two uniformed figures got out. Now she really wanted to scream. One sound. One sound and they would hear her. One quick filling of the lungs and—

Adam Slade hit her suddenly and savagely and the black loomed up at her but she did not remember striking it.

When she awoke, the helicopter was gone.

"Sorry I had to poke you one," Slade said. He did not seem sorry at all. He said it automatically and then added: "You ready to walk?"

She nodded. She got up and staggered a few steps before her legs steadied under her. Then with Slade she walked down along the rocky beach. This, she thought, was a story. It was the only big story she had ever had and probably she would not live to write it. As a woman, she was almost hysterical with fear, but as a videocaster she was angry. The story was hers—if she lived to tell it.

Then she had to live.

Time prison. Sure, she thought. Utterly escape proof—unless someone like Slade could take a hostage, double back to the prison dome, the hermetically sealed dome and somehow trick or overpower the guards who watched the time traveling machine outside the prison dome.

Outside. Naturally, it would be outside. That way the prisoners couldn't get at it.

Unless, like Slade, they too were outside.

Outside, where life had not yet been born. Outside, the infant earth. Let a man escape. What did his escape matter? He would live exactly as long as it took a man, reasonably healthy, to starve to death.

Unless he had a hostage and a plan....

he became aware of rain when they left the cliff overhang. There was almost no wind and the rain came down slowly at first, huge slow drops which splattered on the black rock.

"If it gets any harder," Slade said, "we'll have to duck under the cliff for protection. You don't know what a rain can be like back here. I seen them through the dome."

But they couldn't go under the cliff for protection, not if they wanted to keep going. For the cliff dropped suddenly in a wild jumble of rocks and then there was nothing but the sloping black beach, sloping down to the sea.

Then, all at once, someone opened the sluicegates and the rain bombarded them. It slapped and bounced off the rock like pistol shots. It struck them like hammers. They staggered under its weight.

"We'll have to go back to the cliffs!" Marcia cried. She yelled it again at the top of her voice because she realized Slade would not hear her otherwise as the rain cracked and exploded and splattered and crashed. There were no droplets of water. For each one had size and shape and weight, swift-falling, hammering weight as it came down. Each one, Marcia thought wildly, struggling to keep her feet, was the size of your clenched fist there in the gray dawn of Earth.

"The cliffs!" she cried again.

But Adam Slade shook his head, grabbed her arm above the wrist and pulled her after him. He pointed ahead, in the direction they had been going. He said nothing. There was no need to talk. They were going forward and if it killed them probably Adam Slade did not care much.

He wanted that prison time machine for his escape and he was either going to get it or die in the attempt.

They went on slowly. First one would fall and then the other and when it was Slade who had fallen, she would wait patiently, hopefully. If he ever released his hold on the M-gun—

But if it were Marcia who fell, Slade would yank her to her feet savagely, yelling words which she had heard at first but which after a while, after an eternity of the storm, seemed to merge with the sound of the rain and the far booming of thunder out over the water and then, as if by magic, she was walking again and stumbling along with Slade, drenched and beaten and half-drowned.

She hardly remembered when night came, but presently she was aware of