He rose, and they shook hands. A man of about his own age, smooth-faced, partially bald. Chalmers tried to guess something of the man’s nature from his face, but could read nothing. A face well trained to keep its owner’s secrets.
“Something to smoke, Professor,” he began, offering his cigarette case.
“My pipe, if you don’t mind.” He got it out and filled it.
“Any of those chairs,” Hauserman said, gesturing toward them.
They were all arranged to face the desk. He sat down, lighting his pipe. Hauserman nodded approvingly; he was behaving calmly, and didn’t need being put at ease. They talked at random—at least, Hauserman tried to make it seem so—for some time about his work, his book about the French Revolution, current events. He picked his way carefully through the conversation, alert for traps which the psychiatrist might be laying for him. Finally, Hauserman said:
“Would you mind telling me just why you felt it advisable to request a psychiatric examination, Professor?”
“I didn’t request it. But when the suggestion was made, by one of my friends, in reply to some aspersions of my sanity, I agreed to it.”
“Good distinction. And why was your sanity questioned? I won’t deny that I had heard of this affair, here, before Mr. Dacre called me, last evening, but I’d like to hear your version of it.”
He went into that, from the original incident in Modern History IV, choosing every word carefully, trying to concentrate on making a good impression upon Hauserman, and at the same time finding that more “memories” of the future were beginning to seep past the barrier of his consciousness. He tried to dam them back; when he could not, he spoke with greater and greater care lest they leak into his speech.
“I can’t recall the exact manner in which I blundered into it. The fact that I did make such a blunder was because I was talking extemporaneously and had wandered ahead of my text. I was trying to show the results of the collapse of the Ottoman Empire after the First World War, and the partition of the Middle East into a loose collection of Arab states, and the passing of British and other European spheres of influence following the Second. You know, when you consider it, the Islamic Caliphate was inevitable; the surprising thing is that it was created by a man like Khalid. …”
He was talking to gain time, and he suspected that Hauserman knew it. The “memories” were coming into his mind more and more strongly; it was impossible to suppress them. The period of anarchy following Khalid’s death would be much briefer, and much more violent, than he had previously thought. Tallal ib’n Khalid would be flying from England even now; perhaps he had already left the plane to take refuge among the black tents of his father’s Bedouins. The revolt at Damascus would break out before the end of the month; before the end of the year, the whole of Syria and Lebanon would be in bloody chaos, and the Turkish army would be on the march.
“Yes. And you allowed yourself to be carried a little beyond the present moment, into the future, without realizing it? Is that it?”
“Something like that,” he replied, wide awake to the trap Hauserman had set, and fearful that it might be a blind, to disguise the real trap. “History follows certain patterns. I’m not a Toynbean, by any manner of means, but any historian can see that certain forces generally tend to produce similar effects. For instance, space travel is now a fact; our government has at present a military base on Luna. Within our lifetimes—certainly within the lifetimes of my students—there will be explorations and attempts at colonization on Mars and Venus. You believe that, Doctor?”
“Oh, unreservedly. I’m not supposed to talk about it, but I did some work on the Philadelphia Project, myself. I’d say that every major problem of interplanetary flight had been solved before the first robot rocket was landed on Luna.”
“Yes. And when Mars and Venus are colonized, there will be the same historic situations, at least in general shape, as arose when the European powers were colonizing the New World, or, for that matter, when the Greek city-states were throwing out colonies across the Aegean. That’s the sort of thing we call projecting the past into the future through the present.”
Hauserman nodded. “But how about the details? Things like the assassination of a specific personage. How can you extrapolate to a thing like that?”
“Well. …” More “memories” were coming to the surface; he tried to crowd them back. “I do my projecting in what you might call fictionalized form; try to fill in the details from imagination. In the case of Khalid, I was trying to imagine what would happen if his influence were suddenly removed from Near Eastern and Middle Eastern, affairs. I suppose I constructed an imaginary scene of his assassination. …”
He went on at length. Mohammed and Noureed were common enough names. The Middle East was full of old U.S. weapons. Stoning was the traditional method of execution; it diffused responsibility so that no individual could be singled out for blood-feud vengeance.
“You have no idea how disturbed I was when the whole thing happened, exactly as I had described it,” he continued. “And worst of all, to me, was this Intelligence officer showing up; I thought I was really in for it!”
“Then you’ve never really believed that you had real knowledge of the future?”
“I’m beginning to, since I’ve been talking to these Psionics and Parapsychology people,” he laughed. It sounded, he hoped, like a natural and unaffected laugh. “They seem to be convinced that I have.”
There would be
