The twentieth century looked still uglier than it had last month. The nations felt their pride and saw no way of retreat. The Middle Eastern war was taking a decisive turn which none of the great powers could afford. Herries wondered if he might not be cut off in the Jurassic. A single explosion could destroy the main projector. Five hundred womanless men in a world of reptiles—he’d take the future, cobalt bomb and all.

After lunch there was a quiet, Sunday kind of atmosphere, men lay on their bunks reading their letters over and over. Herries made his rounds, machines and kitchen and sickbay, inspecting.

“I guess we’ll discharge O’Connor tomorrow,” said Dr. Yamaguchi. “He can do light work with that Stader on his arm. Next time tell him to duck when a power shovel comes down.”

“What kind of sick calls have you been getting?” asked the chief.

Yamaguchi shrugged. “Usual things, very minor. I’d never have thought this swamp country would be so healthful. I guess disease germs which can live on placental mammals haven’t evolved yet.”

Father Gonzales, one of the camp’s three chaplains, buttonholed Herries as he came out. “Can you spare me a minute?” he said.

“Sure, padre. What is it?”

“About organizing some baseball teams. We need more recreation. This is not a good place for men to live.”

“Sawbones was just telling me—”

“I know. No flu, no malaria, oh, yes. But man is more than a body.”

“Sometimes I wonder,” said Herries. ‘‘I’ve seen the latest headlines. The dinosaurs have more sense than we do.”

“We have the capacity to do nearly all things,” said Father Gonzales. “At present, I mean in the twentieth century, we seem to do evil very well. We can do as much good, given the chance.”

“Who’s denying us the chance?” asked Herries. “Just ourselves, H. Sapiens. Therefore I wonder if we really are able to do good.”

“Don’t confuse sinfulness with damnation,” said the priest. “We have perhaps been unfortunate in our successes. And yet even our most menacing accomplishments have a kind of sublimity. The time projector, for example. If the minds able to shape such a thing in metal were only turned toward human problems, what could we not hope to do?”

“But that’s my point,” said Herries. “We don’t do the high things. We do what’s trivial and evil so consistently that I wonder if it isn’t in our nature. Even this time travel business…more and more I’m coming to think there’s something fundamentally unhealthy about it. As if it’s an invention which only an ingrown mind would have made first.”

“First?”

Herries looked up into the steaming sky. A foul wind met his face. “There are stars above those clouds,” he said, “and most stars must have planets. I’ve not been told how the time projector works, but elementary differential calculus will show that travel into the past is equivalent to attaining, momentarily, an infinite velocity. In other words, the basic natural law which the projector uses is one which somehow goes beyond relativity theory. If a time projector is possible, so is a spaceship which can reach the stars in a matter of days, maybe of minutes or seconds. If we were sane, padre, we wouldn’t have been so anxious for a little organic grease and the little military advantage involved, that the first thing we did was go back into the dead past after it. No, we’d have invented that spaceship first, and gone out to the stars where there’s room to be free and to grow. The time projector would have come afterward, as a scientific research tool.”