ld have
obtained subsidization and sponsorship. Then they would have had
protection, funds to do a proper job and they need not have
operated on their present shoestring--one beaten-up helicopter and
one time unit. They could have had several and at least one
standing by in the twentieth century as a rescue unit, should that
be necessary.

But that would have meant a bargain, perhaps a very hard one, and
sharing with someone who had contributed nothing but the money.
And there was more than money in a thing like this--there were
twenty years of dreams and a great idea and the dedication to
that great idea--years of work and years of disappointment and an
almost fanatical refusal to give up.

Even so, thought Hudson, they had figured well enough. There had
been many chances to make blunders and they'd made relatively few.
All they lacked, in the last analysis, was backing.

Take the helicopter, for example. It was the one satisfactory
vehicle for time traveling. You had to get up in the air to clear
whatever upheavals and subsidences there had been through geologic
ages. The helicopter took you up and kept you clear and gave you a
chance to pick a proper landing place. Travel without it and,
granting you were lucky with land surfaces, you still might
materialize in the heart of some great tree or end up in a swamp
or the middle of a herd of startled, savage beasts. A plane would
have done as well, but back in this world, you couldn't land a
plane--or you couldn't be certain that you could. A helicopter,
though, could land almost anywhere.

In the time-distance they had traveled, they almost certainly had
been lucky, although one could not be entirely sure just how great
a part of it was luck. Wes had felt that he had not been working
as blindly as it sometimes might appear. He had calibrated the
unit for jumps of 50,000 years. Finer calibration, he had said
realistically, would have to wait for more developmental work.

Using the 50,000-year calibrations, they had figured it out. One
jump (conceding that the calibration was correct) would have
landed them at the end of the Wisconsin glacial period; two jumps,
at its beginning. The third would set them down toward the end of
the Sangamon Interglacial and apparently it had--give or take ten
thousand years or so.

They had arrived at a time when the climate did not seem to vary
greatly, either hot or cold. The flora was modern enough to give
them a homelike feelin