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.”

Sea Burial

Wise shall you wander, at one with the world,
Ever the all of you eagerly errant:
Spirit in sunlight and spindrift and sea-surge,
Flesh in the fleetness of fish and of fowl,
Back to the Bearer your bone and your blood-salt.
Beloved:
The sky take you.
The sea take you.
And we will remember you in the wind.

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.

And then the radio quit.

This was bad! No more tapes were being made of signals received—Earth to one of the artificial satellites to Phobos to a cone of space which a rather smug-looking computer insisted held the Hellik Olav—for later study by electronics engineers. As for the men, they were suddenly bereft of their favorite programs. Adam Langnes, captain, no longer got the beeps whose distortions gave him an idea of exterior conditions and whose Doppler frequency gave him a check on his velocity. Torvald Winge, astronomer, had no answers to his requests for data omitted from his handbook and computations too elaborate for the ship’s digital. Per Helledahl, physicist, heard no more sentimental folk songs nor the recorded babblings of his youngest child. And Erik Bull, engineer, couldn’t get the cowboy music sent from the American radio satellite. He couldn’t even get the Russians’ Progressive jazz.