Symonds spoke in his tight little voice: “I send your recommendations in, of course. The project office passes on them.”

  “I’ll say it does,” muttered young Greenstein irreverently.

  “Please do not blame me,” insisted Symonds.

  I wonder. Herries glowered at him. Symonds had an in of some kind. That was obvious. A man who was simply a glorified clerk would not be called to Washington, for unspecified conferences with unspecified people, as often as this one was. But what was he, then?

  A favorite relative? No…in spite of high pay, this operation was no political plum. FBI? Scarcely…the security checks were all run in the future. A hack in the bureaucracy? That was more probable. Symonds was here to see that oil was pumped and dinosaurs chased away and the hideously fecund jungle kept beyond the fence according to the least comma in the latest directive from headquarters.

  The small man continued: “It has been explained to you officially that the heavier weapons are all needed at home. The international situation is critical. You ought to be thankful you are safely back in the past.”

  “Heat, large economy-size alligators, and not a woman for a hundred million years,” grunted Olson. ‘‘I’d rather be blown up. Who dealt this mess?”

  “You did,” said Polansky. “Gimme two, and make ’em good.”

  Herries stripped the clothes off his thick hairy body, went to the rear of the cabin, and entered the shower cubby. He left the door open, to listen in. A boss was always lonely. Maybe he should have married when he had the chance. But then he wouldn’t be here. Except for Symonds, who was a widower and in any case more a government than company man, Thansoco had been hiring only young bachelors for operations in the field.

  “It seems kinda funny to talk about the international situation,” remarked Carver. “Hell, there won’t be any international situation for several geological periods.”

  “The inertial effect makes simultaneity a valid approximational concept,” declared Symonds pedantically. His habit of lecturing scientists and engineers on their professions had not endeared him to them. “If we spend a year in the past, we must necessarily return to our own era to find a year gone, since the main projector operates only at the point of its own existence which—”

  “Oh, stow it,” said Greenstein. “I read the orientation manual too.” He waited until everyone had cards, then shoved a few chips forward and added: “druther spend my time a little nearer home. Say with Cleopatra.”

  “Impossible,” Symonds told him. “Inertial effect again. In order to send a body into the past at all, the projector must energize it so much that the minimal time-distance we can cover becomes precisely the one we have covered to arrive here, one hundred and one million, three hundred twenty-seven thousand, et cetera, years.”

  “But why not time-hop into the future? You don’t buck entropy in that direction. I mean, I suppose there is an inertial effect there, too, but it would be much smaller, so you could go into the future—”

  “—about a hundred years at a hop, according to the handbook,” supplied Polansky.

  “So why don’t they look at the twenty-first century?” asked Greenstein.

  “I understand that that is classified information,” Symonds said. His tone implied that Greenstein had skirted some unimaginably gross obscenity.

  Herries put his head out of the shower. “Sure it’s classified,” he said. “They’d classify the wheel if they could. But use your reason and you’ll see why travel into the future isn’t practical. Suppose you jump a hundred years ahead. How do you get home to report what you’ve seen? The projector will yank you a hundred million years back, less the distance you went forward.”

  Symonds dove back into his book. Somehow, he gave an impression of lying there rigid with shock that men dared think after he had spoken the phrase of taboo.

  “Uh…yes. I get it.” Greenstein nodded. He had only been recruited a month ago, to replace a man drowned in a grass-veiled bog. Before then, like nearly all the world, he had had no idea time travel existed. So far he had been too busy to examine its implications.

  To Herries it was an old, worn-thin story.

  “I daresay they did send an expedition a hundred million years up, so it could come back to the same week as it left,” he said. “Don’t ask me what was found. Classified: Tip-top Secret, Burn Before Reading.”

  “You know, though,” said Polansky in a thoughtful tone, “I been thinking some myself. Why are we here at all? I mean, oil is necessary to defense and all that, but it seems to me it’d make more sense for the U.S. Army to come through, cross the ocean, and establish itself where all the enemy nations are going to be. Then we’d have a gun pointed at their heads!”

  “Nice theory,” said Herries. ‘‘I’ve daydreamed myself. But there’s only one main projector, to energize all the subsidiary ones. Building it took almost the whole world supply of certain rare earths. Its capacity is limited. If we started sending military units into the past, it’d be a slow and cumbersome operation—and not being a Security officer, I’m not required to kid myself that Moscow doesn’t know we’ve got time travel. They’ve probably even given Washington a secret ultimatum: ‘Start sending back war material in any quantity, and we’ll hit you with everything we’ve got.’ But evidently they don’t feel strongly enough about our pumping oil on our own territory—or what will one day be our own territory—to make it a, uh, casus belli.”

  “Just as we don’t feel their satellite base in the twentieth century is dangerous enough for us to fight about,” said Greenstein, “but I suspect we’re the reason they agreed to make the Moon a neutral zone. Same old standoff.”

  “I wonder how long it can last?” murmured Polansky.

  “Not much longer,” said Olson. “Read your history. I’ll see you, Greenstein, boy, and raise you two.”

  Herries let the shower run about him. At least there was no shortage of hot water. Transoco had sent back a complete atomic pile. But civilization and war still ran on oil, he thought, and oil was desperately short up there.

  Time, he reflected, was a paradoxical thing. The scientists had told him it was utterly rigid. Perhaps, though of course it would be a graveyard secret, the cloak-and-dagger boys had tested that theory the hard way, going back into the historical past (it could be done after all, Herries suspected, though by a roundabout route which consumed fabulous amounts of energy) in an attempt to head off the Bolshevik Revolution. It would have failed. Neither past nor future could be changed—-they could only be discovered. Some of Transoco’s men had discovered death, an eon before they were born…But there would not be such a shortage of oil up in the future if Transoco had not gone back and drained it in the past. A self-causing future—

  Primordial stuff, petroleum. Hoyle’s idea seemed to be right, it had not been formed by rotting dinosaurs but was present from the beginning. It was the stuff which had stuck the planets together.

  And, Herries thought, was sticking to him now. He reached for the soap.

  * * *

  Earth spun gloomily through hours, and morning crept over wide brown waters. There was no real day as men understood day—the heavens were a leaden sheet with dirty black rainclouds scudding below the permanent fog layers.

  Herries was up early, for there was a shipment scheduled. He came out of the bosses’ messhall and stood for a moment looking over the mud beach and the few square miles of cleared land, sleazy buildings and gaunt derricks inside an electric mesh fence. Automation replaced thousands of workers, so that five hundred men were enough to handle everything, but still the compound was the merest scratch and the jungle remained a terrifying black wall. Not that the trees were so utterly alien—besides the archaic grotesqueries, like ferns and mosses of gruesome size, there were cycad, redwood, and gingko, scattered prototypes of oak and willow and birch. But Herries missed wild flowers.

  A working party with its machines was repairing the fence the brontosaur had smashed through yesterday, the well it had wrecked, the viciously persistent inroads of grass and vine. A caterpillar tractor hauled a string of loaded wagons across raw red earth. A helicopter buzzed overhead, on watch for dinosaurs. It was the only flying thing. There had been a nearby pterodactyl rookery, but the men had cleaned that out months ago. When you got right down to facts, the most sinister animal of all was man.

  Greenstein joined Herries. The new assistant was tall, slender, with curly brown hair and the defenseless face of youth. Above boots and dungarees he wore a blue sports shirt; it offered a kind of defiance to this sullen world. “Smoke?” he invited.

  “Thanks.” Herries accepted the cigarette. His eyes still dwelt on the derricks. Their walking beams went up and down, up and down, like a joyless copulation. Perhaps a man could get used to the Jurassic rain forest and eventually see some dark beauty there, for it was at least life; but this field would always remain hideous, being dead and pumping up the death of men.

  “How’s it going, Sam?” he asked when the tobacco had soothed his palate.

  “All right,” said Greenstein. “I’m shaking down. But God, It’s good to know today is mail call!”

  They stepped off the porch and walked toward the transceiving station. Mud squelched under their feet. A tuft of something, too pale and fleshy to be grass, stood near Herries’ path. The yard crew had better uproot that soon, or in a week it might claim the entire compound.

  “Girl friend, I suppose,” said the chief. “That does make a month into a hell of a long drought between letters.”

  Greenstein flushed and nodded earnestly. “We’re going to get married when my two years here are up,” he said.

  “That’s what most of ’em plan on. A lot of saved-up pay and valuable experience—sure, you’re fixed for life.” It was on Herries’ tongue to add that the life might be a short one, but he suppressed the impulse.

  Loneliness dragged at his nerves. There was no one waiting in the future for him. It was just as well, he told himself during the endless nights. Hard enough to sleep without worrying about some woman in the same age as the cobalt bomb.

  ‘‘I’ve got her picture here, if you’d like to see it,” offered Greenstein shyly.

  His hand was already on his wallet. A tired grin slid up Herries’ mouth. “Right next to your…er…heart, eh?” he murmured.

  Greenstein blinked, threw back his head, and laughed. The field had not heard so merry a laugh in a long while. Nevertheless, he showed the other man a pleasant-faced, unspectacular girl.

  Out in the swamp, something hooted and threshed about.

  Impulsively, Herries asked: “How do you feel about this operation, Sam?”

  “Huh? Why, it’s…interesting work. And a good bunch of guys.”

  “Even Symonds?”

  “Oh, he means well.”

  “We could have more fun if he didn’t bunk with us.”

  “He can’t help being…old,” said Greenstein.

  Herries glanced at the boy. “You know,” he said, “you’re the first man in the Jurassic Period who’s had a good word for Ephraim Symonds. I appreciate that. I’d better not say whether or not I share the sentiment, but I appreciate it.”

  His boots sludged ahead, growing heavier with each step. “You still haven’t answered my first question,” he resumed after a while. “I didn’t ask if you enjoyed the work, I asked how you feel about it. Its purpose. We have the answers here to questions which science has been asking—will be asking—for centuries. And yet, except for a couple of under-equipped paleobiologists, who aren’t allowed to publish their findings, we’re doing nothing but rape the earth in an age before it has even conceived us.”

  Greenstein hesitated. Then, with a surprising dryness: “You’re getting too psychoanalytic for me, I’m afreud.”

  Herries chuckled. The day seemed a little more alive, all at once. “Touché! Well, I’ll rephrase Joe Polansky’s question of last night. Do you think the atomic standoff in our home era—to which this operation is potentially rather important—is stable?”

  Greenstein considered for a moment. “No,” he admitted. “Deterrence is a stopgap till something better can be worked out.”

  “They’ve said as much since it first began. Nothing has been done. It’s improbable that anything will be. Ole Olson describes the international situation as a case of the irresistibly evil force colliding with the immovably stupid object.”

  “Ole likes to use extreme language,” said Greenstein. “So tell me, what else could our side do?”

  “I wish to God I had an answer.” Herries sighed. “Pardon me. We avoid politics here, as much as possible; we’re escapists in several senses of the word. But frankly, I sound out new men. I was doing it to you. Because in spite of what Washington thinks, a Q clearance isn’t all that a man needs to work here.”

  “Did I pass?” asked Greenstein, a bit too lightly.

  “Sure. So far. You may wish you hadn’t. The burning issue today is not whether to tolerate ‘privileged neutralism,’ or whatever the latest catchword is up there. It’s: Did I get the armament I’ve been asking for?”

  The transceiving station bulked ahead. It was a long corrugated-iron shed, but dwarfed by the tanks which gleamed behind it. Every one of those was filled, Herries knew. Today they would pump their crude oil into the future. Or rather, if you wanted to be exact, their small temporal unit would establish a contact and the gigantic main projector in the twentieth century would then “suck” the liquid toward itself. And in return the compound would get—food, tools, weapons, supplies, and mail. Herries prayed there would be at least one howitzer…and no VIP’s. That Senator a few months ago!

  For a moment, contemplating the naked ugliness of tanks and pumps and shed, Herries had a vision of this one place stretching through time. It would be abandoned some day, when the wells were exhausted, and rain and jungle would rapidly eat the last thin traces of man. Later would come the sea, and then it would be dry land again, a cold prairie scoured by glacial winds, and then it would grow warm and…on and on, a waste of years until the time projector was invented and the great machine stood on this spot. And afterward? Herries didn’t like to think what might be here after that.

  Symonds was already present. He popped rabbit-like out of the building, a coded manifest in one hand a pencil behind his ear: “Good morning, Mr. Herries,” he said. His tone gave its usual impression of stiff self-importance.

  “ ’Morning. All set in there?” Herries went in to see for himself. A spatter of rain began to fall, noisy on the metal roof. The technicians were at their posts and reported clear. Outside, one by one, the rest of the men were drifting up. This was mail day, and little work would be done for the remainder of it.

  Herries laid the sack of letters to the future inside the shed in its proper spot. His chronometer said one minute to go. “Stand by!” At the precise time, there was a dim whistle in the air and an obscure pulsing glow. Meters came to life. The pumps began to throb, driving crude oil through a pipe which faced open-ended into the shed. Nothing emerged that Herries could see. Good. Everything in order. The other end of the pipe was a hundred million years in the future. The mail sack vanished with a small puff, as air rushed in where it had waited. Herries went back outside.

  “Ah…excuse me.”

  He turned around, with a jerkiness that told him his nerves were half unraveled. “Yes?” he snapped.

  “May I see you a moment?” asked Symonds. “Alone?” And the pale eyes behind the glasses said it was not a request but an order.

  Herries nodded curtly, swore at the men for hanging around idle when the return shipment wasn’t due for hours, and led the way to a porch tacked onto one side of the transceiving station. There were some camp stools beneath it. Symonds hitched up his khakis as if they were a business suit and sat primly down, his thin hands flat on his knees.

  “A special shipment is due today,” Symonds said. “I was not permitted to discuss it until the last moment.”

  Herries curled his mouth. “Go tell Security that the Kremlin won’t be built for a hundred million years. Maybe they haven’t heard.”

  “What no one knew, no one could put into a letter home.”

  “The mail is censored anyway. Our friends and relatives think we’re working somewhere in Asia.” Herries spat into the mud and said: “And in another year the first lot of recruits are due home. Plan to shoot them as they emerge, so they can’t possibly talk in their sleep?”

  Symonds seemed too humorless even to recognize sarcasm. He pursed his lips and declared: “Some secrets need be kept for a few months only; but within that period, they must be kept.”

  “Okay, okay. Let’s hear what’s coming today.”

  “I am not allowed to tell you that. But about half the total tonnage will be crates marked Top Secret. These are to remain in the shed, guarded night and day by armed men.” Symonds pulled a slip of paper from his jacket. “These men will be assigned to that duty, each one taking eight hours a week.”

  Herries glanced at the names. He did not know everyone here by sight, though he came close, but he recognized several of these. “Brave, discreet, and charter subscribers to National Review,” he murmured. “Teacher’s pets. All right. Though I’ll have to curtail exploration correspondingly—either that, or else cut down on their guards and sacrifice a few extra lives.”

  “I think not. Let me continue. You will get these orders in the mail today, but I will prepare you for them now. A special house must be built for the crates, as rapidly as possible, and they must be moved there immediately upon its completion. I have the specifications in my office safe: essentially, it must be air-conditioned, burglar-proof, and strong enough to withstand all natural hazards.”

  “Whoa, there!” Herries stepped forward. “That’s going to take reinforced concrete and—”

  “Materials will be made available,” said Symonds. He did not look at the other man but stared straight ahead of him, across the rain-smoky compound to the jungle. He had no expression on his pinched face, and the reflection of light off his glasses gave him a strangely blind look.