"We've got ourselves a place to live and there's lots to eat. Save our ammo for the big game--a lot of eating for each bullet--and trap the smaller animals."
"I'm wondering what will happen when the flour and all the other stuff is gone. We don't have too much of it because we always figured we could bring in more."
"We'll live on meat," said Hudson. "We got bison by the million. The plains Indians lived on them alone. And in the spring, we'll find roots and in the summer berries. And in the fall, we'll harvest a half-dozen kinds of nuts."
"Some day our ammo will be gone, no matter how careful we are with it."
"There's a lot of beasts here I wouldn't want to stand up to with nothing but a spear."
"We won't stand up to them. We'll duck when we can and run when we can't duck. Without our guns, we're no lords of creation--not in this place. If we're going to live, we'll have to recognize that fact."
"And if one of us gets sick or breaks a leg or--"
"We'll do the best we can. Nobody lives forever."
But they were talking around the thing that really bothered them, Hudson told himself--each of them afraid to speak the thought aloud.
They'd live, all right, so far as food, shelter and clothing were concerned. And they'd live most of the time in plenty, for this was a fat and open-handed land and a man could make an easy living.
But the big problem--the one they were afraid to talk about--was their emptiness of purpose. To live, they had to find some meaning in a world without society.
A man cast away on a desert isle could always live for hope, but here there was no hope. A Robinson Crusoe was separated from his fellow-humans by, at the most, a few thousand miles. Here they were separated by a hundred and fifty thousand years.
Wes Adams was the lucky one so far. Even playing his thousand-to-one shot, he still held tightly to a purpose, feeble as it might be--the hope that he could repair the time machine.
We don't need to watch him now, thought Hudson. The time we'll have to watch is when he is forced to admit he can't fix the machine.
And both Hudson and Cooper had been kept sane enough, for there had been the cabin to be built and the winter's supply of wood to cut and the hunting to be done.