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.