Free Time Waits for Winthrop by William Tenn Page A

control of himself, that once more he was looking upon her as an intriguing but—culturally speaking—extremely distant specimen.
    She knew only too well what was happening: she’d been on the other end of this kind of situation once or twice herself. Just two months ago, a smooth salesman who handled the Nevada territory for her company had taken her out on a date and almost swept her off her feet. Just as she’d reached the point where the wine in her brain was filled with bubbles of starlight, she’d taken out a cigarette and dreamily, helplessly, asked him for a light. The salesman had clicked a lighter at her in an assured and lordly gesture, but the lighter had failed to work. He had cursed, clicked it futilely a few more times, then had begun picking at the mechanism madly with his fingernails.
    I n the next few moments, as he continued to claw at the lighter, it had seemed to Mary Ann that the glossy surface of his personality developed an enormous fissure along its entire length and all the underlying desperation that was essentially him looked out. He was no longer a glamorous, successful and warmly persuasive young man, but a pathetically driven creature who was overpoweringly uncertain, afraid that if one item in his carefully prepared presentation missed its place on the schedule, the sale would not take place.
    And it didn’t. When he’d looked at her again, he saw the cool comprehension in her eyes. His lips sagged. And no matter how he tried to recapture the situation, how cleverly he talked, how many oceans of sparkling urgency he washed over her, she was his master now. She had seen through his magic to the unhooded yellow light bulbs which made it work.
    She remembered feeling somewhat sorry for him as she’d asked him to take her home—not sorrow for someone with whom she’d almost fallen in love, but slight sorrow for a handicapped child (someone else’s handicapped child) who had tried to do something utterly beyond his ability.
    Was that what Gygyo was feeling for her now? With brimming anger and despair, Mary Ann felt she had to reach him again, reach him very personally. She had to wipe off that smile of his.
    “Of course,” she said, selecting the first weapon that came to hand, “it won’t do
you
any good if Winthrop doesn’t go back with us.”
    He looked at her questioningly. “Me?”
    “Well, if Winthrop doesn’t go back, we’ll be stuck here. And if we’re stuck here, the people from Your time who are visiting ours will be stuck in the twentieth century. You’re the temporal supervisor—you might get fired from your job.”
    “My dear little Mary Ann! Getting fired—what a concept! Next you’ll be telling me I’m liable to have my ears cropped!”
    To her chagrin, he chuckled all over.
    “Don’t you even
feel
responsible? Don’t you feel
anything
?”
    “Well, whatever I feel, it certainly isn’t responsibility. The five people from this century who volunteered to make the trip back to yours were well-educated, extremely alert, highly responsible human beings. They knew they were running risks.”
    S he rose agitatedly. “But how were they to know that Winthrop was going to be stubborn? And how could we know that?”
    “Even assuming that the possibility entered nobody’s mind,” he pointed out, tugging at her arm gently until she sat down beside him again, “one has to admit, in all reason, that transferring to a period five centuries away must be accompanied by certain dangers. Not being able to return is one of them. Then one has to further admit that, this being so, one or more of the people making the transfer recognized this danger and—at least unconsciously—wished to subject themselves to its consequences.
    If that is at all the situation, interference would be a major crime, not only against Winthrop’s conscious desires, but against such people’s unconscious motivations as well—and both have almost equal weight in the ethics of our period.