Chapter VII: Part 7

He was gone for five minutes. The barn had apparently not yet been built in 1820 and he found himself on a slight rise in a field of wild hay. The faint snick of scythes, and voices not too far off, indicated mowers. He dropped to the ground. His view of the past was restricted to tall grass and some persistent ants who explored his face and hands until the time was up and he returned with broken spears of ripe hay clinging to his clothes.

“At least that’s what I imagined I saw,” he concluded.

“Did you imagine these?” asked Ace, pointing to the straws.

“Probably. It’s at least as likely as time-travel.”

“But what about corroboration? Your experience, and Barbara’s and Ace’s confirm each other. Doesnt that mean anything?”

“Certainly. Only I’m not prepared to say what. The mind can do anything; anything at all. Create boils and cancers. Why not ants and grass? I don’t know. I don’t know....”

After more fruitless argument, he and I left the workshop. I was again reminded of Enfandin—Why should I believe my eyes? I felt though that Midbin was carrying skepticism beyond rational limits; Barbara’s case was proved.

“Yes, yes,” he answered when I said this. “Why not?”

I puzzled over his reply. Then he added abruptly, “No one can help her now.”

_18._ _THE WOMAN TEMPTED ME_

Gently, Catty said, “Ive never understood why you cut yourself off from the past the way you have, Hodge.”

“Ay? What do you mean?”

“Well, youve not communicated with your father or mother since you left home, fourteen years ago. You say you had a dear friend in the man from Haiti, yet youve never tried to find out whether he lived or died.”

“Oh, that way. I thought you meant ... something different.” By not taking advantage of Barbara’s offer I certainly was cutting myself off from the past.

“Yes?”

“Well, I guess more or less everyone at the haven has done the same thing. Let outside ties grow weak, I mean. You for one—” “But I have no parents, no friends anywhere else. All my life is here.”

“Well, so is mine.”

“Ah, dear Hodge; it is unlike you to be so indifferent.”

“Catty darling, you were brought up comfortably in an atmosphere knowing nothing of indenting or sharecropping, of realizing the only escape from wretchedness was in a miracle—usually translated as a winning number in the lottery. I can’t convey to you the meaning of utterly loveless surroundings, I can only say that affection was a luxury my mother and father couldnt afford.”

“Perhaps not; but you can afford it. Now. And nothing of what you have said applies to Enfandin.”

I squirmed shamefacedly. My ingratitude and callousness must be apparent to everyone; even Barbara, I remembered, had once asked me much the same questions Catty asked now. How could I explain, even to my own satisfaction, how procrastination and guilt made it impossible for me to take the simple steps to discover what had happened to my friend? By a tremendous effort I might have broken through the inertia years ago, just after Enfandin had been wounded, but each day and month between confirmed the impossibility more strongly. “Let the past take care of itself,” I muttered.

“Oh Hodge! What a thing for an historian to say.”

“Catty, I can’t.”

The conversation made me nervous and fidgetty. It also made me remember much I preferred to let fade: the Grand Army, Sprovis, the counterfeit pesetas.... All the evil I had unwillingly abetted. If a man did nothing, literally nothing, all his life, then he might be free of culpability. Manichaeism, said Enfandin. No absolution.

My idleness, I knew very well, heightened all these feelings of degradation. Were I able to continue in the happy, cocksure way I had gone about my note-gathering and the writing of volume one, I would have neither the time nor susceptibility to be plagued by this disquiet. As it was I seemed to be able to do nothing but act as audience for what was going on in the workshop.

With childish eagerness Barbara and Ace explored HX-1’s possibilities for the next two months. They quickly learned that its range was limited to little more than a century, though this limit was subject to slight variations. When they tried to operate beyond this range the translation simply didnt take place, though the same feeling of dissolution occurred. When the light faded they were still in the present. Midbin’s venture into the hayfield had been a freak, possibly due to peculiar weather conditions at both ends of the journey. They set 1850 as a safe limit, with an undefined marginal zone further back which was not to be hazarded lest conditions change during the journey and the traveler be lost.

Why this limit existed at all was a matter of dispute between them, a dispute of which I must admit I understood little. Barbara spoke of subjective factors which seemed to mean that HX-1 worked slightly differently in the case of each person it transported; Ace of magnetic fields and power relays, which didnt mean anything to me at all. The only thing they agreed on was that the barrier was not immutable; HX-2 or 3 or 20, if they were ever built, would undoubtedly overcome it.

Nor would HX-1 work in reverse; the future remained closed, probably for similar reasons, whatever they were. Here again they disputed, Ace holding an HX could be built for this purpose, Barbara insisting that new equations would have to be worked out.

They confirmed their tentative theory that time spent in the past consumed an equal amount of time in the present; they could not return to a point a minute after departure when they had been gone for an hour. As near as I could understand, this was because duration was set in the present. In order to come back to a time-point not in correspondence with the period actually spent, another HX, or at least another set of controls, would have to be taken into the past. And then they would not work since HX-1 could not penetrate the future.

The most inconvenient circumscription was the inability of one person to visit the same past moment twice. When the attempt was made the feeling of dissolution did not occur, the light went on and off with no effect upon the would-be traveler standing beneath it. Here Barbara’s “subjective factor” was triumphant, but why, or how it worked, they did not know. Nor did they know what would happen to a traveler who attempted to overlap by being already on the spot prior to a previous visit; it was too dangerous to try.

Within these limits they roamed almost at will. Ace spent a full week in October 1896, walking as far as Philadelphia, enjoying the enthusiasm and fury of the presidential campaign. Knowing President Bryan was not only going to be elected, but would serve three terms, he found it hard indeed to obey Barbara’s stricture and not cover confident Whig bets on Major McKinley.

Though both sampled the war years they brought back nothing useful to me, no information or viewpoint I couldnt have got from any of a score of books. Lacking historians’ interests or training, their tidbits were those of curious onlookers, not probing chroniclers. It was tantalizing to know that Barbara had seen Secretary Stanton at the York depot or that Ace had overheard a farmer say casually that Southron scouts had stopped at his place the day before and they had thought neither incident worth investigating further.

I grew increasingly fretful. I held long colloquies with myself which always ended inconclusively. _Why not?_ I asked. _Surely this is the unique opportunity. Never before has it been possible for an historian to check back at will, to select a particular moment for personal scrutiny, to write of the past with the detachment of the present and the accuracy of an eyewitness knowing specifically what to look for. Why don’t you take advantage of HX-1 and see for yourself?_

Against this I objected—what? Fear? Uneasiness? The “subjective factor” in HX-1? The superstitious notion that I might be tampering with a taboo, with matters forbidden to human shortcomings? _You mustnt try any shortcuts. Promise me that, Hodge._ Well, Catty was a darling. She was my beloved wife, but she was neither scholar nor oracle. On what grounds did she protest? Woman’s intuition? A respectable phrase, but what did it mean? And didnt Barbara, who first suggested my using HX-1, have womanly intuition also?

A half-dozen times I tried to steer our talk in the direction of my thoughts; each time I allowed the words to drift to another topic. What was the use of upsetting her? _Promise me that, Hodge._ But I had not promised. This was something I had to settle for myself.

What was I afraid of? Because I’d never grasped anything to do with the physical sciences did I attribute some anthropomorphism to their manifestations and like a savage fear the spirit imprisoned in what I didnt understand? (But HX-1 _did_ have subjective factors.) I had never thought of myself as hidebound, but I was acting like a ninety-yearold professor asked to use a typewriter instead of a goose quill.

I recalled Tyss’s, “You are the spectator type, Hodgins.” And once I had called him out of my memory I couldnt escape his familiar, sardonic, interminable argument. _Why are you fussing yourself, Hodgins? What is the point of all this introspective debate? Don’t you know your choice has already been made? And that you have acted according to it an infinite number of times and will do so an infinite number of times again? Relax, Hodgins; you have nothing to worry about. Free will is an illusion; you cannot alter what you are about to decide under the impression that you have decided._

My reaction to this imagined interjection was frenzied, unreasonable. I cursed Tyss and his damnable philosophy. I cursed the insidiousness of his reasoning which had planted seed in my brain to sprout at a moment like this.

Yet in spite of the violence of my rejection of the words I attributed to Tyss, I accepted one of them. I relaxed. The decision had been made. Not by mechanistic forces, nor by blind response to stimulus, but by my own desire.

And now to my aid came the image of Tyss’s antithesis, René Enfandin. _Be a skeptic, Hodge; be always the skeptic. Prove all things; hold fast to that which is true. Joking Pilate, asking,_ What is truth? _was blind. But you can see more aspects of the absolute truth than any man has had a chance to see before. Can you use the chance well, Hodge? That is the only question._

Once I could answer it with a vigorous affirmative, and so buttress the determination to go, I was faced with the problem of telling Catty. I could not shut her out of so important a move. I told myself I could not bear the thought of her anxiety; that she would worry despite the fact others had frequently used HX-1, for my object could not be accomplished in a matter of minutes or hours. I was sure she would be sick with apprehension during the days I would be gone. No doubt this was all true, but I also remembered, _Promise me, Hodge_....

I finally took the weak, the ineffective course. I said I’d decided the only way to face my problem was to go to Gettysburg and spend three or four days going over the actual field. Here, I explained unconvincingly, I thought I might at last come to the conclusion whether to scrap all my work and start afresh, or not.

Her faintly oblique eyes were inscrutable. She pretended to believe me and begged me to take her along. After all, we had spent our honeymoon on battlefields.

Would it be possible? Two people had never stood under the reflector together, but surely it would work? I was tempted, but I could not subject Catty to the risk, however slight. Besides, how could I explain?

“But Catty, with you there I’d be thinking of you instead of the problem.”

“Ah, Hodge, have we already been married so long you must get away from me to think?”

“No matter how long, that time will never come. Perhaps I’m wrong, Catty. It’s just a feeling I have.”

Her look was tragic with understanding. “You must do as you think right. Don’t ... don’t be gone too long, my dear.”

I dressed in clothes I often used for walking trips, clothes which bore no mark of any fashion and might pass as current wear among the poorer classes in any era of the past hundred years. I put a packet of dried beef in my pocket and started for the workshop.

As soon as I left the cottage I laughed at my hypersensitivity, at all the to-do I’d made over lying to Catty. This was but the first excursion; I planned others for the months after Gettysburg. There was no reason why she shouldnt accompany me on them. I grew lighthearted as my conscience eased and I even congratulated myself on my skill in not having told a single technical falsehood to Catty. I began to whistle, never a habit of mine, as I made my way along the path to the workshop.

Barbara was alone. Her ginger hair gleamed in the light of a gas globe; her eyes were green as they always were when she was exultant. “Well, Hodge?”

“Well, Barbara, I....”

“Have you told Catty?”

“Not exactly. How did you know?”

“I knew before you did, Hodge. After all, we’re not strangers. All right. How long do you want to stay?”

“Four days.”

“That’s long for a first trip. Don’t you think you’d better try a few sample minutes?”

“Why? Ive seen you and Ace go often enough and heard your accounts. I’ll take care of myself. Have you got it down fine enough yet so you can invariably pick the hour of arrival?”

“Hour and minute,” she answered confidently. “What’ll it be?”

“About midnight of June 30, 1863,” I answered. “I want to come back on the night of July Fourth.”

“Youll have to be more exact than that. For the return, I mean. The dials are set on seconds.”

“All right, make it midnight going and coming then.”

“Have you a watch that keeps perfect time?”

“I don’t know about perfect—” “Take this one. It’s synchronized with the master control clock.” She handed me a large, rather awkward timepiece which had two independent faces side by side. “We had a couple made like this; the duplicate dials were useful before we were able to control HX-1 so exactly. One shows 1952 Haggershaven time.”

“Ten thirty-three and fourteen seconds,” I said.

“Yes. The other will show 1863 time. You won’t be able to reset the first dial—but for goodness sake remember to keep it wound—and set the second for ... 11:54, zero. That means in six minutes youll leave, to arrive at midnight. Remember to keep that one wound too, for youll go by that regardless of variations in local clocks. Whatever else happens, be in the center of the barn at midnight—allow yourself some leeway—by midnight, July Fourth. I don’t want to have to go wandering around 1863 looking for you.”

“You won’t. I’ll be here.”

“Five minutes. Now then, food.”

“I have some,” I answered, slapping my pocket.

“Not enough. Take this concentrated chocolate along. I suppose it won’t hurt to drink the water if youre not observed, but avoid their food. One never knows what chain might be started by the casual theft—or purchase, if you had enough old coins—of a loaf of bread. The possibilities are limitless and frightening. Listen: how can I impress on you the importance of doing nothing that could possibly change the future—our present? I’m sure to this day Ace doesnt understand, and I tremble every moment he spends in the past. The most trivial action may begin a series of disastrous consequences. Don’t be seen, don’t be heard. Make your trip as a ghost.”

“Barbara, I promise I’ll neither assassinate General Lee nor give the North the idea of a modern six-barreled cannon.”

“Four minutes. It’s not a joke, Hodge.”

“Believe me,” I said, “I understand.”

She looked at me searchingly. Then she shook her head and began making her round of the engines, adjusting the dials. I slid under the glass ring as I’d so often seen her do and stood casually under the reflector. I was not in the least nervous. I don’t think I was even particularly excited.

“Three minutes,” said Barbara.

I patted my breast pocket. Notebook, pencils. I nodded.

She ducked under the ring and came toward me. “Hodge....”

“Yes?”

She put her arms on my shoulders, leaning forward. I kissed her, a little absently. “Clod!”

I looked at her closely, but there were none of the familiar signs of anger. “A minute to go, it says here,” I told her.

She drew away and went back. “All set. Ready?”

“Ready,” I answered cheerfully. “See you midnight, July Fourth, 1863.”

“Right. Goodbye, Hodge. Glad you didnt tell Catty.”

The expression on her face was the strangest I’d ever seen her wear. I could not, then or now, quite interpret it. Doubt, malice, suffering, vindictiveness, entreaty, love, were all there as her hand moved the switch. I began to answer something—perhaps to bid her wait—then the light made me blink and I too experienced the shattering feeling of transition. My bones seemed to fly from each other; every cell in my body exploded to the ends of space.

The instant of translation was so brief it is hard to believe all the multitude of impressions occurred simultaneously. I was sure my veins were drained of blood, my brain and eyeballs dropped into a bottomless void, my thoughts pressed to the finest powder and blown a universe away. Most of all, I knew the awful sensation of being, for that tiny fragment of time, not Hodgins McCormick Backmaker, but part of an _I_ in which the I that was me merged all identity.

Then I opened my eyes. I was emotionally shaken; my knees and wrists were watery points of helplessness, but I was alive and functioning, with my individuality unimpaired. The light had vanished. I was in darkness save for faint moonlight coming through the cracks in the barn. The sweetish smell of cattle was in my nostrils, and the slow, ponderous stamp of hooves in my ears. I had gone back through time.

_19._ _GETTYSBURG_

The barking of the dogs was frenzied, filled with the hoarse note indicating they had been raising the alarm for a long time without being heeded. I knew they must have been baying at the alien smells of soldiers for the past day, so I was not apprehensive that their scent of me would bring investigation. How Barbara and Ace had escaped detection on journeys which didnt coincide with abnormal events was beyond me; with such an unnerving racket in prospect I would either have given up the trips or moved the apparatus.

Strange, I reflected, that the cows and horses were undisturbed. That no hysterical chicken leaped from the roost in panic. Only the dogs scented my unnatural presence. Dogs who, as Mr Haggerwells remarked, are supposed to sense things beyond the perceptions of man.

Warily I picked my way past the livestock and out of the barn, fervently hoping the dogs were tied, for I had no mind to start my adventure by being bitten. Barbara’s warnings seemed inadequate indeed; one would think she or Ace might have devised some method of neutralizing the infernal barking. But of course they could hardly do so without violating her rule of non-interference.

Once out on the familiar Hanover road every petty feeling of doubt or disquiet fell away and all the latent excitement took hold of me. I was gloriously in 1863, half a day and some thirty miles from the battle of Gettysburg. If there is a paradise for historians I had achieved it without the annoyance of dying first. I swung along at a good pace, thankful I had trained myself for long tramps, so that thirty miles in less than ten hours was no monstrous feat. The noise of the dogs died away behind me and I breathed the night air joyfully.

I had already decided I dared not attempt to steal a ride on the railroad, even supposing the cars were going through. As I turned off the Hanover road and took the direct one to Gettysburg, I knew I would not be able to keep on it for any length of time. Part of Early’s Confederate division was moving along it from recently occupied York; Stuart’s cavalry was all around; trifling skirmishes were being fought on or near it; Union troops, regulars as well as the militia called out by Governor Curtin for the emergency, were behind and ahead of me, marching for the Monocacy and Cemetery Ridge.

Leaving the highway would hardly slow me down, for I knew every sideroad, lane, path or shortcut, not only as they existed in my day, but as they had been in the time where I was now. I was going to need this knowledge even more on my return, for on the Fourth of July this road, like every other, would be glutted with beaten Northern troops, supplies and wounded left behind, frantically trying to reorganize as they were harassed by Stuart’s cavalry and pressed by the victorious men of Hill, Longstreet, and Ewell. It was with this in mind I had allowed disproportionately longer for coming back.

I saw my first soldier a few miles further on, a jagged shadow sitting by the roadside with his boots off, massaging his feet. I guessed him Northern from his kepi, but this was not conclusive, for many Southron regiments wore kepis also. I struck off quietly into the field and skirted around him. He never looked up.

At dawn I estimated I was halfway, and except for the sight of that single soldier I might have been taking a nocturnal stroll through a countryside at peace. I was tired but certainly not worn out, and I knew I could count on nervous energy and happy excitement to keep me going long after my muscles began to protest. Progress would be slower from now on—Confederate infantry must be just ahead—even so, I should be at Gettysburg by six or seven.

The sudden drumming of hooves brushed me off the dusty pike and petrified me into rigidity as a troop dressed in gray and dirty tan galloped by screaming, “Eeeeee-yeeee” exultantly. The gritty cloud they stirred up settled slowly; I felt the particles sting my face and eyes. It would be the sideroads from now on, I determined.

Others had the same impulse; the sideroads were well populated. Although I knew the movement of every division and of many regiments, and even had some considerable idea of the civilian dislocation, the picture around me was jumbled and turbulent. Farmers, merchants, workers in overalls rode or tramped eastward; others, identical in dress and obvious intensity of effort, pushed westward. I passed carriages and carts with women and children traveling at various speeds both ways. Squads and companies of blue-clad troops marched along the roads or through the fields, trampling the crops, a confused sound of singing, swearing, or aimless talk hanging above them like a fog. Spaced by pacific intervals, men in gray or butternut, otherwise indistinguishable, marched in the same direction. I decided I could pass unnoticed in the milling crowds.

It is not easy for the historian, ten, fifty or five hundred years away from an event, to put aside for a moment the large concepts of currents and forces, or the mechanical aids of statistics, charts, maps, neat plans and diagrams in which the migration of men, women and children is indicated by an arrow, or a brigade of half-terrified, half-heroic men becomes a neat little rectangle. It is not easy to see behind source material, to visualize state papers, reports, letters, diaries as written by men who spent most of their lives sleeping, eating, yawning, eliminating, squeezing blackheads, lusting, looking out of windows, or talking about nothing in general with no one in particular. We are too impressed with the pattern revealed to us—or which we think has been revealed to us—to remember that for the participants history is a haphazard affair, apparently aimless, produced by human beings whose concern is essentially with the trivial and irrelevant. The historian is always conscious of destiny. The participants rarely—or mistakenly.

So to be set down in the midst of crisis, to be at once involved and apart, is to experience a constant series of shocks against which there is no anesthetic. The soldiers, the stragglers, the refugees, the farm boys shouting at horses, the tophatted gentlemen cursing the teamsters, the teamsters cursing back; the looters, pimps, gamblers, whores, nurses and newspapermen were indisputably what they appeared: vitally important to themselves, of little interest to anyone else. Yet at the same time they were a paragraph, a page, a chapter, a whole series of volumes.

I’m sure I was faithful to the spirit if not the letter of Barbara’s warnings, and that none of the hundreds whom I passed or who passed me noted my presence, except cursorily. I, on the other hand, had to repress the constant temptation to peer into every face for signs which could not tell me what fortune or misfortune the decision of the next three days would bring to it.

A few miles from town the crowded disorder became even worse, for the scouts from Ewell’s Corps, guarding the Confederate left flank on the York Road, acted like a cork in a bottle. Because I, unlike the other travelers, knew this, I cut sharply south to get back on the circuitous Hanover road I had left shortly after midnight, and crossing the bridge over Rock Creek, stumbled into Gettysburg.

The two and a half storey brick houses with their purplish slate roofs were placid and charming in the hot July sun. A valiant rooster pecked at horsedung in the middle of the street heedless of the swarming soldiers, any of whom might take a notion for roast chicken. Privates in the black hats of the Army of the Potomac, cavalrymen with wide yellow stripes and cannoneers with red ones on the seams of their pants, swaggered importantly. Lieutenants with hands resting gracefully on sword hilts, captains with arms thrust in unbuttoned tunics, colonels smoking cigars, all moved back and forth across the street, out of and into houses and stores, each clearly intent on some business which would affect the course of the war. Now and then a general rode his horse through the crowd, slowly and thoughtfully, oppressed by the cares of rank. Soldiers spat, leered at an occasional woman, sat dolefully on handy stoops, or marched smartly toward an unknown destination. On the courthouse staff the flag hung doubtfully in the limp summer air. Every so often there was a noise like poorly organized thunder.

Imitating the adaptable infantrymen, I found an unoccupied stoop and sat down after a curious glance at the house, wondering whether it contained someone whose letters or diaries I had read. Drawing out my packet of dried beef, I munched away without taking any of my attention from the sights and sounds and smells around me. Only I knew how desperately these soldiers would fight this afternoon and all day tomorrow. I alone knew how they would be caught in the inescapable trap on July Third and finally routed, to begin the last act of the war. That major, I thought, so proud of his new-won golden oak leaves, may have an arm or leg shot off vainly defending Culp’s Hill; that sergeant over there may lie faceless under an apple tree before nightfall.

Soon these men would be swept away from the illusory shelter of the houses and out onto the ridges where they would be pounded into defeat and disaster. There was nothing for me now in Gettysburg itself, though I could have spent days absorbing the color and feeling. Already I had tempted fate by my casual appearance in the heart of town. At any moment someone might speak to me, to ask for a light or a direction; an ill-considered word or action of mine might change, with ever-widening consequences, the course of the future. I had been foolish enough long enough; it was time for me to go to the vantage point I had decided upon and observe without peril of being observed.

I rose and stretched, my bones protesting. But a couple of miles more would see me clear of all danger of chance encounter with a too friendly or inquisitive soldier or civilian. I gave a last look, trying to impress every detail on my memory, and turned south on the Emmitsburg Road.

This was no haphazard choice. I knew where and when the crucial, the decisive move upon which all the other moves depended would take place. While thousands of men were struggling and dying on other parts of the battleground, a Confederate advance force, unnoticed, disregarded, would occupy the position which would eventually dominate the scene and win the battle—and the war—for the South. Heavy with knowledge no one else possessed I made my way toward a farm on which there was a wheatfield and a peach orchard.

_20._ _BRING THE JUBILEE_

A great battle in its first stages is as tentative, uncertain, and indefinite as a courtship just begun. At the beginning the ground was there for either side to take without protest; the other felt no surge of possessive jealousy. I walked unscathed along the Emmitsburg Road; on my left I knew there were Union forces concealed, on my right the Southrons maneuvered. In a few hours, to walk between the lines would mean instant death, but now the declaration had not been made, the vows had not been finally exchanged. It was still possible for either party to withdraw; no furious heat bound the two indissolubly together. I heard the periodic shell and the whine of a minie bullet; mere flirtatious gestures so far.

Despite the hot sun the grass was cool and lush. The shade in the orchard was velvety. From a low branch I picked a near ripe peach and sucked the wry juice. I sprawled on the earth and waited. For miles around, men from Maine and Wisconsin, from Georgia and North Carolina, assumed the same attitude. But I knew for what I was waiting; they could only guess.

Some acoustical freak dimmed the noises in the air to little more than amplification of the normal summer sounds. Did the ground really tremble faintly, or was I translating my mental picture of the marching armies, the great wagon trains, the heavy cannon, the iron-shod horses into an imagined physical effect? I don’t think I dozed, but certainly my attention withdrew from the rows of trees with their scarred and runneled bark, curving branches and graceful leaves, so that I was taken unaware by the unmistakable clump and creak of mounted men.

The blue-uniformed cavalry rode slowly through the peach orchard. They seemed like a group of aimless hunters returning from the futile pursuit of a fox; they chatted, shouted at each other, walked their horses abstractedly. One or two had their sabres out; they rose in their saddles and cut at the branches overhead in pure, pointless mischief.

Behind them came the infantrymen, sweating and swearing, more serious. Some few had wounds, others were without their muskets. Their dark blue tunics were carelessly unbuttoned, their lighter pants were stained with mud and dust and grass. They trampled and thrashed around like men long weary. Quarrels rose among them swiftly and swiftly petered out. No one could mistake them for anything but troops in retreat

After they had passed, the orchard was still again, but the stillness had a different quality from what had gone before. The leaves did not rustle, no birds chirped, there were no faint betrayals of the presence of chipmunks or squirrels. Only if one listened very closely was the dry noise of insects perceptible. But I heard the guns now. Clearly and louder. And more continuously—much more continuously. It was not yet the full roar of battle, but death was authentic in its low rumble.

Then the Confederates came. Cautiously, but not so cautiously that one could fail to recognize they represented a victorious, invading army. Shabby they certainly were, as they pushed into the orchard, but alert and confident. Only a minority had uniforms which resembled those prescribed by regulation and these were torn, grimy and scuffed. Many of the others wore the semiofficial butternut—crudely dyed homespun, streaked and muddy brown. Some had ordinary clothes with military hats and buttons; a few were dressed in federal blue trousers with gray or butternut jackets.

Nor were their weapons uniform. There were long rifles, short carbines, muskets of varying age, and I noticed one bearded soldier with a ponderous shotgun. But whatever their dress or arms, their bearing was the bearing of conquerors. If I alone on the field that day knew for sure the outcome of the battle, these Confederate soldiers were close behind in sensing the future.

The straggling Northerners had passed me by with the clouded perception of the retreating. These Southrons, however, were steadfastly attentive to every sight and sound. Too late I realized the difficulty of remaining unnoticed by such sharp, experienced eyes. Even as I berated myself for my stupidity, a great, whiskery fellow in what must once have been a stylish bottle-green coat pointed his gun at me.

“Yank here boys!” Then to me, “What you doing here, fella?”

Three or four came up and surrounded me curiously. “Funniest lookin damyank I ever did see. Looks like he just fell out of a bathtub.”

Since I had walked all night on dusty roads I could only think their standards of cleanliness were not high. And indeed this was confirmed by the smell coming from them: the stink of sweat, of clothes long slept in, of unwashed feet and stale tobacco.

“I’m a noncombatant,” I said foolishly.

“Whazzat?” asked the beard. “Some kind of Baptist?”

“Naw,” corrected one of the others. “It’s a law-word. Means not all right in the head.”

“Looks all right in the foot though. Let’s see your boots, Yank. Mine’s sure wore out.”

What terrified me now was not the thought of my boots being stolen, or of being treated as a prisoner, or even the remote chance of being shot as a spy. A greater, more indefinite catastrophe was threatened by my exposure. These men were the advance company of a regiment due to sweep through the orchard and the wheatfield, explore that bit of wild ground known as the Devil’s Den and climb up Little Round Top closely followed by an entire Confederate brigade. This was the brigade which held the Round Top for several hours until artillery was brought up, artillery which dominated the entire field and gave the South victory at Gettysburg.

There was no allowance for a pause, no matter how trifling, in the peach orchard, in any of the accounts I’d read or heard of. The hazard Barbara had warned so insistently against had happened. I had been discovered, and the mere discovery had altered the course of history.

I tried to shrug it off. Delay of a few minutes could hardly make a significant difference. All historians agreed that the capture of the Round Tops was an inevitability; the Confederates would have been foolish to overlook them—in fact it was hardly possible they could, prominent as they were both on maps and in physical reality—and they had occupied them hours before the Federals made a belated attempt to take them. I had been unbelievably stupid to expose myself, but I had created no repercussions likely to spread beyond the next few minutes.

“Said let’s see them boots. Aint got all day to wait.”

A tall officer with a pointed imperial and a sandy, faintly reddish mustache whose curling ends shone waxily came up, revolver in hand. “What’s going on here?”

“Just a Yank, Capn. Making a little change of footgear.” The tone was surly, almost insolent.

The galloons on the officer’s sleeve told me the title was not honorary. “I’m a civilian, Captain,” I protested. “I realize I have no business here.”

The captain looked at me coldly, with an expression of disdainful contempt. “Local man?” he asked.

“Not exactly. I’m from York.”

“Too bad. Thought you could tell me about the Yanks up ahead. Jenks, leave the civilian gentleman in full possession of his boots.”

There was rage behind that sneer, a hateful anger apparently directed at me for being a civilian, at his men for their obvious lack of respect, at the battle, the world. I suddenly realized his face was intimately familiar. Irritatingly, because I could connect it with no name, place or circumstance.

“How long have you been in this orchard, Mister Civilian-From-York?”

The effort to identify him nagged me, working in the depths of my mind, obtruding even into that top layer which was concerned with what was going on.

What was going on? _Too bad. Thought you could tell me about the Yanks up ahead. How long have you been in this orchard?_

Yanks up ahead? There werent any. There wouldnt be, for hours.

“I said, ‘How long you been in this orchard?’”

Probably an officer later promoted to rank prominent enough to have his picture in one of the minor narratives. Yet I was certain his face was no likeness I’d seen once in a steel engraving and dismissed. These were features often encountered....

“Sure like to have them boots. If we aint fightin for Yankee boots, what the hell we fightin for?”

What could I say? That I’d been in the orchard for half an hour? The next question was bound to be, Had I seen Federal troops? Whichever way I answered I would be betraying my role of spectator.

“Hey Capn—this fella knows something. Lookit the silly grin!” Was I smiling? In what? Terror? Perplexity? In the mere effort of keeping silent, so as to be involved no further?

“Tell yah—he’s laughin cuz he knows somethin!” Let them hang me, let them strip me of my boots; from here on I was dumb as dear Catty had been once.

“Out with it man—youre in a tight spot. Are there Yanks up ahead?” The confusion in my mind approached chaos. If I knew the captain’s eventual rank I could place him. Colonel Soandso. Brigadier-General Blank. What had happened? Why had I let myself be discovered? Why had I spoken at all and made silence so hard now?

“Yanks up ahead—they’s Yanks up ahead!” “Quiet you! I asked him—he didnt say there were Yanks ahead.” “Hay! Damyanks up above. Goin to mow us down!”

“Fella says the bluebellies are layin fur us!”

Had the lie been in my mind, to be telepathically plucked by the excited soldiers? Was even silence no refuge from participation?

“Man here spotted the whole Fed artillery up above, trained on us!”

“Pull back, boys! Pull back!”

I’d read often enough of the epidemic quality of a perfectly unreasonable notion. A misunderstood word, a baseless rumor, an impossible report, was often enough to set a group of armed men—squad or army—into senseless mob action. Sometimes the infection made for feats of heroism, sometimes for panic. This was certainly less than panic, but my nervous, meaningless smile conveyed a message I had never sent.

“It’s a trap. Pull back boys—let’s get away from these trees and out where we can see the Yanks!”

The captain whirled on his men. “Here, damn you,” he shouted furiously, “you all gone crazy? The man said nothing. There’s no trap!”

The men moved slowly, sullenly away. “I heard him,” one of them muttered, looking accusingly toward me.

The captain’s shout became a yell. “Come back here! Back here, I say!”

His raging stride overtook the still irresolute men. He grabbed the one called Jenks by the shoulder and whirled him about. Jenks tried to jerk free. There was fear on his face, and hate. “Leave me go, damn you,” he screamed, “Leave me go!”

The captain yelled at his men again. Jenks snatched at the pistol with his left hand; the officer pulled the gun away. Jenks brought his musket upright against the captain’s body, the muzzle just under his chin, and pushed—as though the firearm somehow gave him leverage. They wrestled briefly, then the musket went off.

The captain’s hat flew upward, and for an instant he stood, bareheaded, in the private’s embrace. Then he fell. Jenks wrenched his musket free and disappeared.

When I came out of my shock I walked over to the body. The face had been blown off. Shreds of human meat dribbled bloodily on the gray collar and soiled the fashionably long hair. I had killed a man. Through my interference with the past I had killed a man who had been destined to longer life and even some measure of fame. I was the guilty sorcerer’s apprentice.

I stooped down to put my hands inside his coat for papers which would tell me who he was and satisfy the curiosity which still basely persisted. It was not shame which stopped me. Just nausea, and remorse.

* * * * *

I saw the Battle of Gettysburg. I saw it with all the unique advantages of a professional historian thoroughly conversant with the patterns, the movements, the details, who knows where to look for the coming dramatic moment, the recorded decisive stroke. I fulfilled the chroniclers’ dream.

It was a nightmare.

* * * * *

To begin with, I slept. I slept not far from the captain’s body in the peach orchard. This was not callousness, but physical and emotional exhaustion. When I went to sleep the guns were thundering; when I woke they were thundering louder. It was late afternoon. I thought immediately, this is the time for the futile Union charge against the Round Tops.

But the guns were not sounding from there. All the roar was northward, from the town. I knew how the battle went; I had studied it for years. Only now it wasn’t happening the way it was written down in the books.

True, the first day was a Confederate victory. But it was not the victory we knew. It was just a little different, just a little short of the triumph recorded. And on the second day, instead of the Confederates getting astride the Taneytown Road and into the position from which they tore Meade’s army to bits from three sides, I witnessed a terrible encounter in the peach orchard and the wheatfield—places known to be safely behind the Southron lines.

All my life I’d heard of Pickett’s charge on the third day. Of how the disorganized Federals were given the final killing blow in their vitals. Well, I saw Pickett’s charge on the third day and it was not the same charge in the historic place. It was a futile attempt to storm superior positions (positions, by established fact, in Lee’s hands since July First) ending in slaughter and defeat.

Defeat for the South, not the North. Meade’s army was not broken; the Confederates could not scatter and pursue them now. The Capitulation, if it ever took place, would come under different circumstances. The independence of the Confederate States might not be acknowledged for years. If at all.

All because the North held the Round Tops.

Years more of killing, and possibly further years of guerrilla warfare. Thousands and thousands of dead, their blood on my hands. A poisoned continent, an inheritance of hate. Because of me.

I cannot tell you how I got back to York. If I walked, it was somnambulistically. Possibly I rode the railroad or in a farmer’s cart. Part of my mind, a tiny part that kept coming back to pierce me no matter how often I crushed it out, remembered those who died, those who would have lived, but for me. Another part was concerned only with the longing to get back to my own time, to the haven, to Catty. A much larger part was simply blank, except for the awesome, incredible knowledge that the past could be changed—that the past _had_ been changed.

I must have wound my watch—Barbara’s watch—for it was ten oclock on the night of July Fourth when I got to the barn. Ten oclock by 1863 time; the other dial showed it to be 8:40, that would be twenty of nine in the morning, 1952 time. In two hours I would be home, safe from the nightmare of happenings that never happened, of guilt for the deaths of men not supposed to die, of the awful responsibility of playing destiny. If I could not persuade Barbara to smash her damnable contrivance I would do so myself.

The dogs barked madly, but I was sure no one heeded. It was the Fourth of July, and a day of victory and rejoicing for all Pennsylvanians. I stole into the barn and settled myself in the exact center, even daring the use of a match, my last one, to be sure I’d be directly under the reflector when it materialized.

I could not sleep, though I longed to blot out the horror and wake in my own time. Detail by detail I went over what I had seen, superimposing it like a palimpsest upon the history I’d always known. Sleep would have kept me from this wretched compulsion and from questioning my sanity, but I could not sleep.

I have heard that in moments of overwhelming shock some irrelevancy, some inconsequential matter persistently forces itself on the attention. The criminal facing execution thinks, not of his imminent fate or of his crime, but of the cigarette stub he left burning in his cell. The bereaved widow dwells, not on her lost husband, but on tomorrow’s laundry. So it was with me. Behind that part of my mind re-living the past three days, a more elementary part gnawed at the identification of the slain captain.

I knew that face. Particularly did I know that face set in a sneer, distorted with anger. But I could not remember it in Confederate uniform. I could not remember it with sandy mustaches. And yet the sandy, reddish hair, revealed in that terrible moment when his hat flew off, was as familiar as part of the face. Oh, I thought, if I could only place it once and for all and free my mind at least of this trivial thing.

I wished there were some way I could have seen the watch, to concentrate on the creeping progress of the hands and distract myself from the wave after wave of wretched meditations which flowed over me. But the moonlight was not strong enough to make the face distinguishable, much less the figures on the dials. There was no narcotic.

As one always is at such times I was convinced the appointed moment had passed unnoticed. Something had gone wrong. Over and over I had to tell myself that minutes seem hours in the waiting dark; it might feel like two or three in the morning to me; it was probably barely eleven. No use. A minute—or an hour or a second—later I was again positive midnight had passed.

Finally I began to suffer a monstrous illusion. I began to think it was getting lighter. That dawn was coming. Of course I knew it could not be; what I fancied lifting darkness was only a sick condition of swollen, overtired eyes. Dawn does not come to Pennsylvania at midnight, and it was not yet midnight. At midnight I would be back at Haggershaven, in 1952.

Even when the barn was fully lighted by the rising sun and I could see the cattle peaceful in their stalls I refused to believe what I saw. I took out my watch only to find something had disturbed the works; the hands registered five oclock. Even when the farmer, milk pails over arm, started in surprise, exclaiming, “Hay, what you doing here?”—even then, I did not believe.

Only when, as I opened my mouth to explain to my involuntary host, did something happen. The puzzle which had pursued me for three days suddenly solved itself. I knew why the face of the Southron captain had been so familiar. Familiar beyond any of the better known warriors on either side. I had indeed known that face intimately; seen those features enraged or sneering. The nose, the mouth, the eyes, the expression were Barbara Haggerwells’. The man dead in the peach orchard was the man whose portrait hung in the library of Haggershaven, its founder, Herbert Haggerwells. Captain Haggerwells—never to become a major now, or buy this farm. Never to marry a local girl or beget Barbara’s great grandfather. Haggershaven had ceased to exist in the future.

_21._ _FOR THE TIME BEING_

I am writing this, as I said, in 1877. I am a healthy man of forty-five, no doubt with many years ahead of me. I might live to be a hundred, except for an illogical feeling that I must die before 1921. However, eighty-nine should be enough for anyone. So I have ample time to put my story down. Still, better to have it down and done with; should anything happen to me tomorrow it will be on paper.

For what? As confession and apology? As an inverted substitute for the merciful amnesia which ought to have erased my memory as well as my biography? (I have written to Wappinger Falls; there are no records of any Hodgins family, or of Backmakers. Does this mean the forces I set in motion destroyed Private Hodgins as well as Captain Haggerwells? Or only that the Hodginses and Backmakers settled elsewhere? In either case I am like Adam—in this world—a special, parentless creation.) There is no one close enough to care, or intimate enough to accept my word in the face of all reason. I have not married in this time, nor shall I. I write only as old men talk to themselves.

The rest of my personal story is simple. The name of the farmer who found me in his barn was Thammis; they had need of a hired hand and I stayed on. I had no desire to go elsewhere; in fact I could not bear to leave what was—and will never be—Haggershaven.

In the beginning I used to go to the location of the Agati’s garden and look across at the spot where I left our cottage and Catty. It was an empty pilgrimage. Now I content myself with the work which needs doing. I shall stay here till I die.

Catty. Haggershaven. Are they really gone, irrevocably lost, in a future which never existed, which couldnt exist, once the chain of causation was broken? Or do they exist after all, in a universe in which the South won the battle of Gettysburg and Major Haggerwells founded Haggershaven? Could another Barbara devise a means to reach that universe? I would give so much to believe this, but I cannot. I simply cannot.

Children know about such things. They close their eyes and pray, “Please God, make it didnt happen.” Often they open their eyes to find it happened anyway, but this does not shake their faith that many times the prayer is granted. Adults smile, but can any of them be sure the memories they cherish were the same yesterday? Do they _know_ that a past cannot be expunged? Children know it can.

And once lost, that particular past can never be regained. Another and another perhaps, but never the same one. There are no parallel universes—though this one may be sinuous and inconstant.

That this world is a better place than the one into which I was born, and promises to grow still better, seems true. What idealism lay behind the Southron cause triumphed in the reconciliation of men like Lee; what was brutal never got the upper hand as it did in my world. The Negro is free; black legislatures pass advanced laws in South Carolina; black congressmen comport themselves with dignity in Washington. The Pacific railroad is built, immigrants pour in to a welcoming country to make it strong and wealthy; no one suggests they should be shut out or hindered.

There are rumors of a deal between northern Republicans and southern Democrats, betraying the victory of the Civil War—how strange it is still, after fourteen years, to use this term instead of the familiar War of Southron Independence—in return for the presidency. If this is true, my brave new world is not so brave.

It may not be so new either. Prussia has beaten France and proclaimed a German Empire; is this the start in a different way of the German Union? Will 1914 see an Emperors’ War—there is none in France now—leaving Germany facing ... whom?

Any one of the inventions of my own time would make me a rich man if I could reproduce them, or cared for money. With mounting steel production and the tremendous jump in population, what a success the minible would be. Or the tinugraph. Or controllable balloons.