("Oh Lord," Blackburn whispered.)
"Another small point. I hate to verbalize the obvious like this but it clears the ground, don't you think? I realize you two might like to traipse back through time and have a friendly chat with, say, Mike Faraday. But that's exactly what you can't do. You know a little too much about time machines. He'd pick your brains in half an afternoon and beat you back to your own office. As I say that's only a nuance. It's a nuance that eliminates 75% of all time travel science fiction ever written but that's still only a nuance, wait till I get to the Great Implication."
It was a curious word for him to have used—nuance—because six months later in Dr. Freylinghuysen's office Blackburn and Shaheen were to tangle over the nuance of blue versus green, a matter of observation which compared in subtlety to apples versus bananas, Shaheen saying heatedly: "The dress was blue. I'm not color blind and I have twenty-twenty vision. I'll stake my reputation as an experimental physicist on it." Blue! And this was a lucid well defined statement of his position, a statement rivaled in lucidity only by that of Blackburn who had in all sincerity to insist that the dress was blue—but only 10:31 that morning at which time it turned green; and if that wasn't bad enough a panting red faced chaplain Rowan had to dash in, carefully locking the door behind him and taking out a huge swatch of dress which he plunked down on the desk shouting: "Green, green, green! Green as the envious devils of hell! Green I say! Green before, green after, green for eternity!"
"I think, in spite of all," Blackburn remarked, "you've managed to find a way."
"No, but that's interesting," Shaheen said. "Semantically, anyway. I will did. Curious."
"A grammatical revolution!" Pendelton was telling them that first day. "I do, I did do, I will do. I have done, I will have done. I do, I did do, I will do. I have done, I will have done, I should have done, I will did! They're all the same now! So you see, I'm not really wasting your time. The future and the past are now united in a fantastic tenseless embrace. At some time in the future I can in the past save Caesar's life. Thus, there being no more future and past, how can I be wasting your time?"
"More than curious," Pendelton replied. "Practical. The Greeks as you may know thought that no man could be sure he had a happy life until it was over. I on the other hand assert that Caesar's assassination is still in doubt because of the future-past equivalence, that he has not yet successfully crossed the Rubicon, that he is still swimming to the Alexandrian lighthouse, that he is not yet emperor of a Rome that has not yet fallen! Not emperor and yet ... emperor. Not yet fallen and yet ... fallen and gone like—what? The wind? No, not even the wind. Nothing is gone, it's all still there moiling and seething around in temporal abeyance. Waiting to be resolved! Give me a time machine and I can mold every second of Caesar's existence and, incidentally, by extension, my own. The Greeks therefore were wrong. A man can no longer be sure he was happy even when he's dead!"
Blackburn leaned back in his chair and inquired blandly: "Did we get to the great implication yet?"