Again: "I'm sorry. Your time is up!"
And after that a click, and after that silence.
I jiggled the hook a few times. No result. I shrugged. I hung up and rearranged the papers on my desk and went back to work, forgetting for the moment the party I'd been trying to call in the first place. And forgetting the odd conversation I had just had. No—not quite. Not quite forgetting it. Queerly, it clung to my mind. What had he said his name was? Zon Twenty. Sounded like that, anyway. Odd name. Of course I still thought it was a gag of some kind. Yet it bothered me. Zon's manner, his tone of voice had been so convincing. What he had said suggested that in some queer way I had managed to place a telephone call into the future. But as a sane, normal, recently promoted colonel, I knew this was impossible.
At lunch I was still thinking about it. I ate in the officers' mess on my floor and steered my tray through the line. I saw, among other acquaintances Major "Clipper" Moskowitz at a far table, and remembered that he was a great science fan, always talking about rockets and reaching the moon, and that sort of thing—we had one argument about why a rocket works in a vacuum, such as space, and he hammered the table and drew diagrams and quoted Newton, and I'm still not convinced. Anyway, I went over and sat next to Clipper.
"'Lo, Larry. How's it?" he said.
"Routine," I said. "Latest request for overseas duty turned down. I'll probably die in the Pentagon with my pencil still behind my ear."
We talked of such things for several minutes.
"Clipper," I said finally, "you're the G.L.E. on this future science stuff—"
"The what?"
"Greatest Living Expert. Latest Pentagonese. Tell me, what do you think of the possibility of ever being in touch with the future?"