Clifford Simak - A Death in the House - And Other Stories

“You are sure?” asked Wolfe. “Sure beyond any possibility of doubt?”

“We have satisfied ourselves.”

Wolfe nodded. It seemed good enough. If Central was satisfied, it usually meant that any battle, any struggle to overcome difficulties, was nine-tenths won.

“He was taken to a hospital,” continued Hughes, “because he’d been in some sort of brawl. He was badly cut up and for a time, according to the records, it seemed most unlikely that he would pull through.”

“He did, however?”

“We can’t be sure. He disappeared again.” Hughes wasn’t smiling now. “I’m afraid that Tuckerman must have given them some bad moments. He came in with no identity, and absolutely no recollection of a previous existence. So they tagged him John Doe, and waited. Even when he improved, and they could talk to him, he could remember nothing. They attributed the memory block to a crack in the head he’d received in the fight. There were no previous records of the man they could consult and it must have seemed incomprehensible to them that anyone his age—he was forty, wasn’t he?”

“Yes,” said Wolfe.

“It must have been hard for them to understand how a man of that time could have lived for forty years without being fingerprinted, or, at the very least, leaving some record of himself somewhere by which his identity could be traced. Then, on top of that, to have him disappear—straight out of a hospital bed without any warning at all.”

“He moved through time again,” said Wolfe. “He didn’t like it there, so he just moved back. Have you looked for him again?”

Hughes shook his head. “What would be the use? We weren’t looking for him this time—we just stumbled on him by accident. He time-jumped four hundred years, remember. How far would he go the second time? Fingerprints are the only really sure means of identification available to us in the past and the time range involving fingerprints is narrow. If he traveled even fifty years from nineteen fifty-eight he’d be lost to us irremediably.”

“But he traveled in time,” said Wolfe. “That’s the important thing. We know now it can be done.”

“You haven’t known before?”

“We had certain evidences,” Wolfe told him. “We had certain working theories. But we have been shooting in the dark. We could not be completely sure.”

“Even after two hundred years?”

“It hasn’t been two hundred years.”

“Well, all right, then. Almost two hundred years. For people who have been so unsure of themselves your reports, I must remark, have seemed extremely hopeful.”

He looked steadily at Wolfe.

Wolfe experienced a sudden surge of anger and fought to hold it in check.

“You’re forgetting,” he said, “that Central assigned us a task that virtually everyone looked upon as almost a lost cause from the first. We went into Hourglass cold. We had nothing to go on beyond a few abstract philosophic concepts that didn’t really mean a thing. We started on this project from scratch. Central should be satisfied if the job is done in a thousand years.”

Hughes’ manner had changed. There was more than a trace of anger in him, too, now—anger and unconcealed impatience.

“Much sooner than a thousand years,” he said. “We must have it in a hundred—fifty would be better. I’m aware that it’s a long-range program, but the time is running short. Our calculators tell us that. Plain common sense comes up with the same warning. The diplomatic situation is getting rather thick.”

He paused for a moment as if he might be considering whether he should say what he had in mind. He leaned slightly forward, a deepening flush mounting up over his cheekbones.

“I can’t stress this too strongly,” he said, slowly. “You are the only people who can avert a war. I don’t think I need to remind you how horrible such a war would be.”

Wolfe closed his eyes and saw it in a flare of agony. It was mostly all bright and blinding light but there were a few tiny darker spots, the molten cores of planets exploding in destruction.

“The Pleiadean System is pressing us hard,” said Hughes. “But they won’t attack unless they can do so from a position of calculated strength. If we can hold our alliances, and gain new strength, there will be peace. After that, in another thousand years, we will have outstripped them and the danger will be past.”

He ran his fingers through his thinning hair. “It’s a matter of ethics and of morality,” he said. “Early in our expansion we made a few mistakes. We know better now. We feel—”

“I know exactly what you feel,” Wolfe told him, bitterly. “You feel that Earth can’t be held accountable for its earlier mistakes. You feel that we’ve outgrown them. You feel we have a perfect right to go back in time to erase and patch them up.”

His lips tightened. “Paradox has it all figured out just how it can be done in complete secrecy. You want to put hindsight to work, and there’s only one really effective way you can do that. So—you throw it in our laps. You say to Hourglass: ‘Now it’s up to you. If you fail the entire federation goes down to utter defeat.’ No—not just defeat. Total annihilation.”

He rose slowly from his chair. “Hughes,” he said, “it’s a burden Hourglass won’t assume. We’ll do everything we can to give you time travel. We’ll strain every nerve and use our every resource. But we can’t accept the broader implication of our failure. We’ll not even accept the full responsibility for possible failure. In other words, Hughes, don’t talk to me in that tone of voice.”

Hughes also rose. “I don’t know if I like your attitude,” he said.

Wolfe shrugged. “You can have it as you wish. You can like it or lump it. It’s immaterial to me. But don’t try to put extra pressure on us. Don’t try to jack us up. We have all the pressure that we need right here.”

He reached for the phone. “I’ll ask Goff to send up the car,” he said.

He was throwing the man out and it wasn’t a smart thing to do. But somehow, it didn’t seem to matter.

The security phone answered. Without hesitation he put through his request for the car.

“Now how about that drink?” he asked.

Hughes was furious. He took a folder out of his briefcase and laid it on the desk. “There’s the data on Tuckerman,” he said to Wolfe. “I’ll wait for the car outside.”

Wolfe watched the man stalk out.

Wolfe had made an enemy, and gained no immediate advantage and his behavior had been foolish in the extreme. But he was determined to make Central understand that Hourglass did not need to be reminded of its purpose.

Hourglass knew its purpose and for almost two hundred years had tried to implement it in every possible way—running down blind alleys, barking up wrong trees, but never pausing for an instant in its search, never losing sight of its ultimate goal. Hourglass needed no pompous fool like Hughes to prod it on its way.

Central might be getting impatient, but there was nothing he could do about that. Central had waited for a long time but it would have to wait still longer.

Not very much longer, perhaps. Paradox had been completed almost fifty years ago and now everything was ready. Once time travel became more than a theoretical possibility Project Paradox could go into operation. But until that day came it couldn’t move an inch.

And that’s just too damn bad, said Wolfe, talking to himself. He sat down behind his desk and put his hands in front of him and clenched them tight together. Nerves, he told himself. We’re all a bunch of nerves.

Although he had denied it vehemently in his reply to Hughes, the urgency dominated and frightened him—the frantic urgency to head off the first galactic war in which Earth would be disastrously involved, and in all probability destroyed.