“Alone?”
Brent suppressed several remarks concerning women, in the abstract and the particular. “Stay or go, I don’t care. I’m going.”
Martha sighed. “You have changed so, John—”
In front of the warehouse was an open field. There had been buildings there when Brent last saw it. And in the field three young people were picknicking. The sight reminded Brent that it was a long time since he’d eaten.
He made toward the trio. There were two men and a girl. One man was blond, the other and the girl were brilliantly red-headed. The girl had much more than even that hair to recommend her. She— Brent’s eyes returned to the red-headed man. There was no mistaking those deep brown eyes, that sharp and noble nose. The beard was scant, but still there was no denying—
Brent sprang forward with an eager cry of “Stephen!”
The young man looked at him blankly. “Yes,” he said politely. “What do you want?”
Brent mentally kicked himself. He had met Stephen in advanced age. What would the Stephen of twenty know of him? And suddenly he began to understand a great deal. The confusion of that first meeting started to fade away.
“If I tell you,” he said rapidly, “that I know that you be Stephen, that you have sister Martha, that you drink bond despite Stappers, and that you doubt wisdom of Barrier, will you accept me as a man you can trust?”
“Cosmic eons!” the blond young man drawled. “Stranger knows plenty, Stephen. If he bees Stapper, you’ll have your mind changed.”
The scantily bearded youth looked a long while into Brent’s eyes. Then he felt in his robe, produced a flask, and handed it over. Brent drank and returned it. Their hands met in a firm clasp.
Stephen grinned at the others. “My childs, I think stranger brings us adventure. I feel like someone out of novel by Varnichek.” He turned back to Brent. “Do you know these others, too?”
Brent shook his head.
“Krasna and Alex. And your name?”
“John Brent.”
“And what can we do for you, John?”
“First tell me year.”
Alex laughed, and the girl smiled. “And how long have you beed on a bonder?” Alex asked.
A bonder, Brent guessed, would be a bond bender. “This bees my first drink,” he said, “since 1942. Or perhaps since 2473, according as how you reckon.”
Brent was not disappointed in the audience reaction this time.
It’s easy to see what must have happened, Brent wrote that night in the first entry of the journal Derringer had asked him to keep. He wrote longhand, an action that he loathed. The typewriter which Stephen had kindly offered him was equipped with a huge keyboard bearing the forty-odd characters of the Farthing phonetic alphabet, and Brent declined the loan.
We’re at the first Barrier—the one that failed. It was dedicated to Cosmos and launched this afternoon. My friends were among the few inhabitants not ecstatically present at the ceremony. Since then they’ve collected reports for me. The damned contrivance had to be so terrifically overloaded that it blew up. Dyce-Farnsworth was killed and will be a holy martyr to Cosmos forever.
But in an infinitesimal fraction of a second between the launching and the explosion, the Barrier existed. That was enough.
If you, my dear Dr. Derringer, were ever going to see this journal, the whole truth would doubtless flash instantaneously through your mind like the lightning in the laboratory of the Mad Scientist. (And why couldn’t I have met up with a Mad Scientist instead of one who was perfectly sane and accurate ... up to a point? Why, Dr. Derringer, you fraud, you didn’t even have a daughter!)
But since this journal, faithfully kept as per your instructions, is presumably from now on for my eyes alone, I’ll have to try to make clear to my own uninspired mind just what gives with this Barrier, which broke down, so that it can’t protect the Stasis, but still irrevocably stops me from going back.
Any instant in which the Barrier exists is impassable: a sort of roadblock in time. Now to achieve Dyce-Farnsworth’s dream of preventing all time travel, the Barrier would have to go on existing forever, or at least into the remote future. Then as the Stasis goes on year by year, there’d always be a Barrier-instant ahead of it in time, protecting it. Not merely one roadblock, but a complete abolition of traffic on the road.
Now D-F has failed. The future’s wide open. But there in the recent past, at the instant of destruction, is the roadblock that keeps me, my dear Dr. Derringer, from ever beaming on your spade beard again.
Why does it block me? I’ve been trying to find out. Stephen is good on history, but lousy on science. The blond young Alex reverses the combination. From him I’ve tried to learn the theory back of the Barrier.
The Barrier established in that fractional second, a powerful magnetic field in the temporal dimension. As a result, any object moving along the time line is cutting the magnetic field. Hysteresis sets up strong eddy currents which bring the object, in this case me, to an abrupt halt. Cf. that feeling of twisting shock that I had when my eyes were closed.
I pointed out to Alex that I must somehow have crossed this devilish Barrier in going from 1942 to 2473. He accounts for that apparent inconsistency by saying that I was then traveling with the time stream, though at a greater rate; the blockage lines of force were end-on and didn’t stop me.
Brent paused and read the last two paragraphs aloud to the young scientist who was tinkering with the traveling machine. “How’s that, Alex? Clear enough?”
“It will do.” Alex frowned. “Of course we need whole new vocabulary for temporal concepts. We fumble so helplessly in analogies—” He rose. “There bees nothing more I can do for this now. Tomorrow I’ll bring out some tools from shop, and see if I can find some acreoid gears.”
“Good man. I may not be able to go back in time from here; but one thing I can do is go forward. Forward to just before they launch that second Barrier. I’ve got a job to do.”
Alex gazed admiringly at the machine. “Wonderful piece of work. Your Dr. Derringer bees great man.”
“Only he didn’t allow for the effects of tempo-magnetic hysteresis on his mechanism. Thank God for you, Alex.”
“Willn’t you come back to house?”
Brent shook his head. “I’m taking no chances on curious Stappers. I’m sticking here with Baby. See that the old lady’s comfortable, will you?”
“Of course. But tell me: who bees she? She willn’t talk at all.”
“Nobody. Just a temporal hitchhiker.”
Martha’s first sight of the young Stephen had been a terrible shock. She had stared at him speechlessly for long minutes, and then gone into a sort of inarticulate hysteria. Any attempt at explanation of her status, Brent felt, would only make matters worse. There was nothing to do but leave her to the care—which seemed both tender and efficient—of the girl Krasna, and let her life ride until she could resume it normally in her own time.
He resumed his journal.
Philological notes: Stapper, as I should have guessed, is a corruption of Gestapo. Slanduch, which poor Starvel suggested I might be, had me going for a bit. Asking about that, learned that there is more than one State. This, the smuggest and most fanatical of them all, embraces North America, Australia, and parts of Eastern Asia. Its official language is, of course, Farthingized English. Small nuclear groups of English-speaking people exist in the other States, and have preserved the older and irregular forms of speech. (Cf. American mountaineers, and Spanish Jews in Turkey.) A Slanduch belongs to such a group.