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same time."
"That's elementary."
A curt nod. "It is so elementary that our engineers overlooked it, and nine men died when the
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vehicle returned to its point of origin, its precise second of launch, and attempted to occupy the same
space." His voice dropped. "Chaney, the most dreadful sight I have ever seen was the crash of an airliner
on a Dakota hillside. I was with a hunting party less than a mile away and watched it fall. I was among the
first to reach the wreckage. There was no possibility of anyone surviving--none." Hesitation. "The
explosion in our laboratory was the second worst sight. I was not there--I was in another building--but
when I reached the laboratory I found a terrible repetition of that hillside catastrophe. No man, no single
piece of equipment was left intact. The room was shattered. We lost the engineer traveling with the
vehicle and eight others on duty in the laboratory. The vehicle returned to the exact moment, the exact
millisecond of its departure and destroyed itself. It was an incredible disaster, an incredible oversight--
but it happened. Once."
After a space, Seabrooke picked up the thread of his recital. "We learned a bitter lesson. We
rebuilt the laboratory with thicker, reinforced walls and we rebuilt the vehicle; we programmed a new line
of research accenting the safety factor. That factor settled itself at just sixty-one seconds, and we were
satisfied."
Chaney said: "They've been counted for me, again and again. I'll lose a minute on every trip."
"A passenger embarking for any distant point, you, will leave at twelve o'clock, let us say, and
return not sooner than sixty-one seconds after twelve. The amount of elapsed time in the field will not
affect the return; if you stayed there ten years you would return sixty-one seconds _after_ you launched.
If we could not be absolutely certain of that we would close shop and admit defeat."
"Thank you," Chaney said soberly. "I like my skin. How are you protecting those men now?"
"By reinforced walls and remote observation. The engineers work in an adjoining room but five
feet of steel and concrete will separate you. They operate and observe the TDV by closed circuit
television; indeed, they observe not only the operations room itself but the corridor to it and the
storeroom and fallout shelter: everything on that level of basement."
Curiously: "How do you really know the vehicle is moving? Is it displacing anything?"
"It does not move, does not travel in the sense of passing through space. The vehicle will always
remain in its original location, unless we choose to move it elsewhere. But it does operate, and in
operation it displaces temporal strata just as surely as those people in the pool are displacing water by
plunging into it."
"How did you prove that?"
"A camera was mounted in the fore of the vehicle, looking through a port into the operations room.
A clock and a day-calendar hang on a wall in direct line of sight of that camera. The camera has not only
photographed past hours and dates but has taken pictures of the wall _before_ the clock was placed
there. We know the TDV has probed at least twelve months into the past."
"Any effect on the monkeys?"
"None. They are quite healthy."
"What have you done to prevent another accident--a different kind of an accident?"
Sharply: "Explain that."
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Chaney said carefully: "What will happen if that machine probes back into the past before the
basement was dug? What will happen if it burrows into a bed of clay?"
"That simply will not be _allowed_ to happen," was the quick reply. "The lower limit of
displacement is December 30, 1941. A probe beyond that date is prohibited." The Director emptied his
glass and put it aside. "Chaney, the site has been carefully researched to determine a lower limit; every
phase of this operation has been researched so that nothing is left to chance. The first building on the site
was a crude structure resembling a cabin. It burned to the ground in February, 1867."
"You went back that far?"
"We were prepared to go farther if necessary; we had access to records dating back to the Black
Hawk war in 1831. A farmhouse _with_ a basement was built on the site during the summer of 1901,
and remained in place until demolition in 1941 when the government acquired this land for an ordnance
depot. It has since been government owned and occupied, and the site remained vacant until the
laboratory was built. The engineers were very careful to locate that basement. Today the TDV floats in a
sealed tank of polywater three feet above the original basement floor, in a space that could have been
occupied by nothing else. We even pinpointed the former location of the furnace and the coal room."
"And so the deadline is 1941? Why not 1901?"
"The lower limit is December 30, 1941, well after the date of demolition. The safety factor above
all."
"I'd like to see that tank of polywater."
"You will. It is necessary that you become quite familiar with every aspect of the operation. Have
you been visiting the doctor for your physicals?"
"Yes." [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]