peaker waited? He could escape, of course--

Escape?

He turned toward the skull. There it was, his skull, yellow with age.
Escape? Escape, when he had held it in his own hands?

What did it matter if he put it off a month, a year, ten years, even
fifty? Time was nothing. He had sipped chocolate with a girl born a
hundred and fifty years before his time. Escape? For a little while,
perhaps.

But he could not _really_ escape, no more so than anyone else had ever
escaped, or ever would.

Only, he had held it in his hands, his own bones, his own death's-head.

_They_ had not.

He went out the door and across the field, empty handed. There were a
lot of them standing around, gathered together, waiting. They expected a
good fight; they knew he had something. They had heard about the
incident at the fountain.

And there were plenty of police--police with guns and tear gas, creeping
across the hills and ridges, between the trees, closer and closer. It
was an old story, in this century.

One of the men tossed something at him. It fell in the snow by his
feet, and he looked down. It was a rock. He smiled.

"Come on!" one of them called. "Don't you have any bombs?"

"Throw a bomb! You with the beard! Throw a bomb!"

"Let 'em have it!"

"Toss a few A Bombs!"

* * * * *

They began to laugh. He smiled. He put his hands to his hips. They
suddenly turned silent, seeing that he was going to speak.

"I'm sorry," he said simply. "I don't have any bombs. You're mistaken."

There was a flurry of murmuring.

"I have a gun," he went on. "A very good one. Made by science even more
advanced than your own. But I'm not going to use that, either."

They were puzzled.

"Why not?" someone called. At the edge of the group an older woman was
watching. He felt a sudden shock. He had seen her before. Where?

He remembered. The day at the library. As he had turned the corner he
had seen her. She had noticed him and been astounded. At the time, he
did not understand why.

Conger grinned. So he _would_ escape death, the man who right now was
voluntarily accepting it. They were laughing, laughing at a man who had
a gun but didn't use it. But by a strange twist of science he would
appear again, a few months later, after his bones had been buried under
the floor of a jail.

And so, in a fashion, he would escape death. He would die, but then,
after a period of months, he would live again, briefly,