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was more like paralyzed horror. Fran was known to be behind the breakdown of the plant. He'd caused
it by trying to tap its lines for a monstrous amount of power. He'd been trying to signal to so great a
distance that tens of thousands of kilowatts were required. He'd failed, but the high brass knew with
absolute certainty that he'd tried to signal to his own race. And to the high brass this meant that he'd tried
to summon a space-fleet with invincible weapons to the conquest of Earth.
So there were two directives from the highest possible policy-making levels. First, Fran must be caught at
any cost in effort, time, money, and man-power. Second, the rest of the world must not know that one of
the four spaceship's crew members was at large.
So the hunt for Fran intensified to a merciless degree.
Soames headed north. He wore a leather jacket, and he rode a battered, second-hand motorcycle, and
on the saddle behind him an obvious kid brother rode, leather-jacketed as Soames was, capped as he
was, scowling as Soames did, and in all ways imitating his elder. Which was so familiar a sight that
nobody noticed Fran at all. He was visibly a tough younger brother of the kind of young man who goes in
for battered motorcycles because he can't afford anything better. Naturally no one suspected him of
being a telepathic monster, a creature of space, or the object of a desperate search.
It was helpful that Soames was not missed at first and was not searched for. It was a full day after the
Navajo Dam breakdown before anybody thought to have him check on the melted-down apparatus. It
was two days before anybody was concerned about him, and three before flights out of Denver had been
checked futilely for his name.
But on the fourth day after a green flame reached up toward the sky, Soames and a silent, scowling,
supposed younger brother occupied a fishing-shack on the shores of Calumet Lake. They were seven
hundred miles from Denver, and the way they'd come was much longer than that. They were far removed
from the tumult of the world. They'd made bivouacs in the open on the journey, and this would be the
first time they'd settled anywhere long enough to take stock.
"Now," said Soames, as sunset-colorings filled the sky beyond the lake's farther edge, "now we figure
out what we're going to do. We ought to be able to do something, though I don't yet know what. And
first we act the parts we're playing. We came here to catch some fish. You shouldn't be able to wait. So
we go out and catch fish for our dinner."
He led the way to a tiny wharf where a small boat lay tied. He carried fishing-rods and bait.
He untied the boat and rowed out to the middle of the lake. He surveyed his surroundings and dropped
anchor. He baited a hook, with Fran watching intently.
Soames handed him the rod. Fran waited. He imitated Soames' actions when Soames began to fish. He
watched his line as closely as the deepening dusk permitted.
"Hmmm," said Soames. "Your ankle's doing all right. Lucky it was a wrench instead of a break or a
sprain. Four days of riding and no walking have fixed it pretty well. It's fairly certain nobody knows
where you are, too. But where do we go from here?"
Fran listened.
"You came out of time," said Soames vexedly. "But time-travel can't be done. The natural law of the
conservation of matter and energy requires that the total of substance and force in the cosmos, taken
together, be the same at each instant that it was in the instant before and the one after. It's self-evident.
That rules out travelling in time."
He jerked at his fishing-rod. He did not hook his fish.
"I don't think you understand me," he observed.
"No," said Fran matter of factly.
"It doesn't matter," Soames told him. "I'm saying that you can't put a gallon of water in a full keg of wine.
And you can't, unless you draw off wine as fast as you add water. Unless you exchange. So you can't
shift an object from time-frame A to time-frame B without shifting a corresponding amount of matter and
energy from time-frame B to time-frame A. Unless you keep the amount of matter and energy unchanged
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