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measurements,
     would be roughly thirty-five days per foot. Every few centuries there is a portal, twenty-five years wide. The intervals cannot
     be less than about two hundred years, or the weakened forcefield would collapse.’
    ‘Does it go clear up to your century?’
    ‘No. This one extends from circa 4000 B.C. to A.D. 2000. It is not feasible to build them much longer. There are many corridors of varying lengths throughout the space-time
     of this planet. The gates are made to overlap time, so that by going from one passage to another a traveler can find any specific
     year he wishes. For example, to go further pastward than 4000 B.C. , we could take corridors I know of in England or China, whose gates also cover this year. To go futureward beyond the limits
     of this one, we would have to seek out still other places.’
    ‘When were they … invented?’
    ‘A century or two before I was born. The struggle between Wardens and Rangers was already intense, so the original purpose
     of scientific research was largely shunted aside.’
    Wolves gave voice in the night. A heavy body went crashing through underbrush and a savage, yelping chorus took up pursuit.
     ‘You see,’ Storm said, ‘we cannot wage total war. That would cost us Earth, as it cost us Mars – a ring of radioactive fragments
     encircling the sun – I sometimes wonder if, at the last, engineers will not go back sixty million years and build great space
     fleets, for a battle that wiped out the dinosaurs and left eternal scars on the moon…’
    ‘You don’t know your own future, then?’ Lockridge asked with a crawling along his nerves.
    The dark head shook. ‘No. When the activator is turned on to make a new corridor, it drives a shaft equally far in both directions.
     We ventured ahead of our era. There were guardianswho turned us back, with weapons we did not understand. We no longer try. It was too terrible.’
    The knowledge of mysteries beyond mysteries was not to be endured. Lockridge fled to practicality.
    ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘I seem to’ve enlisted in a war on your side. Do you mind tellin’ me what the shootin’s for? Who are your
     enemies?’ He paused. ‘Who are you?’
    ‘Let me continue to use the name I chose in your century,’ Storm said. ‘I believe it was a lucky one.’ She sat brooding a
     while. ‘I do not think you could really grasp the issue of my age. Too much history lies between you and us. Could a man from
     your past really feel what the basic difference is that divides East and West in your time?’
    ‘I reckon not,’ Lockridge admitted. ‘In fact quite a few of our own don’t seem to see it.’
    ‘At that,’ Storm said, ‘the issue is the same. Because there has really only been one throughout man’s existence – distorted,
     confused, hidden behind a thousand lesser motivations, and yet always in some fashion the clash between two philosophies,
     two ways of thought and life – of
being –
the question is forever: What is the nature of man?’
    Lockridge waited. Storm brought her gaze back from the night, across the low fire to him, stabbingly intense.
    ‘Life as it is imagined to be against life as it is,’ she said. ‘Plan against organic development. Control against freedom.
     Overriding rationalism against animal wholeness. The machine against the living flesh. If man and man’s fate can be planned,
     organized, made to conform to some vision of ultimate perfection, is not man’s duty to enforce the vision upon his fellow
     man, at whatever cost? That sounds familiar to you, no?
    ‘But your country’s great enemy is only one manifestation of a thing that was born before history: that spoke through the
     laws of Draco and Diocletian, the burning of the Confucian Willow Books, Torquemada, Calvin, Locke, Voltaire, Napoleon, Marx,
     Lenin, Arguellas, the Jovian Manifesto, and on and on. Oh, not clearly, not simply – there was no tyranny inthe hearts of some who believed in supreme