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  Suddenly another shadow crept across the land, a shadow so vast that it swallowed those cast by the pteranodons.

  Turning on his side, Carpenter saw the ship. It was settling down on the plain like an extraterrestrial Empire State Building, and, as he watched, three rainbow-beams of light shot forth from its upper section and the three pteranodons went PFFFFFFTTT! PFFFFFFTT! PFFFFFFTTT! and were no more.

  The Empire State Building came solidly to rest, opened its street doors and extended a gangplank the width of a Fifth Avenue sidewalk. Through the doors and down the sidewalk came the cavalry. Looking in the other direction, Carpenter saw that Sam had reappeared in exactly the same spot from which he had vanished. His nacelle had reopened, and Marcy and Skip were climbing out of the driver’s compartment in the midst of a cloud of bluish smoke. Carpenter understood what had happened then, and he kissed the twenty-second century good-by.

  The two kids came running up just as the commander of the cavalry stepped to the forefront of his troops. Actually, the troops were six tall Martians wearing deep-purple togas and stem expressions and carrying melters, while the commander was an even taller Martian wearing an even purpler toga and an even sterner expression and carrying what1 looked like a fairy godmother’s wand. The dirty look which he accorded Carpenter was duplicated a moment later by the dirty look which he accorded the two children.

  They were helping Carpenter to his feet. Not that he needed help in a physical sense. It was just that he was so overwhelmed by the rapid turn of events that he couldn’t quite get his bearings back. Marcy was sobbing.

  “We didn’t want to bum Sam out, Mr. Carpenter,” she said, all in a rush, “but jumping back four days, two hours, sixteen minutes and three and three-quarter seconds and sneaking on board the kidnaper’s ship and sending a message to space Police Headquarters was the only way we could get them here in time to save your life. I told them what a pickle you’d be in, and to have their iridescers ready. Then, just as we were about to come back to the present Sam’s time-travel unit broke down and Skip had to fix it, and then Sam went and burned out anyway, and oh, Mr. Carpenter, I’m so sorry! Now, you’ll never be able to go back to the year 79,062,156 again and see Miss Sands, and—” Carpenter patted her on the shoulder. “It’s all right, pumpkin. It’s all right. You did the right thing, and I’m proud of you for it.” He shook his head in admiration. “You sure computed it to a T, didn’t you?”

  A smile broke through the rain of tears, and the rain went away. “I’m—I’m pretty good at computations, Mr. Carpenter.”

  “But I threw the switch,” Skip said. “And I fixed Sam’s time-travel unit when it broke down.”

  Carpenter grinned. “I know you did, Slap. I think the two of you are just wonderful.” He faced the tall Martian with the fairy-godmother wand, noted that the man already had a pair of hearrings attached to his ears. “I guess I’m almost as beholden to you as I am to Marcy and Skip,” Carpenter said, “and I’m duly grateful. And now I’m afraid I’m going to impose on your good will still further and ask you to take me to Mars with you. My reptivehide’s burned out and can’t possibly be repaired by anyone except a group of technological specialists working in an ultra-modern machine shop with all the trimmings, which means I have no way either of contacting the era from which I came, or of getting back to it.”

  “My name is Hautor,” the tall Martian said. He turned to Marcy. “Recount to me, with the maximum degree of conciseness of which you are capable, the events beginning with your arrival on this planet and leading up to the present moment.”

  Marcy did so. “So you see, sir,” she concluded, “in helping Skip and me, Mr. Carpenter has got himself in quite a pickle. He can’t return to his own era, and he can’t survive in this one. We simply have to take him back to Mars with us, and that’s all there is to it!”

  Hautor made no comment. Almost casually, he raised his fairy-godmother wand, pointed it toward the kidnapers’ prostrate ship and did something to the handle that caused the wand proper to glow in brilliant greens and blues. Presently a rainbow beam of light flashed forth from the Empire State Building, struck the kidnapers’ ship and relegated it to the same fate as that suffered by the three pteranodons. Turning, Hautor faced two of his men.

  “Put the children on board the police cruiser and see to it that they are suitably cared for.” Finally, he turned back to Carpenter. “The government of Greater Mars is grateful for the services you have rendered it in the preserving of the lives of two of its most valuable citizens-to-be. I thank you in its behalf. And now, Mr. Carpenter, good-by.” Hautor started to turn away. Instantly Marcy and Skip ran to his side. “You can’t leave him here!” Marcy cried. “He’ll die!”

  Hautor signaled to the two Martians whom he had spoken to a moment ago. They leaped forward, seized the two children and began dragging them toward the Empire State Building. “Look,” Carpenter said, somewhat staggered by the new turn of events, but still on his feet, “I’m not begging for my life, but I can do you people some good if you’ll make room for me in your society. I can give you time travel, for one thing. For another—”

  “Mr. Carpenter, if we had wanted time travel, we would have devised it long ago. Time travel is the pursuit of fools. The pattern of the past is set, and cannot be changed; and in it that has not already been done. Why try? And as for the future, who but an imbecile would want to know what tomorrow will bring?”

  “All right,” Carpenter said. “I won’t invent time travel then, I’ll keep my mouth shut and settle down and be a good solid citizen.”

  “You wouldn’t and you know it, Mr. Carpenter—unless we desentimentalized you. And I can tell from the expression on your face that you would never voluntarily submit to such a solution. You would rather remain here in your prehistoric past and die.”

  “Now that you mentioned it, I would at that,” Carpenter said. “Compared to you people, Tyrannosaurus rex is a Salvation Army worker, and all the other dinosaurs, saurischians and omithischians alike, have hearts of purest gold. But it seems to me that there is one simple thing which you could do in my behalf without severely affecting your desentimentalized equilibrium. You could give me a weapon to replace the one that Holmer disintegrated.”

  Hautor shook his head. “That is one thing I cannot do, Mr. Carpenter, because a weapon could conceivably become a fossil, and thereby make me responsible for an anachronism. I am already potentially responsible for one in the form of Holmer’s irretrievable body, and I refuse to risk being responsible for any more. Why do you think I iridesced the kidnapers’ ship?”

  “Mr. Carpenter,” Skip called from the gangplank, up which two Martians were dragging him and his sister, “maybe Sam’s not completely burned out. Maybe you can rev up enough juice to at least send back a can of chicken soup.”

  “I’m afraid not, Skip,” Carpenter called back. “But it’s all right, you kids,” he went on. “Don’t you worry about me—I’ll get along okay. Animals have always liked me, so why shouldn’t reptiles I They’re animals, too.”

  “Oh, Mr. Carpenter!” Marcy cried. “I’m so sorry this happened! Why didn’t you take us back to 79,062,156 with you? We wanted you to all along, but we were afraid to say so.”

  “I wish I had, pumpkin—I wish I had.” Suddenly, he couldn’t see very well, and he turned away. When he looked back, the two Martians were dragging Marcy and Skip through the locks. He waved. “Good-by, you kids,” he called. “I’ll never forget you.”

  Marcy made a last desperate effort to free herself. She almost, but not quite, succeeded. The autumn asters of her •yes were twinkling with tears like morning dew. “I love you, Mr. Carpenter!” she cried, just before she and Skip were dragged out of sight. “I’ll love you for the rest of my life!”

  With two deft movements, Hautor flicked the hearings from Carpenter’s ears; then he and the rest of the cavalry climbed the gangplank and entered the ship. Some cavalry! Carpenter thought. He watched the street doors close,
saw the Empire State Building quiver.

  Presently it lifted and hovered majestically, stabbed into the sky just above the ground on a wash of blinding light. It rose, effortlessly, and became a star. It wasn’t a falling star, but he wished upon it anyway. “I wish both of you happiness,” he said, “and I wish that they never take your hearts away, because your hearts are one of the nicest things about you.”

  The star faded then, and winked out. He stood all alone on the vast plain.

  The ground trembled. Turning, he caught a great dark movement to the right of a trio of fan palms. A moment later, he made out the huge head and the massive, upright body. He recoiled as two rows of saberlike teeth glittered in the sun.

  Tyrannosaurus!

  V

  A burned-out reptivehicle was better than no reptivehicle at all. Carpenter made tracks for Sam.

  In the driver’s compartment, with the nacelle tightly closed, he watched the theropod’s approach. There was no question but what it had seen him, and no question but what it was headed straight for Sam. Marcy and Skip had retracted the nacelle-shield, which left Carpenter pretty much of a sitting duck; however, he didn’t retreat to Sam’s cabin just yet, for they had also re-projected the horn-howitzers.

  Although the howitzers were no longer maneuverable, they were still operable. If the tyrannosaurus came within their fixed range it could be put temporarily out of action with a volley of stun-charges. Right now, it was approaching Sam at right angles to the direction in which the howitzers were pointing, but there was a chance that it might pass in front of them before closing in. Carpenter considered it a chance worth taking.

  He crouched low in the driver’s seat, his right hand within easy reaching distance of the triggers. With the air-conditioning unit no longer functioning, the interior of the triceratank was hot and stuffy. To add to his discomfort, the air was permeated with the acrid smell of burnt wiring. He shut his mind to both annoyances, and concentrated on the task at hand.

  The theropod was so close now that he could see its atrophied forelegs. They dangled down from the neck-width shoulders like the wizened legs of a creature one tenth its size. Over them, a full twenty-five feet above the ground and attached to a neck the girth of a tree trunk, loomed the huge head; below them, the grotesque torso swelled out and down to the hind legs. The mighty tail dragged over the landscape, adding the cracking and splitting noises of crushed shrubbery to the thunder thrown forth each time the enormous bird-claw feet came into contact with the terrain. Carpenter should have been terrified. He was at a loss to understand why he wasn’t.

  Several yards from the triceratank, the tyrannosaurus came to a halt and its partially opened jaws began opening wider.

  The foot-and-a-half-high teeth with which they were equipped could grind through Sam’s nacelle as though it was made of tissue paper, and from all indications, that was just what they were going to do. Carpenter prepared himself for a hasty retreat into Sam’s cabin; then just when things looked blackest, the therodon, as though dissatisfied with its present angle of attack, moved around in front of the reptivehicle, providing him with the opportunity he had been hoping for. His fingers leaped to the first of the trio of triggers, touched, but did not squeeze it. Why wasn’t he afraid?

  He looked up through the nacelle at the horrendous head. The huge jaws had continued to part, and now the whole top of the skull was raising into a vertical position. As he stared, a pretty head of quite another nature appeared over the lower row of teeth and two bright blue (‘yes peered down at him.

  “Miss Sands!” he gasped, and nearly fell out of the driver’s seat.

  Recovering himself, he threw open the nacelle, stepped out on Sam’s snout and gave the tyrannosaurus an affectionate put on the stomach. “Edith,” he said. “Edith, you doll, you!”

  “Are you all right, Mr. Carpenter?” Miss Sands called down.

  “Just fine,” Carpenter said. “Am I glad to see you, Miss Sands!”

  Another head appeared beside Miss Sands. The familiar chestnut haired head of Peter Detritus. “Are you glad to see me too, Mr. Carpenter?”

  “Well, I guess, Pete old buddy!”

  Miss Sands lowered Edith’s lip ladder, and the two of them climbed down. Peter Detritus was carrying a tow cable, and presently he proceeded to affix it to Sam’s snout and Edith’s tail respectively. Carpenter lent a hand. “How’d you know I was in a pickle?” he asked. “I didn’t send back any soup.”

  “We had a hunch,” Peter Detritus said. He turned to Miss Sands. “There, she’s all set, Sandy.”

  “Well, let’s be on our way then,” Miss Sands said. She looked at Carpenter, then looked quickly away. “If, of course, your mission is completed, Mr. Carpenter.”

  Now that the excitement was over he was finding her presence just as disconcerting as he usually found it. “It’s completed all right, Miss Sands,” he said to the left pocket of her field blouse. “You’ll never believe how it turned out, either.”

  “Oh, I wouldn’t say that. Sometimes the most unbelievable things of all turn out to be the most believable ones. I’ll fix you something to eat, Mr. Carpenter.”

  She climbed agilely up the ladder. Carpenter followed, and Peter Detritus brought up the rear. “Ill take the controls, Mr. Carpenter,” the latter said, pulling the ladder. “You look bushed.”

  “I am,” Carpenter said.

  In Edith’s cabin, he collapsed on the bunk. Miss Sands went over to the Idtchenette and put water on to boil for coffee and took a boiled ham down from the refrigerator-shelf. Up in the driver’s compartment, Peter Detritus closed the nacelle and threw Edith into gear.

  He was a good driver, Peter Detritus was, and he would rather drive than eat. Not only that, he could take a paleontology-vehicle apart and put it back together again blindfolded. Funny, why he and Miss Sands had never gone for each other. They were both so attractive, you’d have thought they would have fallen in love long ago. Carpenter was glad that they hadn’t of course—not that it was ever going to do him any good.

  He wondered why they had made no mention of the

  Space Police ship. Surely, they must have seen it when it blasted off . . .

  Edith was moving over the plain in the direction of the uplands now, and through the cabin viewport he could see Sam shambling along behind on motion-provoked legs. In the kitchenette, Miss Sands was slicing ham. Carpenter concentrated on her, trying to drive away the sadness he felt over his parting with Marcy and Skip. His eyes touched her slender shapely legs, her slender waist, rose to her cupreous head, lingering for a moment on the silken fuzz that grew charmingly on the back of her neck where her hair had been cut too short. Strange, how people’s hair got darker when they grew older—

  Carpenter lay motionlessly on the bunk. “Miss Sands,” he said suddenly, “how much is 499,999,991 times 8,003, . . . 432,111?”

  “400,171,598,369,111,001,” Miss Sands answered.

  Abruptly she gave a start. Then she went on slicing ham.

  Slowly, Carpenter sat up. He lowered his feet to the floor. A tightness took over in his chest and he could barely breathe.

  Take a pair of lonely kids. One of them a mathematical genius, the other a mechanical genius. A pair of lonely kids who have never known what it is like to be loved in all their lonely lives. Now, transport them to another planet and put them in a reptivehicle that for all its practicability is still a huge and delightful toy, and treat them to an impromptu Cretaceous camping trip, and show them the first affection they have ever known. Finally, take these things away from them and simultaneously provide them with a supreme motivation for getting them back—the need to save a human life—and include in that motivation the inbuilt possibility I hat by saving that life they can—in another but no less real sense—save their own.

  Hut 79,062,156 years! 49,000,000 miles! It couldn’t be!

  Why couldn’t it?

  They could have built the machine in secret at the preparatory school, all t
he while pretending to go along with the “pre-desentimentalization process”; then, just before they were scheduled to begin receiving doses of the desentimentalization drug, they could have entered the machine and time-jumped far into the future.

  Granted, such a time-jump would have required a vast amount of power. And granted, the Martian landscape they would have emerged on would have given them the shock of their lives. But they were resourceful lads, easily resourceful enough to have tapped the nearest major power source, and certainly resourceful enough to have endured the climate and the atmosphere of Mars Present until they located one of the Martian oxygen caves. The Martians would have taken care of them and have taught them all they needed to know to pass themselves off as terrestrials in one of the domed colonies. As for the colonists, they wouldn’t have asked too many questions because they would have been overjoyed to add two newcomers to their underpopulated community. After that, it would merely have been a matter of the two children’s biding their time till they grew old enough to work and earn their passage to Earth. Once on Earth, it would merely have been a matter of acquiring the necessary education to equip them for paleontological work.

  Sure, it would have taken them years to accomplish such a mission, but they would have anticipated that, and have time-jumped to a point in time far enough in advance of the year A.D. 2156 to have enabled them to do what they had to do. They had played it pretty close at that, though. Miss Sands had only been with NAPS for three months, and as for Peter Detritus, he had been hired a month later. On Miss Sands’ recommendation, of course.

  They had simply come the long way around—that was all. Traveled 49,000,000 miles to Mars Past, 79,062,100 years to Mars Present, 49,000,000 miles to Earth Present, and 79,062,156 years to Earth Past.

  Carpenter sat there, stunned.

  Had they known they were going to turn out to be Miss Sands and Peter Detritus? he wondered. They must have—or, if not, they must have gambled on it and taken the names when they joined the colonists. All of which created something of a paradox. But it was a minor one at best, not worth worrying about. In any event, the names certainly fitted them.