He went on: ‘All right. Assuming he told us all the truth he knows, why did Tywood jump from less than a milligram to a pound?’

His eyes came down and they were hard: ‘Now you’re concentrating on the time-travel angle. To you, I gather, that is the crucial point, with the energy involved as incidental-purely incidental.’

‘Yes, sir,’ I said grimly. ‘I think exactly that.’

‘Have you considered that you might be wrong? That you might have matters inverted?’

‘I don’t quite get that.’

‘Well, look. You say you’ve read up on Tywood. All right. He was one of that bunch of scientists after World War II that fought the atom bomb; wanted a world state- You know about that, don’t you?’

I nodded.

‘He had a guilt complex,’ the Boss said with energy. ‘He’d helped work out the bomb, and he couldn’t sleep nights thinking of what he’d done. He lived with that fear for years. And even though the bomb wasn’t used in World War III, can you imagine what every day of uncertainty must have meant to him? Can you imagine the shriveling horror in his soul as he waited for others to make the decision at every crucial moment till the final Compromise of Sixty-Five?

‘We have a complete psychiatric analysis of Tywood and several others just like him, taken during the last war. Did you know that?’

‘No, sir.’

‘It’s true. We let up after Sixty-Five, of course, because with the establishment of world control of atomic power, the scrapping of the atomic bomb stockpile in all countries, and the establishment of re-· search liaison among the various spheres of influence on the planet, most of the ethical conflict in the scientific mind was removed.

‘But the findings at the time were serious. In 1964, Tywood had a morbid subconscious hatred for the very concept of atomic power. He began to make mistakes, serious ones. Eventually, we were forced to take him off research of any kind. And several others as well, even though things were pretty bad at the time. We had just lost India, if you remember.’

Considering that I was in India at the time, I remembered. But I still wasn’t seeing his point.

‘Now, what,’ he continued, ‘if dregs of that attitude remained buried m Tywood to the very end? Don’t you see that this time-travel is a double-edged sword? Why throw a pound of anything into the past, anyway? For the sake of proving a point? He had proved his case just as much when he sent back a fraction of a milligram. That was good enough for the Nobel Prize, I suppose.

‘But there was one thing he could do with a pound of matter that he couldn’t do with a milligram, and that was to drain a power plant. So that was what he must have been after. He had discovered a way of consuming inconceivable quantities of energy. By sending back eighty pounds of dirt, he could remove all the existing plutonium in the world. End atomic power for an indefinite period.’

I was completely un mpressed, but J tried not to make that too plain. I just said: ‘Do you think he could possibly have thought he could get away with it more than once?’

‘This is all based on the fact that he wasn’t a normal man. How do I kno wh t he ould imagine he could do? Besides, there may be men behind him – with less science and more brains – who are quite ready to contmue onwards from this point.’

‘Have any of these men been found yet? Any evidence of such men?’

A httle wait, an_d his hand reached for the cigar box. He stared at the cigar and turne it end for end. Just a little wait more. I was patient.

Then he put It down dec1 1vely without lighting it.

‘No,’ he said.

He looked at me, and clear through me, and said: ‘Then, you still don’t go for that?’

I shrugged, ‘Well – It doesn’t sound right.’

‘Do you have a notion of your own?’

‘Yes. But I can’t bring myself to talk about it. If I’m wrong, I’m the wrongest man that ever was; but if I’m right, I’m the rightest.’

‘I’ll listen,’ he said, and he put his hand under the desk.

That was the pay-off. The room was armored, sound-proof, and radiation-proof to anythmg short of a nuclear explosion. And with that little signal showmg on his secretary’s desk, the President of the United States couldn’t have interrupted us.

I leaned back and said: ‘Chief, do you happen to remember how you met your wife? Was it a little thing?’

He must have thought it a non sequitur. What else could he have thought? But he was giving me my head now; having his own reasons, I suppose.

He just smiled and said: ‘I sneezed and she turned around. It was aat street comer.’

‘What made you be on that street comer just then? What made her be? Do you remember just why you sneezed? Where you caught the cold? Or where the speck of dust came from? Imagine how many factors had to intersect in just the right place at just the right time for you to meet your wife.’

‘I suppose we would have met some other time, if not then?’

‘But you can’t know that. How do you know whom you didn’t meet, because once when you might have turned around, you didn’t; because once when you might have been late, you weren’t. Your life forks at every instant, and you go down one of the forks almost at random, and so does everyone else. Start twenty years ago, and the forks diverge further and further with time.

‘You sneezed, and met a girl, and not another. As a consequence, you made certain decisions, and so did the girl, and so did the girl you didn’t meet, and the man who did meet her, and the people you all met thereafter. And your family, her family, their family – and your children.

‘Because you sneezed twenty years ago, five people, or fifty, or five hundred, might be dead now who would have been alive, or might be alive who would have been dead. Move it two hundred years ago: two thousand years ago, and a sneeze – even by someone no history ever heard of – might have meant that no one now alive would have been alive.’

The Boss rubbed the back of his head: ‘Widening ripples. I reada story once—’

‘So did I. It’s not a new idea-but I want you to think about it fora while, because I want to read to you from an article by Professor Elmer Tywood in a magazine twenty years old. It was just before the last war.’

I had copies of the film in my pocket and the white wall madea beautiful screen, which was what it was meant to do. The Boss madea motion to tum about, but I waved him back.

‘No sir,’ I said. ‘I want to read this to you. And I want you to listen to it.’

He leaned back.

‘The article,’ I went on, ‘is entitled: ‘Man’s First Great Failure!’ Remember, this was just before the war, when the bitter disappointment at the final failure of the United Nations was at its height. What I will read are some excerpts from the first part of the article. It goes like this:

‘ . . . That Man, with his technical perfection, has failed to solve the great sociological problems of today is only the second immense tragedy that has come to the race. The first, and perhaps the greater, was that, once, these same great sociological problems were solved; and yet these solutions were not permanent, because the technical perfection we have today did not then exist.

‘It was a case of having bread without butter, or butter without bread. Never both together. . . .

‘Consider the Hellenic world, from which our philosophy, our mathematics, our ethics, our art, our literature – our entire culture, in fact – stem . . . In the days of Pericles, Greece, like our own world in microcosm, was a surprisingly modem potpourri of conflicting ideologies and ways of life. But then Rome came,,adopting the culture, but bestowing, and enforcing, peace. To be sure, the Pax Romana lasted only two hundred years, but no like period has existed since. . . .

‘War was abolished. Nationalism did not exist. The Roman citizen was Empire-wide. Paul of Tarsus and Flavius Josephus were Roman citizens. Spaniards, North Africans, Illyrians assumed the purple. Slavery existed, but it was an indiscriminate slavery, imposed as a punishment, incurred as the price of economic failure, brought on by the fortunes of war. No man was a natural slave – because of the color of his skin or the place of his birth.

‘Religious toleration was complete. If an exception was made early in the case of the Christians, it was because they refused to accept the principle of toleration; because they insisted that only they themselves knew truth – a principle abhorrent to the civilized Roman. . . .

‘With all of Western culture under a single polis, with the cancer of religious and national particularism and exclusivism absent; with a high civilization in existence – why could not Man hold his gains?

‘It was because, technologically, ancient Hellenism remained backward. It was because without a machine civilization, the price of leisure – and hence civilization and culture – for the few, was slavery for the many. Because the civilization could not find the means to bring comfort and ease to all the population.

‘Therefore, the depressed classes turned to the other world, and to religions which spumed the material benefits of this world – so that science was made impossible in any true sense for over a millennium. And further, as the initial impetus of Hellenism waned, the Empire lacked the technological powers to beat back the barbarians. In fact, it was not till after 1500 AD. that war became sufficiently a function of the industrial resources of a nation to enable the settled people to defeat invading tribesmen and nomads with ease. . . .

‘Imagine, then, if somehow the ancient Greeks had learned just a hint of modern chemistry and physics. Imagine if the growth of the Empire had been accompanied by the growth of science, technology and industry. Imagine an Empire in which machinery replaced slaves, in which all men had a decent share of the world’s goods, in which the legion became the armored column against which no barbarians could stand. Imagine an Empire which would therefore spread all over the world, without religious or national prejudices.