Billions upon billions of years fled. Saunders lay in his machine, sunk into an apathetic coma. Once he roused himself to eat, feeling the sardonic humor of the situation—the last living creature, the last free energy in all the cindered cosmos, fixing a sandwich.

  Many billions of years in the future, Saunders paused again. He looked out into blackness. But with a sudden shock he discerned a far faint glow, the vaguest imaginable blur of light out in the heavens.

  Trembling, he jumped forward another billion years. The light was stronger now, a great sprawling radiance swirling inchoately in the sky.

  The universe was re-forming.

  It made sense, thought Saunders, fighting for self-control. Space had expanded to some kind of limit, now it was collapsing in on itself to start the cycle anew—the cycle that had been repeated none knew how many times in the past. The universe was mortal, but it was a phoenix which would never really die.

  But he was disturbingly mortal, and suddenly he was free of his death wish. At the very least he wanted to see what the next time around looked like. But the universe would, according to the best theories of twentieth-century cosmology, collapse to what was virtually a point-source, a featureless blaze of pure energy out of which the primal atoms would be reformed. If he wasn’t to be devoured in that raging furnace, he’d better leap a long ways ahead. A hell of a long ways!

  He grinned with sudden reckless determination and plunged the switch forward.

  Worry came back. How did he know that a planet would be formed under him? He might come out in open space, or in the heart of a sun… Well, he’d have to risk that. The gods must have foreseen and allowed for it.

  He came out briefly—and flashed back into time-drive. The planet was still molten!

  * * *

  Some geological ages later, he looked out at a spuming gray rain, washing with senseless power from a hidden sky, covering naked rocks with a raging swirl of white water. He didn’t go out; the atmosphere would be unbreathable until plants had liberated enough oxygen.

  On and on! Sometimes he was under seas, sometimes on land. He saw strange jungles like overgrown ferns and mosses rise and wither in the cold of a glacial age and rise again in altered life-form.

  A thought nagged at him, tugging at the back of his mind as he rode onward. It didn’t hit him for several million years, then: The moon! Oh, my God, the moon!

  His hands trembled too violently for him to stop the machine. Finally, with an effort, he controlled himself enough to pull the switch. He skipped on, looking for a night of full moon.

  Luna. The same old face—Luna!

  The shock was too great to register. Numbly, he resumed his journey. And the world began to look familiar, there were low forested hills and a river shining in the distance…

  He didn’t really believe it till he saw the village. It was the same—Hudson, New York.

  He sat for a moment, letting his physicist’s brain consider the tremendous fact. In Newtonian terms, it meant that every particle newly formed in the Beginning had exactly the same position and velocity as every corresponding particle formed in the previous cycle. In more acceptable Einsteinian language, the continuum was spherical in all four dimensions. In any case—if you traveled long enough, through space of time, you got back to your starting point.

  He could go home!

  He ran down the sunlit hill, heedless of his foreign garments, ran till the breath sobbed in raw lungs and his heart seemed about to burst from the ribs. Gasping, he entered the village, went into a bank, and looked at the tear-off calendar and the wall clock.

  June 17, 1936, 1:30 p.m. From that, he could figure his time of arrival in 1973 to the minute.

  He walked slowly back, his legs trembling under him, and started the time machine again. Grayness was outside—for the last time.

  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.

  Furthermore, and still more ominous, the ship’s transmitter also stopped working.

  Helledahl turned from its disassembled guts. Despite all he could do with racks, bags, magnetic boards, he was surrounded by a zero gravity halo of wires, resistances, transistors, and other small objects. His moon face peered through it with an unwonted grimness. “I can find nothing wrong,” he said. “The trouble must be outside, in the boom.”

  Captain Langnes, tall and gaunt and stiff of manner, adjusted his monocle. “I dare say we can repair the trouble,” he said. “Can’t be too serious, can it?”

  “It can like the devil, if the radar goes out too,” snapped Helledahl.

  “Oh, heavens!” exclaimed Winge. His mild, middle-aged features registered dismay. “If I can’t maintain my meteorite count, what am I out here for?”

  “If we can’t detect the big meteorites in time for the autopilot to jerk us off a collision course, you won’t be out here very long,” said Bull. “None of us will, except as scrap metal and frozen hamburger.”

  Helledahl winced. “Must you, Erik?”

  “Your attitude is undesirable, Herr Bull,” Captain Langnes chided. “Never forget, gentlemen, the four of us, crowded into one small vessel for possibly two years, under extremely hazardous conditions, can only survive by maintaining order, self-respect, morale.”

  “How can I forget?” muttered Bull. “You repeat it every thirty-seven hours and fourteen minutes by the clock.” But he didn’t mutter very loudly.

  “You had best have a look outside, Herr Bull,” went on the captain.

  “I was afraid it’d come to that,” said the engineer dismally. “Hang on, boys, here we go again.”

  * * *

  Putting on space armor is a tedious job at best, requiring much assistance. In a cramped air-lock chamber—for lack of another place—and under free fall, it gets so exasperating that one forgets any element of emergency. By the time he was through the outer valve, Bull had invented three new verbal obscenities, the best of which took four minutes to enunciate.

  He was a big, blocky, redhaired and freckle-faced young man, who hadn’t wanted to come on this expedition. It was just a miserable series of accidents, he thought. As a boy, standing at a grisly hour on a cliff above the Sognefjord to watch the first Sputnik rise, he had decided to be a spaceship engineer. As a youth, he got a scholarship to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and afterward worked for two years on American interplanetary projects. Returning home, he found himself one of the few Norwegians with that kind of experience. But he also found himself thoroughly tired of it. The cramped quarters, tight discipline, reconstituted food and reconstituted air and reconstituted conversation, were bad enough. The innumerable petty nuisances of weightlessness, especially the hours a day spent doing ridiculous exercises lest his very bones atrophy, were worse. The exclusively male companionship was still worse: especially when that all-female Russian satellite station generally called the Nunnery passed within view.

  “In short,” Erik Bull told his friends, “if I want to take vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience, I’d do better to sign up as a Benedictine monk. I’d at least have something drinkable on hand.”

  Not that he regretted the time spent, once it was safely behind him. With judicious embroidering, he had a lifetime supply of dinner-table reminiscences. More important, he could take his pick of Earthside jobs. Such as the marine reclamation station his countrymen were building off Svalbard, with regular airbus service to Trondheim and Oslo. There was a post!

  Instead of which, he was now spinning off beyond Mars, hell for leather into a volume of space that had already swallowed a score of craft without trace.

  He emerged on the hull, made sure his life line was fast, and floated a few minutes to let his eyes adjust. A tiny heatless sun, too brilliant to look close to, spotted puddles of undiffused glare among coalsack shadows. The stars, unwinking, needle bright, were so many that they swamped the old familiar constellations in their sheer number. He identified several points as asteroids, some twinkling as rotation exposed their irregular surfaces, some so close that their relative motion was visible. His senses did not react to the radiation, which the ship’s magnetic field was supposed to ward off from the interior but which sharply limited his stay outside. Bull imagined all those particles zipping through him, each drilling a neat submicroscopic hole, and wished he hadn’t.

  The much-touted majestic silence of space wasn’t evident either. His air pump made too much noise. Also, the suit stank.

  Presently he could make sense out of the view. The ship was a long cylinder, lumpy where meteor bumpers protected the most vital spots. A Norwegian flag, painted near the bows, was faded by solar ultraviolet, eroded by micrometeoric impacts. The vessel was old, though basically sound. The Russians had given it to Norway for a museum piece, as a propaganda gesture. But then the Americans had hastily given Norway the parts needed to renovate. Bull himself had spent six dreary months helping do that job. He hadn’t been too unhappy about it, though. He liked the idea of his country joining in the exploitation of space. Also, he was Americanized enough to feel a certain malicious pleasure when the Ivan Pavlov was rechristened in honor of St. Olav.

  However, he had not expected to serve aboard the thing!

  “O.K., O.K.,” he sneered in English, “hold still, Holy Ole, and we’ll have a look at your latest disease.”

  He drew himself back along the line and waddled forward over the hull in stickum boots. Something on the radio transceiver boom…what the devil? He bent over. The motion pulled his boots loose. He upended and went drifting off toward Andromeda. Cursing in a lackluster voice, he came back hand over hand. But as he examined the roughened surface he forgot even to be annoyed.

  He tried unsuccessfully to pinch himself.

  An hour convinced him. He made his laborious way below again. Captain Langnes, who was Navy insisted that you went “below” when you entered the ship, even in free fall. When his spacesuit was off, with only one frost burn suffered from touching the metal, he faced the others across a cluttered main cabin.

  “Well?” barked Helledahl. “What is it?”

  “As the lady said when she saw an elephant eating cabbages with what she thought was his tail,” Bull answered slowly, “if I told you, you wouldn’t believe me.”

  “Of course I would!” said Langnes. “Out with it!”

  “Well, skipper…we have barnacles.”

  A certain amount of chemical and biological apparatus had been brought along to study possible effects of the whatever-it-was that seemed to forbid spacecraft crossing the Asteroid Belt. The equipment was most inadequate, and between them the four men had only an elementary knowledge of its use. But then, all equipment was inadequate in zero gravity, and all knowledge was elementary out here.

  Work progressed with maddening slowness. And meanwhile the Hellik Olav fell outward and outward, on an orbit which would not bend back again until it was three Astronomical Units from the sun. And the ship was out of communication. And the radar, still functional but losing efficiency all the time, registered an ever thicker concentration of meteorites. And the ’tween-decks radiation count mounted, slowly but persistently.

  “I vote we go home,” said Helledahl. Sweat glistened on his forehead, where he sat in his tiny bunk cubicle without touching the mattress.

  “Second the motion,” said Bull at once. “Any further discussion? I move the vote. All in favor, say, ‘Ja.’ All opposed, shut up.”

  “This is no time for jokes, Herr Bull,” said Captain Langnes.

  “I quite agree, sir. And this trip is more than a joke, it’s a farce. Let’s turn back!”

  “Because of an encrustation on the hull?”

  Surprisingly, gentle Torvald Winge supported the skipper with almost as sharp a tone. “Nothing serious has yet happened,” he said. “We have now shielded the drive tubes so that the barnacle growth can’t advance to them. As for our communications apparatus, we have spare parts in ample supply and can easily repair it once we’re out of this fantastic zone. Barnacles can be scraped off the radar arms, as well as the vision parts. What kind of cowards will our people take us for, if we give up at the first little difficulty?”

  “Live ones,” said Helledahl.

  “You see,” Bull added, “we’re not in such bad shape now, but what’ll happen if this continues? Just extrapolate the radiation. I did. We’ll be dead men on the return orbit.”

  “You assume the count will rise to a dangerous level,” said Winge. “I doubt that. Time enough to turn back, if it seems we have no other hope. But what you don’t appreciate, Erik, is the very real, unextrapolated danger of such a course.”

  “Also, we seem to be on the track of an answer to the mystery—the whole purpose of this expedition,” said Langnes. “Given a little more data, we should find out what happened to all the previous ships.”

  “Including the Chinese?” asked Bull.

  Silence descended. They sat in mid-air, reviewing a situation which familiarity did nothing to beautify.

  Observations from the Martian moons had indicated the Asteroid Belt was much fuller than astronomers had believed. Of course, it was still a rather hard vacuum…but one through which sand, gravel, and boulders went flying with indecent speed and frequency. Unmanned craft were sent in by several nations. Their telemetering instruments confirmed the great density of cosmic debris, which increased as they swung further in toward the central zone. But then they quit sending. They were never heard from again. Manned ships stationed near the computed orbits of the robot vessels, where these emerged from the danger area, detected objects with radar, panted to match velocities, and saw nothing but common or garden variety meteorites.

  Finally the Chinese People’s Republic sent three craft with volunteer crews, toward the Belt. One ship went off course and landed in the Pacific Ocean near San Francisco. After its personnel explained the unique methods by which they had been persuaded to volunteer, they were allowed to stay. The scientists got good technical jobs, the captain started a restaurant, and the political commissar went on the lecture circuit.

  But the other two ships continued as per instructions.

  Their transmission stopped at about the same distance as the robot radios had, and they were never seen again either.