“I’ll try,” Ron Moosic assured him, shaking his head and feeling far more worried now than when he’d walked in the door. This was a bit much to digest, even after a career in high-tech environments. In a sense, there was more unsettling business going on here than at the Pentagon and Kremlin war rooms. Here, just one well-meaning scientist could obliterate all that was constant in the world. A social experimenter would be even worse.
“That’s who we fear the most,” Riggs agreed. “The Air Force boys showed it wasn’t impossible to infiltrate here, but it’s pretty near so. On the other hand, how do you really get into a guy’s head when he’s being considered for downtiming?”
“Downtiming?”
“That’s what we call it, since you can’t seem to go uptime from here in any way except the way we’re doing it—one second at a time. You see, the big problem is that the boys here are mostly technical types. It’s a crew over at NSA that looks around for candidates for research and approves ’em before they even know about this place. The weed-out’s pretty extensive, but you can go only so far without spilling the beans about the place. Then, of course, they get the full treatment—drugs, lie detectors, you name it. We try as hard as we can to make sure that nobody goes into the chamber if they have even the remotest impulse to do anything but observe.”
“But nothing’s perfect,” Moosic noted. “Even the sanest of us has sudden impulses and urges. Until that person goes back there, you can’t know for sure.”
“Yep. And there are ways to beat the system—any system. It’s a constant worry. That’s why we don’t let any professional historians go back at all. After all that, they’re told we have a way of observing and even sometimes recording the past. They give us the targets, and then we send one of our agents back. They have romance in their souls but no stake in the actual work and not enough professional background to know just what wrong button to push. They know, too, that one false move and we can nightside them—cut them off in the past.”