Part 2

He ran over to the hopper in front of the big machine, thrust both hands into it, and came running back to us, his hands held out in front of him.

"Firecrackers!" he said exultantly.

He had a double handful of the round explosive pellets. The machine was manufacturing them. They were being made right here in this windowless building, in Ten Mile Valley.

This was where Tommy had got those incredible bombs. Somehow he had stumbled into this hidden place.

He looked expectantly up at me.

"Gimme bar'l of candy?" he said hopefully.

My tongue was still hiding down in my throat as if it was determined to have no part in the lies it knew I was going to tell. "S--sure," I stuttered. "I'll get the candy for you as soon as we get back to town. But Tommy, where are we?"

That was the question! Where were we?

"Huh?" said Tommy. Then he added, in explanation, "We're here!"

Hell, I knew that! What I wanted to know was where _here_ was. I tried another tack. "Where did this building, all these machines, where did they come from?"

He shrugged. The question was over his head. "Find 'em here," he said. He looked hopefully at me. "Candy for Tommy Sonofagun?"

His little mind ran on one track. The building was here, the machines were here, facts to be accepted without question, just like the hills and the rain. He had found them here. That was all he knew about them.

"Let's get out of this place," I said to Ellen. There was a dazed, glazed expression in her eyes. Her mind had refused to accept the evidence of her eyes and she had stopped thinking.

In my mind was pure panic. Never in my life had I wanted to run so badly. The only thing that interested me was to get out of this place, fast! I was starting to do just that when a voice stopped me.

"Here's that thief again," the voice said. At least that was what I thought it said. The words were English but they weren't like the English I know. The accent was all wrong and they were run together in a sing-songy effect. I turned to see who had spoken.

* * * * *

Two men were standing in a door at the far end of the building. Apparently they had just entered. Dressed in glittering clothes, stern faced, they didn't look like any people I wanted to meet. I grabbed Ellen and started to run.

"Alt!" the command came.

I wasn't doing any halting. I was out of my mind from sheer fright. My sole interest lay in getting out of that place. I was so confused I didn't realize I didn't know how to get out and I did the only thing possible, which was to turn and run.

As it worked out, this was exactly the right thing to do. A split second after I started to run, the building vanished.

I was back at the high-line tower, not under it but beside it, with the night and the stars and the moon around me, and the high-pitched whine of leaking current in my ears. I was back where I had started from and no building full of automatic machinery was in sight.

"W--what's the matter?" Tommy gibbered beside me. He sensed how scared I was and this scared him.

Ellen had quietly fainted. I threw her over my shoulder.

"Run!" I shouted at Tommy.

With him at my heels, I started making tracks away from there.

"Alt!" came a high-pitched command from behind me.

A streak of light drove through the night, passed within a foot of my head. It seemed to set the darkness on fire. The two men had taken a shot at us.

This was all Tommy needed to convince him that something was really after him. He was already scared and when that streak of light went past us, he went crazy. Crouching and turning, he stretched the rubbers of that slingshot.

"Don't shoot!" I screamed at him.

It was too late. The rubbers blurred as he released the sling.

Looking back I caught a glimpse of the two men. It was the same two all right. They were standing beside the tower. Looking completely bewildered, they were making no effort to stop us.

Then the pellet hit them.

_Blooie!_

* * * * *

The blast hurled me forward but I managed to keep my feet and keep running. Fire spouted skyward, there was a crack of breaking steel.

The tower was falling. The explosion had knocked the legs out from under it and it was falling.

Somewhere over my head was a thrumming snap. I knew what it meant. The copper high-line cables, strained by the falling tower, were about to break. There were sixty-six thousand volts of electricity in those twanging cables.

With Ellen in my arms I dived into a ravine. As I hit and rolled the night was cataclysmic with bursting flame. Arcs like bright flashes of lightning leaped against the sky as the cables parted. The live ends hit the ground and writhed like giant snakes spewing fifteen-feet-long streams of molten fire. There was juice in those cables, plenty of juice, and it was running wild.

Somewhere, somebody screamed. Tommy! He was screaming. As if his scream was a signal, the whole earth seemed to gather itself together and hunch upward in one violent explosive blast. It knocked me cold. As I blacked out, I saw a great spout of flame leaping toward the stars and I remember thinking that the whole vault of heaven was on fire. Then something seemed to hit me on the head and I quit thinking.

* * * * *

When I regained consciousness I was in a hospital and a nurse was bending over me. As soon as I opened my eyes, she went dashing out of the room, to return with a doctor. He poked and pried at me and finally said that he thought I would live. From the way I felt, this was more than I expected.

The doctor had no more than left until there was a violent argument at the door. The nurse was telling someone that I couldn't have company and somebody else was saying I was going to have company, or else. Then Ellen was bending over me. "Ben, are you badly hurt?"

I told her what the doctor had said and the relief that flooded her face almost made me feel romantic. She had a big patch of adhesive tape on her face and a lot of scratches and bruises but she was able to walk.

"Ben, what happened?" she asked. "Those two men, that building, those machines--"

"And those atomic bombs!" I said.

"What? Atomic bombs? I don't understand. What were those men doing, Ben?"

"Sabotage," I said firmly.

"But it couldn't have been sabotage," she protested. "If they had wanted to blow up the high-line, they could have done it without any trouble. And that building and the high-line tower existed in the same place. Ben, it couldn't have been attempted sabotage. There must be some other explanation. I've thought and I've thought and I don't see the answer."

"Just the same, it was sabotage," I said. "That's the way I am going to write the story."

"You will be lying, Ben," said a voice from the doorway. I looked up. It was the sheriff. He came walking into the room. His arm was still in a sling and his face looked grayer than ever.

"How did you get here?" I stuttered.

"I found you and brought you in," he said. "The two of you." He pulled up a chair and sat down in a manner that indicated he planned to stay a while. "Now tell me the truth, you two," he said. "Tell me just exactly what happened, the way it happened."

"You will call us liars," I protested.

"That may be," he admitted. "But I want to hear it just the same."

* * * * *

So we told him. He sat there and listened without a sign of expression on his face. For all the emotion he showed, he might have been made out of wood.

"What do you make of it, Ben," he said at last, when we had finished.

"Sabotage," I said.

"What do you really think, Ben?" he came back.

"Well," I said slowly. "There was a slight leakage of current down that particular tower. I think this leakage and the particular way in which it took place accidentally combined to make us the first time travelers in human history!"

Ellen gasped at that but the sheriff didn't blink an eye.

"Go on," he said.

"I think that building exists in the future," I said. "I think it will exist some day and that it exists now and if we could cross time we could see it. Those men spoke a strange kind of English. That points to the future. They were making atomic bombs. We don't know how to make atomic bombs now but we will know how to do it, in the future. I think that building we entered was an arsenal of the future that will be built in Ten Mile Valley in some coming century. You asked me what I think and I've told you," I defiantly finished. "If you don't like it, you can think up your own explanation."

He didn't budge. "Tommy?" he said, his voice a question.

"Tommy accidentally blundered through the arch made by the legs of the tower. He found a machine making tiny atomic bombs. He didn't know they were bombs. He thought they were fine pebbles to shoot in his slingshot. And that's what he used them for. They exploded on contact. Maybe they were designed to be dropped from an airplane, hundreds at a time. Maybe they were to be used in interplanetary war. I don't know why they were being made. All I know is that an idiot found them, and thought they would be fine things to shoot in a sling. Incidentally, what happened to Tommy?"

I had forgotten all about Tommy Sonofagun.

"We found pieces of him," the sheriff sighed. "He had a pocketful of those pebbles when the falling cables hit him. They all exploded at once."

Poor Tommy Sonofagun. He would never get his barrel of candy.

Decisively the sheriff got to his feet. He stopped at the door and looked back. "You are right, Ben," he said. "It was attempted sabotage."

And that's the way it went down in the official records, that's the way I wrote the story for my paper. The public would be willing to believe in sabotage. But would they be willing to believe in time travel?

Not this century!