“Good work, Jo. Cigarette?” Krasna pushed the box across his desk.
“Nope, not now. Like to talk to you, if you’ve got time.”
Krasna pushed a button, and a toadstoollike chair rose out of the floor behind Jo. “What’s on your mind?”
“Well,” Jo said carefully. “I’m wondering why you patted me on the back just now for not doing a job.”
“You did a job.”
“I did not,” Jo said flatly. “Boy would have met girl, whether I’d been here on Randolph or back on Earth, The course of true love always runs smooth. It has in all my boy-meets-girl cases, and it has in the boy-meets-girl cases of every other agent with whom I’ve compared notes.”
“Well, good,” Krasna said, smiling. “That’s the way we like to have it run. And that’s the way we expect it to run.
But, Jo, we like to have somebody on the spot, somebody with a reputation for resourcefulness, just in case there’s a snag. There almost never is, as you’ve observed. Butif there were?”
Jo snorted. “If what you’re trying to do is to establish preconditions for the future, any interference by a Service agent would throw the eventual result farther off the track.
I know that much about probability.”
“And what makes you think that we’re trying to set up the future?”
“It’s obvious even to the hoppies on your own planet; the one that brought me here told me he thought the Service had time-travel. It’s especially obvious to all the individuals and governments and entire populations that the Service has bailed out of serious messes for centuries, with never a single failure.” Jo shrugged. “A man can be asked to safeguard only a small number of boy-meets-girl cases before he realizes, as an agent, that what the Service is safeguarding is the future children of those meetings. Ergothe Service knows what those children are to be like, and has reason to want their future existence guaranteed. What other conclusion is possible?”