"Now, look, if you want me to cooperate...."
The big man made an impatient gesture. "Not impossible because of me.
Physically impossible. Impossible because of the way time travel works."
Maitland stared at him suspiciously.
"To displace a mass from its proper time takes energy," Swarts
explained, "and it's one of the oldest general physical principles that
higher energy states are unstable with respect to lower ones. Are
you familiar with elementary quantum theory? As an analogy, you might
regard yourself, displaced from your proper time, as an atom in an
excited state. The system is bound to drop back to ground state. In the
atomic case, the time which elapses before that transition occurs is a
matter of probabilities. In the case of time travel, it just depends on
the amount of mass and the number of years the mass is displaced.
"In short, the laws of nature will insist on your returning to 1950 in
just a few days."
Maitland looked at the floor for a while, and his shoulders sagged.
"Your memories of this will be faded," Swarts said. "You'll forget
about what Ingrid has told you--forget you were ever here, and take
up your life where you left off. You were happy working on rockets,
weren't you?"
"But--" Maitland shook his head despairingly. Then he had an idea.
"Will you let me do one thing, before I go back? I realize now that
our time is limited, and you have a lot of tests to give me, but I'm
willing to help speed things up. I want to see the stars, just once,
from deep space. I know you'll make me forget it ever happened, but
once in my life.... You have vessels--_vliegvlotter_, Ingrid called
them--that can go into space. If you'd give me just a couple days to go
out there, maybe circle the Moon...?" There was a pleading note in his
voice, but he didn't care.
Swarts regarded him dispassionately for a moment, then nodded. "Sure,"
he said. "Now let's get to work."
* * * * *
"The Earth doesn't change much," Maitland mused. Sitting on the cot,
his arm around Ingrid's yielding waist, he was wearing the new blue
trunks she had given him to replace his rumpled pajamas. The room
was full of evening sunlight, and in that illumination she was more
beautiful than any other woman he could remember. This had been the
last day of tests; tomorrow, Swarts had promised, he would begin his
heart-breakingly brief argosy to the Moon, with Ingrid as pilot.
Over the past four days, he had been with the girl a lot. In the
beginning, he realized, she had been drawn to him as a symbol of an era
she longed, but was unable, to visit. Now she understood him better,
knew more about him--and Maitland felt that now she liked him for
himself.
She had told him of her childhood in backward Aresund and of loneliness
here at the school in Nebraska. "Here," she had said, "parents spend
most of their time raising their children; at home, they just let us
grow. Every time one of these people looks at me I feel inferior."
She had confided her dream of visiting far times and places, then had
finished, "I doubt that Swarts will ever let me go back. He thinks
I am too irresponsible. Probably he is right. But it is terribly
discouraging. Sometimes I think the best thing for me would be to go
home to the fiord...."
Now, sitting in the sunset glow, Maitland was in a philosophic mood.
"The color of grass, the twilight, the seasons, the stars--those things
haven't changed." He gestured out the window at the slumbering evening
prairie. "That scene, save for unessentials, could just as well be
1950--or 950. It's only human institutions that change rapidly...."
"I'll be awfully sorry when you go back," she sighed. "You're the first
person I've met here that I can talk to."
"Talk to," he repeated, dissatisfied. "You're just about the finest
girl I've ever met."
He kissed her, playfully, but when they separated there was nothing
playful left about it. Her face was flushed and he was breathing faster
than he had been. Savagely, he bit the inside of his cheek. "Two days!
A lifetime here wouldn't be long enough!"
"Bob." She touched his arm and her lips were trembling. "Bob, do you
have to go--out there? We could get a couple of horses tomorrow, and
we would have two days."
He leaned back and shook his head. "Can't you see, Ingrid? This is my
only chance. If I don't go tomorrow, I'll never get to the Moon. And
then my whole life won't mean anything...."
* * * * *
He woke with Ingrid shaking him. "Bob! Bob!" Her voice was an urgent
whisper. "You've got to wake up quick! Bob!"