"Hatches battened down," reported sailor Molly with a smart salute some two hours later. "Main sail keel-hauled—or sumpin'."
Bill grinned, but it was a strained grin.
"Man the lifeboats," he quipped back, a bit too inappropriately, because Molly paled. Bill squeezed her hand reassuringly, then turned his attention to the chrono-controls. He threw in the power. A dark vibration swept through the room, robbing the light of some of its intensity.
"That's normal," Bill said hastily, but Molly said "Ooh!" and shuddered against him, while Is and Was sat on their prize-winning hindquarters and whined uncomfortably.
Bill was feeling goose pimples himself. He watched the tubes proceeding through their changes of color. He set the pointer. When the tubes glowed a full violet, he threw the contact-switch down hard.
What happened, he reflected later on when he woke up, shouldn't happen even to the manager of a sewing machine branch office.
First, just before the universe turned hazy white and then quite black, Bill saw one tiny tube on the panel explode in a flash of yellow.
Second, the pointer, which indicated years, centuries, and millenia on an advancing logarithmic scale, snapped to its top position. This meant that the ship was flinging into the future at some fantastic rate measured in millions of years per ship-second.
When Bill staggered wildly erect it was because Was was running madly around the room, tail pointed down, blocky wiry head sniffing along the floor. Is was anxiously licking his face. The wall chronometer told him thirty minutes had passed. Thirty times sixty is eighteen hundred. Eighteen hundred times. He glanced at the pointer and mentally retched.
"Down Was," he ordered groggily. Was huddled to the deck, looking at him with imploring wet eyes. Just then Molly sat up, rubbing her eyes sleepily.