e want for
this fight. We might even do a lot of exploring for the archeologists of
Earth and Venus and Ortol and Talso. As to getting back--that's a
question."

"Which is," added Arcot, "easy to answer now, thank the good Lord. All
we have to do is wait for our time to catch up with us. If we just wait
eighty thousand years, eight hundred centuries, we will be in our own
time."

"Oh, I think waiting so long would be boring," said Wade sarcastically.
"What do you suggest we do in the intervening eighty millenniums? Play
cards?"

"Oh, cards or chess. Something like that," grinned Arcot. "Play cards,
calculate our fields--and turn on the time rate control."

"Oh--I take it back. You win! Take all! I forgot all about that," Wade
smiled at his friend. "That will save a little waiting, won't it."

"The exploring of our worlds would without doubt be of infinite benefit
to science, but I wonder if it would not be of more direct benefit if we
were to get back to our own time, alive and well. Accidents always
happen, and for all our weapons, we might easily meet some animal which
would put an abrupt and tragic finish to our explorations. Is it not
so?" asked Stel Felso Theu.

"Your point is good, Stel Felso Theu. I agree with you. We will do no
more exploring than is necessary, or safe."

"We might just as well travel slowly on the time retarder, and work on
the way. I think the thing to do is to go back to Earth, or better, the
solar system, and follow the sun in its path."

They returned, and the desolation that the sun in its journey passes
through is nothing to the utter, oppressive desolation of empty space
between the stars, for it has its family of planets--and it has no
conscious thought.

The Sun was far from the point that it had occupied when the travelers
had left it, billions on billions of miles further on its journey around
the gravitational center of our galactic universe, and in the eighty
millenniums that they must wait, it would go far.

They did not go to the planets now, for, as Arcot said in reply to Stel
Felso Theu's suggestion that they determine more accurately their
position in time, life had not developed to an extent that would enable
them to determine the year according to our calendar.

So for thirty thousand years they hung motionless as the sun moved on,
and the little spots of light, that were worlds, hurled about it in a
mad race. Even Pluto, in its three-hundred-year-long track se