Hell's Gate

include the present situation.”
        He told it all that had happened since he had left it in the cave to go purchase the Jacobi house. When he was done, he said, “Now maybe you can tell me why you wouldn't respond when I came to you to find out about the lizard-things and the robots.”
        “You must realize that an 810-40.04 has a contained power source and that I can only operate in the time allotted by the plan. Otherwise I risk draining my reserves, which could be disastrous. Without computer briefing, you might fail. The plan might fail. We mis-estimated the time of the first vacii attacks. Seriously mis-estimated. Otherwise, you would not have had to face the robots unarmed.”
        “Who am I working for?” he asked, not bothering to comment on the first answer, afraid that the well of information would dry up if he didn't fill his buckets quickly.
        “The oppressed people of the vacii experimental society of Earth Number 4576.”
        Salsbury waited for more. When there wasn't any” more, he said, “What is that supposed to mean? Where are these oppressed people?”
        “Two-hundred-and-eighty-five years in the future,” the 810-40.04 said.
        They sat still, hardly breathing. Vic cleared his throat. “And what… Is… Well, is that where I came from? From 2255 A.D.?”
        “Yes.”
        “But why doesn't he remember that future?” Lynda asked, leaning over the table toward the trunk as if it were a person.
        “Because he never lived it,” the computer said.
        “Wait,” Salsbury interrupted. “I'm not tracking clearly. When did I live, then?”
        “Never,” the computer said. “You're an android.”
        He looked at Lynda; she at him. She took his hand, which was the sign he needed to maintain his confidence. He spoke to the 810-40.04 again. “I'm not made of wires and tubes. I bleed real blood.”
        “Android, not robot,” the computer said. You were a product of the Artificial Wombs, grown from a chemically simulated egg and a chemically simulated sperm, each with carefully engineered genes. From all appearances, you are a natural born man. You think, feel, and react like a man, like Victor Salsbury who was chosen because data about him had survived the centuries; his work gained renown after his death. You have, it is agreed, a soul like any man, for you are in all ways human except for those differences built into you. They are three. One: in a crisis, you react with more speed than a man should, for your mental process are stimulated by danger and you can tap them with the fluency of some wild animals. Two: you have an ability to produce and use an adrenalin-like substance which is secreted by a mechanism buried in your liver. This has the single drawback of making you highly susceptible to alcoholic beverages, but this cannot be helped. Three: you have great recuperative powers far beyond the normal. Otherwise, you are a man.”
        “If this cause is so important,” Victor said, “why not send one of those oppressed people back? He would be more fanatical. You would be more certain of his cooperation, though he would not have my recuperative powers or reactions.”
        “That is reason enough,” the machine said. “But, also, a man cannot travel so far into the past, unfortunately.”
        “Why not?”
        “As he travels backwards, a man grows younger. If he begins his journey as a fifty year old, travels twenty years into the past, he is then thirty. No man can, therefore, return further into the past than his birth date. Since, in our future, the average age under the vacii is only eighty-two, we have no chance of finding a real man old enough to come back to this period and still be an adult when he arrives.”
        “But why didn't I react like a man?” Vic asked. He suspected why. The suspicion lingered in the back of his mind, frightening yet tantalizing.
        The computer continued in a level tone. “The artificial atmosphere of the mechanical wombs can help us achieve many things. The flow of time can be compressed or stretched. In your case, we made the interior of the womb capsule an accelerated time pocket. It took two years to create you, but you were carefully aged 310 years in that time. When you came back into the past in the normal time-flow reversal, you ended up in 1970 as a twenty-five-year-old man.”
        Salsbury could think of nothing to say, nothing to ask. He could only look at