"You work with thought graphs and attitude charts and historic reports," said Case, almost as if he had not been interrupted. "You trace back certain happenings and then you go back and try to change some of those happenings…just a little, you understand, for you must not change them much. Just enough so the end result is slightly different, just a little less favorable to the enemy. One change here and another there and you have him on the run."
"It drives you nuts," said Pringle, confidentially. "Because you must be sure, you see. You pick out a nice juicy historic trend and you figure it out to the finest detail and you pick a key point where change is indicated, so you go back and change it…"
"And, then," said Case, "it kicks you in the face."
"Because, you understand," said Pringle, "the historian was wrong. Some of his material was wrong or his method was clumsy or his reasoning was off…"
"Somewhere along the line," said Case, "he missed a lick."
"That's right," said Pringle, "somewhere he missed a lick and you find, after you have changed it, that it affects your side more than it does your enemy's."
"Now, Mr. Bones," said Sutton, "I wonder if you could tell me why a chicken runs across the road."
"Yes, sir, Mr. Interlocutor," said Pringle. "Because it wants to get on the other side."
Mutt and Jeff, thought Sutton. A scene jerked raw and bleeding from a Krazy Kat cartoon.
But clever. Pringle was a propagandist and he was no fool. He knew semantics and he knew psychology and he even knew about the ancient minstrel shows. He knew all there was to know about the human race, so far as that knowledge could serve him in the human past.