Project Mastodon
Public Domain
Chapter 8
It had taken ten full days of back-breaking work to build the pyramid. They’d hauled the rocks from the creek bed half a mile away and had piled them, stone by rolling stone, to the height of a full twelve feet. It took a lot of rocks and a lot of patience, for as the pyramid went up, the base naturally kept broadening out.
But now all was finally ready.
Hudson sat before the burned-out campfire and held his blistered hands before him.
It should work, he thought, better than the logs--and less dangerous.
Grab a handful of sand. Some trickled back between your fingers, but most stayed in your grasp. That was the principle of the pyramid of stones. When--and if--the time machine should work, most of the rocks would go along.
Those that didn’t go would simply trickle out and do no harm. There’d be no stress or strain to upset the working of the force-field.
And if the time unit didn’t work?
Or if it did?
This was the end of the dream, thought Hudson, no matter how you looked at it.
For even if they did get back to the twentieth century, there would be no money and with the film lost and no other taken to replace it, they’d have no proof they had traveled back beyond the dawn of history--back almost to the dawn of Man.
Although how far you traveled would have no significance. An hour or a million years would be all the same; if you could span the hour, you could span the million years. And if you could go back the million years, it was within your power to go back to the first tick of eternity, the first stir of time across the face of emptiness and nothingness--back to that initial instant when nothing as yet had happened or been planned or thought, when all the vastness of the Universe was a new slate waiting the first chalk stroke of destiny.
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