A score or better break loose from the riot, which is already calling forth weapons and claiming lives. They surround me with their bodies. Their eyes are the eyes of prophets. We make haste to seek a hiding place, for one military robot has appeared and others will not be long in coming. The tall engine strides to stand guard over Our Lady, and this is my last glimpse of Her.

  My followers do not reproach me for having cost them all they were. They are mine. In me is the godhead which can do no wrong.

  And the war is open, between me and SUM. My friends are few, my enemies many and mighty. I go about the world as a fugitive. But always I sing. And always I find someone who will listen, will join us, embracing pain and death like a lover.

  With the Knife and the Ax I take their souls. Afterward we hold for them the ritual of rebirth. Some go thence to become outlaw missionaries; most put on facsimile bracelets and return home, to whisper my word. It makes little difference to me. I have no haste, who own eternity.

  For my word is of what lies beyond time. My enemies say I call forth ancient bestialities and lunacies; that I would bring civilization down in ruin; that it matters not a madman’s giggle to me whether war, famine, and pestilence will again scour the earth. With these accusations I am satisfied. The language of them shows me that here, too, I have reawakened anger. And that emotion belongs to us as much as any other. More than the others, maybe, in this autumn of mankind. We need a gale, to strike down SUM and everything It stands for. Afterward will come the winter of barbarism.

  And after that the springtime of a new and (perhaps) more human civilization. My friends seem to believe this will come in their very lifetimes: peace, brotherhood, enlightenment, sanctity. I know otherwise. I have been in the depths. The wholeness of mankind, which I am bringing back, has its horrors.

  When one day

  the Eater of the Gods returns

  the Wolf breaks his chain

  the Horsemen ride forth

  the Age ends

  the Beast is reborn

  then SUM will be destroyed; and you, strong and fair, may go back to earth and rain.

  I shall await you.

  My aloneness is nearly ended, Daybright. Just one task remains. The god must die, that his followers may believe he is raised from the dead and lives forever. Then they will go on to conquer the world.

  There are those who say I have spurned and offended them. They too, borne on the tide which I raised, have torn out their machine souls and seek in music and ecstasy to find a meaning for existence. But their creed is a savage one, which has taken them into wildcountry, where they ambush the monitors sent against them and practice cruel rites. They believe that the final reality is female. Nevertheless, messengers of theirs have approached me with the suggestion of a mystic marriage. This I refused; my wedding was long ago, and will be celebrated again when this cycle of the world has closed.

  Therefore they hate me. But I have said I will come and talk to them.

  I leave the road at the bottom of the valley and walk singing up the hill. Those few I let come this far with me have been told to abide my return. They shiver in the sunset; the vernal equinox is three days away. I feel no cold myself. I stride exultant among briars and twisted ancient apple trees. If my bare feet leave a little blood in the snow, that is good. The ridges around are dark with forest, which waits like the skeleton dead for leaves to be breathed across it again. The eastern sky is purple, where stands the evening star. Overhead, against blue, cruises an early flight of homebound geese. Their calls drift faintly down to me. Westward, above me and before me, smolders redness. Etched black against it are the women.

  The Barrier Moment

  When he heard the footsteps, Cohen turned on his heel and growled, “Now what the devil is it?” The jaggedness of the movement and of his voice told him how thin his nerves were worn.

  A guard in the door saluted. “I was told to escort this gentleman to see you, colonel. Being as how the project is so near, uh, well, the next phase, sir, General Sanchez thought he’d better see you right away.”

  He stood aside. Cohen laid down the voltmeter he had been about to plug into a testing circuit. He was a large blond man, still fairly young, who had played football for his technical college before going on to a Ph.D. in physics and an officer’s commission. “So?”

  A stooped gray figure entered from the hall, leaning on a cane and peering through thick-lensed glasses that sat uneasy on a great beak of nose. “Good Lord!” exploded Cohen. “McMurtrie!”

  “Surprised?” The old man advanced, one wisp of a hand outstretched. “Don’t see what a professor of philosophy is doing in the precious heart of your Project Robinson, eh?” As they shook, his beady gaze swept the apparatus-packed great room. “Biggest mystery to me is how it gets so drab a name. I suppose you ran out of the romantic ones. Eh? To be expected when every two-bit undertaking, to shoot off this rocket or index that file cabinet, has to be called Project Thus and Operation So. Waste not, want not, say the Gods of the Copybook Headings.”

  His grumble died out and he took a cheroot from his shabby coat.

  Cohen jerked his head at the guard, who departed. The colonel sat down on a lab bench, swinging one leg, and indicated a swivel chair. “Well, make yourself at home, professor,” he said. “I wish General Sanchez had told me—”

  “Too busy, perhaps. Or more likely, didn’t want you raising advance objections. He’s as intelligent a man as the government allows him to be.” McMurtrie lowered himself, focusing attention on the fifty-foot cylinder which gleamed in a cradle near the center of the room. One panel had been removed so that Cohen could probe its electronic guts. “And that is the time machine.”

  “Please.” Cohen winced. “The Tempotron.”

  McMurtrie stamped his cane on the concrete floor. “Do you believe an object becomes more scientific when you name it with a hybrid of bad Latin and worse Greek? I say time machine.”

  Despite weariness and tension, Cohen smiled. He had been McMurtrie’s neighbor for some two years now; the Army research project was undertaken in collaboration with the University physics department, and on University grounds. They didn’t have much in common. Cohen’s wife, a shy gentle girl with a degree in arts, was the only one who could even try to talk McMurtrie’s kind of shop. But the professor played a slashing game of chess, which had often brought him together with Cohen.

  “All right, have it your way,” said the colonel. “I suppose mainly we’re afraid of the headlines, if and when this is finally made public. Tempotron sounds less sensational.”

  McMurtrie held a wooden match to his cheroot. “Word magic! But how did this project ever start? How long ago?”

  “Not quite three years. Certain phenomena were noticed by Gundestrup when he bombarded lithium with super-high-energy mesons in the big accelerator. He’s never understood just what happened, for the same experiment had been performed before without such anomalous results.” Cohen shrugged. “However, nuclear physics is at least as much an art as a science. Gundestrup’s an imaginative fellow, and saw he could explain his data quite simply by assuming that the xi particles formed were thrown backward in time a few microseconds. He devised a special experiment to test his hypothesis, a very simple breadboard circuit. And it worked! I suppose I’d better not go into detail, even if you must have a Q clearance to get in here.”

  “I wouldn’t understand, anyhow,” said McMurtrie. “My job is to analyze statements made by men, not squiggles made by electrons.” He drew hard on his cigar. “Go on, please. General Sanchez gave me only the barest outline and then referred me to you. This is all so new to me, such a stunning thing—”

  “I know,” said Cohen. “Even now, two years after I was co-opted, I often catch myself wondering if it can be true.”

  “Oh, I don’t boggle at the idea itself,” said McMurtrie. “Philosophers are always coming up with odder ones than time travel. It’s adjusting to the fact which is difficult. Continue.”

  “Gundestrup was getting data for…another project. So everything he did was under security from the start. Thank God for that, or we’d be racing the Russians in still another field!”

  “Are you certain that you aren’t?”

  Cohen winced again. “The basic circuits are astonishingly simple,” he hurried on, “and not much energy is required. In some ways, the strangest part of this whole affair is that no one ever stumbled on the phenomenon before. In a matter of months, once the project had been set up, we were sending mice hours back. Eeriest sensation: suddenly the cage would appear, maybe right next to itself. Later we’d take the other cage, or the original one, or whatever you call it, strap it on the projector board, throw a switch—and have only one cage again.”

  “Ever tried not sending the first cage back?”

  “Once. For several days. Until one of the boys needed to test a new hookup, absent-mindedly grabbed the extra cage, and projected it back just far enough. Oh, the theory is well worked out by now. If you really have mulled over time travel, I need only summarize by saying that there are no paradoxes, except for the theoretical possibility of circular causation. And no, we have not yet figured out how to travel into the future. And yes, we have considered the military potentialities, which is why the project has suddenly become so big and urgent.”

  “I see.” McMurtrie scowled. “And yet your longer-range machines have never returned, eh?”

  “Exactly,” said Cohen. “The longest backward leap we’ve ever made, successfully, was thirty months. We projected a shell, containing a camera and so on, not into this same laboratory—I told you paradoxes can’t happen—but up the hill, in that wooded area where no one ever goes. It stayed for twenty-four hours, photographed certain places in the city beneath it through a telescopic lens—including a house torn down two years ago—and returned on schedule. That was just a few months back.”

  “But the return trip is travel into the future!”

  “Not exactly. When a world line doubles back into the past, it reverses direction once more as the projected object rejoins the normal time-flow. This sets up what we call, very loosely, a stress in the continuum. A sort of linkage. The trouble with travel into our future is that we have no, well, no anchor point.”

  “Your anchor points in the farther past don’t seem very helpful.”

  “No. Which is driving us crazy, inch by inch. There’s no reason why we should not send a machine back a billion years. The extra energy required is negligible. The jump-span is determined by the vibration frequency set up in the drive unit. And yet—

  “We sent an object back a thousand years. It was to photograph the stars and return, so our astronomers could check the exact date it reached. It never did return, though. We sent others. No luck. We wondered if maybe some Indians weren’t destroying them, so we went back a million years. No return. We tried a hundred years back, fifty, ten, five—no return. We’ve spent half a billion dollars on machines that we never saw again.”

  McMurtrie regarded his cigar ash. “It’s as if you could go no farther back than the date when Gundestrup made his discovery,” he mused.

  “Yes. But that’s absurd! It…it…no, I won’t believe it.”

  “The human psyche does not feel comfortable with any form of philosophical idealism,” said McMurtrie. “I mean, you barbarian, any belief that mind is somehow supreme over matter.” He puffed for a moment before adding: “I suppose the responsibility seems too great. Eh?”

  “Well, I’m not going to believe the world is all in my head without more data,” said Cohen grimly. “I know what I think our trouble is.”

  He left the bench and paced, restless as a bird dog. “You still haven’t told me what you’re doing here, professor,” he said.

  “Well,” McMurtrie answered, “you can partly blame your wife. Security or not, she can’t help knowing you are involved with something enormous and more than a little sinister. She’s frightened for you. She blurted some of her fears out to me, one evening when you were working late and I’d come over. It happens I know General Sanchez. We often argue history, a hobby of both of us. I told him it might be a good idea to let someone with philosophical training take a look at his project. Not intending myself, d’ you understand. I didn’t want any of your classified information. I only thought that somebody with some familiarity with the larger issues should consider the implications of whatever was being done, not from the scientific viewpoint alone.”

  “We have sociologists in the project.”

  “Nor the pseudoscientific viewpoint. Well, Sanchez asked me if I would. I demurred, but he pressed me, and I remembered the look on your wife’s face, and here I am. Of course, this all happened a year ago. My clearance came through only yesterday. I have traveled, and corresponded abroad, so of course it took a year to prove I wasn’t about to plant a bomb in your lavatory. How many man-years have you spent in that time, sending machines on one-way trips?”

  Cohen raised a brow. “So you have the answer?”

  McMurtrie spread his hands wide. “I might. As I said before, in my line of work we’ve been over this ground again and again. Free will versus determinism. The prediction paradox. Physical impossibilities compared to logical impossibilities. Somewhere in all that literature, the answer may lie ready made.”

  Cohen suppressed a snort. “General Sanchez actually took that seriously? Uh…I don’t want to hurt your feelings, but you know as well as I do, science is quantitative and philosophy is at best only qualitative. Unless you can prove to me that God or the World Soul or whatever doesn’t want time travel beyond a certain date—Huh? What’s wrong?”

  McMurtrie’s waspishness dissolved. All at once he was a very old man, huddled in a chair, and Cohen had never seen anything so bleak as his eyes.

  The colonel stepped close, wondering whether to call a doctor. He was waved back. Another moment dragged by before McMurtrie whispered: “Something has occurred to me.”

  “Not a divine prohibition, I hope ?” Cohen had hoped his mockery might put life back in the air, but it fell flat.

  “No,” said McMurtrie. “Worse. Much more final.”

  Cohen stood rigid.

  “You should send machines to the earliest possible date,” said McMurtrie in a slow and rusty voice. “If that barrier moment can be repeatedly verified—”

  “Then our project is washed up,” said Cohen. “What use is a time machine that won’t put you any further back than August, 1959?”

  “Oh, I can still think of applications,” said McMurtrie. His mouth twisted into something that might have been a grin. “It’s the discovery itself, the fact, which will end an era.”

  Cohen knotted his fists. The weariness of labor and tension and underlying fear snapped for him: “If you won’t come to the point, professor, then tell me about it when I return.”

  “Eh?” McMurtrie looked up, blinking.

  “I’m on my way. After lunch. I was just making a final check.”

  “You can’t!” The words were gasped.

  Cohen shrugged. “I should send another man? The piloted Tempotron is my own idea. I pushed it through, persuaded my superiors, oversaw the job. I’m responsible for this baby here, fifty million dollars’ worth.”

  McMurtrie licked his lips. “You’re going back…a year? Two years?”

  “I’ve been back two years, up on the hill. I stood in a grove of trees and looked down across these buildings and knew myself was working inside one of them. Now it’s the long jump. A thousand years.”

  “But—”

  “My guess,” said Cohen, and anger doubled in him that his tone should be so hoarse, “is that the high vibration frequency needed to go back so far changes the characteristics of the crystals used. I’m taking a complete set of tools, meters, and spare parts.”

  McMurtrie struggled to his feet. “No,” he said “Please. You must listen.”

  “Sure. But whatever you say, I’m going.”

  “You won’t come back. I never thought you were a suicidal type.”

  Cohen shrugged again.

  “Your wife—” said the professor in a beggar’s voice.

  “I told her last night. That I’d be taking a risk. I don’t want to talk any more about that.”

  McMurtrie nodded with slow care. “Ironic,” he said. “What the first human traveler through time needs, is time.”

  “What?”

  “Time to think. Suppose an accident occurred, damage was done, which delayed this expedition even a week. You would have time to contemplate my suggestion, and see that it isn’t so wild a notion that you will stake your existence on my being wrong. Eh? Sanchez will also have time to digest the concept and inform Washington. The government will order a delay while a more cautious probing program is undertaken. Eventually, my friend, you will be ordered to cease and desist, and thus released from this compulsion to demonstrate your courage.”

  Cohen stood aside, for McMurtrie was shuffling toward the machine, head thrust forward like an old and wrinkled tortoise. “So?” he clipped.

  McMurtrie’s cane jabbed forward, slashing across the exposed circuits. Cohen heard glass shatter and saw wires yanked loose,

  “So you just had an accident,” said McMurtrie, “Very clumsy of me. My foot slipped. I apologize.”

  “You—”

  Cohen picked up a monkey wrench and beat it, most softly and methodically, against a table top. After a long while, keeping his back turned to McMurtrie, he said, “O.K. What is it ?”

  “If you had only had a man with proper philosophical training from the start,” sighed the other. “Your glorious, expensive, half-cocked Project Robinson would never—Well. Let me explain.”

  “You’d better.”

  “I presume nothing can exist prior to existence itself.”

  “That sounds…reasonable…yes.”

  “Have you never encountered that philosophical question? Even in own ignorance? It’s the oldest chestnut in the book…Oldest!” McMurtrie laughed with so startling a tone that Cohen whirled. He looked into a rather terrible grimace.