‘What kind of power is it?’ Caxton asked.

  ‘Something called adeledicnander,’ she said. ‘You wouldn’t know about that. It’s powerful, but it must be periodically replaced.’

  So she wasn’t aware that he had been to the twenty-fifth century. He had been wondering. Sitting there, Caxton remembered his disinterest up there in 2476 A.D. in learning the details of adeledicnander; now, they would all three pay the price of his ignorance and inattention.

  Yet - and he brightened - it was also encouraging for his personal situation with Selanie. There would inevitably come a moment when they were at end of the mechanical resources of their trailer. The sooner the better, he decided. Meaning, he thought grimly, the longer this trip, the better.

  And so, his second main question was: ‘Where are we going?’

  They were going, she said, where it would be easier to find food. ‘Toward the mountains, I would guess,’ she said. ‘I flew many hours yesterday, and saw very little game.’

  Caxton was silently glad to hear it. He had a feeling that a search for game could be a continuous moving process. He was still thinking about it, when Selanie said, ‘If you don’t mind, Mr Caxton, I think we should get Father in and start up again.’

  Caxton drove the rest of that day, and the days that followed, with a faint, satisfied smile on his face and a smug feeling. He invariably took the most roundabout routes, always on the grounds of seeking the flattest land over which to maneuver their bulky machine. Several times Selanie sat beside him. On each occasion, she urged him to fly over certain rough areas, suggesting that it would save fuel. (She had shown him late that first afternoon how to fly the trailer.) And once she actually took the wheel away from him, and flew over a wooded area that he had intended to go around. Finally, on the thirty-fifth day of the journey, she informed him curtly that she would henceforth do the driving.

  The fourth morning after that, the trailer did not resume its journey. At breakfast Selanie announced, ‘We’ll stay here for a while.’

  ‘Here,’ as Caxton discovered when he went outside, was in the lower Rockies - he guessed near where Colorado Springs or Denver, or perhaps even Pueblo, would someday be. The trailer was drawn up beside a mountain stream that glistened brightly in the sun. As he stood there, gazing about him at the rock-strewn hillside, Caxton suddenly realised that the girl had come out of the trailer and was standing nearby.

  He turned and she said, without looking directly at him, ‘Mr Caxton, I have been thinking about our situation here in this era. And it seems wrong that my father and I should have to associate so intimately with the person who caused such a disaster, and whose method of driving - let me say it frankly -suddenly brought me the feeling that he was trying to use up our fuel.’

  Her expression as she spoke was not antagonistic. She was wearing slacks and a blouse. The slacks were red, the blouse white - very pretty. Not antagonistic, but her words came to Caxton with a terrible shock.

  Before he could recover his wits, she finished, ‘And so I’m wondering if we couldn’t supply you with some weapons, and some equivalent of a tent, and have you leave. I don’t mean today, but as soon as you can brace yourself to be man enough.’

  After a long moment, Caxton realised that his principal emotion was amazement. Because where could he go?

  The thought was so powerful that he actually turned away from her and gazed out at this remote world again as if to verify that it was indeed an uninhabited wilderness. The girl (woman?) and he were standing beside the swift-flowing stream, and everything was wild and untouched, and, most convincing of all, in his mind was the knowledge of all the miles they had driven, the forests and rivers they had flown over. And, once again, there was no question. This was western America before the coming of civilisation.

  Slowly, he faced Selanie again. He wondered if her father had concurred in this confrontation. And doubted it. In spite of himself a smile touched his lips at the realisation that was suddenly in his mind: It takes a woman, he thought, to tell a man to get out under such circumstances.

  Just like that, on impulse, he spoke the thought aloud. The girl flushed a little, but when she spoke it was in an even voice, ‘I have a lot of experience, Mr Caxton, and so I’m only too sadly familiar with the kind of thinking that goes on in the mind of the paranoid-type male. And so’ - she shrugged - ‘I’d just not rather face that situation at some future time.’

  In spite of himself, her words penetrated. He had thought that his barriers were up, but he was staggered by the cruel meaning. Paranoid! … She was really letting him have it.

  Nonetheless, he was presently able to protest: ‘Look! what I did was designed to get me into the Palace of Immortality. I can’t’ - stubbornly - ‘see anything wrong with that. The truth is, you people had no business withholding it from me once I found out about it. So you were the villains, not me. But’ - he felt a lot better by the time he had this twisted thought – ‘I don’t sense any repugnance in myself to having you two in close proximity to me.’

  The girl said coldly, ‘Your feelings are not at issue. You’re the intruder.’

  It was still attack, and still without mercy. Yet he was a man who had always been able to hold his own with women, and somehow not be bowled over when they did their outrageous acts. At least, not bowled over for long.

  This particular female madness triggered a kind of facetiousness in him. The instant that happened, he was secure again within himself. He said, ‘Any time you have a method for me to go up to the future, I’ll be glad to go.’

  ‘I’m afraid,’ she said stiffly, ‘that kind of solution will be impossible - thanks to you. So now that you know my thoughts, what do you suggest?’

  He was a man who had been for too long a time without a woman in 2476 A.D. And now more than a month here. So he was ready. He said, ‘There are two ways of facing the future here, and I can assure you that yours is wrong.’

  ‘Mr Caxton,’ Selanie said sharply, ‘I do not wish to hear your solution.’

  He couldn’t have stopped himself. He said simply, ‘If we’re going to be in this predicament from now on, you become my wife. And I do all the hard work, as a man should.’

  She laughed. It was a tinkling laughter that could have been musical, but it had a cutting, derisive note in it, and it ended only as she said, ‘Incredible. Evidently, Mr Caxton, you don’t know that you have a continuing unpleasant odor.’

  Caxton felt the color drain from his cheeks. The shock was all the greater because he had forgotten. With his return to the twentieth century, and then to the seventeenth, the memory of that unhappy experience in the twenty-fifth century had gone off into some nether part of his brain.

  In his anguish, he was only vaguely aware that she had turned away from him, and was climbing the hill that overlooked the swift-flowing stream. Her departure took the awful pressure off of him. And so, presently, he watched her, thinking: She’s a live person, with her own needs. So there has got to come a time when even I - odor and all - will look good to her.

  Standing there, watching her as she now reached the top of the hill, he wondered if - when that time came and suddenly the resistance was gone out of her and she was willing - he would then just peacefully accept what she offered; would he act as if all those minutes and hours and months of waiting while nature brought her to her senses, were not to be held against her? Sullenly he guessed that he could. But there would be mental reservations, he realised, bitterly. That was why a woman often lost a man’s respect: because she never used her God-given brains.

  The bitter reflections stopped. For Selanie was precipitately running back down the hill. The speed of her return alarmed him… something wrong! Involuntarily, Caxton started toward her. She waved him back urgently. Moments later, she arrived beside him, breathless.

  ‘Indians!’ she said. ‘Dozens of them.’

  ‘Did they see you?’

  ‘I think so.’

  XXIII

  By the time they were in the trailer and had the door closed, Caxton had a satiric reaction. How odd for her to have taken flight just like any normal person… . What about that high-and-mighty attitude which she had expressed to him so insultingly about Indians being peaceful?

  He discreetly spoke none of these thoughts, but silently went with her to the cab window - and sat there beside her as about a hundred Indian males came racing around a bend in the stream, and halted in confusion, those behind, almost falling over their companions. In fact several fell, and several were pushed down.

  A dozen moments went by. Caxton realised with a faint shock that he had stopped breathing. It cost him an effort to exhale and then inhale. Finally, he thought, They look exactly like a painting by George Catlin. So in two hundred years up to the time of the famous artist, the clothes didn’t change … hard to imagine how they could in a society that lacked the scientific or philosophical roots of potential progress.

  At that instant, Mr Johns settled into the rear seat. He chuckled. ‘I’ve activitated the brain sound. After all, we don’t really want them spying on us or prowling around here.’

  The ‘brain sound,’ as he explained it, created a humming effect in the human brain toward which it was directed - which really meant that it disturbed the inner ear in a nondirectional manner.

  The effect was visible out there. The Indians were retreating. First they turned and walked slowly away, as if striving to maintain their male dignity. Then they walked faster, as if by mutual consent dignity was replaced by a strong survival impulse. Abruptly, they broke into a scampering run, and, running, disappeared around the bend. Caxton went outside after a while. He was jittery but he felt he should be the one. He climbed the hill, and from its height he caught a few glimpses of stragglers in the distance along the stream. They were, he was relieved to see, still running.

  When he came down, Selanie had gone to her room, but Johns was still in the cab. Caxton sank down beside him and asked, ‘How far does that, uh, brain sound, project?’

  Johns shrugged. ‘It’s line of sight. So only while they were in view. After all, we don’t want to hurt these people.’

  He seemed friendly for the first time. And Caxton, who had suddenly had an idea, took advantage of the opportunity and asked about the instrument. ‘Can this thing that produces the brain sound be reduced to hand-weapon size?’

  Johns’s answer was to put his hand into his pocket and carefully draw out a tiny metallic object. With his other hand, he grasped Caxton’s palm, squeezed the fingers back and placed the object in it.

  ‘Don’t point it at your own head,’ he advised.

  The object was slightly less than half an inch in diameter; and it was a little difficult to determine which was the part that could ‘point’. But Caxton held it steady in his hand exactly the way it had been placed, and then he carefully bent down to it and studied it. Seen close up, it showed as an intricate structure, each protuberance of which, at Caxton’s request, Johns explained.

  The device, it seemed, was always on. But it operated, literally on line of sight. The slightest barrier, other than the gaseous atmosphere, stopped its action. A piece of transparent tissue paper was a complete barrier. ‘So, if you’re ever out and you run into a life form you want to drive off,’ said the older man, ‘Just take it out of your pocket, point it correctly, and they’ll be confused and run.’

  Caxton was struck by the wording. ‘You’re giving this to me?’ he asked.

  ‘Of course. We should all carry one.’

  As Caxton slipped the object into his own pocket, he realised that an enormous and satisfying thought had suddenly come into view over the horizon of his mind. He said, ‘A few minutes ago, your daughter asked me to leave the trailer - since I was an intruder. For the first time, I can see how to do so. With this device, I can probably go and live with those Indians.’

  He mustered a smile in his need to hide the sly impulse that was motivating him. ‘After all,’ he continued in a hearty tone, ‘it would be wrong of me to force my presence indefinitely on people whom I have injured as I have you and your daughter, particularly since’ - he concluded suavely - ‘your daughter has informed me I have an unpleasant odor.’

  The older man nodded. ‘I’ve noticed,’ he said. ‘It’s a one-way time travel odor, and I’ve been wondering how you acquired it.’

  Caxton, who had parted his lips to continue with his sly game, closed them again. And then he sat there. When he came out of that shock, he found that he was explaining to Johns about his five-hundred-year journey to far Centaurus.

  As he came to that awareness he stopped, startled at himself. For nearly two months he had successfully suppressed the need to communicate his secret. It was not that he had any reason to hold it back. It was simply that he had a lifetime policy of never communicating anything for the sake of telling it.

  He forgot that. It seemed minor. He echoed, ‘A time smell?’ Pause, then: ‘Does Selanie know?’

  Johns shook his head. There was a faraway expression in his eyes. ‘That,’ he said, ‘was quite a long journey. Too bad. You’ll have to live an undetermined number of years in the Palace to balance that off. I know of no other that was longer than a hundred years.’

  ‘Why didn’t you tell your daughter?’

  Johns was astonished. ‘Why should I?’

  Caxton was outraged… . What was the matter with this guy? Didn’t he even talk to his own relatives? The brief passion ceased. He remembered how uncommunicative Johns had been; and there was no doubt, he didn’t talk much to anyone.

  Johns’s attention was no longer directly on Caxton. His mood had become sort of - ‘well, well, so I keep running into repercussions of my experiment. So Bustaman brought him all the way down from the twenty-fifth century to defeat me and my dream.’ The probabilities would most likely go on. They were too numerous for Bustaman to stop. But the experimental aspect was doomed. Johns shook his head wonderingly, and thought - How can someone who is less, be better? It was a question that Claudan Johns had asked himself many times. On occasion, when he had looked around at all the bright, wonderful Possessors whom he had created and saw how bright and wonderful they were, and how completely they had become the New People of whose existence he had dreamed his dream of perfection, it seemed incredible that they accepted themselves for what they were without question. He also could see them for what they were, and appreciate them - and be glad that they didn’t think about it. But it was equally obvious that anybody who didn’t think about himself, even though perfect, was not - what? He wasn’t sure what.

  I am not perfect, he thought, but I can think about myself, and also observe them with dispassionate awareness. So I am the experimenter, and they are my subjects. But they are better.

  He had never participated. He watched while they gaily went off into probability worlds, willingly creating duplicates of themselves, and never seemed to worry about how it would all come out. Claudan Johns worried. And he never duplicated himself.

  But they were better, freer, more capable, happier, more intelligent. It was amazing. They were better, and he was less. But in his studies he had learned things that they had never been motivated to find out - they just lived it; they didn’t have to know it - and so he was tolerated, and in a curious fashion accepted as the mentor and leader.

  In that same dispassionate fashion, he had studied Peter Caxton … a paranoid type, he observed, by twentieth century nomenclature. It was estimated by the Possessors that twenty per cent of twentieth century males were paranoid in the way that Caxton was. Dominant, subjective, self-centered, on the personal level incapable of seeing another point of view. It was a type of male who - the Possessors believed from their study of history - had once been around in even greater percentages. The total gradually increased going backward in time until, among pre-Dawn men, it was about eighty percent. It was never one hundred percent. Never. There were always some men around who could be reasoned with. On the personal level, the Peter Caxton type could not be reasoned with.

  The dream of the New People was that, in the future, there must be no Peter Caxtons. And, of course, no Kameel Bustamans.

  So Claudan Johns saw with a certain compassion, of which he was capable, that the quest of Peter Caxton was not possible. The Possessors, obsessed by their quest, could not accept him.

  Yet, Johns saw his own daughter was disturbed by Caxton -… Maybe it was the knowledge in her mind that they couldn’t get out of there. Perhaps a long-buried womanly instinct was stirring. Historically, women had associated with the more subjective males… like Caxton. The fact that this woman was his own daughter was no problem to Claudan Johns. She was, after all, 439 years old, and, it said somewhere in his mind, she was capable of looking after herself.

  As these thoughts completed themselves in his mind, he rose to his feet with an enigmatic smile. ‘Don’t go off to those Indians,’ he said, ‘until I’ve had a chance to discuss this matter with Selanie.’

  Caxton, who had no intention of going off anywhere, and whose sole purpose in bringing up the Indians was so that Selanie would hear about it, promised that he would take no hasty action.

  But the days went by and nothing happened, except that Johns was more friendly. As a result they had a number of conversations, and Caxton learned a few - a tiny few - more pieces of information about the Palace of Immortality.

  Of how the foldback in time occurred in November of 9812 A.D., and went in reverse to February, 1977, and then presumably started forward again. But they had not found where it went after that.

  Not, Caxton thought, that it mattered to people sealed off in the seventeenth century.

  On another occasion Johns described how the hope of the Possessors was that they would be able to find a probability way of going forward after 9812 A.D. ‘I told them that the tests I’ve made show that there is no sweet by-and-by, that it’s all here, and that the only future is in the probabilities in this vast vault of nearly eight thousand years - between 1977 and 9812. That, and nothing more, is the time universe.’