it came to repairing a suit of Medieval armor. The answer to the problem was to obtain the help of persons who understood the construction and operation of the machines at least as well as Medieval armorers understood their steel suits. And that answer—in both cases—lay back in time."

Pearce changed position on the blanket under him and glanced at his watch. He went on, "Time travel had been accomplished well before Nela's period, but the process had proved too involved and tricky for serious, large-scale use. The important thing, though, was that a number of machines were immediately available for time travel, and Nela was one of those chosen to operate them. She was, it seems, a gal of parts. In addition to being one of the leaders of a world-wide group which had been formed to deal with the machine break-down problem, she was also an expert on time travel and an authority on Twentieth Century life.

"Actually, you see, Nela's people were undergoing a cultural renaissance, a reawakening of interest in every field of knowledge and endeavor. For many hundreds of years there had been stagnation. The machines had filled every human want, and there had been little need for effort of any kind. Also, progress had been discouraged by a hidebound government, which had remained in power through its control of certain of the more important machines. The government had fallen when realization came that it could do nothing to keep the machines in repair, but the damage had been done. After centuries of a hands-off attitude toward the machines, nobody else knew how to repair them, either. Rapid progress was made everywhere except in this one direction.

"Nela and the others decided to travel to different points in time and obtain specialists who would each be able to deal with some particular repair job on the machines. The machines, of course, were not the product of any one time period, but were the cumulative result of the knowledge and skills of different periods. I was the specialist with whom contact was made at this point in time. It was, I realize now, quite a complicated business.

"When a beautiful girl appears in a time machine and tells some young man she needs his help, he doesn't just drop whatever he happens to be doing and go sailing blithely off into the mysterious future. Not in real life. He has to consider his family and friends, the career he was working on, all the things familiar and important to him, his surroundings, interests and amusements, climate, customs, clothing—all the rest. He has to consider that he might not be happy in the future, 

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