WINMX Assorted Textfiles/Ebooks.tar/Text - Compilations - The Library - Volume 09 - R to Z - 354 fiction ebooks (PDF, HTML, RTF, DOC, TXT, ZIP).zip/Simak, Clifford D - Auk House.txt

Text File | 2000-01-30 | 125KB | 2,387 lines

Title : Auk House

Author : Clifford D. Simak
Original copyright year: 1977
Genre : science fiction
Comments : to my  knowledge, this is the only available e-text of this book
Source  :  scanned  and  OCR-read  from  a  paperback  edition  with  Xerox
TextBridge Pro 9.0, proofread in MS Word 2000.
Date of e-text : January 3, 2000
Prepared by : Anada Sucka

  ------------------------------------------------------------------------

Anticopyright 2000. All rights reversed.

  ------------------------------------------------------------------------

Auk House

Clifford D. Simak

David  Latimer  was lost  when  he  found the  house.  He had  set out  for
Wyalusing,  a  town  he  had only  heard  of  but  had  never visited,  and
apparently  had taken  the  wrong road.  He  had passed  through two  small
villages, Excelsior  and Navarre, and if the  roadside signs were right, in
another few  miles he would be coming into  Montfort. He hoped that someone
in Montfort could set him right again.

The  road was  a  county highway,  crooked  and narrow  and bearing  little
traffic.  It twisted  through  the rugged  headlands that  ran down  to the
coast, flanked by birch and evergreens and rarely out of reach of the muted
thunder of surf pounding on giant boulders that lay tumbled on the shore.

The  car was  climbing  a long,  steep hill  when he  first saw  the house,
between the  coast and  road. It was  a sprawling pile of  brick and stone,
flaunting massive  twin chimneys at either  end of it, sited  in front of a
grove of  ancient birch  and set so  high upon the  land that  it seemed to
float against the sky.  He slowed the car, pulled over to the roadside, and
stopped to have a better look at it.

A semicircular brick-paved driveway curved up to the entrance of the house.
A few  huge oak trees grew on the well-kept lawn,  and in their shade stood
graceful stone benches that had the look of never being used.

There was, it seemed to Latimer, a pleasantly haunted look to the place - a
sense of  privacy, of  olden dignity, a  withdrawal from the  world. On the
front lawn, marring it, desecrating it, stood a large planted sign:

FOR RENT OR SALE

See Campbell's Realty - Half Mile Down the Road

And an arrow pointing to show which way down the road.

Latimer made no move  to continue down the road. He sat quietly in the car,
looking  at  the house.  The  sea,  he thought,  was  just  beyond; from  a
second-story window at the back, one could probably see it.

It  had been  word  of a  similar retreat  that  had sent  him  seeking out
Wyalusing - a place  where he could spend a quiet few months at painting. A
more modest place, perhaps, than this, although the description he had been
given of it had been rather sketchy.

Too expensive,  he thought, looking at the house;  most likely more than he
could afford,  although with the last  couple of sales he  had made, he was
momentarily flush. However, it  might not be as expensive as he thought, he
told  himself, a  place  like this  would  have small  attraction for  most
people. Too  big, but for himself  that would make no  difference; he could
camp out in a couple of rooms for the few months he would be there.

Strange, he  reflected, the built-in attraction the  house had for him, the
instinctive, spontaneous attraction, the  instant knowing that this was the
sort of  place he had  had in mind. Not  knowing until now that  it was the
sort of place he had in mind. Old, he told himself

He put  the car in gear  and moved slowly out  into the road, glancing back
over his shoulder  at the house. A half mile down the  road, at the edge of
what probably  was Montfort, although there  was no sign to  say it was, on
the right-hand  side, a lopsided,  sagging sign on an  old, lopsided shack,
announced Campbell's  Realty. Hardly intending to do  it, his mind not made
up as yet, he pulled the car off the road and parked in front of the shack.

Inside, a  middle-aged man  dressed in slacks  and turtleneck sat  with his
feet propped on a littered desk.

'I dropped  in,' said Latimer, 'to  inquire about the house  down the road.
The one with the brick drive.'

'Oh, that one,' said  the man. 'Well, I tell you, stranger, I can't show it
to  you now.  I'm waiting  for someone  who wants  to look at  the Ferguson
place. Tell you what, though. I could give you the key.'

'Could you give me some idea of what the rent would be?'

'Why don't you look  at it first. See what you think of it. Get the feel of
it. See  if you'd fit into  it. If you like it, we  can talk. Hard place to
move. Doesn't  fit the  needs of many  people. Too big, for  one thing, too
old. I could get you a deal on it.'

The man took his feet off the desk, plopped them on the floor. Rummaging in
a desk drawer, he came up with a key with a tag attached to it and threw it
on the desk top.

'Have a  look at it and  then come back,' he  said. 'This Ferguson business
shouldn't take more than an hour or two.'

'Thank you,' said Latimer, picking up the key.

He parked  the car  in front of  the house and  went up the  steps. The key
worked easily in the  lock and the door swung open on well-oiled hinges. He
came into a hall that ran from front to back, with a staircase ascending to
the second floor and doors opening on either side into ground-floor rooms.

The hall was dim and cool, a place of graciousness.

When he  moved along  the hall, the  floorboards did not  creak beneath his
feet as in a  house this old he would have thought they might. There was no
shut-up odor, no smell of damp or mildew, no sign of bats or mice.

The door  to his right was  open, as were all the  doors that ran along the
hall.  He  glanced into  the  room  - a  large  room, with  light from  the
westering sun  flooding through the windows that stood  on either side of a
marble fireplace.  Across the hall was a smaller  room, with a fireplace in
one corner. A library or a study, he thought. The larger room, undoubtedly,
had been  thought of, when the  house was built, as  a drawing room. Beyond
the larger  room, on the right-hand  side, he found what  might have been a
kitchen with  a large  brick fireplace that  had a utilitarian  look to it,
used, perhaps,  in the  olden days for  cooking, and across from  it a much
larger room,  with another marble  fireplace, windows on either  side of it
and oblong mirrors set into the wall, an ornate chandelier hanging from the
ceiling. This,  he knew, had to be the dining  room, the proper setting for
leisurely formal dinners.

He  shook his  head at what  he saw. It  was much  too grand for  him, much
larger, much more elegant than he had thought. If someone wanted to live as
a place like this  should be lived in, it would cost a fortune in furniture
alone. He  had told himself that during a  summer's residence he could camp
out in  a couple of rooms,  but to camp out  in a place like  this would be
sacrilege; the house deserved a better occupant than that.

Yet, it still held  its attraction. There was about it a sense of openness,
of airiness,  of ease. Here a  man would not be  cramped; he'd have room to
move about. It conveyed  a feeling of well-being. It was, in essence, not a
living place, but a place for living.

The man had said  that it had been hard to move, that to most people it had
slight appeal  - too large, too old - and that  he could make an attractive
deal on it. But, with a sinking feeling, Latimer knew that what the man had
said was  true. Despite its attractiveness, it was  far too large. It would
take too much furniture  even for a summer of camping out. And yet, despite
all this, the pull - almost a physical pull - toward it still hung on.

He went out the  back door of the hall, emerging on a wide veranda that ran
the full  length of  the house. Below  him lay the slope  of ancient birch,
running  down  a smooth  green  lawn  to the  seashore  studded by  tumbled
boulders  that flung  up white clouds  of spume  as the racing  waves broke
against  them. Flocks  of mewling  birds hung  above the surging  surf like
white phantoms, and beyond  this, the gray-blue stretch of ocean ran to the
far horizon.

This was  the place, he knew,  that he had hunted for  - a place of freedom
that would free his  brush from the conventions that any painter, at times,
felt crowding in upon  him. Here lay that remoteness from all other things,
a  barrier set up  against a crowding  world. Not  objects to paint,  but a
place  in  which  to  put  upon  his  canvases that  desperate  crying  for
expression he felt within himself.

He  walked down  across  the long  stretch of  lawn, among  the age-striped
birch, and came upon the shore. He found a boulder and sat upon it, feeling
the wild exhilaration of wind and water, sky and loneliness.

The sun had set and quiet shadows crept across the land. It was time to go,
he  told  himself, but  he  kept  on sitting,  fascinated  by the  delicate
deepening of the dusk, the subtle color changes that came upon the water.

When he  finally roused himself and started walking  up the lawn, the great
birch trees  had assumed a  ghostliness that glimmered in  the twilight. He
did not  go back into  the house, but walked  around it to come  out on the
front.

He reached  the brick  driveway and started walking,  remembering that he'd
have to go back into the house to lock the back door off the hall.

It was not until  he had almost reached the front entrance that he realized
his car was gone. Confused, he stopped dead in his tracks. He had parked it
there - he was  sure he had. Was it possible he had  parked it off the road
and walked up the drive, now forgetting that he had?

He turned and started  down the driveway, his shoes clicking on the bricks.
No, dammit, he told himself, I did drive up the driveway - I remember doing
it. He  looked back and there wasn't any car, either  in front of the house
or  along the  curve  of driveway.  He broke  into a  run, racing  down the
driveway toward  the road.  Some kids had  come along and pushed  it to the
road -  that must  be the answer.  A juvenile prank,  the pranksters hiding
somewhere,  tittering to  themselves as  they watched  him run to  find it.
Although that  was wrong,  he thought -  he had left  it set  on 'Park' and
locked. Unless they broke a window, there was no way they could have pushed
it.

The brick  driveway came to an end and there wasn't  any road. The lawn and
driveway came down to  where they ended, and at that point a forest rose up
to block  the way. A wild and tangled forest that  was very dark and dense,
great trees  standing up where the road had been.  To his nostrils came the
damp scent  of forest mold, and somewhere in the  darkness of the trees, an
owl began to hoot.

He  swung  around, to  face  back toward  the  house, and  saw the  lighted
windows. It couldn't be, he told himself quite reasonably. There was no one
in  the  house, no  one  to  turn on  the  lights. In  all likelihood,  the
electricity was shut off.

But the  lighted windows persisted.  There could he no  question there were
lights. Behind  him, he could hear  the strange rustlings of  the trees and
now there were two owls, answering one another.

Reluctantly, unbelievingly, he started  up the driveway. There must be some
sort of  explanation. Perhaps,  once he had  the explanation, it  would all
seem quite  simple. He might have  gotten turned around somehow,  as he had
somehow gotten turned around  earlier in the day, taking the wrong road. He
might have  suffered a  lapse of memory,  for some unknown  and frightening
reason have experienced a blackout. This might not be the house he had gone
to look at, although, he insisted to himself, it certainly looked the same.

He came  up the  brick driveway and  mounted the steps  that ran  up to the
door, and while he  was still on the steps, the door came open and a man in
livery stepped aside to let him in.

'You are a little  late, sir,' said the man. 'We had expected you some time
ago. The  others waited for you,  but just now went  in to dinner, thinking
you had been unavoidably detained. Your place is waiting for you.'

Latimer hesitated.

'It is  quite all right, sir,' said the  man. 'Except on special occasions,
we do not dress for dinner. You're all right as you are.'

The hall  was lit  by short candles  set in sconces on  the wall. Paintings
also  hung there, and  small sofas and  a few  chairs were lined  along the
wall. From the dining room came the sound of conversation.

The butler closed the  door and started down the hall. 'If you would follow
me, sir.'

It was  all insane, of course. It could not  be happening. It was something
he imagined. He was standing out there, on the bricks of the driveway, with
the forest and the  hooting owls behind him, imagining that he was here, in
this  dimly lighted  hallway  with the  talk and  laughter coming  from the
dining room.

'Sir,' said the butler, 'if you please.'

'But, I don't understand. This place, an hour ago...'

'The others are all waiting for you. They have been looking forward to you.
You must not keep them waiting.'

'All right, then,' said Latimer. 'I shall not keep them waiting.'

At the entrance to the dining room, the butler stood aside so that he could
enter.

The others were seated at a long, elegantly appointed table. The chandelier
blazed with burning tapers. Uniformed serving maids stood against one wail.
A  sideboard gleamed  with  china and  cut  glass. There  were bouquets  of
flowers upon the table.

A man  dressed in a green sports shirt and a  corduroy jacket rose from the
table and motioned to him.

'Latimer, over here,' he said. 'You are Latimer, are you not?'

'Yes, I'm Latimer.'

'Your place  is over here, between  Enid and myself. We'll  not bother with
introductions now. We can do that later on.'

Scarcely feeling his feet making contact with the floor, moving in a mental
haze, Latimer went down the table. The man who stood had remained standing,
thrusting out  a beefy hand. Latimer took it  and the other's handshake was
warm and solid.

'I'm Underwood,' he said.  'Here, sit down. Don't stand on formality. We've
just started on the  soup. If yours is cold, we can have another brought to
you.'

'I thank you,' said Latirner. 'I'm sure it's all right.'

On the other  side of him, Enid said, 'We waited for  you. We knew that you
were coming, but you took so long.'

'Some,'  said Underwood,  'take longer  than others.  It's just the  way it
goes.'

'But I don't understand,' said Latimer. 'I don't know what's going on.'

'You will,' said Underwood. 'There's really nothing to it.'

'Eat  your soup,'  Enid urged.  'It is  really good.  We get  such splendid
chowder here.'

She was small and dark of hair and eyes, a strange intensity in her.

Latimer lifted the spoon  and dipped it in the soup. Enid was right; it was
a splendid chowder.

The man  across the  table said, 'I'm  Charlie. We'll talk  later on. We'll
answer any questions.'

The woman  sitting beside Charlie  said, 'You see, we  don't understand it,
either. But it's all right. I'm Alice.'

The maids were removing  some of the soup bowls and bringing on the salads.
On the  sideboard the china and cut glass  sparkled in the candlelight. The
flowers on  the table were peonies. There  were, with himself, eight people
seated at the table.

'You see,' said Latimer, 'I only came to look at the house.'

'That's the way,' said  Underwood, 'that it happened to the rest of us. Not
just recently. Years apart. Although I don't know how many years. Jonathon,
down there at the  table's end, that old fellow with a beard, was the first
of us. The others straggled in.'

'The house,' said Enid,  'is a trap, very neatly baited. We are mice caught
in a trap.'

From across  the table, Alice said,  'She makes it sound  SO dreadful. It's
not that  way at all. We  are taken care of  meticulously. There is a staff
that  cooks our food  and serves it,  that makes  our beds, that  keeps all
clean and neat...'

'But who would want to trap us?'

'That,' said  Underwood, 'is the question we all try  to solve - except for
one or two of us, who have become resigned. But, although there are several
theories, there  is no solution. I sometimes  ask myself what difference it
makes. Would we feel any better if we knew our trappers?'

A trap  neatly baited, Latimer thought,  and indeed it had  been. There had
been that instantaneous, instinctive attraction that the house had held for
him - even only driving past it, the attraction had reached out for him.

The salad  was excellent, and so were the steak  and baked potato. The rice
pudding was the best  Latimer had ever eaten. In spite of himself, he found
that he was enjoying the meal, the bright and witty chatter that flowed all
around the table.

In the drawing  room, once dinner was done, they sat in  front of a fire in
the great marble fireplace.

'Even in the summer,'  said Enid, 'when night come on, it gets chilly here.
I'm  glad it  does, because  I love  a fire.  We have  a fire  almost every
night.'

'We?' said Latimer. 'You speak as if you were a tribe.'

'A band,' she said. 'A gang, perhaps. Fellow conspirators, although there's
no  conspiracy. We  get along together.  That's one  thing that is  so nice
about it. We get along so well.'

The  man with the  beard came over  to Latimer.  'My name is  Jonathon,' he
said. 'We were too far apart at dinner to become acquainted.'

'I am  told,' said  Latimer, 'that you  are the one  who has  been here the
longest.'

'I am  now,' said Jonathon. 'Up until a couple of  years ago, it was Peter.
Old Pete, we used to call him.'

'Used to?'

'He died,'  said Enid.  'That's how come  there was room for  you. There is
only so much room in this house, you see.'

'You mean it took two years to find someone to replace him.'

'I have  a feeling,' said Jonathon, 'that we belong  to a select company. I
would  think that  you might  have to  possess rather  rigid qualifications
before you were considered.'

'That's what  puzzles me,' said Latimer. 'There  must be some common factor
in the group. The kind of work we're in, perhaps.'

'I am sure of it,' said Jonathon. 'You are a painter, are you not?'

Latimer nodded.  'Enid is a poet,'  said Jonathon, 'and a  very good one. I
aspire  to  philosophy, although  I'm  not too  good  at it.  Dorothy is  a
novelist and Alice a  musician - a pianist. Not only does she play, but she
can compose as well. You haven't met Dorothy or Jane as yet.'

'No. I think I know who they are, but I haven't met them.'

'You will,' said Enid, 'before the evening's over. Our group is so small we
get to know one another well.'

'Could I get a drink for you?' asked Jonathon.

'I would appreciate it. Could it be Scotch, by any chance?'

'It could be,' said Jonathon, 'anything you want. Ice or water?'

'Ice, if you would. But I feel I am imposing.'

'No one imposes here,' said Jonathon. 'We take care of one another.'

'And if  you don't mind,' said  Enid, 'one for me as  well. You know what I
want.'

As Jonathon  walked away to get  the drinks, Latimer said  to Enid, 'I must
say that you've all been kind to me. You took me in, a stranger...'

'Oh,  not  a  stranger  really.  You'll  never  be a  stranger.  Don't  you
understand? You  are one of us. There was an  empty place and you've filled
it. And you'll be here forever. You'll never go away.'

'You mean that no one ever leaves?'

'We try.  All of us  have tried. More than  once for some of  us. But we've
never made it. Where is there to go?'

'Surely there must be someplace else. Some way to get back.'

'You don't understand,' she said. 'There is no place but here. All the rest
is wilderness.  You could get lost if you  weren't careful. There have been
times when we've had to go out and hunt down the lost ones.'

Underwood came  across the room and sat down on the  sofa on the other side
of Enid.

'How are you two getting on?' he said.

'Very well,'  said Enid.  'I was just  telling David there's no  way to get
away from here.'

'That is  fine,' said Underwood, 'but it  will make no difference. There'll
come a day he'll try.'

'I suppose he will,'  said Enid, 'but if he understands beforehand, it will
be easier.'

'The thing that rankles  me,' said Latimer, 'is why. You said at the dinner
table everyone tries for a solution, but no one ever finds one.'

'Not exactly  that,' said Underwood.  'I said there are  some theories. But
the point  is that  there is no  way for us  to know  which one of  them is
right. We  may have already guessed the reason for  it all, but the chances
are we'll never know.  Enid has the most romantic notion. She thinks we are
being held by some super-race from some far point in the galaxy who want to
study us. We are specimens, you understand. They cage us in what amounts to
a laboratory,  but do  not intrude upon  us. They want to  observe us under
natural conditions and see  what makes us tick. And under these conditions,
she thinks we should act as civilized as we can manage.'

'I don't  know if I really  think that,' said Enid,  'but it's a nice idea.
It's  no crazier  than  some of  the other  explanations.  Some of  us have
theorized that  we are  being given a  chance to do  the best  work we can.
Someone is  taking all economic pressure  off us, placing us  in a pleasant
environment, and giving us all the time we need to develop whatever talents
we may have. We're being subsidized.'

'But what good would that do?' asked Latimer. 'I gather we are out of touch
with the world we knew. No matter what we did, who is there to know?'

'Not  necessarily,'  said  Underwood.  'Things disappear.  One  of  Alice's
compositions and one of Dorothy's novels and a few of Enid's poems.'

'You think someone is reaching in and taking them? Being quite selective?'

'It's just  a thought,'  said Underwood. 'Some  of the things  we create do
disappear. We hunt for them and we never find them.'

Jonathon came  back with  the drinks. 'We'll  have to settle  down now,' he
said,  'and quiet  all  this chatter.  Alice is  about  to play.  Chopin, I
believe she said.'

It was  late when  Latimer was shown  to his room  by Underwood,  up on the
third  floor. 'We  shifted  around a  bit to  give this  one to  you,' said
Underwood.  'It's the  only  one that  has a  skylight.  You haven't  got a
straight ceiling - it's broken by the roofline - but I think you'll find it
comfortable.'

'You knew that I was coming, then, apparently some time before I arrived.'

'Oh, yes, several days ago. Rumors from the staff - the staff seems to know
everything. But  not until late  yesterday did we definitely  know when you
would arrive.'

After Underwood said good  night, Latimer stood for a time in the center of
the room. There was a skylight, as Underwood had said, positioned to supply
a north light.

Standing  underneath it  was an  easel, and  stacked against the  wall were
blank canvases.  There would be paint and  brushes, he knew, and everything
else that he might need. Whoever or whatever had sucked him into this place
would do everything up brown; nothing would be overlooked.

It was unthinkable, he  told himself, that it could have happened. Standing
now, in the center  of the room, he still could not believe it. He tried to
work out  the sequence of events that had led him  to this house, the steps
by which he had  been lured into the trap, if trap it was - and on the face
of the evidence, it  had to be a trap. There had been the realtor in Boston
who had told him of the house in Wyalusing. 'It's the kind of place you are
looking for,' he had said. 'No near neighbors, isolated. The little village
a couple of miles down the road. If you need a woman to come in a couple of
times a  week to keep the place in order, just  ask in the village. There's
bound to  be someone you could hire. The place  is surrounded by old fields
that haven't been farmed in years and are going back to brush and thickets.
The coast  is only  half a mile distant.  If you like to  do some shooting,
come fall  there'll be  quail and grouse.  Fishing, too, if you  want to do
it.'

'I might  drive up and have  a look at it,' he had  told the agent, who had
then proceeded  to give him the  wrong directions, putting him  on the road
that would  take him past this place. Or had he?  Had he, perhaps, been his
own muddleheadedness that had put him on the wrong road? Thinking about it,
Latimer  could  not  be   absolutely  certain.  The  agent  had  given  him
directions,  but  had  they  been  the  wrong directions?  In  the  present
situation, he knew that he had the tendency to view all prior circumstances
with suspicion. Yet, certainly,  there had been some psychological pressure
brought, some  misdirection employed to  bring him to this  house. It could
not have  been simple  happenstance that had  brought him here,  to a house
that trapped practitioners of the arts. A poet, a musician, a novelist, and
a philosopher  - although, come to think of it,  a philosopher did not seem
to exactly  fit the pattern. Maybe  the pattern was more  apparent, he told
himself, than  it actually  was. He still  did not know  the professions of
Underwood, Charlie, and Jane. Maybe, once he did know, the pattern would be
broken.

A bed  stood in one corner  of the room, a bedside  table and a lamp beside
it. In  another corner three  comfortable chairs were grouped,  and along a
short section of the wall stood shelves that were filled with books. On the
wall beside  the shelves hung a  painting. It was only  after staring at it
for  several minutes that  he recognized it.  It was  one of his  own, done
several years ago.

He moved across the  carpeted floor to confront the painting. It was one of
those to  which he had taken  a special liking - one  that, in fact, he had
been somewhat  reluctant to  let go, would not  have sold it if  he had not
stood so much in need of money.

The subject sat on  the back stoop of a tumbledown house. Beside him, where
he had  dropped it, was a  newspaper folded to the  'Help Wanted' ads. From
the breast pocket of  his painfully clean, but worn, work shirt an envelope
stuck out, the gray envelope in which welfare checks were issued. The man's
work-scarred hands, lay listlessly  in his lap, the forearms resting on the
thighs, which  were clad  in ragged denims.  He had not  shaved for several
days and  the graying  whiskers lent a  deathly gray cast to  his face. His
hair,  in  need of  barbering,  was a  tangled  rat's nest,  and his  eyes,
deep-set  beneath heavy, scraggly  brows, held  a sense of  helplessness. A
scrawny cat sat at one corner of the house, a broken bicycle leaned against
the  basement wall.  The man was  looking out  over a backyard  filled with
various kinds  of litter, and beyond it the  open countryside, a dingy gray
and brown, seared by drought and lack of care, while on the horizon was the
hint of  industrial chimneys,  gaunt and stark,  with faint wisps  of smoke
trailing from them.

The painting  was framed in heavy  gilt - not the  best choice, he thought,
for such  a piece. The bronze  title tag was there, but  he did not bend to
look at it. He knew what it would say:

UNEMPLOYED

David Lloyd Latimer

How long ago? he  wondered. Five years, or was it six? A man by the name of
Johnny Brown, he remembered,  had been the model. Johnny was a good man and
he had used him  several times. Later on, when he had tried to find him, he
had been unable  to locate him. He had not been seen  for months in his old
haunts along the waterfront and no one seemed to know where he had gone.

Five years ago, six  years ago - sold to put bread into his belly, although
that was  silly, for when did he ever paint other  than for bread? And here
it was. He tried to recall the purchaser, but was unable to.

There was  a closet,  and when he  opened it, he  found a  row of brand-new
clothes, boots  and shoes lined up on the floor,  hats ranged neatly on the
shelf. And all of  them would fit - he was sure they would. The setters and
the baiters  of this trap would  have seen to that.  In the highboy next to
the bed would be underwear, shirts, sock, sweaters - the kind that he would
buy.

'We are  taken care  of,' Enid had told  him, sitting on the  sofa with him
before the flaring fire. There could be, he told himself, no doubt of that.
No harm was intended them. They, in fact, were coddled.

And  the question:  Why? Why  a few  hand-picked people selected  from many
millions?

He walked to a window and stood looking out of it. The room was in the back
of the house so  that he looked down across the grove of ghostly birch. The
moon had risen and  hung like a milk-glass globe above the dark blur of the
ocean. High  as he stood, he could see the  whiteness of the spray breaking
on the boulders.

He had to have  time to think, he told himself, time to sort it out, to get
straight  in his  mind all  the things  that had  happened in the  last few
hours. There was no  sense in going to bed; tense as he was, he'd never get
to sleep.  He could not think in this room, nor,  perhaps, in the house. He
had to  go some place that was uncluttered. Perhaps  if he went outside and
walked for  an hour  or so, if  no more than  up and down  the driveway, he
could get himself straightened out.

The  blaze in  the fireplace  in the  drawing room  was little more  than a
glimmer in the coals when he went past the door.

A voice called to him: 'David, is that you?'

He spun around and  went back to the door. A dark figure was huddled on the
sofa in front of the fireplace.

'Jonathon?' Latimer asked.

'Yes, it  is. Why don't you  keep me company. I'm an  old night owl and, in
consequence, spend  many lonely hours.  There's coffee on the  table if you
want it.'

Latimer walked  to the sofa and sat down. Cups and  a carafe of coffee were
on the table. He poured himself a cup.

'You want a refill?' he asked Jonathon.

'If you  please.' The older man held out his cup  and Latimer filled it. 'I
drink a sinful amount of this stuff.' said Jonathon. 'There's liquor in the
cabinet. A dash of brandy in the coffee, perhaps.'

'That sounds fine,' said Latimer. He crossed the room and found the brandy,
brought it back, pouring a dollop into both cups.

They settled  down and  looked at one  another. A nearly burned  log in the
fireplace collapsed  into a mound of  coals. In the flare  of its collapse,
Latimer saw  the face of the  other man - beard  beginning to turn gray, an
angular yet refined face, eyebrows that were sharp exclamation points.

'You're a confused young man,' said Jonathon.

'Extremely  so,' Latimer  confessed. 'I  keep asking  all the time  why and
who.'

Jonathon nodded. 'Most of us still do, I suppose. It's worst when you first
come  here,  but you  never  quit.  You keep  on  asking questions.  You're
frustrated and  depressed when there are  no answers. As time  goes on, you
come more  and more to accept the situation and  do less fretting about it.
After all,  life is pleasant here.  All our needs are  supplied, nothing is
expected  of us.  We do  much as we  please. You,  no doubt, have  heard of
Enid's  theory that  we are  under observation  by an  alien race  that has
penned us here in order to study us.'

'Enid told  me,' said  Latimer, 'that she  did not necessarily  believe the
theory, but regarded it  as a nice idea, a neat and dramatic explanation of
what is going on.'

'It is that, of course,' said Jonathon, 'but it doesn't stand up. How would
aliens be able to employ the staff that takes such good care of us?'

'The staff  worries me,' said Latimer. 'Are  its members trapped here along
with us?'

'No, they're  not trapped,' said Jonathon.  'I'm certain they are employed,
perhaps at very handsome salaries. The staff changes from time to time, one
member leaving to be  replaced by someone else. How this is accomplished we
do not know.  We've kept a sharp watch in the hope  that we might learn and
thus obtain a clue  as to how we could get out of here, but it all comes to
nothing. We  try on occasions, not too obviously, to  talk with the staff -
but beyond  normal civility, they will not talk with  us. I have a sneaking
suspicion, too, that there are some of us, perhaps including myself, who no
longer try too hard.  Once one has been here long enough to make peace with
himself, the ease of our life grows upon us. It would be something we would
be reluctant to part  with. I can't imagine, personally, what I would do if
I  were turned  out  of here,  back into  the world  that I  have virtually
forgotten.  That is  the  vicious part  of it  - that  our captivity  is so
attractive, we are inclined to fall in love with it.'

'But  certainly  in some  cases  there  were people  left  behind -  wives,
husbands,  children,  friends. In  my  own case,  no  wife and  only a  few
friends.'

'Strangely enough,' said Jonathon,  'where such ties existed, they were not
too strong.'

'You mean only people without strong ties were picked?'

'No,  I doubt  that would  have been  the case.  Perhaps among the  kind of
people who are here, there is no tendency to develop such strong ties.'

'Tell me what kind  of people. You told me you are a philosopher and I know
some of the others. What about Underwood?'

'A playwright. And a rather successful one before he came here.'

'Charlie? Jane?'

'Charlie is a cartoonist, Jane an essayist.'

'Essayist?'

'Yes, high social consciousness. She wrote rather telling articles for some
of  the  so-called  little  magazines,  even  a few  for  more  prestigious
publications. Charlie was big in the Middle West. Worked for a small daily,
hut his  cartoons were widely  reprinted. He was building  a reputation and
probably would have been moving on to more important fields.'

'Then we're not all from around here. Not all from New England.'

No. Some of us,  of course. Myself and you. The others are from other parts
of the country.'

'All of us from  what can be roughly called the arts. And from a wide area.
How in  the world would they  - whoever they may be  - have managed to lure
all these people to  this house? Because I gather we had to come ourselves,
that none of us was seized and brought here.'

'I think  you are right. I can't imagine  how it was managed. Psychological
management of some sort, I would assume, but I have no idea how it might be
done.'

'You say you are a philosopher. Does that mean you taught philosophy?'

'I did  at one time. But it was not a  satisfactory job. Teaching those old
dead philosophies  to a group  of youngsters who paid  but slight attention
was  no  bargain, I  can  tell you.  Although,  I shouldn't  blame them,  I
suppose. Philosophy  today is  largely dead. It's  primitive, outdated, the
most of  it. What we need  is a new philosophy that  will enable us to cope
with the present world.'

'And you are writing such a philosophy?'

'Writing at  it. I find that  as time goes on, I get  less and less done. I
haven't the  drive any  longer. This life  of ease, I  suppose. Something's
gone out of me.  The anger, maybe. Maybe the loss of contact with the world
I knew. No longer  exposed to that world's conditions, 1 have lost the feel
for it.  I don't feel the  need of protest, I've  lost my sense of outrage,
and the need for a new philosophy has become remote.'

'This business about the staff. You say that from time to time it changes.'

'It may be fairly simple to explain. I told you that we watch, but we can't
have a watcher posted  all the time. The staff, on the other hand, can keep
track of us. Old  staff members leave, others come in when we are somewhere
else.'

'And  supplies.  They have  to  bring in  supplies.  That would  not be  as
simple.'

Jonathon chuckled. 'You've really got your teeth in this.'

'I'm interested, dammit. There  are questions about how the operation works
and  I want  to know. How  about the  basement? Tunnels, maybe.  Could they
bring in  staff and supplies through  tunnels in the basement?  I know that
sounds cloak-and-dagger, but...'

'I suppose  they could. If they did, we'd never  know. The basement is used
to store  supplies and we're not  welcome there. One of  the staff, a burly
brute who is a deaf-mute, or pretends to be, has charge of the basement. He
lives down there, eats and sleeps down there, takes care of supplies.'

'It could be possible, then?'

'Yes,' said Jonathon. 'It could be possible.'

The fire had  died down; only a few coals still blinked  in the ash. In the
silence that came upon them, Latimer heard the wind in the trees outside.

'One thing  you don't know,' said Jonathon. 'You  will find great auks down
on the beach.'

'Great auks? That's impossible. They've been ...'

'Yes, I know. Extinct for more than a hundred years. Also whales. Sometimes
you can sight a dozen a day. Occasionally a polar bear.'

'Then that must mean..."

Jonathon nodded.  'We are  somewhere in prehistoric North  America. I would
guess several thousand years  into the past. We hear and, occasionally, see
moose. There  are a number of  deer, once in a  while woodland caribou. The
bird life,  especially the  wildfowl, are here in  incredible numbers. Good
shooting if you ever have the urge. We have guns and ammunition.'

Dawn  was beginning to  break when Latimer  went back  to his room.  He was
bone-tired and  now he could sleep. But before going to  bed he stood for a
time in  front of the window  overlooking the birch grove  and the shore. A
thin log  had moved off the  water and everything had  a faery, unrealistic
cast.

Prehistoric North  America, the philosopher  had said, and if  that was the
case, there  was little  possibility of escape  back to the  world he knew.
Unless one had  the secret - or the technology - one  did not move in time.
Who, he wondered, could have cracked the technique of time transferral? And
who, having  cracked it, would use it for  the ridiculous purpose of caging
people in it?

There had  been a  man at MIT, he  recalled, who had spent  twenty years or
more in  an attempt to define  time and gain some  understanding of it. But
that had been  some years ago and he had dropped out  of sight, or at least
out of the news. From time to time there had been news stories (written for
the  most part  with  tongue firmly  in cheek)  about the  study. Although,
Latimer told  himself, it need not have been the  MIT man; there might have
been  other  people  engaged  in similar  studies  who  had escaped,  quite
happily, the attention of the press.

Thinking  of it, he  felt an excitement  rising in  him at the  prospect of
being in  primitive North America, of being able to see  the land as it had
existed before white explorers had come - before the Norsemen or the Cabots
or Cartier or any the others. Although there must be Indians about - it was
funny that Jonathon had not mentioned Indians.

Without  realizing that he  had been doing  so, he  found that he  had been
staring at a certain  birch clump. Two of the birch trees grew opposite off
another, slightly  behind but on opposite sides of  a large boulder that he
estimated  at  standing five  feet  high  or so.  And  beyond the  boulder,
positioned slightly down the  slope, but between the other two birch trees,
was a  third. It was not  an unusual situation, he  knew; birch trees often
grew in  clumps of  three. There must  have been some feature  of the clump
that had riveted his  attention on it, but if that had been the case, he no
longer  was aware  of  it and  it was  not  apparent now.  Nevertheless, he
remained  staring at  it,  puzzled at  what he  had  seen, if  he  had seen
anything at all.

As he  watched, a bird flew down from somewhere to  light on the boulder. A
songbird, but  too far  away for identification.  Idly he watched  the bird
until it flew off the rock and disappeared.

Without bothering to undress,  simply kicking off his shoes, he crossed the
room to the bed and fell upon it, asleep almost before he came to rest upon
it.

It was almost noon  before he woke. He washed his face and combed his hair,
not bothering  to shave, and  went stumbling down the  stairs, still groggy
from the  befuddlement of having slept  so soundly. No one  else was in the
house, but  in the dining room a place was  set and covered dishes remained
upon the  sideboard. He chose kidneys  and scrambled eggs, poured  a cup of
coffee, and went back to the table. The smell of food triggered hunger, and
after gobbling the plate  of food, he went back for seconds and another cup
of coffee.

When he  went out  through the rear  door, there was  no one  in sight. The
slope of  birch stretched toward the  coast. Off to his  left, he heard two
reports that  sounded like  shotguns. Perhaps someone out  shooting duck or
quail. Jonathon had said there was good hunting here.

He had  to wend his way carefully through a  confused tangle of boulders to
reach the shore, with  pebbles grating underneath his feet. A hundred yards
away the  inrolling breakers  shattered themselves upon  randomly scattered
rocks, and  even where  he stood he  felt the thin  mist of  spray upon his
face.

Among the pebbles he  saw a faint gleam and bent to see what it was. Closer
to it, he saw  that it was an agate - tennis-ball size, its fractured edge,
wet with  spray, giving off a waxy, translucent glint.  He picked it up and
polished it,  rubbing off the clinging  bits of sand, remembering  how as a
boy he  had hunted agates in abandoned gravel pits.  Just beyond the one he
had  picked up  lay another  one, and  a bit  to one  side of it,  a third.
Crouched, he  hunched forward  and picked up  both of them.  One was bigger
than the  first, the second slightly smaller.  Crouched there, he looked at
them, admiring  the texture of them, feeling  once again, after many years,
the thrill he had felt as a boy at finding agates. When he had left home to
go to college, he remembered there had been a bag full of them still cached
away in  one corner  of the garage.  He wondered what might  have become of
them.

A few yards down  the beach, something waddled out from behind a cluster of
boulders, heading  for the water. A bird, it  stood some thirty inches tall
and had  a fleeting resemblance to a penguin.  The upper plumage was black,
white below, a large  white spot encircled its eye. Its small wings shifted
as it waddled. The bill was sharp and heavy, a vicious striking weapon.

He was  looking at, he knew,  a great auk, a bird that  up in his world had
been extinct  but which, a few centuries before,  had been common from Cape
Cod to far north  in Canada. Cartier's seamen, ravenous for fresh meat as a
relief from sea rations, had clubbed hundreds to death, eating some of them
at once, putting what remained down in kegs with salt.

Behind  the first  great  auk came  another and  then  two more.  Paying no
attention to  him, they waddled down across the  pebbles to the water, into
which they dived, swimming away.

Latimer  remained  in his  crouch,  staring  at the  birds in  fascination.
Jonathon had  said he  would find them  on the beach, but  knowing he would
find them  and actually seeing them, were two  different things. Now he was
convinced, as he had not been before, of exactly where he was.

Off to his left,  the guns banged occasionally, but otherwise there were no
signs of  the others  in the house. Far  out across the water,  a string of
ducks went scuddling close  above the waves. The pebbled beach held a sense
of peace  - the kind of  peace, he thought, that  men might have known long
years ago  when the earth was still largely  empty of humankind, when there
was still room for such peace to settle in and stay.

Squatting there  upon the beach, he remembered the  clump of birch and now,
suddenly  and  without thinking  of  it,  he knew  what  had attracted  his
attention to  it - an aberration of perspective  that his painter's eye had
caught. Knitting  his brow, he tried  to remember exactly what  it was that
had made the perspective  wrong, but whatever it had been quite escaped him
now.

He glimpsed another agate and went to pick it up, and a little farther down
the beach he found yet another one. This, he told himself, was an unworked,
unpicked  rock-hunters  paradise.  He  put the  agates  in  his pocket  and
continued down  the beach. Spotting other agates, he  did not pick them up.
Later, at  some other  time, if need  be, he could find  hours of amusement
hunting them.

When he  climbed the beach and  started up the slope,  he saw that Jonathon
was  sitting in  a chair  on the veranda  that ran  across the hack  of the
house. He climbed up to where he sat and settled down in another chair.

'Did you see an auk?' asked Jonathon.

'I saw four of them,' said Latimer.

'There are  times,' said  Jonathon, 'that the  beach is crowded  with them.
Other  times, you  won't see one  for days.  Underwood and Charlie  are off
hunting woodcock.  I suppose you heard  them shooting. If they  get back in
time, we'll have woodcock for dinner. Have you ever eaten woodcock?'

'Only once. Some years  ago. A friend and I went up to Nova Scotia to catch
the early flight.'

'I guess  that is  right. Nova Scotia  and a few  other places  now. Here I
imagine you can find hunting of them wherever you can find alder swamps.'

'Where was  everyone?' asked Latimer. 'When  I got out of  the sack and had
something to eat, there was no one around.'

'The  girls went out  blackberrying,' said  Jonathon. 'They do  that often.
Gives them  something to do.  It's getting a little  late for blackberries,
but there  are some  around. They got  back in time to  have blackberry pie
tonight. He smacked his  lips. 'Woodcock and blackberry pie. I hope you are
hungry.'

'Don't you ever think of anything but eating?'

'Lots  of other  things,'  said Jonathon.  'Thing  is, here  you grab  onto
anything you  can think about. It keeps you occupied.  And I might ask you,
are  you feeling  easier than you  were last  night? Got all  the immediate
questions answered?'

'One thing  still bothers me,' said Latimer. 'I  left my car parked outside
the house.  Someone is going to  find it parked there  and will wonder what
has happened.'

'I think  that's something  you don't need  to worry over,'  said Jonathon.
'Whoever is engineering this  business would have seen to it. I don't know,
mind you,  but I would guess that before morning your  car was out of there
and will  be found,  abandoned, some other  place, perhaps a  hundred miles
away. The people we  are dealing with would automatically take care of such
small details.  It wouldn't do  to have too many  incidents clustered about
this house  or in  any other place.  Your car will  be found  and you'll be
missing  and a hunt  will be made  for you.  When you aren't  found, you'll
become just  another one of the dozens of people  who turn up missing every
year.'

'Which  leaves me  to  wonder,' said  Latimer, 'how  many of  these missing
people wind up in  places such as this. It is probably this is not the only
place where some of them are being trapped.'

'There is  no way to know,'  said Jonathon. 'People drop  out for very many
reasons.'

They  sat silent  for  a time,  looking out  across  the sweep  of  lawn. A
squirrel went  scampering down the slope. Far  off, birds were calling. The
distant surf was a hollow booming.

Finally,  Latimer  spoke.  'Last  night,  you  told  me  we  needed  a  new
philosophy, that the old ones were no longer valid.'

'That I did,' said Jonathon. 'We are faced today with a managed society. We
live by  restrictive rules,  we have been  reduced to numbers  - our Social
Security numbers, our Internal  Revenue Service numbers, the numbers on our
credit cards, on our  checking and savings accounts, on any number of other
things.  We are being  dehumanized and,  in most cases,  willingly, because
this numbers  game may seem to make life easier,  but most often because no
one wants to bother to make a fuss about it. We have come to believe that a
man who  makes a fuss is antisocial. We are  a flock of senseless chickens,
fluttering and scurrying, cackling and squawking, but being shooed along in
the way that others want us to go. The advertising agencies tell us what to
buy, the  public relations people tell  us what to think,  and even knowing
this, we do not resent it. We sometimes damn the government when we work up
the  courage  to damn  anyone  at  all. But  I  am  certain it  is not  the
government  we  should  be  damning,  but,  rather,  the  world's  business
managers.  We have  seen the  rise of  multinational complexes that  owe no
loyalty to  any government, that think and plan  in global terms, that view
the  human populations  as a joint  labor corps  - consumer group,  some of
which also  may have investment potential.  This is a threat,  as I see it,
against  human free  will and  human dignity,  and we need  a philosophical
approach that will enable us to deal with it.

'And if  you should write this philosophy,' said  Latimer, 'it would pose a
potential threat against the managers.'

'Not  at first,'  said  Jonathon. 'Perhaps  never. But  it might  have some
influence over the years.  It might start a trend of thinking. To break the
grip  the  managers  now   hold  would  require  something  like  a  social
revolution...'

'These men,  these managers you are talking about  - they would be cautious
men, would they not, farseeing men? They would take no chances. They'd have
too much at stake to take any chances at all.'

'You aren't saying...'

'Yes, I think I am. It is, at least, a thought.'

Jonathon  said, 'I  have thought  of it  myself but  rejected it  because I
couldn't trust myself. It  follows my bias too closely. And it doesn't make
sense. If  there were people they wanted to get out  of the way, there'd be
other ways to do it.'

'Not as  safely,' said  Latimer. 'Here there  is no way we  could be found.
Dead, we would be found...'

'I wasn't thinking of killing.'

'Oh, well,' said Latimer, 'it was only a thought. Another guess.'

'There's one  theory no  one has told you,  or I don't think  they have. An
experiment  in  sociology. Putting  various  groups of  people together  in
unusual situations  and measuring their reactions.  Isolating them so there
is no present-world influence to modify the impact of the situation.'

Latimer shook his head.  'It sounds like a lot of trouble and expense. More
than the experiment would be worth.'

'I think so, too,' said Jonathon.

He rose from  his chair. 'I wonder if you'd excuse me.  I have the habit of
stretching out  for an  hour or so  before dinner. Sometimes  I doze, other
times I sleep, often I just lie there. But it is relaxing.'

'Go ahead,' said Latimer. 'We'll have plenty of time later to talk.'

For half  an hour or more  after Jonathon had left,  he remained sitting in
the chair, staring down across the lawn, but scarcely seeing it.

That idea  about the managers being responsible  for the situation, he told
himself, made  a ragged sort of sense. Managers, he  thought with a smile -
how easy it is to pick up someone else's lingo.

For  one thing, the  idea, if it  worked, would  be foolproof. Pick  up the
people you  wanted out  of the way  and pop them  into time,  and after you
popped them  into time  still keep track of  them to be sure  there were no
slipups. And,  at the  same time, do  them no real injustice,  harm them as
little  as  possible,  keep  a light  load  on  your  conscience, still  be
civilized.

There were two flaws, he told himself. The staff changed from time to time.
That meant  they must  be rotated from  here back to present  time and they
could be a threat. Some way would have had to be worked out to be sure they
never talked,  and given human nature, that would  be a problem. The second
flaw lay  in the people who were here. The  philosopher, if he had remained
in  present time,  could have  been a  threat. But  the rest of  them? What
threat could  a poet pose? A  cartoonist, maybe, perhaps a  novelist, but a
musician-composer -what threat could lie in music?

On the  surface of it, however,  it was not as insane  as it sounded if you
happened not  to be on the  receiving end of it.  The world could have been
spared a lot of grief in the last few hundred years if such a plan had been
operative,  spotting potential  troublemakers well  ahead of the  time they
became a  threat and  isolating them. The hard  part of such a  plan - from
where he sat, an apparently impossible part of it - would lie in accurately
spotting  the potential  troublemakers  before they  began making  trouble.
Although that,  he supposed, might be possible. Given  the state of the art
in psychology, it might be possible.

With a  start, he realized  that during all this  time, without consciously
being  aware of  it, he  had been staring  at the  birch clump. And  now he
remembered another  thing. Just before he  had stumbled off to  bed, he had
seen a  bird light on the  boulder, sit there for  a time, then lift itself
into  the air and  disappear - not  fly away,  but disappear. He  must have
known this  when he saw  it, but been so  fogged by need of  sleep that the
significance of it had not made an impression. Thinking back on it, he felt
sure he was not mistaken. The bird had disappeared.

He  reared out  of  the chair  and strode  down  the slope  until  he stood
opposite the  boulder with the two trees flanking  it and the other growing
close behind it. He  took one of the agates out of his pocket and tossed it
carefully over  the boulder, aimed so that it  would strike the tree behind
the rock.  It did  not strike the  tree; he could  not hear it  fall to the
ground. One  by one,  he tossed all the  other agates as he  had tossed the
first. None of them hit the tree, none fell to the ground. To make sure, he
went around  the tree to the right and,  crouching down, crawled behind the
boulder. He carefully went over the ground. There were no agates there.

Shaken, his  mind a seething turmoil  of mingled doubt and  wonder, he went
back up the hill and sat in the chair again. Thinking the situation over as
calmly as he could, there seemed to be no doubt that he had found a rift of
some sort  in - what would you call it? -  the time continuum, perhaps. And
if you wriggled through  the rift or threw yourself through the rift, you'd
not be  here. He had thrown  the agates and they  were no longer here; they
had  gone elsewhere.  But where would  you go?  Into some other  time, most
likely, and  the best guess would seem to be back  into the time from which
he had been  snatched. He had come from there to here,  and if there were a
rift in  the time continuum, it would seem to  be reasonable to believe the
rift  would  lead back  into  present time  again.  There was  a chance  it
wouldn't, but the chance seemed small, for only two times had been involved
in the interchange.

And if he did  go back, what could he do? Maybe not a lot, but he damn well
could  try. His  first move  would be  to disappear,  to get away  from the
locality  and lose himself.  Whoever was  involved in this  trapping scheme
would try  to find him, but  he would make it  his business to be extremely
hard  to find.  Then, once  he had  done that,  he would start  digging, to
ferret  out the  managers  Jonathon had  mentioned,  or if  not them,  then
whoever might he behind all this.

He could not tell  the others here what he suspected. Inadvertently, one of
them might tip off  a staff member, or worse, might try to prevent him from
doing what he  meant to do, having no wish to change  the even tenor of the
life they enjoyed here.

When Underwood and Charlie  came up the hill with their guns, their hunting
coats bulging with the  woodcock they had bagged, he went inside with them,
where  the  others  had  gathered  in  the  drawing  room for  a  round  of
before-dinner drinks.

At dinner, there was, as Jonathon had said there would be, broiled woodcock
and blackberry  pie, both  of which were exceptionally  tasty, although the
pie was very full of seeds.

After  dinner, they  collected  once again  before the  fire and  talked of
inconsequential things. Later on Alice played and again it was Chopin.

In his  room, he pulled a  chair over to the  window and sat there, looking
out  at the  birch clump.  He waited  until he  could hear no  one stirring
about, and then two  more hours after that, to make sure all were safely in
their beds, if not  asleep. Then he went softly down the stairs and out the
back  door. A  half-moon lighted  the lawn  so that  he had  little trouble
locating the birch clump.  Now that he was there, he was assailed by doubt.
It was ridiculous to  think, he told himself, what he had been thinking. He
would climb  up on the boulder and throw himself  out toward the third tree
that stood behind the boulder and he would tumble to the ground between the
tree  and  boulder  and  nothing  would  have  happened.  He  would  trudge
sheepishly up  the slope  again and go  to bed, and  after a  time he would
manage to forget what  he had done and it would be as  if he had never done
it.  And yet,  he remembered,  he had  thrown the  agates, and when  he had
looked, there had not been any agates.

He  scrambled up  the face  of the  boulder and  perched cautiously  on its
rounded top. He put out his hands to grasp the third birch and save himself
from falling. Then he launched himself toward the tree.

He fell  only a short distance, but landed hard  upon the ground. There had
not been any birch to catch to break his fall.

A hot  sun blazed  down upon him. The  ground beneath him was  not a greasy
lawn, but a sandy loam with no grass at all. There were some trees, but not
any birches.

He scrambled to his feet and turned to look at the house. The hilltop stood
bare; there was no house. Behind him, he could hear the booming of the surf
as it battered itself to spray against the rocky coastline.

Thirty  feet  away,  to  his  left,  stood  a massive  poplar,  its  leaves
whispering in  the wind  that blew off  the sea. Beyond it  grew a scraggly
pine tree and just  down the slope, a cluster of trees that he thought were
willows.  The  ground was  covered  -  not too  thickly  covered, for  rain
runneled  soil  showed through  -  by a  growth  of small  ferns and  other
low-growing plants he could not identify.

He felt  the perspiration starting from his  body, running in rivulets from
his armpits down his  ribs - but whether from fear or sun, he did not know.
For he was afraid, stiff and aching with the fear.

In addition  to the poplar and the pine,  low-growing shrubs were rooted in
the ground among the ferns and other ground cover. Birds flew low, from one
clump of shrubbery to another, chirping as they flew. From below him, their
cries muted by the pounding of the surf, other birds were squalling. Gulls,
he thought, or birds like gulls.

Slowly the  first impact  of the fear drained  from him and he  was able to
move. He took a  cautious step and then another and then was running toward
the hilltop where the house should be, but wasn't.

Ahead of him, something moved and he skidded to a halt, poised to go around
whatever had moved in the patch of shrubbery. A head poked out of the patch
and stared  at him with unblinking  eyes. The nose was  blunt and scaly and
farther hack  the scales gave way to plates of  armor. The thing mumbled at
him disapprovingly and lurched forward a step or two, then halted.

It  stood there,  staring at  him with  its unblinking  eyes. Its  hack was
covered by  overlapping plates.  Its front legs  were bowed. It  stood four
feet at  the shoulder.  It did not  seem to be threatening;  rather, it was
curious.

His breath caught in  his throat. Once, long ago, he had seen a drawing, an
artist's conception, of this tiling -not exactly like it, but very much the
same. An  anky, he thought - what was it? -  an ankylosaurus, that was what
it was,  he realized,  amazed that he  should remember, an  ankylosaurus. A
creature that should have  been dead for millions of years. But the caption
had said  six feet at the shoulder and fifteen feet  long, and this one was
nowhere near that big.  A small one, he thought, maybe a young one, maybe a
different species, perhaps a baby ankywhatever-the-hell-it-was.

Cautiously, almost  on tiptoe, he  walked around it, while  it kept turning
its head to watch him. It made no move toward him. He kept looking over his
shoulder to  be sure it  hadn't moved. Herbivorous, he  assured himself, an
eater of plants -  posing no danger to anything at all, equipped with armor
plate to  discourage the  meat eaters that  might slaver for  its flesh. He
tried hard to remember whether the caption had said it was herbivorous, but
his mind, on that particular point, was blank.

Although, if it were here, there would he carnivores as well - and, for the
love of  God, what had he fallen into? Why hadn't  he given more thought to
the possibility  that something like this might  happen, that he would not,
necessarily, automatically  go back  to present time, but  might be shunted
off into  another time? And why, just as a  matter of precaution, hadn't he
armed himself  before he left? There were  high-caliber guns in the library
and he could have taken one of them and a few boxes of ammunition if he had
just thought about it.

He had  failed to  recognize the possibility  of being dumped  into a place
like this,  he admitted, because he had been  thinking about what he wanted
to  happen, to  the exclusion of  all else,  using shaky logic  to convince
himself that  he was right. His  wishful thinking, he now  knew, had landed
him in a place no sane man would choose.

He was back in the age of dinosaurs and there wasn't any house. He probably
was the only human on the planet, and if his luck held out, he might last a
day or two, but  probably not much more than that. He knew he was going off
the deep end again, thinking as illogically as he had been when he launched
himself into the time  rift. There might not be that many carnivores about,
and if a man was observant and cautious and gave himself a chance to learn,
he might  be able to survive.  Although the chances were  that he was stuck
here. There  could be little hope that he could  find another rift in time,
and even if  he did, there would be no assurance that  it would take him to
anything better than this. Perhaps, if he could find the point where he had
emerged into  this world, he might have a chance  to locate the rift again,
although  there was  no  guarantee that  the rift  was  a two-way  rift. He
stopped and looked around,  but there was no way to know where he had first
come upon this place. The landscape all looked very much the same.

The ankylosaurus,  he saw, had come  a little out of  the shrub thicket and
was nibbling  quite contentedly at the ground  cover. Turning his back upon
it, he went trudging up the hill.

Before he  reached the  crest, he turned  around again to have  a look. The
ankylosaurus was no longer around, or perhaps he did not know where to look
for it. Down in the swale that had been the alder swamp where Underwood and
Charlie had  bagged the  woodcock, a herd  of small reptiles  were feeding,
browsing off low-growing shrubs and ground cover.

Along the  skyline of the hill beyond which the  herd was feeding. a larger
creature lurched  along on  its hind legs,  its body slanted  upright at an
angle,  the shriveled forearms  dangling at  its side, its  massive, brutal
head jerking  as it  walked. The herd  in the swale  stopped their feeding,
heads  swiveling to  look  at the  lurching horror.  Then they  ran, racing
jerkily on skinny hind  legs, like a flock of outsize, featherless chickens
racing for their lives.

Latimer turned again and  walked toward the top of the hill. The last slope
was  steep, steeper  than he remembered  it had  been on that  other, safer
world. He was panting when he reached the crest, and he stopped a moment to
regain his  breath. Then, when he  was breathing more easily,  he turned to
look toward the south.

Half-turned, he halted, amazed at what he saw - the last thing in the world
that he had expected  to see. Sited in the valley that lay between the hill
on which he stood and the next headland to the south, was a building. Not a
house, but  a building.  It stood at  least thirty stories  high and looked
like an office building, its windows gleaming in the sun.

He sobbed  in surprise and thankfulness,  but even so, he  did not begin to
run toward it, but  stood for a moment looking at it, as if he must look at
it for a time  to believe that it was there. Around it  lay a park of grass
and tastefully planted trees.  Around the park ran a high wire fence and in
the fence at  the foot of the hill closest to him  was a gate, beside which
was a sentry box. Outside the sentry box stood two men who carried guns.

Then he  was running, racing  recklessly down the hill,  running with great
leaps, ducking thickets of shrubs. He stubbed his toe and fell, pinwheeling
down the  slope. He brought up against a  tree and, the breath half-knocked
out of him, got  to his feet, gasping and wheezing. The men at the gate had
not moved, but he knew that they had seen him; they were gazing up the hill
toward him.

Moving  at a  careful, slower  pace, he  went on  down the hill.  The slope
leveled off and he found a faint path that he followed toward the gate.

He came up to the two guards and stopped.

'You damn fool,' one  of them said to him. 'What do you think you're doing,
going out without a gun? Trying to get yourself killed?'

'There's  been an  old  Tyranno messing  around here  for the  last several
days,' said the other guard. 'He was seen by several people. An old bastard
like that could go  on the prod at the sight of you and you wouldn't have a
chance.'

'The first guard jerked his rifle toward the gate. 'Get in there,' he said.
'Be thankful  you're alive. If I  ever catch you going  out again without a
gun, I'll turn you in, so help me.'

'Thank you, sir,' said Latimer.

He walked  through the gate, following a path  of crushed shells toward the
front  entrance of  the office building.  But now  that he was  there, safe
behind the fence, the  reaction began setting in. His knees were wobbly and
he staggered  when he  walked. He sat  down on a  bench beneath  a tree. He
found that his hands  were shaking and he held them hard against his thighs
to stop the trembling.

How lucky could one get? He asked himself. And what did it mean? A house in
the  more  recent past,  an  office building  in  this place  that must  be
millions  of years  into the past.  There had  not been dinosaurs  upon the
earth for at least sixty million years. And the rift? How had the rift come
about? Was  it something that could  occur naturally, or had  it come about
because someone was manipulating  time? Would such rifts come when someone,
working  deliberately,  using  techniques  of  which there  was  no  public
knowledge, was  putting stress upon the  web of time? Was  it right to call
time a web? He decided that it made no difference, that the terminology was
not of great importance.

An office  building, he thought. What  did an office building  mean? Was it
possible that he had stumbled on the headquarters of the
project/conspiracy/program  that was  engaged in  the trapping  of selected
people in the past?  Thinking of it, the guess made Sense. A cautious group
of men could not take the chance of operating such an enterprise in present
time,  where  it  might  he nosed  out  by  an  eager-beaver  newsman or  a
governmental investigation or by some other means. Here, buried in millions
of years of time, there would be little chance of someone unmasking it.

Footsteps crunched on the path and Latimer looked up. A man in sports shirt
and flannels stood in front of him.

'Good morning, sir,' said Latimer.

The man asked, 'Could you be David Latimer, by any chance?'

'I could be, said Latimer.

'I thought  so. I don't remember  seeing you before. And  I was sure I knew
everyone. And the guards reported..."

'I arrived only an hour or so ago.'

'Mr Gale wanted to see you as soon as you arrived.'

'You mean you were expecting me?'

'Well, we  couldn't be absolutely sure,'  said the other. 'We  are glad you
made it.'

Latimer got off the  bench and the two of them walked together to the front
entrance, climbed the steps, and went through the door. They walked through
a deserted  lounge, then into a  hallway flanked by numbered  doors with no
names upon them. Halfway down the hall, the man with Latimer knocked at one
of the doors.

'Come in,' a voice said.

The man  opened the  door and stuck his  head in. 'Mr Latimer  is here,' he
said. 'He made it.'

'That is fine,' said the voice. 'I am glad he did. Please show him in.'

The man stepped aside to allow Latimer to enter, then stepped back into the
hall and  closed the door. Latimer  stood alone, facing the  man across the
room.

'I'm Donovan  Gale,' said the man,  rising from his desk  and coming across
the room.  He held  out his hand  and Latimer took  it. Gale's  grasp was a
friendly corporate handshake.

'Let's sit over here,'  he said, indicating a davenport. 'It seems to me we
may have a lot to talk about.'

'I'm interested in hearing what you have to say,' said Latimer.

'I guess  both of us are,' said Gale. 'Interested in  what the other has to
say, I mean.'

They  sat down  on  opposite ends  of the  davenport,  turning to  face one
another.

'So you are David Latimer,' said Gale. 'The famous painter.'

'Not famous,'  said Latimer. 'Not yet. And it appears  now that I may never
be. But what I don't understand is how you were expecting me.'

'We knew you'd left Auk House.'

'So that is what you call it. Auk House.'

'And we  suspected you  would show up  here. We didn't  know exactly where,
although we  hoped that it would be nearby.  Otherwise you never would have
made it.  There are monsters in those hills.  Although, of course, we could
not be  really sure that you would wind up here.  Would you mind telling us
how you did it?'

Latimer shook  his head. 'I don't believe I will.  Not right now, at least.
Maybe later  on when I know  more about your operation.  And now a question
for  you. Why me?  Why an inoffensive  painter who  was doing no  more than
trying to  make a living and  a reputation that might  enable him to make a
better living?'

'I see,' said Gale, 'that you have it figured out.'

'Not all of it,'  said Latimer. 'And, perhaps, not all of it correctly. But
I resent being treated  as a bad guy, as a potential threat of some sort. I
haven't got the guts  or the motive to be a bad guy. And Enid, for Christ's
sake. Enid is a poet. And Alice. All Alice does is play a good piano.'

'You're talking  to the  wrong men,' Gale  told him. 'Breen  could tell you
that, if you can get him to tell you. I'm only personnel.'

'Who is Breen?'

'He's head of the evaluation team.'

'Those are the ones  who figure out who is going to be picked up and tossed
into time.'

'Yes, that is the  idea, crudely. There's a lot more to it than that. There
is a  lot of work done here. Thousands  of newspapers and other periodicals
to  be   read  to   spot  potential  subjects.   Preliminary  psychological
determinations.  Then it's  necessary  to do  further study  back  on prime
world. Further  investigation of potential subjects.  But no one back there
really knows what is  going on. They're just hired to do jobs now and then.
The real work goes on here.'

'Prime world is present time? Your old world and mine?'

'Yes. If you think,  however, of prime world as present time, that's wrong.
That's not  the way it is. We're not dealing  with time, but with alternate
worlds. The  one you just came  from is a world  where everything else took
place  exactly as  it  did in  prime world,  with  one exception  man never
evolved. There are no  men there and never will be. Here, where we are now,
something more drastic occurred.  Here the reptiles did not become extinct.
The Cretaceous  never came to an  end, the Cenozoic never  got started. The
reptiles  are  still  the  dominant  species  and  the  mammals  still  are
secondary.'

'You're taking a chance, aren't you, in telling me all this.'

'I don't  think so,' said Gale. 'You're not  going anywhere. There are none
of us  going anywhere. Once we  sign up for this  post, we know there's not
any going back. We're stuck here. Unless you have a system...'

'No system. I was just lucky.'

'You're  something of  an embarrassment  to us,'  said Gale. 'in  the years
since the program has  been in operation, nothing like this has happened at
any of  the stations. We don't  know what to make of  it and we don't quite
know what to do  with you. For the moment, you'll stay on as a guest. Later
on, if it is  your wish, we could find a place for  you. You could become a
member of the team.'

'Right at  the moment,' said  Latimer, 'that holds no  great attraction for
me.'

'That's because  you aren't aware of  the facts, nor of  the dangers. Under
the economic  and social systems  that have been developed  in prime world,
the great  mass of mankind has never had it  so good. There are ideological
differences, of course, but  there is some hope that they eventually can be
ironed out. There are underprivileged areas; this cannot be denied. But one
must  also  concede that  their  only  hope lies  in  their development  by
free-world  business interests.  So-called  big-business interests  are the
world's  one hope.  With the  present economic  structure gone,  the entire
world would  go down into another  Dark Age, from which  it would require a
thousand years  or more to recover, if recovery,  in fact, were possible at
all.'

'So to  protect your  precious economic structure,  you place a  painter, a
poet, a musician into limbo.'

Gale made  a despairing  gesture with his  hands. 'I have told  you I can't
supply the  rationale on that. You'll have to see Breen  if he has the time
to see you. He's a very busy man.'

'I would imagine that he might be.'

'He  might even  dig out  the files and  tell you,'  said Gale. 'As  I say,
you're not going anywhere.  You can pose no problem now. You are stuck with
us and we with you. I suppose that we could send you back to Auk House, but
that would be undesirable,  I think. It would only upset the people who are
there. As  it is, they'll probably figure that  you simply wandered off and
got killed  by a  bear or bitten by  a rattlesnake, or drowned  in a swamp.
They'll look  for you  and when they don't  find you, that will  be it. You
only  got lost;  they'll never consider  for a  moment that you  escaped. I
think we  had better leave it at that. Since you  are here and, given time,
would nose out the  greater part of our operation, we have no choice but to
be frank with you. Understandably, however, we'd prefer that no one outside
this headquarters knew.'

'Back at Auk House, there was a painting of mine hanging in my room.'

'We thought  it was a nice touch,' said Gale. 'A  sort of friendly thing to
do. We could bring it here.'

'That  wasn't  why I  asked,'  said Latimer.  'I  was wondering  - did  the
painting's subject  have something to do with what you  did to me? Were you
afraid that  I would  go on painting  pictures pointing up  the failures of
your precious economic structure?'

Gale was uncomfortable. 'I couldn't say,' he said.

'I was  about to  say that if  such is the  case, you stand  on very flimsy
ground and carry a deep guilt complex.'

'Such things are beyond me,' said Gale. 'I can't even make a comment.'

'And this is all you want of me? To stand in place? To simply be a guest of
all these big-hearted corporations?'

'Unless you want to tell us how you got here.'

'I have told you  that I won't do that. Not now. I suppose if you put me to
the torture...'

'We wouldn't torture you,'  said Gale. 'We are civilized. We regret some of
the things  that we must  do, but we do  not flinch from duty.  And not the
duty to  what you call big-hearted corporations,  but to all humankind. Man
has  a good  thing going;  we can't  allow it  to be undermined.  We're not
taking any  chances. And now, perhaps I should call  someone to show you to
your room. I take it you got little sleep last night.'

Latimer's room was on one of the topmost floors and was larger and somewhat
more tastefully furnished than the room at Auk House. From a window, he saw
that the conformation of  the coastline was much the same as it had been at
Auk House.  The dirty gray of  the ocean stretched off  to the east and the
surf still  came rolling in to  break upon the boulders.  Some distance off
shore,  a school  of  long-necked creatures  were cavorting  in  the water.
Watching them more closely,  Latimer made out that they were catching fish.
Scattered reptilian  monstrosities moved  about in the hills  that ran back
from the  sea, some of them in small herds, some  of them alone. Dwarfed by
distance, none of them  seemed unusually large. The trees, he saw, were not
a great  deal different from the ones he had known.  The one thing that was
wrong was the lack of grass.

He had been a  victim of simplistic thinking in believing, he told himself,
that when  he threw  himself into the  rift he would be  carried to present
time or prime world or whatever one might call it. In the back of his mind,
as well,  although he had not  really dared to think  it, had been the idea
that if he could get back to the real world, he could track down the people
who were involved and put a stop to it.

There was no chance of that now, he knew, and there never had been. Back on
prime world,  there would be no  evidence that would stand  up, only highly
paid lackeys  who performed necessary chores.  Private investigators, shady
operators like the Boston realtor and the Campbell who had listed Auk House
for sale or rent.  Undoubtedly, the sign announcing the house was available
was posted only when  a potential so-called customer would be driving past.
Campbell  would have  been paid well,  perhaps in  funds that could  not be
traced,  for the  part  he played,  offering the  house and  then, perhaps,
driving  off the  car  left behind  by the  customer.  He took  some risks,
certainly,  but they were  minimal. Even  should he have  been apprehended,
there  would be  no way  in which he  could be  tied into the  project. He,
himself, would have had no inkling of the project. A few men in prime world
would have  to know, of course,  for some sort of  communications had to be
maintained  between  this  operations  center  and  prime  world.  But  the
prime-world men, undoubtedly, would  be solid citizens, not too well known,
all beyond  suspicion or reproach.  They would be very  careful against the
least suspicion, and the communications between them and this place must be
of a kind that could not be traced and would have no record.

Those few  upright men, perhaps a number of hired hands  who had no idea of
what was  being done, would he the only ones in  prime world who would play
any part  in the project. The heart of the  operation was in this building.
Here the  operations were safe. There  was no way to  get at them. Gale had
not even  bothered to deny what was being done,  had merely referred him to
Breen  for any  further explanation.  And Breen,  should he talk  with him,
probably would make no denial, either.

And  here  he  stood,  David Latimer,  artist,  the  one  man outside  time
organization  who,  while  perhaps  not realizing  the  full  scope of  the
project, still knew what was happening. Knew and could do nothing about it.
He ran  the facts  he had so far  acquired back and forth  across his mind,
seeking some chink of weakness, arid there seemed to be none.

Silly, he  thought, one man pitting  himself against a group  that held the
resources  of the  earth within  its grasp,  a group  at once  ruthless and
fanatical, that  commanded as its  managers the best brains  of the planet,
arrogant  in its  belief  that what  was good  for the  group was  good for
everyone,  brooking no  interference, alert  to even the  slightest threat,
even to imagined threat.

Silly, perhaps absurdly quixotic  - and, yet, what could he do? To save his
own self-respect,  to pay even lip  service to the dignity  of humanity, he
must make at least a token effort, even knowing that the possibility of his
accomplishing anything was very close to zero.

Say this much for  them, he thought, they were not cruel men. In many ways,
they  were compassionate.  Their imagined  enemies were neither  killed nor
confined in  noisome prisons, as  had been the case  with historic tyrants.
They  were held  under  the best  of  circumstances, all  their needs  were
supplied,  they  were not  humiliated.  Everything  was done  to keep  them
comfortable  and happy.  The one thing  that had  been taken from  them was
their freedom of choice.

But man, he thought, had fought for bitter centuries for that very freedom.
It was not something that should be lightly held or easily relinquished.

All this, at the moment, he thought, was pointless. If he should be able to
do anything  at all, it might not he until  after months of observation and
learning. He could remain  in the room for hours, wallowing in his doubt an
incompetency,  and gain  not a  thing by it.  It was  time to begin  to get
acquainted with his new surroundings.

The parklike  grounds surrounding  the buildings were ringed  by the fence,
twelve  feet high  or more, with  a four-foot  fence inside it.  There were
trees and shrubs and beds of flowers and grass - the only grass he had seen
since coming here, a well-tended greensward.

Paths  of crushed  shell  ran among  the trees  and  underneath them  was a
coolness  and a  quiet. A few  gardeners worked  in flower beds  and guards
stood  at the  distant  gate, but  otherwise there  were few  people about.
Probably it was still office hours; later on, there might be many people.

He  came upon the  man sitting on  the bench  when the walk  curved sharply
around a  group of head-high  shrubbery. Latimer stopped, and  for a moment
they regarded one another as if each was surprised at the appearance of the
other.

Then the man  on the bench said, with a twinkle in  his eye, 'It seems that
the  two of  us  are the  only ones  who  have no  tasks on  this beautiful
afternoon. Could you be, possibly, the refugee from Auk House?'

'As a matter of fact, I am,' said Latimer. 'My name is David Latimer, as if
you didn't know.'

'Upon my word,' said  the other, 'I didn't know your name. I had only heard
that  someone had escaped  from Auk House  and had  ended up with  us. News
travels  swiftly here. The  place is a  rumor mill.  There is so  little of
consequence that  happens that  once some notable  event does occur,  it is
chewed to tiny shreds.

'My name,  by the way, is  Horace Sutton and I'm  a paleontologist. Can you
imagine a better place for a paleontologist to be?'

'No, I can't,' said Latimer.

'Please  share this  bench with me,'  invited Sutton.  'I take it  there is
nothing of immediate urgency that requires your attention.'

'Not a thing,' said Latimer. 'Nothing whatsoever.'

'Well, that  is fine,' said Sutton. 'We can sit and  talk a while or stroll
around for a bit,  however you may wish. Then, as soon as the sun gets over
the yardarm,  if by that time  you're not totally disenchanted  with me, we
can indulge ourselves in some fancy drinking.'

Sutton's hair  was graying and his face was  lined, but there was something
youthful about him that offset the graying hair and lines.

Latimer sat down and Sutton said to him, 'What do you think of this layout?
A  charming place,  indeed. The  tall fence,  as you  may have  guessed, is
electrified, and the lower fence keeps stupid people such as you and I from
blundering into  it. Although, there have  been times I have  been glad the
fence is  there. Comes  a time when a  carnivore or two scents  the meat in
here and is intent upon a feast, you are rather glad it's there.'

'Do they gather often? The carnivores, I mean.'

'Not as much as  they did at one time. After a while, the knowledge of what
to keep away from sinks into even a reptilian brain.'

'As a paleontologist you study the wildlife here.'

'For the last ten  years,' said Sutton. 'I guess a bit less time than that.
It was strange at first; it still seems a little strange. A paleontologist,
you understand, ordinarily works with bones and fossil footprints and other
infuriating  evidence that  almost  tells you  what you  want to  know, but
always falls short.

'Here there is another  problem. From the viewpoint of prime world, many of
the reptiles,  including the dinosaurs, died  out sixty-three million years
ago. Here they did  not die out. As a result, we are looking at them not as
they  were  millions of  years  ago,  but as  they  are  after millions  of
additional years of evolutionary  development. Some of the old species have
disappeared, others  have evolved into something else  in which you can see
the traces of their lineage, and some entirely new forms have arisen.'

'You  sound as  if your  study of  them is  very dedicated,'  said Latimer.
'Under other circumstances, you would probably be writing a book...'

'But I am writing  a book,' said Sutton. 'I am hard at work on it. There is
a man here  who is very clever at drawing and he  is making diagrams for me
and there will be photographs...'

'But what's  the point?' asked Latimer. 'Who will  publish it? When will it
be published?  Gale told me that no one ever leaves  here, that there is no
going back to prime world.'

'That  is right,'  said Sutton. 'We  are exiled  from prime world.  I often
think  of us  as  a Roman  garrison stationed,  say, on  Britain's northern
border or  in the wilds of Dacia, with the  understanding that we'll not be
going back to Rome.'

'But  that  means your  book  won't be  published.  I suppose  it could  be
transmitted back to prime world and be printed there, but the publishing of
it would destroy the secrecy of the project.'

'Exactly how much do you know about the project?' Sutton asked.

'Not much,  perhaps. Simply the purpose  of it - the  trapping of people in
time - no, not time, I guess. Alternate worlds, rather.'

'Then you don't know the whole of it?'

'Perhaps I don't,' said Latimer.

'The matter of removing  potentially dangerous personnel from prime world,'
said Sutton, 'is only  part of it. Surely if you have thought of it at all,
you could see other possibilities.'

'I haven't  had time to think too deeply on it,'  said Latimer. 'No time at
all, in fact. You don't mean the exploitation of these other worlds?'

'It's exactly  what I  mean,' said Sutton.  'It is so  obvious, so logical.
Prime  world  is  running  out of  resources.  In  these  worlds, they  lie
untouched. The exploitation of the alternate worlds not only would open new
resources, but  would provide  employment, new lands  for colonization, new
space for  expansion. It is definitely  a better idea than  this silly talk
you hear about going  off into outer space to find new worlds that could be
colonized.'

'Then why all the mummery of using it to get rid of potential enemies?'

'You sound as if you do not approve of this part of the project.'

'I'm not sure I approve of any of it and certainly not of picking up people
and stashing them away. You seem to ignore the fact that I was one of those
who was picked up and stashed away. The whole thing smells of paranoia. For
the love of God,  the big business interests of prime world have so solid a
grip on the institutions  of the Earth and, in large part, on the people of
the Earth, that there  is no reason for the belief that there is any threat
against them.'

'But  they do  take into  account,' said  Sutton, 'the possibility  of such
threats rising in the  years to come, probably based upon events that could
be happening  right now. They have corps  of psychologists who are pursuing
studies aimed against such possibilities, corps of economists and political
scientists who  are looking at possible future  trends that might give rise
to antibusiness  reactions. And, as you  know, they are pinpointing certain
specific  areas  and peoples  who  could  contribute, perhaps  unwittingly,
either now or in the future, to undesirable reactions. But, as I understand
it, they are hopeful that if they can forestall the trends that would bring
about such reactions for a few centuries, then the political, the economic,
and the  social climates will be so solidly  committed in their favor, that
they can  go ahead with the  exploitation of some of  the alternate worlds.
They want  to be  sure before they  embark on it, however,  that they won't
have to keep looking over their shoulders.'

'But hundreds of years! All the people who are engaged in this project will
have been long dead by then.'

'You  forget   that  a  corporation  can   live  for  many  centuries.  The
corporations are  the driving force  here. And, in the  meantime, those who
work in the project gain many advantages. It is worth their while.'

'But they can't go back to Earth - back to prime world, that is.'

'You are hung up  on prime world,' said Sutton. 'By working in the project,
you are  showered with  advantages that prime  world could never  give you.
Work in the project  for twenty years, for example, and at the age of fifty
- in some cases, even earlier - you can have a wide choice of retirements -
an estate  somewhere on Auk world,  a villa on a  paradise world, a hunting
lodge  in  another  world  where  there  is  a  variety  of  game  that  is
unbelievable. With  your family, if you have  one, with servants, with your
every  wish fulfilled. Tell  me, Mr Latimer,  could you  do as well  if you
stayed on prime world? I've listed only a few possibilities; there are many
others.'

'Gale told me it  would be possible to send me back to Auk House. So people
can move around these alternate worlds, but not back to prime world?'

'That is  right. Supplies for all the worlds  are transported to this world
and from here sent out to other stations.'

'But how? How is this done?'

'I have  no idea.  There is an  entire new technology involved.  Once I had
thought it would be matter transmitters, but I understand it's not. Certain
doors exist. Doors with quote marks around them. I suppose there is a corps
of elite engineers who knew, but would suspect that no one else does.'

'You spoke of families.'

'There are families here.'

'But I didn't see ...'

'The kids are in  school. There aren't many people about right now. They'll
be showing  up at the cocktail  hour. A sort of  country-club routine here.
That's why I like  to get up early. Not many are about. I have this park to
myself.'

'Sutton, you sound as if you like this setup.'

'I don't mind it,'  Sutton said. It's far preferable to what I had in prime
world. There  my reputation had been ruined by a  silly dispute I fell into
with several  of my colleagues. My wife died. My  university let me stay on
in sufferance. So when I was offered a decent job...'

'Not telling you what kind of job?'

'Well, no, not really.  But the conditions of employment sounded good and I
would be  in sole charge of  the investigation that was  in prospect. To be
frank with you, I jumped at it.'

'You must have been surprised.'

'In fact, I was. It took a while to reconcile myself to the situation.'

'But why would they want a paleontologist?'

'You  mean,   why  would   money-grabbing,  cynical  corporations   want  a
paleontologist?'

'I guess that's what I mean.'

'Look, Latimer  - the  men who make  up the corporations  are not monsters.
They saw here the need for a study of a truly unique world - a continuation
of the  Cretaceous, which  has been, for  years, an intriguing  part of the
planet's  history. They  saw it  as a  contribution to human  knowledge. My
book,  when it  is published,  will show  this world  at a time  before the
impact of human exploitation fell upon it.'

'When your book is published?'

'When it  is safe to make the announcement  that alternate worlds have been
discovered and are being  opened for colonization. I'll never see the book,
of course,  but nevertheless,  I take some  pride in it. Here  I have found
confirmation for my stand that brought about condemnation by my colleagues.
Fuzzy thinking, they said, but they were the fuzzy thinkers. This book will
vindicate me.'

'And that's important? Even after you are dead?'

'Of course it is important. Even after I am dead.'

Sutton looked  at his  watch. 'I think,' he  said, 'it may be  time now. It
just occurred to me. Have you had anything to eat?'

'No,' said Latimer. 'I hadn't thought of it before. But I am hungry.'

'There'll be  snacks in  the bar,' said  Sutton. 'Enough to  hold you until
dinner.'

'One more  question before we leave,' said  Latimer. 'You said the reptiles
showed some evolutionary trends. In what direction? How have they changed?'

'In many ways,' said Sutton. 'Bodily changes, of course. Perhaps ecological
changes as  well - behavioral changes, although I can't  he sure of that. I
can't know  what their behavior  was before. Some of  the bigger carnivores
haven't changed  at all. Perhaps a  bit more ability in  a number of cases.
Their prey  may have become faster,  more alert, and the  carnivores had to
develop a greater agility  or starve. But the most astonishing change is in
intelligence. There  is one species, a brand-new species  so far as I know,
that  seems  to  have   developed  a  pronounced  intelligence.  If  it  is
intelligence,  it  is  taking  a  strange  direction. It's  hard  to  judge
correctly. You must remember that of all the stupid things that ever walked
the earth, some of  the dinosaurs ranked second to none. They didn't have a
lick of sense.'

'You said intelligence in a strange direction.'

'Let me  try to tell you.  I've watched these jokers  for hours on end. I'm
almost  positive  that  they  handle  herds  of  herbivores  -  herbivorous
reptiles, that is. They  don't run around them like sheepdogs manage sheep,
but I am sure they do control them. There are always a few of them watching
the herds, and while they're watching them, the herds do no straying - they
stay  together like  a  flock of  sheep tended  by dogs.  They move  off in
orderly fashion when there is need to move to a new pasture. And every once
in a while, a few members of the herd with detach themselves and go ambling
off  to a  place where  others of  the so-called intelligent  dinosaurs are
hanging out,  and there they are killed. They walk  in to be slaughtered. I
can't  get  over the  feeling  that  the herbivores   are  meat herds,  the
livestock of  the intelligence species. And  another thing. When carnivores
roam in,  these intelligent jokers shag  them out of there.  Not by chasing
them or  threatening them. Just by moving out where  they can be seen. Then
they  sit  down,  and  after the  carnivores  have  looked  them over,  the
carnivores seem  to get a little jittery, and after  a short time they move
off.'

'Hypnotism? Some sort of mental power?'

'Possibly.'

'That  wouldn't  have to  be  intelligence. It  could  be no  more than  an
acquired survival trait.'

'Somehow  I don't  think  so. Other  than  watching herds  and warning  off
carnivores -  if that is what  they're doing - they  sit around a lot among
themselves. Like  a hunch of  people talking. That's the  impression I get,
that they  are talking. None of  the social mannerisms that  are seen among
primates  - no  grooming, horseplay,  things like  that. There seems  to be
little personal contact -  no touching, no patting, no stroking. As if none
of  this were  needed. But  they dance.  Ritualistic dancing of  some sort.
Without music.  Nothing to  make music with.  They have no  artifacts. They
haven't got  the hands that could fashion  artifacts. Maybe they don't need
tools  or  weapons or  musical  instruments. Apparently  they have  certain
sacred spots.  Places where they go,  either singly or in  small groups, to
meditate  or worship. I  know of one  such place;  there may be  others. No
idols, nothing  physical to  worship. A secluded spot.  Seemingly a special
place. They  have been using it  for years. They have worn  a path to it, a
path trod out through  the centuries. They seem to have no form of worship,
no  rituals that  must be  observed. They  simply go  and sit there.  At no
special time.  There are no Sundays  in this world. I  suspect they go only
when they feel the need of going.'

'It is a chilling thought,' said Latimer.

'Yes, I suppose it is.'

He looked  at his  watch again. 'I  am beginning to  feel the  need of that
drink,' he said. 'How about you?'

'Yes' said Latimer, 'I could do with one.'

And now, he told himself, he had a few more of the answers. He knew how the
staff at  Auk House was  changed, where the supplies  came from. Everything
and  everyone, apparently,  was channeled  and routed from  this operations
center. Prime  world, from  time to time, furnished  supplies and personnel
and then the rest was handled here.

He  found  himself  puzzled  by Sutton's  attitude.  The  man seemed  quite
content, bore no resentment  over being exiled here. They are not monsters,
he had  said, implying that the  men in this operation  were reasonable and
devoted men  working in the public interest.  He was convinced that someday
his book  would be  published, according him  posthumous vindication. There
had been,  as well,  Latimer remembered, Enid's poems  and Dorothy's novel.
Had the  poems and  the novel been  published back in  prime world, perhaps
under pseudonyms, works so excellent that it had been deemed important that
they not be lost?

And what  about the men who had done the research  that had resulted in the
discovery  of the  alternate  worlds and  had worked  out the  technique of
reaching  and occupying  them? Not  still on  prime world,  certainly; they
would pose  too great a danger there. Retired,  perhaps, to estates on some
of the alternate worlds.

They  walked around  one of  the clumps  of trees  with which the  park was
dotted, and  from a distance Latimer  heard the sound of  children happy at
their play.

'School is out,' said Sutton. 'Now it's the children's hour.'

'One more  thing,' said Latimer, 'if you don't  mind. One more question. On
all these  other alternate worlds you mention,  are there any humans native
to those worlds? Is it possible there are other races of men?'

'So far as I  know,' said Sutton, 'man rose only once, on prime world. What
I have told you  is not the entire story, I imagine. There may be much more
to it. I've been  too busy to attempt to find out more.  All I told you are
the things I have  picked up in casual conversation. I do not know how many
other  alternate worlds  have  been discovered,  nor  on how  many of  them
stations  have been  established. I  do know  that on  Auk world  there are
several stations other than Auk House.'

'By stations, you mean the places where they put the undesirables.

'You put it very  crudely, Mr Latimer, but yes, you are quite right. On the
matter of  humans arising elsewhere, I think  it's quite unlikely. It seems
to me that it  was only by a combination of a number of lucky circumstances
that man  evolved at all. When you take a close  look at the situation, you
have to conclude that man had no right to expect to evolve. He is a sort of
evolutionary accident.'

'And intelligence?  Intelligence rose on prime world,  and you seem to have
evidence that  it has  risen here as  well. Is intelligence  something that
evolution may  be aiming at and  will finally achieve, in  whatever form on
whatever world? How  can you be sure it has not risen  on Auk world? At Auk
House, only a few square miles have been explored. Perhaps not a great deal
more around the other stations.'

'You ask impossible questions,' said Sutton shortly. 'There is no way I can
answer them.'

They  had  reached a  place  from which  a  full view  of the  headquarters
building  was possible  and  now there  were many  people  - men  and women
walking  about or sunning  themselves, stretched  out on the  grass, people
sitting  on terraces  in conversational  groups, while children  ran gaily,
playing a childish game.

Sutton,  who had  been walking  ahead of  Latimer, stopped so  quickly that
Latimer, with difficulty, averted bumping into him.

Sutton pointed. 'There they are,' he said.

Looking in the direction  of the pointing finger, Latimer could see nothing
unusual. 'What? Where?' he asked.

'On top the hill, just beyond the northern gate.'

After a moment Latimer  saw them, a dozen squatting creatures on top of the
hill down which, a  few hours ago, he had run for the gate and safety. They
were too distant to  be seen clearly, but they had a faintly reptilian look
and  they seemed  to be  coal-black, but  whether naturally black  or black
because of their silhouetted position, he could not determine.

'The ones I told you about,' said Sutton. 'It's nothing unusual. They often
sit and  watch us. I suspect  they are as curious about  us as we are about
them.'

'The intelligences?' asked Latimer.

'Yes, that is right,' said Sutton.

Someone, some  distance off, cried in a loud voice  - no words that Latimer
could make  out, but a cry of apprehension, a  bellow of terror. Then there
were other cries, different people taking up the cry.

A  man was  running  across the  park,  heading for  its northeast  corner,
running desperately, arms pumping back and forth, legs a blur of scissoring
speed. He was so  far off that he looked like a toy runner, heading for the
four-foot fence  that stood inside the higher  fence. Behind him were other
runners, racing in au attempt to head him off and pull him down.

'My  God, it's  Breen,'  gasped Sutton.  His face  had  turned to  gray. He
started forward, in a  stumbling run. He opened his mouth to shout, but all
he did was gasp.

The running  man came  to the inner fence  and cleared it with  a leap. The
nearest of his pursuers was many feet behind him.

Breen lifted  his arms  into the air,  above his head. He  slammed into the
electrified fence. A flash blotted him out. Flickering tongues of flame ran
along the fence - bright and sparkling, like the flaring of fireworks. Then
the brightness faded and on the fence hung a black blot that smoked greasly
and had a fuzzy, manlike shape.

A hush,  like an  indrawn breath, came  upon the crowd. Those  who had been
running stopped running and,  for a moment, held their places. Then some of
them, after that moment,  ran again, although some of them did not, and the
voice took up again, although now there was less shouting.

When he looked, Latimer  saw that the hilltop was empty; the dinosaurs that
had been there were gone. There was no sign of Sutton.

So it was Breen,  thought Latimer, who hung there on the fence. Breen, head
of the evaluation team,  the one man, Gale had said, who could tell him why
he had been lured to Auk House. Breen, the man who pored over psychological
evaluations,  who  was  acquainted  with  the  profile  of  each  suspected
personage,  comparing  those   profiles  against  economic  charts,  social
diagnostic  indices, and  God knows what  else, to  enable him to  make the
decision  that would  allow one  man to  remain in  prime world as  he was,
another to be canceled out.

And  now, thought  Latimer, it was  Breen who  had been canceled  out, more
effectively than he had canceled any of the others.

Latimer  had remained  standing where he  had been  when Sutton and  he had
first sighted the running Breen, had stood because he could not make up his
mind what  he should do, uncertain of the relationship  that he held or was
expected to  assume with those other persons  who were still milling about,
many of them perhaps as uncertain as he of what they should do next.

He began  to feel conspicuous  because of just standing  there, although at
the same time he was certain no one noticed him, or if they did notice him,
almost immediately dismissed him from their thoughts.

He  and Sutton  had  been on  their way  to  get a  drink  when it  had all
happened, and thinking of that, Latimer realized he could use a drink. With
this  in mind,  he  headed for  the building.  Few  noticed him,  some even
brushing against  him without notice; others  spoke noncommittal greetings,
some  nodded briefly as  one nods to  someone of  whose identity he  is not
certain.

The lounge was almost  empty. Three men sat at a table in one corner, their
drinks  before  them;  a  woman  and  a  man  were  huddled  in  low-voiced
conversation  on  a  corner   of  a  davenport;  another  man  was  at  the
self-service bar, pouring himself a drink.

Latimer made his way to the bar and picked up a glass.

The man who was  there said to him, 'You must be new here; I don't remember
seeing you about.'

'Just today,' said Latimer. 'Only a few hours ago.'

He found  the Scotch and his  brand was not among  the bottles. He selected
his  second choice  and  poured a  generous  serving over  ice. There  were
several trays  of sandwiches and other  snack items. He found  a plate, put
two sandwiches on it.

'What do you make of Breen?' asked the other man.

'I don't  know,' said Latimer. 'I never met the  man. Gale mentioned him to
me.'

"Three,'  said the  other man.  'Three in  the last  four months.  There is
something wrong.'

'All on the fence?'

'No, not on the fence. This is the first on the fence. One jumped, thirteen
stories. Christ, what a mess! The other hanged himself.'

'The  man walked  off and  joined another  man who  had just come  into the
lounge. Latimer stood alone,  plate and glass in hand. The lounge still was
almost empty. No one was paying the slightest attention to him. Suddenly he
felt a stranger, unwanted.  He had been feeling this all the time, he knew,
but in the emptiness of the lounge, the feeling of unwantedness struck with
unusual force. He could  sit down at a table or in one of a group of chairs
or  on the  end of  an unoccupied sofa,  wait for  someone to join  him. He
recoiled from  the thought. He didn't want to  meet these people, talk with
them. For the moment, he wanted none of them.

Shrugging, he put another  sandwich on the plate, picked up the bottle, and
filled his  glass to the top. Then he walked out  into the hallway and took
the elevator to his floor.

In his  room, he  selected the most  comfortable chair and sat  down in it,
putting the  plate of sandwiches on  a table. He took  a long drink and put
down the glass.

'They can all go to hell,' he told himself.

He  sensed his  fragmented self  pulling back  together, all  the scattered
fragments falling  back into him again, making  him whole again, his entire
self  again. With  no effort  at all,  he wiped  out Breen and  Sutton, the
events of  the last hours, until he was simply  a man seated comfortably in
his room.

So great  a power,  he thought, so  great and secret. Holding  one world in
thrall, planning to hold others. The planning, the foresight, the audacity.
Making certain  that when they moved into the  other worlds, there would be
no  silly  conservationists yapping  at  their  heels, no  environmentalist
demand jug  environmental impact statements, no  deluded visionaries crying
out  in  protest against  monopolies.  Holding  steadily in  view the  easy
business ethic  that had held sway in that  day when arrogant lumber barons
had built mansions such as Auk House.

Latimer picked  up the glass and had another drink.  The glass, he saw, was
less than half full.  He should have carried off the bottle, he thought; no
one  would have  noticed. He reached  for a  sandwich and munched  it down,
picked up a second one. How long had it been since he had eaten? He glanced
at his watch and  knew, even as he did, that the time  it told might not be
right for this Cretaceous world. He puzzled over that, trying to figure out
if there might be some time variance between one world and another. Perhaps
there wasn't  - logically there shouldn't  be - but there  might be factors
... he  peered closely at the  watch face, but the  figures wavered and the
hands would not stay in line. He had another drink.

He woke  to darkness,  stiff and cramped,  wondering where he  was. After a
moment of  confusion, he  remembered where he  was, all the  details of the
last  two days  tumbling in upon  him, at  first in scattered  pieces, then
subtly arranging themselves and interlocking into a pattern of reality.

He had fallen asleep in the chair. The moonlight pouring through the window
showed  the empty  glass, the  plate with  half a  sandwich still  upon it,
standing on the table at his elbow. The place was quiet; there was no noise
at  all. It  must  be the  middle of  the night,  he thought,  and everyone
asleep. Or  might it  be that there  was no one  else around,  that in some
strange  way, for  some strange  reason, the  entire headquarters  had been
evacuated, emptied of all life? Although that, he knew, was unreasonable.

He rose  stiffly from  the chair and  walked to the window.  Below him, the
landscape was pure silver,  blotched by deep shadows. Somewhere just beyond
the fence,  he caught a sense of movement, but was  unable to make out what
it was. Some small  animal, perhaps, prowling about. There would he mammals
here, he  was sure,  the little skitterers, frightened  creatures that were
hard-pressed to keep out  of the way, never having had the chance to evolve
as they  had back  in prime world  when something had  happened millions of
years before to sweep  the world clean of its reptilian overlords, creating
a vacuum into which they could expand.

The silver  world that  lay outside had  a feel of  magic - the  magic of a
brand-new  world as yet  unsullied by the  hand and  tools of men,  a clean
place  that had  no  litter in  it. If  he went  out and  walked in  it, he
wondered, would  the presence  of himself, a  human who had no  right to be
there, subtract something from the magic?

Out in  the hall,  he took the elevator  to the ground floor.  Just off the
corridor lay the lounge  and the outer door opened from the lounge. Walking
softly, although  he could not explain  why he went so  softly, for in this
sleeping place there was no one to disturb, he went into the lounge.

As he reached the door, he heard voices and, halting in the shadow, glanced
rapidly  over the  room to locate  the speakers.  There were three  of them
sitting at a table  in the far end of the lounge. Bottles and glasses stood
upon the  table, but  they did not  seem to be drinking;  they were hunched
forward, heads close together, engaged in earnest conversation.

As he watched, one of them reared back in his chair, speaking in anger, his
voice rising. 'I warned you,' he shouted. 'I warned Breen and I warned you,
Gale. And you laughed at me.'

It was  Sutton who was speaking. The man was too  distant and the light too
dim for Latimer to recognize his features, but the voice he was sure of.

'I did not laugh at you,' protested Gale.

'Perhaps not you, but Breen did.'

'I don't  know about Breen or  laughter,' said the third  man, 'but there's
been too  much going  wrong. Not just  the three suicides.  Other things as
well. Miscalculations, erroneous data processing, bad judgments. Things all
screwed up.  Take the generator failure the other  day. Three hours that we
were without power, the  fence without power. You know what that could mean
if several big carnivores ...

'Yes,  we know,'  said Gale,  'but that  was a mere  technical malfunction.
Those things happen. The  one that worries me is this fellow, Latimer. That
was a  pure and  simple foul-up. There  was no reason  to put  him into Auk
House. It cost a  hell of a lot of money to do so; a very tricky operation.
And when  he got  there, what happens?  He escapes. I  tell you, gentlemen,
there are  too many foul-ups. More than can be  accounted for in the normal
course of operation.'

'There is no use  trying to cover it up, to make a mystery out of it,' said
Sutton. 'You know and  I know what is happening, and the sooner we admit we
know and start trying to figure out what to do about it, the better it will
be.  If  there  is  anything we  can  do  about  it.  We're  up against  an
intelligence that may be  as intelligent as we are, but in a different way.
In a way that  we can't fight. Mental power against technical power, and in
a case  like that, I'd bet on mental power. I  warned you months ago. Treat
these jokers with kid  gloves, I told you. Do nothing to upset them. Handle
them with deference. Think  kindly toward them, because maybe they can tell
what you're thinking. I believe they can. And then what happens? A bunch of
lunkheads go  out for an afternoon of shooting and  when they find no other
game, use these friends of ours for casual target practice ...'

'But that was months ago,' said the third man.

'They're testing,' said Sutton. 'Finding out what they can do. How far they
can go.  They can stop a generator. They can  mess up evaluations. They can
force men to kill  themselves. God knows what else they can do. Give them a
few more weeks. And,  by the way, what particular brand of idiocy persuaded
prime world to site the base of operations in a world like this?'

'There were  many considerations,' said  Gale. 'For one thing,  it seemed a
safe place. If some opposition should try to move in on us ...'

"You're  insane,' shouted  Sutton. 'There  isn't any opposition.  How could
there he opposition?'

Moving swiftly. Latimer crossed the corner of the lounge, eased his way out
of the door. Looking back over his shoulder, he saw the three still sitting
at the table. Sutton was shouting, banging his fist on the table-top.

Gale was  shrilling at him,  his voice rising over  Sutton's shouting: 'How
the hell  could we suspect there  was intelligence here? A  world of stupid
lizards ...'

Latimer  stumbled across the  stone-paved terrace  and went down  the short
flight  of stone  stairs that  took him  to the  lawn. The world  still was
silver magic,  a full moon riding in a cloudless  sky. There was a softness
in the air, a cleanness in the air.

But he scarcely noticed the magic and the cleanness. One thing thundered in
his brain. A mistake!  He should not have been sent to Auk House. There had
been  a miscalculation. Because  of the  mental machination of  a reptilian
intelligence on this world  where the Cretaceous had not ended, he had been
snatched from prime world.  Although the fault, he realized, did not lie in
this world, but in prime world itself - in the scheme that had been hatched
to  make  prime  world  and the  alternate  worlds  safe,  safe beyond  all
question, for prime world's business interests.

He walked out across the sward and looked up at the northern hilltop. A row
of  huddled  figures sat  there,  a  long row  of  dumpy reptilian  figures
solemnly  staring down  at the  invaders who  had dared to  desecrate their
world.

He had wondered, Latimer  remembered, how one man alone might manage to put
an  end to  the prime-world project,  knowing well  enough that no  one man
could do it, perhaps that no conceivable combination of men could do it.

But now he need  wonder no longer. In time to come, sooner or later, an end
would come to it. Maybe by that time, most of the personnel here would have
been transferred  to Auk  House or to  other stations, fleeing  this doomed
place. It  might be that in years to  come, another operations center would
be set  up on some  safer world and the  project would go on.  But at least
some time would be  bought for the human race; perhaps the project might be
dropped.  It already  had  cost untold  billions. How  much more  would the
prime-world managers be willing to put into it? That was the crux of it, he
knew, the crux of everything on prime world: was it worth the cost?

He turned about to  face the hilltop squarely and those who squatted there.
Solemnly, David Latimer, standing  in the magic moonlight, raised an arm in
salutation to them.

He knew  even as  he did it  that it was  a useless gesture,  a gesture for
himself rather  than for  those dumpy figures  sitting on the  hilltop, who
would neither  see nor know. But  even so, it was  important that he do it,
important that  he, an intelligent human, pay  a measure of sincere respect
to an  intelligence of another species in recognition  of his belief that a
common code of ethics might be shared.

The figures  on the  hilltop did not  stir. Which, he told  himself, was no
more than  he had expected of  them. How should they  know, why should they
care what  he instinctively  had tried to  communicate to them,  not really
expecting to  communicate, but at least  to make some sign,  if to no other
than himself, of the  sense of fellowship that he, in that moment, felt for
them?

As he  was thinking  this, he felt  a warmness come  upon him, encompassing
him,  enfolding  him, as  when  he  had been  a  child, in  dim memory,  he
remembered  his mother  tucking him  snugly into  bed. Then he  was moving,
being lifted and impelled, with the high guard fence below him and the face
of the great hill  sliding underneath him. He felt no fright, for he seemed
to be  in a dreamlike state  inducing a belief, deep-seated,  that what was
happening was not happening and that, in consequence, no harm could come to
him.

He faced  the dark and huddled figures, all sitting  in a row, and although
he still  was dream-confused, he could see  them clearly. They were nothing
much to  look at. They were as dumpy and misshapen  as they had seemed when
he had  seen them from a  distance. Their bodies were  graceless lumps, the
details vague  even in the bright  moonlight, but the faces  he never would
forget. They had the  sharp triangle of the reptilian skull, the cruelty of
the sharpness softened by the liquid compassion of the eyes.

Looking at them, he wondered if he was really there, if he was facing them,
as he seemed  to be, or if he still might be  standing on the greensward of
the compound,  staring up the hill at the  huddled shapes, which now seemed
to be only a few feet distant from him. He tried to feel the ground beneath
his  feet, to  press his  feet against  the ground,  a conscious  effort to
orient himself,  and, try as he might, he could  feel no ground beneath his
feet.

They were not awesome creatures and there was nothing horrible about them -
just a  faint distastefulness. They squatted in  their limpy row and stared
at him out of  the soft liquid of their eyes. And he felt - in some strange
way that  he could not recognize,  he felt the presence  of them. Not as if
they were  reaching out physically to touch him -  fearing that if they did
touch him, he would  recoil from them - but in another kind of reaching, as
if they  were pouring  into him, as  one might pour  water in  a bottle, an
essence of themselves.

Then they spoke to him, not with voice, not with words, with nothing at all
that he could recognize  - perhaps, he thought wildly, they spoke with that
essence of themselves they were pouring into him.

'Now that we have met,' they said, 'we'll send you back again.'

And he was back.

He stood  at the end of the brick-paved driveway that  led up to the house,
and behind  him he  heard the damp  and windy rustle of  a primeval forest,
with two owls chuckling throatily in the trees behind him. A few windows in
the  house were  lighted.  Great oaks  grew  upon the  spreading lawn,  and
beneath the  trees stood graceful stone benches that  had the look of never
being used.

Auk House,  he told himself. They had sent him back  to Auk House, not back
to the grassy compound  that lay inside the fence in that other world where
the Cretaceous had not ended.

Inside  himself  he  felt  the yeasty  churning  of  the  essence that  the
squatting row of monstrosities had poured into him, and out of it he gained
a knowledge and a comfort.

Policemen, he wondered, or  referees, perhaps? Creatures that would monitor
the  efforts  of those  entrepreneurs  who  sought a  monopoly  of all  the
alternate  worlds that  had been  opened for  humans, and perhaps  for many
other races. They would monitor and correct, making certain that the worlds
would not  fall prey  to the multinational  financial concepts of  the race
that  had opened  them, but  would become  the heritage and  birth-right of
those few intelligent peoples  that had risen on this great multiplicity of
worlds, seeing to it  that the worlds would be used in a wiser context than
prime world had been used by humans.

Never doubting  for a moment that it would or could  be done, knowing for a
certainty that it would come about, that in the years to come men and other
intelligences would live on the paradise worlds that Sutton had told him of
-  and  all  the  other  worlds  that  lay  waiting  to  be  used  with  an
understanding the  human race had missed.  Always with those strange, dumpy
ethical wardens who would sit on many hilltops to keep their vigil.

Could they  be trusted? he wondered,  and was ashamed of  thinking it. They
had  looked into his  eyes and had  poured their  essence into him  and had
returned  him here,  not back  to the  Cretaceous compound. They  had known
where it was best for him to go and they would know all the rest of it.

He started up the driveway, his heels clicking on the bricks. As he came up
to the stoop the door came open and the man in livery stood there.

'You're a  little late,' said the  butler. 'The others waited  for you, but
just now sat down to dinner. I'm sure the soup's still warm.'

'I'm sorry,' said Latimer. 'I was unavoidably detained.'

'Some  of the others  thought they should  go out  looking for you,  but Mr
Jonathon dissuaded  them. He said you'd be all right.  He said you had your
wits about you. He said you would be back.'

The butler  closed the door behind him. 'They'll all  he very happy to find
you're back,' he said.

'Thank you,' said Latimer.

He walked, trying not to hurry, fighting down the happiness he felt welling
up inside  himself, toward the doorway from which  came the sound of bright
laughter and sprightly conversation.