"I don't believe we've met."
They talked, thereafter, for hours ... long into the night; undisturbed by the passage of time, not distracted, at least not very badly distracted, by the recurrent pangs of the unsated supper appetite; exchanging small bits of unhappiness in their separate lots, and each sympathizing heartily and hopelessly with the misfortunes of the other like two long-lost souls—as indeed they were.
The upshot of it was that they resolved to meet again in the same manner when the conditions of their separate lives permitted, and to this end they set a series of future dates, calculated to find the disembodied man—whose name turned out to be Jones—at liberty to manipulate the forbidden Time mechanism of his age at an hour when his workshop was deserted, and when Harbinger might be expected to be at home after the day's job hunting—a prospect from which he shrank—or a day's work, if he should be fortunate enough to ever get another job.
A possibility he doubted, due to the precipitate, not to say frank, or even to say vulgar, now that he thought of it, manner in which he had informed his previous employer of his decision to resign.
But, meet they did, from time to time, and they had many good laughs over the pun in that one. When it came to puns, Jones was pretty adept and it was a puzzle to Mr. Harbinger how the language had changed so little in a hundred and fifty years.
Jones cleared that up by explaining that the status quo in everything from contraceptives to slang had been rigidly maintained and enforced for nearly all that time, beginning with the great Scholars' Debate in the U.N. in 1971.
Eventually, a night came when Jones greeted Mr. Harbinger with startling news. "I don't know whether it had occurred to you," he said slowly, "but I could arrange, I think, for you to get a job up here in good old Two Thousand and Ninety Four if you wanted me to."
Jones said it slowly, for he had found that such novel ideas were apt to throw Mr. Harbinger into an attack of jingling nerves by virtue of their very novelty; a commodity he found a very hot thing to handle.
"My word!" Mr. Harbinger said, at length. "What on Earth would I do up there? And how about identification, and all that?"
Now that he had somewhat assimilated the idea, details passed rapidly through his head, spinning as it was now with the mystery of the even suggested possibility of him ... HIM, Henry Harbinger, taking a jaunt in Time. Oh, the ideas, the details came, but, for a few moments he was too carried away with the ROMANCE of it all to grasp at them, to do more than allow the 'gasping Juan,' the 'sinking Flynn,' the 'distant Da Vinci' to reverse themselves for an instant and show small signs of inner life.