Steve Darville, gazing past Professor Ploving to the moonlit scene beyond the window, wondered what changes ten years would have wrought. There could be little alteration in the immediate vicinity of the workshop, he knew, for the cautious professor had taken no chances. His iron law had decreed that nothing be erected or remodeled or torn away in the vicinity of the workshop; the provision, as an added precaution, being incorporated as the first item in his will.
The professor fumbled with his spectacles, managed at last to place them upon his nose at an unaccustomed angle, and coughed hesitatingly.
"Ready?" he asked.
"Ready," Darville told him, and turned to the tube.
It was a moment made for drama, but there was no time for drama. He climbed into the narrow tube, strapped himself into the awkward jump-seat and carefully checked the dial readings on the control panel before him. He nodded without glancing out toward the professor, jerked his hand in a quick salute and closed the tube's door.
For a single moment he thought of the music and laughter out on the lawn beyond, the laughter and music he was missing tonight as he had been missing them for so many nights on end. But in the moment that he eased the control stick toward him he knew that it had been a small price for this moment. One hour more, less than an hour, and there would be time again for music and laughter and cool arms—or no longer need of them.
The thin needles vibrated to life, swayed crazily across the faces of compact dials and as suddenly hesitated and stopped. To the man within the tube it seemed impossible that anything could have happened in those seconds. It was ludicrous; a moment more, he knew, and he must step out to face the heartbreak in the eyes of the kindly old man waiting just outside those thin metal walls.
To open that door required a kind of courage Darville had never needed before and for seconds he hesitated, prolonging the moment. What could he say to the broken man at the other side of that door, what would there be to say? His white-knuckled fist twisted the latch, threw the door open almost rudely.
The workshop was dark, save for soft moonlight that flooded across a section of the floor from a gaping hole in the roof and farther wall. Rubble lay in heaps over the shop; broken plaster and crumbled bricks and twisted, jagged fingers of steel.