Time Waits for Winthrop by William Tenn Page B

resignation. The sentient, eager-to-serve sidewalks didn’t bother him, either. He had expected something like that in the future, that and the enormously alert servitor houses, the clothes which changed their color and cut at the wearer’s caprice—all more or less, in one form or another, to be anticipated by a knowledgeable man as human progress.
    Even the development in food—from the wiggling please-eat-me-and-enjoy-me stuff all the way up to the more complex culinary compositions on which an interstellarly famous chef might have worked for a year or more—was logical, if you considered how bizarre, to an early American colonist, would be the fantastic, cosmopolitan variety of potables and packaged meals in any twentieth-century supermarket.
    These things, the impedimenta of daily life, all change and modify in time. But
certain
things should not.
    When the telegram had arrived in Houston, Texas, informing him that—of all the people in the United States of America—he was most similar to one of the prospective visitors from 2458 A.D., he had gone almost mad with joy. The celebrity he suddenly enjoyed in the faculty lunchroom was unimportant, as were the page-one stories in local newspapers under the heading: LONE STAR SON GALLOPING FUTURE-WARD.
    First and foremost, it was reprieve—reprieve and another chance. Family responsibilities—a dying father and a sick younger sister—had prevented him from getting the advanced academic degrees necessary for a university teaching position, with all its accompanying prestige, higher income to and opportunities for research. Then, when they had come to an end and he had gone back to school, a sudden infatuation and too-hasty marriage had thrown him back onto the same treadmill.
    He had just begun to realize—despite the undergraduate promise he had shown and none-too-minute achievement—how thoroughly he was trapped by the pleasant residential neighborhood and cleanly modern high school between which he shuttled daily, when the telegram arrived, announcing his selection as one of the group to be sent five hundred years ahead. How it was going to help him, what, precisely, he would do with the chance, he did not know—but it had lifted him out of the ruck of anonymity. Somehow, someway, it would enable him to become a striking individual at last.
    D ave Pollock had not realized the extent of his good fortune until he met the other four in Washington, D.C. He had heard, of course, how the finest minds in the country had bitterly jostled and elbowed each other in a frenzied attempt to get into the group and find out what was going to develop in
their specialty
half a millennium hence. But not until he had talked with his prospective fellow-tourists—an itinerant worker, a Bronx housewife, a pompous Midwestern business executive, a pretty but very ordinary San Francisco stenographer—did it come to him that he alone had any amount of scientific training.
    Only he would be capable of evaluating the amount of major technological advance! He would be the only one able to correlate all the bewildering mass of minor changes into something resembling coherence! And thus, above all, he would be the only one to appreciate the essential quality of the future, the basic threads that would run through it from its underlying social fabric to its starleaping fringes!
    He, who had wanted to devote his life to knowledge-seeking, would exist for two weeks, unique and intellectually alone, in a five-century-long extrapolation of every laboratory and library in his age!
    At first, it
had
been like that. Everywhere there was glory and excitement and discovery. Then little disagreeable things began to creep in. The food, the clothing, the houses—well, you either ignored them or made other arrangements. These people were extremely hospitable and quite ingenious: they didn’t at all mind providing you with more familiar meals when your stomach had revolted a couple of times. The women,