ver. And not a blemish nor
scar to show that man had ever landed there.

"Fine thing," Norton chaffed him. "Fine navigation, Louie. Get us clear
across the universe in great shape, and then you can't even find the
landing field."

But Louie was in no mood for banter. He wished Tom would go back and
hold the manual controls of the ship instead of letting it hover on
automatic. He wished Cal would go back to his stateroom and think. He
wished Frank Norton would shut up. He wished they wouldn't all stand
over him, reading his charts over his shoulder.

In irritated silence he reduced the viewscope dimensions to scale, and
snapped a picture of the whole island. He took the fresh picture, still
moist from its self-developing camera, and laid it beside the chart.
Wordlessly, for the benefit of them all, he traced his pencil over the
outlines of the chart and their duplicates in the picture. As in
comparing fingerprints, he flicked his pencil at the points of identity.
There were far too many to ignore. He poked the point of his pencil at
Appletree where it was located on the chart. Then he picked out the same
location in the picture.

It was not the science of navigation that was wrong.

"It's just one of those dirty tricks life plays on a fellow," Tom said
over Cal's shoulder. "You got us in the right place, Louie, but probably
in the wrong time slot. You've warped us right out of our own time, and
Eden hasn't been discovered yet. Maybe won't be for another million
years. Maybe, back on Earth, man is just discovering fire."

"Yeah," Norton agreed. "Or maybe in the wrong dimension. You and your
fancy navigation. Now you take a midgit-idgit navigating machine. It
wouldn't know how to pull such fancy short cuts. Take a little longer,
maybe, but when we got there we'd be there."

They were both talking nonsense and knew it. Time and dimensional travel
were still purely theoretical. Louie ignored the ribbing with elaborate
patience.

"You know what I think," he asked seriously. "I think the whole thing's
a hoax. I'll betcha there never was any settlement there. I'll betcha
the colonists have pulled a whingding all the way through."

"There's a whole raft of pictures to show they were there," Frank
reminded him.

"Pictures!" Louie answered scornfully. "You think they couldn't fake
pictures?" He thought for a moment. "And where's their ship, their
escape ship?" he asked as a clincher. "They didn't like it here and have