He kissed her. "Rather, I've got to go back later. About ten."
"Why so late?"
"Some special stuff that depends on time. I don't know how long I'll be."
He didn't know how long he'd be —
He looked at Martha and the children. He couldn't kid himself out of the knowledge that he was planning to gamble them and everything else he had on this fantastic sweep into the future.
But he had to go. Just had to —
This would give him and Kennely the one break they needed, he thought. With knowledge of the coordinator and other machines like it, they could command the trade of the whole electronic world. They'd be free to develop the research labs they'd always dreamed of.
More than that, it would satisfy the hungry yearning something that Devon had felt when he'd seen Kennely go off to the South Seas during the war to do field engineering in war-contested skies.
It was a sort of desperate need to prove himself. He had to do at least one big thing in his lifetime.
He felt guilty as he sat down to listen to the radio for a while. Martha, sat on the arm of the chair and talked. He ought to tell her, he thought, but she'd tell him how dangerous it was and how much she and the children needed him, and he wouldn't go.