ed, and filling my stolen clothes a bit better, I walked to the recorder's office and spent the rest of the morning looking up old documents. There was nothing there for Krasnow, as I had expected. But for me there was a very pretty file clerk. Talking to her, I verified my impression that human instincts and relationships were much the same in this dimension as in my own—except in the one basic respect that interested Krasnow, of course.
The file clerk and I lunched together and then I spent the afternoon in the library. But I didn't find anything there, either, and then I had dinner with her. She said her name was Julie. I told her mine was Heck, for Hector, which it is. She thought this was "awfully cute" and we got along fine.
Julie had a delightful apartment and a matching sense of hospitality. The following day, when she went to work, I stayed home and washed the dishes and made the bed and used the telephone.
I ran up quite a bill with my long-distance calls, but I found out what I needed to know. I impressed a lot of people with my elephant story and pretended to be impressed hardly at all with what they told me they did—although often I was, very much.
The trouble with these people is that they no longer know how to lie, if that can be listed as trouble. I don't think it can. Neither did Krasnow, obviously. He'd never have sent me off on my expensive side-trip if he had.
Of course, Krasnow looked at it objectively. What he wanted from Timeline Seventeen Point Zero Eight was not for himself. It was for everybody else. He wanted the formula for the truth gas these people had developed long ago and loosed upon their world to put a stop to wars.
They had been in a bad way, although no worse than the sort of problem we were up against. Their trans-ocean squabbles and power politics seemed to have settled into a pattern of a war or two per generation. Just like us. Hence, the man who invented the truth gas became a global hero, after a certain amount of cynicism and skepticism. All the doubts vanished, naturally, once the gas got to working. And so did war.
