“After each collision, the chronar will return roughly half the number of years covered before, automatically gathering information each time. The geological and historical periods we expect it to touch are listed from I to XXV in your sheets; there will be more than twenty-five, naturally, before both balls come to rest, but scientists feel that all periods after that number will be touched for such a short while as to be unproductive of photographs and other material. Remember, at the end, the balls will be doing little more than throbbing in place before coming to rest, so that even though they still ricochet centuries on either side of the present, it will be almost unnoticeable. A question, I see.”

  The thin woman in gray tweeds beside Culpepper got to her feet. “I—I know this is irrelevant,” she began, “but I haven’t been able to introduce my question into the discussion at any pertinent moment. Mr. Secretary—”

  “Acting secretary,” the chubby little man in the black suit told her genially. “I’m only the acting secretary. Go on.”

  “Well, I want to say—Mr. Secretary, is there any way at all that our post-experimental examination time may be reduced? Two years is a very long time to spend inside Pike’s Peak simply out of fear that one of us may have seen enough and be unpatriotic enough to be dangerous to the nation. Once our stories have passed the censors, it seems to me that we could be allowed to return to our homes after a safety period of, say, three months. I have two small children and there are others here—”

  “Speak for yourself, Mrs. Bryant!” the man from Security roared. “It is Mrs. Bryant, isn’t it? Mrs. Bryant of the Women’s Magazine Syndicate? Mrs. Alexis Bryant.” He seemed to be making minute pencil notes across his brain.

  MRS. BRYANT sat down beside Culpepper again, clutching her copy of the amended Security Code, the special pamphlet on the Brooklyn Project and the thin mimeographed sheet of paper very close to her breast. Culpepper moved hard against the opposite arm of his chair. Why did everything have to happen to him? Then, to make matters worse, the crazy woman looked tearfully at him as if expecting sympathy. Culpepper stared across the booth and crossed his legs.

  “You must remain within the jurisdiction of the Brooklyn Project because that is the only way that Security can be certain that no important information leakage will occur before the apparatus has changed beyond your present recognition of it. You didn’t have to come, Mrs. Bryant—you volunteered. You all volunteered. After your editors had designated you as their choices for covering this experiment, you all had the peculiarly democratic privilege of refusing. None of you did. You recognized that to refuse this unusual honor would have shown you incapable of thinking in terms of National Security, would have, in fact, implied a criticism of the Security Code itself from the standpoint of the usual two-year examination time. And now this! For someone who had hitherto been thought as able and trustworthy as yourself, Mrs. Bryant, to emerge at this late hour with such a request makes me, why it,” the little man’s voice dropped to a whisper, “—it almost makes me doubt the effectiveness of our Security screening methods.”

  Culpepper nodded angry affirmation at Mrs. Bryant who was biting her lips and trying to show a tremendous interest in the activities on the laboratory floor.

  “The question was irrelevant. Highly irrelevant. It took up time which I had intended to devote to a more detailed discussion of the popular aspects of chronar and its possible uses in industry. But Mrs. Bryant must have her little feminine outburst. It makes no difference to Mrs. Bryant that our nation is daily surrounded by more and more hostility, more and more danger. These things matter not in the slightest to Mrs. Bryant. All she is concerned with are the two years of her life that her country asks her to surrender so that the future of her own children may be more secure.”

  The acting secretary smoothed his black jumper and became calmer. Tension in the booth decreased.

  “Activation will occur at any moment now, so I will briefly touch upon those most interesting periods which the chronar will record for us and from which we expect the most useful data. I and II, of course, since they are the periods at which the earth was forming into its present shape. Then III, the Pre-Cambrian Period of the Proterozoic, one billion years ago, the first era in which we find distinct records of life—crustaceans and algae for the most part. VI, a hundred twenty-five million years in the past, covers the Middle Jurassic of the Mesozoic. This excursion into the so-called ‘Age of Reptiles’ may provide us with photographs of dinosaurs and solve the old riddle of their coloring, as well as photographs, if we are fortunate, of the first appearance of mammals and birds. Finally, VIII and IX, the Oligocene and Miocene Epochs of the Tertiary Period, mark the emergence of man’s earliest ancestors. Unfortunately, the chronar will be oscillating back and forth so rapidly by that time that the chance of any decent recording—”

  A GONG SOUNDED. The hand of the clock touched the red mark. Five of the technicians below pulled switches and, almost before the journalists could lean forward, the two spheres were no longer visible through the heavy plastic screen. Their places were empty.

  “The chronar has begun its journey to four billion years in the past! Ladies and gentlemen, an historic moment—a profoundly historic moment! It will not return for a little while; I shall use the time in pointing up and exposing the fallacies of the—ah, federation of chronic sighers!”

  Nervous laughter rippled at the acting secretary to the executive assistant on press relations. The twelve journalists settled down to hearing the ridiculous ideas tom apart.

  “As you know, one of the fears entertained about travel to the past was that the most innocent-seeming acts would cause cataclysmic changes in the present. You are probably familiar with the fantasy in its most currently popular form—if Hitler had been killed in 1930, he would not have forced scientists in Germany and later occupied countries to emigrate, this nation might not have had the atomic bomb, thus no third atomic war, and Venezuela would still be part of the South American continent.

  “The traitorous Shayson and his illegal federation extended this hypothesis to include much more detailed and minor acts such as shifting a molecule of hydrogen that in our past really was never shifted.

  “At the time of the first experiment at the Coney Island Subproject, when the chronar was sent back for one-ninth of a second, a dozen different laboratories checked through every device imaginable, searched carefully for any conceivable change. There were none! Government officials concluded that the time stream was a rigid affair, past, present, and future, and nothing in it could be altered. But Shayson and his cohorts were not satisfied: they—”

  * * * * *

  I. Four billion years ago. The chronar floated in a cloudlet of silicon dioxide above the boiling earth and languidly collected its data with automatically operating instruments. The vapor it had displaced condensed and fell in great, shining drops.

  * * * * *

  “—insisted that we should do no further experimenting until we had checked the mathematical aspects of the problem yet again. They went so far as to state that it was possible that if changes occurred we would not notice them, that no instruments imaginable could detect them. They claimed we would accept these changes as things that had always existed. Well! This at a time when our country—and theirs, ladies and gentlemen of the press, theirs, too—was in greater danger than ever. Can you—”

  Words failed him. He walked up and down the booth, shaking his head. All the reporters on the long, wooden bench shook their heads with him in sympathy.

  There was another gong. The two dull spheres appeared briefly, clanged against each other and ricocheted off into opposite chronological directions.

  “There you are.” The government official waved his arms at the transparent laboratory floor above them. “The first oscillation has been completed; has anything changed? Isn’t everything the same? But the dissidents would maintain that alterations have occurred and we haven’t noticed them. With such faith-based, unscientific Brooklyn Project viewpoints, there can be no argument. People like these—”

  * * * * *

  II. Two billion years ago. The great ball clicked its photographs of the fiery, erupting ground below. Some red-hot crusts rattled off its sides. Five or six thousand complex molecules lost their basic structure as they impinged against it. A hundred didn’t.

  * * * * *

  “—will labor thirty hours a day out of thirty-three to convince you that black isn’t white, that we have seven moons instead of two. They are especially dangerous—”

  A long, muted note as the apparatus collided with itself. The warm orange of the corner lights brightened as it started out again.

  “—because of their learning, because they are sought for guidance in better ways of vegetation.” The government official was slithering up and down rapidly now, gesturing with all of his pseudopods. “We are faced with a very difficult problem, at present—”

  * * * * *

  III. One billion years ago. The primitive triple tribolite the machine had destroyed when it materialized began drifting down wetly.

  * * * * *

  “—a very difficult problem. The question before us: should we shllk or shouldn’t we shllk?” He was hardly speaking English now; in fact, for some time, he hadn’t been speaking at all. He had been stating his thoughts by slapping one pseudopod against the other—as he always had . . .

  * * * * *

  IV. A half-billion years ago. Many different kinds of bacteria died as the water changed temperature slightly.

  * * * * *

  “This, then, is no time for half measures. If we can reproduce well enough—”

  * * * * *

  V. Two hundred fifty million years ago. VI. A hundred twenty-five million years ago.

  * * * * *

  “—to satisfy the Five Who Spiral, we have—”

  * * * * *

  VII. Sixty-two million years. VIII. Thirty-one million. IX. Fifteen million. X. Seven and a half million.

  * * * * *

  “—spared all attainable virtue. Then—”

  * * * * *

  XI. XII. XIII. XIV. XV. XVI. XVII. XVIII. XIX. Bong—bong—bong bongbongbongongongngngngggg . . .

  * * * * *

  “—we are indeed ready for refraction. And that, I tell you, is good enough for those who billow and those who snap. But those who billow will be proven wrong as always, for in the snapping is the rolling and in the rolling is only truth. There need be no change merely because of a sodden cilium. The apparatus has rested at last in the fractional conveyance; shall we view it subtly?”

  They all agreed, and their bloated purpled bodies dissolved into liquid and flowed up and around to the apparatus. When they reached its four square blocks, now no longer shrilling mechanically, they rose, solidified, and regained their slime-washed forms.

  “See,” cried the thing that had been the acting secretary to the executive assistant on press relations. “See, no matter how subtly! Those who billow were wrong: we haven’t changed.” He extended fifteen purple blobs triumphantly. “Nothing has changed!”

  The Human Angle

  What greater folly than to seek out the human angle in a thing that belongs not to humanity?

  WHAT a road! What filthy, dismal, blinding rain! And, by the ghost of old Horace Greeley, what an idiotic, impossible assignment!

  John Shellinger cursed the steamy windshield from which a monotonous wiper flipped raindrops. He stared through the dripping, half-clear triangle of glass and tried to guess which was broken country road and which was the overgrown brown vegetation of autumn. He might have passed the slowly moving line of murderous men stretching to right and left across country and road; he might have angled off into a side-road and be heading off into completely forsaken land. But he didn’t think he had.

  What an assignment!

  “Get the human angle on this vampire hunt,” Randall had ordered. “All the other news services will be giving it the hillbilly twist, medieval superstition messing up the atomic world. What dumb jerks these dumb jerks are! You stay off that line. Find yourself a weepy individual slant on bloodsucking and sob me about three thousand words. And keep your expense account down—you just can’t work a big swindle sheet out of that kind of agricultural slum.”

  So I saddles my convertible, Shellinger thought morosely, and I tools off to the pappy-mammy country where nobody speaks to strangers nohow “specially now, ’cause the vampire done got to three young ’uns already.” And nobody will tell me the names of those three kids or whether any of them are still alive; and Randall’s wires keep asking when I’ll start sending usable copy; and I still can’t find one loquacious Louise in the whole country. Wouldn’t even have known of this cross-country hunt if I hadn’t begun to wonder where all the men in town had disappeared to on such an unappetizing, rainy evening.

  The road was bad in second, but it was impossible in almost any other gear. The ruts weren’t doing the springs any good, either. Shellinger rubbed moisture off the glass with his handkerchief and wished he had another pair of headlights. He could hardly see.

  That dark patch ahead, for instance. Might be one of the vampire posse. Might be some beast driven out of cover by the brush-beating. Might even be a little girl.

  He ground into his brake. It was a girl. A little girl with dark hair and blue jeans. He twirled the crank and stuck his head out into the falling rain.

  “Hey, kid. Want a lift?”

  The child stooped slightly against the somber background of night and decaying, damp countryside. Her eyes scanned the car, came back to his face and considered it. The kid had probably not known that this chromium-plated kind of post-war auto existed. She’d certainly never dreamed of riding in one. It would give her a chance to crow over the other kids in the ’tater patch.

  Evidently deciding that he wasn’t the kind of stranger her mother had warned her about and that it would be less uncomfortable in the car than walking in the rain and mud, she nodded. Very slowly, she came around the front and climbed in at his right.

  “Thanks, mister,” she said.

  Shellinger started again and took a quick, sidewise glance at the girl. Her blue jeans were raggedy and wet. She must be terribly cold and uncomfortable, but she wasn’t going to let him know. She would bear up under it with the stoicism of the hill people.

  But she was frightened. She sat hunched up, her hands folded neatly in her lap, at the far side of the seat right up against the door. What was the kid afraid of? Of course, the vampire!

  “How far up do you go?” he asked her gently.

  “ ’Bout a mile and a half. But that way.” She pointed over her shoulder with a pudgy thumb. She was plump, much more flesh on her than most of these scrawny, share-cropped kids. She’d be beautiful, too, some day, if some illiterate lummox didn’t cart her off to matrimony and hard work in, a drafty cabin.

  Regretfully, he maneuvered around on the road, got the car turned and started back. He’d miss the hunters, but you couldn’t drag an impressionable child into that sort of grim nonsense. He might as well take her home first. Besides, he wouldn’t get anything out of those uncommunicative farmers with their sharpened stakes and silver bullets in their squirrel rifles.

  “What kind of crops do your folks raise—tobacco or cotton?”

  “They don’t raise nothing yet. We just came here.”

  “Oh.” That was right: she didn’t have a mountain accent. Come to think of it, she was a little more dignified that most of the children he’d met in this neighborhood. “Isn’t it a little late to go for a stroll? Aren’t your folks afraid to let you out this late with a vampire around?”

  She shivered, “I—I’m careful,” she said at last.

  Hey! Shellinger thought. Here was the human angle. Here was what Randall was bleating about. A frightened little girl with enough curiosity to swallow her big lump of fear and go out exploring on this night of all others. He didn’t know how it fitted, just yet—but his journalistic nose was twitching. There was copy here; the basic, colorful human angle was sitting fearfully on his red leather seat.

  “Do you know what a vampire is?”

  She looked at him, startled, dropped her eyes and studied her folded hands for words. “It’s—it’s like someone who needs people instead of meals.” A hesitant pause. “Isn’t it?”

  “Ye-es.” That was good. Trust a child to give you a fresh viewpoint, unspoiled by textbook superstition. He’d use that—“People instead of meals.”

  “A vampire is supposed to be a person who will be immortal—not die, that is—so long as he or she gets blood and life from living people. The only way you can kill a vampire—” “You turn right here, mister.”

  HE POINTED the car into the little branchlet of side road. It was annoyingly narrow; surprised wet boughs tapped the windshield, ran their leaves lazily across the car’s fabric top. Once in a while, a tree top sneezed collected rain water down.

  Shellinger pressed his face close to the windshield and tried to decipher the picture of brown mud amid weeds that his headlights gave him. “What a road! Your folks are really starting from scratch. Well, the only way to kill a vampire is with a silver bullet. Or you can drive a stake through the heart and bury it in a crossroads at midnight. That’s what those men are going to do tonight if they catch it.” He turned his head as he heard her gasp. “What’s the matter—don’t you like the idea?”

  “I think it’s horrid,” she told him emphatically.

  “Why? How do you feel—live and let live?”

  She thought it over, nodded, smiled. “Yes. Live and let live. Live and let live. After all—” She was having difficulty finding the right words again. “After all, some people can’t help what they are. I mean,” very slowly, very thoughtfully, “like if a person’s a vampire, what can they do about it?”