“Anyway,” she added, her lips quirking roguishly, “by our time, back there, it was December 25th.”
Masters clawed his way to his knees, his lips parted unnaturally.
“A Christmas present!” he croaked. “A Christmas present!” His face went white.
The girl said unsteadily, “Cut it out, Erle!”
She leaned weakly against the wall of the cave. “Now come up here, lieutenant, and take this gun out of my hands and don’t stare at me as if you’ve lost your senses.”
Tony forced himself to his feet, and like an automaton skirted around Braker and Yates and took the suddenly shaking weapon from her.
She uttered a weary sigh, smiled at him faintly, bemusedly, and whispered, “Merry Christmas, lieutenant!” She slumped slowly to the ground.
Tony gestured soundlessly at Masters. Masters, face abject and ashamed, picked her up in tender arms.
“Come up here, professor,” Tony said dully. He felt as if all the life had been pumped from his bones.
Overland came forward, shaking his head with emotion. “Amos!” he whispered. He broke in a half-hysterical chuckle, stopped himself. He hovered around Laurette, watching her tired face. “At least my girl lives,” he whispered brokenly.
“Get up, Braker,” said Tony. “You, too, Yates.”
Yates rose, vaguely brushing dust from his pressure suit, his lips working over words that refused to emerge.
Braker’s voice was a hoarse, unbelieving whisper. His eyes were abnormally wide and fixed hypnotically on the skeleton.
“So that’s what we went through — for a damned classroom skeleton.” He repeated it. “For a damned classroom skeleton!”
He came to his feet, fighting to mold his strained face back to normal. “Just about back where we started, eh? Well,” he added in a shaking, bitter tone, “Merry Christmas.” He forced his lips into half-hearted cynicism.
Tony’s face relaxed. He drew in a full, much-needed breath of air. “Sure. Sure — Merry Christmas. Everybody. Including Amos — whoever he used to be.”
Nobody seemed to have anything to say. Or perhaps their thoughts were going back for the moment to a pre-asteroid world. Remembering. At least Masters was remembering, if the suffering, remorseful look on his face meant anything.
Tony broke it. “That’s that, isn’t it? Now we can go back to the ship. From there to Earth. Professor — Masters — start off.” He made a tired gesture.
Masters went ahead, without a backward look, carrying the gently breathing, but still unconscious girl. Overland stole a last look at the skeleton, at Amos, where he lay unknowing of the chaos the mere fact of his being there, white and perfect and wired together, and with a ring on his perfect tapering finger, had caused. Overland walked away hurriedly after Masters. Amos would stay where he was.
Tony smiled grimly at Braker. He pointed with his free hand.
“Want your ring back, Braker?”
Braker’s head jerked minutely. He stared at the ring, then back at Tony. His fists clenched at his sides. “No!”
Tony grinned — for the first time in three weeks.
“Then let’s get going.”
He made a gesture. Braker and Yates, walking side by side, went slowly for the ship, Tony following behind. He turned only once, and that was to look at his wrecked patrol ship, where it lay against the base of the mountain. A shudder passed down his spine. There was but one mystery that remained now. And its solution was coming to Tony Crow, in spite of his effort to shove its sheerly maddening implications into the back of his mind—
Professor Overland and Masters took Laurette to her room. Tony took the two outlaws to the lounge, wondering how he was going to secure them. Masters solved his problem by entering with a length of insulated electric wire. He said nothing, but wordlessly went to work securing Braker and Yates to the guide rail while Tony held the Hampton on them. After he had finished, Tony bluntly inspected the job. Masters winced, but he said nothing.
After they were out in the hall, going toward Laurette’s room, Masters stopped him. His face was white, strained in the half-darkness.
“I don’t know how to say this,” he began huskily.
“Say what?”
Masters’ eyes shifted, then, as if by a deliberate effort of will, came back.
“That I’m sorry.”
Tony studied him, noted the lines of suffering around his mouth, the shuddering pain in his eyes.
“Yeah, I know how you feel,” he muttered. “But I guess you made up for it when you tackled Braker and Yates. They might have been using electric wire on us by now.” He grinned lopsidedly, and clapped Masters on the arm. “Forget it, Masters. I’m with you all the way.”
Masters managed a smile, and let loose a long breath. He fell into step beside Tony’s hurrying stride. “Laurette’s O.K.”
“Well, lieutenant,” said Laurette, stretching lazily, and smiling up at him, “I guess I got weak in the knees at the last minute.”
“Didn’t we all!” He smiled ruefully. He dropped to his knees. She was still in her pressure suit and lying on the floor. He helped her to a sitting position, and then to her feet.
Overland chuckled, though there was a note of uneasy reminiscence in his tone. “Wait till I tell the boys at Lipton U. about this.”
“You’d better not,” Laurette warned. She added, “You broke down and admitted the ring was an omen. When a scientist gets superstitious—”
Tony broke in. “Weren’t we all?”
Masters said, dropping his eyes, “I guess we had good enough reason to be superstitious about it.” His hand went absently upward to his shoulder.
Overland frowned, and, hands behind his back, walked to the empty porthole. “All that work DeTosque, the Farr brothers, Morrell, and myself put in. There’s no reason to patch up the asteroids and try to prove they were all one world. But at the same time, there’s no proof — no absolute proof—” He clicked his tongue. Then he swung on Tony, biting speculatively at his lower lip, his eyes sharpening.
“There’s one thing that needs explaining which probably never will be explained, I guess. It’s too bad. Memory? Bah! That’s not the answer, lieutenant. You stood in the cave there, and you saw the skeleton, and somehow you knew it had existed before the human race, but was not older than the human race. It’s something else. You didn’t pick up the memory from the past — not over a hundred million years. What then?” He turned away, shaking his head, came back abruptly as Tony spoke, eyes sharpening.
“I’ll tell you why,” Tony said evenly.
His head moved up and down slowly, and his half-lidded eyes looked lingeringly out the porthole toward the mountain where his wrecked patrol ship lay. “Yes, I’ll tell you why.”
Laurette, Masters and Overland were caught up in tense silence by the strangeness of his tone.
He said faintly: “Laurette and I were trapped alive in the back of the cave when the two worlds crashed. We lived through it. I didn’t know she was back there, or course; she recovered consciousness later — at the right time, I’d say!” He grinned at her obliquely, then sobered again. “I saw the skeleton and somehow I was too dazed to realize it couldn’t be Laurette. Because when the gravity was dispersed, the tension holding everything back in time was released, and everything went back to the present — just a little less than the present. I’ll explain that later.”
He drew a long breath.
“This is hard to say. I was in the back of the cave. I felt something strike the mountainside.
“That was my patrol ship — with me in it.”
His glance roved around. Overland’s breath sucked in audibly.
“Careful now, boy,” he rumbled warningly, alarm in his eyes.