no
way to test it. They had not been certain, he remembered, the
first time they had used it, that it would really work. There had
been no way to find out. When it worked, you knew it worked. And
if it hadn't worked, there would have been no way of knowing
beforehand that it wouldn't.

Adams had been sure, of course, but that had been because he had
absolute reliance in the half-mathematical, half-philosophic
concepts he had worked out--concepts that neither Hudson nor
Cooper could come close to understanding.

That had always been the way it had been, even when they were
kids, with Wes dreaming up the deals that he and Johnny carried
out. Back in those days, too, they had used time travel in their
play. Out in Johnny's back yard, they had rigged up a time
machine out of a wonderful collection of salvaged junk--a wooden
crate, an empty five-gallon paint pail, a battered coffee maker, a
bunch of discarded copper tubing, a busted steering wheel and
other odds and ends. In it, they had "traveled" back to
Indian-before-the-white-man land and mammoth-land and
dinosaur-land and the slaughter, he remembered, had been
wonderfully appalling.

But, in reality, it had been much different. There was much more
to it than gunning down the weird fauna that one found.

And they should have known there would be, for they had talked
about it often.

He thought of the bull session back in university and the little,
usually silent kid who sat quietly in the corner, a law-school
student whose last name had been Pritchard.

And after sitting silently for some time, this Pritchard kid had
spoken up: "If you guys ever do travel in time, you'll run up
against more than you bargain for. I don't mean the climate or the
terrain or the fauna, but the economics and the politics."

They all jeered at him, Hudson remembered, and then had gone on
with their talk. And after a short while, the talk had turned to
women, as it always did.

He wondered where that quiet man might be. Some day, Hudson told
himself, I'll have to look him up and tell him he was right.

We did it wrong, he thought. There were so many other ways we
might have done it, but we'd been so sure and greedy--greedy for
the triumph and the glory--and now there was no easy way to
collect.

On the verge of success, they could have sought out help, gone to
some large industrial concern or an educational foundation or even
to the government. Like historic explorers, they cou