“I know. It’s unfair, it’s cruel—it’s anything else you may choose to call it. You had no idea you would walk into a situation like this. Well, I feel sorry for you. But you knew you were going on a one-way trip to the future, and would be subject to whatever that future might decide to do with you. You knew that you could not possibly return in time to your own age.” Mahler began to tidy up the paper on his desk with a brusqueness that signaled finality. “I’m terribly sorry, but you’ll just have to try to understand our point of view,” he said. “We’re frightened to death by your very presence here. We can’t allow you to roam Earth, even in a spacesuit. No. There’s nothing for you but the Moon. I have to be absolutely inflexible. Take him away,” he said gesturing to the guards.

They advanced on the little man and began gently to ease him out of Mahler’s office.

Mahler sank gratefully into the pneumochair and sprayed his throat with laryngogel. These long speeches always left him exhausted, and now his throat felt raw and scraped. Someday I’ll get throat cancer from all this talking. Mahler thought. And that’ll mean the nuisance of an operation. But if I don’t do this job, someone else will have to.

Mahler heard the protesting screams of the time jumper impassively. In the beginning he had been ready to resign on first witnessing the inevitable frenzied reaction of jumper after jumper as the guards dragged them away. But eight years had hardened him.

They had given him the job because he had been a hard man in the first place. It was a job that called for a hard man. Condrin, his predecessor, had not been the same sort of man at all, and because of his tragic weakness Condrin was now himself on the Moon. He had weakened after heading the bureau a year, and had let a jumper go.

The jumper had promised to secrete himself at the tip of Antarctica and Condrin, thinking that Antarctica would be as safe as the Moon, had foolishly released him. Right after that they had called Mahler in. In eight years Mahler had sent four thousand men—to the Moon. The first had been the runaway jumper—intercepted in Buenos Aires after he had left a trail of disease down the hemisphere from Appalachia to the Argentine Protectorate. The second had been Condrin.