"But that would be a change in the past, in itself."
"Not exactly. What I told you about forgetting was true, it was just not the whole truth. There will be, in my time, a Moirta who exists normally up to the time she is translated to the past. And there will be, in your time, a George Dolan who never met Mr. Brown or Miss Jones. But you and I, as we exist at this moment, will not have been."
"I see," Dolan said. "It's too bad I didn't know about this sooner. I think we still may have a chance, though. You see, I had to worry about the possibility that Smith and Brown might think it worth while to come back after you. So I changed the switches, too. The time translator isn't going into the future, it's gone into the past, and then it's fixed to burn out again, a long way in the past, where there aren't any electronics technicians, no people at all. How about that?"
"The past? I don't know," she said doubtfully. "I am not a temporal technician, I know only about the displacement effect as it operates in our usual translations. Perhaps, in that case, the bubble might continue to exist, as a sort of permanent side-track. I really don't know."
She laughed suddenly, as the full implications of what he had said struck her. "The past? Oh, poor Smith. And poor Brown. A long way in the past, where there are no people at all, just dinosaurs and snakes—and they hate such things so." She laughed helplessly, tears rolling down her cheeks. "And poor George, and poor Moirta. All with their clever little plans, their tricks to out-smart each other. Everyone has outsmarted everyone else, and we all lose now, don't we?"
Dolan stared at her narrowly. "We all lose?"
She nodded—
The senior gun runner had been quite confident of victory.
It took him a rather long moment to assimilate the fact of defeat; but in that moment he did assimilate it, as fully and completely as he took in the implications of any other situation.