"You'll do this last favor for me?"

She nodded and leaned forward on tiptoe. "Good-bye, Andy—and good luck." Her voice was little more than a whisper.

He touched her lips with his and for a moment stood looking down at her, thinking once more of what might have been. An echo of his own thoughts seemed to glisten wetly in her dark eyes. Abruptly she turned away.

Pearce gripped Fuller's hand. "So long, Dave."

"Take care of yourself, Andy." Fuller looked painfully reflective, then suddenly held out the bottle. "Here, Andy, you take this. You might need it."

Pearce watched with a deep inward aching as Fuller and Ellen strode from the glade. Reaching the trees, they turned to look back at him. They hesitated, waved—were gone.

Pearce felt that the last door to the past had been irrevocably closed.

He looked down at the bottle he was holding and lifted it to his mouth. Then he lighted a cigarette, glanced at his watch again, and fell to pacing along one edge of the glade. His eyes roved tensely about him, expectant and dreading.

Thoughts shifted uneasily in his mind. Would Nela actually appear? Fifteen years had passed for him—a matter of a few hours to her. But perhaps something had gone wrong. Perhaps she had miscalculated somewhere.

And on mental scales he balanced Ellen against the future, wondering if his choice had been wise. Could the future possibly hold the happiness he might have known with Ellen, in the age familiar to him?

He heard a car motor start up in the distance. The sound rose in volume, then began fading. Dave and Ellen were on their way back to the city.

He felt suddenly alone—somehow abandoned.

Raising the bottle to his lips again, he resumed his nervous pacing. And then he stopped, frozen, aware of a change in his surroundings. The air in the glade was thickening queerly, the trees all around were growing crazily distorted. And he heard a deep humming sound—the kind of sound that might have been made by a string on a giant harp.

Across the glade, appearing as though from nothingness itself, an object was taking shape—a metal globe. Bands of distortion surrounded it like ripples in water. For an instant the globe seemed unsubstantial, 

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