“Nevertheless, some people would try it just for the hell of it. Didn’t anybody ever ride it?”
Chuck glanced around again. “I’ve talked too much already.”
“A little more won’t hurt.”
“I think three people tried it. I think. One of them was an instructor. I was in the lab when Twitch and this bird, Leo Vincent, came in; Twitch told me I could go home. I hung around outside. After a while Twitch came out and Vincent didn’t. So far as I know, he’s still in there. He certainly wasn’t teaching at Boulder after that.”
“How about the other two?”
“Students. They all three went in together; only Twitch came out. But one of them was in class the next day, whereas the other one was missing for a week. Figure it out yourself.”
“Weren’t you ever tempted?”
“Me? Does my head look fat? Twitch suggested that it was almost my duty, in the interests of science, to volunteer. I said no, thanks; I’d take a short beer instead . . . but that I would gladly throw the switch for him. He didn’t take me up on it.”
“I’d take a chance on it. I could check up on what’s worrying me . . . and then come back again by cold sleep. It would be worth it.”
Chuck sighed deeply. “No more beer for you, my friend; you’re drunk. You didn’t listen to me. One,”-he started making tallies on the table top-“you have no way of knowing that you’d go back; you might go forward instead.”
“I’d risk that. I like now a lot better than I liked then; I might like thirty years from now still better.”
“Okay, so take the Long Sleep again; it’s safer. Or just sit tight and wait for it to roll around; that’s what I’m going to do. But quit interrupting me. Two, even if you did go back, you might miss 1970 by quite a margin. So far as I know, Twitch was shooting in the dark; I don’t think he had it calibrated. But of course I was just the flunky. Three, that lab was in a stand of pine trees and it was built in 1980. Suppose you come out ten years before it was built in the middle of a western yellow pine? Ought to make quite an explosion, about like a cobalt bomb, huh? Only you wouldn’t know it.”
“But- As a matter of fact, I don’t see why you would come out anywhere near the lab. Why not to the spot in outer space corresponding to where the lab used to be-I mean where it was.
or rather–”
“You don’t mean anything. You stay on the world line you were on. Don’t worry about the math; just remember what that guinea pig did. But if you go back before the lab was built, maybe you wind up in a tree. Four, how could you get back to now even with cold sleep, even if you did go the right way, arrive at the right time, and live through it?”
“Huh? I did once, why not twice?”
“Sure. But what are you going to use for money?”
I opened my mouth and closed it. That one made me feel foolish. I had had the money once; I had it no longer. Even what I had saved (not nearly enough) I could not take with me-shucks, even if I robbed a bank (an art I knew nothing about) and took a million of the best back with me, I couldn’t spend it in 1970. I’d simply wind up in jail for trying to shove funny money. They had even changed the shape, not to mention serial numbers, dates, colors, and designs. “Maybe I’d just have to save it up.”
“Good boy. And while you were saving it, you’d probably wind up here and now again without half trying . . . but minus your hair and your teeth.”
“Okay, okay. But let’s go back to that last point. Was there ever a big explosion on that spot? Where the lab was?”
“No, I don’t think so.”
“Then I wouldn’t wind up in a tree-because I didn’t. Follow me?”