He stepped forward and opened his mouth to shout.
He never did. Something went suddenly wrong. Brown flicked a thumb,
Smith moved like lightning, and before Dolan realized what was
happening, he found himself flat on his back, wondering numbly what
had happened.
Brown snapped a syllable at Moirta. She answered with a shrug and a
word. He frowned momentarily and then his face lightened.
"Ah," he said softly. "I think I see, now. You were going to shout to
Moirta to run out of range of the machine, while you jumped in and
activated it, isn't that so? Really, it would have done no good, we
could still have returned, and besides Moirta--" he frowned suddenly.
"Oh _could_ we have returned?"
He bit delicately at his lower lip. "Moirta," he said. "Step a little
closer to the machine, please."
"Now," he turned back to Dolan, "I am going to push the buttons, with
Moirta quite close to the machine. Are there any last-minute changes
you wish to make?"
Dolan hesitated, studying both Moirta's and the men's positions, and
then nodded sullenly.
"I thought there might be," Brown said with satisfaction. "Mr. Smith,
help Mr. Dolan up to the machine."
Dolan reached out unsteadily, leaning on Smith, and reversed two
connections. "That's it," he mumbled.
"Thank you, Mr. Dolan. Now, Mr. Smith, if you will just carry Mr. Dolan
over there into the corner, well away from the machine, and immobilize
him--no, no, just temporarily. We may still need him again, Mr. Dolan
is a very tricky sort of person."
Dolan felt Smith's fingers touch his neck lightly, there was a sudden
blazing pain, and that was all. He blanked out.
* * * * *
The first thing he knew after that was that fingers were working gently
at his neck, massaging it. His head was resting on something soft. He
opened his eyes and saw that he was lying with his head pillowed on
Moirta's lap.
"George?" she said sharply. "Are you all right, George?"
"I'm all right," he said. He raised his head and looked around. The
machine was gone, and Smith and Brown were gone, and half the boxes
were gone. The end ones in the little semicircle were broken, and from
them a pile of brass cartridges had spilled through the hole in the
floor where the others had been.
"Wise jerks," he mumbled with grim satisfaction. "See how they like it
now."
Moirta stared at him. "What happened, George? I don't understand what
happened."
"I gimmicked the machine. That's what happened. Surprise, huh? I'll bet
they were plenty surprised too."
"But I thought--"
Dolan sat up and felt tenderly of his throat. He nodded. "I know,"
he said. "You thought they had me licked. So did they. That was just
smoke-screen, a little diversion. I knew they could out-smart me if
I tried to pull anything foxy, that's their trade. But they weren't
really mind-readers, you told me that, and the business with the notes
cinched it.
"And they didn't think like technicians. They could see I might disable
the machine, or booby-trap it; but they couldn't see I could fix it so
it would work, only just a little different.
"All I had to do was to keep their minds on their own specialty, let
them wear out their suspicion on the little foxy tricks they expected,
so they wouldn't notice what I was really doing. See?"
She shook her head. "No," she said. "I do not see. I suppose I'm
stupid, too--"
"Not stupid. Just not technically minded. You understand, this machine
works by setting up a field around itself, ordinarily that field's
circular, it takes in everything in a certain radius. But it doesn't
have to be, that's just because it's the easiest way, more convenient.
So I just distorted the field a little, made it lopsided. Then I went
through all that other business to keep their minds on me, keep them
off your position, and make sure they both stayed over on my side." He
smiled at her. "I told you, remember, in this time the villains always
get it in the neck, the boy gets the girl, and they live happily ever
after."
She shook her head. "No," she said gently. "I'm sorry, for you and me
there will not be any ever after. You forget the displacement effect."
"Displacement effect?"
"Yes," she said. "I am afraid I did not explain that fully to you,
I thought it would only hurt you to do so. You understand, the past
is really immutable, we only seem to change it. For the time that
the time-translator exists at any given time in the past, a sort
of enclave, a self-supporting bubble, is established which permits
apparent changes. When the time translator returns to its normal
existence in my era, that bubble dissolves. I do not know, in terms of
our present subjective time, just how long the displacement will hold,
but when it vanishes we, you and I, will no longer exist."
"But that would be a change in the past, in itself."
"Not exactly. What I told you about forgetting was true, it was just
not the whole truth. There will be, in my time, a Moirta who exists
normally up to the time she is translated to the past. And there will
be, in your time, a George Dolan who never met Mr. Brown or Miss Jones.
But you and I, as we exist at this moment, will not have been."
"I see," Dolan said. "It's too bad I didn't know about this sooner. I
think we still may have a chance, though. You see, I had to worry about
the possibility that Smith and Brown might think it worth while to come
back after you. So I changed the switches, too. The time translator
isn't going into the future, it's gone into the past, and then it's
fixed to burn out again, a long way in the past, where there aren't any
electronics technicians, no people at all. How about that?"
"The past? I don't know," she said doubtfully. "I am not a temporal
technician, I know only about the displacement effect as it operates
in our usual translations. Perhaps, in that case, the bubble might
continue to exist, as a sort of permanent side-track. I really don't
know."
She laughed suddenly, as the full implications of what he had said
struck her. "The past? Oh, poor Smith. And poor Brown. A long way
in the past, where there are no people at all, just dinosaurs and
snakes--and they hate such things so." She laughed helplessly, tears
rolling down her cheeks. "And poor George, and poor Moirta. All with
their clever little plans, their tricks to out-smart each other.
Everyone has outsmarted everyone else, and we all lose now, don't we?"