised to keep the story under wraps. It interferes with the legends growing up about my father.
Still, I think the truth is valuable. There’s a moral to it. A man can spend his life devoting his energies solely to the satisfaction of his own curiosity and then, quite accidentally, without ever intending anything of the sort, find himself a benefactor of humanity.
Dad was just a theoretical physicist, devoted to the investigation of time travel. I don’t think he ever gave a thought to what time travel might mean to Homo sapiens. He was just curious about the mathematical relationships that governed the universe, you see.
Hungry? All the better. I imagine it will take nearly half an hour. They will do it properly for an official such as yourself. It’s a matter of pride.
To begin with, Dad was poor as only a university professor can be poor. Eventually, though, he became wealthy. In the last years before his death he was fabulously rich, and as for myself and my children and grandchildren – well, you can see for yourself.
They’ve put up statues to him, too. The oldest is on the hillside right here where the discovery was made. You can just see it out the window. Yes. Can you make out the inscription? Well, we’re standing at a bad angle. No matter.
By the time Dad got into time-travel research the whole problem had been given up by most physicists as a bad job. It had begun with a splash when the Chrono-funnels were first set up.
Actually, they’re not much to see. They’re completely irrational and uncontrollable. What you see is distorted and wavery, two feet across at the most, and it vanishes quickly. Trying to focus on the past is like trying to focus on a feather caught in a hurricane that has gone mad.
They tried poking grapples into the past but that was just as unpredictable. Sometimes it was carried off successfully for a few seconds with one man leaning hard against the grapple. But more often a pile driver couldn’t push it through. Nothing was ever obtained out of the past until – Well, I’ll get to that.
After fifty years of no progress, physicists just lost interest. The operational technique seemed a complete blind alley; a dead end. I can’t honestly say I blame them as I look back on it. Some of them even tried to show that the funnels didn’t actually expose the past, but there had been too many sightings of living animals through the funnels – animals now extinct.
Anyway, when time travel was almost forgotten, Dad stepped in. He talked the government int9 giving him a grant to set up a Chrono-funnel of his own, and tackled the matter all over again.
I helped him in those days. I was fresh out of college, with my own doctorate in physics.
However, our combined efforts ran into bad trouble after a year or so. Dad had difficulty in getting his grant renewed. Industry wasn’t interested and the university decided he was besmirching their reputation by being so single-minded in investigating a dead field. The dean of the graduate school, who understood only the financial end of scholarship, began by hinting that he switch to more lucrative fields and ended by forcing him out.
Of course, the dean-still alive and still counting grant-dollars when Dad died – probably felt quite foolish, I imagine, when Dad left the school a million dollars free and clear in his will, with a codicil canceling the bequest on the ground that the dean lacked vision. But that was merely posthumous revenge. For years before that—
I don’t wish to dictate, but please don’t have any more of the breadsticks. The clear soup, eaten slowly to prevent a too-sharp appetite, will do.
Anyway, we managed somehow. Dad kept the equipment we had bought with the grant money, moved it out of the university and set it up here.
Those first years on our own were brutal, and I kept urging him to give up. He never would. He was indomitable, always managing to finda thousand dollars somewhere when we needed it.
Life went on, but he allowed nothing to interfere with his research. Mother died; Dad mourned and returned to his task. I married, hada son, then a daughter, couldn’t always be at his side. He carri d o without me. He broke his leg and worked with the cast impedmg him for months.
So I give him all the credit. I helped, of course. I did consulting work on the side and carried on negotiation with Washington. But he was the life and soul of the project.
Despite all that, we weren’t getting anywhere. All the money we managed to scrounge might just as well have been poured into one of the Chrono-funnels – not that it would have passed through.
After all, we never once managed to get a grapple through a funnel. We came near on only one occasion. We had the grapple about two inches out the other end when focus changed. It snapped off clean and somewhere in the Mesozoic there is a man-made piece of steel rod rusting on a riverbank.
Then one day, the crucial day, the focus held for ten long minutes – something for which the odds were less than one in a trillion. Lord, the frenzies of excitement we experienced as we set up the cameras. We could see living creatures just the other side of the funnel, moving energetically.
Then, to top it off, the Chrono-funnel grew permeable, until you might have sworn there was nothing but air between the past and ourselves. The low permeability must have been connected with the long holding of focus, but we’ve never been able to prove that it did.
Of course, we had no grapple handy, wouldn’t you know. But the low permeability was clear enough because something just fell through, m?ving from the Then into the Now. Thunderstruck, actmg simply on bhnd instinct, I reached forward and caught it.
At that moment we lost focus, but it no longer left us embittered and despairing. We were both staring in wild surmise at what I held. It wasa mass of caked and dried mud, shaved off clean where it had struck the borders of the Chrono-funnel, and on the mud cake were fourteen eggs about the size of duck eggs.
I said, ‘Dinosaur eggs? Do you suppose they really are?’
Dad said, ‘Maybe. We can’t tell for sure.’
‘Unless we hatch them,’ I said in sudden, almost uncontrollable excitement. I put them down as though they were platinum. They felt warm with the heat of the primeval sun. I said, ‘Dad, if we hatch them, we’ll have creatures that have been extinct for over a hundred million years. It will be the first case of something actually brought out of the past. If we announce this—’
