“All right,” she said. She unbuckled the glove of her right hand. She moved close to him, holding his eyes with her own. “If you want to be the skeleton, you may.”
He felt her fingers touch his right hand. He felt something cold traveling up his fingers. He felt the ring enclosing his finger. Yes, the ring was on there, where it should be. He felt it — coldly. It could not very well be his imagination — could it? Of course not. She would not try to fool him. Yet her eyes were hypnotic, and he was in a daze. Feebly, he knew he should resist. But she forced his glove over his right hand, and he heard the buckles click. Then the left hand glove went on, and was buckled.
Her arms crept up around his neck. Tears glinted unashamedly in her eyes.
“Hold me tight, lieutenant,” she whispered huskily. “You know… you know, there may be a chance.”
“No, there isn’t, Laurette. There can’t be. I’ve got the ring on my finger.”
He could feel her drawing a deep breath. “Of course — you’ve got the ring on your finger! I think it can’t be very far away, lieutenant. Hold me.” Her voice was a whimper. “Maybe we’ll live.”
“Not I. Perhaps you.”
“This cave, this very mountain, lived through the holocaust. And perhaps we will, too. Both of us.”
She was being illogical, he knew. But he had sunk into a dull, apathetic state of mind. Let her try to believe what was impossible. He had the ring on his finger. He did.
Did he?
He jerked. He had felt the cold of its metal encircling his finger. He had thought he had felt it! His fingers moved. A dull, sickening sense of utter defeat engulfed him. This was defeat. She had the ring! She was the skeleton!
And there was no time to change it. There would be no time. The blood rushed in his head, giddily. He caught her eyes, and held them, and tried to let her know in that last moment that he knew what she had done. She bit her lip and smiled. Then — her face clouded. Clouded as his thoughts clouded. It was like that.
He heard no monstrous sound, for here was sound that was no sound. It was simply the ponderous headlong meeting of two planets. They had struck. They were flattening out against each other, in the immeasurable second when consciousness was whipped away, and fragments of rock, some large, some small, were dribbling out in a fine frothy motion from underneath the circle of collision. The planet was yawning mightily. A jigsaw of pieces, a Humpty Dumpty that all the king’s horses and all the king’s men could never put together again. This was the mighty prelude to the forming of an asteroid belt, and of a girl skeleton on Asteroid No. 1007.
He was alive.
Alive and thinking.
It did not seem possible.
He was wedged into the back of the cave. A boulder shut off light, and a projecting spur of it reached out and pinioned him with gentle touch against the wall at his back. He was breathing. His suit was inflated with ten pounds of pressure. Electric coils were keeping his body warm. He was alive and the thoughts were beginning in his brain. Slow, senseless thought. Thoughts that were illogical. He could not even bring himself to feel emotion. He was pinioned here in the darkness, and out there was an asteroid of no air, small gravity, and a twenty-mile altitude.
Laurette Overland would be dead, and she would be wearing the ring. Tears, unashamed, burned at his eyes.
How long had he been here, wedged in like this: minutes, hours, days? Where were Overland, Masters, Braker and Yates? Would they land and move this boulder away?
Something suddenly seemed to shake the mountain. He felt the vibration rolling through his body. What had caused that? Some internal explosion, an aftermath of the collision? That did not seem likely, for the vibration had been brief, barely perceptible.
He stood there, wedged, his thoughts refusing to work except with a monotonous regularity. Mostly he thought of the skeleton; so that skeleton had existed before the human race!
After a while, it might have been five minutes or an hour or more, he became aware of arms and legs and a sluggishly beating heart. He raised his arms slowly, like an automaton that has come to life after ages of motionlessness, and pushed against the boulder that hemmed him in. It seemed to move away from him easily. He stepped to one side and imparted a ponderous, rocking motion to the boulder. It fell forward and stopped. Light, palely emanating from the starry, black night that overhung Asteroid No. 1007, burst through over the top of the boulder. Good. There was plenty of room to crawl through — after a while. He leaned against the boulder, blood surging weakly in his veins.
He felt a vibration so small that it might have been imagination. Then again, it might have been the ship, landing on the asteroid. At least, there was enough likelihood of that to warrant turning his headset receiver on.
He listened, and heard the dull undertone of a carrier wave; or was that the dull throb of blood against his temples? No, it couldn’t be. He strained to listen, coherent thoughts at last making headway in his mind.
Then:
“Go on, professor — Masters.” That was Braker’s voice! “We’ll all go crazy if we don’t find out who the skeleton is.”
Then Braker had landed the ship, after escaping the holocaust that had shattered that before-the-asteroids world! Tony almost let loose a hoarse breath, then withheld it, savagely. If Braker heard that, he might suspect something. Whatever other purpose Tony had in life now, the first and most important was to get the Hampton away from Braker.
Overland muttered, his voice lifeless, “If it’s my daughter, I’d rather you’d go first, Braker.”
Masters spoke. “I’ll go ahead, professor. I’d do anything to—’ His voice broke.
Overland muttered, “Don’t take it so hard, son. We all have our bad moments. It couldn’t be a skeleton, anyway.”
“Why not?” That was Yates. Then, “Oh, hell, yes! It couldn’t be, could it, professor? You know, this is just about the flukiest thing that has ever happened I guess. Sometimes it makes me laugh! On again, off again!”
“Finnegan,” finished Braker absently. “Say, I don’t get it. This time business. You say the gravity of that planet was holding us back in time like a rubber band stretched tight. When the planet went, the rubber band broke — there wasn’t that gravity any more. And then we snapped back to our real time. But what if Crow and your daughter weren’t released like that? Then we ought to find the skeleton — maybe two of ’em.”
“The gravity of the asteroid would not be enough to hold them back,” Overland said wearily.
“Then I don’t get it,” Braker snapped with exasperation. “This is the present, our real present. Back there is the ledge that cracked our ship up, so it has to be the present. Then how come Crow said he saw a skeleton? Say,” he added, in a burst of anger, “do you think that copper was pulling the wool over our eyes? Well, I’ll be—”
Yates said, “Grow up! Crow was telling the truth.”
Overland said, “The skeleton will be there. The lieutenant saw it.”
Masters: “Maybe he saw his own skeleton.”
Yates: “Say, that’s right!”
Braker: “Well, why not? The same ring was in two different places at the same time, so I guess the same skeleton could be in Crow at the same time as in the cave. It’s a fact, and you don’t talk yourself out of it.”
Tony’s head was whirling. What in heaven were they talking about? Were they intimating that the release of gravity, when the planet broke up, released everything back to the real present, as if some sort of bond had been broken? His hands started to tremble. Of course. It was possible. The escapage of gravitons had thrust them back into the past. Gravitons, the very stuff of gravity, had helped them there. And when that one and a half gravity had dispersed, when the gravitons were so far distant that they no longer exerted that tension, everything had snapped back — to the present!