"I'm all right," Harlan said in a monotone.
Twissell's first sight of them in the role of natives of the 20th elicited a feeble attempt at jocularity. "Father Time," he said, "what ugly costumes in the Primitive, and yet how it fails to hide your beauty, my-my dear."
Noys smiled warmly at him, and Harlan, standing there impassively silent, was forced to admit that Twissell's rust-choked vein of gallantry had something of truth in it. Noys's clothing encompassed her without accentuating her as clothing should. Her make-up was confined to unimaginative dabs of color on lips and cheeks and an ugly rearrangement of the eyebrow line. Her lovely hair (this had been the worst of it) had been cut ruthlessly. Yet she was beautiful.
Harlan himself was already growing accustomed to his own uncomfortable belt, the tightness of fit under armpits and in the crotch and the mousy lack of color about his rough-textured clothing. Wearing strange costumes to suit a Century was an old story to him.
Twissell was saying, "Now what I really wanted to do was to install hand controls inside the kettle, as we discussed, but there isn't any way, apparently. The engineers simply must have a source of power large enough to handle temporal displacement and that isn't available outside Eternity. Temporal tension while occupying the Primitive is all that can be managed. However, we have a return lever."
He led them into the kettle, picking his way among the piled supplies, and pointed out the obtruding finger of metal that now marred the smooth inner wall of the kettle.
"It amounts to the installation of a simple switch," he said. "Instead of returning automatically to Eternity, the kettle will remain in the Primitive indefinitely. Once the lever is plunged home, however, you will return. There will then be the matter of the second and, I hope, final trip-"
"A second trip?" asked Noys at once.
Harlan said, "I haven't explained that. Look, this first trip is intended merely to fix the time of Cooper's arrival precisely. We don't know how long a Time-lapse exists between his arrival and the placing of the advertisement. We'll reach him by the post-office box, and learn, if possible, the exact minute of his arrival, or as close as we can, anyway. We can then return to that moment plus fifteen minutes to allow for the kettle to have left Cooper-"
Twissell interposed, "Couldn't have the kettle in the same place at the same time in two different physiotimes, you know," and tried to smile.
Noys seemed to absorb it. "I see," she said, not too definitely.
Twissell said to Noys, "Picking up Cooper at the time of his arrival will reverse all micro-changes. The A-bomb advertisement will disappear again and Cooper will know only that the kettle, having disappeared as we told him it would, had unexpectedly appeared again. He will not know that he was in the wrong Century and he will not be told. We will tell him that there was some vital instruction we had forgotten to give him (we'll have to manufacture some) and we can only hope that he will regard the matter as so unimportant that he won't mention being sent back twice when he writes his memoir."
Noys lifted her plucked eyebrows. "It's very complicated."
"Yes. Unfortunately." He rubbed his hands together and looked at the others as though nursing an inner doubt. Then he straightened, produced a fresh cigarette, and even managed a certain jauntiness as he said, "And now, boy, good luck." Twissell touched hands briefly with Harlan, nodded to Noys, and stepped out of the kettle.
"Are we leaving now?" asked Noys of Harlan when they were alone.
"In a few minutes," said Harlan.
He glanced sideways at Noys. She was looking up at him, smiling, unfrightened. Momentarily his own spirits responded to that. But that was emotion, not reason, he counciled himself; instinct, not thought. He looked away.
The trip was nothing, or almost nothing; no different from an ordinary kettle ride. Midway there was a kind of internal jar that might have been the downwhen terminus and might have been purely psychosomatic. It was barely noticeable.
And then they were in the Primitive and they stepped into a craggy, lonely world brightened by the splendor of an afternoon sun. There was a soft wind with a chilly edge to it and, most of all, silence.
The bare rocks were tumbled and mighty, colored into dull rainbows by compounds of iron, copper, and chromium. The grandeur of the manless and all but lifeless surroundings dwarfed and shriveled Harlan. Eternity, which did not belong to the world of matter, had no sun and none but imported air. His memories of his own homewhen were dim. His Observations in the various Centuries had dealt with men and their cities. He had never experienced this.
Noys touched his elbow.
"Andrew! I'm cold."
He turned to her with a start.
She said, "Hadn't we better set up the Radiant?"
He said, "Yes. In Cooper's cavern."
"Do you know where it is?"
"It's right here," he said shortly.
He had no doubt of that. The memoir had located it and first Cooper, now he, had been pin-pointed back to it.
He had not doubted precision pin-pointing in Time-travel since his Cubhood days. He remembered himself then, facing Educator Yarrow seriously, saying, "But Earth moves about the Sun, and the Sun moves about the Galactic Center and the Galaxy moves too. If you started from some point on Earth, and move downwhen a hundred years, you'll be in empty space, because it will take a hundred years for Earth to reach that point." (Those were the days when he still referred to a Century as a "hundred years.")
And Educator Yarrow had snapped back, "You don't separate Time from space. Moving through Time, you share Earth's motions. Or do you believe that a bird flying through the air whiffs out into space because the Earth is hurrying around the Sun at eighteen miles a second and vanishes from under the creature?"
Arguing from analogy is risky, but Harlan obtained more rigorous proof in later days and, now, after a scarcely precedented trip into the Primitive, he could turn confidently and feel no surprise at finding the opening precisely where he had been told it would be.
He moved the camouflage of loose rubble and rock to one side and entered.
He probed the darkness within, using the white beam of his flash almost like a scalpel. He scoured the walls, ceiling, floor, every inch.
Noys, remaining close behind him, whispered, "What are you looking for?"
He said, "Something. Anything,"
He found his something, anything, at the very rear of the cave in the shape of a flattish stone covering greenish sheets like a paperweight.
Harlan threw the stone aside and flipped the sheets past one thumb.
"What are they?" asked Noys.
"Bank notes. Medium of exchange. Money."
"Did you know they were there?"
"I knew nothing. I just hoped."
It was only a matter of using Twissell's reverse logic, of calculating cause from effect. Eternity existed, so Cooper must be making correct decisions too. In assuming the advertisement would pull Harlan into the correct Time, the cave was an obvious additional means of communication.
Yet this was almost better than he had dared hope. More than once during the preparations for his trip into the Primitive, Harlan had thought that making his way into a town with nothing but bullion in his possession would result in suspicion and delay.
Cooper had managed, to be sure, but Cooper had had time. Harlan hefted the sheaf of bills. And he must have used time to accumulate this much. He had done well, the youngster, marvelously well.
And the circle was closing!
The supplies had been moved into the cave, in the increasingly ruddy glow of the westering sun. The kettle had been covered by a diffuse reflecting film which would hide it from any but the closest of prying eyes, and Harlan had a blaster to take care of those, if need be. The Radiant was set up in the cave and the flash was wedged into a crevice, so that they had heat and light.