Clifford Simak - I Am Crying All Inside - And Other Stories

A hand grabbed him by the arm and there was Douglas Marshall, sweating. “We got to send him back, Chief,” said Doug. “E.J.’s got to take him back.”

Spencer shook his head. “I don’t know if we can. I’ll put it up to Legal. Just keep them here, and tell the boys. Tell them if one of them so much as whispers …”

“I’ll do my best,” said Doug. “But I don’t know. They’re a bunch of blabbermouths.”

Spencer jerked away and sprinted for the corridor.

What a day, he thought. What a loused-up day!

He charged down the corridor and saw that the door marked Private was closed. He skidded almost to a halt, reaching for the knob, when the door flew open. Miss Crane came tearing out.

She slammed into him head-on. Both of the bounced back, Miss Crane’s spectacles knocked at a crazy angle by the impact.

“Mr. Spencer,” she wailed. “Mr. Spencer, something awful’s happened! Remember Mr. Hudson?”

She stepped back out of his way. He sprang inside and slammed the door behind him. “As if I ever could forget him,” he said bitterly.

Said Miss Crane, “Mr. Hudson’s dead!”

Spencer stood stricken.

Miss Crane raged, “If only you had seen him when I wanted you to! If you hadn’t kept him waiting out there …”

“Now, look here—”

“He got up finally,” said Miss Crane, “and his face was red. He was angry. I don’t blame him, Mr. Spencer.”

“You mean he died right here?”

“He said to me, ‘Tell your Mr. Spencer—’ and that’s as far as he ever got. He sort of lurched and caught with his hand at the edge of the desk to support himself, but his hand slipped off and he folded up and …”

Spencer waited for no more. He went in three quick steps across the office and out into the reception room.

There was Mr. Hudson, huddled on the carpet.

He looked startlingly like a limp ragdoll. One blue-veined hand was stretched out ahead of him. The portfolio that it had held lay just beyond the fingertips, as if even in his death Mr. Hudson might be stretching out his hand to it. His jacket was hunched across the shoulders. The collar of his white shirt, Spencer saw, was ragged.

Spencer went slowly across the floor and knelt down beside the man. He put his ear down on the body.

There was no sound at all.

“Mr. Spencer.” Miss Crane was standing in the doorway, still terrified but enjoying it a lot. Not in all her years of being secretary had anything like this happened. Not in all her life. It would keep her supplied with conversation for many, many years.

“Lock the door,” said Spencer, “so no one can come strolling in. Then phone the police.”

“The police!”

“Miss Crane,” said Spencer, sharply.

She walked around him and the body on the floor, edging close against the wall.

“Call Legal, too,” said Spencer.

He stayed squatting on the floor, staring at the man who lay there and wondering how it had happened. Heart attack, most likely. Miss Crane had said that he looked ill—and had urged that he see him first, ahead of the other two.

And if one were looking for a man to blame for what had happened here, Spencer told himself, they might have but little trouble fastening it on him.

If Hudson had not had to wait, growing angrier and more upset as the time slipped past, this might not have happened.

Hudson had waited in this room, a sick and impatient man, and finally an angry one—and what had he waited for?

Spencer studied the ragdoll of a man slumped upon the carpet, the thinning hair atop his head, the thick-lensed spectacles bent and twisted in the fall, the bony, blue-veined hands. He wondered what such a man might have expected from Past, Inc.

Spencer started to get up and lost his balance as he did, his left hand going out behind him to prop himself erect.

And beneath the spread-out palm there was something cool and smooth. Without looking, he knew what it was. Hudson’s portfolio!

The answer might be there!

Miss Crane was at the door, locking it. There was no one else.

With a swift sweep of his hand, Spencer skidded the portfolio in the direction of the doorway that led into his office.

He got smoothly to his feet and turned. The portfolio lay halfway through the doorway. In one quick stride he reached it and nudged it with his foot, inside and out of sight.

He heard the snick of the lock falling home and Miss Crane turned around.

“The police first, or Legal, Mr. Spencer?”

“The police, I’d think,” said Spencer.

He stepped within his office and swung the door so that it came within an inch of closing. Then he snatched the portfolio off the floor and hurried to his desk.

He put in on his desk and zipped it open and there were three sheafs of paper, each of the sheafs paper-clipped together.

The first bore the legend at the top of the first page: A Study of Ethics Involved in Traveling in Time . And after that page upon page of typescript, heavily underlined and edited with a neat red pencil.

And the second, a thin one, with no legend, and composed of sheets of unneatly scribbled notes.

And the third, once again typed, with carefully drawn diagrams and charts, and the heading: A New Concept of the Mechanics of Time Travel .

Spencer sucked in his breath and bent above the paper, his eyes trying to gallop along the lines of type, but forced to go too fast to really catch the meaning.

For he had to get the portfolio back where it had been and he had to do it without being seen. It was not his to touch. The police might become difficult if they found he’d rifled it. And when he put it back, it must have something in it. A man would hardly come to see him with an empty portfolio.

In the outer office, he heard Miss Crane talking. He made a quick decision.

He swept the second and third sheaf of papers into the top drawer of his desk. Leaving the first sheaf on time-travel ethics in the portfolio, he zipped it shut again.

That would satisfy the cops. He held the portfolio in his left hand, letting his arm hang along his side, and stepped to the doorway, shielding the left side of his body and the portfolio.

Miss Crane was on the phone, her face turned away from him.

He stopped the portfolio on the carpeting, just beyond the outstretched fingers of the dead man.

Miss Crane put down the phone and saw him standing there.

“The police will be right over,” she said. “Now I’ll call Mr. Hawkes in Legal.”

“Thanks,” said Spencer. “I’ll go through some papers while we’re waiting.”

Back at his desk, he took out the pile of papers that said: A New Concept of the Mechanics of Time Travel . The name on it was Boone Hudson.

He settled down to read, first with mounting wonderment, then with a strange, cold excitement—for here, at last, was the very thing that would at once erase the basic headache of Past, Inc.

No longer would one face the nightmare of good travelers wearing out in a few years’ time.

No longer would a man go into time a young man and return sixty seconds later with the beginning lines of age showing on his face. No longer would one watch one’s friends age visibly from month to month.

For they would no longer be dealing in men, but in the patterns of those men.

Matter transference, Spencer told himself. You could probably call it that, anyway. A man would be sent into the past; but the carrier would not move physically into time as it moved now. It would project a pattern of itself and the man within it, materializing at the target point. And within the carrier—the basic carrier, the prime carrier, the parent carrier which would remain in present time—there’d be another pattern, a duplicate pattern of the man sent into time.