The Syndicated Time
Fantasy & Science Fiction – July 1978
(1978)*
Sterling E. Lanier

The immensely entertaining account of the events following the discovery of time travel by a seedy physicist at a Florida junior college.

-
I

	Time travel is a dirty word these days. A person can get lynched just for mentioning it, like people being arrested in the old days for joking about hijacking while boarding a jet. The UN, in one of those few cases where even the Maldive Islands and Cocos-Keeling voted on the same side, has agreed that no member nation will do anything but suppress any research on the subject. Many nations passed laws of their own dealing with the treatment of those apprehended while conducting any such research. My personal favorite is the one from Uganda. Some people get sick reading it, but those old devil Amin habits die hard.

	Every country in the world is still looking for the possible inventor or (ess). Since I know who it was, I could command a hefty sum for the right squeal. The only trouble is, the loudest squeal might turn out to be mine. I couldn't fix an out-of-phase water wheel, but I'm too deeply involved. I'm no inventor, but I am a promoter. I should say, an ex-promoter.

	It all started with a greedy inventor. You think maybe Tom Edison wasn't greedy? Or read the fine clauses in the last Wright Brothers contracts. Yes, friends, they had a dream. Part of the dream was cash. Maybe only part, but still ... part.

	My friend, or let's say acquaintance (if they ever get me, he was a deadly foe), was not like Tom Edison exactly, or the Wright Brothers either. He was a seedy little physicist at a third-rate, Florida, junior college. I never went there, or any other college, but I used to sell pirated texts, Formosa's best, to some of them back in my less affluent days. A flat campus, four decaying coconut trees; the lawn, solid sand spurs; the faculty, solid losers. The academic end of the line. If you retire after thirty years, you get $12,000 before taxes and a plated Bulova. The janitors make more, and for once the state has right on its side. Through these hallowed halls pass a collection of out-of-state weed-heads, local rednecks, Northern heroin salesmen and apprentice whores equal to those found anywhere, that is until one comes, of course, to the next county. Need I say more?

	I was motoring through Florida, searching, on behalf of a large conglomerate which shall be nameless, for vacant lands to develop. Bluntly, I was looking for places to put large, expensive condominiums, preferably smack on the beach sand, of course. My own employers, who I regret to say are, or were, not equal opportunity, owned a lot of them already, particularly on the west coast, the so-called "Sun Coast." They wanted more. Due to many of their other enterprises still being frowned on by the law, they had to work through middlemen. One of these was my employer, J. G. "Bushveldt" Barnstaffel, the President of Amalgamated Tourist Enterprises.

	No one in this splendid firm had a record, including the president, which made it ideal for certain purposes. Barnstaffel was a skinny slob who had once been lost in Kruger Park, R.S.A., for three whole days, while on a world tour. This almost incredible feat gave him his nickname.

	"Check out the liddel colleges, Syd. Maybe some got left some land they can't use," he told me in his Dutch wheeze. He talked like George Washington or maybe Rip Van Winkle was his brother, but he was originally a simple Hollands crook, too inept for the Amsterdam police to tolerate. They flung him to the New World, or at least he decided to leave. He had fat hands, rheumy blue eyes, too close together, a bulbous red nose and an air of knowing everything in the world.

	What does this have to do with the ban on time travel? "All history hangs on the actions of a few men (or women)." Lord Acton, or someone.

	So, I pursued my merry way, from one Christawful motel to another, down the world's most architecturally fucked-up peninsula. And then, one day, in a bar I encountered Associate Professor Motley van D'Alliance III, once a faint gleam in the eye of the New York Social Register. As of the point I met him, he was a bleary little soak, leaning on the bar and trying to pick up anyone to talk to. I hasten to add that the professor was not gay, pausing to add that I have nothing against such persons, myself. Who knows who will betray you?

	"You may not believe me," says this small, drained-out lush on the next bar stool, "but I can save the world."

	I removed an olive from my Manhattan and reordered, this being a typical Florida bar, and sat, waiting for the revelation. You get a mild laugh once in a great while from these type encounters.

	"You might not think this," says this jerk, "but I am the Professor of Ascidian Ophiolatry at Southern Dugong College." He babbled on and I heard nothing, until, in the third martini, something came across. The words were "time machine."

	He had red eyes, like a semi-albino or possibly a white rat of some obscure sort. The only word for him was "unwholesome." But, somehow, we got to talking. When I told him that my employers were looking for new coast land, he got all excited. "Coast land!" he yelled. "I'll give you coast land! How would you like the best islands in the world, the finest tropic shores, absolutely untouched. Never a human print on them! I guarantee it!"

	Well, I normally don't encourage nuts. But this little weemer was so positive. Maybe it was the martinis. Cheap Florida gin made from orange pulp.

	Anyway, I called the base, i.e., New York, that night, and, of course, I got Barnstaffel. I had nothing else to report, since there was nothing left to buy. But Bush-veldt was simply in love with the idea of my nut professor. "Sounds like a great lead. Make sure you don't lose him. Follow it up." And more crap like that. I didn't get it then, but after I'd hung up, a thought occurred to me. Barnstaffel sounded very anxious indeed. Maybe his unknown superiors, the boys with all the well-laundered financing, were leaning on him a bit? If these people asked the impossible, those on the end of the request often died trying. Literally.

	Well, I had made an appointment with the little jerk. So the following day I got directions and motored out to the sun-browned series of vacant lots that Dugong called a campus. The heat, even for Florida, was blistering and my soles burned even through Ked rubber. I found his office in a moldering cube of puce-colored stucco, where the peeling paint and corroded metal vied with the exposed cinder block in a tribute to rip-off contracting.

	He was crouched behind a crummy desk pretending to read a report when I walked in without knocking. The blinds were down and the place was so dark, I thought I'd stumbled into a broom closet by mistake. When I twitched up the Venetians, the place was hardly bigger, and I rated van D'Alliance a U on the alphabet scale of any college rank. For Christ's sake, it wasn't air-conditioned, even!

	He gave a pitiful moan as the light hit his eyes, but I perched myself on his desk and inspected the place at leisure.

	"What do you want?" he quavered. "I'm not seeing students today. I have work to do. What class are you in, anyway?"

	I now discovered that the red in his eyes was caused by innumerable tiny broken veins, which were matched by mottled skin of the same color on his sunken face. Only his suit, which, though pretty soiled, was new, prevented him from an appearance on Skid Row as a major lead.

	"Remember me?" I said, in soft tones. He winced because any tones must have hurt. "I'm the guy you were telling about all those untouched beaches, the virgin palmy islands and junk like that which you were going to give to me. I want to hear more about them, that's all. Remember, we made a date at the Soapstone Pelican last night?"

	"I did?" he mumbled. "I forgot. I must have had one too many. I didn't know what I was saying." He rose, or rather lurched to his feet. "Now if you don't mind, I'm feeling quite ill. There must have been a mistake. Please, run along, there's a good chap, and let's forget the whole thing." In the tiny, shut office, his stale breath was sheer murder, being half booze and half pyorrhea. But I'd stood worse.

	When I'd mentioned the reason I was there, a light had flickered in back of the beat-up face, the eyes had glittered and the mouth worked. This piece of academic flotsam knew something, or at least he thought he did. This was the only reason I didn't blow the unwholesome joint and leave him to his d.t.'s.

	"Now, now," I said soothingly. "Let's not take that attitude. Have you any classes today? At my tasteful motel, we can lounge by the crystal pool and partake of cool beverages. Just the thing for a man in your condition. Then, if you feel like going further into the aforesaid matter, it's up to you." What a man in his condition really needed was oxygen, vitamin B-12 injections and restraint, not necessarily in that order.

	I had the sorry bastard hooked in one sentence. After that office, cool drinks and someone else paying, by a pool, must have sounded like Paradise. He hesitated an easy split second, the stumbled around his desk, croaking, "I'll have one with you for old times' sake. What did you say your name was? Have you got a car?"

	I gave him the name I was registered under, which we'll call Joe Doakes, and led him out to my air-conditioned Toyota. He almost fainted from the cool as we pedaled off campus, but the first gin and tonic by the pool pepped him up in no time. Maybe the dank reek of chlorine and the grinding and screeching noises from the highway out front added to the glamor. It was the off season, so the place was almost empty, and I had provided lots of gin (not the orange-pulp variety) and ice.

	He'd reached a stage of his drinking life that I'd had lots of experience with in the past, starting with my own old man. I don't think the guy was ever what you'd call sober, but he probably never was really flat-out drunk either. He just coasted along in a paranoid fog of dreams, frustrated ambitions, half-started projects, meaningless fuck-ed-up jobs and general discontent. These types of people always have a glorious past and a fantastic future. During the now, or present, they are always being held back or harried by treachery, infidelity and corruption in high places, plus fire, plague and the Loch Ness Monster. All I had to do was sit back, listen and pour, judging his intake with a careful orb. Some of them fade like a quarterback at one gill too many.

	I heard all about the van D'Alliances to open with. "Would you believe, my dear chap, grandmother had footmen in powder? I mean people knew what was due, then!" And the balls at the Waldorf. And his club at Yale. And his mother. And the Southhampton Yacht Club. And his first, or society wife (she was too good for him, of course). And so on, adbullshititem.

	When he'd caromed off the New York Racquet Club, "my dear chap," for the third time and was starting a second round of "if they could only see me now!" I judged it was time for the kill.

	Ever so gently, I leaned over and glared into his glazed eyes from about one inch away.

	"But you'll show them, Motley!" I hissed at him. "You'll be batting those racquets with the best of them!" I paused. "When you find all those lovely islands or palmy shores you were talking about last night! That's when you '11 be back where you belong! Old chap," I added.

	He was pretty far gone into his private dream world, and I'd gone and yanked him back by his zipper, but I'd also, please note, added the dream world to my own question. He gulped some gin while it sank in. Then a funny, kind of shy look came over him and, with it, that same flicker I'd seen before, in his cubicle.

	"Well," he mumbled. "It's not fully tested yet." He gulped more booze and his face got redder. "In fact, to be honest, it might not work at all." He stared at the pool. "I haven't dared make many tests. I think it works, but that's not enough for a scientist, old chap." For one fleeting moment, damned if I didn't feel sorry for the useless, dumb bastard. For a whole second, I thought I saw something that maybe might have once been a real scientist.

	"I suppose it has commercial uses. Possibly even military," he was going on, "but I can't finance proper tests. I'm at the end of the line, even down here. They won't renew my present contract. I can't get a job at a shitty high school, if this place goes and blackballs me." He stared at me in what he must have thought of as honest candor or something. He just looked polluted, defeated, overripe and stale. His voice lowered in confidence. "The fact is, old chap, I have a slight drinking problem, nothing serious, but he reached eagerly for the bottle, but I snaked it away first.

	"Now look, Motley," I purred. "I just happen to work for some very big interests. Very large on the cash flow, understand. People who back real science and real discoveries. With good old honest cash. These are important people, Motley, old chap. Ever heard of C. J. Wallingford? He's on the board, in fact, he's one of the men I report to. The biggest, see?"

	Needless to affirm, I had never heard of C. J. Wallingford, either, but this sorry soak brightened up at once. "Ah, of course, Shaker Heights people. Made their money in corsets, but still quite acceptable. How is the old man?"

	"He's great, a grand old boy. And he's backing this group to the hilt, Motley. To the hilt. He'll be counting on you, if things go right.

	Whoever might be counting on him, or me either, I couldn't say for sure. Beyond and above Barnstaffel, the office chatter differed, opinions ranging between the Salupo Family of Brooklyn and the Figliosi Clan, with interests in Philadelphia and Miami: None of us really wanted to know, to be honest. The letter, to misquote from the Good Book, ain't all that kills.

	I hauled my mad scientist back from his lost world of Grosse Point, or wherever he'd got to, and now gave him the works, plus a small gin. He'd long since forgotten the tonic and even the ice.

	"Now look, Motley," I said. "You know and I know, you didn't just gabble about islands and such last night. You also used two magic words. They had to do with time, right? So let's discuss that aspect, like good chums, eh?"

	He didn't turn pale, or anything, to my surprise. I think by now, what with the intake of battery acid and all his childhood memories, he'd fitted me into his 	crazy mental world, like I belonged there. He looked at me and slurped down some more gin.

	"Well, it's at the house. Can't have a thing like that at the college, old chap. They'd steal it or say I was crazy." He giggled and looked at his cheap wristwatch. Of course it had stopped.

	"Maybe we could go and look," I coaxed. "It's only just a little before noon. We could take a bottle in case we get tired, hmm?"

	This made him look eager and nervous at the same time. "I don't know, old man. My wife, you know. Splendid woman and all that. Not quite my own class, you know, but splendid. Still, she gets a bit annoyed at times. Thinks I drink too much, you know." Again I snatched the booze away from questing fingers.

	"That's easy," I said. "Look, we sneak out to your place, all very quiet. Should your frau get a peek at us, why I'll tell her we're discussing big business, very big money, and please not to interrupt. What can you lose?"

	He looked impressed and I poured him another small bite which increased his pleasure. Then I capped the bottle, the second bottle, that is, and stuffed it into a paper bag as I stood up.

	He lived in the kind of scruffy subsection, which, to be fair, cannot be blamed on the Sunshine State alone. A lot of nasty little piles of congealed cinder block, all exactly alike, squatted inside an imitation brick gate, which said on top, "El Dorado Gardens." That is, it should have, but the D and one o were missing, making it "El rado Gardens." The van D'Alliance manse was even crappier than the average, but a broken television antenna hanging off over the roof and roosting on a dead palm tree gave it that different look. The grass was dead too, the windows were shuttered, and the dump looked abandoned.

	"Charming," I said as we pulled up under his carport, which incidentally was full of holes. "A real haven of rest, away from the workaday world." He was plastered but not that far gone, and he gave me a dirty look as I helped him out of the car.

	Just behind the carport was, logically, a small, one-car garage. This was padlocked, not once but twice. It took Motley three tries to fish out both keys and get the locks off, but he finally made it. He pushed feebly at the sliding overhead door, and I finally had to help him. He wobbled over to one side and switched on a light, then managed to pull the door back down. I noticed he bolted it, too. Maybe he was a nut, but he at least thought he had something worth protecting. A window built into one wall of the room was filled with a window-unit air conditioner. We were sealed in.

	The place was a mess and smelled as stale as its owner. There were rusting tools all over the concrete floor. A long work bench held more of them, plus a lot of oddly shaped bits of metal and also lots of wires, some in coils and others strung about in weird patterns. But in the middle, close to the back wall, was something else. It was a great big metal box, really, about six feet square, with gauges all over the outside. It was very thick metal, which I could see because it had a round door, like a porthole, and this was open. Actually it looked more like one of those thick hatches you see on a submarine, and you could also note it had heavy clamps. A kid of six could have scrunched into the inside of this box thing, but nothing much bigger.

	I decided to goose him a little.

	"What's that junk pile?" I said with a nasty smile. "The famous time machine? Can you bring back Cleopatra and things like the Atlantis Treasures, maybe? How about King Tut or something?"

	He woke up a little and looked serious, but not really angry.

	"No," he said slowly, "no, it won't do that. I'm not quite sure what it will do. I built it with a legacy from a great aunt, you know, had the thing constructed and assembled over in Jacksonville to my own specs. But it's funny. It goes back about eighty to one hundred and fifty million years, and I can't seem to change it. I can't get it closer and I can't make it go forward either, not at all. There must be something I haven't figured out yet." This calm statement made a prickle of ice run down my spine. I'd been discounting this silly jerk all the way, but he sounded so sure!

	"You mean," I said, in what I hoped sounded like a relaxed voice, "this box goes back into time, real time, eighty million years?"

	"No. no," he said petulantly, "not the box, as you call it. That's the gate. It's what you put into the box that goes back." There was a silence while I tried to think.

	"OK," I said, after a minute, "so how do you know it's like eighty million years, say, not ten minutes or a million, million years?"

	"I don't know, not exactly," he said in weary tones. "I'm not a geologist, a botanist, or a paleontologist either, and I'd really need to be all these to be anything like sure." He eyed the paper bag. "Let's have a little snort. I'll go get some ice from the house. While I'm gone, you look into this stuff and I'll try and explain it when I come back." He pushed a box like an oversized foot locker into the light and unlocked it. Then he turned the air conditioner on and unbolted the door and left. He seemed to be making a lot more sense since we'd reached his workshop, and I didn't know whether that was good or bad.

	Meanwhile, I looked into the box, and since there was a lot of junk inside, I began to lift things into the light.

	First came some dried plants, tall round things, like reeds or cattails, but with short spiky leaves all the way around, arranged in rings. They meant pure nothing to me. Next came some dried branches of a pine tree, with huge flat needles. I dumped this with the other dead vegetables. Next, so help me, was a big stoppered jar, filled with alcohol or some such preservative gorp, and floating in it was a dead rat! It had an open mouthful of sharp, pointy teeth and a furry tail, but was still a reject from the local drainage system, for my money.

	Now I was down to a small cardboard box. I opened this and it was full of little broken pieces of something like coarse yellow paper, but with a pebble-grain surface like my English shoes. Some of the pieces were round or even dimpled.

	There only was one more box, a large one, that took up most of the big container's bottom. I opened this, and for the first time found something that really shook me. It was some bones, and they were impressive all right. I took them out and carefully put them on the floor, just as I heard Motley return. He was carrying a plastic ice bucket and some bottles of soda, which I guess were for me. While he re-bolted his door, I took a hard look at those bones again.

	They smelled terrible and had brown pieces of gut, muscle or whatever, dried onto them. But they were obviously part of a leg or maybe arm or foot. There were two great big round claws, something like a chicken's but three times that size, and places where some more had been broken off. I felt Motley relieving me of the gin, and the clink of ice, but I didn't look up, even. I laid out the two long bones again, and one was broken like the foot or hand thing. They were at least three inches around the middle and, even broken, three feet long. I felt that old creepy chill on the spine again and reached up for a drink which Motley handed me in silence.

	"All right, Professor," I said in as nice and easy a voice as I could, "what is all this crap? Take it from the top; start with the dried leaves."

	"I'm not sure," he said, pouring a second dram for himself, and me too. I didn't turn it down.

	"I had to find a lot of my data in books I wasn't trained to use, my dear chap. None of this is in my field, you know." He inhaled some gin, but his voice was steady enough as he went on.

	"Those round plants, like reeds with a trim, are called horsetails, I think, Equisetums or something. The only modern ones found now are about six inches long, I believe. Notice that both ends of the stalks are shaved off smoothly? That's the time machine. The plants may have been twenty feet high. They were green when I got them."

	I looked at the stalky plants and he was right. They'd been cut off real smooth at each end.

	"So what," I growled. "I've seen bamboos that big here in Florida. What's with this pine tree?"

	"Well, that one is a puzzler. But I think it's a sequoia, a sort of Redwood, very like the big trees in California. They used to grow all over the world, it seems. Just a guess, of course." The gin bottle gurgled again. I removed it politely.

	"The little box full of things are certainly broken egg shells. We have tortoises — turtles, you know — right here, on the campus actually, that lay eggs like that. But these seem to be much bigger in diameter. Much bigger."

	I held up the bottle with the dead rat in silence, and he began to laugh hoarsely. When he managed to stop, he choked out, "Ellen-Sue really had a fit. That was running around our bedroom. I killed it, but not before she had had hysterics."

	"I bet she did," I said, "but so what, Motley? Most chicks don't make it big with rats."

	"Rats?" he said in a funny way. "What rats? Oh, I see what you mean, old chap. My mistake too, at first. But it's not a rat, not a rat at all."

	I waited, as patiently as I could, while he peered at the jar. "Look here," he said, pointing. "See those pointed teeth. No rodent or rat has those. Look at the feet. They're like tiny human hands. Some rats have furry tails, but none around here. I looked it up."

	"So it's not a rat," I snapped. "Why not a, well, a possum or a, well, raccoon or something?"

	"Very sharp, old boy, very sharp," he giggled at me. "As a matter of fact, a possum may well be what it is, or was. But if so, it's a sort of possum no human ever saw alive. Maybe a remote possum ancestor, but if the books are right, nothing like it has lived for many millions of years. How about a shot, old boy? Getting a bit dry, all this talking?"

	I gave him a slug in his glass but kept tight hold of the bottle. Then I fed myself another. I was thinking. I was thinking about old movies. Movies like King Kong, One Million, B.C. and The Lost World. I was thinking about those fucking bones! "And the bones?" I said.

	"I found them down the road a little way, one evening. It was after I'd sent a ham and some other stuff through, the biggest load I'd sent, as a matter of fact." He paused. "I suppose you can see they aren't very old. Not much older than the beef bones you'd find in a dump, say." He didn't elaborate on what had owned the bones in the first place. From the look on my face he didn't need to. I'm no scientist, but I have been to a museum or two in my life.

	This was so big I got kind of numb all over for a minute or two. While I was deciding what to do next, I fed Motley another drink and walked over to look at his machine. It had, when I got close, a sort of homemade look about it. It could have been an experimental dishwasher or something. That meant nothing. Bell's first phone looked that way too. Two very thick armored cables led from it into a special plug in the wall, which I also looked at.

	"It takes a lot of power for its size," said my host, who had followed me. "About four times the amount a big central air conditioner would, I've estimated. I had to have a special line put in. That took the last of my legacy," he added sadly. "But I don't need to have it on long, of course. Only a few minutes."

	Something else stirred in my mind, something he'd said which had grabbed my attention previously.

	"Hey, wait a minute. You found that rat thing or whatever it is alive and in your bedroom, right? So I guess it got out of the machine. But what about those bones? What the hell, how could they be out in the road? You did say 'road,' didn't you?"

	"Yes," he said, "I did. And that ancient pre-opossum didn't get out of the machine, either. It couldn't. There's a lug and a locking wheel on the door. Nothing could get out." Here, he was wrong, but not by much.

	"The way I figure it," he went on, not forgetting to hold out his glass, "is something like this: when the Chronocron sends something back, it gets replaced in our time, and it gets replaced by something of the same exact mass. Say, ten pounds of coal gets sent back. OK, then ten pounds, no more, no less, of something, anything, alive or dead, comes out of the past. But there's a catch. And the catch is the time lag. Somehow it's uncertain, in a way I don't yet understand. Some replacements have never turned up here at all. They must have been dumped a ways off, maybe a long way. Maybe it's the earth's rotational spin. Maybe something else." He sunk back into his glass, mumbling about "Heisenberg" or someone.

	My thoughts were still tripping over themselves, when a terrific bang hit the door. I almost jumped over the time machine, thinking some dinosaur (all right, I said it, finally) was coming home for lunch.

	"Ah heeah you in theah, Motleee!" came a voice like worn truck brakes. Southern, worn, truck brakes.

	"You come out heeah, rait naaow, you stinkin', no good, runty, licker-haid!" I won't do any more misspelled dialogue, but that's the sound. Mrs. Motley van D'Alliance III was home in force, and from the pitch in her screech, my precious ideas about dealing with her might need a bit of overhaul.

	Motley was shrunk into a corner. So I put my finger to my mouth, then patted myself on the chest, to let him know I'd handle things. He looked grateful but also doubtful.

	I slipped the bolt and ran up the door just in time to nearly get caught on the noggin with one of those heavy brown palm stems that littered the yard. It whanged past me and into the wall with impressive force.

	Mrs. van D'Alliance seemed stunned at her near-miss or an unknown target, or maybe both. It gave me a second to look her over and figure out what to do about it.

	I dunno what the first, or Newport, Mrs. van D' had been like, but this was an item from the bottom of the list. Any list. "Used hard and put away wet," described her, in the classic words of an old pal in the horse-raising business.

	She was a blobby, tightly corseted job, with orange-dyed hair, pulled up in one of those beehive things. She had purple lipstick and too much eye shadow on a pale washed-out face. A dirty green dress and wedgie-type shoes, plus cracked purple toenails, completed the picture. A semiretired hooker, recently drafted to the Tijuana League, would describe her.

	"Who in hell are you and where's that lousy drunken Motley?" was her greeting. "I could smell that gin ten yards off and I know he's in there hiding behind his crazy, nut gadgets which cost Keerrist knows how much when I ain't got hardly money to eat on and …"

	I held up my hand in a solemn way and put on a look of sober dignity, something like some funeral parlor manager.

	"Mrs. van D'Alliance," I said in a deep, vibrant voice, "your husband, Madam, has been doing very secret work for a long time." I lowered my voice. "There are things it is not safe for you to know, but I can tell you this much, anyway. Vast sums might possibly be involved, vast sums indeed. Your husband has done some high-class inventing which may well interest people in high places, and people who don't welcome idle chatter."

	Her mouth opened, but not in speech, just simple surprise.

	"At this time, Madam, I am in the employ of the ATE. But I have worked for other agencies and may again, if you take my meaning?" If she wanted to think Amalgamated Tourist Enterprises was the CIA, that was her business. And my ultimate employers certainly disliked chatter about their business, idle or otherwise.

	Motley had advanced behind me and now took on a little courage. He'd probably never seen his private hot-air outlet shut up before.

	"You hear that, Ellen-Sue," he said, sticking out his shrunken chest, "Mr. Doakes and I were discussing finances, big finances. You've never understood my work, so let's hear no more of this. Mr. Doakes and I are going in town to dinner, eh, old chap? We may be discussing plans late into the night, so don't wait up." He had me in a corner, but I wasn't unhappy about it. I had things to do and I wanted him under my eye.

	I handed her a card, which had my name, ATE, and a phony Park Avenue address on it, and smiled in a tight, restrained way.

	"I'll take good care of old Mot," I said. "We have much to discuss and I'll be at the XYZ Motel with him later on. But remember, please, no gossip, none at all. There are penalties, you understand?"

	She could only nod, with her mouth still open. As we drove away, after locking the workshop very carefully, she was still standing in the drive next to the chewed-up '54 Plymouth, looking at my card. Motley was laughing and singing to himself. I'd given him back the whole bottle. Now, I wanted him drunk, dead drunk. By the time we reached the motel, after stopping for more booze, he was half gone. In another fifteen minutes he was totally gone and snoring unattractively on my couch. I loosened his grubby tie and went out to a public booth to do some long-distance phoning.

	I got Barnstaffel on a very private line, only to be used in emergencies, and talked for a half-hour without a break. Then I listened for a minute, hung up and waited. Twenty minutes later, the phone rang and I did some more listening, but not to Barnstaffel. This was a voice I'd never heard before, but George Raft or Edward G. Robinson would have appreciated it. I especially disliked the ending, which went: "and if this is some kind of con or something, Doakes, you'll be the sickest sickie in the business!"

	I tried to convey my true sincerity in my answer, and it was no acting.

	I had dinner sent in from a nearby burger joint. It was for one, naturally. Then I watched television until bedtime and retired, after piling furniture in front of the door.

	I needn't have bothered because Motley was still out cold, come the dawn. Breakfast was also sent in, but with it came some visitors.

	One was Barnstaffel, as big as life and twice as repulsive. With him were two other guys, and if old B. B. made me sick, they just made me very nervous. They were dark, nattily dressed types in their thirties and they didn't say "dese" and "dose." They don't any longer. They were supposed to take orders from Barnstaffel, but he was very nervous about giving them any.

	"Choe, my boy," he cried. "Where iss this famous discoverer?" I won't give you any more of his Katzenjammer dialect crap either, but that's the way he talked. I pointed to repulsive van D'Alliance on the couch and they all went over and peered at him. When he exhaled noisily, they moved back quickly.

	"This scumbag invented something besides halitosis?" said the taller one. His name, I discovered, was Leo.

	"He looks pretty terrible," I admitted. "But I'll be screwed if he hasn't got something I don't understand, and I'm damned if I think anyone in the world but him does either."

	"You may wish you was only getting screwed, Doakes, if this is a bust," said the short one. His name was Goldy, but don't ask me why. He had black hair.

	"Now, now," said Bushveldt, "that's no nice way to talk. Joe finds something that looks good. He tells me and I tell — some other people. We both do our best. So let's go look at what this professor has to show us, eh?"

	"OK," said Leo, "let's. But first let's get Lushwell here up on his feet. I want him along and someone's supposed to watch him anyway."

	"Hell, I watched him all night," I answered. "All we have to do is comb that scruddy wife of his out of the way. Wait till you see her!"

	"Wait till she sees us," said Goldy. Leo laughed in a hearty way and slapped him on the back.

	The two of them simply undressed the guy and stuffed him into the shower, which they ran alternately boiling hot and ice cold for ten minutes, with the television turned up to muffle his screams. When they hauled him out, I thought he'd bought a coronary, but they knew what they were doing. He didn't know where, or what he was for a bit, but Barnstaffel laid on his greasy charm over four cups of black coffee, and at the end of it, he was in something like human shape.

	Next, they had him call in at West Dugong College and report himself sick. Then we poured ourselves into Bushveldt's big rented limo, and headed out to Palazzo van D'Alliance.

	It looked even scummier at nine thirty a.m., and we pounded on the door for a while until it opened creakingly.

	Madam van D' looked a hell of a lot worse than the estate. Her breath was as bad as Motley's, and I figured a mutual hobby had brought them together in the first place. Her eyes were bleary and she had on a once-orange housecoat that might have seen the laundry the previous fall. Her bare feet peeped shyly out from under the frazzled hem. The bags under her eyes were a deep beige, and with her ratty snarled hair, she was a figure to frighten a sadist bill collector.

	Barnstaffel stepped forward, gut out, ready to take the lead, but his two anchormen knew better. Leo elbowed him gently out of the way and blocked him off.

	"You this man's wife?" he said. He made 'wife' sound like 'accomplice.' "We need him on some top-secret work. You cleared by the government, lady?"

	Once again, I watched fascinated, as the jaw dropped. Of course these boys had advantages I didn't. Like her hangover, for one. She was not pushed out of the way, she was ignored out of the way. It was kind of interesting to watch. We all went in to the Florida Room, which is what they call a messy room to watch TV and get blasted in, down on the Sunny Peninsula. This was as big a mess as one might dream up, replete with empty bottles, full ashtrays, and assorted bad smells, all distributed over a cracked terrazzo floor, and interrupted by broken pseudo-bamboo type furniture.

	Barnstaffel had been conferring with his assistants, while I steered Motley and the helpmeet into chairs. Now he stuck out his chin and launched into his spiel.

	"Professor and Mrs. van D'Alliance. We are here as representatives of high authorities. We ask, no, we command your silence, yes, and your co-operation. The professor may just have found a new principle. If so, enemies of our great country will try to get it. So, we frustrate them! We go away, all of us, with the professor's device and we build again in secret!" He hissed on "secret" and sounded pretty impressive, if you happen to dig old World War II movies with fat guys in S.S. uniforms doing the same act.

	"We are all of us subject to the National Security Act," he thundered, one mottled paw resting on his sunken chest. "Its penalties are severe!" They were no where near as severe as the penalties Leo's and Goldy's employers dished out, but it seemed to make its point. Anyway, Mrs. van D' Alliance's toes began to twitch, and Motley looked up at the dirty windows like he was looking for bayonets or maybe rifle muzzles.

	So help me, Bushveldt administers now the loyalty oath, or something like it, in the High Dutch he uses for English! Maybe they thought he was Henry Kissinger, who used to sound pretty similar. They were practically on their knees when he was through.

	Next, we all went outside, having given Mrs. van D' time to dress, which did nothing to improve her. She was pretty well cowed, but I failed to analyze her recovery period.

	Here, I got surprised, because pulled into the drive was an armored car of the Brinks variety, only larger. The organization did not waste time when it got interested!

	We all piled in, Mrs. van D' protesting, but not very loudly, especially when Leo or Goldy looked at her. Before the rear door slammed, I could see a few neighbors gawking in surprise. I could also note the open garage door, locks busted and hanging loose, which made me gawk in surprise.

	The armored truck had comfortable seats clamped to the floor and even a heavy card table, likewise bolted down, with a good lamp anchored to the wall. Some set up!

	"Before you should ask," said Leo, "his machine dingus got moved into another truck like this while we were inside. It's on the road ahead of us. And don't worry, Professor, we had it crated and padded like a baby's ass. It'll be in the same shape when we get where we're going."

	"Where might that be!" I put in. "My gear and car are back at the motel, you may recall."

	Goldy sighed wearily. "Doakes, your wheels and your junk are checked out and are on their way up north to your pad. Just relax, OK? We're all going on a trip and I don't know any more than you do. It's on a need-to-know basis, like in the spy books, see?"

	"No one tells me this!" exploded Barnstaffel. "What about my office? What about my work?"

	"Your work, chum, is doing what you're told."

	"Suppose I don't want to go on no trip? And what about Motley's job at that chicken-shit college? It ain't much, but it's what we eat on. You gonna ship the college away, too?" Mrs. van D'Alliance had finally got her unpleasant voice back.

	"Lady, I'm real glad you reminded me," said Leo. "Over on that table, you will all find pens and paper. So everybody just sit down and write nice letters, OK? Professor, you resign from your college. The rest of you write anyone else which might get itchy that you are off on a long vacation to the South Seas or somewhere. Any moms, dads, sisters, girlfriends, businesses, or anything. And don't seal the letters because I'm going to read them before they get mailed, dig?"

	There was a long silence while we went on our separate thought paths. One thing was becoming most clear to yours truly. Leo and Goldy's employers, who at one remove were mine and Barnstaffel's also, were taking no chances, none at all. This time machine was so hot that no one who knew anything about it was going to be allowed out, except on a dog leash, if that! They had the whole pack of us wrapped up like salami, and Barnstaffel had been conned into thinking he was bossing things, when he was just more lunch meat like the rest of us.

	Well, we all wrote letters. I had only one, to my landlord, telling him to keep the apartment open, that I'd be back in time and that a check for the rent would be along. Ellen-Sue wrote no one. Maybe she couldn't   write.   Motley's   hand shook so bad I had to help him with his, but West Dugong now had a new vacancy. Barnstaffel wrote at least ten, probably all to creditors. Leo read them all carefully and then sealed them and stuck them in his coat pocket. Then he settled down to relax with a paperback, which I observed to be Spengler's Decline of the West. Goldy was a reader, too, it turned out, but Teenage Vice School somehow looked less out of place. The rest of us just sat and listened to the tires, except for Motley, who fell asleep, breathing asthmatically into his shoulder.

	Five hours later, by my clock, we stopped and the armored doors were opened onto a night sky, plus several shadowy figures. As we climbed out, I could see an identical truck parked next to us and figured the time machine must be in it.

	We were on a flat piece of ground, with tufts of scrubby grass here and there and palm trees outlined against the stars some ways off. It looked like nowheresville and the mosquitoes began to bite hell out of me. Then I saw the plane. It was close behind us, a whopping big black shape against the sky, from the look of it, an old DC-4 prop job. This had to be one of the illegal Florida strips I was always hearing about, which funneled in dope, grass, and immigrants of the non-kosher type. What had I succeeded in horning myself into?

	We were all herded, more or less gently, to the plane, and a door in the side opened, letting out light, while a row of steps clanked down. Up these we went and found ourselves in a big cabin made into a lounge, with sofas, chairs, and even a chrome bar with stools. As we entered in single file, I could hear grunting noises and thuds behind us, and I figured the machine was being wrestled into the cargo space. The plane door slammed and Leo dogged the locks shut.

	Up front, next to the bar, a door opened and three men came through, from the direction of the pilot's cabin, and moved down the slanting deck. These old prop jobs sit up very nose-high. Then they stepped and looked at us.

	The one on the left was a tall skinny guy with a bald head and horn-rimmed glasses, wearing a rumpled seersucker suit. Every so often the corner of his mouth twitched a little. On the right was a burly clown in a windbreaker and worn levis. He had on heavy boots and sported a badly broke nose, as well as two days' blue beard.

	The one in the middle, though, was what held my attention. Because I knew him, and had for years. Lots of people knew him, including many assorted types in law enforcement.

	He was still a bit round, but not so much as when we both attended P.S. 86 in a northern metropolis I shall not name. His name then was Salvatore Tomaselli, and we called him Sally Pasta, on account of his being unable to stop eating the stuff. He was the only kid I ever saw with both spaghetti and lasagna in his lunch box. Long since those childish days of yore, he had become upwardly maneuverable, via el Syndicato, where he became known as Sally Tomatoes, first as an enforcer, or soldier, then as a capo, and then as a very big area boss indeed. At this point, he made US Senate hearings with nonstop mutterings about "decline to answer on the grounds." He finally managed to get deported as an illegal immigrant, and unless my wires were crossed, he had no business being back in the States at all. It made me even chillier watching his beady black orbs and his pinstriped chubbiness, when I figured he probably wouldn't want it known he was here, let alone who he was in the first place.

	"Greetings, chums," he said, in an oily way. "You can call me Mr. Saul. On my right is Professor Jones, a very brilliant man who has come to look over your machine, Dr. van D'Alliance," and he gave a nod to Motley, who just looked panicked. The tall guy twitched his mouth once and grunted, "Nonsense. Farcical. Impossible."

	Sally ignored him and continued in his breezy rasp: "On my left, we have Mr. Williams, who is a construction and metals expert in the engineering line. He builds things, as you will see. Now let's all have a drink. I'll tend bar and we can sit down and get better acquainted, eh?"

	Motley and his bride were numbers one and two in line, and I was last, except for Leo and Goldy. They were always last from now on, remaining poised behind our backs for reasons which I had no doubt of.

	When I got to the bar I had my head down, and since Motley was already behind me for seconds, I hoped I would pass unnoticed. No such luck. Sally hadn't gotten to his present altitude by missing much. As I turned quickly away with my double Scotch, his hand clamped on my arm.

	"I know you!" came the rasp, but with all the fake jollity evaporated.

	"OK, it's a cop," I said feebly. "Long time since P.S. 86, eh, — Mr. Saul?"

	He glared at me for a minute, then relaxed. "Well, well," he smirked. "Old Joe Doakes, the class cut-up. You ain't no Fed, that's for sure." His voice lowered to a whisper. "See that it stays Mr. Saul, Doakes, if you want to stay healthy." Then he raised his voice to normal. "Remember when we blew up the crapper, with old lady Melchick sitting on it? Christ, what a laugh! Ah, them were the days!"

	I laughed hollowly, having been home sick the day poor Miss Melchick was taken to the hospital after this merry jest, with two quarts of lye burning off her epidermis.

	"Well, folks," went on Sally, looking at his watch, "it's nice to find an old buddy amongst you. But we can rework the past on other occasions. Now, let me explain loud and clear what comes next. And no dumb questions until I finish, see!" Aside from gulping and slurping noises, the cabin went dead quiet.

	"In a few moments, we will all take off and fly to a tropical retreat of my acquaintance, where we will all live in luxury, If everyone co-operates, that is!

	"While there," he went on, "my colleagues will appraise and report on the van D'Allliance invention. If the report is favorable, there is going to be lots of money. Lots and lots of money, in fact more money than any of you ever thought about. There will also be lots of security, hence present arrangements, right? No one talks, nobody writes, nobody goes for unauthorized walks or swims or boat rides. And if they do, or try to, they get to be very, very sorry." He looked hard at all of us and still not a soul spoke.

	"Good," he said, smiling again, like a chubby rattlesnake. "Now let's all have another slug and relax. Think of all that dough that's coming, which will be paid, I may say, into nice numbered bank accounts, which I will open for you in sunny Switzerland, right?"

	The motors roared suddenly and in a short while we were bumped aloft and growling our way through the Florida night, destination Shangri-La, for all I knew.

	Barnstaffel finally found his voice and, true to form, asked a stupid leading question.

	"Ahem, Mr. Saul, I'm just maybe a little bit puzzled about something. I'm no scientist or engineer, and neither is Joe. What do we do on these operations? What do you need us for?" I felt the old chill as two nasty black eyes looked us over. If the answers came out "nothing," then Bushveldt and I had a good chance to start a skydiving course in a hurry, minus parachutes!

	After a pause that seemed to last several decades, Sally took a drink, then leaned over.

	"You know hotels, motels, stuff like that, don't you, Barnstaffel? I mean how they should look, how they should be run, right? Catering, first-class service, all that jazz?" Bushveldt gulped and nodded violently. He'd just made the same equation I had, only much later. If he'd been asked to be a ballet expert, he'd have nodded. Which left me, feeling very lonely.

	"Look at those two crumbum lushes put it away," marveled Sally, staring past me to where Motley and the Mrs. were knocking back their fifth or sixth jolts. "My best booze too. Ah, the hell with it. Now listen, Doakes," he said, turning to me, "forget the old school shit. You mean one thing to me and one only. If that alky has really got what you claim he has, you get a free ride, plus all the dough you ever dreamed of. But I want him working. I mean, happy, but in condition to put out in the brain waves. He can get juiced on his own time, so long as he works his ass off when he's needed, see. That means you! You see he stays healthy and in his mental right mind when he's needed, and that woman of his, too. But keep her out of my hair and sight. Jeez, how could anyone get in the sack with that? No wonder he's a lush. You get my picture?"

	"Roger and out, Sally — I mean Mr. Saul."

	He scowled at the slip, then relaxed and even smiled. "So call me Sally. I get tired of being called Boss all the time, you know? Nice to have someone around that knew me back when, once in a while. Say remember the time...."

	I gave eager grunts of approval to an endless stream of Sally's happy memories, ranging from cats incinerated in gasoline to dumping elderly pushcart vendors down open manholes. Eventually he ran dry and excused himself for some sack time. We all flaked out on chairs and lounges and I even managed to fall asleep to the roar of the engines.

	Some six hours later I woke up as we landed again. But Leo informed us all it was a fuel stop, and no doors were opened. Out of the window I could see a pink dawn, a few palm trees and also a lot of sand. We could have been in the central Sahara, for all I could guess, though this seemed a bit unlikely from my estimate of our speed. As I tried to look further, Leo and Goldy went around and flicked all the shades down in an obvious way. "No peeking," said Goldy, patting my bald spot. "Daddy doesn't like that." I got the message and fell asleep again.

	When I woke next, we were lumbering down once more and landing for the second time. This time my watch said noon. And there was Sally standing in the door to the front section, all neat, shaved and spruced up, which none of us certainly were.

	"OK, folks," he said as we all unglued ourselves and got the sticky out of our eyes, "here we are in a great little place. It's a very private island the Rockefellers ain't got around to buying yet. Don't ask the name or location, because you won't get told and I will get very annoyed if I hear about it, which I will. Just think about all the sweet money at the end, eh? So now let's go and see the sights."

	At the end of a long, hot day, what we had seen was this: A hot, low, squatty island covered with thorny brush and drooping palm trees, some of which had coconuts on them. Some big concrete buildings, like airplane hangars, but lower. These had trees all around and growing on the roofs, too, a pretty good camouflage gimmick. From a distance they looked like low hills. A big white house, and I mean big, with about fifty rooms, like a small hotel, with a pool and a fancy garden. A lot of bare, sharp, rock coast without even one beach, plus a lot of coral reefs just offshore. One very small harbor with some large cabin cruisers in it, entirely surrounded by tall wire fencing and a guarded gate. And a lot of peons in white clothes, jabbering in some language which might possibly have been Spanish. They, it turned out, were the help.

	We saw all of this because Leo and Goldy drove the van D's, Barnstaffel and me all around the island. We were meant to see it, Leo informed us, so that any silly ideas about leaving would be henceforward just that — silly ideas. We were told the island was around six miles long and two wide and that it was the property of a nutty hermit, a Swede millionaire, who never had any visitors. I believed the last part, but strongly suspected the Swede millionaire to be the collective label of a group of gentlemen who had once met at Appalachian, N.Y., to divvy up the U. S. A.

	Anyway, by late evening we were back at the big house, well wined and dined, in clean clothes, and ready for the morrow's business. I retired with a head full of thoughts, none of which were pleasant.

	From the next day's breakfast coffee, life took on a fast tempo indeed. The schedule went something like this: Motley and his twitchy corpse of a fellow scientist disappeared into a back office to argue all day with each other and also Williams the construction type. Mrs. van D' slept hangover late, which was nice for the rest of us. Leo, Goldy and I played gin or fished or swam or read (there was even a large-sized library). I took a terrible beating at gin, and at a buck a point, it really hurt. Leo explained we were gambling on future wealth and that markers were fine, but it still made me nervous. Bush-veldt Barnstaffel was very busy, however, and scuttled around all day checking blueprints and lists of various things, which he refused to let me see, for some stupid reason. Sally flew in and out to check on things, and after a while a lot of things were available to be checked on.

	The only work I had, and it got pretty draggy, was watching Motley's level of booze intake, which started at five thirty over cocktails. I stayed with him all evening, which was a big bore, then searched both him and his room for stashed-away samples, then locked him up for the night. Mrs. van D' had a separate room, which suited both of them, and got sloshed totally and regularly. Nobody gave a fiddler's fart about her, anyway. I soon learned what Motley could handle and still do his head work on the next day. So it got into a dull routine. The funny thing was, it became obvious that the other professor, whose alias was Jones and whom I suspected strongly of being a closet junkie, had changed his way of thinking about old Motley. He called him "Doctor" with real respect, even when Motley was boiled as an owl come sundown.

	Two dirty freighters with Panama flags appeared off the minute harbor and began to unload lots of stuff onto flat barges they brought with them. The first thing that came off the barges was a bunch of mean-looking bastards who made Texas oil riggers look like ladies' maids. These, in turn, began to bring in and unload tons of construction stuff, like cranes, bulldozers, cement, steel beams, heavy lumber, and God knows what all. These rough types built their own camp on the other end of the island, and we never saw them except at loading and unloading, which got pretty frequent. But a hell of a lot of building was going on somewhere back in the island, and Mr. "alias Williams" was always roaring around in hardhat and a jeep. One time they unloaded a monster generator that could have powered New York, or at least Staten Island. Another, it was tons of new furniture in crates and also swimming-pool loads of paint. This cargo and also the tons of assorted crockery were of special interest to Bushveldt, who went away with them into the backcountry looking smugger and stupider than usual.

	For me, life went on like a crazy dream, being really bad only after Ellen-Sue got tired of propositioning Leo and Goldy and turned her efforts on me. I decided I would drown myself the day she began to look halfway acceptable. Meanwhile the peons buzzed about, serving as help, gardeners, and what all. And I continued to lose at gin, which might have been bad luck.

	After three months of this weird, but no-so-bad existence, all at once the shit hit the fan.

	Sally appeared unexpectedly at dinner one evening and announced we were all going on a little drive later in the night. I only hoped the drive would not end with free catering for the island's large population of sharks, which I had many opportunities to eyeball whilst fishing for nicer things. But he even took time to pat me on the back and tell me I'd been doing a great job on Motley. I felt confused, but this was nothing new.

	So after the food, terminated by good brandy and better coffee as usual, we call crammed into a parade of jeeps and drove off in a cloud of bugs. One thing no one had been able to do was kill the hundred billion local mosquitoes, or even discourage them slightly. And they were a very greedy kind, which I can rate, being a sometime resident of south Jersey.

	After fifteen minutes of swatting mosquitoes or spitting them out, a blaze of light appeared ahead of us, and we zipped down a tunnel on a concrete ramp into the underground, while enormous steel doors clanged shut behind us. We came to a stop in a huge cave with concrete all about us and lights like kliegs overhead. But none of us were looking at lights.

	In front of us, in the middle of this king-sized air-raid shelter, sat an oversized version of Motley's steel box. Where his had been maybe six feet high, this job was fifty if it was an inch. The round door was three feet thick, as well as being open, and inside you could put perhaps two school busses and a possible four cars as well. The biggest cables I ever saw, like a foot thick, ran out of it and into steel plates on the wall. Now I knew what that mother of a generator was for.

	Sally lines us all up and, so help me, picked up an electric bullhorn, like they use on boats.

	"OK," he boomed, while the gray walls echoed, "I'm going to let you in on a little secret. We here are not really government men. In fact, this whole deal is strictly free enterprise."

	I smiled sourly to myself. Even Motley and Ellen-Sue had figured that out a long time ago.

	"What we have here," he went on, "due to many talents present, but chiefly Professor van D'Alliance," and he gave him a big wave, "is a thing which will enable many persons which like privacy to have it, free from care and types who want to prosecute, I mean to persecute them." He covered this slight error of the tongue quickly and went on.

	"This here time gimmick means anyone with access to the right ticket can go into the past and disappear!" He looked solemn, as if at a buddy's funeral, many of which he had no doubt both attended and arranged as well. At this point I noticed "Jones" and "Williams" had appeared behind us. Leo and Goldy had never left, as usual.

	"With my chum, Mr. Barnstaffel here," he continued, as Bushveldt beamed, "I have designed a luxurious hotel in the past, friends, like many millions of years ago. All comforts are there or rather will be provided, at cost or maybe just a teentsy bit higher." Like eight million percent higher, said the Doakes brain.

	"We haven't actually built anything yet, but the planning is all done, the materials are here ready to go. We are going to run a few tests first, and then we're all set. Now, I will let that great genius who concepted the whole scene, brain-wise, explain what we've done and what comes next. Professor van D'Alliance?" He now starts clapping, as so, of course, does everyone else.

	Motley looked much the same as when I first met him, which was scared, although a little cleaner and with a shave. But he ambled forward and borrowed the bullhorn with a feeble grin.

	"Well," he said, "the van D'Alliance Chronocron, or time shuttle, is here in front of you all. And it works. We have been able to get to certain points in the past on repeated occasions, that is the same points, which is vital. These points all fall within a period of about eighty-five to two hundred million years ago, give or take a few. There have been many problems to overcome. Professor, er, Jones and I have found certain, well, anomalies which we simply cannot resolve, in some cases. For instance, why are we limited to this one segment of time? Why can we go neither beyond it or closer to the present? We don't know, but Krug's recent work on magnetic fluxes may well Here a loud rasping cough from Sally shut him up. No Krug fluxes need apply. Stick to business!

	"Ah, yes, well," he went on, "then we had to find ways of probing what the shuttle emerged into. Obviously coming out into solid rock, earth or even underwater, would not only be useless but highly dangerous as well. But that problem we solved also, and we can safely predict that the shuttle will only exit safely onto dry land and in the same place, always, if the proper controls are used." He looked down at the floor before going on, and, I realized late, he must have been summoning up his small supply of nerve to go on, because what he said next took some guts. His voice suddenly got louder.

	"I am not satisfied with the matter displacement problem, how-ever. Large and unpredictable objects may reappear anywhere on this globe, since the larger the mass sent back, the further the point of rediffusion into the present seems to occur. What I mean is But Sally had now grabbed the bullhorn back, having finally got the idea that he was not listening to a hymn of thanksgiving any longer. He shoved Motley away in a sweeping motion and the poor bastard's one feeble attempt to be honest was over.

	"So like the professor said, folks," Sally resumed, "practically all the problems been worked out. And, now, the volunteers which has been named to take a first look at our future site will be given their equipment and sent back into the past to survey around the site of the lovely retreat we will build!"

	Two guys appeared from through a side door, pushing a dolly loaded with sun helmets, rifles, khaki clothes, and other gear of the Tarzan-epic variety, but I hardly gave them a glance, because I was looking around for the volunteers.

	And found everyone looking at me. Or rather at me and Bushveldt Barnstaffel. Meet the "volunteers." I thought of those rotting bones that Motley had found in his driveway and shuddered.

	Bushveldt was blubbering helplessly about hotels and how he was needed to run and plan them, but meanwhile he was being dressed, forcibly, by the dolly crew and other rough types who had filed in behind us. They advanced on me, too, but I glared and pushed my way through them. I'm no hero, but I was fucked if I'd be dressed up like a baby.

	I was interrupted by a wild howling noise and looked up to see two amazon bull-dyke types appearing to seize Ellen-Sue and dress her as well. I looked over at Motley and now found him grinning broadly. He must have made his own deal, the little rat. So much for his courage, the scummy creep. She was a mess, but nobody sends a woman, let alone a wife, into something like this. Then I got another surprise.

	"Look, boss," said Leo, stepping forward, "this is a test, right? Now Doakes here is the only one with half an ounce of guts or brains either. They could all three fall down a hole and you wouldn't learn nothing. For a small bonus, me and Goldy will go along and ride shotgun, right, Goldy?" I felt kind of flattered, I must say.

	Goldy looked surprised and not very pleased, either, but he was used to following Leo's lead and grunted an assent.

	Sally was really surprised because professional hoods don't volunteer any more than career army sergeants, but Leo led him aside, and after a spirited discussion in whispers, he agreed. The discussion must have been about the size of the bonus.

	Ellen-Sue finally stopped yelling and got dressed the same as us four, in long-sleeved khaki shirts and long pants, with high boots and sun helmets. Sally took one look at her face and told Leo the guns would be given only to him and Goldy, until after we were through the machine and out the other side. But she managed to get close to her helpmeet and spit in his face. No one tried to stop her. Barnstaffel was dead-white and muttering in Dutch.

	We all got into the big lighted chamber, and the enormous round port slammed shut behind us. We could hear all the lugs and clamps being applied, and then there was a silence as we all looked at each other. It lasted maybe a minute and then there came a deep soft humming, more like a vibration that went all through us, as if we were inside some whopper of a microwave oven. It didn't actually hurt, but your skin pringled all over, the way static electricity makes it.

	This went on for a bit and I moved over to look at the heap of weapons, more to stop thinking than anything else. I was glad to see an old friend, an M-l Garand from World War II days, which I could still handle, I thought. There was also a bazooka and a lot of big shells for it, plus two .45 automatics and a .38 police-type revolver; also a couple of army auto-load shotguns and buckshot shells for them. At least we wouldn't be completely defenseless, which was some comfort. We divvied them up and I got a .45 and the Garand .30 rifle. Ellen-Sue got a revolver and oddly enough could handle it. Watching her spin the cylinder, I wondered what her background had been. Goldy took the bazooka and Leo a .45 and one shotgun. Bushveldt got the other, but his hand trembled so, I made a vow to stick well back behind his fat butt.

	The humming vibration finally died away, and Leo, who seemed to know all about it, moved to the opposite end of the chamber from where we had come in. There was an identical door, but all the huge lugs and locking bars were on the inside, our side. This made practical sense, because this way nothing could get back through and out the way we had come in. In theory, that is.

	Leo positioned Goldy in the center, Ellen-Sue behind him, his bazooka aimed at the port, with Barnstaffel on one side and me on the other, also aiming. Then he began to free the bars, one by one, until all were dogged open. He looked around to see we were in line and pushed hard against the great steel circle, which opened slowly outward. Then he jumped back to one side.

	A blaze of red light poured in, along with a gush of warm tropical air. We heard a crowing sound, like a rooster but much larger, in the distance. A thing like a huge oversized wasp, buzzed past the opening. We were looking into a sunset and down to a long sloping beach, with the blue sea lapping gently on it, about a hundred yards away. Strange pungent smells came in through the opening, the sea mixed with plant odors that really tickled the nose. The crowing thing let go again in the distance, but nothing moved in the circle of light.

	"OK," said Leo, peering around the door, "here's how it goes. Doakes, Barnstaffel and me go out first. Goldy, as back-up, you stay within ten feet of the door. Ellen-Sue, you stay with him. We'll go maybe a hundred feet, no more, and look around; then I'll have some idea what to do next. And listen, you," he added to Bushveldt, "if that shotgun goes off aimed at one of us, I'm going to personally blow your lard-ass off, see!"

	We moved slowly out, stepping over the high rim of the port, and, once we were twenty feet outside, took a look around and back.

	The big box now sat on level ground above the quiet sea, crushing down an acre of low, knee-high palmettos or something. Bigger palms, with fat trunks, loomed in the background and, beyond them, much taller trees still, but with pointed stems like pine trees and deep shadows under them. I did not really like the shadows and decided to keep an eye peeled to the rear. Bugs of all kinds buzzed around us, but nothing tried to bite us. I guess we smelted wrong to bugs which had never tasted a human before. There was a nice breeze moving down through the trees, but it was very quiet in a funny way, and I finally figured out why. There were no birds singing. Jeez, pre-bird world! Somehow this hit me harder than anything else to date!

	"This is supposed to be an island, about the same size as the one we left," said Leo to me. "It isn't in the exact same place, though, according to the eggheads, and I don't think they know why, any more than I do. Jones thinks it may be in the South Pacific or what was the South Pacific way back then. Anyway, it's supposed to be as safe as anything around in this period. So let's push a little further away and see the sights. Stay well away from the water, though. They told me that much."

	The sea looked the safest place around to me, barring running back into the time shuttle, but if that was the word, then I would not venture to argue.

	We went real slow, angling down the slope to the left, so we stayed midway between the sand of the beach and the higher stuff further up. And I noticed something else funny. This was a green, humid, tropical set-up that could have used Dorothy Lamour to advantage, but it was all green, or greeny-yellow. There was no other color, no flowers of any kind, any more than there were birds! Underfoot, there was just scrub or nothing, except some moss in the shady bits. But no grass of any kind. What a nutty place!

	About a hundred yards from the shuttle entrance, trouble appeared. In front of us was a kind of shallow gully, choked with taller brush, which led down direct to the sea through a little rocky gulch. I could hear water trickling down from up to the left, but it was only visible at the sea edge where a little stream ran over some shallow rocks.

	There was a cracking noise of trampled brush and out of the gully came a head. The mud-colored head had a big turtle beak and a huge horn like a rhino's, but much bigger and straighter. Behind the horn were two yellow eyes and a skull flaring back into a rim of black spikes two feet long, pointing up and rearwards. The whole skull apparatus was perhaps six fee| wide.

	The yellow eyes looked us over and decided to vote "no." There was a grunt, and two really gross front legs and a notched back, like a large hippo's in size, began to come up out of the gully. How in hell it was hidden in the first place, I don't know, unless it was asleep and lying down.

	"Run," yelled Leo, unnecessarily, while loosing off a blast of buckshot at the head. He might as well have blown a soda straw, for all the impression it made. The whole enormous body had heaved up now, and it was bigger than any elephant, with a long, heavy tail to match.

	I was running my ass off toward the shuttle, and Barnstaffel was too. Leo, who was lighter and younger, plus in better shape, soon caught up and led the way. Ahead, I could see Goldy pointing the bazooka at my face, and I gave him A-plus for guts, as well as praying he knew how to aim. Personally, I'd have slammed the door on what was grunting and lumbering along behind us.

	I sneaked a quick peek back and was appalled. The thing could make better time smashing through the scrub than we could, and that chomping beak was only twenty feet behind my tail! I let out a yowl and proceeded to trip on a flat palmetto trunk, falling down smoosh on my face. With my mouth full of scratchy brush, I froze, not even thinking "this is the end."

	Goldy kept his nerve, God bless him, and that bazooka sent one shell zipping over my back from about forty feet in front. There was a Christ-almighty bang and a shower of sloppy wet things fell on me. I scrambled up and looked back.

	The bazooka was designed for knocking out tanks, but it had effectively removed most of the beaked head in front of the shoulders. Only fragments remained, both red meat and shattered white bone, and blood was spraying all over the place in fountains. We watched, all of us stupefied, because the whole colossal hulk was still staggering around, tearing up the ground in chunks, while gobs of raw flesh splattered all around us.

	Then it tripped, and as we stood petrified into position, the headless dinosaur rolled and tumbled down the slope and went over and over the sand into the calm water of the sea with a twenty-ton splash, leaving a trail of blood and shredded unmentionables in its rear.

	It thrashed feebly in the shallows, the gushing red stain coloring the water around it, and then rolled into deeper water, where it floated upside down, but still kicking. Not for long, however.

	Out of the sea came a head like a huge snake, but with long needle fangs on the jaws. This was on a neck like a giraffe, only twice as long, and two more joined in. They began to tear the headless one in chunks, and we could see the huge tan bodies and flippers that went with the necks, while they fought and battered at the dying dinosaur, plus each other as well.

	Suddenly, all three tried to leave, paddling desperately away and sending bloody waves washing way up the beach. Two of them made it, but the third suddenly rose out of the water held by a shark head that must have been ten feet wide, which promptly bit the giant body in half! The bitten things screamed so our ears hurt.

	More showers appeared of blood and meat, more snapping and grinding and more red, foaming waves poured ashore. By this time we had all backed into the time shuttle, without even noticing what we were doing.

	Still watching this incredible scene in the water, Leo pulled shut the big port and with shaky hands, set the locking bars, and dogged them shut. Silence now fell, broken first by friend Goldy.

	"This is going to be a resort?" he said, rather in a mild way, I thought.

	"I declare," said Ellen-Sue, carefully checking out her revolver, "I think I'm gonna have a few words to say to Motley and that dirty stinkin' Mr. Saul, sendin' a lady off to a place like a crazy zoo with no cages!"

	Goldy reached over nimbly and whipped the gun out of her mitts. "You got a point there, lady," he admitted, "but I think Leo and me will keep the artillery while we go back to normal. Ante up, boys."

	I'd forgotten I was clutching the unfired M-l to my bloody breast. Looking down, I almost blew my dinner. I was sticky-tight with lizard gore and a few bits of solider gorp mixed in for effect. And the smell! I handed over my unused arsenal and so did Bushveldt. He was still mumbling in High Dutch.

	"If you're hungry, baby, try my shirt," I told him.

	He took a good look at it and went over and was violently sick in a far corner, which almost made it all worth it. When I turned around, Goldy started gagging. The back, it appeared, was much worse and I was glad I couldn't see it. Leo shook his head at me in a reproving way, but he was grinning, if wolves can grin.

	Then we sat in the quiet of the big box for sometime, and I began to wonder if we were going to stay there permanently. Leo did his usual mind-reading act.

	"Relax, everybody. This thing is timed. We were supposed to go back in one hour, and we are almost at it."

	Sure enough, in a minute or so, the weird humming started again, and we could feel that strange tingling all through our bodies.

	Eventually it stopped again, and we could hear the catches being freed on the other side of the original entry port.

	When they opened we looked into the muzzles of two more bazookas, plus some assorted machine guns and a rifle or two, all of which slowly dropped as it sank in we had brought back no after-dinner guests.

	Then Sally pushed up to the front and looked at us, and with him were Jones, Motley, and a guy in a white coat with a black bag. All their jaws sunk when they saw us, especially me, with my new re-encrusted suit.

	"It's a little like hairy back there, boss," said Leo from behind me. "But we're all OK, thanks to Goldy and that tank buster of his." He slapped Goldy on the back. "They all behaved real good, but we need to have a little talk before anybody else gets sent back. Some very special equipment ought to go first, is what I mean." He paused as if searching for what to say next. Then it came.

	"Maybe we could get a loan from the Second Armored at Fort Hood or somewhere?"

-

II

	It turned out the guy in the white coat was a doctor after all. Maybe an unfrocked abortionist or something, but he ran us through all kinds of tests, blood and otherwise, and we were even kept locked up until the tests were all over. I joked with the others about being astronauts, but sobered up when Ellen-Sue, of all people, pointed out we had been a hell of a lot further away than any of the space jockeys.

	Actually, when some of the implications began to sink in, they scared the piss out of me. Suppose we had brought back some disease or bug that didn't exist now? Compared to the precautions the United States takes over returning astronauts, what we went through was kindergarten stuff. We could have infected the whole island the minute we got out of the box!

	I mentioned this to Leo over cards and he shrugged. "Yeah. I thought of that, too. But the doc says that the bugs back then were much too primitive to hurt us. Only a ninety-nine percent chance, he says."

	One percent, I thought to myself and flinched.

	Well, we finished the tests, but more unnamed experts of various kinds quizzed us. One showed us pictures of various dinosaurs, each worse than the one before. And, sure enough, we spotted old Nose-horn right off. His name was Monocolonius (I wrote it down), and the three long-necked paddle-feet jobs were called plesiosaurs. The shark was only a shark, merely four times bigger than the biggest which nibble on you nowadays. This all got the guy with the book very excited and he squared off with twitchy Jones, who was also present.

	"It can't be an island!" he squeaked at Jones. "It is totally impossible, due to weight, especially skull weight, for an animal like this" (which was Nose-horn) "to swim very far, that is if they could swim at all."

	All this crap led to a long egghead argument and they went out together, still gabbling like geese and hand waving. It was amazing how much crazy talent Sally could lay his hands on, I often thought.

	Eventually, after we had all been questioned to death, they let us out and alone, while the former routine began again. I found it very restful, personally. Fighting dinosaurs may look like fun in the flicks, but one hour would last me forever.

	Meanwhile, equipment was still being landed and sent inland. A lot of it made more sense, after what we had been through. One night I heard a lot of clanking and engines and looked out the windows. There was a bunch of square tank-like things going by in the moonlight. Where a tank's turret should be was a shield with a long, thin, skinny gun, looking much too small for the body, sitting up on a mount with a hole for the driver or gunner behind it. My knowledge of United States hardware was World War II vintage, and these were new to me.

	"Multipurpose ONTOS," purred Leo from behind me, making me jump. He had drifted in from his own pad. "They're like tanks, but amphibious and also troop carriers. And that gun doohickey, is a recoil-less rifle. It shoots small shells, like a bazooka, but bigger and ten times as far.

	"So they still think they can handle that bunch of monsters, eh?"

	"Hell, Doakes, they could probably get an atom bomb if they needed to. You think with all the leftover junk from thirty wars floating around, the boss can't take care of some oversized lizards?" He laughed and went away again, leaving me leaning on my elbow until the motor noise died away.

	Two other new things were of note in our lives. A bulletin board appeared with no advance notice, in the big main lounge, and on it every day were clipped bits from newspapers, mostly American, but English too, and sometimes German or French, which I don't read.

	There were pictures in lots of them. One week's reading was enough to tell the main story. We were rumbled, that is, up to a point.

	Like a shower of mud, mixed with green logs, crushed a house in England. Two people were killed. The logs were from fossil trees, only they were fresh.

	Or 60 tons of sea water washed away an oil rig. Not an offshore oil rig, but one planted in central Canada. When the mess was cleared away, a lot of fish, ripe and stinking, were found which should not have been anything but skeletons in very old rock indeed.

	The one that broke Sally up made me want to vomit, as well as killing him with a dull knife. I've conned people in a mild way all my life, but this was murder. He was giggling over it when I came through the hall, and he waved me over to share the fun. Anything that made him laugh should have been a good enough stop sign.

	A ten-foot high, meat-eating dinosaur had appeared in an Indonesian school yard during recess. It ate two kids and killed twelve others and a teacher before the local army arrived with artillery.

	"This will really keep everybody hopping," he chuckled. "They won't have no time to think about us, baby, none at all." If I'd had the guts, I'd have strangled him on the spot.

	There was other news relating to Sally Tomatoes and Friends, Limited. The United Nations had secret security sessions going, and a world-wide alert was on. The United States, China and Russia, for once, all decided they were all under attack, and even the Arabs and Israel agreed it was neither of them. Castro sent offers of help to everybody, and teams of top scientists were meeting hourly. I had reached such a point of sickness, I almost hoped they would find us and wipe us out with a hydrogen bomb. But Sally had been clever, or someone had. The slant from the papers was that the world was being attacked by mad scientists from outer space! Or from the ancient past or somewhere. Nutty religious groups formed all over, ranging from end-of-the-world idiots to eco-freaks, who said the planet was striking back at polluters and had a giant brain down in its center core! Try to sell anyone on a Syndicate operation and you would have been sent to the nearest funny farm in a jacket laced up the back. All I could do was try and avoid Sally and his laughter, but I was getting less and less sleep. Motley was boozing more and more now, and I let him, but no one seemed to give a damn. They'd sucked him dry by now.

	I have mentioned that a couple of things happened about this time.

	The other one was a pleasant surprise. Ellen-Sue began to pick up her socks.

	First, I noticed that her hair dye was faded out and that she was neater. She held herself to one drink before chow and began to go swimming and even fishing with us. The bags disappeared from under her eyes and she got a nice tan, mixed with a lot of freckles. What appeared finally was a snappy-looking woman in the early forties, with brown hair (OK, so a little gray) and a cute figure for her age. She was no Raquel Welch, but she was no pig either.

	She quit making drunken passes at anything in pants and was nice and polite. I dunno where her education stopped, but she was no dumb-head, and once I got used to her hog-and-hominy accent, she was fun to talk to. I found myself drifting her way more and more and even tried a pass after a good dinner one night. I got chilled off but quick, but not nasty, either, you know? Just, "You're a nice guy, but nothing doing; let's stay friends." I began to look at her harder and harder. The Hour of the Dinosaur had really brought on a change, and I don't mean change of life, either.

	To Motley, she was Miss Frost. She looked right through him when he spoke to her, and after a bit he quit trying. He was so ginned up now anyway, I doubt if much really penetrated. He spent most of the day out under a tree, either passed out, bottle in paw or working on it.

	Ellen-Sue and I found we felt the same way about the horror show on the bulletin board. She let me know that this was what had snapped her out of the scummy life she'd been rolling around in and that she felt slow burning was too good for Sally Tomatoes and his buddies. But wrack our brains as we tried, there seemed nothing we could do.

	Meanwhile, the mountains of supplies and building stuff were still unloaded at night and trucked inland; the small army of servants and serfs still padded around mowing lawns, serving food and booze and doing tons of laundry.

	A funny thing happened one evening in connection with these guys though. I heard low voices down near a little beach when I was out walking, and it sounded like the native secret code which I had figured out to be two parts Aztec, or something, and one part bad Spanish. I would have paid no attention, but the voices stopped and a man swung up the slope and passed me in the dark. I was standing still and he never noticed me at all, but I'll be damned if it wasn't Goldy. What was that illiterate slob doing talking the weird native lingo and being so secret about it too? I decided to say nothing and keep an eye on him.

	A few days later, just in case we were all getting too restless or bored, Sally staged another little show. This time it was bingo night, Godfather style, and we all got numbered certificates of deposit in Swiss banks plus keys to open them. I thought they must be counterfeit, but they looked real enough. I had always assumed he was going to knock us all off whenever our use was over, but if these things were real, maybe he felt some gratitude. I didn't like to ask how much was involved, but he told us anyway, with no prompting. I almost fainted because my share was a hundred grand and so was Ellen-Sue's. We all looked stunned and this gave him a big boot.

	"You people never exactly seen what we got here, with the professor's little machine," he confided, while pulling on a foot-long Cuban cigar.

	"Look, how many guys in the world need to cool off once in a while? Not just in the rackets, but South American generals and like that? OK, so the U.N. and Interpol and all the various law people with computers can make it pretty hairy these days, see? But one place they can't go is back in time. So, my friends and I, which financed this whole operation, we sell shares. You can't buy anything permanent, but you can lease space. And nobody without lots of the folding gets in. Everybody gets checked out first, and then they get assessed on two counts, one being what they are good for finance-wise, and second he degree of heat which is on them. Then we figure a scale for that person and back they will go, safe and sound. Neat, huh?"

	"Plus a few million people get killed as a fringe benefit," I couldn't help putting in.

	"So what are you, Doakes, Mr. Sunday School?" He gave me a dirty look, then laughed. "Maybe when you went back, half a big lizard head came up front and helped eat someone here. So you ain't no rose either. We're all in it together, folks, and that's why you ain't going to turn down that lovely money, right?"

	He was right and I felt sick at my stomach. That night I lay awake, staring at the wall and wishing I could make a volcano blow up this rotten business and the whole scumbag crowd, including myself. What had once seemed merely a bad joke was now so filthy sick and nauseating that I now hated my own face in the bathroom mirror.

	Suddenly, I heard a faint knock at my bedroom door. When it came a second time, I slid over and eased it open a crack. I could see Ellen-Sue's face and I felt better all at once. Maybe a little female comfort was just what I needed.

	But when I let her in I got a surprise. She was wearing the same long dress she had on at dinner and behind her in came Leo, in his dark suit, which made me flinch, naturally.

	"Be quiet, Joseph," she hissed, closing the door and locking it. "We got to talk to you. Leo here has somethin' to tell you that's mighty important!"

	Leo checked the window and closed it, lowering the screens. Then he moved over and pulled my hand away from the light switch I was about to turn on.

	"No lights, Doakes. I've checked your room and Ellen-Sue's already. They've been bugged all along, but only with twenty-four hour tapes. That means no one checks them but once a day, understand? And I'm the one who does it. So we're in the clear on that point." His voice had changed, being now very clear and with no mistakes in English. And he was somehow on a first-name basis with Ellen-Sue, which annoyed me a bit. I sat down on the bed and looked at his tall shadow in the dark.

	"I have to trust someone," he said, "and I'm going to gamble on you two. I've been watching you both and this lousy set-up is really getting to you, unless I'm dimmer than I used to be. Right?"

	My mind must have been working quicker than usual, I guess, because I began to see a new picture.

	"Who are you, Leo?" I asked, "a Fed, or some other branch?"

	"Not bad," he said. "Glad your brain is functioning. Yes, I'm an agent. The bureau has been quite interested in Sally for a long time, and it took me two years to get this close to him. But no one ever thought of the van D'Alliance Chronocron, damn your drunken genius of a husband, Ellen-Sue."

	"I know," she said. "I never thought he was worth anything, either, just a meal ticket after too many cheap bars and bad times. I knew he was no good, rat down inside, but I was no prize, either; so I had no decent complaint. Even when he had me sent back with you to that awful place, I guess I deserved it. But not now. Not with those rats killing kids and letting innocent people get eaten up and buried and all."

	I put my hand over her shoulders and pulled her over next to me on the bed. She'd never had much and neither had I and it felt good to know we were being honest. She didn't pull away either.

	"What can we do?" I said, "I think you realize we'll both help. I've trimmed a few marks in my life but not this kind of a thing. It has to be stopped someway, anyway."

	"I don't know, and that's the hell of it. I have no signaling equipment and frankly don't know where we are myself. I think it's the Caribbean somewhere, but I'm not even sure of that. The boats are always tightly guarded by imported muscle, and if I make a move out of line, then all eyes get turned my way. Goldy watches me, I watch him, and everyone watches everyone else. Sally is no Rhodes scholar, but he's damnably clever at hiring technical talent and setting up security arrangements. I simply haven't got one clue as to how to get a message off this island, let alone get off myself. And now we have to move fast, very fast. You see

	"Wait a minute," I cut in, "you should hear a funny thing about your pal, Goldy. It may not mean much, but …" and I went on to fill him in on Goldy's overheard private chat in the native lingo. This got him very excited indeed.

	"You're sure Doakes, that it was Goldy? No chance of a mistake?"

	"No, it was him. And I saw one of the locals slide off down the rocks a little later. Mean anything?"

	"Maybe a lot. I've always pegged him for a dumb killer, though now and again he gets an odd look in his eyes. But if he can talk this weird native gibberish, then he's not that. But what is he? Not one of our people, for sure." He went silent for a bit, and we waited while he tried to figure it out. After a bit he started again.

	"Look, just keep an eye on him, I don't know what his game is and I can't trust him in case he's one of Sally's deep-cover types. That creep could run the CIA if he were halfway honest. He has a flair for covert operations. Anyway, I started to tell you something else, which is more important. Everyone who wants to use the Chronocron at present has to come here first, OK? But, Jones, or whatever his name is — and he's got to be traced — has found a new gimmick. He's pretty sure he can build other time-gates elsewhere in the world and lock them in to the same area and moment in the past as this one. See what that means?"

	I thought for a second, but Ellen-Sue beat me to it. "It means no one can any longer, ever step them at all. If you close one, they go to another or build another one or somethin'. And the varmints and trash keep comin' right out the past and eatin' babies and such!"

	"Right! So for God's sake put on your thinking caps and keep your eyes open! Sally has something big planned for this weekend, though I have no idea what it is." He punched my shoulder, patted her on the head and slipped out. I gave her a small hug and we both sat for a while in the dark without talking. At least we had a friend and some new ideas. The problem now was what to do with them.

	Saturday came around and with it a new big notice on the bulletin board. Everybody was to wear party clothes for a grand hotel opening, and buses and trucks would pick us up at five p.m. that afternoon. I spent the afternoon cleaning and sharpening an old rusty machete I had found a week before on a path. It was so worn down it was only a foot and a half long and a couple of inches wide, but this made it easier to jam into my pants. Sally's parties had a way of turning out rough on the guests, and the machete wasn't much but it was the best I could do.

	The sun started to go down at last and we all met on the terrace. Prominent in front was Sally and with him was none other than Bushveldt Barnstaffel, my beloved former employer. Here he was grinning and cracking jokes and slapping Sally on the back till you wanted to get sick.

	I hadn't seen him around for a couple of weeks, and we had figured out, Ellen-Sue and me, that he was back in the past, building the El Crooko, Hideout Hilton, or at least seeing it was built right. He must have done the job to Sally's approval, because he was also in white jacket and black tie, looking as slimy as his new owner.

	We all piled into some buses and Goldy and Leo sat opposite me.

	I looked at Goldy's dead, cold eyes and wondered if I'd made a mistake. He looked merely stuffed.

	Eventually we went down the tunnel and the machine door shut on us. This time a ramp was ready and the whole busload ran up and into the thing. It really was a fantastic arrangement, and when I saw Motley, half-gassed and slumped in a corner seat by himself, it seemed impossible it could have come out of that gin-head skull of his.

	When the humming finally stopped and the bus rolled down the outer ramp into the sunset again, I grabbed the arm of my seat as well as Ellen-Sue's hand. But I could have relaxed. Old Nose-horn was a thing of the past.

	All the close-at-hand trees and brush had been cut down, and a tarred road ran up to a big pink building with a red tile roof. There were lights all over and ferns covered the ground where the scrub had been. Some clumps of tall trees were left in places for shade, I guess, and bunches of the fat-trunked palms grew here and there. Down on the beach, actually in the water, was a whopper of a steel fence twenty feet high and anchored on big concrete pilings. I could see both triple-strand barb wire and electric insulators set on top of the fence, which stretched along the coast out of sight in both directions.

	The bus did not head for the big building, but took a fork along the beach and followed a road along for about a mile or so. I watched the water, but saw no long-necked whatsits of any kind coming up to grab at us. What I did see were tall towers set at regular intervals and in them searchlights and the noses of those bazooka-type guns. Leo and Goldy were looking around too, and Leo pointed to the nearest tower.

	"Anything gets near the fence, which is electrified, I guess, one of those recoilless rifles blasts it. After a while, even a dumb dinosaur could learn to stay away, eh, Goldy?"

	"I guess," said Goldy. But I was watching him now as I never used to before, and I thought I saw a spark in the dull glims as he swiveled his head back and forth.

	By now, we had reached a place where the fence came out of the sea and ran to our left over the ground. We swung left on the road to stay parallel with it and I noticed the towers were set now twice as thick. Beyond the fence was an area of low swamp and really a terrible stink came in the open windows.

	"In case you are wondering, folks," yells Sally from up front, "this smell is dead meat! We are on a peninsula, or point, for those which cut school like Doaksey and me, of land sticking out into the ocean. With this fence, plus the artillery, we keep the bad guys from coming through from the mainland. Quite a layout, huh?"

	The bus stopped and we all got out and looked at the swamp, trying not to breathe in the awful smell. As far as we could see was a flat country with bunches of tall reeds, twenty feet high and winding black water in between the clumps. In the sunset it looked dead and gloomy. Ellen-Sue shivered and held my arm.

	Over our heads, from the tower, came a long loud "whoosh," followed by an explosion, far out in the swamp.

	Out of the reeds came a greenish neck like a giant, mobile crane, with a little flat head on the end. From the open mouth a hooting scream came like the grandfather of all steam engine whistles. A tremendous thrashing flattened acres of reeds and black mud flew way up in the air. I caught a glimpse of a slimy body the size of a Goodyear blimp, and then there were more "whooshes," from our tower and the nearest ones on the left and right, with lots more explosions and that mind-bending hooting noise, which never stopped.

	Even Sally had enough and he waved us all back into the bus, his fat face even paler than usual. We drove off in a hurry, but the continued explosions and the dinosaur's death yells followed after us a long ways. How long would it take to die, I thought?

	We crossed the fenced-off peninsula and went back up a beach road on the other side, a mirror copy of the first, complete with the same fence and guard towers. Eventually we got back to a road slanting up to the big pink building, all of us pretty shaky in the knees. The reality of this place was hard to take, even when you had been there before. I wondered just how many millions this all must have cost and how many more had been paid in by the prospective customers.

	By now the sun was down on the horizon and more lights were coming on, as we pulled up a long driveway and stopped in front of the pink place. It was bigger than I had thought, like a super gambling casino I once saw in Cuba, back before Castro. It looked new and raw, but the furniture was something else, and inside there were glass chandeliers that must have weighed a ton apiece. There were uniformed servants all over, some of them women, and a guy came up and passed me and Ellen-Sue some champagne from a loaded tray. Lots more guests were arriving now, and I stood back to one side and took a look at them. Both sexes were well represented, though the women were all younger and a lot better looking, in nonwifely ways, which figured.

	I saw a lot of types like Sally, but the Unione Sicilione was hardly alone. There were several blond guys, like Krauts or Swedes, and a lot of fancy uniforms and dark faces, some of which looked vaguely familiar. An old bald guy with a girl on each arm tottered past, and Leo sucked in his breath behind me.

	"So he really didn't die in Berlin, or Paraguay either!" I looked at the old guy again, but he meant nothing to me.

	A waiter passed us all slips of paper, with a message on it written in ten different languages. The American on mine said: "Please do not discuss your own or anyone else's past. Please do not ask questions either of, or about the other guests. The reasons for this are obvious. Thank you. The Management."

	Conversation died while everyone read their piece of paper, but picked up quickly again, and the papers got dropped in ashtrays. More drinks were served and I saw a huge bar at one side where you could get anything not being passed already.

	Ellen-Sue and I walked around and eyeballed the place. It was hard to believe. There were even polar bear rugs on the floor, and the door knobs and lamp switches looked like real gold. The tables were either mahogany or a good imitation, and a big marble fountain was even fizzing up in the middle of the main room.

	Off on the sides, you could see lots more rooms, including a huge dining one with a buffet-smorgasbord set-up a mile long. I noticed at least two pool tables in their own rooms, as I wandered up and down the various halls, and big marble stairs led up to the second floor at several points. The place looked like Buzby Berkeley musical set crossed with something out of the Arabian Nights. If all the lice out in the main hall were paying out billions, it looked like Sally was going to at least try and give them their money's worth.

	Eventually, Ellen-Sue and I got bored with all the fancy furniture and stuff and went back to the festivities. Everybody was in groups now, all Cosa Nostra here, all loud gold-braid uniforms there, and so on. None of the various outfits seemed inclined to get together, though Sally and a couple of other hoods were trying to circulate. The talk and squeals of the call girls would start up and then stop. So there were funny bits of quiet when all you could hear was the help shoving glasses around or shuffling silverware. As a fun party it was a wet smack to me.

	I was about to tow Ellen-Sue into the food room when I heard Leo whisper behind me.

	"This place will have to slow down in the very early morning. There are a million bedrooms upstairs. You two pick one and then sneak down here to the front door at five a.m. sharp. This will probably be the only chance we'll ever get to get back into that damned machine when the guards will be slack. It's not much of a chance but it's the only one I can think of." Then he was gone, faded back into the crowd. I felt the old chopper cold against my ribs under the jacket and shivered. Ellen-Sue squeezed my hand and we went in together and ate. I'd just lost my appetite, but I figured we'd need the energy.

	The food was like everything else there, caviar plus the trimmings. It all tasted like mud, the way I felt, but I managed to choke something down off a gold plate handed me by a uniformed flunky. It might have been hummingbird tongues or, equally, old whale guts, because I was beyond caring or noticing. I signaled Ellen-Sue and we carried our plates out and upstairs.

	Like our FBI informant had said, there were miles of bedroom doors opening off long corridors. We grabbed the nearest, ducked in and then ducked out again even quicker, followed by a lot of curses and yells. One creep and his companion had not waited for dessert downstairs.

	We ran around a corner and eventually found an empty suite, because it even had a sitting room plus bath along with the bedroom. It was so impressive I looked around for the TV, before realizing the local stations were unlikely to be working. The door had a bolt, I was glad to see, and I locked it, wondering why the clown we had interrupted hadn't. In a hurry, I guess.

	We chatted a little, but neither of us felt much like yakking, and we finally just lay down and rested, eyes open and counting the clicks on my wrist watch. We could hear the party getting louder down below through the open windows, and eventually I got up and shut them, which turned it down to a dull hum. All I could think of was how many Godawful horrors had been dumped back in our time to pay for Sally's little house-warming binge.

	Eventually, things quieted down, and by four o'clock I could open a window and hear nothing but a gentle breeze blowing in from the sea. Searchlights played along the water here and there, doing the monster-watch bit, but there was no gunfire. I wondered if that big dinosaur was still alive back by the fence. Somewhere I remembered reading those things were so stupid they didn't even know when they had been killed.

	We watched the first pale light come over the land and glitter on the quiet sea, and I put my arm around Ellen-Sue's waist, while she snuggled up. I think both of us figured this was going to be the last day for us, but we didn't say anything.

	So probably we were the first to see what was coming.

	Away out on the horizon, miles away, I noticed a wavy line building up on the water, like the line a squall makes when it comes. But there was no sound of any wind and the sky was perfectly clear, a few late stars dimming out in the west as the sun came up behind us. I pointed to the dark line and Ellen-Sue stared at it too. While we watched, it seemed to get bumpier and flecks of white foam began to appear. All I could suddenly think of was a description of a tidal wave, something I had never personally seen and didn't want to. My watch said it wasn't quite five, but I had a sudden urge to get the hell out of this crazy place.

	We ran for the door, whipped it open and tore down the stairs. There was good old Leo standing by the front entrance, and as we appeared, he opened it a crack, peeped out and then waved his hand for us to get moving.

	We all scurried outside into the growing light and ran through bushes and into a garden with clipped paths leading everywhere. A drunk's shoes and pants stuck out of one bush, and I've often wondered since if it was Motley. I hope so.

	At this point we all froze. A whole bunch of sirens went off, over to our left, where the beach and ocean were hidden by trees, and I figured we'd been spotted and that it was all over. But no one came our way, though people began to yell back at the house and further off, and then I figured out what had happened.

	"They spotted a tidal wave coming," I gasped to Leo. "We saw it from upstairs, way out on the water. Let's get out of here!"

	We made even better time after that, and the garden was over in no time. Next, as we broke out into the open, on the road leading to the time machine, all Hell really broke loose. An artillery barrage started, like Stalingrad or D-Day, and mixed in with it came howling and crashing noises like all the world's zoos being broken up and bulldozed with the animals still inside. The "tidal wave" had arrived.

	As far out as you could see, the ocean was boiling with giant bodies, as God knows how many swimming monsters raced for the shore, their flappers churning up huge waves that rushed in front of them. They were all the same kind, with bodies something like the plesiosaur thing I had seen the shark get, but different, too. They ranged from what must have been a hundred feet long, down to maybe thirty or forty, and had short heavy necks with heads like giant crocodiles, full of teeth like Bowie knives. And they were only a hundred yards offshore and coming fast.

	All the guard towers in sight were blasting at them full tilt, but you might as well have tried to douse an oil rig fire with spit. For every one that got hit, and it only seemed to make them mad, a dozen more churned past, bellowing and screaming. There had to be thousands of them and they all had one idea, which was to hit the beach.

	"Come on!" yelled Leo in my ear. "That electric fence won't hold for five seconds. This whole place is going under!"

	That juiced us into moving and we took off for the time gate like Jesse Owens. I kept looking at the beach as we panted down the road, and, boy, was Leo right! I saw the first wave hit that fence and sparks flew all along the line of ten-foot heads. Then — the fence was just gone and the whole bunch of freight-train bodies were wallowing and hauling themselves up onto the sand, with waves washing up ahead of them and clouds of sand and spray being pushed up by the flippers. If I'd needed more adrenalin, that view gave it to me!

	We each took one of Ellen-Sue's elbows and raced up to the big port. There were no guards, and I guess they had taken off when they saw what was coming. As I climbed in last, I turned and took one more look back. It was unbelievable. The towers were all down, and a steady wave of screaming tons of reptile meat was pouring out of the ocean and flopping and crawling up to the hotel, smashing everything in their way. They moved like circus seals, which is a lot faster than you might think, and just as the port shut, I saw the first ones rear up against one wing of Sally's hideaway and smash into it and through it like it was paper. That was the last I saw of monsterland and I sat down with a thud on the steel floor, pulling Ellen-Sue with me. When I looked up, I saw we had company.

	Leo was standing in a half crouch, his right hand frozen as he reached for his coat. Facing him was Goldy, and his automatic was out and pointing.

	"Please don't, Leo," said Goldy. "You'd never make it, you know." His voice was now educated and the dull eyes were lit up. He was even smiling.

	"I have nothing against you, Colonel," he went on. "If you give your word, I'll put the gun away. How's that for trust?"

	"What's with the 'colonel' bit?" I asked. "Leo's an FBI man, chum, so be careful."

	Goldy laughed. "That wasn't quite truthful, Leo. I'm glad I listened to the room tapes when you were out." He turned to us and waggled a finger. "Let me introduce Lt. Col. Leonid Krassin of the KGB, or Soviet Security Service. As it happens, my name is Arthur Goldthwaite, and, oddly enough, I am the United States representative, though not, regrettably, from the bureau. Well, Leo what about a deal?"

	"OK," said Leo, straightening up. "The USSR wants this thing smashed as badly as anyone. How did you get on to me? I thought I was pretty good."

	"Oh, you're good, pal," said Goldy stowing his gun under his arm. "Thing is, I've been following you, not Sally Tomatoes. We wanted to know why the KGB put a top operator in with a bunch of hoods. All this time-travel stuff was a big surprise to me. And then I was stuck on that damn island, with no way to tell anyone." They both ignored me and Ellen-Sue and went on talking shop while we gawped at each other and listened.

	Leo laughed. "Now I know why there were no guards on this apparatus. Are they dead?"

	"They are now," was the answer. "Kronosaurus" will see to that. But you still haven't told me what you're doing here."

	"Very simple. We discovered that many Fascists, old Nazis, new ones, all the assorted scum of the political earth, were beginning to give lots of money to gangsters, both in America and elsewhere. Looking for protection, I imagine, since all governments are now hunting them down. I was sent to follow them, by becoming a gangster myself. Like you, I had no way of knowing this drunken pig van D'Alliance was going to invent a working time machine. I had thought at one time of trying to get the plans. But now I think not. It is better destroyed. You agree?"

	"I sure as hell do. But the time's almost up. We may have trouble getting out of here. And what made you bring these two?" He waved a hand at us.

	Leo shrugged. "Sentimentality, I think. They are not criminals, really, and both were sickened by the murders and bloodshed these people have loosed on our century. Do I gather, my friend, you know what those last animals were, which invaded the beaches?"

	"I think so," said Goldy. "I borrowed some of Jones' books when he was asleep or knocked out with dope. That was Kronosaurus or something close, a giant plesiosaur, an extinct marine reptile. While I was watching them appear, it occurred to me the place might be an annual nesting ground, like with sea turtles. That would account for them swarming in all at once." He looked at his watch. "Anyway, it put paid to time travel for crooks, at least temporarily. And if Jones and van D'Alliance are still there He glanced at Ellen-Sue and looked a little embarrassed. I thought of Bushveldt with no regrets at all.

	"Don't you mind about me," she said. "Motley threw me back there, remember? But, say, isn't the machine noise dying down?"

	Both men drew their guns and I pulled Ellen-Sue over to one side. The big chamber was empty, but we could at least get out of any direct lines of fire. The humming stopped and we could hear the bolts sliding open on the other side of the port. Slowly, the thing opened.

	What happened was so quick it was all over in seconds. I don't know why Sally had gone back from his bash or what made him suspicious of his two pet hoods, but he was waiting. Maybe he just wasn't taking chances, but Leo had said how good he was at security. I just don't know and now I never will.

	There was the rattle of a machine gun, and both Leo and Goldy were blasted back into the chamber, shot full of holes. They never even had time to pull a trigger.

	I waited without breathing, Ellen-Sue behind me. I heard a step, then another. Sally's head poked past the line of the hatch, looking down at the two dead men. It stayed there. He never even saw me.

	I brought the old cane knife down on his plump neck so hard it cut through bone and went on, leaving blood all over me and the corpses, Ellen-Sue and the metal floor. And, you know, I felt great, looking at that head bonce away.

	I looked out and there was no one else there in the big room at all. The guards must have been sent away so Sally could be alone. The empty ramp led up to the sunlight, and that was it.

	Ellen-Sue stopped and looked at me. "We gonna fix this thing, Joe?" she asked. "Won't be no other chance, and these two poor guys got mighty dead trying."

	"Yeah," I agreed. "But how? Neither of us can run this thing."

	"I watched real careful, Joe, and so did Leo. It runs just like on automatic when this door is bolted. Now just suppose, for instance, we open the other door a teeny bit, or even just unlock it? Then we shut this one. What happens now if this thing goes back with one door open?"

	I thought for a minute. What would happen if the thing had a gate open and rushed back millions of years into the past? What would come in while it was moving, moving back into time, whatever "time" was?

	"Get ready up at the top," I said. "Watch out for anyone who might be on guard. Here." I handed her Leo's gun, after wiping it on his sleeve, the dry one. Then I stepped wetly over Sally's head and went back to unlock the inside catches on the other port.

	Ten seconds later I was closing the outer catches, on the tunnel side. When the last one was tight, I waited. Sure enough, the humming started. I ran like hell for daylight, and then some. I don't think anybody alive knew what kind of force that damn machine built up, and I didn't want a close view of any malfunction, either!

	At the top, Ellen-Sue met me with good news. No one was in sight, but there was an empty jeep with a key in it. This must have been Sally's. He wouldn't need it. He was going back to his paradise hotel, minus head, with two dead secret agents as bodyguards.

	We tore down the hill road and went straight past the big house, heading for the little harbor. At the gate, two goons were lounging in the shade and they slouched over, not suspicious. I guess they had seen us around enough. Fortunately, they both looked to be halfwits.

	"Any of these motor cruisers gassed up?" I asked casually.

	"So who wants to know, bud? You know the rules around here."

	"I do!" said Ellen-Sue sticking her gun up his nose. "And you better too, mister, 'cause that crazy machine is running wild up there, Mister Big Boss is stone-cold dead, and this whole rat pit of an island is probably going to blow up!"

	That did it. Ten minutes later, the two hoods in one boat, minus hardware, and us in another were creaming out through the entrance. We had no map, so we just went west and hoped. Where they went, I never heard.

	About an hour later, when we were well out of sight of the island, a great big smooth wave came out of the east and picked us up by the rear end and shook us before going on. When the ocean got calm again, we just looked at each other. But we never heard a sound.

	You know, we weren't over fifty miles from the mainland? Never mind which mainland, either. But not too far from a town where I could swipe a car and Ellen-Sue could hock her jewelry (in her purse the whole time; she just "had a feeling") for enough to get us airline tickets. We didn't need passports either, if that's a clue.

	Yeah, we found the money in the Swiss accounts. Half what Sally said, and so I stopped any tears which might have got started. And we're living OK. And no more live freight or dead weight is appearing out of the past any more. And the scientists are all busy writing papers about what they think happened. So here's mine. No time like the present.

The End