Nat and Abby had learned the language thoroughly through the time machine's hypno-translator, then picked an uninhabited little island in the atoll. After weeks of sun bathing, they had let themselves be discovered by the natives in their outrigger canoes. The natives quietly accepted Nat and Abby as slightly different, but members of their informal society, for it was inconceivable to them that any but their own kind could be living on one of the atolls. "This is a heavenly life," Abby sighed, stretching out on the sand one day. "Cocoanuts, breadfruit, seafood, all for the taking. I'll hate to leave it." "But I'm afraid we must," Nat said slowly, "And soon, too. We don't dare stay too long in one place." From the islands, Nat and Abby drifted on from century to century, usually stopping in post-war periods when both governments and populations were preoccupied with constructive social progress. It was during the American reconstruction period following World War III that they again were tracked down by the TIC. Nat was an engineer, rebuilding shattered Seattle, when one day he spotted a tall, angular mechanic, newly hired on the project--and unmistakably Anton Bor! Ten years before, Nat and Abby had cached the time machine a hundred miles away. Now, as they winged through the night in their private helicopter, Nat groaned at the futility of matching wits with scientists of century twenty-five. "I don't understand it, Abby! There's atomic radiation lingering here from the war. We're working on a reactor for the city's power plant, yet Bor and his TIC manage to track us down." "Perhaps, Dear Nat," Abby said, lapsing into her original old New England speech, as she often did when thinking deeply, "He followeth us by inductive methods rather than through his science." There was a moment's silence. Nat broke it to say, "We've been doing the obvious. Well then, our next stop _must_ be different!" They cruised silently toward the hiding place of their time machine until they saw the faint glow of a radioactive crater. A missile missing its target, had gouged a large hole in the mountainside. Nat had hidden the time machine in a cave as close as possible to the crater to lessen the chance of detection by the TIC or casual explorers. "Just in case they _have_ spotted our machine, and someone is waiting for us, we're going to take the last few miles on foot," Nat said, checking his paralysis gun. He set the heli down in a clearing and they started cautiously forward on foot, working their way up the mountainside, with all the tension of a hunter stalking game. A hundred yards from the cave entrance, they spotted a campfire. They approached stealthily, and finally were able to make out the shadowy form of an old man, apparently a war hermit who had set up a mountain retreat.