I don’t think we’ve gone past ten thousand. I’m Steven McTroy, who has the pleasure of organizing these contests.”
His photos littered the place, so surely I should have recognized him, but since I had entered the contest through an intermediary, I hadn’t had a chance to speak to him in person until then. But I didn’t see her, first because the experience was taking place somewhere else entirely, and second because the time tachometer was scrolling its digits on the display far too fast to keep track of anything. The girls who proved more recalcitrant to my overtures and who were not even impressed by my champion status, I lured away with a trip to the Jurassic. I looked around expecting applause and cheers, but instead all I saw were the desolate cliffs that looked exactly as desolate as the Precambrian. I wished the invention now being worked on in the Institute, which automatically bypassed time vortices, was ready, but as it wasn’t, I had to stretch my attention to the limit. I sped like lightning through the historical period, then into pre-history and accelerated, so now it only took a few minutes to get to the period where I lost Eliza, and even as I looked for her, I was aware that I couldn’t have stopped even if I’d caught a
