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math again.
He knew those equations. They were descriptive of the electron flow
within the tempora tube that he and Carl had made.
The tempora tube was the velac-with modifications.
Rena had erred by mere months perhaps, even weeks. She had known that
he had helped develop it. No wonder there had been no explanation. But she had
forgotten that the contraction, velac, had not yet been coined.
In his previous haste and intense fatigue he had defeated himself by
passing over those equations without recognizing them. He swore futilely. If
Rena had been harmed or lost to him because of his own thick headedness --
He went to the screen room where Carl worked and broke open the cabinet
that held the existing models of the tempora-velac. He took them back to his
own room and returned to the math.
There would have to be minor alterations. They were not developed
closely enough to the form in which Rena knew them. He contemplated the
two-foot globe with its complex innards. It would mean opening the bottle and
resealing it.
The company boasted a television tube lab but it was ill-suited to
anything else and George was even less suited as a glass technician.
He computed the alterations required in the elements and built a tiny
grid assembly that would have to be added. He took the tubes to the other lab.
Carefully he heated one and broke the seal. Then he removed the largest
terminal seal that contained a single highvoltage lead. It left a hole three
inches in diameter. Deftly, he worked through it to alter the elements and
insert the additional grid. His fingers felt clumsy and thick. He wondered if
he could ever depend on the operation of the tube when he was through.
Finally the terminal seal was replaced and the vacuum line joined. It
seemed an endless wait while the mercury pump scavenged the thinning molecules
of air.
Then he flashed it-and a clear thin line appeared almost all the way
around the tube.
He glanced wearily out the window. It was almost daylight-Sunday. No
one would be down. He could try again with the other tube but he felt the
exhaustion creeping up on him again and he remembered the other blunder that
fatigue had cost.
Still, he couldn't give up a whole day with possible success this
close. If the next tube were a failure he could get the lab to make another on
Monday.
He returned to the work. He let the glass anneal for hours after he
finished the alterations. This time there was no cracking.
The sun was setting when he took the finished tube back to his own lab,
He clamped the tempora-velac in place and adjusted the orifice as Rena had
directed. Twenty-four hours after he had first recognized the velac equations
the alternator was ready for the application of power.
* * * *
He was ready to go-eight days late. Would it make a difference? Could
he still join Rena at that moment when she passed into Cell Four? She had
given him exact coordinate settings for the machine with warning not to alter
them in any way. It was possible that other factors of which he was ignorant
were involved. He didn't know but he carefully adjusted the time setting to
eight days less.
It was anti-climatic now. A week ago he had been keyed to intolerable
pitch when failure had come. Now Rena's written thoughts seemed like ghostly
memories out of an irretrievable past. He looked about the lab where he had
worked for eight years. He wondered what they'd think when he disappeared.
The alternator was set for self destruction. They could never follow.
The pen was in his pocket and Rena's papers had been carefully burned in a
wastebasket. There would be no evidence he had left as far as he knew-unless
it were his own body found dead in an alternator that was a failure.
The gray field was rising now. It pressed like gelatin fingers against
the space beyond its confining plates. He glanced at the clock. It was ten
minutes after eight.
He walked into the grayness.
* * * *
He was standing on a low hill and there was a city not far away just as
she had said. It was even raining and the lights glistened in the slowly
falling shower. And then he heard her step, saw her moving in the shadows.
"Rena!"
"George-oh, George, darling!"
He pressed her close in his arms and when he kissed her face he tasted
her tears mingled with the rain.
"I've been waiting," she said. "I was sure I'd failed and you weren't
coming,"
He tried to see his watch."Ten minutes. Ten minutes isn't bad-out of
thirty-two hundred years."
"I know. But it seemed so long when I thought I would never see you
again. I've found out about these cells. There's no going back through
them-only forward-even for us. I could never have gone back to try to reach
you again."
She shivered, half with cold and half with the thought of the awful
impenetrable gulf that might have separated them at this moment if they had
failed.
"It's just as you dreamed it would be," she said. "But you're cold.
Let's go down to the city and find out what kind of a world we've come into.
Maybe even the people are as you dreamed of them,"
They moved down the muddy slope towards the town.
* * * *
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