“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.”

“What in the devil is this?” It was almost a snarl from Hull.

“I—don’t—know. There seems to be some kind of resistance which increases the further back we try to go—”

“Come on!”

“But—”

“Come on, God damn it!”

Saunders shrugged hopelessly.

It took two hours to fight back five years. Then Saunders stopped the projector. His voice shook.

“No go, Sam. We’ve used up three quarters of our stored energy—and the farther back we go, the more we use per year. It seems to be some sort of high-order exponential function.”

“So—”

“So we’d never make it. At this rate, our batteries will be dead before we get back another ten years.” Saunders looked ill. “It’s some effect the theory didn’t allow for, some accelerating increase in power requirements the farther back into the past we go. For twenty-year hops or less, the energy increases roughly as the square of the number of years traversed. But it must actually be something like an exponential curve, which starts building up fast and furious beyond a certain point. We haven’t enough power left in the batteries!”