“Why doed you choose this year?”
“At random. Derringer set the outer circle at 2400—half a millennium seemed a plausible choice. Then I spun the inner dial blindfolded. When this switch here is turned, you create a certain amount of temporal potential, positive or negative— which is as loose as applying those terms to magnetic poles, but likewise as convenient. For instance if I turn it to here”—he spun the outer dial to 2900—“you’ll have five hundred years of positive potential which’ll shoot you ahead to 2973. Or set it like this, and you’ll have five centuries of negative, which’ll pull you back practically to where I started from.”
Stephen frowned. “Ahead and back be of course nonsense words in this connection. But they may be helpful to Martha in visualizing it. Will you please show Martha the back of your dial?”
“Why?” There was no answer. Brent shrugged and climbed into the seat. The Roman matron moved around the machine and entered the other seat as he loosed the catch on the dial and opened it as one did for oiling.
Stephen said, “Look well, my dear. What be the large wheels maked of?”
“Aceroid, of course. Don’t you remember how Alex—”
“Don’t remember, Martha. Look. What be they?”
Martha gasped. “Why, they . . . they be aluminum.”
“Very well. Now don’t you understand— Ssh!” He broke off and moved toward the doorway. He listened there a moment, then slipped out of sight.
“What does he have?” Brent demanded as he closed the dial. ‘The ears of an elkhound?”
“Stephen haves hyper-acute sense of hearing. He bees proud of it, and it haves saved us more than once from Stappers. When people be engaged in work against State—”
A man’s figure appeared again in the doorway. But its robes were white. “Good God!” Brent exclaimed. “Jiggers, the Staps!”
Martha let out a little squeal. A rod appeared in the Stappers hand. Brent’s eyes were so fixed on the adversary that he did not see the matron’s hand move toward the switch until she had turned it.
Brent had somehow instinctively shut his eyes during his first time transit. During, he reflected, is not the right word. At the time of? Hardly. How can you describe an event of time movement without suggesting another time measure perpendicular to the time line? At any rate, he had shut them in a laboratory in 1942 and opened them an instant later in a warehouse in 2473.
Now he shut them again, and kept them shut. He had to think for a moment. He had been playing with the dial—where was it set when Martha jerked the switch? 1973, as best he remembered. And he had now burst into that world in plastic garments of the twenty-fifth century, accompanied by a Roman matron who had in some time known him for fifty years.
He did not relish the prospect. And besides he was bothered by that strange jerking, tearing sensation that had twisted his body when he closed his eyes. He had felt nothing whatsoever on his previous trip. Had something gone wrong this time? Had—
“It doesn’t work!” said Martha indignantly.
Brent opened his eyes. He and Martha sat in the machine in a dim warehouse of opaque brick.
“We be still here,” she protested vigorously.
“Sure we’re still here.” Brent frowned. “But what you mean is, we’re still now.”
“You talk like Stephen. What do you mean?”
“Or are we?” His frown deepened. “If we’re still now, where is that Stapper? He didn’t vanish just because you pulled a switch. How old is this warehouse?”
“I don’t know. I think about sixty years. It beed fairly new when I beed a child. Stephen and I used to play near here.”
“Then we could have gone back a few decades and still be here. Yes, and look— those cases over there. I’d swear they weren’t here before. After. Whatever. Then, when we saw the Stapper.” He looked at the dial. It was set to 1973. And the warehouse was new some time around 2420.
Brent sat and stared at the panel.
“What bees matter?” Martha demanded. “Where be we?”
“Here, same like always. But what bothers me is just when we are. Come on; want to explore?”
Martha shook her head. “I want to stay here. And I be afraid for Stephen. Doed Stappers get him? Let’s go back.”
“I’ve got to check up on things. Something’s gone wrong, and Derringer’ll never forgive me if I don’t find out what and why. You stay here if you want.”
“Alone?”
Brent suppressed several remarks concerning women, in the abstract and the particular. “Stay or go, I don’t care. I’m going.”
Martha sighed. “You have changed so, John—”
In front of the warehouse was an open field. There had been buildings there when Brent last saw it. And in the field three young people were picnicking. The sight reminded Brent that it was a long time since he’d eaten.
He made toward the trio. There were two men and a girl. One man was blond, the other and the girl were brilliantly red-headed. The girl had much more than even that hair to recommend her. She— Brent’s eyes returned to the red-headed man. There was no mistaking those deep brown eyes, that sharp and noble nose. The beard was scant, but still there was no denying—
Brent sprang forward with an eager cry of “Stephen!”
The young man looked at him blankly. “Yes,” he said politely. “What do you want?”
Brent mentally kicked himself. He had met Stephen in advanced age. What would the Stephen of twenty know of him? And suddenly he began to understand a great deal. The confusion of that first meeting started to fade away.
“If I
