“Tom Barlow.” He was much taken with Amily, who was tall and well-formed, with dark hair falling past a heart-shaped blue-eyed face and halfway down her back. She wore sandals, shorts, a kind of tee shirt, and a friendly expression. “What, uh, what year is this?”

“Twen’y-four nine’y-seven,” she replied.

“The twelfth April. Your calculations were very close. This place was readied special for your coming.”

He had to ask it, with his heart in his throat despite all soothing drugs: “Is there any way for me to return?”

Joe Grozen’s broad red visage grew sober. “No,” he muttered. “ ’Fraid not.”

Barlow sighed. “Never mind. I didn’t expect it. Travel into the past, an obvious absurdity. All I did was give myself a jolt of energy, a vector along the time axis rather than through space, and so increased my rate of existence several millionfold…But you know all about that.” He fumbled after a cigarette.

“Oh, yes,” said an Oriental. “The phenomenon’s well un’erstood today.” He bowed. “Though ’s an honor to meet its first discoverer. So youthful you are, too.”

“Sam’s chief o’ the technics department,” explained Amily. “Natur’lly he’d be mos’ in’erested in the science aspect. An’ Phil here.” She laid a hand briefly on the shoulder of the Negro. “He heads up the sociohist’ry section. He’ll want to ask you all sorts o’ questions ’bout the past.”

“You’ll have status all your life in my department, if you wish,” Phil assured Barlow. “Special lecturer, consultant, whatever you want to call it. We’re missing so much information about everything prior to the Atomic Wars.”

“Shut up, you damn scientists,” said Joe good-naturedly. “Our frien’ Tom is first of all a free human being. You can quiz him later, but give the poor tovarsh time to get used to us first. How y’ feeling now, Tom?”

“Okay.” Barlow drew heavily on his cigarette. It might have been the drug, or simply the conviction, now proven, that his farewells in the twentieth century had been final. But whatever the cause, that era already seemed remote—though he had departed it less than half an hour ago, as far as his conscious mind knew. His fears had not materialized: emergence in a desert, or an Orwellian dictatorship, or something equally horrible. He’d gambled on finding a world where his own romantic advent would give him a head start in establishing himself. (Surely, even in the course of five hundred years, there had not been many time leapers. The messages he left, sealed into marked blocks of concrete, had been carefully designed to arouse the curiosity of future humankind about Thomas Barlow.) These easy-going, familiar-looking people dissolved the tension in him. His gamble had paid off.

“Sure, I’m fine,” he said. “Tired, is all.”

Joe nodded. “That I un’erstan’. We got a home all prepared for you. You can rest up there. I’d like to give you a welcoming banquet this evening, though. Lots o’ people want to meet you.”

“I don’t need—” Barlow was interrupted as Amily took him by the hand.