«There’ll be people in the future,» said Eve.
«Oh, well, if they invite us in for a drink we won’t say no,» shrugged Hull. «Which reminds me—» He fished a pint out of his capacious coverall pocket. «We ought to drink a toast or something, huh?»
Saunders frowned a little. He didn’t want to add to Eve’s impression of a voyage into darkness. She was worried enough, poor kid, poor, lovely kid. «Hell,» he said, «we’ve been back to nineteen fifty-three and seen the house standing. We’ve been ahead to nineteen ninety-three and seen the house standing. Nobody home at either time. These jaunts are too dull to rate a toast.»
«Nothing,» said Hull, «is too dull to rate a drink.» He poured and they touched glasses, a strange little ceremony in the utterly prosaic laboratory. «Bon voyage!»
«Bon voyage.» Eve tried to smile, but the hand that lifted the glass to her lips trembled a little.
«Come on,» said Hull. «Let’s go, Mart. Sooner we set out, the sooner we can get back.»
«Sure.» With a gesture of decision, Saunders put down his glass and swung toward the machine. «Good-bye, Eve. I’ll see you in a couple of hours—after a hundred years or so.»
«So long—Martin.» She made the name a caress.
MacPherson beamed with avuncular approval.
Saunders squeezed himself into the forward compartment with Hull. He was a big man, long-limbed and wide-shouldered, with blunt, homely features under a shock of brown hair and wide-set gray eyes lined with crow’s feet from much squinting into the sun. He wore only the plain blouse and slacks of his work, stained here and there with grease or acid.
The compartment was barely large enough for the two of them, and crowded with instruments—as well as the rifle and pistol they had along entirely to quiet Eve’s fears. Saunders swore as the guns got in his way, and closed the door. The clang had in it an odd note of finality.
«Here goes,» said Hull unnecessarily.
Saunders nodded and started the projector warming up. Its powerful thrum filled the cabin and vibrated in his bones. Needles flickered across gauge faces, approaching stable values.
Through the single porthole he saw Eve waving. He waved back and then, with an angry motion, flung down the main switch.
The machine shimmered, blurred, and was gone. Eve drew a shuddering breath and turned back to MacPherson.
Grayness swirled briefly before them, and the drone of the projectors filled the machine with an enormous song. Saunders watched the gauges, and inched back the switch which controlled their rate of time advancement. A hundred years ahead—less the number of days since they’d sent the first automatic, just so that no dunderhead in the future would find it and walk off with it.
He slapped down the switch, and the noise and vibration came to a ringing halt.
Sunlight streamed in through the porthole. «No house?» asked Hull.
«A century is a long time,» said Saunders.
«Come on, let’s go out and have a look.»
They crawled through the door and stood erect. The machine lay in the bottom of a half-filled pit above which grasses waved. A few broken shards of stone projected from the earth. There was a bright blue sky overhead, with fluffy white clouds blowing across it.
«No automatics,» said Hull, looking around. «That’s odd. But maybe the ground-level adjustments—let’s go topside.» Saunders scrambled up the sloping walls of the pit.
It was obviously the half-filled basement of the old house, which must somehow have been destroyed in the eighty years since his last visit. The ground-level machine in the projector automatically materialized it on the exact surface whenever it emerged. There would be no sudden falls or sudden burials under risen earth. Nor would there be disastrous materializations inside something solid; mass-sensitive circuits prevented the machine from halting whenever solid matter occupied its own space. Liquid or gas molecules could get out of the way fast enough.
Saunders stood in tall, wind-rippled grass and looked over the serene landscape of upper New York State. Nothing had changed, the river and the forested hills beyond it were the same, the sun was bright and clouds shone in the heavens.
No—no, before God! Where was the village?
House gone, town gone—what had happened? Had people simply moved away, or…
He looked back down to the basement. Only a few minutes ago—a hundred years in the past—he had stood there in a tangle of battered apparatus, and Doc and Eve—and now it was a pit with wild grass covering the raw earth. An odd desolation tugged at him.
Was he still alive today? Was—Eve? The gerontology of 1973 made it entirely possible, but one never knew. And he didn’t want to find out.
«Must’a given the country back to the Indians,» grunted Sam Hull.
The prosaic wisecrack restored a sense of balance. After all, any sensible man knew that things changed with time. There would be good and evil in the future as there had been in the past. «—And they lived happily ever after» was pure myth. The important thing was change, an unending flux out of which all could come. And right now there was a job to do.
They scouted around in the grass, but there was no trace of the small automatic projectors. Hull scowled thoughtfully. «You know,» he said, «I think they started back and blew out on the way.»
«You must be right,» nodded Saunders. «We can’t have arrived more than a few minutes after their return-point.» He started back toward the big machine. «Let’s take our observation and get out.»
They set up their astronomical equipment and took readings on the declining sun. Waiting for night, they cooked a meal on a camp stove and sat while a cricket-chirring dusk deepened around them.
«I like this future,» said Hull. «It’s peaceful. Think I’ll retire here—or now—in my old age.»
The thought of transtemporal resorts made Saunders grin. But—who knew? Maybe!
The stars wheeled grandly overhead. Saunders jotted down figures on right ascension, declination and passage times. From that, they could calculate later, almost to the minute, how far the machine had taken them. They had not moved in space at all, of course, relative to the surface of the earth. «Absolute space» was an obsolete fiction, and as far as the projector was concerned Earth was the immobile center of the universe.
They waded through dew-wet grass back down to the machine. «We’ll try ten-year stops, looking for the automatics,» said Saunders. «If we don’t find ’em that way, to hell with them. I’m hungry.»
2063—it was raining into the pit.
2053—sunlight and emptiness.
2043—the pit was fresher now, and a few rotting timbers lay half buried in the ground.
Saunders scowled at the meters. «She’s drawing more power than she should,» he said.
2023—the house had obviously burned, charred stumps of wood were in sight. And the projector had roared with a skull-cracking insanity of power; energy drained from the batteries like water from a squeezed sponge; a resistor was beginning to glow.
They checked the circuits, inch by inch, wire by wire. Nothing was out of order.
«Let’s go.» Hull’s face was white.
It was a battle to leap the next ten years, it took half an hour of bawling, thundering, tortured labor for the projector to fight backward. Radiated energy made the cabin unendurably hot.
2013—the fire-blackened basement still stood.
On its floor lay two small cylinders, tarnished with some years of weathering.
«The automatics got a little further back,» said Hull. «Then they quit, and just lay here.»
Saunders examined them. When he looked up from his instruments, his face was grim with the choking fear that was rising within him. «Drained,» he said. «Batteries completely dead. They used up all their energy reserves.»