Saunders nodded dispiritedly. He hated to think of the blasting energies that would devour a peaceful and harmless folk, the looting and murdering and enslaving, but history was that way. It was littered with the graves of pacifists.

The bright scene swirled into grayness. They drove ahead.

4400 a.d. A villa was burning, smoke and flame reaching up into the clouded sky. Behind it stood the looming bulk of a ray-scarred spaceship, and around it boiled a vortex of men, huge bearded men in helmets and cuirasses, laughing as they bore out golden loot and struggling captives. The barbarians had come!

The two travelers leaped back into the machine. Those weapons could fuse it to a glowing mass. Saunders swung the main-drive switch far over.

“We’d better make a longer jump,” Saunders said, as the needle crept past the century mark. “Can’t look for much scientific progress in a dark age. I’ll try for five thousand a.d.”

His mind carried the thought on: Will there ever be progress of the sort we must have? Eve, will I ever see you again? As if his yearning could carryover the abyss of millennia: Don’t mourn me too long, my dearest. In all the bloody ages of human history, your happiness is all that ultimately matters.

* * *

As the needle approached six centuries, Saunders tried to ease down the switch. Tried!

“What’s the matter?” Belgotai leaned over his shoulder.

With a sudden cold sweat along his ribs, Saunders tugged harder. The switch was immobile—the projector wouldn’t stop.

“Out of order?” asked Belgotai anxiously.

“No—it’s the automatic mass-detector. We’d be annihilated if we emerged in the same space with solid matter. The detector prevents the projector from stopping if it senses such a structure.” Saunders grinned savagely. “Some damned idiot must have built a house right where we are!”

The needle passed its limit, and still they droned on through a featureless grayness. Saunders reset the dial and noted the first half millennium. It was nice, though not necessary, to know what year it was when they emerged.

He wasn’t worried at first. Man’s works were so horribly impermanent; he thought with a sadness of the cities and civilizations he had seen rise and spend their little hour and sink back into the night and chaos of time. But after a thousand years…

Two thousand…

Three thousand…

Belgotai’s face was white and tense in the dull glow of the instrument panel. “How long to go?” he whispered.

“I—don’t—know.”

Within the machine, the long minutes passed while the projector hummed its song of power and two men stared with hypnotized fascination at the creeping record of centuries.

For twenty thousand years that incredible thing stood. In the year 25,296 a.d., the switch suddenly went down under Saunders’ steady tug. The machine flashed into reality, tilted, and slid down a few feet before coming to rest. Wildly, they opened the door.

The projector lay on a stone block big as a small house, whose ultimate slipping from its place had freed them. It was halfway up a pyramid.