AFTER A WEEK AT Transformations Ann had learned very little more about the company. She had to take two buses, early in the morning, to the campus, where she spent a full day studying everything from particle physics to ancient history.

She discussed it, of course, with the other people in her classes, but they had come to no firm conclusion. “Maybe it’s some kind of experiment,” Franny said. She had long pale crinkly hair and she laughed a lot; her mouth seemed wider than most people’s. She was another person with an easy life, Ann had thought, and at first she was prepared to dislike her because of it, but Franny seemed so friendly with everybody that she couldn’t keep it up.

They were eating lunch on the long green lawn, in the shade of one of the trees. The lunches were available in the cafeteria, and, Ann had been startled to learn, were free to all the employees. She usually took as much advantage of these meals as she could, and today she was eating a fish she had never tried before, tilapia.

“What kind of experiment?” Ann asked. “What do they want to prove?”

“I don’t know. Maybe they want to see how long we go without asking any questions.”

“Well, for God’s sake don’t ask any, then. I’ve never been paid to study before.”

“Oh, the bill’s going to come due sooner or later,” a man named Jerry said. He was thin, intense, with long blond hair that flopped over his black-framed glasses. “It’s all being funded by the CIA, or some secret organization we never heard of. They’ll give us government jobs when we graduate.”

“They’re secretive, all right, but why does it have to be the CIA?” Ann asked. “Maybe it’s something boring and obvious, like designing bombs.”

“You’re no fun,” Franny said. “Anyway, I wouldn’t do it. I’d never make bombs.”

“You might have to. They made us sign those forms, remember? Did you read all of them?”

“Aliens,” Zachery said suddenly, a man with a long thin face and a fuzzy beard. “Has to be. They’re training us to colonize some distant planet.”

Jerry turned to him. “You can’t possibly believe—”

Zach laughed. Ann had already noticed that he didn’t take very much seriously. “Well, Franny said she wanted something fun.”

Franny ignored him. “And as long as we’re asking questions, what’s up with those mirrors they have in all the classrooms?” she said. “Do you think they’re two-way mirrors?”

“Don’t you mean one-way?” Ann said. “I mean, if you could see through it both ways it would just be a window, right?”

Franny laughed. “Yeah, I guess. But my question is, why would they bother looking at us through a mirror? They probably have cameras and microphones and whatnot.”

“You think so? You really think they’re watching us that closely?”

“Yeah, I do. At the interview they seemed to know things—well, they knew a lot about me.”

“Yeah, I know what you mean,” Ann said.

The others nodded. She waited, wondering if anyone would open up, confide their secrets, but no one said anything.

Chimes rang out over the lawn: lunch was over. As she cleaned up and headed to class with the others she felt a strange lightness building under her breastbone. It took her a while to figure out what it was, and then she realized: it was happiness.

“ALL RIGHT,” PROFESSOR DAS said in their physics class that afternoon, with no preamble. “We’re going to try an experiment.”

He set a small wire cage on his desk. It looked like a hamster cage she’d seen in one of her high school classes, though there was no hamster inside it, or anything else. Instead it had a control panel on the side, with several buttons and a small LED display. Another table had been placed next to the desk, with a ragged baseball sitting on top.

“Now,” he said. He looked out over the class. “You, Jerry. Come up here, please.”

He took out another baseball, just as scruffy as the first one, and handed it to Jerry. “Write something on it, please,” the professor said. “Anything you like.”

Jerry thought a while, then scribbled something. He turned to go back to his seat.

“No, wait a moment,” Das said. “I’ll need you again.” He looked at the ball, then showed it to the class. “He’s written his name here—does everybody see it?”

The class nodded. Das put the ball in the cage and pressed some buttons. There was a high, nearly inaudible sound, a painful flash of light, and the ball vanished.

Everyone started talking at once, a murmur of soft voices. “So, what do you think happened to it?” Das asked, speaking over the various conversations.

“Well, it’s a magic trick, isn’t it?” Ann said. Even as she spoke, she felt amazed at herself. She had never volunteered first for anything in her life.

“A magic trick,” Das said. “Anyone else? How would I have done the trick, anyone want to guess?”

“Mirrors,” Franny said.

“Jerry?” Das said. “Do you see any mirrors here?”

He shook his head. He looked a little embarrassed up there, not sure what to do with himself.

“Could you go over to that ball there on the table?” Das said. “Okay, now pick it up. What does it say?”

“It—it says my name,” Jerry said.

“Does it look like the ball I put in the cage?”

“Yeah. Yeah, exactly like it.”

“Okay, so how did I do that? I mean, that ball was sitting there for a while, before I put the other one in the cage. Before Jerry wrote anything on his ball. Right? Did everyone see it?”

“Well, but it can’t be the same ball,” Zach said. “You and Jerry are working together—you told him what to say. He’s your stooge.”

Das laughed. “Stooge, is it? Jerry, did I tell you what to say?”

“No, sir.”

“That’s just what a stooge would say, though, isn’t it?” Zach said.

“But if Jerry’s right, if they are the same ball, how could that work?”

“Oh, no,” Ann said. “No, no, no. I don’t believe it.”

“Yes?” Das said. “Ann?”

“No. It’s impossible.”

“What’s impossible?”

“You sent the ball back in time.”

Everyone started speaking at once.

“That’s ridiculous—”

“Everyone knows you can’t—”

“It’s a magic trick, like she said—”

“Ann?” Das said. “Do you think I sent that ball back in time?”

“No,” she said. Jerry had called Das “sir,” she remembered. Was that what people did in college? “Sir,” she added.

“Why not?”

“Well, because it’s impossible. Things can’t go back in time. Occam’s Razor says …”

“Yes? What does Occam’s Razor say?”

“It says not to multiply entities needlessly. That the simplest explanation is usually the truth. And the simplest explanation is, well, a magic trick. Sleight of hand.”

“What would it take for you to believe that that ball went back in time?”

“I don’t know. Well, if you sent me back. If I could experience it for myself.”

“And we’ll be doing that, eventually. But—”

“What?”

“We’ll be sending you back in time. But there’s a good many things you’ll have to learn first, before we can do that.”

Ann had barely heard him. “You’ll be—you’ll be sending us back in time?”

Das grinned. “That’s right.”

SHE SPENT THE EVENING in a daze, not even booting up her computer. This is either the biggest hoax ever, she thought, or they really do have a time machine.

But suppose it was true. Not that she believed it, but just suppose, just let Occam’s Razor cut through all her disbelief. Where would she go? She couldn’t think, could only imagine herself in one of those ridiculous costume dramas on late-night television, wearing a bodice and corset and curtsying to a king. She didn’t know how to curtsy. No, the whole thing was insane. It had to be a joke, a test to see how much they would believe. But on the other hand …

The next day they were divided up into smaller groups in their history and language classes. Ann and Franny found themselves in one group, along with another employee named Gregory Nichols. Gregory had been working at the company for a year, and he told them that he had already made several trips back in time—told them this with a straight face, yet another piece of evidence on the side of the company. Together they began to study ancient Crete, which Professor Strickland, their history teacher, called Kaphtor.

“You’re going to learn to speak Kaphtoran in your language class,” said Strickland. “It was spoken on Kaphtor for about a thousand years, from 2500 to 1500 BCE, and it—”

“Wait a minute,” Franny said. “No one knows what they spoke there. It’s what they call Linear A, isn’t it? There are fragments of it, but it’s never been translated.”

“Well,” said Strickland. “That’s the advantage of having a time machine.”

No one spoke for a long moment. “Why, though?” Ann asked finally. “Why are you doing all this?”

“I can only give you the outlines of our program,” the professor said. “You’ll learn more when you’ve been here longer. What happened is, well, things go very badly wrong in the future. The climate changes drastically, there are food shortages, and then a few countries get into a nuclear war over resources. There’s starvation, plague, genocide, with huge numbers of people dying …”

“Wait a minute,” Franny said again. “You’re from the future?”

“That’s right.”

“But—but what are you doing here?”

“I’m getting to that. Our goal is, well, we’re trying to make things right. We’re going back and changing one or two things, performing some very small modifications, but the changes we make widen out, grow greater over time. And because of what we do, history is different, it turns out for the better.”

“Why don’t you just send people from your own time to change things?”

Strickland hesitated. “We—well, we’re still struggling in our time,” she said. “We don’t have enough people to spare, for one thing. The most intelligent people we have are needed to do work there—we can’t afford to lose them. So we came back here, to a time where we can take a few bright people from the population who won’t be missed.”

Thanks a lot, Ann thought. Though she had to admit that at least in her case it was probably true that no one would miss her. Even Sam hadn’t seemed that sorry to see her go, when she’d given him her notice.

“What year do you come from?” she asked.

“I can’t tell you that,” Strickland said. “You can only know enough about the future as we think is safe.”

“So is that what you want us to do? Go back in time and change things?”

“That’s right. We’ll ask you to make only small changes, though—move a vase from one room to another, or keep someone from getting to work on time. It isn’t dangerous— you don’t have to worry about that. Though of course you’ll have to be careful.”

Every day brought some new marvel. They watched holographic videos in their history class, videos that had been taken on Kaphtor by mobile cameras sent into the past. “The cameras look like flying insects—you’ll probably see a few of them when you’re there,” Strickland explained. “Unfortunately we can’t control them from the present—the best we can do is send them to a tace we’re interested in and program them to come back. They home in on heat signatures, on groups of people. Then when they return we pull the data they’ve recorded. So our knowledge is a bit limited, but you’ll know everything you’ll need for a brief visit.”

They took a drug that enhanced their ability to learn, and they were all speaking the Kaphtoran language after a month of study, though none of them was fluent. And they were introduced to another sort of language, one invented by the time travelers themselves, with words like “tace” for “time and place,” and “thern” for “there and then.” The language had extra tenses too, for events that had happened but had been erased, or events that existed but that the company planned to erase in the future.

The drug also made it easier to learn about the history of Kaphtor, and Ann grew fascinated by their customs, their society. Women wore long, frilled skirts, and blouses that opened in a V to their waist and left their breasts bare. The men were slender, athletic. They danced with bulls, they sailed to distant places, their art was renowned throughout the Mediterranean.

She worried about the open blouses, though it was not her breasts she feared exposing but her scars. She was working her way up to asking about them when Franny brought the subject up in their history class. Franny looked at Gregory as she spoke, as if daring him to laugh or make some lewd comment, but he seemed as serious as she was.

“We don’t know what your cover story is yet,” Professor Strickland said. “But one thing I do know is that you won’t be from Kaphtor—you won’t know enough to get away with that. Probably you’ll be from Egypt, or Asia Minor. So no, you won’t be wearing those blouses.”

She returned to her lesson. “People out there don’t know a lot about Kaphtor,” she said, indicating the world beyond Transformations with a wave of her hand. “If they’ve heard of ancient Crete at all they think the inhabitants were called Minoans, because the man who discovered the ruins, Sir Arthur Evans, named them that, after King Minos. And they might have a vague memory of the myth of King Minos, who sent young people into the labyrinth to be killed by the Minotaur. In fact there was no King Minos—as I’ve said before, Kaphtor was a matriarchy, ruled by a queen. The word Minos was an honorific—there were men who were called ‘the Minos,’ which means Moon God.

“Even people who study Kaphtor don’t know much about it. Some of that is because we’re in the process of changing its history, because history itself is in flux. So if you read books in outside libraries you’ll learn that civilization ended on Kaphtor because a volcano erupted on a nearby island, or because people revolted against the aristocracy in the palaces, or because the Achaeans, the ancient Greeks, invaded.”

Ann felt a thrill at her words. She had always felt on the outside of things, looking in, had always wondered what it would be like to be part of an elite, someone in the know.

“The volcano isn’t going to go off while we’re on our assignment, is it?” Gregory asked.

Strickland laughed. “No, we wouldn’t do that to you. The volcano erupted thirty years before your insertion. Some parts of Kaphtor still haven’t been rebuilt, meaning it’ll be easier to carry out your assignment.”

“So what’s our assignment?” Franny asked.

“We don’t tell you that until you’re in the field, actually,” Strickland said. “The knowledge might change the way you act, make you self-conscious. Your Facilitator knows, and he or she will tell you what your specific tasks are.”

“What about paradoxes?” Ann asked.

“What about them?” Strickland said.

“Well, when history changes, that means things change in the present, doesn’t it? Can we change things so much that out parents don’t meet, or our grandparents, and we end up not existing? And won’t other people notice that things aren’t the same? Or do we end up in a parallel world, where the present is different?”

“No, we’ll still be in our world, this world. There wouldn’t be much point in changing things if we weren’t. As for things changing, and people noticing, well, as we told you, we only make very slight changes. There will be some small differences here, but no one outside Transformations will realize it. They’ll think it’s the way it’s always been.”

She smiled at them. “We’ll feel it on the campus, though. You might have already felt a timeshift. The ground seems to move under you, like an earthquake.”

They shook their heads. None of them had experienced a timeshift yet.

“If we changed something important, something that’s in the history books and everyone knows about, the timequake would be huge,” Professor Strickland went on. “If we went back in time and saved Lincoln, for example, or Kennedy— they’d feel it all through North America, maybe the world. That’s why we only make small changes, and let the changes accumulate, add up. We don’t want people becoming aware of what we’re doing here.”

Why not? Ann wondered. The company had already warned them not to share their knowledge with the world outside. Probably everyone would want to get their hands on a time machine if they knew about them; things would become chaotic pretty quickly

GREGORY HAD STARTED JOINING them at lunch, and they all pressed him for what he knew about the company and their travels in time. “Whern did they send you?” Franny asked.

“The Spanish Inquisition, the first time,” Gregory said. He was as good-looking as a model, Ann thought, dark-haired but with startling blue eyes.

“Wow,” Franny said. “That must have been scary.”

“You know, it wasn’t, not really. I was a priest from Rome, making sure that the other priests were following orders. People were afraid of me, not the other way around.”

“Sounds like fun,” Jerry said.

Gregory shook his head. “I didn’t like it. Everyone was so terrified, all the time. They even smelled terrified—you could smell their sweat, and the mold in the prisons. I gotta tell you, I can’t wait for Kaphtor. Sunlight and oceans. And I always liked the Greek gods and goddesses, Kore and Demeter …”

Ann would rather hear about Gregory’s experiences, though; they’d talked enough about Kaphtor in class. So did Zach, it seemed, because he said, “So what did you do in Spain? Did you rescue someone, break them out of jail?”

“I had to cut through an axle on a cart, that’s all. And before you ask me, no, I don’t know why. Someone had to be stopped from getting somewhere, that’s all I know.”

“But Professor Strickland said—well, she said that we’ll be debriefed when we get back,” Ann said. “I mean, didn’t they tell you anything?”

“I thought they would. But all they told me was that it worked out, whatever it was.”

Ann sighed. If Gregory didn’t know the answers to their questions, who would? “Why are they so secretive?” she asked.

“I wondered about that too,” Franny said. “Do you think they’re telling the truth, about being from the future?”

“What else could they be?” Gregory said.

“I don’t know,” Ann said. “One of those Internet hoaxes, maybe. You know—‘We come from the future to save you.’”

“Why would they go to all this trouble—”

“Or a cult. Like when Strickland said they’ll tell us more when we’ve been here longer. Like they’re stringing us along, until suddenly we’re all dressing the same and going door to door handing out pamphlets.”

“Believe me, they’re what they say they are. I really did go to Spain in the sixteenth century. And where else would they get all this technology?”

“I haven’t seen any technology yet,” Ann said.

“What—you want some guy in a blue box to land here in the courtyard?” Franny asked. “I don’t think it’s as easy as that.”

“What about that drug they give us?” Jerry asked. “I had a look at it, in the lab. And, well, it isn’t based on anything I know about. It has to have come from the future.”

“Are you a chemist?” Franny asked.

“Something like that,” Jerry said.

Franny frowned at the evasion, but Ann thought she could guess why he hadn’t answered her. He had been manufacturing drugs, or something just as illegal. The people at Transformations weren’t the only ones with secrets, she thought. Everyone here probably had a history they wanted to keep to themselves.

Ann had another question, but it wasn’t one she wanted to share with the others. It had taken her a week after Professor Das’s first time travel experiment to think of it, something that surprised her later, since the subject was usually at the forefront of her mind. Would it be possible to travel back to when she was born, see how she had gotten her scars? Could she finally get answers to the questions she had wondered about for so long? Who was her mother? Why had she given her up?

The conversation had moved on, and she tried to pay attention. “So where did they get the money for all this?” Jerry was asking, sweeping a hand at the complex in front of him. “The campus, and all the equipment—”

“Oh, man, you never read any science fiction, did you?” Zach asked. “They play the stock market, and bet on the races. It’s easy if you know what’s going to happen.”

“I still think there’s something strange here,” Franny said. “Something stranger than just time travel, I mean.”

“So what, you’re going to back out?” Gregory said.

“Hell no,” Franny said, smiling at him. “I can’t wait to see Kaphtor.”