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Chaney picked up a towel and his shaving kit and went to the showers. The snoring was audible all the
way down the corridor.
The cold water was _cold_ but the hot water was only a few degrees warmer--barely enough to
feel a difference. Chaney came out of the shower, wrapped a towel about his middle and began rubbing
lather on his face.
"Stop!" Arthur Saltus was in the doorway, pointing an accusatory finger. "Put down the razor,
civilian."
Startled, Chaney dropped the razor into the bowl of tepid water. "Good morning, Commander."
He recovered his wits and the razor to begin the shave. "Why?"
"Secret orders came in the middle of the night," Saltus declared. "All the people of the future wear
long beards, like old Abe Lincoln. We must be in character."
"Nudists with bushy beards," Chaney commented. "That must be quite a sight." He kept on
shaving.
"Well, you bit hard yesterday, civilian." Saltus put an exploratory hand under the shower and
turned on the water. He had anticipated the result. "This hasn't changed since boot camp," he told
Chaney. "Every barracks is allotted ten gallons of hot water. The first man in uses it all."
"I _thought_ this was a barracks."
"This building? It must have been at one time or another, but the station wasn't always a military
post. I spotted that coming in. Katrina said it was built as an ordnance plant in 1941--you know, during
_that_ war." He stepped under the shower. "That was--what? Thirtyseven years ago? Time flies and the
mice have been at work."
"That other building is new."
"The lab building is brand new. Katrina said it was built to house that noisy machine--built to last
forever. Reinforced concrete all the way down; a basement, and a sub-basement, and other things. The
vehicle is down there somewhere hauling monkeys back and forth."
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"I'd like to _see_ that damned thing."
"You and me together, civilian. You and me and the Major." His head popped out of the shower
and his voice dropped to a stage whisper. "But I've got it figured."
"You have? What?"
"Promise you won't tell Katrina? You won't tell the man in the White House I broke security?"
"Cross my heart, spit at the moon and everything."
"All right: all this is a plot, a trick to be ahead of everybody else. Katrina has been misleading us,
We're not going up to the turn of the century--we're going back down, back into history!"
"Back? Why?"
"We're going back two thousand years, civilian. To grab those old scrolls of yours, pirate them, as
if they _were_ classified or something. We're going to sneak in there some dark night, find a batch of
them in some cave or other and copy them. Photograph them. _That's_ why we're using cameras. And
meanwhile, you'll be using a recorder, making tapes of the location and the like. Maybe you could unroll
a parchment or two and read off the titles, so we'll know if we have anything important."
"But they seldom have titles."
Saltus was stopped. "Why not?"
"Titles just weren't important at the time."
"Well--no matter; we'll make do, we'll just copy everything we can find and sort them out later.
And when we're finished we'll put everything back the way we found it and make our escape." Saltus
snapped his fingers to indicate a job well done and went back into the shower.
"Is that all?"
"That's enough for us--we've scooped the world! And a long time afterward--you know, whatever
year it was--some shepherd will stumble into the cave and find them in the usual way. Nobody but us will
be the wiser."
Chaney wiped his face dry. "How do we get into the Palestine of two thousand years ago? Cross
the Atlantic in a canoe?"
"No, no, we don't ride backwards _first_, civilian--not here, not in Illinois. If we did that we'd
have to fight our way though Indians! Look, now: the Bureau of Standards will ship the vehicle over there
in a couple of weeks, after we've had our field trials. They'll pack it in a box marked _Agricultural
Machinery_, or some such thing, and smuggle it in like everybody else does. How do you think the
Egyptians got that baby bomb into Israel? By sending it parcel post?"
Chaney said: "Fantastic."
A face emerged from the shower. "Are you being disagreeable, civilian?"
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"I'm being skeptical, sailor."
"Spoil-sport!"
"Why would we want to copy the scrolls?"
"To be first."
"Why that?"
Saltus stepped all the way out of the shower.
"Well--to be _first_, that's all. We like to be first in everything. Where's your patriotism, civilian?"
"I carry it in my pocket. How do we copy the scrolls in the dark, in a cave?"
"Now that's my department! Infra-red equipment, of course. Don't fret about the technical end,
mister. I'm an old cameraman, you know."
"I didn't know."
"Well, I _was_ a cameraman, a working cameraman, when I was an EM. Do you remember the
Gemini flights about thirteen or fourteen years ago?"
I remember.
"I was right there on deck, mister. Photographer's apprentice, stationed on the _Wasp_ when the
flights began; I manned the deck cameras on some of those early flights in 1964, but when the last one
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