sick or breaks a leg or--"

"We'll do the best we can. Nobody lives forever."

But they were talking around the thing that really bothered them,
Hudson told himself--each of them afraid to speak the thought
aloud.

They'd live, all right, so far as food, shelter and clothing were
concerned. And they'd live most of the time in plenty, for this
was a fat and open-handed land and a man could make an easy
living.

But the big problem--the one they were afraid to talk about--was
their emptiness of purpose. To live, they had to find some meaning
in a world without society.

A man cast away on a desert isle could always live for hope, but
here there was no hope. A Robinson Crusoe was separated from his
fellow-humans by, at the most, a few thousand miles. Here they
were separated by a hundred and fifty thousand years.

Wes Adams was the lucky one so far. Even playing his
thousand-to-one shot, he still held tightly to a purpose, feeble
as it might be--the hope that he could repair the time machine.

We don't need to watch him now, thought Hudson. The time we'll
have to watch is when he is forced to admit he can't fix the
machine.

And both Hudson and Cooper had been kept sane enough, for there
had been the cabin to be built and the winter's supply of wood to
cut and the hunting to be done.

But then there would come a time when all the chores were finished
and there was nothing left to do.

"You ready to go?" asked Cooper.

"Sure. All rested now," said Hudson.

They hoisted the pole to their shoulders and started off again.

Hudson had lain awake nights thinking of it and all the thoughts
had been dead ends.

One could write a natural history of the Pleistocene, complete
with photographs and sketches, and it would be a pointless thing
to do, because no future scientist would ever have a chance to
read it.

Or they might labor to build a memorial, a vast pyramid,
perhaps, which would carry a message forward across fifteen
hundred centuries, snatching with bare hands at a semblance of
immortality. But if they did, they would be working against the
sure and certain knowledge that it all would come to naught, for
they knew in advance that no such pyramid existed in historic
time.

Or they might set out to seek contemporary Man, hiking across four
thousand miles of wilderness to Bering Strait and over into Asia.
And having found contemporary Man cowering in his caves, they
might be able to help him immeasurab