W. J. Born grunted: 'If I knew I wouldn't tell you. You've got no business in the market. Not if you think you can play it like a craps table.'
He fumed all through his taxi ride to the office. Sam, a million Sams, had no business in the market. But they were in, and they had built up the Great Boom of 1975 on which W. J. Born Associates was coasting merrily along. For how long? His ulcer twinged again at the thought.
He arrived at 9:15. Already the office was a maelstrom. The clattering tickers, blinking boards, and racing messengers spelled out the latest, hottest word from markets in London, Paris, Milan, Vienna. Soon New York would chime in, then Chicago, then San Francisco.
Maybe this would be the day. Maybe New York would open on a significant decline in Moon Mining and Smelting. Maybe Chicago would nervously respond with a slump in commodities and San Francisco's Utah Uranium would plummet in sympathy. Maybe panic in the Tokyo Exchange on the heels of the alarming news from the States—panic relayed across Asia with the rising sun to Vienna, Milan, Paris, London, and crashing like a shockwave into the opening New York market again.
Dominoes, W. J. Born thought. A row of dominoes. Flick one and they all topple in a heap. Maybe this would be the day.
Miss Illig had a dozen calls from his personal crash-priority clients penciled in on his desk pad already. He ignored them and said into her good-morning smile: 'Get me Mr. Loring on the phone.'
Loring's phone rang and rang while W. J. Born boiled inwardly. But the lab was a barn of a place, and when he was hard at work he was deaf and blind to distractions. You had to hand him that. He was screwy, he was insolent, he had an inferiority complex that stuck out a yard, but he was a worker.
Loring's insolent voice said in his ear: 'Who's this?'
'Born,' he snapped. 'How's it going?'
There was a long pause, and Loring said casually: 'I worked all night. I think I got it licked.'
'What do you mean?'
Very irritated: 'I said I think I got it licked. I sent a clock and a cat and a cage of white mice out for two hours. They came back okay.'
'You mean—' W. J. Born began hoarsely, and moistened his lips. 'How many years?' he asked evenly.
'The mice didn't say, but I think they spent two hours in 1977.'
'I'm coming right over,' W. J. Born snapped, and hung up. His office staff stared as he strode out.
If the man was lying—! No; he didn't lie. He'd been sopping up money for six months, ever since he bulled his way into Bern's office with his time machine project, but he hadn't lied once. With brutal frankness he had admitted his own failures and his doubts that the thing ever would be made to work. But now, W. J. Born rejoiced, it had turned into the smartest gamble of his career. Six months and a quarter of a million dollars—a two-year forecast on the market was worth a billion! Four thousand to one, he gloated; four thousand to one! Two hours to learn when the Great Bull Market of 1975 would collapse and then back to his office armed with the information, ready to buy up to the very crest of the boom and then get out at the peak, wealthy forever, forever beyond the reach of fortune, good or bad!
He stumped upstairs to Loring's loft in the West Seventies.
Loring was badly overplaying the role of casual roughneck. Gangling, redheaded, and unshaved, he grinned at Born and said: 'Wat-cha think of soy futures, W. J.? Hold or switch?'
W. J. Born began automatically: 'If I knew I wouldn't—oh, don't be silly.
Show me the confounded thing.'
Loring showed him. The whining generators were unchanged; the tall Van de Graaf accumulator still looked like something out of a third-rate horror movie. The thirty square feet of haywired vacuum tubes and resistances were still an incomprehensible tangle. But since his last visit a phone booth without a phone had been added. A sheet- copper disk set into its ceiling was connected to the machinery by a ponderous cable. Its floor was a slab of polished glass.
'That's it,' Loring said. 'I got it at a junkyard and fixed it up pretty. You want to watch a test on the mice?'
'No,' W. J. Born said. 'I want to try it myself. What do you think I've been paying you for?' He paused. 'Do you guarantee its safety?'
'Look, W. J.,' Loring said, 'I guarantee nothing. I think this will send you two years into the future. I think if you're back in it at the end of two hours you'll snap back to the present. I'll tell you this, though. If it does send you into the future, you had better be back in it at the end of two hours. Otherwise you may snap back into the same space as a strolling pedestrian or a moving car—and an H-bomb will be out of your league.'
W. J. Bern's ulcer twinged. With difficulty he asked: 'Is there anything else I ought to know?'
'Nope,' Loring said after considering for a moment. 'You're just a paying passenger.'
'Then let's go.' W. J. Born checked to make sure that he had his memorandum book and smooth-working pen in his pocket and stepped into the telephone booth.
Loring closed the door, grinned, waved, and vanished—literally vanished, while Born was looking at him.
Born yanked the door open and said: 'Loring! What the devil—' And then he saw that it was late afternoon instead of early morning. That Loring was nowhere in the loft. That the generators were silent and the tubes dark and cold. That there was a mantle of dust and a faint musty smell.
He rushed from the big room and down the stairs. It was the same street in the West Seventies. Two hours, he thought, and looked at his watch. It said 9:55, but the sun unmistakably said it was late afternoon.
Something had happened. He resisted an impulse to grab a passing high-school boy and ask him what year it was. There was a newsstand down the street, and Born went to it faster than he had moved in years.
He threw down a quarter and snatched a Post, dated September 11th, 1977. He had done it.
Eagerly he riffled to the Post's meager financial page. Moon Mining and Smelting had opened at 27. Uranium at 19. United Com at 24.
Catastrophic lows! The crash had come!
He looked at his watch again, in panic. 9:59. It had said 9:55. He'd have to be back in the phone booth by 11:55 or—he shuddered. An H-bomb would be out of his league.
Now to pinpoint the crash. 'Cab!' he yelled, waving his paper. It eased to the curb. 'Public library,' W. J. Born grunted, and leaned back to read the Post with glee.
The headline said: 25000 RIOT HERE FOR UPPED JOBLESS DOLE.
Naturally; naturally. He gasped as he saw who had won the 1976
presidential election. Lord, what odds he'd be able to get back in 1975 if he wanted to bet on the nomination! NO CRIME WAVE, SAYS
COMISSIONER. Things hadn't changed very much after all. BLONDE
MODEL HACKED IN TUB; MYSTERY BOYFRIEND SOUGHT. He read that one all the way through, caught by a two-column photo of the blonde model for a hosiery account. And then he noticed that the cab wasn't moving. It was caught in a rock-solid traffic jam. The time was 10:05.
'Driver,' he said.
The man turned around, soothing and scared. A fare was a fare; there was a depression on. 'It's all right, mister. We'll be out of here in a minute. They turn off the Drive and that blocks the avenue for a couple of minutes, that's all. We'll be rolling in a minute.'
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?'
