The sun grew hotter and whiter as the hydrogen-helium cycle increased its intensity. Earth spiraled slowly closer to it, the friction of gas and dust clouds in space taking their infinitesimal toll of its energy over billions of years.
How many intelligent races had risen on Earth and had their day, and died, since the age when man first came out of the jungle? At least, he thought tiredly, we were the first.
A hundred billion years in the future, the sun had used up its last reserves of nuclear reactions. Saunders looked out on a bare mountain scene, grim as the Moon—but the Moon had long ago fallen back toward its parent world and exploded into a meteoric rain. Earth faced its primary now; its day was as long as its year. Saunders saw part of the sun’s huge blood-red disc shining wanly.
So good-bye, Sol, he thought. Good-bye, and thank you for many million years of warmth and light. Sleep well, old friend.
Some billions of years beyond, there was nothing but the elemental dark. Entropy had reached a maximum, the energy sources were used up, the universe was dead.
The universe was dead!
He screamed with the graveyard terror of it and flung the machine onward. Had it not been for the gods’ command, he might have let it hang there, might have opened the door to airlessness and absolute zero to die. But he had to go on. He had reached the end of all things, but he had to go on. Beyond the end of time—
Billions upon billions of years fled. Saunders lay in his machine, sunk into an apathetic coma. Once he roused himself to eat, feeling the sardonic humor of the situation—the last living creature, the last free energy in all the cindered cosmos, fixing a sandwich.
Many billions of years in the future, Saunders paused again. He looked out into blackness. But with a sudden shock he discerned a far faint glow, the vaguest imaginable blur of light out in the heavens.
Trembling, he jumped forward another billion years. The light was stronger now, a great sprawling radiance swirling inchoately in the sky.
The universe was re-forming.
It made sense, thought Saunders, fighting for self-control. Space had expanded to some kind of limit, now it was collapsing in on itself to start the cycle anew—the cycle that had been repeated none knew how many times in the past. The universe was mortal, but it was a phoenix which would never really die.
But he was disturbingly mortal, and suddenly he was free of his death wish. At the very least he wanted to see what the next time around looked like. But the universe would, according to the best theories of twentieth-century cosmology, collapse to what was virtually a point-source, a featureless blaze of pure energy out of which the primal atoms would be reformed. If he wasn’t to be devoured in that raging furnace, he’d better leap a long ways ahead. A hell of a long ways!
He grinned with sudden reckless determination and plunged the switch forward.
Worry came back. How did he know that a planet would be formed under him? He might come out in open space, or in the heart of a sun… Well, he’d have to risk that. The gods must have foreseen and allowed for it.
He came out briefly—and flashed back into time-drive. The planet was still molten!
Some geological ages later, he looked out at a spuming gray rain, washing with senseless power from a hidden sky, covering naked rocks with a raging swirl of white water. He didn’t go out; the atmosphere would be unbreathable until plants had liberated enough oxygen.
On and on! Sometimes he was under seas, sometimes on land. He saw strange jungles like overgrown ferns and mosses rise and wither in the cold of a glacial age and rise again in altered life-form.
A thought nagged at him, tugging at the back of his mind as he rode onward. It didn’t hit him for several million years, then: The moon! Oh, my God, the moon!
His hands trembled too violently for him to stop the machine. Finally, with an effort, he controlled himself enough to pull the switch. He skipped on, looking for a night of full moon.
Luna. The same old face—Luna!
The shock was too great to register. Numbly, he resumed his journey. And the world began to look familiar, there were low forested hills and a river shining in the distance…
He didn’t really believe it till he saw the village. It was the same—Hudson, New York.
He sat for a moment, letting his physicist’s brain consider the tremendous fact. In Newtonian terms, it meant that every particle newly formed in the Beginning had exactly the same position and velocity as every corresponding particle formed in the previous cycle. In more acceptable Einsteinian language, the continuum was spherical in all four dimensions. In any case—if you traveled long enough, through space of time, you got back to your starting point.
He could go home!
He ran down the sunlit hill, heedless of his foreign garments, ran till the breath sobbed in raw lungs and his heart seemed about to burst from the ribs. Gasping, he entered the village, went into a bank, and looked at the tear-off calendar and the wall clock.
June 17, 1936, 1:30 P.M.
From that, he could figure his time of arrival in 1973 to the minute.
He walked slowly back, his legs trembling under him, and started the time machine again. Grayness was outside—for the last time.
1973.
Martin Saunders stepped out of the machine. Its moving in space, at Brontothor, had brought it outside MacPherson’s house; it lay halfway up the hill at the top of which the rambling old building stood.
There came a flare of soundless energy. Saunders sprang back in alarm and saw the machine dissolve into molten metal—into gas—into a nothingness that shone briefly and was gone.
The gods must have put some annihilating device into it. They didn’t want its devices from the future loose in the twentieth century.
But there was no danger of that, thought Saunders as he walked slowly up the hill through the rain-wet grass. He had seen too much of war and horror ever to give men knowledge they weren’t ready for. He and Eve and MacPherson would have to suppress the story of his return around time—for that would offer a means of travel into the past, remove the barrier which would keep man from too much use of the machine for murder and oppression. The Second Empire and the Dreamer’s philosophy lay a long time in the future.
He went on. The hill seemed strangely unreal, after all that he had seen from it, the whole enormous tomorrow of the cosmos. He would never quite fit into the little round of days that lay ahead.
Taury—her bright lovely face floated before him, he thought he heard her voice whisper in the cool wet wind that stroked his hair like her strong, gentle hands.
«Good-bye,» he whispered into the reaching immensity of time. «Good-bye, my dearest.»
He went slowly up the steps and in the front door. There would be Sam to mourn. And then there would be the carefully censored thesis to write, and a life spent in satisfying work with a girl who was sweet and kind and beautiful even if she wasn’t Taury. It was enough for a mortal man.
He walked into the living room and smiled at Eve and MacPherson. «Hello,» he said. «I guess I must be a little early.»
BARNACLE BULL
The Hellik Olav was well past Mars, acceleration ended, free-falling into the Asteroid Belt on a long elliptical orbit, when the interior radiation count began to rise. It wasn’t serious, and worried none of the four men aboard. They had been so worried all along that a little extra ionization didn’t seem to matter.
But as the days passed, the Geigers got still more noisy.