“Your problem has a simple answer,” Ravenholt said coldly. “Do not send a Christian.”

  “Now we are really getting somewhere,” said Spencer. “Let’s send a Moslem to get the Christian facts and a Christian to track down the life of Buddha—and a Buddhist to investigate black magic in the Belgian Congo.”

  “It could work,” said Ravenholt.

  “It might work, but you wouldn’t get objectivity. You’d get bias and, worse yet, perfectly honest misunderstanding.”

  Ravenholt drummed impatient fingers on his well-creased knee. “I can see your point,” he agreed, somewhat irritably, “but there is something you have overlooked. The findings need not be released in their entirety to the public.”

  “But if it’s in the public interest? That’s what our license says.”

  “Would it help,” asked Ravenholt, “if I should offer certain funds which could be used to help defray the costs?” “In such a case,” said Spencer, blandly, “the requirement would not be met. It’s either in the public interest, without any charge at all, or it’s a commercial contract paid for at regular rates.”

  “The obvious fact,” Ravenholt said flatly, “is that you do not want to do this job. You may as well admit it.”

  “Most cheerfully,” said Spencer. “I willingly wouldn’t touch it with a ten-foot pole. What worries me right now is why you’re here.” ’’

  Ravenholt said, “I thought that with the project about to be rejected, I possibly could serve as a sort of mediator.”

  “You mean you thought we could be bribed.”

  “Not at all,” said Ravenholt wrathfully. “I was only recognizing that the project was perhaps a cut beyond what your license calls for.”

  “It’s all of that,” said Spencer.

  “I cannot fully understand your objection to it,” Ravenholt persisted.

  “Dr. Ravenholt,” said Spencer gently, “how would you like to be responsible for the destruction of a faith?”

  “But,” stammered Ravenholt, “there is no such possibility …”

  “Are you certain?” Spencer asked him. “How certain are you, Dr. Ravenholt? Even the black magic of the Congo?” “Well, I—well, since you put it that way …”

  “You see what I mean?” asked Spencer.

  “But even so,” argued Ravenholt, “there could be certain facts suppressed ..

  “Come now! How long do you think you could keep it bottled up? Anyway, when Past, Inc., does a job,” Spencer told him firmly, “it goes gunning for the truth. And when we learn it, we report it. That is the one excuse we have for our continuing existence. We have a certain project here—a personal, full-rate contract—in which we have traced a family tree for almost two thousand years. We have been forced to tell our client some unpleasant things. But we told them.” “That’s part of what I’m trying to convey to you,” shouted Ravenholt, shaken finally out of his ruthless calm. “You are willing to embark upon the tracing of a family tree, but you refuse this!”

  “And you are confusing two utterly different operations! This investigation of religious origins is a public interest matter. Family Tree is a private account for which we’re being paid.”

  Ravenholt rose angrily. “We’ll discuss this some other time, when we both can keep our temper.”

  Spencer said wearily, “It won’t do any good. My mind is made up.”

  “Mr. Spencer,” Ravenholt said, nastily, “I’m not without recourse.”

  “Perhaps you’re not. You can go above my head. If that is what you’re thinking, I’ll tell you something else: You’ll carry out this project over my dead body. I will not, Dr. Ravenholt, betray the faith of any people in the world.”

  “We’ll see,” said Ravenholt, still nasty.

  “Now,” said Spencer, “you’re thinking that you can have me fired. Probably you could. Undoubtedly you know the very strings to pull. But it’s no solution.”

  “I would think,” said Ravenholt, “it would be the perfect one.”

  “I’d still fight you as a private citizen. I’d take it to the floor of the United Nations if I had to.”

  They both were on their feet now, facing one another across the width of desk.

  “I’m sorry,” Spencer said, “that it turned out this way. But I meant everything I said.”

  “So did I,” said Ravenholt, stalking out the door.

  III

  Spencer sat down slowly in his chair.

  A swell way to start a day, he told himself.

  But the guy had burned him up.

  Miss Crane came in the door with a sheaf of papers for his desk.

  “Mr. Spencer, shall I send in Mr. Hudson? He’s been waiting a long time.”

  “Is Hudson the applicant?”

  “No, that is Mr. Cabell.”

  “Cabell is the man I want to see. Bring me his file.” She sniffed contemptuously and left.

  Damn her, Spencer told himself, I’ll see who I want to see when I want to see them!

  He was astounded at the violence of his thought. What was wrong with him? Nothing was going right. Couldn’t he get along with anyone any more?

  Too tensed up, he thought. Too many tilings to do, too much to worry over.

  Maybe what he ought to do was walk out into Operations and step into a carrier for a long vacation. Back to the Old Stone Age, which would require no Indoctrination. There wouldn’t be too many people, perhaps none at all. But there’d be mosquitoes. And cave bear. And saber-tooths and perhaps a lot of other things equally obnoxious. And he’d have to get some camping stuff together and—oh, the hell with it!

  But it was not a bad idea.

  He’d thought about it often. Some day he would do it. Meanwhile, he picked up the sheaf of papers Miss Crane had dropped upon his desk.

  They were the daily batch of future assignments dreamed up by the Dirty Tricks department. There was always trouble in them. He felt himself go tense as he picked them up.

  The first one was a routine enough assignment—an investigation of some tributes paid the Goths by Rome. There was, it seemed, a legend that the treasure had been buried somewhere in the Alps. It might never have been recovered. That was S.O.P., checking up on buried treasure.

  But the second paper—

  “Miss Crane!” he yelled.

  She was coming through the door, with a file clutched in her hand. Her face changed not a whit at his yelp of anguish; she was used to it.

  “What is the matter, Mr. Spencer?” she inquired, at least three degrees too calmly.

  Spencer banged his fist down on the pile of sheets. “They can’t do this to me! I won’t stand for it. Get Rogers on the phone!”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “No, wait a minute there,” Spencer interrupted grimly.

  “This I can do better personal. I’ll go up and see him. In fact, I’ll take him apart barehanded.”

  “But there are those people waiting . .

  “Let them wait for a while. It will make them humble.”

  He snatched up the assignment sheet and went striding out the door. He shunned the elevator. He climbed two flights of stairs. He went in a door marked Evaluation.

  Rogers was sitting tilted back, with his feet up on the desk top, staring at the ceiling.

  He glanced at Spencer with a bland concern. He took his feet down off the desk and sat forward in his chair.

  “Well? What’s the matter this time?”

  “This!” said Spencer, throwing the sheet down in front of him.

  Rogers poked it with a delicate finger. “Nothing difficult there. Just a little ingenuity …”

  “Nothing difficult!” howled Spencer. “Movies of Nero’s fire in Rome!”

  Rogers sighed. “This movie outfit will pay us plenty for it.” “And there’s nothing to it. One of my men can just walk out into the burning streets of Rome and set up a movie camera in an age where the principle of the camera hasn’t yet been thought of.”

  “Well, I said it would call for some ingenuity,” said Rogers. “Look, there’ll be a lot of people running, carrying stuff, trying to save themselves and anything they can. They won’t pay any attention to your man. He can cover the camera with something so that it will look …”

  “It’ll be an ugly crowd,” insisted Spencer. “It won’t like the city being burned. There’ll be rumors that the Christians are the ones who set the fire. That crowd will be looking for suspicious characters.”

  “There’s always an element of danger,” Rogers pointed out.

  “Not as dangerous as this!” said Spencer, testily. “Not deliberately asking for it. And there is something else.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like introducing an advanced technology to the past. If that crowd beat up my man and busted the camera …” Rogers shrugged. “What difference if they did? They could make nothing of it.”

  “Maybe. But what Fm really worried about,” Spencer persisted, “is what the watchdog group would say when they audit our records. It would have to be worth an awful lot of money before I’d take a chance.”

  “Believe me, it is worth a lot of money. And it would open up a new field for us. That’s why I liked it.”

  “You guys in Dirty Tricks,” said Spencer, bitterly, “just don’t give a damn. You’ll hand us anything ..

  “Not everything,” said Rogers. “Sales pushed us pretty hard on this one ..

  “Sales!” spat Spencer, contempt in his voice.

  “There was a woman in here the other day,” said Rogers. “She wanted to send her two children to their great-great-great-grandfather’s farm back in the nineteenth century. For a vacation, mind you. A summer in the country in another century. Said it would be educational and quite relaxing for them. Said the old folks would understand and be glad to have them once we had explained.”

  Rogers sighed. “I had quite a session with her. She pooh-poohed our regulations. She said . ..”

  “You passed up a good one there,” Spencer said sarcastically. “That would have opened up another field—vacations in the past. I can see it now. Family reunions with old friends and neighbors foregathering across the centuries.”

  “You think you are the only one who has his troubles.”

  “I am bleeding for you,” Spencer told him.

  “There’s a TV outfit,” Rogers said, “that wants interviews with Napoleon and Caesar and Alexander and all the rest of those ancient bigshots. There are hunters who want to go back into the primordial wilderness to get a spot of shooting. There are universities that want to send teams of investigators back …”

  “You know that all of that is out,” said Spencer. “The only ones we can send back are travelers we have trained.” “There’ve been times.”

  “Oh, sure, a few. But only when we got a special dispensation. And we sent along so many travelers to guard them that it was an expedition instead of a simple little study group.”

  Spencer got up from his chair. “Well, what about this latest brainstorm?”

  Rogers picked up the offending assignment sheet and tossed it into an overflowing basket.

  “I’ll go down to Sales, with tears streaming down my cheeks..

  “Thanks,” said Spencer and went out.

  IV

  Back in his office, he sat down at the desk and picked up the file on Cabell.

  The squawk box gibbered at him. He thumbed up the lever.

  “What is it?”

  “Operations, Hal. Williams just got back. Everything’s okay; he snagged the Picasso without any trouble. Only took six weeks.”

  “Six weeks!” Spencer yelled. “He could have painted it himself in that time!”

  “There were complications.”

  “Is there any time there aren’t?”

  “It’s a good one, Hal. Not damaged. Worth a hunk of dough.”

  “O.K.” said Spencer, “take it down to Customs and let them run it through. The good old government must be paid its duty. And what about the others?”

  “Nickerson will be leaving in just a little while.”

  “And E.J.?”

  “He’s fussy about the time fix. He is telling Doug ..

  “Look,” yelled Spencer wrathfully, “you tell him for me that the fix is Doug’s job. Doug knows more about it than EJ. ever will. When Doug says it’s time to hop, E.J. hops, funny cap and all.”

  He snapped down the lever and turned back to the Cabell file, sitting quietly for a moment to let his blood pressure simmer down.

  He got worked up too easily, he told himself. He blew his top too much. But there never was a job with so many aggravations!

  He opened the folder and ran through the Cabell file.

  Stewart Belmont Cabell, 27, unmarried, excellent references, a doctorate in sociology from an ivy college. A uniformly high score in all the tests, including attitude, and an astonishing I.Q. Unqualifiedly recommended for employment as a traveler.

  Spencer closed the file and pushed it to one side.

  “Send Mr. Cabell in,” he told Miss Crane.

  Cabell was a lanky man, awkward in his movements; he seemed younger than he was. There was a certain shyness in his manner when Spencer shook his hand and pointed out a chair.

  Cabell sat and tried, without success, to make himself at ease.

  “So you want to come in with us,” said Spencer. “I suppose you know what you are doing.”

  “Yes, sir,” said young Cabell. “I know all about it. Or perhaps I’d better say..

  He stammered and stopped talking.

  “It’s all right,” said Spencer. “I take it you want this very much.”

  Cabell nodded.

  “I know how it is. You almost have the feeling you’ll die if you can’t do it.”

  And he remembered, sitting there, how it had been with him—the terrible, tearing heartache when he’d been rejected as a traveler, and how he had stuck on regardless of that hurt and disappointment. First as operator; then as operations superintendent; finally to this desk, with all its many headaches.

  “Not,” he said, “that I have ever traveled.”

  “I didn’t know that, sir.”

  “I wasn’t good enough. My attitudes were wrong.”

  And he saw the old hope and hunger in the eyes of the man across the desk—and something else besides. Something vaguely disturbing.

  “It’s not all fun,” he said, a shade more harshly than he had meant to make it. “At first there’s the romance and the glitter, but that soon wears off. It becomes a job. Sometimes a bitter one.”

  He paused and looked at Cabell and the queer, disturbing light still was shining in his eyes.

  “You should know,” he said, deliberately harsh this time, “that if you come in with us you’ll probably be dead of advanced old age in five years.”

  Cabell nodded unconcernedly. “I know that, sir. The people down in Personnel explained it all to me.”

  “Good,” said Spencer. “I suspect at times that Personnel makes a rather shabby explanation. They tell you just enough to make it sound convincing, but they do not tell it all. They are far too anxious to keep us well supplied. We’re always short of travelers; we run through them too fast.”

  He paused and looked at the man again. There was no change in him.

  “We have certain regulations,” Spencer told him. “They aren’t made so much by Past, Inc., as by the job itself. You cannot have any settled sort of life. You live out your life in pieces, like a patchwork quilt, hopping from neighborhood to neighborhood, and those neighborhoods all many years apart. There is no actual rule against it, but none of our travelers has ever married. It would be impossible. In five years the man would die of old age, and his wife would still be young.” “I think I understand, sir.”

  “Actually,” Spencer said, “it’s a very simple matter of simple economics. We cannot afford to have either our machines or men tied up for any length of time. So while a man may be gone a week, a month, or years, the machine comes back, with him inside of it, sixty seconds after he has left. That sixty seconds is an arbitrary period; it could be a single second, it could be an hour or day or anything we wanted. One minute has seemed a practical period.”

  “And,” asked Cabell, “if it does not come back within that minute?”

  “Then it never will.”

  “It sometimes happens?”

  “Of course it happens. Time traveling is no picnic. Every time a man goes back he is betting his life that he can get along in an environment which is as totally alien, in some instances, as another planet. We help him every way we can, of course. We make it our business to see that he is well briefed and Indoctrinated and as well equipped as it is possible to make him. He is taught the languages he is likely to require. He is clothed properly. But there are instances when we simply do not know the little vital details which mean survival. Sometimes we learn them later when our man comes back and tells us. Usually he is quite profane about it. And some we don’t find out about at all. The man does not come back.”

  “One would think,” said Cabell, “that you would like to scare me out.”

  “No! I tell you this because I want no misunderstanding. It costs a lot to train a traveler. We must get our costs back. We do not want a man who will stay with us just a little while. We don’t want a year or two from you; we want your entire life. We’ll take you and we’ll wring you dry of ever) minute…”

  “I can assure you, sir..1 “We send you where we want your,” Spencer said, “and although we have no control of you once you’ve left, we expect that you’ll not fool around. Not that you won’t came back inside of sixty seconds—naturally you will, if you come back at all. But we want you to come back as young as possible. Past, Inc., is a pure commercial venture. We’ll squeeze all the trips we possibly can out of you.”