“No,” said Hunter. “I was thinking of fabric when I gave him instructions.”

“Better contact him to make sure,” said Rita. She quickly glanced over all the clothes, including the shoes. “Everything else is acceptable.”

“Take these,” said Hunter, handing each of them a communicator. They were simple, decorative, silver buttons with a tiny speaker hole in the center, a pin on the back, and a tiny button on the side. “Pin them to the underside of your lapels, out of sight. That way, they will be close enough to speak into without attracting a lot of attention.”

While the humans took turns changing their clothes in an adjacent room, Hunter called the tailor robot about the thread. He changed his own clothes at the same time. The thread was satisfactory.

“Fortunately,” said Hunter, “the tailor robot understood my meaning when I asked him to use only natural fibers of cotton. Steve, are the belts necessary? We can save time if we do not bother to replace the buckles.”

“No, we can get by without them, at least at first. We can buy some there if we need them.”

“Good,” said Hunter. “Rita, how are your clothes?”

“How do I look?” She smiled and did a little twirl in her loose blouse and full skirt. “They’re a little big, but I think good enough. We don’t need to delay the trip to make minor alterations.” Now that she was out of her business suit, her manner seemed more casual.

“You look fine,” said Steve. “Hunter, shall we go?”

“I believe we are about ready to go,” said Hunter. “Everyone’s communicator is in place, I see; good. Before we go, however, I want to brief you again on the matter of altering history.”

“I think I’ve already heard it,” Steve said wryly. ”Jane too.”

“Rita must hear it,” said Hunter.

“Yeah, well.” Steve rolled his eyes and sat down in a chair. “All right, let’s get it over with.”

“I have estimated that Mojave Center 2, the robot we seek, will return to full size from his miniaturized state about the time we arrive. That is how I chose the destination in time for our trip, since we cannot possibly find him while he is still microscopic. The greatest danger in this mission is that before we can apprehend him, he will take actions that alter the time line of history from 1668 to the present day.”

“I already know that, Hunter,” Rita said patiently.

“I have not made my point yet.”

“Maybe you don’t have to,” said Rita. “Hunter, as a historian, I understand the theories behind your concern, but let me give you a counterargument, all right?”

“Go ahead,” said Hunter. After all, what she had said earlier was right; he had hired her for her expertise.

Steve pointedly faked a yawn and pretended to fall asleep.

3

Actually, Steve listened with amusement as Rita earnestly argued with Hunter. Jane seemed seriously interested in their difference of opinion. Hunter’s face, as usual, was calm and hard to read.

“On the surface of it, the history in this time and place really isn’t very important,” said Rita. “You see, the depredations of the buccaneers from Jamaica in this era were a side issue to European wars. In fact, much of the booty that resulted from their raids never left the Caribbean.”

“Wait a minute,” said Steve. “I know my history isn’t great, but I remember something about this stuff. I learned in school that the Spanish were taking huge amounts of gold back to Spain at that time. Sir Francis Drake and Walter Raleigh and the Spanish Armada-all that stuff. And that the English kept raiding Spanish ships and taking a lot of gold back to England. What about that?”

“Your history is correct as far as it goes, but that was a century earlier, during the 1500s.”

“Oh. Sorry.”

“No reason to be. That was simply a different phase of the same era. But even more to the point, Port Royal itself and three thousand of its inhabitants will be wiped out in the 1692 earthquake that I mentioned. So this town is not even going to last very long after we’re there-only one short generation after we leave.”

“So you don’t feel that the events in Jamaica in 1668 are going to mean much to the overall direction of history?” Jane asked thoughtfully.

“No, I don’t. I believe that history is driven by major developments in technology and economics, which in turn trigger social and political change.”

“I am still worried about the application of chaos theory to our missions into the past,” said Hunter. “You are familiar with the theory?”

“Yes,” said Rita. “It’s an application of a theory from physics, applied to time and, therefore, to history. Basically, it says that any change in the past, no matter how small, will send out continuing ripple effects that will eventually change history greatly.”

“That is right.”

“As a historian, I’ve never been convinced that chaos theory truly applies to history.”

“I’m no scientist, “ said Steve, grinning. “But if I understand this theory at all, then our previous trip to the dinosaur age disproved it a little.”

“What do you mean?” Rita asked.

“We made some changes. I mean, we captured a dinosaur to ride, trampled on a lot of plants, and caused a stampede. But when we got back, everything was pretty much the same.”

“The question is where the threshold of change lies,” said Hunter. “That is, how many changes must take place, or how important must they be, to set a course of permanent change?”

“I’m afraid we’ll be the ones to find out,” said Jane. “As the first time travelers, we may just find out the hard way, by making changes we don’t want to make.”

“Maybe not,” said Rita. “Look, at your trip to the Late Cretaceous Period-one expectation might have been that minor changes from that long ago could have caused a divergent time line that would be very different by the time events reached the present-that the changes would become more extreme every second for millions of years. But that didn’t happen. So another theory is that so much time was involved that the sheer weight of random events neutralized the changes you caused.”

“That would not really be a form of chaos theory at all,” said Hunter.

“Exactly,” said Rita.

“You mean we didn’t have to be so careful after all?” Steve grinned at Jane. “All that extra effort.”

“I disagree,” said Hunter firmly. “By the argument Rita just presented, the time line marked from 1668 is much more fragile. Instead of many millions of years for events to neutralize any changes we might cause, only a few centuries will pass. That may not be enough time to absorb the effects of what we do. We still have to be as careful as before not to make unnecessary changes.”

“All right,” said Steve, with an exaggerated sigh. “Can we go now?”

“Yes. I shall set the controls while you three enter the sphere,” said Hunter. “Just do not take the danger of MC 2’5 changing history lightly either. Please remember that when MC 2 reaches full size, his interpretation of the First Law may not be centered on preserving the future at all. Yet saving a human from harm in the 16005, when that person actually died according to history, could mean harming all the humans whose history and future are changed. That is theoretical, however, and the immediate danger is tangible. So we have to assume that the fugitive MC 2 is a real danger to the course of history, no matter what theory you believe in.”

“Yes, I agree with that,” said Rita.

While Hunter moved to the control panel, Steve caught Jane’s eye with a grin and shook his head. Sometimes Hunter’s boring repetition of this theoretical stuff reminded him of being a kid in school. Still, he realized that Rita’s disbelief in chaos theory was probably worrying Hunter more than the robot was admitting.

Ishihara still remained by the door, where he would wait to apprehend Dr. Nystrom if he appeared. Hunter had told him that stopping Dr. Nystrom was a First Law imperative.