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Jock was looking up at him, patiently waiting for him to give some sign of recognition.
Cathy must have picked him up like she had said she could.
He knelt down and scratched the dog’s ears. “We’re in a fix, Jock. Maybe she shouldn’t have picked you up—”
He turned and followed Cathy into the council room. Jock padded silently after them.
The Council chamber was a huge, vault-shaped room the top arch of which was hundreds of feet above his head. The floor was a solid surface that looked like blue tinted marble and stretched for yards without a sign of a crack. They were the only ones in the room with the exception of eleven men sitting on a low dais at the exact center.
Once there had been twelve councilors, Hayssen thought.
There were no visible guards but Hayssen could conceive of nobody trying to break away or commit a violence. It would be like a murder inside a cathedral.
The dais seemed at least a full city block away. Their footsteps echoed from the marble floor and re-echoed from the polished brilliance of the glassy walls. There were no corners to the room and he Realized it was like being inside a shell casing, magnified a million times, where the floor is perfectly round and the walls rise to a cone overhead.
They were in front of the Council now. He stood ill at ease and watched Cathy bend her head slightly as a token of respect. He followed her lead and then stood there awkwardly awaiting what might happen next.
The old man who sat in the middle, apparently the head of the Council, looked at them quietly for a few minutes. Hayssen had a feeling that he was being inspected and weighed and found wanting.
“The case of Cathrinxa Cooper and one Donald Hayssen, an ancient from the Twentieth Century,” the old man droned. “The woman Cooper is charged with violating the Prime Injunction and revealing the existence of time travel to said Hayssen. Her motives apparently were confusing at the time but it is thought that personal desires entered into it. Recommended that she be confined, stripped of her status as watch-warden and student, and be prohibited from ever entering the time lanes again.”
He paused a moment. A murmur of assent rose from the other members of the Council. Catherine Cooper said nothing but stood there with bowed head. Hayssen moved closer to her and let his hand find her own.
The oldster started up again.
“As to Donald Hayssen, inadvertently drawn into an affair not dealing with his time and age, it is recommended that he be deprived of his memories of the event and sent back to his own time, to live his life as he will.”
Again the murmur of assent.
The Council started to file off the dais. At the same time Hayssen finally found his voice. It was a cracked and trembling voice but he managed to keep it fairly well under control.
He was nervous but that couldn’t be helped. A Neanderthal brought before a group of Chicago aldermen would feel exactly like I do, Hayssen thought.
“I object!”
The Council looked interested. It had been a long, long time since anybody had objected to their decisions.
“I object,” he repeated. “I think you owe me something!”
The oldster pursed his lips. “Why do you think we owe you something?”
Hayssen tried to be as persuasive as possible.
“It’s true that the students might have been able to take care of Lehman by themselves. But the fact is, they didn’t. Lehman might easily have changed the past, and far more radically than Cathy and I did. Perhaps to the extent that your civilization as you know it—maybe even yourselves—would cease to exist!
“Cathy and I were the ones who followed Lehman.” His voice dropped. “We were the ones who killed Lehman. And we were the ones who saved you.”
The Council sat there quietly.
“I think you owe us something,” Hayssen repeated stubbornly.
“All right, Hayssen,” the oldster said finally. “What is it you want?”
“Cathy.”
The Council was in an uproar. Cathy moved next to him and he put his arm around her protectingly.
“If we grant the woman Cooper to be reprieved and allowed to live with you as your wife,” the oldster began, “has it occurred to you that she will live for a thousand years while your own life span is at most a hundred?”
“I’ve thought of that,” Hayssen said humbly, “and I’ve thought of a solution.”
He reached into his pants pocket and drew forth the vial of sparkling fluid. He had saved it and protected it for the last three weeks and he thanked the gods who had given him brains enough to leave it in the time machine when he had gone out after Lehman.
He drew the cork and drained the contents, then let the vial drop and shatter on the floor.
“That was the last of Lehman’s vials,” he announced. “And there is no reason now why Cathy and I can’t be together.”
The Council sat in silence. They seemed unable to come to a decision.
“If I may,” Hayssen pleaded, “I think I can suggest a solution.”
They looked at him coldly.
“One of your Council members is missing and so is one of the students who was studying my era. Why can’t Catherine and I return to my time and continue there as she has been, studying the past and acting as watch-warden so people like Lehman can’t alter the past? What have you to lose?”
There was a sober discussion and then the head of the Council turned back to Hayssen. He had a hint of a smile on his face.
“So be it!”
They were in the time machine again, watching the ages roll past. Cathy stood next to him, her head resting lightly against his shoulder.
It was going to be a wonderful future, he thought. They would see the marvels of tomorrow, watch the race develop spaceships and grasp the moon and the planets and then reach out for the distant stars. They would watch the world come out of the dark-ages and gradually become a better place in which to live.
But there would be heartbreak I and pain, too. They would outlive I their own children ten times over. They would see wars and poverty I and famine past anything they had ever known.
And they would have to disappear every twenty years or so. If they didn’t, their friends and neighbors would get to wondering why he and Cathy were always so young, so youthful.
It wouldn’t be easy to see his j children die and have to find a new living and make new friends every twenty years or so. But it would be worth it.
He would have a ringside seat at I the drama of the ages, the ebb and flow of the tides of history.
He looked out of the transparent walls of the machine. The familiar towers and buildings of Chicago were slowly coming to view.
He bent down and kissed Catherine.
“I love you, Cathy,” he murmured softly.
It would be a wonderful future, he thought again. And the best part of it was, Catherine would always be with him.
For a thousand years—
THE END