Yes. By the dubious existence of divine mercy, yes.

* * *

Again a little rain, just a small warm touch on his face, like tears. Herries splashed to the transceiver building and stood quietly in the sudden flashlight glare. At last, out of blackness, the sentry’s voice came: “Oh, it’s you, sir.”

“Uh-huh. You know Worth got hurt today? I’m taking his watch.”

“What? But I thought—”

“Policy,” said Herries.

The incantation seemed to suffice. The other man shuffled forth and laid his rifle in the engineer’s hands. “And here’s the glim,” he added. “Nobody came by while I was on duty.”

“What would you have done if somebody’d tried to get in?”

“Why, stopped them, of course.”

“And if they didn’t stop?”

The dim face under the dripping hat turned puzzledly toward Herries. The engineer sighed. ‘‘I’m sorry, Thornton. It’s too late to raise philosophical questions. Run along to bed.”

He stood in front of the door, smoking a damp cigarette, and watched the man trudge away. All the lights were out now, except overhead lamps here and there. They were brilliant, but remote; he stood in a pit of shadow and wondered what the phase of the Moon was and what kind of constellations the stars made nowadays.

He waited. There was time enough for his rebellion. Too much time, really. A man stood in rain, fog about his feet and a reptile smell in his nose, and he remembered anemones in springtime, strewn under trees still cold and leafless, with here and there a little snow between the roots. Or he remembered drinking beer in a New England country inn one fall day when the door stood open to red sumac and yellow beech and a far blue wandering sky. Or he remembered a man snatched under black Jurassic quagmires, a man stepped into red ruin, a man sitting in a jeep and bleeding brains down onto the picture of the girl he had planned to marry. And then he started wondering what the point of it all was, and decided that it was either without any point whatsoever or else had the purpose of obliterating anemones and quiet country inns, and he was forced to dissent somehow.

When Thornton’s wet footsteps were lost in the dark, Herries unlocked the shed door and went through. It was smotheringly hot inside. Sweat sprang forth under his raincoat as he closed the door again and turned on his flashlight. Rain tapped loudly on the roof. The crates loomed over him, box upon box, many of them large enough to hold a dinosaur. It had taken a lot of power to ship all that tonnage into the past. No wonder taxes were high. And what might the stuff be? A herd of tanks, possibly…some knocked-down bombers…Lord knew what concept the men who lived in offices, insulated from the sky, would come up with. And Symonds had implied it was just a beginning; there would be more shipments when this had been stored out of the way, and more, and more.