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  Barbara was alone. Her ginger hair gleamed in the light of a gas globe; her eyes were green as they were when she was exultant. “Well, Hodge?”

  “Well, Barbara, I . . .”

  “Have you told Catty?”

  “Not exactly. How did you know?”

  “I knew before you did, Hodge. All right. How long do you want to stay?”

  “Four days.”

  “That’s long for a first trip. Don’t you think you’d better try a few sample minutes?”

  “Why? I’ve seen you and Ace go often enough and heard your accounts. I’ll take care of myself. Have you got it down fine enough yet so you can pick the hour of arrival?”

  “Hour and minute,” she answered confidently. “What’ll it be?”

  “About midnight of June 30, 1863,” I answered. “I want to come back on the night of July Fourth.”

  “You’ll have to be more exact than that. For the return, I mean. The dials are set on seconds.”

  “All right, make it midnight going and coming then.”

  “Have you a watch that keeps perfect time?”

  “Well, I don’t know about perfect—”

  “Take this one. It’s synchronized with the master control clock.” She handed me a large, rather awkward timepiece, which had two independent faces side by side. “We had two made like this; the two dials were useful before we were able to control HX-1 so exactly. One shows 1952 Haggershaven time.”

  “Ten thirty-three and fourteen seconds,” I said.

  “Yes. The other will show 1863 time. You won’t be able to reset the first dial—but for goodness sake remember to keep it wound—and set the second for . . . 11:54, zero. That means in six minutes you’ll leave—to arrive at midnight. Remember to keep that one wound too, for you’ll go by that regardless of variations in local clocks. Whatever else happens, be in the center of the barn at midnight—allow yourself some leeway—by midnight, July Fourth. I don’t want to have to go wandering around 1863 looking for you.”

  “You won’t have to. I’ll be here.”

  “Five minutes. Now then, food.”

  “I have some,” I answered, slapping my pocket.

  “Not enough. Take this concentrated chocolate along. I suppose it won’t hurt to drink the water if you’re not observed, but avoid their food. One never knows what chain might be begun by the casual theft (or purchase, if you had an old enough coin) of a loaf of bread. The possibilities are limitless. Listen! How can I impress on you the importance of doing nothing that could possibly change the future—our present? I’m sure to this day Ace doesn’t understand it, and I tremble every moment he spends in the past. The most trivial action may start a series of disastrous consequences. Don’t be seen, don’t be heard. Make your trip as a ghost.”

  “Barbara, I promise I’ll neither assassinate General Lee nor give the North the idea of a modern six-barreled cannon.”

  “Four minutes. It’s not a joke, Hodge.”

  “Believe me,” I said, “I understand.”

  She looked at me searchingly. Then she shook her head and began making her round of the engines, adjusting the dials. I slid under the glass ring as I’d so often seen her do and stood casually under the reflector. I was not in the least nervous. I don’t think I was even particularly excited.

  “Three minutes,” said Barbara.

  I patted my breast pocket. Notebook, pencils. I nodded.

  She ducked under the ring and came toward me. “Hodge . . .”

  “Yes?”

  She put her arms on my shoulders, leaning forward. I kissed her, a little absently. “Clod!”

  I looked at her closely, but there were none of the familiar signs of anger. “A minute to go, it says here,” I told her.

  She drew away and went back. “All set. Ready?”

  “Ready,” I answered cheerfully. “See you midnight, July Fourth, 1863.”

  “Right. Goodbye, Hodge. Glad you didn’t tell Catty.”

  The expression on her face was the strangest I’d ever seen her wear. I could not, then or now, quite interpret it. Doubt, malice, suffering, vindictiveness, love were all there as her hand moved the switch. I began to answer something—perhaps to bid her wait—then the light made me blink and I too experienced the shattering feeling of transition. My bones seemed to fly from each other; every cell in my body exploded to the ends of space.

  The instant of translation was so brief it is hard to believe all the multitude of impressions occurred simultaneously. I was sure my veins were drained of blood, my brain and eyeballs dropped into a bottomless void, my thoughts pressed to the finest powder and blown a universe away. Most of all, I knew the awful sensation of being, for that tiny fragment of time, not Hodgins McCormick Backmaker, but part of an I in which the I that was me merged all identity.

  Then I opened my eyes. I was emotionally shaken; my knees and wrists were watery points of helplessness, but I was alive and functioning—with my individuality unimpaired. The light had vanished. I was in darkness save for faint moonlight coming through the cracks in the barn. The sweetish smell of cattle was in my nostrils, and the slow, ponderous stamp of hooves in my ears. I had gone back through time.

  XI

  The barking of the dogs was frenzied, filled with the hoarse note indicating they had been raising the alarm for long without being heeded. I knew they must have been barking at the alien smells of soldiers for the past day, so I was not apprehensive their scent of me would bring investigation. How Barbara and Ace had escaped detection on journeys which didn’t coincide with abnormal events was beyond me; with such an unnerving racket in prospect I would either have given up the trips or moved the apparatus.

  Strange, I reflected, that the cows and horses were undisturbed. That no hysterical chicken leaped from the roost in panic. Only the dogs scented my unnatural presence. Dogs, who are supposed to sense things beyond the perceptions of man.

  Warily I picked my way past the livestock and out of the barn, fervently hoping the dogs were tied for I had no mind to start my adventure by being bitten. Barbara’s warnings seemed inadequate indeed; one would think she or Ace would have devised some method of neutralizing the infernal barking.

  Once out on the familiar Hanover road every petty feeling of doubt or distress fell away and all the latent excitement took hold of me. I was gloriously in 1863, half a day and some 30 miles from the battle of Gettysburg. If there is a paradise for historians I had achieved it without the annoyance of dying first. I swung along at a good pace, thankful I had trained myself for long tramps, so that 30 miles in less than ten hours was no monstrous feat. The noise of the dogs died away behind me and I breathed the night air joyfully.

  I had already decided I dare not attempt to steal a ride on the railroad, even supposing the cars were going through. As I turned off the Hanover road and took the direct one to Gettysburg, I knew I would not be able to keep on it for long. Part of Early’s Confederate division was marching along it from recently occupied York; Stuart’s cavalry was all around; trifling skirmishes were being fought on or near it; Union troops, regulars as well as the militia called out by Governor Curtin for the emergency, were behind and ahead of me, marching for the Mono-cacy and Cemetery Ridge.

  Leaving the highway would hardly slow me down, for I knew every sideroad, lane, path or shortcut, not only as they existed in my day, but as they had been in the time where I was now. I was going to need this knowledge even more on my return, for on the Fourth of July this road, like every other, would be glutted with beaten Northern troops—supplies and wounded left behind—frantically trying to reorganize as they were harassed by Stuart’s cavalry and pressed by the victorious men of Hill, Longstreet, and Ewell. It was with this in mind I had allowed disproportionately longer for coming back.

  I saw my first soldier a few miles farther on, a jagged shadow sitting by the roadside with his boots off, massaging his feet. I guessed him Northern from his kepi, but this was not conclusive, for many Southron r
egiments wore kepis also. I struck off quietly into the field and skirted around him. He never looked up.

  At dawn I estimated I was halfway, and except for that single sight of a soldier I might have been taking a nocturnal stroll through a countryside at peace. I was tired but certainly not worn out, and I knew I could count on nervous energy and happy excitement to keep me going long after my muscles began to protest. Progress would be slower from now on—Confederate infantry must be just ahead—but even so, I should be at Gettysburg by six or seven.

  The sudden drumming of hooves brushed me off the dusty pike and petrified me into rigidity as a troop dressed in gray and dirty tan galloped by screaming “Eeeeee-yeeee” exultantly. It would be the sideroads from now, I decided.

  But others had the same impulse; the sideroads were well populated. Although I knew the movement of every division and of many regiments, and even had some considerable idea of the civilian dislocation, the picture around me was confused and chaotic. Farmers, merchants, workers in overalls rode or tramped eastward; others, identical in dress and obvious intensity of effort, pushed westward. I passed carriages and carts with women and children traveling at various speeds both ways. Squads and companies of blue-clad troops marched along the roads or through the fields, trampling the crops, a confused sound of singing, swearing, or aimless talk hanging above them like a fog. Spaced by pacific intervals, men in gray or butternut, otherwise indistinguishable, marched in the same direction. I decided I could pass unnoticed in the milling crowds.

  It is not easy for the historian, 10, 50, or 500 years away from an event, to put aside for a moment the large concepts of currents and forces, or the mechanical aids of statistics, charts, maps, neat plans and diagrams in which the migration of men, women and children is indicated by an arrow, or a brigade of half-terrified, half-heroic men becomes a neat little rectangle. It is not easy to see behind source material, to visualize state papers, reports, letters, diaries as written by men who spent most of their lives sleeping, eating, yawning, eliminating, squeezing blackheads, lusting, looking out of windows, or talking about nothing in general with no one in particular. We are too impressed with the pattern revealed to us—or which we think has been revealed to us—to remember that for the participants history is a haphazard affair, apparently aimless, produced by human beings whose concern is essentially with the trivial and irrelevent. The historian is always conscious of destiny. The participants rarely—or mistakenly.

  So to be set down in the midst of crisis, to be at once involved and apart, is to experience a constant series of shocks against which there is no anesthetic. The soldiers, the stragglers, the refugees, the farm boys shouting at horses, the tophatted gentlemen cursing the teamsters, the teamsters cursing back; the looters, pimps, gamblers, whores, nurses and newspapermen were indisputably what they appeared: vitally important to themselves, of little interest to anyone else. Yet at the same time they were a paragraph, a page, a chapter, a whole series of volumes.

  I’m sure I was faithful to the spirit if not the letter of Barbara’s warnings, and that none of the hundreds whom I passed or who passed me noted my presence. I, on the other hand, had to repress the constant temptation to peer into every face for signs which could not tell me what fortune or misfortune the decision of the next three days would bring to it.

  A few miles from town the crowded confusion became even worse, for the scouts from Ewell’s Corps, guarding the Confederate left flank on the York Road, acted like a cork in a bottle. Because I, unlike the other travelers, knew this, I cut sharply south to get back on the circuitous Hanover road I had left shortly after midnight, and crossing the bridge over Rock Creek, stumbled into Gettysburg.

  The two and a half storey brick houses with their purplish slate roofs were placid and charming in the hot July sun. A valiant rooster pecked at horsedung in the middle of the street, heedless of the swarming soldiers, any of whom might take a notion for roast chicken. Privates in the black hats of the Army of the Potomac, cavalrymen with wide yellow stripes and cannoneers with red ones on the seams of their pants, swaggered importantly. Lieutenants with hands resting gracefully on sword hilts, captains with arms thrust in unbuttoned tunics, colonels smoking cigars, generals on horseback, all moved back and forth across the street, out of and into houses and stores, each clearly intent on some business which would affect the course of the war. Soldiers spat, leered at an occasional woman, sat dolefully on handy stoops, or marched smartly toward an unknown destination. On the courthouse staff the flag hung doubtfully in the limp summer air. Every so often there was a noise like poorly organized thunder.

  Imitating the adaptable infantrymen, I found an unoccupied stoop and sat down, after a curious glance at the house, wondering whether it contained someone whose letters or diaries I had read. Drawing out my packet of dried beef, I munched away without taking any of my attention from the sights and sounds and smells around me. Only I knew how desperately these soldiers would fight this afternoon and all day to-morrow. I alone knew how they would be caught in the inescapable trap on July Third and finally routed, to begin the last act of the war. That major, I thought, so proud of his new-won golden oak leaves, may have an arm or leg shot off vainly defending Culp’s Hill; that sergeant over there may lie faceless under an apple tree before nightfall.

  Soon these men would be swept away from the illusory shelter of the houses and out onto the ridges where they would be pounded into defeat and rout. There was nothing for me now in Gettysburg itself—though I could have spent days absorbing the color and feeling. Already I had tempted fate by my casual appearance in the heart of town. At any moment someone might speak to me; an ill considered word or action of mine might change, with ever-widening consequences, the course of the future. I had been foolish enough and long enough; it was time for me to go to the vantage point I had decided upon and observe without peril of being observed.

  I rose and stretched, my bones protesting. But a couple of miles more would see me clear of all danger of chance encounter with a too friendly or inquisitive soldier or civilian. I gave a last look, endeavoring to impress every detail on my memory, and turned south on the Emmitsburg Road.

  This was no haphazard choice. I knew where and when the crucial, the decisive move upon which all the other moves depended would take place. While thousands of men were struggling and dying on other parts of the field, a Confederate advance force, unnoticed, disregarded, would occupy the position which would eventually dominate the field and win the battle—and the war—for the South. Heavy with knowledge no one else possessed I made my way toward a farm on which there was a field and a peach orchard.

  A GREAT BATTLE in its first stages is as tentative, uncertain and indefinite as a courtship just begun. At the beginning the ground was there for either side to take without protest; the other felt no surge of possessive jealousy. I walked unscathed along the Emmitsburg Road; on my left I knew there were Union forces concealed, on my right the Southrons maneuvered. In a few hours, to walk between the lines would mean instant death, but now the declaration had not been made, the vows had not been finally exchanged. It was still possible for either party to withdraw; no furious heat bound the two indissolubly together. I heard the occasional shell and the whine of a minie bullet; mere flirtatious gestures so far.

  Despite the hot sun the grass was cool and lush. The shade in the orchard was velvety. From a low branch I picked a near-ripe peach and sucked the wry juice. I sprawled on the ground and waited. For miles around, men from Maine and Wisconsin, from Georgia and North Carolina, assumed the same attitude. But I knew for what I was waiting; they could only guess.

  Some acoustical freak dimmed the noises in the air to little more than amplification of the normal summer sounds. Did the ground really tremble faintly, or was I translating my mental picture of the marching armies, the great wagon trains, the heavy cannon, the iron-shod horses into an imagined physical effect? I don’t think I dozed, but certainly my attention withdrew from the row
s of trees with their runneled and scarred bark, curving branches and graceful leaves, so that I was taken unaware by the unmistakable clump and creak of mounted men.

  The blue-uniformed cavalry rode slowly through the peach orchard. They seemed like a group of aimless hunters returning from the futile pursuit of a fox; they chatted, shouted at each other, walked their horses abstractedly. One or two had their sabres out; they cut at the branches overhead and alongside in pure, pointless mischief.

  Behind them came the infantrymen, sweating and swearing, more serious. Some few had wounds, others were without their muskets. Their dark blue tunics were carelessly unbuttoned, their lighter pants were stained with mud and dust and grass. They trampled and thrashed around like men long tired out. Quarrels rose among them swiftly and swiftly petered out. No one could mistake them for anything but troops in retreat.

  After they had passed, the orchard was still again, but the stillness had a different quality from that which had gone before. The leaves did not rustle, no birds chirped, there were no faint betrayals of the presence of chipmunks or squirrels. Only if one listened very closely was the dry noise of insects perceptible. But I heard the guns now. Clearly, and louder. And more continuously—much more continuously. It was not yet the roar of battle, but death was unmistakable in its low rumble.

  Then the Confederates came. Cautiously, but not so cautiously that one could fail to recognize they represented a victorious, invading army. Shabby they certainly were, as they pushed into the orchard, but alert and confident. Only a minority had uniforms which resembled those prescribed by regulation and these were torn, stained and scuffed. Many of the others wore the semi-official butternut—crudely dyed homespun, streaked and muddy brown. Some had ordinary clothes with military hats and buttons; a few were dressed in federal blue pants with gray or butternut jackets.