Neil didn’t answer. His eyes were busily scanning the horizon. It spread around them, a gigantic circle of water, green and immense. Overhead, a few scattered clouds, bloated and lazy, drifted across the bright blue sky. The sun blazed down fiercely.
No land broke the clean line of sky meeting water. Nothing.
“Where do you suppose we are?” Neil asked.
“Where and
“First of all, where?” asked Neil.
“Where, I don’t know. I can only estimate.”
“What do you figure?”
“I can only judge by our speed,” Dave said. “We were traveling at top speed, one hundred and fifty miles an hour. We were in the air for over five hours, which means we traveled approximately eight hundred or so miles.”
“That’s a long way,” Neil said, thinking wistfully of the University.
“It’s a lot longer than you think,” Dave said. “The worst part is that I had no control of the machine. We could have traveled in any direction.”
“Which means?”
“Which means we can be somewhere off the coast of Yucatan, or somewhere off the coast of Pensacola, or somewhere off the coast of Lower California in the Pacific. We might even be in the middle of the Great Salt Lake.”
“Isn’t there any way of knowing?”
‘I’m afraid not. And the same holds true for the time angle, although we can estimate a little more closely there. We were in the air for more than five hours, traveling at a time speed of three hundred years an hour, except for the few minutes we were at half-speed.”
“That would put us somewhere around… A.D. 400, wouldn’t it?”
“Approximately. I’d give or take a few centuries and say somewhere between A.D. 100 and 600.”
Neil whistled softly.
“Some fun, eh, kid?” Dave asked.
“Yeah, yeah, some fun.”
They sat quietly for a few minutes, the sound of the waves whispering around the machine.
“What’s our next move?” Neil asked.
“An excellent question,” Dave said, assuming the pose of a college professor, one finger placed meditatively beside his temple. “An excellent question.”
“And the answer?”
“Several answers,” Dave said. “First, we find land. Second, we start to fix the mach-”
“How do we find land?”
“Another good question. How
“I hadn’t even thought of sinking,” Neil said.
“Our food’ll last about two weeks,” Dave said, “But the machine won’t float that long, as light as it is. And if we should hit a storm-”
Dave stopped and watched Neil’s face. Neil’s mouth had dropped open, and his eyes now were large and bright against the copper of his skin. He was staring over Dave’s shoulder, looking out at the horizon.
Quickly, Dave’s head snapped over his shoulder, and he followed Neil’s intent stare. “What is it, kid?”
Neil pointed, his hand on Dave’s shoulder. “There! Look. On the horizon.”
“I don’t see anything. Is it land?”
“No, no, look. It’s a sail. A sail, Dave!”
“Where? I don’t see any-yes, I see it. It’s a sail, Neil. By jumping Jupiter, it’s a sail.”
“And heading this way, Dave. See, it’s heading toward us.”
A look at Dave’s face cooled Neil’s enthusiasm.
“What’s the matter, Dave? That’s a sail out there. A ship! Don’t you understand? We’ll be rescued.”
“There’s one catch,” Dave said, his voice low and serious.
“Catch? What can possibly be wrong with a-?”
“I don’t know a heck of a lot about the Mayas, Neil,” Dave hurried on, “and I sure wish the Doc or Art were here to back me up on this. I’m not even sure we’re near Yucatan, or that we’re in the time I estimated.”
“I don’t get it. What’s all that got to do with-?”
“Just this. If we are sometime between A.D. 100 and 600, and if we are near Yucatan, there shouldn’t be a sail in these waters.”
“But, why not?”
“Because the sail is unknown to the Mayas. That’s why.”
Neil considered this briefly. “Well, that’s simple, Dave, We just aren’t near Yucatan.”
Dave’s eyes flicked again toward the horizon and the approaching sail.
“That’s what bothers me. I don’t know who’s on that ship, or what their business is.”
He looked out over the horizon once more, at the tiny sail in the distance.
“I think,” he said slowly, “we’d better break some rifles out of the gunlocker.”
Without waiting for Neil’s reaction to his statement, Dave dropped down inside the machine. He began walking toward the control room, his feet wide spread on the curved surface below him.
“Keep an eye on that ship,” he called. And then his body wiggled through the hatchway leading to the control room and the gunlocker.
Neil watched the patch of sail on the horizon. It was still too soon to recognize what type of ship it was. At the moment, it appeared to be an inch-square piece of cloth pasted against the sky.
Unconsciously, Neil glanced at his wrist watch, then grinned to himself as he realized he was estimating the time it would take the ship to reach them.
It was moving exceptionally fast, it seemed, with a strong wind behind it, a wind that tossed Neil’s blond hair wildly about his face.