"What could possibly stop you?"
"I don't know," he answered abstractedly.
"You're strange," Lois told him. "There's a weight of sadness in you.
As if you lived in a less happy age. As if it weren't 2050."
"Twenty?" he repeated, awakening from his thoughts with a jerk. "What's
the time?" he asked anxiously.
"Two," Jock said. The word sounded like a knell.
"You need cheering," Lois announced firmly.
Amid a whoosh of air rebounding from earth, they jounced gently down.
Lois vaulted out. "Come on," she said.
Tom followed her. "Where?" he asked stupidly, looking around at the red
rocks through the settling sand cloud stirred by the vanes.
"Your camera," she told him, laughing. "Over there. Come on, I'll race
you."
He started to run with her and then his uneasiness got beyond his
control. He ran faster and faster. He saw Lois catch her foot on a
rock and go down sprawling, but he couldn't stop. He ran desperately
around the rock and into a gust of up-whirling sand that terrified him
with its suddenness. He tried to escape from the stinging, blinding
gust, but there was the nightmarish fright that his wild strides were
carrying him nowhere.
Then the sand settled. He stopped running and looked around him. He was
standing by the balancing rock. He was gasping. At his feet the rusty
brown leather of the camera case peeped from the sand. Lois was nowhere
in sight. Neither was the helicopter. The valley seemed different,
rawer--one might almost have said younger.
Hours after dark he trailed into Tosker-Brown. Curtained lights still
glowed from a few cabins. He was footsore, bewildered, frightened. All
afternoon and through the twilight and into the moonlit evening that
turned the red rocks black, he had searched the valley. Nowhere had he
been able to find the soot-roofed ranch house of the Wolvers. He hadn't
even been able to locate the rock like a giant bobbin where he'd met
Lois.
During the next days he often returned to the valley. But he never
found anything. And he never happened to be near the balancing rock
when the time winds blew at ten and two, though once or twice he did
see dust devils. Then he went away and eventually forgot.
In his casual reading he ran across popular science articles describing
the binary system of numbers used in electronic calculating machines,
where one and one make ten. He always skipped them. And more than once
he saw the four equations expressing Einstein's generalized theory of
gravitation:
[Illustration: Einstein's equation.]
He never connected them with the little girl's chant: "Gik-lo, I-o,
Rik-o, Gis-so."