We'd inevitably begun calling it my "debriefing," and I sat as I'd done before, a microphone hung on my chest, reciting names and random facts onto tape. As I spoke, I watched the people who sat or stood leaning against the walls; every one of them was staring at me. My voice droned on, the muffled clatter of the electric typewriter accompanying it, and they watched me, knowing I was different from all of them now. Staring back at them, so did I. Rube was there in faded, very clean sharply pressed army pants, and shirt without insignia. He lay tilted back in a molded-plastic chair, hands clasped behind his head, looking at me. He grinned when our eyes met once, quirking a mouth corner and shaking his head in mock awe and wonder, his eyes filled with friendly aching envy. Dr. Danziger just stood there, his great hands hung on the lapels of his double-breasted brown suit; his eyes, blazing with fierce joy, never left me. Colonel Esterhazy, neat and cool in a gray suit, stood against a wall, a hand clasping a wrist, regarding me thoughtfully. The Columbia and Princeton history men were there, too; so was the U.S. senator, several others I'd met, and even three or four neatly dressed strangers. After I'd finished we waited in the cafeteria for forty minutes or so. I sat with Rube, Danziger, and Colonel Esterhazy, and had three, maybe even four, cups of coffee. Every chair at the other tables was occupied, and people were sitting on the radiator cover against the far wall. I had to respond to a good many jokes from people pausing at our table, most of them being questions about whether I'd bought any Manhattan real estate at bargain prices. Oscar sat down with us for a minute. He said, "What one thing hit you the hardest?" and I tried to tell him about the man, the living actuality of the man, who had sat opposite us on the bus, and who might have remembered Andrew Jackson as President. Oscar sat nodding, smiling a little; he knew what I meant. As soon as he'd left, Rube leaned toward me and said, " 'Us'? Who else was there, Si?" and I told him there were one or two other passengers on my side of the bus. The tall bald man of the day before came hurrying in, the room going silent as he stopped at our table. Grinning, he said that everything they'd been able to investigate so far had checked out okay. He felt certain now that the rest would, too, and the room broke into an excited gabble. At one fifteen the board assembled, I sat at an end of the long conference-room table, and for the fourth time today I began describing what had happened. Every chair at the table was filled, and along one side there was a second row of folding chairs, all occupied. As far as I could tell,looking around the table as I talked, everyone I'd met here before was here again today plus at least a dozen others I didn't know. One of them, Danziger told me later, was a personal representative of the President. Again I spoke in the singular, saying nothing about Kate. I'd have to tell Danziger what she'd done but I wanted to do that when we were alone. I described every move I'd made, every sight I'd seen and sound I'd heard, the room silent. Something like two dozen men sat around that table or on the folding chairs and no one coughed or glanced away from me. It may be that some of them lighted cigarettes during the twenty minutes I spoke, or sat back in their chairs, shifted position, crossed their legs; I expect they did. But my impression was of motionless silence, complete except for my voice, and of a focused concentration on me so absolute I felt I was talking with a kind of invisible searchlight bathing me in the glare of their attention. I finished, then sat answering questions for half an hour more. Mostly, whatever the specifics, it was the same unanswerable question: What was it like? What was it really like? And now they were restless. They stirred, frowned, whispered, lighted cigarettes. Because no matter how I tried or how complete the detail, I couldn't give them the essence of what had happened to me; the mystery remained. One set of questions, the senator's, had a tone different from the others. For reasons I don't understand he was antagonistic. It was as though he suspected or thought it was a possibility at least that I might be hoaxing them. I suppose it wasn't an unreasonable suspicion under the circumstances, though no one else showed it. But the senator, for example, didn't remember his grandfather's ever mentioning the kind of bus I'd described. He sat looking at me shrewdly then, as though he'd caught me. All I could do, of course, was shrug politely and reply that nevertheless that's what I'd seen. I suspect he was simply following the politician's sleazy instinct to protect himself in case something later went wrong. Presently Esterhazy cut in on him smoothly with some minor question, and then forgot to give him the floor back. He simply thanked me, and asked if I'd mind keeping myself available here in the building till the meeting ended. When I said yes, of course, he thanked me again, and I understood that I was dismissed, and left. There was actually a little applause as I walked out, and my face flushed. I sat forever in Rube's office then, turning the pages of old copies of Life, discovering again, as in a doctor's waiting room, that it's very hard to tell, looking through back issues of Life, whether or not you've seen them before. I looked through a Playboy, a copy of the U.S. Infantry Journal, and I walked out once and down the corridor to the cafeteria for a Coke I didn't want. Rube's girl came in twice, wanting to know, of course, what it had been like, really like, and once again I did my damnedest to find the words that would convey it. It was after four o'clock when she came in the third time. She'd just gotten the call: Could I come back to the conference room, please? I've never really walked into a jury room after they've been locked up for hours, but I think this must have been like it in appearance and atmosphere. The room was air-conditioned so it wasn't full of smoke, but the ashtrays overflowed and the air smelled of cigarettes. And ties werepulled down now, coats were off, note pads were doodle-filled, crumpled paper balls lay on the table, and I noticed a pencil snapped in half; faces were set, some actually sullen. Esterhazy stood up as I came in, smiling affably, looking unruffled. His suit coat was still on, his tie and shirt neat as ever. He gestured me to the chair I'd had before, waited till I'd sat down, then he sat down too, resting his forearms on the tabletop, his hands loosely clasped, very relaxed. He said, "I'm sorry to have kept you waiting like this; you must be quite tired, physically and mentally." He sounded as though he meant it, and I murmured a polite response. I realized that I'd expected it would be Danziger who'd speak, and I glanced down the table at him. One big hand lay on the tabletop at the edge; his chair was pushed back from the table as though—the thought popped into my mind—he were disassociating himself from the meeting. Did he look angry? No, I decided; actually his face was expressionless. There was no way to know what he was feeling or thinking; he might only be tired. Esterhazy was talking. "We have had to hear, wanted to hear, every shade of opinion in reaching a decision as important as the one"—he looked slowly around the table—"that we are now agreed upon." Then he smiled and sat looking at me for a moment or so, and I had the sudden feeling that he was interested in me as a person as well as just someone who'd done what I had. "Your first 'visit,' if that's the term, couldn't have been more cautiously made. No one so much as glimpsed or heard you, and no least trace of your brief presence was left behind. There was no interference whatever in even the smallest events of the past, and you had no effect upon it. But your second visit— deliberately, by design—was more bold. Again you made no interference with events, except"—he unclasped his hands to raise his forefinger, a West Point lecturer requiring attention—"that your very presence event. A tiny one, but this time people saw you, and spoke to you, momentarilyatleas(was) t.W(an) hat trains of thought might possibly have resulted? Influencing events that followed in what ways, large or small? It was a danger and a profound one, but"—soundlessly striking the table with his fist, he emphasized each slow word—"if is a risk already over and past. We accepted the risk, the full report is now in, and once again there is no least evidence that your presence affected subsequent events in even the slightest way." He sat silent for a moment, then again smiled, suddenly and very pleasantly, adding, "And I'm not a bit surprised. This confirms, most of us feel—and as all of us, I'm certain, will come to feel— a theory we've been calling 'twig-in-the-river.' Would you like to hear it?" I nodded. "Well, time is often compared to a river, a stream, as you know. What happens at any one point in the stream depends at least partly on what happened upstream earlier. But a tremendous number of events occur every day and every moment; billions of events, some of them enormous. So if time is a river, it's infinitely bigger than even a Mississippi at full raging flood. While you"—he smiled at............