Time Waits for Winthrop by William Tenn

a finger to help us get back to our own time and our own families—and we can’t help ourselves. A brave new world, all right. Real achievement. Real progress.”
    “I don’t see what call you have to shoot your mouth off, young man,” Mr. Mead growled from where he was sitting at the far end of the room. Periodically, his necktie curled upward and tried to nuzzle against his lips; wearily, petulantly, he slapped it down again. “At least
we
tried to do something about it. That’s more than you can say.”
    “Ollie, old boy, I may not pay a whopping income tax, but I’ve been trained to use my mind. I’d like nothing better than to find out what a thoroughly rational approach to this problem could do for us. One thing I know—it can’t possibly come up with less than all this hysteria and emotional hoopla, this executive-type strutting have managed to date.”
    “Listen, a difference it makes?” Mrs. Brucks held her wrist out and pointed to the tiny goldplated watch strapped around it. “Only forty-five minutes left before six o’clock. So what can we do in forty-five minutes? A miracle maybe we can manufacture on short notice? Magic we can turn out to order? Go fight City Hall. My Sammy I know I won’t see again.”
    The thin young man turned on her angrily. “I’m not talking of magic and miracles. I’m talking of logic. Logic and the proper evaluation of data. These people not only have a historical record available to them that extends back to and includes our own time, but they are in regular touch with the future—their future. That means there are also historical records that extend back to and include
their
time.”
    Mrs. Brucks cheered up perceptibly. She liked listening to education. “So?”
    “Isn’t it obvious? Those five people who exchanged with us must have known in advance that Winthrop was going to be stubborn. It stands to reason they wouldn’t want to spend the rest of their lives in what is for them a pretty raw and uncivilized environment—unless they had known of a way out. It’s up to us to find that way.”
    “Maybe,” Mary Ann Carthington suggested, bravely biting the end off a sniffle, “maybe the next future kept it a secret from them. Or maybe all five of them were suffering from what they call here a bad case of individual eccentric impulse.”
    “That’s not how the concept of individual eccentric impulse works. I don’t want to go into it now, but
believe me
, that’s not how it works! And I don’t think the Temporal Embassies keep this kind of secret from the people in the period to which they’re accredited. No, I tell you the solution is right here, if we can only see it.”
    O liver T. Mead had been sitting with an intent expression on his face, as if he were trying to locate a fact hidden at the other end of a long tunnel of unhappiness. He straightened up suddenly and said: “Storku mentioned the Temporal Embassy! But he didn’t think it was a good idea to approach them—they were too involved with long-range historical problems to be of any use to us. But something else he said—something else we could resort to. What was it now?”
    They all waited anxiously while he thought. Dave Pollock had just begun a remark about “high-surtax memories” when the rotund executive smacked his thigh resoundingly.
    “I remember! He said we could ask the Oracle Machine! We might have some difficulty interpreting the answer, according to him, but at this point that’s the least of our worries. We’re in a desperate emergency and beggars can’t be choosers. If we get any kind of answer, any kind of answer at all—”
    Mary Ann Carthington looked away from the little cosmetics laboratory she was using to repair the shiny damage caused by tears. “Now that you bring it up, Mr. Mead, the temporal supervisor made some such remark to me, too. About the Oracle Machine, I mean.”
    “He did? Good! That firms it up nicely. We may still have a chance. Well, then, as