'Not one word of blame has been put on you for your failure,' the chairman told the physicist. 'That you could do it seems to be more than can be humanly expected. If Adams did it—
'You will recall,' said the general, 'that the research program, even from the first, was thought of strictly as a gamble. Our one hope was, and must remain, that they will return.'
'It would have been so much simpler all around,' the state department man said, 'if Adams had patented his method.'
The general raged at him. 'And had it published, all neat and orderly, in the patent office records so that anyone who wanted it could look it up and have it?'
'We can be most sincerely thankful,' said the chairman, 'that he did not patent it.'
VI
The helicopter would never fly again, but the time unit was intact.
Which didn't mean that it would work.
They held a powwow at their camp site. It had been, they decided, simpler to move the camp than to remove the body of Old Buster. So they had shifted at dawn, leaving the old mastodon still sprawled across the helicopter.
In a day or two, they knew, the great bones would be cleanly picked by the carrion birds, the lesser cats, the wolves and foxes and the little skulkers.
Getting the time unit out of the helicopter had been quite a chore, but they finally had managed and now Adams sat with it cradled in his lap.
'The worst of it,' he told them, 'is that I can't test it. There's no way to. You turn it on and it works or it doesn't work. You can't know till you try.'
'That's something we can't help,' Cooper replied. 'The problem, seems to me, is how we're going to use it without the whirlybird.'
'We have to figure out some way to get up in the air,' said Adams. 'We don't want to take the chance of going up into the twentieth century and arriving there about six feet underground.'
'Common sense says that we should be higher here than up ahead,' Hudson pointed out. 'These hills have stood here since Jurassic times. They probably were a good deal higher then and have weathered down. That weathering still should be going on. So we should be higher here than in the twentieth century—not much, perhaps, but higher.'
'Did anyone ever notice what the altimeter read?' asked Cooper.
'I don't believe I did,' Adams admitted.
'It wouldn't tell you, anyhow,' Hudson declared. 'It would just give our height then and now—and we were moving, remember—and what about air pockets and relative atmosphere density and all the rest?'
Cooper looked as discouraged as Hudson felt.
'How does this sound?' asked Adams. 'We'll build a platform twelve feet high. That certainly should be enough to clear us and yet small enough to stay within the range of the unit's force-field.'
'And what if we're two feet higher here?' Hudson pointed out.
'A fall of fourteen feet wouldn't kill a man unless he's plain unlucky.'
'It might break some bones.'
'So it might break some bones. You want to stay here or take a chance on a broken leg?'
'All right, if you put it that way. A platform, you say. A platform out of what?'
'Timber. There's lot of it. We just go out and cut some logs.'
'A twelve-foot log is heavy. And how are we going to get that big a log uphill?'
'We drag it.'
'We try to, you mean.'
'Maybe we could fix up a cart,' said Adams, after thinking a moment.
'Out of what?' Cooper asked.
'Rollers, maybe. We could cut some and roll the logs up here.'
'That would work on level ground,' Hudson said. 'It wouldn't work to roll a log uphill. It would get away from us. Someone might get killed.'
'The logs would have to be longer than twelve feet, anyhow,' Cooper put in. 'You'd have to set them in a hole and that takes away some footage.'
'Why not the tripod principle?' Hudson offered. 'Fasten three logs at the top and raise them.'
'That's a gin-pole, a primitive derrick. It'd still have to be longer than twelve feet. Fifteen, sixteen, maybe. And how are we going to hoist three sixteen-foot logs? We'd need a block and tackle.'
'There's another thing,' said Cooper. 'Part of those logs might just be beyond the effective range of the force-field. Part of them would have to—
'Another thing about it,' added Hudson, 'is that we'd travel with the logs. I don't want to come out in another time with a bunch of logs flying all around me.'
'Cheer up,' Adams told them. 'Maybe the unit won't work, anyhow.'
VII
The general sat alone in his office and held his head between his hands. The fools, he thought, the goddam knuckle-headed fools! Why couldn't they see it as clearly as he did?
For fifteen years now, as head of Project Mastodon, he had lived with it night and day and he could see all the possibilities as clearly as if they had been actual fact. Not military possibilities alone, although as a military man, he naturally would think of those first.
The hidden bases, for example, located within the very strongholds of potential enemies—within, yet centuries removed in time. Many centuries removed and only seconds distant.
He could see it all: The materialization of the fleets; the swift, devastating blow, then the instantaneous retreat into the fastnesses of the past. Terrific destruction, but not a ship lost nor a man.
Except that if you had the bases, you need never strike the blow. If you had the bases and let the enemy know you had them, there would never be the provocation.
And on the home front, you'd have air-raid shelters that would be effective. You'd evacuate your population not in space, but time. You'd have the sure and absolute defense against any kind of bombing—fission, fusion, bacteriological or whatever else the labs had in stock.
And if the worst should come—which it never would with a setup like that—you'd have a place to which the entire nation could retreat, leaving to the enemy the empty, blasted cities and the lethally dusted countryside.
Sanctuary—that had been what Hudson had offered the then-secretary of state fifteen years ago—and the idiot had frozen up with the insult of it and had Hudson thrown out.
And if war did not come, think of the living space and the vast new opportunities—not the least of which would be the opportunity to achieve peaceful living in a virgin world, where the old hatreds would slough off and new concepts have a chance to grow.
He wondered where they were, those three who had gone back into time. Dead, perhaps. Run down by a mastodon. Or stalked by tigers. Or maybe done in by warlike tribesmen. No, he kept forgetting there weren't any in that era. Or trapped in time, unable to get back, condemned to exile in an alien time. Or maybe, he thought, just plain disgusted. And he couldn't blame them if they were.
Or maybe—let's be fantastic about this—sneaking in colonists from some place other than the watched
