They were rolling in a minute, but for a few seconds only. The cab inched agonizingly along while W. J. Born twisted the newspaper in his hands. At 10:13 he threw a bill at the driver and jumped from the cab.
Panting, he reached the library at 10:46 by his watch. By the time that the rest of the world was keeping on that day it was quitting-time in the midtown offices. He had bucked a stream of girls in surprisingly short skirts and surprisingly big hats all the way.
He got lost in the marble immensities of the library and his own panic. When he found the newspaper room his watch said 11:03. W. J. Born panted to the girl at the desk: ‘”File of the Stock Exchange Journal for 1975, 1976 and 1977.”
“We have the microfilms for 1975 and 1976, sir, and loose copies for this year.”
“Tell me,” he said, “what year for the big crash? That’s what I want to look up.”
“That’s 1975, sir. Shall I get you that?”
“Wait,” he said. “Do you happen to remember the
month?”
“I think it was March or August or something like that, sir.” “~~~
“Get me the whole file, please,” he said. Nineteen seventy-five. His year—his real year. Would he have a month? A week? Or—?
“Sign this card, mister,” the girl was saying patiently. “There’s a reading machine, you just go sit there and I’ll bring you the spool.”
He scribbled his name and went to the machine, the only one vacant hi a row of a dozen. The tune on his watch was 11:05. He had fifty minutes.
The girl dawdled over cards at her desk and chatted with a good-looking young page with a stack of books while sweat began to pop from Born’s brow. At last she disappeared into the stacks behind her desk.
Born waited. And waited. And waited. Eleven-ten. Eleven-fifteen. Eleven-twenty.
An H-bomb would be out of his league. His ulcer stabbed him as the girl appeared again, daintily carrying a spool of 35-millimeter film between thumb and forefinger, smiling brightly at Born. “Here we are,” she said, and inserted the spool hi the machine and snapped a switch. Nothing happened.
“Oh, darn,” she said. “The light’s out. I told the electrician.”
Born wanted to scream and then to explain, which would have been just as foolish.
“There’s a free reader,” she pointed down the line. W. J. Born’s knees tottered as they walked to it. He looked at his watch—11:27. Twenty-eight minutes to go. The ground-glass screen lit up with a shadow of the familiar format; January 1st, 1975. “You just turn the crank,” she said, and showed him. The shadows spun past on the screen at dizzying speed, and she went back to her desk.
Born cranked the film up to April, 1975, the mouth he had left 91 minutes ago, and to the sixteenth day of April,
the very day he had left. The shadow on the ground glass was the same paper he had seen that morning: SYNTHETICS SURGE TO NEW VIENNA PEAK.
Trembling he cranked into a vision of the future; the Stock Exchange Journal for April 17th, 1975.
Three inch type screamed: SECURITIES CRASH IN
GLOBAL CRISIS: BANKS CLOSE; CLIENTS STORM BROKERAGES!
Suddenly he was calm, knowing the future and safe from its blows. He rose from the reader and strode firmly into the marble halls. Everything was all right now. Twenty-six minutes was time enough to get back to the machine. He’d have a jump of several hours on the market; his own money would be safe as houses; he could get his personal clients off the hook.
He got a cab with miraculous ease and rolled straight to the loft building in the West 70’s without hindrance. At 11:50 by his watch he was closing the door of the phone both in the dusty, musty-smelling lab.
At 11:54 he noticed an abrupt change in the sunlight that filtered through the dirt-streaked windows and stepped calmly out. It was April 17th, 1975, again. Loring was sound asleep beside a gas hotplate on which coffee simmered. W. J. Born turned off the gas and went downstairs softly. Loring was a screwy, insolent, insecure young man, but by his genius he had enabled W. J. Born to harvest his fortune at the golden moment of perfection.