“What about the other three component robots?” Hunter stopped to pull her cloak free.

“I don’t recall. I left my notes with my regular clothes back in Room F-12.” “You believe that these specialties reflect their choices of where and in what time period to hide?”

“Yes, even though they intended to remain microscopic forever. It may be a subliminal influence of their specialties, rather than part of their deliberate, rational thought. But if I can figure out what kind of influence MC 3’s specialty, for instance, had on him, I might have a shortcut for finding him here.”

“You say that MC 3 handled security matters for Mojave Center,” Hunter said.

“This strikes me as irrelevant to his presence here. Do you have any guess as to where he might be now, or where he would go here, with this information?” “No,” Jane said. “Not yet.”

The Germans quietly led the way through the forest. Hunter saw that they were still carefully watching the birds in the trees and stopping occasionally simply to listen. The dogs, too, were on the alert. He decided that they were still hoping to find prey for dinner, even on their way home.

Dr. Wayne Nystrom squatted next to a cold, fast-flowing stream in the forest. He drank some water out of his cupped hand and wiped his hand on a patch of grass. Then he shivered in the chilly breeze and looked around at the trees. A few birds chirped and twittered in the branches. Otherwise, the forest looked the same in every direction.

"I'm freezing," he muttered to himself. He stood up and slowly turned around again, hoping to see a sign of human life somewhere. The view, however, was the same now that he was standing as it had been when he was squatting.

Wayne had been lost ever since his arrival here. All he knew about his location was that he was some- where in the German forest east of the Rhine in A.D. 9. He had no idea where to find human habitation.

Only a few hours ago by his own time, but seventeen centuries in the future from this year, he had taken some time to tinker with his belt unit. This was the device that he carried to trigger the time travel sphere back in Room F-12 of the Bohung Institute. In working with it, he had learned that it could control the settings in the console of the sphere even when he was in another time. This occurred during the early stage of its function, just before the sphere picked him up to move him through time. Instantly, he had realized that he could use this capability to his own advantage.

First he had used the unit’s controls to slow down the action of the device. This had allowed him enough time to monitor and read all the records inside the console that ran the sphere. Since these records contained each setting that had been used so far, they told him where all the other component robots had gone. At the time Wayne read them, Hunter and his team had not used the sphere since going to Jamaica in 1668.

Based on when each of the component robots had left its own time, Wayne had judged that of the remaining component robots still at large, the one here in Germany was due to explode the soonest. Guessing that Hunter would try to capture him next, Wayne had also picked this location. If at all possible, he wanted to grab MC 3 and study him here in this time, before Hunter could take him back.

He had arrived safely, but moving directly from Jamaica in the summer of 1668 left him unprepared for life in this forested mountain area in central Europe. The water in the stream was clear and certainly untouched by industrial pollution, but finding food in this northern forest was going to require more work than buying tropical fruit in Port Royal, Jamaica. Worst of all, without heavier clothing, he might not survive the night. He was not sure how cold these mountains would get at night.

Rubbing his arms, he stood up and looked around. All he could do was start walking. He chose a direction at random and began to pick his way through the underbrush.

“Somewhere across the Rhine in A.D. 9,” he said quietly. In the solitude, he liked hearing the sound of his own voice. However, he was not a historian and did not know much about what would be happening nearby. He only knew that he was in Germany in Roman times.

He had smelled the faint odor of woodsmoke for several minutes before he suddenly realized what it meant. In these times, of course, open fires were the principal means for cooking and keeping warm-though in a forest, the odor of smoke could also mean a forest fire. However, this smoke was too faint to present an immediate danger. Encouraged, he followed the scent.