Again Harl shook his head.
“No, we must try it. We may fail, but we must try it at least. If we succeed we shall return and bring with us books of knowledge and tools to work with.”
Agnar combed his beard with skinny fingers.
“You’ll fail,” he said.
“But if we don’t we will return,” said Bill.
“Yes, if you don’t,” replied the old man.
“We are going now,” said Bill. “We thank you for your thoughtfulness. We must at least try. We are sorry to leave you. Please believe that.”
“I do believe it,” cried the old man and he seized their hands in a farewell clasp.
Harl opened the door of the plane and Bill clambered in.
At the door Harl stood with upraised hand.
“Good-bye,” he said. “Someday we will return.”
The crowd burst into a roar of farewell. Harl climbed into the plane and closed the door.
The motors bellowed, droning out the shouting of the future-men and the great machine charged down the sand. With a rush it took the air. Three times Bill circled the ruined city in a last mute good-bye to the men who watched silently and sorrowfully below.
Then Harl threw the lever. Again the utter darkness, the feeling of hanging in nothingness.
The motors, barely turning, muttered at the change. A minute passed, two minutes.
“Who says we can’t travel back in time!” Harl shouted triumphantly. He pointed to the needle. It was slowly creeping back across the face of the dial.
“Maybe the old man was wrong after—”
Bill never finished the sentence.
“Roll her out,” he screamed at Harl, “roll her out. One of our engines is going dead!”
Harl snatched at the lever, jerked frantically at it. The faulty motor choked and coughed, sputtered, then broke into a steady drone.
The two men in the cabin regarded one another with blanched faces. They knew they had escaped a possible crash—and death—by bare seconds.
Again they hung in the air. Again they saw the brick-red sun, the desert, and the sea. Below them loomed the ruins of Denver.
“We couldn’t have gone far back in time,” said Harl. “It looks the same as ever.”
They circled the ruins.
“We had better land out in the desert to fix up the engine,” suggested Harl. “Remember we have traveled back in time and Golan-Kirt still rules over the land. We don’t want to have to kill him a second time. We might not be able to do it.”
The plane was flying low and he nosed it up. Again the faulty engine sputtered and missed.
“She’s going dead this time for certain,” yelled Bill. “We’ll have to chance it, Harl. We have to land and chance getting away again.”
Harl nodded grimly.
Before them lay the broad expanse of the arena. It was either that or crash.
As Bill nosed the plane down the missing motor sputtered for the last time, went dead.
They flashed over the white walls of the amphitheater and down into the arena. The plane struck the sand, raced across it, slowed to a stop.
Harl opened the door.
“Our only chance is to fix it up in a hurry and get out of here,” he shouted at Bill. “We don’t want to meet that damn brain again.”
He stopped short.
“Bill,” he spoke scarcely above a whisper, “am I seeing things?”
Before him, set on the sands of the arena, only a few yards from the plane, was a statute of heroic size, a statue of himself and Bill.
Even from where he stood he could read the inscription, carved in the white stone base of the statue in characters which closely resembled written English.
Slowly, haltingly, he read it aloud, stumbling over an occasional queer character.
“Two men, Harl Swanson and Bill Kressman, came out of time to kill Golan-Kirt and to free the race.”
Below it he saw other characters.
“They may return.”
“Bill,” he sobbed, “we haven’t traveled back in time. We have traveled further into the future. Look at that stone—eroded, ready to crumble to pieces. That statue has stood there for thousands of years!”
Bill slumped back into his seat, his face ashen, his eyes staring.
“The old man was right,” he screamed. “He was right. We’ll never see the twentieth century again.”
He leaned over toward the time machine.
His face twitched.
“Those instruments,” he shrieked, “those damned instruments! They were wrong. They lied, they lied!”
With his bare fists he beat at them, smashing them, unaware that the glass cut deep gashes and his hands were smeared with blood.
Silence weighed down over the plain. There was absolutely no sound.
Bill broke the silence.
“The future-men,” he cried, “where are the future-men?”
He answered his own question.
“They are all dead,” he screamed, “all dead. They are starved—starved because they couldn’t manufacture synthetic food. We are alone! Alone at the end of the world!”
Harl stood in the door of the plane.
Over the rim of the amphitheater the huge red sun hung in a sky devoid of clouds. A slight wind stirred the sand at the base of the crumbling statue.
Skirmish
Although Clifford D. Simak sent this story to his agent under the title “Skirmish,” it would first appear in the December 1950 issue of Amazing Stories under the melodramatic title “Bathe Your Bearings in Blood.” And while this editor confesses that he rather likes the latter title, it appears here under its original title, since it is clear that Cliff deliberately restored the initial title for all further appearances of the story. Cliff was paid $114.75 for that first publication (a strange number that may result from the commission taken by his agent, Fred Pohl).
The story is old enough that it contains a couple of anachronisms that should perhaps be explained: To “tie the can” on someone was a euphemism for firing that person from his or her job and the Daily Worker was a publication of the government of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics that was generally thought of, in Western literary and journalistic circles, as an unusually ham-fisted propaganda rag of no redeeming social value.
It is probably useless to engage in speculations about whether this story was an ancestor of Fred Saberhagen’s “Berserker” stories, or even of the (much later) “Transformer” movies. But I would suggest that Cliff Simak, having already written a number of stories featuring benign robots, including some of the stories in the City cycle, might have been examining the obverse of the robot coin with a certain relish …
It was a good watch. It had been a good watch for more than thirty years. His father had owned it first and his mother had saved it for him after his father died and had given it to him on his eighteenth birthday. For all the years since then it had served him faithfully.
But now, comparing it with the clock on the newsroom wall, looking from his wrist to the big face of the clock over the coat cabinets, Joe Crane was forced to admit that his watch was wrong. It was an hour fast. His watch said seven o’clock and the clock on the wall insisted it was only six.
Come to think of it, it had seemed unusually dark driving down to work, and the streets had appeared singularly deserted.