The dream-image Caxton never seemed to notice the twisted world around him. At least, he didn’t notice it with the critical concern that was a must if you really hoped to understand what a lousy place it was.

  Ridiculous, thought Caxton. It’s me - the way I am right now - that’s the one that’s got to go forward. He realised that he couldn’t even imagine any other Peter Caxton being the ‘real’ one.

  So intense was his yearning, so strong his determination, that all the apathetic thoughts of the day before about how impossible his search was were gone almost as if they had never been.

  He kept thinking: I can go back to where I first saw Selanie…There must be a clue.

  He drove to Piffer’s Road that very day, arriving after a hard four hours’ ride (and one speeding ticket)shortly after noon.

  And found open countryside, brush, hill country. Nothing.

  Returned to the city, shaken. A belief built up in him that his search had not been thorough. There were places he hadn’t looked…. Rent a motorcycle, follow every trail.

  Sunday, he went. His machine growled along back roads, forced into wooded areas, up streams.

  Late that night, Peter Caxton, M.A. physicist, idled emptily back to his little one-room apartment in the city. And now, at last, he knew his problem.

  How do you go a hundred-odd years into the future … if you absolutely have to?

  … Have to, have to, have to -

  The mental picture he saw was of himself emerging from the time eddy… shortly before noon, June 3, 2083 A.D.

  If he could be waiting there near that house at the moment when his … earlier … self went off to that shopping center; and if he could then go into the Palace of the Possessors, and hide -

  What he would do there was a little obscure. But he visualised himself this time making a study of the whole situation, a proper scientific study, for which he would prepare himself, for which, in fact, he was already partially prepared … from the films he had studied.

  There’s got to be a way, Caxton told himself obstinately.

  During the three nothing days that followed, he never for a moment lost that feeling of obstinacy.

  XI

  The way revealed itself on the fourth morning.

  Caxton opened the morning paper, and read the headline: 500-YEAR SPACE TRIP.

  The subhead stated: ‘James Renfrew to sponsor fantastic voyage to Alpha Centauri. Will go along himself, says nationally known playboy millionaire.’

  The story under the subhead reported that four men would make the incredible journey. In addition to Renfrew, there would be Ned Blake, who was Renfrew’s personal manager; and the Nobel-prizewinning chemist, Arthur Pelham, who was the inventor of the drug that made it possible for living creatures to be placed in suspended animation.

  The newspaper account stated that the fourth member of the expedition had not yet been selected. Wanted was a Ph.D physicist, who would be the technical and scientific expert of the group in that field. Unfortunately, the paper quoted Ned Blake, ‘We have so far had turndowns from every physicist we have approached.’

  The news story continued, ‘However, the committed trio is confident that somewhere in the country is a qualified physicist who -’

  At that point, Caxton dropped the paper and grabbed for the phone. It took a while, but in due course he obtained a number in New York. He dialed that number and gave his name and his purpose to the young woman who answered.

  He was put through at once to a firm-voiced man who identified himself as Ned Blake. Blake questioned him closely, and with a developing friendliness and - could it be? - relief. He said finally, ‘We need a qualified physicist so badly, Mr Caxton, that I’m sure we can make do with an M.A. What you have said sounds great to me. So why don’t you fly to New York this afternoon? Your air ticket will be waiting at your airport office. When you get to New York, you’ll be paged, and taken to -’

  He gave the address of an office building in downtown New York, finished, ‘I’ll leave your name with the guard on the thirtieth floor, and you can come up from there.’

  Caxton did not contact Quik-Photo. The question of what he could give as an excuse was too much for him…. If nothing comes of it, he thought, I’ll return here tomorrow, and brazen it through, somehow.

  But he had a feeling, a lifting feeling, a sense of soaring feeling, that this thing had the sound of steel and fire.

  He was met at the New York airport by a chauffeur-driven Rolls-Royce. Caxton sat in the luxurious back seat feeling breathless all the way into town. It was excitement of a different kind; not fear. The thought, over and over, was that any appearance of courage and boldness takes you further up the scale of life.

  It made him feel a lot better. Because in his own horrible-reacting fashion, he was being extremely brave. Driven is the word, he thought shakily.

  At the thirtieth floor, after the guard had checked him through, he took a self-service elevator up several floors - and stepped out into a magnificent office. As he came gingerly forth from the elevator, three men, who had been sitting with glasses in their hands, put the glasses down and stood up.

  Two of the three were heavily moustached, and wore their hair long but elegantly styled. The third man was well-dressed but conservatively. He was older, and almost bald.

  One of the moustachioed men came forward, his hand out. He was square of jaw; his eyes were slightly narrowed, and there was just the edge of disappointment in his manner.

  ‘Ned Blake,’ he said.

  ‘Peter Caxton,’ said Caxton.

  ‘You’re younger than I thought, from our phone conversation,’ said Blake, and it was obvious from the tone of his voice that that was what disturbed him.

  ‘I’m thirty-eight,’ said Caxton. ‘I taught high school physics for more than twelve years, which I can prove… . I’m sorry I look so young.’

  Actually he wasn’t sorry at all… For heaven’s sake, that was why he had come.

  Before Blake could make a further comment, the other moustachioed man said, ‘Hell, Ned, he wouldn’t be here if he didn’t have some lingering youth in his cells.’

  Blake had, in fact, already relaxed. Now he eagerly grasped Caxton’s wrist, and drew him toward his companions - first, to the conservatively dressed individual.

  ‘This is Mr Pelham, Mr Caxton.’

  Caxton shook hands with the world-famous chemist, thinking, I’m really up in the stratosphere, meeting a man like this.

  Aloud, he said, ‘Your great achievement makes this journey possible, sir, I realise.’

  Pelham was lean, leaner than he had looked in the newspaper photograph, his face almost angular in its thinness. He took Caxton’s palm in his bony hand, and said in an intense tone, ‘As we told the papers, we want the physicist to be the first to awaken. What do you think? Are you capable of facing return to consciousness fifty years from now, when the other three of us are still in suspended animation?’

  There was a muffled sound from the third man at this point. Then: ‘My God, Pelham, what a lousy introductory sentence!’

  ‘No worse than Caxton’s,’ said Pelham with a smile.

  They were clearly on very intimate terms, for at this point the third man grabbed the chemist around the shoulders, and, leaning over and past the slight-built Pelham from several inches of greater height, grabbed Caxton’s hand.

  ‘I’m Renfrew,’ he said.

  The newspaper had said that Renfrew was thirty-nine. He looked somewhat older. There were lines of dissipation in his cheeks, tiny red-purple streaks, and the beginning of puffiness. But he had the bluest eyes that Caxton had ever seen.

  ‘We want to ask you a lot of questions,’ said Renfrew. But we can do that on the way to the house where you’ll be staying. In the morning, we’ll call in the newspaper boys.’ The ‘house’ to which they took him was a five-story mansion overlooking the East River. From his bedroom window, Caxton watched the river traffic for a while, and then finally gave in to exhaustion.

  That was about five o’clock in the morning.

  At noon the next morning what seemed to be at least a hundred news cameras flashed at Caxton. Some of the microphones that he spoke into, it developed, were TV and radio on national hookups.

  It was while he and the others were being interviewed that he heard Ned Blake say, in answer to a question, that he would have a thousand-dollar-a-week drawing account, and before takeoff would be given a hundred thousand dollars to assign to any dependents or relatives he wished.

  Like a dream.

  From that moment on, he was in that house, or in a Cadillac, or a Rolls-Royce, or in a magnificent office, or in Renfrew’s private jet…Several times, Caxton flew down with the others to Cape Kennedy, where the takeoff would be, because of course with so much money and influence at work, the journey was in fact a combination government-private industry project.

  He learned that Renfrew had coasted through a college engineering course; the man actually had retained a good portion of his training and was, scientifically, easy to talk to. Caxton quickly found that he himself was now also subject to Renfrew’s warmth. The millionaire playboy had an amazing capacity for camaraderie. The first time Renfrew introduced him as ‘My dear friend, Peter,’ Caxton was electrified. He felt an instant response, an immediate desire to be worthy of such a friendship.

  But afterwards, he cautioned himself … Got to watch that. Don’t get enmeshed in personal attachments.

  After all, I’m the guy that’s going to turn this ship back when I wake up. And be on Earth again a couple of years before 2083 A.D.

  Caxton had a number of moments of curiosity, as he watched the brilliant scene around him. He knew why he was going on this fabulous journey. But what would make a man like Renfrew bow out of a world where he had everything?

  It was a question that, one day, he asked Blake. That rather grim young man stared at him, and then shrugged, and said, ‘He says he’s made love to four hundred beautiful women, eaten thousands of perfectly cooked steaks, played golf in the low seventies, shot a tiger and a lion - and wished he hadn’t, because the damned things cried as they were dying. But that made him wonder about his own future. For him, a perfect universe, with millions of dollars, and servants for every purpose … except that each birthday he was a year older, and one day reasonably soon he would be eaten by worms. He figures that five hundred years from now, they may have solved the problems of life prolongation.’

  So it was the same reason. Caxton felt a special excitement. Oddly, it was validation. In the wee hours, he had had doubts about his own sanity … how crazy could you get?

  But they were brief doubts, somehow. And having discovered that the same intense motive was now driving another man, they became more fleeting still.

  It’s truth, he thought. There’s nothing here for anybody…. And out of nowhere an opportunity had come his way, and he was pursuing it with the singleness of purpose that had always driven him; only, now, an accident had taken him off one track and put him on another.

  Blake, Caxton realised presently, liked him. More and more as departure time drew near, Blake sought him out, and Caxton learned more and more about Renfrew.

  Blake was worried about his friend. ‘All that golden personality,’ he said in a low-voiced aside to Caxton on still another day, ‘is dependent on a lifetime of being a money king… . When he wakes up the first time out there in empty space and suddenly realises that that isn’t there any more…’ Blake shook his head doubtfully, and his rugged square face showed grave concern, as he concluded, ‘what will happen is anybody’s guess.’

  Caxton’s thought was that the problem might not be as severe as Blake anticipated. Because, by the time Renfrew awakened - after a hundred years - the ship would be back in the solar system… . Naturally, Caxton made no mention of these reassuring thoughts.

  The takeoff, when it finally came, was routine, of course.

  XII

  Caxton awakened with a start, and thought: How was Renfrew taking it?

  He must have moved physically, for blackness edged with pain closed over him. How long he lay in that agonised faint, he had no means of knowing. His next awareness was of the throbbing of an engine.

  Slowly this time, consciousness returned. He lay very quiet, feeling the weight of his years of sleep, determined to follow the routine prescribed so long ago by Pelham.

  He didn’t want to faint again.

  He thought: It was silly to have worried about Jim Renfrew. He wasn’t due to come out of his state of suspended animation for another fifty years.

  He began to watch the illuminated face of the clock in the ceiling. It had registered 23:12; now it was 23:22. The ten minutes Pelham had suggested for a time lapse between passivity and initial action was up.

  Slowly he pushed his hand toward the edge of the bed. Click! His fingers pressed the button that was there. There was a faint hum. The automatic massager began to fumble gently over his naked form.

  First it rubbed his arm; then it moved to his legs, and so on over his body. As it progressed, Caxton could feel the fine slick of oil that oozed from it working into his dry skin.

  A dozen times he could have screamed from the pain of life returning. But in an hour he was able to sit up and turn on the lights.

  The small, sparsely furnished, familiar room couldn’t hold his attention for more than an instant. He stood up.

  The movement must have been too abrupt. He swayed, caught the metal column of the bed, and retched discolored stomach juices.

  The nausea passed. But it required an effort of will for him to walk to the door, open it, and head along the narrow corridor that led to the control room.

  He wasn’t supposed to so much as pause there, but a spasm of absolutely dreadful fascination seized him, and he couldn’t help it. He leaned over the control chair and glanced at the chronometer.

  It said: 53 years, 7 months, 2 weeks, 0 days, 0 hours and 27 minutes.

  Fifty-three years! A little blindly, almost blankly, Caxton thought of the people they had known back on Earth, the young men they had gone to college with, that girl who had kissed him at the party given them the night they left - they were all dead. Or dying of old age.

  Caxton remembered the girl very vividly. She was pretty, vivacious, a complete stranger. She had laughed as she offered her red lips, and she had said, ‘A kiss for the young one, too.’

  She’d be a grandmother now - or in her grave.

  As he had these thoughts he began to heat the can of concentrated liquid that was to be his first food. Slowly, his mind calmed.

  Fifty-three years and seven and one half months, he thought drably. Nearly four years over the allotted time. He’d have to do some figuring before he took another dose of Eternity drug. Twenty grains had been calculated to preserve his flesh and his life for exactly fifty years.

  The stuff was evidently more potent than Pelham had been able to estimate from his short-period advance tests.

  He sat tense, narrow-eyed, thinking about that. Abruptly, he grew conscious of what he was doing. Laughter spat from his lips. The sound split the silence like a series of pistol shots, startling him.

  But it also relieved him. Was he actually being critical?

  A miss of only four years was bull’s-eye across that span of years. The method wasn’t as simple as at the Palace of Immortality. But it worked, also.

  He was alive and still young. Time and space had been conquered, by a second system of bypassing the years.

  Caxton ate his soup, sipping each spoonful deliberately. He made the small bowlful last every second of thirty minutes. Then, greatly refreshed, he made his way back to the control room.

  This time he paused for a long look through the plates. It took only a few moments to find Sol, a very brightly glowing star in the approximate center of the rearview plate.

  Alpha Centauri required longer to locate. But it shone finally, a glow point in a light-sprinkled darkness.

  Caxton wasted no time trying to estimate their distances. They looked right. In fifty-four years they had covered approximately one-tenth of the four and one-third lightyears to the famous nearest star system.

  As Caxton straightened up, he realised that there was a thought in his mind, other than the one he was supposed to have at this point.

  He was supposed to check on his three companions; make sure all was well with them.

  He found himself resisting that; found himself thinking: First, turn the ship around. Start the long journey back. It would be utterly ridiculous if, because of any delay now, the spaceship returned to Earth after June 3, 2083… . Have to remember, there was already a four-year overtime balance to compensate for. He had originally estimated that it would require the equivalent of an Earth-day to make the turnabout and insure that the return course was exactly right.

  Start that, then look.

  As he sat there, making his precise calculations and setting the dials, he realised that he was irritated that he had, as his first reaction on awakening, been concerned about Renfrew.

  That guy almost got to me, he thought. ‘My dear friend, Peter’ indeed. Damn it, he scarcely knew me when he said that. So it had to be a lie. Showed how easily influenced people were by wealth.

  Even I, thought Caxton tolerantly… . After a little, he realised that the ‘even I’ was phony. Money had always been supremely important to him. Or rather, success had.

  So the colossal success and wealth of the Renfrew family had made an enormous impact. In his thoughts, the man seemed bigger than life, as if somehow what happened to him was more important than what happened to Peter Caxton.

  Which, of course, was ridiculous.

  But it occurred to him, for the first time in all his years, that this was the feeling that must have motivated guards of ancient kings to sacrifice themselves, and die smiling with gladness that they had been able to be of service to the superbeing, the monarch.