very uncomfortable during those last few days."
"And nothing else?"
"Oh yes. The Mass was destroyed by a bombardment of heavy neutrons. It disintegrated completely."
"And you can't recall any details of the annihilator machine?"
"It was your invention."
"I seem to have forgotten."
"But you haven't forgotten that the Mass was destroyed, and the world saved from a fate that hung over it for ten years?"
"No."
"Or the shining things that come showering down from the sky?"
"No."
George Vignot snorted and rumpled his hair. "You've got ten years in which to perfect that annihilator machine again. And you'll do it. Can't help it. You've already done it. That much is settled even if we can't prove it. I'm going back to my classes. When you need help, call on me and I'll come. But don't expect too much. I'm only a messy chemist. I'm not a miracle worker."
He left the laboratory and was shortly followed by Danzig, leaving the young scientist to solve the problems that were to face him in the future.
Carruthers walked to the quartz-glass window and stared into the twilight encompassing the city. But his mind was not on the problem of destroying the Mass that would eventually threaten the earth. He was thinking of those last, precious minutes on Thunder Mountain.
"Ten years," he breathed, as if talking to someone far off in space, "is a long time to wait for you again, Ishtar—a long time to await your second coming since you first appeared out of the void of outer space. Where are you now, and what are you doing?"
He waited patiently, but no answer came out of the present. It lay in the future—ten years of research and toil.
The lights winked on in the teeming caverns of city streets one hundred floors below his window. The throb of the underground turbines beat familiarly against his ears as if to bring him back to a more normal way of life.
But nothing would ever be normal from now on. Nothing would ever be quite the same. Nothing would ever erase the memory of her from his mind. For he knew that no matter what might happen during the next decade, the pattern of his life would flow on to its ultimate conclusion. That Ishtar, the girl from outer space, would come rocketing down from the sky in the shining thing. And he would hold her again in his arms. This was his Alpha and Omega. The beginning, and the end.
