Our Children's Children by Clifford D. Simak Read Free Book Online Page A

it very difficult for you to settle there?”
    â€œWe came here blind, of course,” said Gale. “But that was different, We had fairly good historic evidence. We knew what we would find. You can’t be as certain when you deal with time spans covering millions of years. But we think we have an answer fairly well worked out. Our physicists and other scientists have developed, at least theoretically, a means of communication through a time tunnel. We hope to be able to send through an advance party that can explore the situation and then report back to us.
    â€œOne thing I have not explained is that, as we have it developed now, our time travel capability is in one direction only. We can go into the past; we cannot move futureward. So, if any advance party is sent back and finds the situation untenable, they have no recourse other than to stay there. Our great fear is that we may have to keep readjusting the destination of the tunnels and may have to send out, and abandon, several advance parties. We hope not, of course, but it is a possibility, and if necessary it will be done. Our people, gentlemen, are quite prepared to face such a situation. We have men up in your future guarding the tunnel heads who do not expect to travel through the tunnels. They are well aware that there will come a time when each tunnel must be destroyed and that they and whoever else may not have made it through the tunnels must then face death.
    â€œI don’t tell you this to enlist your sympathy. I only say it to assure you that whatever dangers there may be we are quite willing, ourselves, to face. We shall not call upon you for more than you are willing to give. We shall be grateful, of course, for anything that you may do.”
    â€œKindly as I may feel toward you,” said the Secretary of State, “and much as I am disposed, short of a certain natural skepticism, to believe what you have told us, I am considerably puzzled by some of the implications. What is happening now, right here this minute, will become a matter of historical record. It stands to reason that it now becomes a part of history that you read up in the future. So you knew before you started how it all came out. You would have had to know.”
    â€œNo,” said Gale, “we did not know. It was not in our history. It hadn’t, strange as it may sound, happened yet.…”
    â€œBut it had,” said Sandburg. “It must have.”
    â€œNow,” said Gale, “you are getting into an area that I do not understand at all, philosophical and physical concepts, strangely intertwined and, so far as I am concerned, impossible of any real understanding. It is something that our scientific community gave a lot of thought to. At first we asked ourselves if it lay within our right to change history, to go back into the past and introduce factors that would change the course of events. We wondered what effects such history changing would have and what would happen to the history that we already have. But now we are told that it will have no effect at all upon the history that already has been laid down. I know all this must sound impossible to you and I admit that I don’t fully understand all the factors myself. The human race passed this way once before, when our ancestors were moving futureward and this thing that is happening now did not happen then. So the human race moved up to our future and the alien invaders came. Now we come back to escape the aliens and this event now is happening, history has been changed and from this moment forward nothing will be quite the same. History has been changed, but not our history, not the history that led forward to the moment that we left. Your history has been changed. By our action you are on another time track. Whether on this second time track the aliens will attack, we cannot be sure, but the indications are they will.…”
    â€œThis,” said Douglas flatly, “is a