was almost willing to let it go at that, but he broke his moment's silence with a muttered "I suppose you said nothing about--"
"No, no," was the testy response. "I said nothing about the girl or about your part in the misdirection of Cooper. It was an unfortunate error, a mechanical failure. I took full responsibility."
Harlan's conscience, burdened as it was, could find room for a twinge. He said, "That won't affect you well."
"What can they do? They must wait for the correction to be made before they can touch me. If we fail, we're all beyond help or harm. If we succeed, success itself will probably protect me. And if it doesn't--" The old man shrugged. "I plan to retire from active participation in Eternity's affairs thereafter anyway." But he fumbled his cigarette and disposed of it before it was half burned away.
He sighed. "I would rather not have brought them into this at all, but there would have been no way, otherwise, of using the special kettle for further trips past the downwhen terminus."
Harlan turned away. His thoughts moved around and about the same channels that had been occupied to the increasing exclusion of all else for days. He heard Twissell's further remark dimly, but it was only at its repetition that he said with a start, "Pardon me?"
"I say, is your woman ready, boy? Does she understand what she's to do?"
"She's ready. I've told her everything."
"How did she take it?"
"What?... Oh, yes, uh, as I expected her to. She's not afraid."
"It's less than three physiohours now."
"I know."
That was all for the moment, and Harlan was left alone with his thoughts and a sickening realization of what he must do.
With the kettle loading done and the controls adjusted Harlan and Noys appeared in a final change of costume, approximating that of an unurbanized area of the early 20th.
Noyshad modified Harlan's suggestion for her wardrobe, according to some instinctive feeling she claimed women had when it came to matters of clothing and aesthetics. She chose thoughtfully from pictures in the advertisements of the appropriated volumes of the news magazine and had minutely scrutinized items imported from a dozen different Centuries.
Occasionally she would say to Harlan, "What do you think?"
He would shrug. "If it's instinctive knowledge, I'll leave it to you."
"That's a bad sign, Andrew," she said, with a lightness that did not quite ring true. "You're too pliable. What's the matter, anyway? You're just not yourself. You haven't been for days."
"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