into the great stream of Time....

* * * * *

"You think he has gone forward into the future?" Larry asked. "Won't
the instrument show anything, Tina?"

"No. No trace of him yet."

We were passing 3,000 A.D., traveling into the future. Tina reasoned
that Tugh, according to Harl's confession, had originally come from a
future Time-world. It seemed most probable that now he would return
there.

The Time-telespectroscope so far had shown us no evidence of the other
cage. Tina kept the telescope barrel trained constantly on that other
space five hundred feet from us which held Tugh's vehicle. The flowing
gray landscape off there gave no sign of our quarry; yet we knew we
could not pass it, without at least a brief flash of it in the
telespectroscope and upon the image-mirror. Nervously, breathlessly we
waited for a sign of the other Time-cage.

But nothing showed. We were not traveling fast. With Larry and Tina at
the instrument table, I was left to stand at the window. Always I
gazed eastward. That other little point of space only five hundred
feet to the east held Mary; she was there; but not _now_. She was
remote, inaccessible. The thought of her with Tugh, so inaccessible,
set me shuddering.

I was barely aware of the changing gray outlines of the city: I
stared, praying for the fleeting glimpse of a spectral cage.... I
think that up to 3,000 A.D., New York remained much the same. And
then, quite suddenly, in some vast storm or cataclysm, it was gone. I
saw but a blurred chaos. This was near 4,000 A.D. Then it was rebuilt,
smaller, with more trees growing about, until presently there seemed
only a forest. People, if they still were here, were building such
transitory structures that I could not see them.

* * * * *

5,000 A.D. Mankind no doubt had reached its peak of civilization,
paused at the summit and now was in decadence, reverting to savagery.
Perhaps in Europe the civilized peak lasted longer. This was a
backward space during the ascent; perhaps now it was reverting faster
to the primitive.

But I think that by 15,000 A.D., mankind over all the Earth had become
primitive. There is no standing still: we must go forward; or back.
Man, with his own machines softening him, enabling him to do nothing,
eventually unfitted himself to cope with nature. That storm at 4,000
A.D. in New York, for instance, even in my own Time would have been
merely