A hundred other parallel speculations raced through her mind without interfering with her rapid and insatiable survey of the commonplace features of the barn, features which could never really be commonplace to her since they proved all her speculations so victoriously right.
Suddenly she shivered with the bitter cold and burst into teeth-chattering laughter. She had made such careful plans to visit on the First of January—and had never thought to take along a warm coat.
She looked at her watch; only twenty seconds had passed. The temptation to defy her agreement with Ace not to step outside the tiny circle of HX-1’s operating field on the initial experiment was almost irresistible. She longed to touch the fabric of the past, to feel the worn boards of the barn, to handle as well as look. Again her thoughts whirled with speculation; again the petty moment stretched and contracted. She spent eternity and instantaneity at once.
Suppose.... But she had a thousand suppositions and questions. Was she really herself in the flesh, or in some mental projection? A pinch would do no good; that might be projection also. Would she be visible to the people of the time, or was she a ghost from the future? Oh, there was so much to learn, so much to encounter!
When the moment of return came, she again experienced the feeling of dissolution, followed immediately by the light. When she opened her eyes she was back.
Midbin rubbed his belly and then his thinning hair. “Hallucination,” he propounded at last; “a logical, consistent hallucination. Answer to an overriding wish.”
“You mean Barbara was never gone?” asked Ace. “Was she visible to you—or Mr H or Hodge—during that minute?” “Illusion,” said Midbin; “group illusion brought on by suggestion and anxiety.”
“Nonsense,” exclaimed Barbara. “Unless youre accusing Ace and me of faking youll have to account for what you just called the logical consistency of it. Your group illusion and my individual hallucination fitting so neatly together.”
Midbin recovered some of his poise. “The two phenomena are separate, connected only by some sort of emotional hypnosis. Certainly your daydream of having been back in 1900 is an emotionally induced aberration.”
“And your daydream that I wasn’t here for a minute?”