She whirled to face him and dropped the telephone receiver, her dark brown eyes widening.
"Harry Ogden," he said. "Remember?"
As soon as he asked the question, he knew it was a foolish one. The time trap was his trap alone and only he was conscious of all the repeated cycles. She was unaware of all their previous conversations and he was now a stranger to her.
She backed away and let out a scream.
It didn't bother him. It was music to his ears—a sound that broke the silence of his peculiar world—a weapon to combat boredom with, and he reflected that he would make many trips to apartment 1403....
The ruby rolled across the table and fell to the floor.
He smiled as he picked the ruby up from the floor. He estimated that he'd lived more than twenty years in ten-minute intervals, and therefore the trap was not a death-trap. He'd discovered countless ways of fighting boredom and knew he would never succumb to it and resultant insanity. He had entered the other apartments by using the stone ledge and breaking through the windows. In them he had found a total of hundreds of books ... a pair of binoculars that he used to study a multitude of new things from his window ... a typewriter that he used to write books although there was never a completed manuscript ... a chess set ... decks of cards ... hobbies....
There were many more possibilities that he hadn't explored yet and he realized that the Martian had given him a valuable gift: extra years of life.
It seemed incredible that a machine could operate continuously for twenty years, but the ancient Martians had been expert in constructing devices without moving parts. He knew little science, but he could vaguely imagine a sort of "gateway" to the space-time continuum that the removal of the ruby had opened. Perhaps during a ten-minute period a predetermined amount of energy passed through the "gateway" and flowed against a radioactive substance in a way and with a force that thrust a few atoms backward in time to the point when the energy didn't exist and that established the cycle.