Also, he made certain changes in the time-machine.
Finally, he told Brown the machine was ready.
"You want to test-hop it?" he asked. "I'm pretty sure it'll work now, but it's still a haywire job, I could be wrong."
Brown shook his head. "Not necessary. If the machine works, we will be ... home. If not, well, you will just have to tinker with it some more." It was not sound reasoning, from Dolan's viewpoint, but consistent with what he had come to expect from these people in technical matters. He had counted heavily on such a reaction.
"OK," he said. "Then she's ready to go."
Brown nodded and tossed a key to Smith, speaking curtly in a language strange to Dolan. Dolan had noticed long before that the back bedroom door was always locked, and the windows securely boarded up. Artifacts of historical interest, Brown had told him. It seemed like rather extreme precaution to take for security of such material.
Brown turned back to Dolan. "You had better move your equipment out of range of the machine now, if you wish to keep it," he said.
Dolan carried his equipment outside. When he returned the three aliens were carrying small heavy boxes out of the back room, stowing them in a tight circle about the machine. Moirta was straining at a heavy case with neatly dove-tailed corners, marked "Remington".
So that was what it was all about.
It suddenly occurred to him to wonder how, if the machine could not move a person into the future, if it had no real existence in this time, they expected to move guns and ammunition. Did the laws of time operate differently for living organisms and inanimate things? What was it someone had once said about life—'islands of reverse entropy'? But that was only a figure of speech, men were still made up of the same elements as steel and brass—
Well, it could wait, there were more important things right now. "You need a hand?" he asked Moirta.
She smiled and nodded breathlessly.
As he stooped to help lift the box, their heads almost touched. "Listen!" he whispered, "be on your toes, now. I'm going to try something. Stay on this side of the machine, no matter what happens, and do just as I say."
She looked startled, but nodded.
With four of them working, it did not take long to pile the cargo in place. Brown checked it over with his eye and then turned to study Dolan.
"Well," he said slowly, "I suppose we are ready to go. No doubt you wish your payment now, eh, Mr. Dolan?"
This was the critical point. Dolan tensed as Smith stepped clear and lifted an inquiring eyebrow at Brown, his hand in his hip-pocket; but the senior gun runner shook his head. "Don't be stupid," he said quietly. "I think we have a few negotiations to make now." He looked at Dolan inquiringly.
Dolan hoped his relief did not show too clearly. He had been reasonably sure Brown would be too acute to kill him off-hand, but it had been a tricky moment, just the same. Now, he thought, play it cagey, make them lay it out on the table, get it moving—
"I'm no good at guessing games," he said. "You'll have to come down to my level on this."
Brown nodded. "Of course. Excuse me. I will be more explicit. Mr. Smith wants to kill you and get you out of the way immediately; he does not trust you. I do not trust you completely myself, I do not trustanyonecompletely; and for that exact reason I feel it would be stupid and dangerous to kill you. I am quite sure you will have booby-trapped the machine against just such a contingency."
"Booby-trapped?" Dolan asked blankly.
"Yes," Brown said patiently. "I mean the machine will not work satisfactorily if you are killed. It will blow up, burn out, or some such thing. Is that not true?"
Dolan considered the question for a moment. He was acutely aware that the most devious plot would probably seem simple and childish to a man like Brown. "Suppose it were?" he said cautiously. "Then what?"
"Then we shall negotiate, like reasonable people. What do you need to convince you of our good faith. Your money?" Brown reached in his jacket pocket and brought out a slip of paper. "Here," he said, "I think you will find this satisfactory." He handed it to Dolan.
Dolan looked absently at the check. It was more than satisfactory—for a purely business transaction. But this was no longer just a business transaction.
"It's not enough," he said flatly.
Brown raised an eyebrow. "The girl? No." He shook his head firmly. "We must have Moirta for a hostage, a guarantee of your good faith. She goes with us. Afterward, perhaps, if she wishes to return—" he shrugged.
Dolan studied him, trying to decide just how much Brown's word was worth. Just as much as it suited him to make it worth, probably. He glanced at Moirta. She shook her head, a tiny almost imperceptible jerk, confirming his own thought. There was no particular reason to expect that Brown would really let her return—Moirta probably was not important to him, but the whereabouts of the time-translator was.
He turned back to Brown. "You'll promise not to stop her?"
Brown smiled indulgently. "I promise." Dolan felt an almost uncontrollable urge to smash the smug smile with his fist. He bottled it up. This was no time to get excited.
"OK," he said shortly. He stepped to the machine and carefully bent a wire just so, while Brown watched alertly.
"Also," Brown said, "the notes."
"Notes?"
"Exactly. The notes you kept on the operation of the machine. Give them to me, please."
Dolan shrugged. He had not really expected to keep the notes. "They're out in my briefcase," he said. Brown looked at Smith, who went out and returned in a moment with the briefcase. Dolan took out a folder and handed it to Brown. Brown riffled through the pages, nodded and tossed the folder on the pile of boxes.
He studied Dolan speculatively. "The other notes, too, please," he said. "The secret notes."
The man was guessing, of course. Dolan had not even mentioned the other notes to Moirta. "You've got all the notes I made," he said.
Brown stepped forward and grasped his arm. "Walk!" he commanded.
Dolan twisted to look at him, startled. "What—?"
"The notes," Brown said coldly. "Walk." He gave a little shove, and Dolan found himself walking, with Brown holding his arm in a firm even grasp, a look of preoccupation on his face.
"This way," Brown said. They went out the door.
"The notes," Brown repeated insistently. "Keep walking, keep walking." They zigzagged rapidly across the yard, Brown still guiding Dolan by the arm, Smith coming behind with his hand in his pocket. Brown paused. "Here, I think," he said to Smith. "Look under that rock."
Dolan watched in helpless rage as Smith dug the jar out and handed it to Brown.WasBrown a mind-reader, after all? How else—?
Well, of course, he thought, muscular tension, the old 'mind-reading' trick. He should have caught on sooner; but Brown was good at it, no doubt about that.
Brown smashed the jar against the rock and stuffed the notes in his pocket. They went back in to the time machine.
Brown bent over the control box and studied it carefully. He examined the wire Dolan had adjusted. For the first time, there was a flicker of uncertainty in his eyes.
"Well," he said absently. "I suppose—" he looked comprehensively around, checking the position of the cargo. "There is something—" He punched the power button, moved his hand to start the machine.
Dolan glanced at Moirta. She sat on one of the boxes on the far side of the machine, watching him.
This was the time,now—
He stepped forward and opened his mouth to shout.
He never did. Something went suddenly wrong. Brown flicked a thumb, Smith moved like lightning, and before Dolan realized what was happening, he found himself flat on his back, wondering numbly what had happened.
Brown snapped a syllable at Moirta. She answered with a shrug and a word. He frowned momentarily and then his face lightened.
"Ah," he said softly. "I think I see, now. You were going to shout to Moirta to run out of range of the machine, while you jumped in and activated it, isn't that so? Really, it would have done no good, we could still have returned, and besides Moirta—" he frowned suddenly. "Ohcouldwe have returned?"
He bit delicately at his lower lip. "Moirta," he said. "Step a little closer to the machine, please."
"Now," he turned back to Dolan, "I am going to push the buttons, with Moirta quite close to the machine. Are there any last-minute changes you wish to make?"
Dolan hesitated, studying both Moirta's and the men's positions, and then nodded sullenly.
"I thought there might be," Brown said with satisfaction. "Mr. Smith, help Mr. Dolan up to the machine."
Dolan reached out unsteadily, leaning on Smith, and reversed two connections. "That's it," he mumbled.
"Thank you, Mr. Dolan. Now, Mr. Smith, if you will just carry Mr. Dolan over there into the corner, well away from the machine, and immobilize him—no, no, just temporarily. We may still need him again, Mr. Dolan is a very tricky sort of person."
Dolan felt Smith's fingers touch his neck lightly, there was a sudden blazing pain, and that was all. He blanked out.
The first thing he knew after that was that fingers were working gently at his neck, massaging it. His head was resting on something soft. He opened his eyes and saw that he was lying with his head pillowed on Moirta's lap.
"George?" she said sharply. "Are you all right, George?"
"I'm all right," he said. He raised his head and looked around. The machine was gone, and Smith and Brown were gone, and half the boxes were gone. The end ones in the little semicircle were broken, and from them a pile of brass cartridges had spilled through the hole in the floor where the others had been.
"Wise jerks," he mumbled with grim satisfaction. "See how they like it now."
Moirta stared at him. "What happened, George? I don't understand what happened."
"I gimmicked the machine. That's what happened. Surprise, huh? I'll bet they were plenty surprised too."
"But I thought—"
Dolan sat up and felt tenderly of his throat. He nodded. "I know," he said. "You thought they had me licked. So did they. That was just smoke-screen, a little diversion. I knew they could out-smart me if I tried to pull anything foxy, that's their trade. But they weren't really mind-readers, you told me that, and the business with the notes cinched it.
"And they didn't think like technicians. They could see I might disable the machine, or booby-trap it; but they couldn't see I could fix it so it would work, only just a little different.
"All I had to do was to keep their minds on their own specialty, let them wear out their suspicion on the little foxy tricks they expected, so they wouldn't notice what I was really doing. See?"
She shook her head. "No," she said. "I do not see. I suppose I'm stupid, too—"
"Not stupid. Just not technically minded. You understand, this machine works by setting up a field around itself, ordinarily that field's circular, it takes in everything in a certain radius. But it doesn't have to be, that's just because it's the easiest way, more convenient. So I just distorted the field a little, made it lopsided. Then I went through all that other business to keep their minds on me, keep them off your position, and make sure they both stayed over on my side." He smiled at her. "I told you, remember, in this time the villains always get it in the neck, the boy gets the girl, and they live happily ever after."
She shook her head. "No," she said gently. "I'm sorry, for you and me there will not be any ever after. You forget the displacement effect."
"Displacement effect?"
"Yes," she said. "I am afraid I did not explain that fully to you, I thought it would only hurt you to do so. You understand, the past is really immutable, we only seem to change it. For the time that the time-translator exists at any given time in the past, a sort of enclave, a self-supporting bubble, is established which permits apparent changes. When the time translator returns to its normal existence in my era, that bubble dissolves. I do not know, in terms of our present subjective time, just how long the displacement will hold, but when it vanishes we, you and I, will no longer exist."
"But that would be a change in the past, in itself."
"Not exactly. What I told you about forgetting was true, it was just not the whole truth. There will be, in my time, a Moirta who exists normally up to the time she is translated to the past. And there will be, in your time, a George Dolan who never met Mr. Brown or Miss Jones. But you and I, as we exist at this moment, will not have been."
"I see," Dolan said. "It's too bad I didn't know about this sooner. I think we still may have a chance, though. You see, I had to worry about the possibility that Smith and Brown might think it worth while to come back after you. So I changed the switches, too. The time translator isn't going into the future, it's gone into the past, and then it's fixed to burn out again, a long way in the past, where there aren't any electronics technicians, no people at all. How about that?"
"The past? I don't know," she said doubtfully. "I am not a temporal technician, I know only about the displacement effect as it operates in our usual translations. Perhaps, in that case, the bubble might continue to exist, as a sort of permanent side-track. I really don't know."
She laughed suddenly, as the full implications of what he had said struck her. "The past? Oh, poor Smith. And poor Brown. A long way in the past, where there are no people at all, just dinosaurs and snakes—and they hate such things so." She laughed helplessly, tears rolling down her cheeks. "And poor George, and poor Moirta. All with their clever little plans, their tricks to out-smart each other. Everyone has outsmarted everyone else, and we all lose now, don't we?"
Dolan stared at her narrowly. "Wealllose?"
She nodded—
The senior gun runner had been quite confident of victory.
It took him a rather long moment to assimilate the fact of defeat; but in that moment he did assimilate it, as fully and completely as he took in the implications of any other situation.
He examined the wreckage of the time translator curiously, tried and failed to make sense of the erratic pattern in which their cargo had accompanied them, the absence of Moirta. He straightened and looked about. There were no dinosaurs, the range of the time machine did not extend that far; but over on a ledge of rock a large cat with hyper-trophied eyeteeth squatted, switching its stub of a tail, startled by their sudden appearance.
He sighed and turned toward the other gun runner. "Old, old, time," he said. He nodded toward the cat. "Bad for us. No chance rescue. Supplies short."
The other said nothing, watching him narrowly, hand in back pocket. Down in the valley below, something trumpeted, a hoarse grunting roar. The senior gun runner started nervously. It was getting dark.
He held out his hand. "Older first," he said simply. The younger man laid the gun in his hand; and the senior gun runner, without hesitation or farewell, raised it to his head and pulled the trigger.
"—yes, everyone," Moirta said. She wiped at her eyes. "I'm sorry, George. I will die very quickly in this time, whether the displacement operates or not."
"But you said—!"
"I know. I was so sure there was nothing you could do, and I said what I thought would make you happy. And I did want to stay with you, in a way, even though I knew it would kill me ... and in another way, I wanted to go back, to return to my own time, and you were my means to that ... oh, it's so mixed up, really, it is funny, everyone so sure of themselves, and now ... this...."
Dolan shook his head helplessly. "I never thought. You seemed so ... so...."
"So human?" her lips curled wryly. "I wasmadeto seem human, twentieth-century human, it was part of my job. I'm not. And soon, I shall not even seem human, without the things I need—things that won't even be invented for ten thousand years—cancer inhibitors, blood clotting agents, insulin surrogate, vaccines, serums, antibiotics—why, I can't even eat your food!" She shook her head sadly. "You had better just leave me, it will not be nice, you will not like me at all."
And yet, even with the game played out, she could not forget her trade, her specialty, for it was bred into her as deeply as the tendency to leukemia, the hemophilia, the diabetes, the congenital digestive deformity he had inherited from a hundred ancestors kept alive by a superb medical science to breed her. She laid her cheek against his, the smooth velvet human-seeming cheek, with no hint as yet of the lumps of wild tissue waiting to proliferate within.
"Please don't worry, George," she said softly. "It's not your fault, really." She smiled up at him. "I've lived a rough life, most of us do, in my time. Remember, I've earned what I received, I came here knowing what I was doing. It's just caught up with me. It had to, some day."
He caught her in his arms and pulled her tightly to him. "Oh, God, honey," he said. "I didn't know, I didn't even think.... I'd give anything...." he turned his face up blindly. "Please, Lord, let the bubble break," he prayed. "Let us not be, both together, now...."
But the bubble did not break.