His voice was strangely tender, all of a sudden. «Good-bye, Martin my comrade. And—good luck!»
He opened the main-drive switch and stepped out as the projector began to warm up. The door clanged shut behind him.
Saunders writhed on the floor, cursing with a brain that was a black cauldron of bitterness. The great drone of the projector rose, he was on his way—Oh no—stop the machine, God, set me free before it’s too late!
The plastic cords cut his wrists. He was lashed to a stanchion, unable to reach the switch with any part of his body. His groping fingers slid across the surface of a knot, the nails clawing for a hold. The machine roared with full power, driving ahead through the vastness of time.
Vargor had bound him skillfully. It took him a long time to get free. Toward the end he went slowly, not caring, knowing with a dull knowledge that he was already more thousands of irretrievable years into the future than his dials would register.
He climbed to his feet, plucked the gag from his mouth, and looked blankly out at the faceless gray. The century needle was hard against its stop. He estimated vaguely that he was some ten thousand years into the future already.
Ten thousand years!
He yanked down the switch with a raging burst of savagery.
It was dark outside. He stood stupidly for a moment before he saw water seeping into the cabin around the door. Water—he was under water—short circuits! Frantically, he slammed the switch forward again.
He tasted the water on the floor. It was salt. Sometime in that ten thousand years, for reasons natural or artificial, the sea had come in and covered the site of Brontothor.
A thousand years later he was still below its surface. Two thousand, three thousand, ten thousand…
Taury, Taury! For twenty thousand years she had been dust on an alien planet. And Belgotai was gone with his wry smile, Hunda’s staunchness, even the Dreamer must long ago have descended into darkness. The sea rolled over dead Brontothor, and he was alone.
He bowed his head on his arms and wept.
For three million years the ocean lay over Brontothor’s land. And Saunders drove onward.
He stopped at intervals to see if the waters had gone. Each time the frame of the machine groaned with pressure and the sea poured in through the crack of the door. Otherwise he sat dully in the throbbing loneliness, estimating time covered by his own watch and the known rate of the projector, not caring anymore about dates or places.
Several times he considered stopping the machine, letting the sea burst in and drown him. There would be peace in its depths, sleep and forgetting. But no, it wasn’t in him to quit that easily. Death was his friend, death would always be there waiting for his call.
But Taury was dead.
Time grayed to its end. In the four millionth year, he stopped the machine and discovered that there was dry air around him.
He was in a city. But it was not such a city as he had ever seen or imagined, he couldn’t follow the wild geometry of the titanic structures that loomed about him and they were never the same. The place throbbed and pulsed with incredible forces, it wavered and blurred in a strangely unreal light. Great devastating energies flashed and roared around him—lightning had come to Earth. The air hissed and stung with their booming passage.
The thought was a shout filling his skull, blazing along his nerves, too mighty a thought for his stunned brain to do more than grope after meaning:
CREATURE FROM OUT OF TIME, LEAVE THIS PLACE AT ONCE OR THE FORCES WE USE WILL DESTROY YOU!
Through and through him that mental vision seared, down to the very molecules of his brain, his life lay open to Them in a white flame of incandescence.
Can you help me? he cried to the gods. Can you send me back through time?
MAN, THERE IS NO WAY TO TRAVEL FAR BACKWARD IN TIME, IT IS INHERENTLY IMPOSSIBLE. YOU MUST GO ON TO THE VERY END OF THE UNIVERSE, AND BEYOND THE END, BECAUSE THAT WAY LIES—
He screamed with the pain of unendurably great thought and concept filling his human brain.
GO ON, MAN, GO ON! BUT YOU CANNOT SURVIVE IN THAT MACHINE AS IT IS. I WILL CHANGE IT FOR YOU… GO!
The time projector started again by itself. Saunders fell forward into a darkness that roared and flashed.
Grimly, desperately, like a man driven by demons, Saunders hurtled into the future.
There could be no gainsaying the awful word which had been laid on him. The mere thought of the gods had engraved itself on the very tissue of his brain. Why he should go on to the end of time, he could not imagine, nor did he care. But go on he must!
The machine had been altered. It was airtight now, and experiment showed the window to be utterly unbreakable. Something had been done to the projector so that it hurled him forward at an incredible rate, millions of years passed while a minute or two ticked away within the droning shell.
But what had the gods been?
He would never know. Beings from beyond the Galaxy, beyond the very universe—the ultimately evolved descendants of man—something at whose nature he could not even guess—there was no way of telling. This much was plain: whether it had become extinct or had changed into something else, the human race was gone. Earth would never feel human tread again.
I wonder what became of the Second Empire? I hope it had a long and good life. Or—could that have been its unimaginable end product?
The years reeled past, millions, billions mounting on each other while Earth spun around her star and the Galaxy aged. Saunders fled onward.
He stopped now and then, unable to resist a glimpse of the world and its tremendous history.
A hundred million years in the future, he looked out on great sheets of flying snow. The gods were gone. Had they too died, or abandoned Earth—perhaps for an altogether different plane of existence? He would never know.
There was a being coming through the storm. The wind flung the snow about him in whirling, hissing clouds. Frost was in his gray fur. He moved with a lithe, unhuman grace, carrying a curved staff at whose tip was a blaze like a tiny sun.
Saunders hailed him through the psychophone, letting his amplified voice shout through the blizzard: «Who are you? What are you doing on Earth?»
The being carried a stone ax in one hand and wore a string of crude beads about his neck. But he stared with bold yellow eyes at the machine and the psychophone brought his harsh scream: «You must be from the far past, one of the earlier cycles.»
«They told me to go on, back almost a hundred million years ago. They told me to go to the end of time!»
The psychophone hooted with metallic laughter. «If They told you so—then go!»
The being walked on into the storm.
Saunders flung himself ahead. There was no place on Earth for him anymore, he had no choice but to go on.
A billion years in the future there was a city standing on a plain where grass grew that was blue and glassy and tinkled with a high crystalline chiming as the wind blew through it. But the city had never been built by humans, and it warned him away with a voice he could not disobey.
Then the sea came, and for a long time thereafter he was trapped within a mountain; he had to drive onward till it had eroded back to the ground.