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"I won't need them. Only Karellen can stop me now. Thanks for all that you've done. If I ever get back, and write a book about the Overlords, I'll dedicate it to you."

"Much good that will do me," said Sullivan gruffly. "I'll have been dead for years." To his surprise and mild consternation, for he was not a sentimental man, he discovered that this farewell was beginning to affect him. He had grown to like Jan during the weeks they had plotted together. Moreover, he had begun to fear he might be an accessory to a complicated suicide.

He steadied the ladder as Jan climbed into the great jaw, carefully avoiding the lines of teeth. By the light of the electric torch, he saw Jan turn and wave; then he was lost in the cavernous hollow. There was the sound of the airlock hatch being opened and closed, and, thereafter, silence.

In the moonlight, that had transformed the frozen battle into a scene from a nightmare, Professor Sullivan walked slowly back to his office. He wondered what he had done, and where it would lead. But this, of course, he would never know. Jan might walk this spot again, having given no more than a few months of his life in travelling to the home of the Overlords and returning to Earth. Yet if he did so, it would be on the other side of Time's impassable barrier, for it would be eighty years in the future.

***

The lights went on in the tiny metal cylinder as soon as Jan had closed the inner door of the lock. He allowed himself no time for second thoughts, but began immediately upon the routine check he had already worked out. All the stores and provisions had been loaded days ago, but a final recheck would put him in the right frame of mind, by assuring him that nothing had been left undone.

An hour later, he was satisfied. He lay back on the sponge-rubber couch and recapitulated his plans. The only sound was the faint whirr of the electric calendar dock, which would warn him when the voyage was coming to its end.

He knew that he could expect to feel nothing here in his cell, for whatever tremendous forces drove the ships of the Overlords must be perfectly compensated. Sullivan had checked that, pointing out that his tableau would collapse if subjected to more than a few gravities. His-clients-had assured him that there was no danger on this score. -

There would, however, be a considerable change of atmospheric pressure. This was unimportant, since the hollow models could "breathe" through several orifices. Before he left his cell, Jan would have to equalize pressure, and he had assumed that the atmosphere inside the Overlord ship was unbreathable. A simple face-mask and oxygen set would take care of that; there was no need for anything elaborate. If he could breathe without mechanical aid, so much the better.

There was no point in waiting any longer; it would only be a strain on the nerves. He took out the little syringe, already loaded with the carefully prepared solution. Narcosamine had been discovered during research into animal hibernation; it was not true to say-as was popularly believed-that it produced suspended animation. All it caused was a great slowing-down of the vital processes, though metabolism still continued at a reduced level. It was as if one had banked up the fires of life, so that they smouldered underground. But when, after weeks or months, the effect of the drug wore off, they would burst out again and the sleeper would revive. Narcosamine was perfectly safe. Nature had used it for a million years to protect many of her children from the foodless winter.

So Jan slept. He never felt the tug of the hoisting cables as the huge metal framework was lifted into the hold of the Overlord freighter. He never heard the hatches close, not to open again for three hundred million million kilometres. He never heard, far-off and faint through the mighty walls, the protesting scream of Earth's atmosphere, as the ship climbed swiftly back to its natural element.

And he never felt the Stardrive