The Technicolor Time Machine

He never looked at his watch, but surely no more than a minute or two passed. Yet in that short time he realized only too well how Charley Chang had felt, stranded on prehistoric Catalina with the eyes and teeth, and he hoped that Jens Lyn wasn’t too unhappy after his two months’ stay. If his conscience had not been eroded away by years in the movie business he might have felt a twang of pity for them. As it was he just felt sorry for himself. The cloud moved away and the sun shone warmly upon him, but he was still cold. For those few minutes he felt alone and lost in a manner he had never experienced before.

The platform appeared and dropped a few inches into the meadow close by.

“About time,” he shouted, the authority coming back with a rush as he stood and squared his shoulders. “Where have you been?”

“In the twentieth century—where else?” the professor said. “You have not forgotten point K already, have you? In order to come forward these few minutes in your subjective time I had to first return the time platform to the time we had left, then return here with the correct physical and temporal displacement. How long did it take—from your point of view?”

“I don’t know, a few minutes I suppose.”

“Very good, I should say, for a round trip of approximately two thousand years. Let us say five minutes, that would give a microscopically small figure for the error of…”

“All right, Prof, work it out on your own time. We want to get the company back in time and to work. Drive that jeep off and you two stay here with it. We’ll start shuttling back the vehicles and I want you to move them as soon as they arrive so we can have room for the next ones. Let’s roll.”

This time Barney returned with the platform and never for an instant did he think about how the two men must feel who had been left behind.

The transfer went easily enough. Once the first few trips had been made the trucks and trailers moved smoothly through the doors of the sound stage and vanished into the past. The only mishap was on the third transfer when a truck overhung the platform, so that when the time trip was made two inches of exhaust pipe and half a license plate clattered to the floor. Barney picked up the piece of pipe and looked at the shining end, flat and smooth, as if it had been polished. Apparently this bit had been outside the time field and had simply stayed behind. It could happen as easily to an arm.

“I want everyone inside the vehicles during the trip, all except the professor. We can’t afford accidents.”

A tractor towing the motorboat trailer and the deepfreeze truck made up the last load, and Barney climbed on after them. He took one last look at the California sunshine, then signaled the professor to take it away. His watch said 11:57, just before noon on Saturday as the twentieth century winked out and the eleventh century appeared, and he took a deep, relieved breath. Now time—in the century they had left—would have a stop. As long as they stayed in this era to film the picture, no matter how long they took, no time would elapse back home. When they returned with the film it would be noon Saturday, almost two full days before the Monday deadline. For the first time the pressure tension drained away. Then he remembered that he had an entire picture to shoot, with all the problems and miseries that would entail, and the pressure dropped heavily back onto his shoulders and the knot of tension returned, full strength.

A roar of sound burst over him as the tractor driver revved up his engine, and the clear air was filled with reeking exhaust. Barney got out of the way as the motorboat trailer was carefully backed off, and he looked across the meadow. The trucks and trailers were scattered about at random, though some of them had been drawn up in a circle like a wagon train getting ready for the Indians. A few figures were visible, but most of the people were still asleep. Barney wished that he were too, but he knew that he wouldn’t sleep even if he tried. So he might as well get some work done.

Tex and Dallas were just settling down in the grass with cushions from the jeep when he came up. “Catch,” he said, flipping a quarter toward Dallas, who grabbed it out of the air. “Toss. I want one of you to go with me to pick up Jens Lyn, the other can catch up on his beauty sleep.”

“Tails you go,” Dallas said, then cursed at George Washington’s portrait. Tex laughed once, then settled himself down.

“You know,” Dallas said, as they drove down to the beach, “I don’t even know where we are.”

“The Orkney Islands,” Barney said, watching the gulls rocketing into the air before them, screaming insults.

“My geography was always weak.”

“They’re a little group of islands north of Scotland, about the same latitude as Stockholm.”

“North of Scotland—come off it! I was stationed in Scotland during the war and the only time I ever saw the sun was through a hole in the clouds, but not often, and it was cold enough to freeze the—”