long outgrown
would never cease to act as a barrier between himself and the men and
women of this era of the past. Without it he could not hope to find
complete understanding and sympathy here.

He was still alone and soon winter would come and the sky grow cold and
empty ...

The Time machine materialized so suddenly before him that for an instant
his mind refused to accept it as more than a torturing illusion conjured
up by the turbulence of his thoughts. All at once it towered in his
path, bright and shining, and he moved forward over the dew-drenched
grass until he was brought up short by a joy so overwhelming that it
seemed to him that his heart must burst.

* * * * *

Rutella emerged from the machine with a gay little laugh, as if his
stunned expression was the most amusing in the world.

"Hold still and let me kiss you, darling," her mind said to his.

She stood in the dew-bright grass on tiptoe, her sleek dark hair falling
to her shoulders, an extraordinarily pretty girl to be the wife of a man
so tormented.

"You found me!" his thoughts exulted. "You came back alone and searched
until you found me!"

She nodded, her eyes shining. So Time wasn't too vast to pinpoint after
all, not when two people were so securely wedded in mind and heart that
their thoughts could build a bridge across Time.

"The Bureau of Emotional Adjustment analyzed everything I told them.
Your psycho-graph ran to fifty-seven pages, but it was your desperate
loneliness which guided me to you."

She raised his hand to her lips and kissed it.

"You see, darling, a compulsive fear isn't easy to conquer. No man or
woman can conquer it alone. Historians tell us that when the first
passenger rocket started out for Mars, Space Fear took men by surprise
in the same way your fear gripped you. The loneliness, the utter
desolation of space, was too much for a human mind to endure."

She smiled her love. "We're going back. We'll face it together and we'll
conquer it together. You won't be alone now. Darling, don't you
see--it's because you aren't a clod, because you're sensitive and
imaginative that you experience fear. It's not anything to be ashamed
of. You were simply the first man on Earth to develop a new and
completely different kind of fear--Time Fear."

Moonson put out his hand and gently touched his wife's hair.

Ascending into the Time Observatory a thought came unbidden into his
mind: _Others he