"All right; we'll let it go at that."
She grinned at him again as the door slid shut.
* * * * *
Swarts came half an hour later, and Maitland began his planned
offensive.
"What year is this?"
Swarts' steely eyes locked with his. "You know what the date is," he
stated.
"No, I don't. Not since yesterday."
"Come on," Swarts said patiently, "let's get going. We have a lot to
get through this morning."
"I _know_ this isn't 1950. It's probably not even the 20th Century.
Venus was a morning star before you brought me here. Now it's an
evening star."
"Never mind that. Come."
Wordlessly, Maitland climbed to his feet, preceded Swarts to the
laboratory, lay down and allowed him to fasten the straps and attach
the instruments, making no resistance at all. When Swarts started
saying a list of words--doubtlessly some sort of semantic reaction
test--Maitland began the job of integrating "csc^3x dx" in his head.
It was a calculation which required great concentration and frequent
tracing back of steps. After several minutes, he noticed that Swarts
had stopped calling words. He opened his eyes to find the other man
standing over him, looking somewhat exasperated and a little baffled.
"What year is this?" Maitland asked in a conversational tone.
"We'll try another series of tests."
It took Swarts nearly twenty minutes to set up the new apparatus. He
lowered a bulky affair with two cylindrical tubes like the twin stacks
of a binocular microscope over Maitland's head, so that the lenses at
the ends of the tubes were about half an inch from the engineer's
eyes. He attached tiny clamps to Maitland's eyelashes.
"These will keep you from holding your eyes shut," he said. "You can
blink, but the springs are too strong for you to hold your eyelids down
against the tension."