Seeker of To-morrow
Astounding – July 1937
(1937)*
Eric Frank Russell & Leslie T. Johnson

Life is illogical; earthquakes are illogical time travel ...?

-

I

	The Venusian city of Kar shimmered beneath an inverted bowl of blue glory. It was a perfect day for a civic demonstration such as the welcoming home of the first expedition to Earth in many centuries. Citizens appreciated the cooperation of the weather; Liberty Square was packed with a murmuring, multicolored concourse that swirled in kaleidoscopic patterns. Something shrieked in the vault of space; the kaleidoscope turned uniformly pink, as five hundred thousand faces lifted to the sky.

	High in the stratosphere appeared a pair of metallic pencils, their rear ends vomiting crimson flames. Sound waves from the rocket tubes fleeted downward, bounced from the eardrums of the expectant crowd. The pencils swelled; the crimson spread along their under surfaces as the retarding rockets belched with maximum power. In a short time the objects had resolved themselves into long, streamlined space ships.

	With startling suddenness they loomed hugely to the view, sinking behind the mighty mass of university building. They seemed to pause for a moment, while the great, circular ports in their sides stared over the edge of the roof at the mob beneath. Then they were gone. Came one tremendous, reverberating crash succeeded by a moment's perfect silence. The great audience found tongues, broke into a babble of sound, as, with one accord, it stretched itself into a stream of individuals rushing along University Avenue toward the Kar Airport.

	The landing field of Kar Airport presented a scene of utmost confusion. To one side lay the space ships surrounded by a shouting, struggling mob. The uproar was loudest at a point where the overwhelmed City Guards had reformed themselves into a wedge and were desperately battling their way through the barrier of bodies.

	Babbling and bawling arose into a crescendo, when it was perceived that the nearer space ship was opening its bow door. Steadily, the circular piece of metal revolved along its worm, retreating more and more into the shadow. A final half revolution and it was drawn into the interior of the ship, while the form of a man appeared in the gap thus left.

	The crowd bellowed itself red in the face: "Urnas Karin! Urnas Karin!"

	Karin acknowledged the shouts and raised his hand for silence. Half the crowd hissed for silence, while the other half continued to bawl. The hissers reproved the bawlers and the bawlers answered back. Somebody pushed somebody and somebody else resented it. A woman fainted, collapsed, and a little man ten yards away was struck on the cranium by way of retaliation. In a flash, fifty different individuals assumed fifty different versions of what they regarded as a menacing pose. A hidden dog yelped, as somebody trod on it, and from the back of the crowd a piercing voice shrilled, "Woopsey! Woopsey!"

	Immediately, the crowd laughed; an ugly situation passed away and silence fell.

-

	Karin jumped to the ground, followed by twenty of his companions from inside the ship. A small platform, about twice man-height, stood near. Karin mounted and let his sharp eyes pass over the waiting audience. A uniformed guard placed before him a small ebony box mounted on a tripod. He waved away the guard, stood before the box and spoke.

	"My friends," he said, his voice pleasantly magnified by the disseminator he was using, "your marvelous welcome is a reward in itself. I thank you; and again, on behalf of my colleagues, I thank you! Now, I am sure that you are all fairly bursting to know whether this expedition has made any startling discoveries upon our Mother Planet." He paused and smiled, as the crowd signified with a roar that it was fairly bursting.

	"Well, I am afraid that our story is far too long to narrate in detail. Let it suffice if I tell you that we did not find a trace of the civilization of those who were our ancestors. The great cities, the mighty machines that once were theirs have crumbled into the dust and have been obliterated completely by the foot of Time. Old Mother Earth is airless, waterless and lifeless, thoroughly and completely.

	"But we did make one most remarkable discovery." He hesitated for a tantalizing minute. "We found the body of a prehistoric man! It was truly an amazing discovery. There, upon a world so ancient that every artificial mark had been smoothed away, atmosphere had leaked off into space, and even axial rotation had ceased, lay the body of this man.

	"Examination of the corpse disclosed the seemingly impossible fact that life had departed from it not more than fifty hours previously. Fortunately, we had with us, as part of our standard first-aid equipment, a normality chamber. We placed the corpse therein, warmed it, liquefied the blood and have succeeded in bringing it safely home in a condition that gives us good cause to hope that the experts in our Institute of Medicine and Surgery will be able to resuscitate it.

	"The body of this man is in perfect condition. The cause of death, literally, was lack of breath. He appears to belong to a period placed several thousands of years before our ancestors departed from the dying Earth and settled here on Venus, a period so far back in time that our history reels do not talk of it. Why, his head is covered with hair and he even has hairs upon his chest and legs!

	"The ability of scientists, in this our most progressive time, to revive the dead in cases where death is not due to old age and is not accompanied by serious injury is a marvel too well-known to need emphasis by me. Possibly there are some people here who would not be with us but for the miracles performed by our most able men and women." He was interrupted by several cries of assent.

	"I feel that there is a most excellent chance of the institute bringing this man back to life and permitting him to tell us his story with his own lips. If my hopes prove" to be justified, I intend to make an official request to Orca Sanla, chairman of the stereo-vision committee, that this lone inhabitant of a long-dead planet be allowed to stand before the screen at Kar Stereo Station and give to our world an explanation of circumstances which, to be quite candid with you, we regard as absolutely inexplicable." Karin turned and gestured toward a burly individual standing in the front rank of his scores of followers.

	"In any case, you will receive entertainment to-night. Olaf Morga, aided by his brother Reca, who is on our companion ship, has made a complete pictorial record of our venture from the time we departed from Kar to the time we left Earth. The record is being dispatched to the K. S. Station and will be radiated from sunset this evening."

	Karin started to descend, as a storm of cheering broke out. A woman in the center of the crowd screamed "Belt!"

	The word was caught up by a thousand others, ere Karin had placed his foot upon the topmost step the whole mob was roaring, "The belt! We want the belt!"

	Morga and Karin exchanged smiles. The latter returned to the center of the platform, slowly and deliberately unbuckling the flexible metal belt encircling his middle. He held it loosely by one end, while the crowd danced with excitement.

	Suddenly, he whirled it above his head, flung it upward and out. It snaked through the air toward where the throng clustered thickest. Half a hundred men leaped for it as it fell. Then it vanished beneath a mass of human beings all fighting madly for the prized souvenir.

	Quick to profit by the diversion, the city guards cleared a path from the rocket ships to the control tower. Karin and his crew, together with the crew of the sister ship, sped along the path, entered the tower. The crowd swarmed out of the airport field, poured in a colorful torrent down University Avenue and put a test load on the moving roadways to the suburbs.

	Dusk fell over Venus. The stars set in a Moonless sky penetrated the thick veil of atmosphere just sufficiently to paint faint glimmers of steely brightness upon the sides of two voyagers of interplanetary space. Side by side, in a littered field, the rocket ships slept.

-

II.

	Two months later, Bern Hedan, the man who got the buckle of the belt, fiddled with the controls of his stereo set and cursed. The brand-new pan-selenite screen of the set displayed, in natural colors and with stereoscopic effect, the final stage of transformation of a sample of Venusian pond life. A hidden announcer betrayed the fact that Sanla's myrmidons regarded a dirge played upon an asthmatic oboe as fit accompaniment to the tri-monthly acrobatics of a frog-faced fish.

	"By the death of Terra!" he ejaculated, using the most fearful oath his imagination could conceive at the moment. "I pay fifty-five yogs down and twelve more every high tide to be the owner of the set. I pay exorbitant bills for power to operate it; I produce eighteen yogs per annum for the right to make use of that which I have purchased—or am purchasing." He gestured to nothing in particular and talked aloud. He was very fond of talking to himself.

	Common-sense views appealed to him. "And what do we get for this outrageous expenditure? What do we get, I say? Pictorial demonstrations of the domestic habits of red-hammed Venusian baboons accompanied by the noise of wailing catgut. Or the amatory adventures of a deep-sea worm who pays court to somebody's symphony for ten harmonicas. Bah!"

	He wound savagely at the coordinating handle protruding from the front of the stereo cabinet. The screen dimmed, clouded over, then cleared and depicted a new scene. It was an interior view of the Hall of Debate in the city of Newlondon. Two men were seated upon chairs placed on a semicircular stage, facing a great auditorium packed with people from floor to ceiling. A third individual stood upon the stage facing a stereo screen. Bern Hedan noticed that a mirror suspended on the wall at the rear of this stage was responsible for the peculiar effect of showing the transmission screen in his own screen, giving him a double image of the three people on the stage.

	The stereo announcer was saying:

	"This evening you have heard and seen an extremely interesting and most instructive debate upon the subject of another Great Migration. You all know the reasons why the human race was compelled to make use of its discovery of the means of traveling through cosmic space by indulging in a wholesale move to our present abode—Venus. The symptoms of planetary senile decay, such as loss of atmosphere, loss of orbital velocity and speed of axial rotation, became so alarming that eventually it was obvious that Earth's characteristics were altering faster than humanity could accommodate itself to the change. Earth's days were numbered— from the human viewpoint, at least. Venus was a suitable habitat for our forefathers, ourselves and our children's children, and the means to get to Venus were at hand.

	"The question that has been discussed to-night has been, to put it briefly: 'Will history repeat itself?' In the course of time, somewhere in the distant future, our planet's fate will duplicate that of Earth. We may not like to think of it, but it is a fact, a perfectly natural fact, an inevitable one. Will Venusians die with Venus, or shall there be another Great Migration?" He signed with his hand to the man seated on his right-hand side.

	"The pessimist thinks we are doomed for the reasons he has given you, the most unanswerable of which is that the next foothold in space is the planet Mercury—and Mercury is quite uninhabitable by human beings." He signed to the opposite side. "The optimist believes that humanity shall never disappear from creation, mainly because of our steady scientific advancement which, he has said, will enable us to perfect the art of space travel to such a degree that we shall have the choice of a dozen worlds long before our present one has grown uncomfortable. "This concludes the debate between

	Leet Horis of Kar and Reca Morga of the Newlondon Debating Society." He stood staring into the transmission screen while the auditorium thundered with applause.

-

	"Now we come to the event to which all Venus has been looking forward with the keenest anticipation. Since the Kar Institute successfully resuscitated the prehistoric man two months ago, the entire world has been waiting to hear his story. There has been some comment about this delay of two months, which' I am now to tell you was due to the fact that the revival of this man was not, in itself, enough to justify his immediate appearance. He needed a period of convalescence, during which he has learned how to speak our language. You will find that he can speak with fair fluency, the reason for this being that his own language proved to be the root of ours."

	Bern Hedan adjusted the clarity knob of his set, making the screen depict the stage more sharply. He moved an easy-chair before the stereo, sat in it and switched on the automatic head-scratcher. Soothed by the restfulness of the cushions and the gentle rubs and tickles of the scratcher, he prepared to listen with tolerance;

	Seen in the screen, the pair of debaters left the stage. The announcer walked to the rear, opened a door and, with a dramatic air, ushered in the prehistoric man. The man stood directly in front of the screen and studied twelve thousand Venusians. Two hundred million Venusians studied the man.

	The Venusians felt slightly disappointed. The object of their examination did not look as though he lived in trees and ate nuts. His head was covered with disgusting hair, but otherwise he looked quite normal. He stood six feet in height; his eyes were dark, alert, his face intellectual even by Venusian standards of judgment. A woven silvoid karossa hung from his shoulders; the inevitable Venusian belt encircled his middle. He seemed to be quite at ease; it was evident that he did not agree with his audience in giving his own personality a purely antiquarian value.

	"It is my privilege," said the announcer, "to introduce to you Glyn Weston, the man from A. D. 2007—a date placed approximately seventy thousand years before the Great Migration, about one hundred and fifty thousand years from to-day." Murmurs of surprise rippled around the serried rows of seats.

	"Glyn Weston has told his story to the university board at Kar; he has made a most valuable contribution to the pages of ancient history. I shall now request him to repeat his narrative, and I think that after you have heard what he has to say you will agree that this voice from the past has recounted the most amazing tale ever to be projected over the stereo. Glyn Weston!"

-

III.

	My friends, began Weston, speaking in a pleasantly modulated voice, there is one thing I must say before I tell you my story. God's greatest gift to man is life. I cannot say that you have given me life, but to the remarkable abilities of your wonderful civilization I owe the restoration of that which was snatched from me—life! The poor and faulty power of speech is quite inadequate to convey to you the gratitude I feel. I want every one of you to know how deeply I appreciate what has been done for me by Venusian science.

	(A roar of applause shook the auditorium. The audience decided that it was to listen to a man and not to a savage.)

	As you have been informed, my name is Glyn Weston. My age I do not know; the reason will become apparent later in my story. In the period that is called mine, if any particular period can be so called, I was a physicist.

	My work commenced at the age of twenty-eight, when I was fortunate enough to inherit a very large sum of money. I was then assistant to the famous Professor Vanderveen, astrophysicist at the Glasgow Observatory. For many years my hobby had been the study of the work of McAndrew, popularly called "The Death-ray Man."

	McAndrew was a scientist of the previous decade. His life's work had advanced that of certain mathematicians and physicists of the twentieth century, most particularly Einstein, Graham, Forrest and Schweil. He was the world's most authoritative exponent of the space-time concept and, like many other geniuses, he died discredited by his contemporaries because he had asserted that it would be found possible to travel in time, to move through time into the future.

	Schweil, with whom McAndrew had been coworker, had shown that time was not an independent concept but an aspect of motion. There could be no time without motion—no motion without time.

	This may seem rather obscure to some of you, but it really is quite simple. Try to imagine time without motion; consider the means whereby you estimate time. The two cannot be separated, for they are merely different aspects of the same thing. McAndrew's life was dedicated to discovering the true relationship between these aspects and, if I may put it so, to defining the "difference."

	His work was crowned with success two years before his death. Working upon the theory that the velocity of motion and the rate of time invariably maintained a constant parallel, he evolved a ray with which he made a number of objects vanish. It was his claim that the ray speeded up the velocity of electronic motion, causing the atoms to experience time at a faster rate and thus forcing the objects into the future. Of course, he was laughed at.

	His discovery was described in the absurdest terms, such as "the automatic disintegrator" and "the death ray." McAndrew left his data in the safe-keeping of the only scientist who believed in him. That scientist was Vanderveen, my superior.

	Vanderveen was in the late fifties when he caught the torch cast by the fallen McAndrew. During my association with him he gave me constant, almost fatherly, encouragement. My interest in McAndrew pleased him immensely. When I received my inheritance I told him that it was my desire to use it in carrying on from where McAndrew had left off.

	"Weston," he said, placing a hand upon my shoulder, "I have prayed that this should be your ambition. McAndrew, alas! found in me a dog too old to learn new tricks. But as for you— you are young."

	Thus the seed was sown. But Vanderveen did not live to see the crop. Twenty-two years later I became the human subject of a time-travel experiment. I had set up my laboratory in the wilds of the Peak District of Derbyshire, in England, where work could be carried on with the minimum of interference. From this laboratory I had dispatched into the unknown, presumably the future, a multitude of objects, including several live creatures such as rats, mice, pigeons and domestic fowl. In no case could I bring back anything I had made to vanish. Once gone, the subject was gone forever. There was no way of discovering exactly where it had gone. There was nothing but to take a risk and go myself.

	To this end I designed an air-tight time-travel room and had it fabricated immediately. The room was capable of holding the much perfected Schweil-McAndrew ray projector, myself and a quantity of material I considered necessary to take with me. The projector fitting was designed so that the entire room, with all its contents, would vanish immediately the ray was turned on. I knew, of course, that if this room actually transported me into the future it was imperative that I take into account the possible alteration of ground contours over the period of time I covered. It would be foolhardy to experiment at a point where the ground might rise and leave me embedded yards below Earth's surface. So I hired a field upon a hilltop nine miles northwest of Bakewell—a very lonely spot; and equipped the roof beams with a parachute of my own design, to thwart an opposite possibility.

	Upon the fourteenth of April, A. D. 1998, all was prepared for the great test. My financial affairs had been settled with an eye to the future in more ways than one. The time-travel room, lavishly set with windows and looking like a very large telephone kiosk, stood waiting in the middle of Farmer Wright's field. As I walked toward it, not knowing what Fate held in store for me, I thought what an incongruous object it looked standing amid the furrows. Without the slightest hesitation, I unlocked the door, stepped inside and relocked it, started the air-purifying apparatus, took one last look at Earth, fresh with the aura of spring, and closed the projector switch.

-

IV.

	The sensation of being under the influence of the rays was weird in the extreme. My mind seemed to be emptied of all thoughts, retaining only alternating impressions of roughness and smoothness, stickiness and gloss, for all the world as if the very nature of my brain material was swaying between a pseudo-fibrousness like that of pulled toffee and a satisfying softness like that of a newly rolled ball of putty. A veil of mist came between myself and the world I strained my eyes to see. The mist was elusive, intangible. Some temporary optical fault intervened to defeat all my efforts to decide whether this mist lay over the windows of the room or was coating my own eyeballs.

	A sudden panic assailed me, and I pressed down the switch handle to which my right hand was still clinging. A sensation of immense strain racked my body from hair to toes, my blood vessels fizzed as if their contents had been replaced with soda water. The fugitive mist was whisked away like the gauzy veil of an oriental dancer. I felt as sick as a dog.

	My key clicked in the lock of the door. I stepped outside and looked around. Everything looked exactly as I had left it. The field was still furrowed; a few trees and bushes were displaying their awareness of spring; the sky was still cloudy, the air as stimulating as before. My experiment had failed.

	It was a miserable man who wended his way along the lonely lanes to his laboratory. I remember that birds were singing, but I did not hear them—at the moment; early flowers were adding their sweet beauty to this ugly world of mine and I did not see them—just then.

	Mentally cursing my lack of foresight in not parking my car in the hired field, I turned a bend in the road and began to climb a hill lying between the field and the laboratory. A farm laborer emerged from a lane to my left and trudged along behind me. He increased his pace, caught up to me and requested the time. He was an old man of the garrulous type and, to my mind, his question was merely an excuse for a conversation. Nevertheless, I lugged at my gold chain and glanced at the cheap timepiece hooked upon its end.

	"I'm sorry," I said, "my watch has stopped."

	"So has mine," he responded. "Guess I'll have to get it on the wireless when I land home." He lighted a cigarette and climbed up the hill in silence for a little while. "What d'you think of the great rocket flight?" he asked suddenly.

	I had some difficulty in gathering my wits, and had to make a definite mental effort before I could reply. Somehow, I managed to recall the sensational flight across the Channel of Robert Clair. This had been hailed as the first really successful experiment with a man-carrying rocket. If I remembered rightly, the event had taken place at least a month before. The science of rocketry held the interest of only a very small number of people; it was strange that this old man should still betray an interest in such an event placed a month earlier. Courtesy demanded a reply.

	"Merely another step in the inevitable march of progress," I answered.

	"D'you think they'll ever get to the Moon?"

	"Who can tell," I said evasively.

	"Well, they're talking about it; they're talking about it," he persisted. "I was reading in the papers only the other day that some professor had worked out how long it would take to get to Venus, how a suitable rocket could be built and how much it would cost. Always thought Venus was a naked woman, not a planet. Shows how knowledge has advanced since my younger days."

	"Ah! it is the fate of all of us to be considered ignorant by later standards," I soothed.

-

	"What's the world coming to?" he demanded, puffing furiously at his cigarette. "What with steam engines, then motor cars, airplanes and them auto-whatyamacallits that look like windmills and have got no wings, stratosphere planes—and now rockets! I remember when I was a kid there was a furor in the papers because Ginger Leacock circum—circum—went right round the world without a stop, in one of them crazy old stratosphere planes. They've gone round six times since then and aren't satisfied with that! So they've started meddling with rockets.

	"First of all some maniac hops over a house and breaks his neck. They called him 'a martyr to science.' Then another idiot who wants to be a martyr rockets across the Channel and breaks both his legs. Not to be outdone, another fool starts out from Dublin and plunges clean through a skyscraper in New York, smearing himself all—"

	"Here!" I interrupted. "What the devil are you talking about?"

	"Rockets," he replied, startled. "And now when they can get from here to New Zealand in twenty-four hours, including stops, or eighteen hours without, what I say is—"

	"Will you listen to me," I shouted, grabbing him by the shoulders. "What, in Heaven's name, are you talking about?"

	"No offense, guv'nor, no offense!" he said nervously, trying to draw back. "I didn't mean anything, really I didn't!"

	"Of course there's no offense," I roared. Then, realizing that my behavior was making the man nervous, I calmed myself and continued in quieter tone, "You must pardon me. This subject you have been talking about is one that interests me very considerably and, for certain reasons, I have been out of touch with the news concerning it. My foolish excitement was caused by your mention of a rocket flight to New York. Will you tell me when that flight took place?"

	"Now let me see!" Apparently reassured, he stood and contemplated the skies while he exercised his memory. "As near as I can guess it was in the late summer of 2004."

	"What year?"

	"2004," he repeated.

	"And when was this great rocket flight to which you alluded in the beginning?" I asked, making a tremendous effort to control myself.

	"Yesterday."

	"You will think this a strange question," I told him, "but there is nothing seriously wrong with me. I am suffering from a slight trouble with my memory. Now tell me, what day was yesterday?"

	He looked sympathetic, pulled a folded newspaper from his left pocket, opened it with deliberation and handed it to me. A two-inch streamer was spread across the top of the front page. It said: NEW ROCKET RECORD. Beneath appeared: TO N. Z. IN EIGHTEEN HOURS—Lampson Crashes In Hawkes Bay. I took little notice of this news, red-hot though it was. My eyes searched eagerly along the top. There it stood in plain, indisputable print: DAILY VOICE—May 22, 2007.

	Before the startled native had time to move I had seized him and kissed him. I flung his paper into the air and caught it with a mighty kick as it came down. I whoope-e-ed at the top of my voice and danced a fandango in the roadway. My hat fell off and rolled without hindrance into a ditch; my watch jumped out of my pocket and danced in sympathy at the end of its chain. My time-travel experiment had succeeded! For a space of five minutes I went stark, staring mad, while my erstwhile companion, forgetting the dignity of age and his rheumatism, galloped up the hill like a hunted deer and vanished over the crest.

-

V.

	The remarkable feat of making a short trip through time had an effect upon me totally different to what I would have prophesied a few years before. I did not rush, flushed with triumph, to place the news before an astounded world. On the contrary, I became as suspicious and as secretive as any village miser. My desire for fame and the respect of the scientific world faded away, being replaced by a curiosity so insatiable that each to-day became a mere period of speculation about to-morrow. The future had grasped me like a vicious drug.

	Formerly, I was secretive because I was determined not to permit my work to fall into unworthy hands. Now, the motive was fear of being deprived of the means to satisfy my desire to explore the future as thoroughly as possible.

	From every point of view it seemed highly desirable that my next venture be undertaken at once. My personal fortune became a matter of little moment; my money was cached securely—but not securely enough to withstand the onslaught of time. I came to the conclusion that I could afford to ignore the fate of my worldly possessions; it was not likely that I could claim them at a distant date.

	In the quiet atmosphere of the dust-covered laboratory, I thought it over. The time-travel room must be removed as soon as possible. Heaven alone knew what weird story had been told by my late companion upon his return home, what curious eyes and prying fingers would explore the object in Wright's field. Come to that, I did not know whether the field still belonged to Farmer Wright. The owner, whoever he might be, could arbitrarily uproot the trespasser upon his property. My next move must be made that night.

	It was an hour after sunset when I entered the time-travel room and locked the door preparatory to my second adventure. My stomach was empty; the laboratory had been devoid of food and nothing had passed my lips for several hours. I consoled myself with a nine-year-old cigarette—still fresh! Faint streamers of light still permeated the sky in the direction of Staffordshire; a crescent moon hung low and stars twinkled clearly. The cigarette surrendered its last fragrant puff. I stamped on it and said, "Good-by, 2007!"

	With my hand on the switch, I hesitated. On the last occasion the switch had been closed between six and ten seconds, as near as I could estimate, and I had covered nine years. Was the distance traveled in direct proportion to the time the switch was closed? Would I drop dead when the rays carried me to the very day that Nature intended to be the day of my death, or, whether it seemed logical or not, could one travel past what should be one's day of death? Silence answered my unspoken questions. There was nothing for it but to find out. It was a straight issue, of success or suicide. I rammed home the switch with exaggerated determination. The die was cast!

	I shall not weary you with another description of the sickness that I have called time nausea. The rays operated for a period about ten times longer than the last occasion—about one minute. Then the switch was opened; my body was subjected to a powerful but momentary strain and I had arrived. The key clicked in the door lock; the door swung inward. With my eyes raised to the distant hills, I stepped out. Something snatched at my unwary feet and I fell upon my face. Regaining my feet, I discovered that the time-travel room was sunk into the soil to a depth of six inches, I had been tripped by the step of earth outside the door. It was fortunate that I had not fitted the time-	travel room with an outward-opening door and thus imprisoned myself.

-

	Looking around me, the first thing I noticed was that the field was uncultivated. A few miserable trees and bushes displayed their last tattered rags of brownish foliage. The sky was gray, angry and overcast; I concluded that it was late autumn or early winter. There was not a soul in sight as I paced across the field toward the lane.

	Reaching a stone wall, about four feet in height, I mounted it and Surveyed the distant horizon and the intervening terrain. There was not a sign of life or human habitation. My eyes roamed eagerly around, caught a glimpse of an inexplicable shape in the mid-distance, about four miles away. I took out my spectacles, polished them and adjusted them carefully on my nose. The object was a huge hemisphere of drab color.

	The edifice, if such it was, bulged from the top of a tor like a wart upon an Earthly nose. It lay in the opposite direction from where my laboratory stood, or had once stood. I felt very hungry; my stomach suggested that this, the only artificiality on the landscape, held promise of food. I jumped down from the wall and trudged in the general direction of the distant tor.

	Maintaining a rapid pace for best part of an hour brought me to within a few hundred yards of the object which had resolved itself into a great, smooth hump of concrete about one thousand feet in diameter by five hundred feet in height. There seemed to be a large hole in its top. I did not get a chance to pause and examine it before proceeding nearer; I hesitated in my stride and a voice materialized out of the air behind me. It spoke in accents curiously clipped, somewhat as the Scottish speak, briefly and to the point. It said, "Keep it up!"

	I whirled around. Facing me was a man in dark-brown clothes cut in the manner of a compromise between an engineer's dungarees and a soldier's uniform. A helmet, nothing more than a dull metal skullcap, rested on his head; his hands grasped and pointed at me an object bearing only the faintest resemblance to a rifle. His attire was quite devoid of decoration; it made him look like something between an infantryman and a plumber.

	"Where did you come from?" I exclaimed.

	"Under a gooseberry bush," said he, grinning broadly. "Where did you?"

	"From the year 2007."

	"Indeed! Then the past is rising up against us!" A tinge of sarcasm suffused his voice, but he appeared to be an intelligent fellow.

	"You must believe me," I argued. "My tale is very long, but when you have heard it you will find it—"

	"Very plausible!" he interrupted. "If you're a better liar than most of us, you must be good. Now, get going. You can tell us all about how you saved the world in 2300 when you get inside."

-

	"2300! Did you say 2300?" I tried to clutch his arm.

	He placed the muzzle of his weapon against my middle. "Of course I said 2300. Move those feet of yours a little more and your tongue a little less. And, just in case you want to keep up the play, Methuselah, may I anticipate a question by informing you that this is the year of disgrace 2486?"

	"Good heavens!" I cried, turning and moving up the hill. "I've jumped nearly four centuries!"

	"Right out of the frying pan into the fire," my companion remarked.

	"Why, what d'you mean?"

	"Exactly what I said," he answered, his face taking on a sardonic expression. "You may be a good jumper, but you're a darned poor picker. Why didn't you jump a little less or a good bit more? The jumper who picks on this year is crazy. Hell, I knew you were crazy, anyway!"

	"Yes, but—"

	"Walk on, jumper, walk on!" he commanded. "I don't want to use my economy gun on a white man, even if he is cracked."

	"Why d'you call your weapon an 'economy gun'?" I asked him.

	He heaved a sigh. "Well, if you must talk, and if you must pretend ignorance of commonplace things, it's because it uses poisoned darts propelled by compressed air and thus saves expenditure of explosives that are sorely needed elsewhere."

	I was about to ask him where the explosives were needed, and for what purpose, when I found that we had arrived at the foot of the concrete mound and were facing a metal door set in its side.

	My companion touched the door and slid aside a small trap set in its center, revealing a fluorescent screen behind. He faced the screen and spoke. "Number KH.328S1B4, with a gentleman from the year 2007."

-

VI.

	The door opened silently. We entered. Facing us was a long passage indirectly illuminated from slots set in the sides. With synchronized step, which aggravated me and which I vainly tried to break, we marched down the passage, turned to the right at the bottom, clump-clump-clumped along a concrete corridor and entered a large room.

	A leather-skinned, mustached individual looked up from his desk. "What do you want?" he snapped.

	"Food," I answered, briefly.

	"Bring him food," he said, addressing my guardian. Turning to me, he said, "Sit."

	A high cube of red rubber squatted on the floor behind me. I seated myself on it gingerly. It was an air cushion and it felt luxurious. The man behind the desk leaned forward, switched on an instrument bearing a vague resemblance to the old-time voice recorders. He stroked his mustache and looked me over.

	"Name?" he demanded.

	"Professor Glyn Weston."

	"Professor, eh? Of what seat of learning?"

	"Originally of Glasgow Observatory; since then I have been working in my own laboratory, about nine miles from here."

	"There is no laboratory within a dozen miles of here," he said, acidly. "My laboratory was within nine miles of here in the year 2007," I replied, doggedly.

	"In 2007! How old are you then?"

	"From one point of view I am a little over fifty, from another I am nearly five hundred."

	"Absurd!" he exclaimed. "Obviously absurd!"

	"There is an explanation for this seeming absurdity. In the year 2007 I was the first man to have made a trip in time—that is to say, into the future. I had traveled to that year from 1998. The experiment has been repeated. This is the result—I am here!"

	"Hah!" He rubbed one side of his nose with a forefinger and regarded me queerly. "The popularity of science-fiction has made the subject of time travel quite familiar to us. But time travel is impossible."

	"Why?" I asked.

	"It is illogical."

	"Life is illogical; earthquakes are illogical."

	"True," he agreed. "From some aspects that is profoundly true. But can you reconcile yourself with the idea of shaking hands with your ancestors a few centuries before you are born?"

	"No—that would be really illogical. My experiments have shown me that time can be traveled in one direction only—and that is forward, into the future. There can be no returning, no motion into the past by as much as a fraction of one second."

	He stood up, moved away from his desk toward a corner bookcase, searched along the serried volumes and pulled out a large, black tome. He ruffled its pages. Turning to me, with the book open in his hand, he questioned me. "What was the population of Bakewell in 2007?"

	"I cannot tell you," I replied. "I spent very little time in that year. But in 1998 it was about 4500."

	"Hm-m-m! Who was the Premier of Great Britain?"

	"Richard Grierson."

	"Correct! Clair flew the Channel that year. Who designed his rocket?"

	"The German astronautical experimenter, Fritz Loeb."

	"Again correct!"

	"Listen to me," I begged. "If that's some sort of ancient encyclopedia you've got there, please turn up the time concept and see who wrote books about it."

	He wet a finger, searched through the pages of his book. Placing it on the desk, he grabbed another and searched through that also. Four books were explored before he found what was wanted.

	"Here we are. By the way, my name is Captain Henshaw," he added, as an afterthought. "Let me see, Schweil, Herman, philos. Dutch 'Der something-or-other'; Schweil again, with another book; McAndrew, Fergus, 'Space-Time Coordinates'; McAndrew again, 'Time-Motion Relationship'; Weston, Glyn—well I'm a yellow man!—Weston, Glyn, 'Atomic Acceleration In The Time Stream'; again: Weston, Glyn, 'Schweil-McAndrew Theories Simplified'. Another and another; one, two, three, four, five, six! Glyn Weston—that's you!"

	"And I can prove it," I said, feeling supremely satisfied that my work had been recorded over five centuries.

	"How?" asked Captain Henshaw.

	"My time-travel room stands awaiting your inspection at a place that I can describe to you only as Farmer Wright's field. It is an hour's walk from here."

-

	A door to my left-hand side opened suddenly. A uniformed man appeared wheeling a dinner wagon constructed of bright metal tubes and mounted upon doughnut-tired castors. He twisted the wagon dexterously, turning it before my seat, lifted a well-loaded tray from the top and, with the casual air of an expert conjurer, drew four telescopic legs from its underside. Adjusting the contraption to a nicety, he stepped backward, flourished a cloth and bowed with an impudent grin.

	"You must be hungry after five hundred years of abstention!" he said. Throwing another grin at Henshaw he marched from the room.

	"To be perfectly candid with you," said Henshaw, as I commenced the welcome meal, "your story is too utterly ridiculous to believe, despite the evidence you have to offer. Now don't think that I am about to call you a liar, for I am not. All that I can say is that I intend to keep an open mind about the matter until I've had the opportunity to examine this magic kiosk of yours, and I am going to take a look at it immediately my spell of duty ends, in about two hours' time."

	"You are welcome," I mumbled with full mouth, waving a fork in the air.

	"After I've taken a look at your gadget, I'll make a report to Manchester. My superiors can then decide how to treat you."

	"Sounds threatening," I remarked, chewing rapidly.

	"And, just in case your story happens to be true in every respect, is there anything you would like to know?"

	"Yes!" I speared a potato. "Where am I?"

	"You are inside No. 37 Interceptor Fortress." He moved from his desk and began to pace the room.

	"No. 37 what?" I asked with sudden energy.

	"Interceptor Fortress," he repeated. "There is a war on."

	"A war!" I echoed, feebly.

	"The biggest and most ferocious war the world has known. It has been on for the last five years and looks like lasting for the next five. One tenth of Earth's population has been wiped out, obliterated. The Metropolis, which was called 'London' in your time, no longer exists except as a great area of shattered bricks, slates and concrete, which harbor the bones of those they harbored in life. If you can travel in time, as you say you can, you will live to curse the invention that plunged you into the present day." Henshaw's face grew bitter, his voice hoarse.

	"With whom is Britain fighting?" I asked, my dinner almost forgotten.

	"There is no Britain," Henshaw answered. "The name was given up two centuries ago. There is no British Empire, either. You are now living in England, which is a self-ruling state and part of the White World, just as Scotland, Ireland, Australia, Germany, Russia and all the others are part of the White World. The Earth of to-day has only three divisions: the White World, the Yellow World and the Brown World.

	"The Brown World is the smallest and most insignificant of the three. It includes the so-called black races and is neutral—up to the moment. The White and Yellow Worlds are decimating each other to assert their right to breed regardless of the room available. But I am disturbing your meal; please finish it and I will take you to the telescan room. There I can show you something of the war."

	My mind pestered by a dozen vagrant thoughts, I ate in silence, while Henshaw fidgeted before the bookcase, taking out volumes and putting them back again. Eventually, the meal came to an end. I drank the last drop of liquid, munched the last fragment of biscuit and arose.

	Henshaw signed toward the door through which I had entered. We passed through it, moved down a long corridor, through another door, up a corkscrew staircase into another corridor, reached its end and found ourselves in a long, rectangular room set under the roof of the fortress.

	"This is the telescan room," said Henshaw.

-

VII.

	The walls and floor of the room were littered with a mass of instruments and equipment. Four men were moving about in the jumble, occupying themselves with various jobs, while, at the distant end, two more were seated at what I deduced to be control boards of some description. The most prominent object was a great glass disk secured in a metal frame in the center of the floor. The disk was tilted slightly out of the horizontal, had a mirror surface and bore a strong resemblance to the astronomical reflectors of my own day.

	Henshaw produced a chair from somewhere. Placing it near the mirror, he bade me be seated, moved to the men at the control boards and held a brief conversation with them. He returned and stood by my chair.

	"This telescan was the result of permitting amateur short-wave experimenters to play with television. It is much too complicated to explain to you here but, to put it briefly, a beam is directed into the sky, passes through the Heaviside and Appleton Layers and rebounds from the Grocott Layer, which lies at an altitude of about eight hundred miles. The beam then returns to Earth and catches the scene at its striking place.

	It bounces right round the Earth, registering the scene wherever it happens to strike; the first impression is the strongest, and when we pick up the beam again we have no great difficulty in tuning out the confusion of underlying scenes, leaving the first clear and sharp. The operators are now trying to angle the beam to give us a view of the Metropolis. We should get results any second."

	Even as he spoke, the mirrored disk came to life with startling suddenness. There was no preliminary clouding or blur. One moment the surface was devoid of all but glitter; the next moment it depicted a scene with astonishing clarity. I leaned forward and looted at it.

	A ruined road, pitted with ragged craters, passed through an area filled, with hummocks of crushed building material. Carefully though I searched, I could not perceive one place where two bricks still clung together, neither could I find a single unbroken brick. The scene maintained a harrowing uniformity from the foreground to the background, a square mile of pathetic evidence.

	Nothing stirred in that dismal scene; no step was taken where once ten million pairs of feet had trod; no voice was raised where the voices of children once were raised in play. A lump came in my throat, as I realized that the Metropolis—dear old London—was no more. It lay like a great, gray scar upon what I still imagined as the sweet green face of Mother Earth; it lay like a scar upon the soul of humanity.

-

	The mirror altered its focus as the men at the end of the room manipulated their controls. The nearest end of the road seemed to rise toward me and show itself in greater detail. I saw bones protruding from a mound of dirt fifty yards from a large crater; near the legs lay the flattened skeleton of a dog. Henshaw bent his head forward, rubbed his chin with a harsh, scratching sound and spoke.

	"Before you lies one of the most heart-rending incidents of the War. The dog refused to leave its stricken master. It stayed there until it starved to death. Thousands of people watched its long, drawn-out act of devotion, watched it through the telescan with curses and tears born of helplessness. Flight Lieutenant O'Rourke, disobeying orders, made a mad attempt to rescue the dog about the time its belly disappeared into its ribs. He was brought down by a Yellow squadron. His rocket plane is mixed with the dust of the Marble Arch. God rest a gallant gentleman!"

	"Are the Yellows winning?" I asked, feeling sick at heart.

	"No, I would not say that. Warfare has now reached the stage of perfection where nobody wins and everybody loses. The Metropolis, or what is left of it, is in no worse condition than Kobe and Tokyo. The campaign consists of a series of destructive assaults, followed by equally destructive retaliation; there have been no prolonged battles such as featured the past, just a delivering of rapid blows by one side or the other. The end of this great city was the result of such a blow; the end of Tokyo was our reply. Come, we'll take a look at your time-travel room."

	With that I arose. We departed from the telescan room; retraced our steps through the corridors and came to the metal door. It opened silently as we reached it, revealing a small, streamlined vehicle standing on the path outside. Henshaw struggled to get his long legs beneath the steering wheel, while I took a seat by his side. Slamming the off-side door, Henshaw pressed a button protruding from the wheel boss. A smooth whir came from beneath the bonnet and we were off.

	"Don't take the telescan picture too much to heart," said Henshaw, juggling with the wheel. "We received warning of that raid from our very excellent espionage service and managed to evacuate nine tenths of the population in time. The remaining tenth was wiped out, but the death roll was not as large as the picture suggests."

	"What caused the damage," I asked.

	"Bombs—high-explosive bombs dropped from the stratosphere airplanes and also from rocket ships flying at tremendous heights. The next raid will be upon Manchester or Sheffield, for these are now the southernmost towns of any importance, also centers of the armaments industry. Our fortress is one of a chain strung across the Derbyshire hills to protect Manchester. We cannot prevent a raid, but we can administer severe punishment with our rocket shells and our aerial torpedoes, which can ascend to very great heights, the latter by means of power picked up from the North Radiation Station."

	"The Continent must have dropped in for it!" I offered.

	"Not so much as you would think," he replied. "The opposing forces have vented their spite on what they consider to be the nerve centers of the enemy; thus England and Japan are the favorite targets. Neither side keeps its air fleet for purposes of defense but for retaliation. That is why these fortresses are very important—they are one of the few defense concessions wrung from the powers that be who worship the policy of attack, attack and again attack." He jerked at the steering wheel, avoided the curve of a stone wall and continued in a voice that grew more bitter.

	"I am not looking forward to the next raid with eager anticipation. Information has reached us, from certain sources, telling that the Yellows have perfected a disintegrator bomb, the result of some nosey scientist occupying himself with the problem of how solar radiation is maintained. I understand that the bomb drops, bursts, upsets the stability of surrounding matter and causes it to burn itself away.

	"The process does not continue indefinitely, but only as long as the original energy in the bomb lasts; the bigger the bomb the greater the area of matter affected. The process was described to me as 'readjustment of electronic balance,' and I believe that it takes place at a rate that will trap all but champion sprinters."

-

	The car went over the crest of a hill. A field came into view. Simultaneously, we saw the time-travel room. We shot down a slight slope toward it, took an equally slight rise and came to rest beside the wall from which I had viewed the distant fortress. Henshaw squirmed from his seat, took out a watch and glanced at its dial.

	"Four minutes—not so bad considering the state of the road."

	"You've averaged about sixty miles per hour," I told him. "What sort of motor is this?" I asked, gesturing to the car.

	"Electric. Runs on Freimeyer high-capacity batteries employing silver-tantalum alloy plates." He vaulted the wall, stared at the object in mid-field. "So that's the magic box, eh? Let's go and put a penny in."

	I climbed the wall. We started for the room together. Henshaw stroked at his mustache, an expression of keen interest in his face. The turf was damp and slippery beneath our feet. We had covered half the distance to the room when a hoarse whistle ran over the hills and echoed in the valleys. Henshaw stopped abruptly. The whistle ended, then was succeeded by six short toots.

	Henshaw whirled around, grabbed me by the arm, pulled me toward the car. "By the Mandarin's Button," he roared, his face red with excitement, "a raid! Did you hear the siren? It's a raid warning from the fortress. We must return at once! Put a move on, for Heaven's sake! There's not a second to lose."

	We ran toward the wall. Twenty yards from it I slid, staggered with wildly waving arms, slid again and fell upon the flat of my back with force that knocked the breath from my body. Henshaw, half a dozen jumps ahead, skidded in a circle, returned and grasped my hands, preparatory to helping me up.

	"Look!" I gasped weakly, my eyes bulging at the sky. "Look!"

	About a mile away, coming in our direction at a fast pace, was a golden-colored air machine shaped like a bullet, small, stubby wings protruding from its sides, a long tail of fire streaming from its rear. It looked sinister, threatening; my heart turned to ice.

	"By Hades! a fighting scout of the Yellows," shouted Henshaw. "He's got us spotted and intends to have a little amusement. Run like the very devil. We're as good as dead men already."

	So saying, he gave a tremendous heave that swung me to my feet. I clutched his shoulders. We swayed about like a pair of adagio dancers, slipped and went down together. Somebody rattled a piece of rock in a monster can; a roar swept overboard; a flood of hot air washed our recumbent bodies. We regained our feet. The scout had passed us by a mile and was nosing upward in a great loop. The car was a smoking ruin.

	"He's coming back for us," Henshaw screamed. "We're done. There's nowhere we can hide!"

	"Heaven help—" I commenced, paused as a thought struck me. "The time-travel room! Come on. We can make it with luck. We'll be safe there."

-

VIII.

	I turned, made for the center of the field, arms working like pistons, my pace hampered by fear of falls. Henshaw raced beside me, his chest laboring, his face livid.

	Despite the telling pace, he found breath enough to ask a question as he ran. "What good will it do to get into that thing? He'll simply blow it sky high!"

	"Wait and see!" I grunted.

	A noise grew loud behind us, filling us with fear that added to our speed. With surprising suddenness, the scout roared overhead followed by its wake of heated air. A terrific blast came somewhere in the rear. Henshaw looked over his shoulder.

	"A disintegrator bomb!" he shouted. "It's eating toward us like greased lightning. Run! Run as you've never run before!"

	My protesting feet increased their speed. The total distance from the wall to the room was a bare five hundred yards. I would not have believed that such a distance could be so punishing. Thirty yards separated us from the time-travel room, it seemed like thirty miles. The distance already covered told in this final stage; we did not run it; we reeled it.

	Henshaw, ahead of me, reached the room and tugged madly at the door, as a sensation of heat penetrated to the back of my legs. He danced with excitement as he pulled in vain. I sobbed out to him "Push! Push!" and he fell headlong inside. A fraction of a second later I staggered through the open door, turned and saw the earth literally melting and boiling within a yard of the step. We were barely in time.

	Without further ado, I slammed the door and closed the switch of the ray apparatus. Red flames jumped upward and peered at us through the windows; a film of mist blotted them out. My body tingled with the old, familiar sensation and, as I breathed a prayer of thankfulness, the whole room fell over on its side. My head struck a projection on the wall. Frantically, I tightened my grip upon the switch as I slipped into unconsciousness.

-

	The period of stupor did not last long—or it did not seem to. I came to my senses, jerked out a hand in search of the switch, found it and pulled it.

	Somebody said, "Ouch!"

	I sat up hastily. I was in bed!

	My astonishment can well be imagined. I was in bed, there was not the slightest doubt about that. I stroked and felt the clothes, studied the weave of them and pinched myself. There was nothing else for it: definitely, beyond all dispute, I was sitting up in bed clad in a crimson nightgown.

	A half-seen movement to one side drew my attention that way. I rubbed my eyes and looked again. Standing beside the bed, his face expressive of kindly solicitude, was a bald-headed man garbed in rompers of brilliant hue. His forehead was high, his eyes large, liquid and brown, his mouth and chin small, almost womanly. Suspended from a chain encircling his neck was a plated instrument which, I guessed, had taken the tug that brought forth the "Ouch!"

	I stared at him. He contemplated me with quiet serenity.

	"Where am I?" I asked weakly, making use of the conventional phrase under such circumstances.

	"You are within my house situated in the city of Leamore," he answered in a pleasantly modulated voice, "and the year is 772 by the new reckoning, or 34656 by the old. You have leaped a chasm of time representing about thirty-two thousand years!"

	"How did you know that I am a time traveler?" I demanded.

	"Because your time-traveling device materialized out of thin air before the eyes of half a hundred citizens. You chose the center of a busy road as your arriving point. Dozens of people witnessed the phenomenon which, in the far past, undoubtedly would have been given a supernatural explanation. Our solution was that you had traveled through time: a simple solution seeing that your feat is the second within the last five centuries. Finally, your companion confirmed our—"

	"Henshaw!" I interrupted, realizing that I had company on my time trip. "Henshaw—Where is he?"

	"He is having his hair plucked," was the amazing response.

	"Hair plucked! Hair! Why?

	What?" My mind relapsed into confusion at this nonsensical twist in the conversation. For the second time I pinched myself to make sure I was not asleep. The man in the blue rompers smiled as he noted the effect of his words. Seating himself on the edge of the bed, he hugged a knee and continued.

	"Your friend appears to be a person accustomed to making quick decisions. It is scarcely thirty minutes since your time-conquering device staged its dramatic appearance, yet already he has discovered that, according to present-day conventions, hair is regarded as not nice. Apparently he is determined to look nice at all costs, so he is having his hair removed by a painless method of extraction. We are depriving him of his mustache and head covering. The bristles on his face will have to grow longer before we can deal with them."

-

	"Well, I'm damned!" I exploded. "Henshaw—the blessed goat! I boost him through a multitude of centuries and what happens? He rushes into a beauty parlor leaving me to expire in bed." Indignation brought me out of the bed and to my feet. "In a crimson nightgown!" I added.

	My companion laughed aloud. "No fear of you expiring just yet," he assured me. "You received a nasty bump from which you will recover very soon. As for the nightgown, as you call it, we put you into it after giving you a much-needed bath, while we looked around for some suitable clothes."

	"What's wrong with my own clothes?" I demanded.

	"They have been burned; your friend's have been burned, also. The contents of your pockets have been fumigated; so has your time-travel room. This is a hygienic world you've stepped into. We don't mind you coming here, but we object, in the strongest possible manner, to you importing large quantities of germs of types that we have gone to considerable pains to eliminate. We like you; we like your friend; we don't like your passengers."

	"Sorry!" I said, humbly.

	"It's quite all right," he answered, releasing his knee and standing up. "Perhaps I have been too blunt. The apology should be mine." He walked across the room, pressed a button. A panel in the wall slid silently downward. Behind lay a recessed wardrobe. He reached inside, produced a complete outfit of clothing made of some material resembling silk, tossed them on to the bed.

	Removing the crimson wrap with secret relief, I commenced to put on the apparel. The soft, almost dainty material enveloped my bathed, refreshed body pleasantly. There was not a button in the outfit. Everything fastened with a Sort of glorified zipper. I pulled on one strangely cut garment after another, zipped them tight and, in the end, stood before a mirror regarding myself attired in emerald-green rompers, green socks and sandals to match, a green tricorn hat cocked rakishly on my head. I stared into the mirror, thinking it depicted the biggest fool alive.

	"How do you like it?" questioned the onlooker.

	"Not so bad. All I want now is the cat."

	"The cat?" he repeated, mystified.

	"Yes, the cat. I look like the principal boy in Dick Whittington."

	"Dick Whittington?" he muttered.

	"You wouldn't know about that—let it pass!" I tried the tricorn at a different angle; the result was an abomination.: Finally, I gave it up. If all of them dressed like this, an extra idiot wouldn't be noticed.

	"Well, I'm ready, Mr.—Mr.—"

	"Ken Melsona is my name," he responded.

	"And Glyn Weston is mine." We shook hands. Melsona opened a door, led the way down a passage to another door, which sank at the pressure of a button. Outside lay the street. Conscious of my unfamiliar garb, I hesitated; Melsona, dressed like Little Boy Blue, stepped boldly out. I followed.

-

IX.

	Before me stretched a scene so unexpected I stopped and gasped. Between the pavement curbs ran a moving roadway, smooth, soft-surfaced, flowing evenly from west to east. It was divided into three sections, all traveling in the same direction, the outer sections at about five miles per hour, the middle section at about ten. Hundreds of people clothed in gaudy colors stood and chatted on the road or stepped from one section to another, all carried along steadily like an array of targets in a gipsy shooting gallery. The total width of the roadway was about one hundred feet; fixed, mosaic-patterned pavements bordered it.

	Picturesque villas set in lavish, well-cultivated gardens lined the roadway on both sides. Ornamental trees of every size and color, drilled and trimmed into every conceivable shape, sprouted from the pavements at intervals of thirty yards. It was a beautiful sight indeed, the most beautiful I had ever seen. The road deserved the name of Boulevard of Heaven.

	Melsona made for the nearest-moving section of roadway, warning me to step on it while facing the direction of motion. We passed over to the middle section, stood upon it, side by side, and glided to the east. I felt as pleased as a kid at a fair.

	"Let us call at one or two shops," suggested my guide. "Then we can pick up your companion—er—Henshaw you said his name was, didn't you?"

	I mumbled an affirmative, my eyes roaming busily over the scenery and the accompanying crowd of road-riders, my mind inveigled by the novelty of it all.

	We swept along for the best part of a mile, before Melsona nudged me into attention, dexterously transferred himself to the right-hand slow track, crossed it and gained the pavement. With me tagging behind, he made a bee line for a section of half a dozen shops, entering one displaying a mass of goods I had not the time to examine. A man and a woman, both brightly clad and equally bald, advanced eagerly at our entrance.

	"Pray serve this gentleman," said Melsona, making a patronizing wave in my direction.

	"Ah, certainly, it is a pleasure," purred the male assistant, washing his hands with invisible soap. "What is the gentleman's need?"

	"Money," I said, succinctly.

	"Money!" he parroted. "Money! What a strange request! It is obtainable, of course, but you will have to apply to a collector."

	"Then how the devil can I—"

	"It's quite all right," Melsona interrupted. "All you have got to do is to ask for whatever you require. If this shop has it, you will get it; if it hasn't, then some other shop may stock it."

	"Ask and it shall be given unto you," I quoted. The idea sounded crazy to me, but who was I to question the economics of this age? "Cigarettes," I said, hopefully.

	The words were no sooner out of my mouth than the lady assistant darted to a shelf, beating her confrere by a foot, grabbed a dozen packages of assorted size and shape and placed them, on the counter. My eyes stared in astonishment and delight. They were packets of cigarettes. I took one of the biggest. The lady wanted to know whether she could provide me with anything else. I asked her for a cigarette case and got it. I asked her for an automatic lighter. She provided me with a replica of the instrument dangling from Melsona's neck, which I had mistaken for the switch. I spent thirty minutes in that shop, emerging convinced that I had stepped into Utopia.

-

	We stood on the pavement outside. I opened my cigarette packet, placed a welcome tube between my lips, and Melsona showed me how to use the lighter. It was shaped like an elongated fir cone, made of metal and affixed to the conventional neck chain. One merely squeezed it. A small lid in the wide end popped open, revealing a glowing filament underneath. I lighted it, inhaling the fragrant smoke with indescribable satisfaction.

	"How long will this last?" I asked, studying the glowing end of the lighter curiously.

	"For the whole of your lifetime," answered Melsona. "It's—" He looked upward suddenly, as a loud noise thundered down from the clouds. "Look! There's a world-trip liner!"

	Overhead soared a titanic cigar, silvery-colored, flame-girt, awe-inspiring. The circumstances made it hard to grasp the true perspective. I judged the monster to be about a mile in length and a tenth of a mile in diameter. Poised high above the thin, almost transparent clouds, it was truly a majestic sight, its conical nose pointed toward the Sun setting in the west, its tail vomiting spears of flame that spread, lightened and resolved into an enormous fan of vapor.

	It was moving at a height of at least seven miles, yet its size and the wonderful clearness of the atmosphere made the rows of circular ports along its sides easily discernible. Barraging the whole city of Leamore with a bombardment of sound, it sped swiftly to the west, its tremendous bulk dwarfing the antlike humans responsible for its fabrication.

	"What do you think of that?" asked Melsona, proudly.

	"It's magnificent! It's marvelous!" I said.

	A shout drew our eyes to the roadway. A man standing on the distant five-mile track waved madly, rushed in our direction, trod on the edge of the intervening ten-mile track and executed an incomplete cart wheel. With the road rushing onward beneath him, he rolled full length in the contrary direction, mowing down people by the dozen. Still rolling, he broke out of a knot of recumbent forms, revolved across the track and tried to regain his feet on the very verge.

	He stood up, for a fraction of a second, with one foot on the middle track and one foot on the nearer five-mile track; then the difference in speed overcame him. He chose the five-mile track and sat on it, hard. He passed us, as we gazed with interest, lying flat on his back, his feet in the air. Fifty yards along the road he gained the safety of the pavement with a sudden, acrobatic movement, turned and dashed toward us.

	As he neared, I perceived that he was darker in complexion than most of the people I had seen. His rompers were a horrible yellow above the waist and black below; his socks were of black; his sandals black with yellow piping. A yellow pork-pie hat was rammed squarely on his head; a yellow tassel hung from the center of its crown and dangled over his left ear.

	"Weston!" he bellowed. "It's me— Henshaw!"

-

	He came up to us, his face beaming with pleasure, and smacked me heartily on the back. I studied him closely. He was as hairy as an egg.

	"I don't believe it," I said, flatly.

	"I can hardly believe it when I look at you," he retorted.

	"Then how did you recognize me?"

	"Because yours is the only monkey nut in the whole wide world." He took a pace back and surveyed me from head to heel. "The only original Robin Hood, as I live and breathe," he said. "How d'you like my rig?" He spread his arms and slowly rotated before us.

	"I would rather not say," I said, averting my eyes from the bilious yellow, "justice can be pronounced only in vulgar terms."

	"Jealous!" was his laughing comment. "Personally, I think attire such as this lends color to life. If I've any fault to find, it is only the trouble it creates in distinguishing sahibs from memsahibs. So you've been shopping, huh?" He jabbed a finger at the lighter suspended from my neck. "And how do you like this moneyless world?"

	"Seeing you know about the money, or lack of it, it's evident you've been shopping," I commented.

	"Oh, no," he assured us. "I went to pay the hair-plucker and he acted like one thunderstruck. Then I found out about the money. Wistfully, he said he would like an odd coin if I had one to give away. So I let him run through my purse, which I had swiped when they grabbed my clothes to burn them. His eyes stood out like organ stops, when he saw what I had: eighteen dollars and forty-seven cents in good old White money."

	"White money?" I queried.

	"Of course. You didn't think I'd have money from your age, did you? Well, he raked through the lot and picked out a half-dollar piece which was the oldest-dated coin there. He was as pleased as a dog with two tails. I asked him what he was going to do with it. You would never guess what he said."

	"What?" I encouraged him.

	"I've not yet been able to make up my mind whether I'm mentally deficient or all this world's daft but me. Believe it or not, he said he was going to swap that half dollar for a glass fish!"

	"A glass fish!" I echoed, incredulously.

	"Now what the deuce could he want with that?" Henshaw continued. "A live fish would be bad enough, a dead fish better, but a glass fish!"

	"That can be explained," Melsona interjected. "You see, this world has progressed so far that its one great problem is how to keep people occupied. There is no monetary system; everything can be had for the mere asking. All work, manufacturing and the like, is carried on by volunteers, but so efficient are our methods that there is never enough work for all the people who want it. Inhabitants of this world have to fill up a very large amount of spare time somehow or other; consequently, work, once a curse, is now a godsend.

	"How do our citizens spend their spare time? I will tell you. A little less than half devote themselves to science, a little more than half devote themselves to art. People invent things or create things, and everybody tries to make his work individualistic or superior to that of others.

	People dispose of the unwanted products of their own handicrafts by placing them in the shops for disposal to the persons who ask for them. The greatest shame any citizen can feel is when one of his products stands waiting in a shop for months. The greatest triumph he can experience is when so many clamor for one of his works that it has to be disposed of by means of drawing lots.

	"People who collect the work of any particular artist, or have a special desire to acquire one of his works, can obtain them in three ways: they can get them from a shop for the asking, if the shop happens to have them; or, if the artist is so popular his work never reaches a shop, they can apply to the artist to join with other applicants in drawing lots for his work; or, if the artist happens to be a collector himself they can barter with him.

	This explains your man's intention of changing a coin for a glass fish. Coins of your age are not rare; they are absolutely unknown and, therefore, of incalculable pleasure to a collector. One of our most prominent collectors of these old trading tokens is Torquilea, who is Earth's greatest glass artist. I would like you to see an example of his work. Come with me."

-

X.

	Following Melsona's lead we marched along the pavement in the opposite direction to the motion of the road. A lively conversation was maintained; it consisted mainly of questions by Henshaw and myself, and Melsona's answers. We gathered that a system of moving roadways radiated like the spokes of a wheel from the center of Leamore to its outskirts, that roads ran inward and outward alternately, that people who wanted to travel in the opposite direction to a road's motion either walked along the pavements or cut through a side street to the next road. This road ran to the center of the city; if Melsona was returning home from the center and did not care to walk, he just took the adjacent road, which ran outward, and entered his house by the back way. All roads exceeding thirty meters in width were moving roads; narrower roads were stable. The whole system of transport was absurdly simple.

	Melsona was explaining to us that private air machines and wheeled vehicles existed in large numbers, but were not allowed to enter into, or fly over, any city, confining their activities to the terrain between towns. Just then we passed an open-air cafe. We did not go far past; with one accord, we retraced our steps, entered and claimed a table.

	"—thus only the great liners bound for city airports are permitted to pass over occupied areas," said Melsona, finishing his conversation. "What will you have?"

	"Beef," said Henshaw.

	"Beef? What is that?"

	"Meat," said Henshaw, licking his lips and easing the belt around his rompers. An expression of ineffable disgust appeared on Melsona's face.

	"I was only joking," Henshaw assured him, quick-wittedly. "I'll have whatever you recommend."

	Melsona's expression suggested that he did not regard the joke as being in the best of taste. He scribbled on a pad framed in the table's center, rammed his foot on a pedal protruding from the floor. The table sank downward, leaving us gaping into a shaft between our feet. After a short pause the table rose into view, settled before us with its top bearing the three meals ordered. We set to. The food was strange, but satisfying.

	Eventually, feeling like a new man, I left the table and, with my companions, continued along the pavement. I fell into a reverie, thinking how queer it was that my previous meal was only a few hours before—or was it thousands of years? We had walked for about ten minutes, when Melsona stopped so suddenly that, still buried in my thoughts, I bumped into him. He pointed to the garden of a beautiful villa.

	"Here's a fine sample of Torquilea's work," he remarked. "Come inside and take a look at it." Without hesitation, he opened the gate and stepped into the garden, telling us that our interested inspection would be regarded as most flattering both by the artist and the owner. He led us to an object standing in the middle of the lawn. We looked at it in silence. It was divine; there was no other word for it.

-

	A mass of colored marble, onyx, agate and lapis lazuli, ingeniously arranged, arose to a height of ten or twelve feet. Over it flowed a mock waterfall of glass so realistic one was shocked by the lack of noise. So superb was the artist's cunning that even the grain of the underlying stone had been utilized to create an impression of subsurface swirls. Embedded in the glass, by what means I could not determine, were bubbles and shadows and vague flickers of light making a perfect simulation of live and dancing water.

	The fall broke at the bottom, eddying and spraying among the colored rocks, while here and there little drops of spray hung glistening in various cracks and crannies. A pair of glass salmon were leaping the fall. By looking closer I could discern that several fine wires held them suspended in mid-air, but so accurately were they formed by the fingers of genius it was hard to believe that the wand of some modern Merlin had not fixed them thus when in full enjoyment of vibrant life.

	Henshaw removed his pork pie and said, "I take off my hat to this!"

	"It was indeed a great triumph for Torquilea," Melsona told us. "No less than twenty-seven thousand persons drew lots to decide who should have this particular masterpiece."

	He looked wistfully at Henshaw. "Torquilea is crazy about old coins. Only the other day I saw one of his works that will soon be given to somebody. It was simply a small bowl containing a sea-shore pool in glass. Sand and pebbles lay over its bottom; a pair of semitransparent shrimps sported in its depths; a strand of green seaweed grew from a small rock on which bloomed a beautiful sea anemone with all its tentacles fully extended. It was a reproduction of nature so truthful, so marvelous, one half expected ripples on the surface of the glass. Torquilea is the happiest of men to have his work so eagerly sought after. I am sure he would consider an exchange."

	Henshaw took the hint, fishing out a coin, he handed it to Melsona, telling him to put it to the best use on behalf of us all. This grouping together of we three seemed to please Melsona immensely. He accepted the gift with glee, announcing that he would interview Torquilea at the first opportunity.

	Darkness had fallen several hours when we returned to Melsona's house for rest and sleep. We had ridden half the roads of Leamore, explored many shops and buildings, seen many marvels and had been introduced to so many people we could not remember more than a couple of them. Melsona, continuing in his voluntary capacity of city guide, had conducted us hither and thither, declaring himself to be the luckiest of men because our arrival had provided him with the means to use up leisure hours. His conversation, under the continual urge of our questions, informed us of a number of remarkable facts.

	We found, first of all, that the day was much longer than in my time, and that Earth's axial rotation was slowing down at such a rate scientists estimated it would have ceased altogether in another twenty to thirty thousand years. The phenomenon dated from the arrival of The Invader, which time inaugurated the new calendar and made this the year 772 N.R.; the letters N.R. standing for "new reckoning."

	The Invader, we were informed, was a planet about twice the size of Jupiter, which had come through interstellar space, cleaved a path through the solar system and vanished into the cosmos. It passed between the orbits of Mars and the asteroid belt, its influence upsetting the normal balance of half the system, making the paths of the asteroids, Mars and Earth much more eccentric, capturing and taking with it two members of the Trojans group of asteroids.

	We were told that Venus had been reached by rocket ships about fifty years after The Invader had passed, that interplanetary travel was still so difficult, so risky, that the present population of Venus was not more than twelve thousand, and that for every individual who had reached the planet safely another had been killed in the attempt.

	Earth's population had not altered in number for the last ten thousand years; all Earth acknowledged a central government situated in Osmia, and the social system was Pallarism. We found that Osmia was on the site of the city I had known as Constantinople, and that the "ism" favored at the moment was based on the theories of a philosopher named Palla, who had lived about 22,800 O.R.

	Our stomachs warmed with a late supper, our minds filled with memories of the day's explorations, we went to bed. With quiet deference to my taste, our host had laid upon my bed what looked like a black bathing costume. The crimson nightgown had been transferred to Henshaw's bed. Henshaw came into my room to get my opinion of how he looked prepared for slumber. I fell asleep murmuring a description he could not hear.

-

XI.

	The following four days I count the most pleasant I have experienced. We traveled extensively with our host, becoming completely at home in this strange, new world. Upon the morning of the fifth day we were riding on the center track of the Derby Highway, toward the outskirts of the city, when Melsona whistled to an old man walking along the pavement in the opposite direction. The old man stopped, Melsona transferred to the slow track, then to the pavement. We followed.

	"This is Senior Glen Moncho," he introduced us. "Senior is a title we have for very learned men," he added in explanation.

	"Like professor," I suggested.

	"Exactly. This is Senior Glyn Weston and Captain Henshaw." He smiled as we shook hands in turn. "The senior is our most prominent historian. I thought he would have a special interest in meeting you."

	Henshaw was quick to seize the opportunity. He asked, "Who won the White-Yellow War of 2481 to 2486?"

	"The women," replied the senior promptly.

	"The women!" Henshaw looked dazed.

	"The war lasted nine years, not five," the senior continued. "It was brought to an end by a militant organization of women who, first of all, refused to bear any more children, then deserted the munitions factories, causing both sides to withdraw great numbers of men to replace them, and, finally, took up arms and assassinated the individuals whom they considered to be the key men of the war. The conflict was the direct cause of the world matriarchy that held sway for the next three thousand years."

	"Well I'm a dirty soldier!" cried Henshaw.

	"So you're the famous time traveler," said the senior, turning to me. "I've heard a lot about you over the newscast. I understand that you are to be invited to the Annual Convention of Scientists to be held in Metro a week hence. It would be very interesting if you could bring your travel apparatus with you."

	"Now isn't that curious!" I said. "I've been here several days and it has never occurred to me to inquire what has happened to the device."

	"It is quite safe," said Melsona. "It was carried along on the road while you were being taken into my house. It was rescued and placed in the Science Museum until such time as you wish to have it."

	"Good," I responded. "Would you like to go and see it?" Both Senior Moncho and Melsona indicated their eagerness to inspect the time-travel room. We cut through a side street to the next road, moving inward, stood upon an outer five-mile track and glided cityward.

	"The most curious thing about time travel," I said to the senior, "is how it alters one's ideas. For instance, one would think that I have defeated Nature by living for thousands of years but, as a time traveler, I know that I have not. Actually, I am about a week older than when first I started my experiment. I now know that Nature has fixed the date of my end, not in terms of years of human computation but in terms of years of my life. I shall die a certain number of my own years after my birth, regardless of how that number of years may be divided out, or distributed over the future."

	"There is one point which, to my mind, is even more curious," the senior remarked. "How is it that we, with our great civilization, our enormous interest in every branch of science, have not been able to solve the problem which already has been solved by two who antedate us by thousands of years."

	"Henshaw hasn't solved it," I told him.

	"I was not referring to Henshaw, but to your predecessor."

	"My predecessor?" I failed to grasp his meaning.

	"I told you that time traveling was known to us," put in Melsona. "I told you when first we met that it had been accomplished before."

-

	I searched my memory and found that I did have a vague recollection of him mentioning something of the sort. It had escaped me at the time, as I had felt rather confused.

	"When Schweil turned up, claiming that—"

	"Schweil!" I shouted at the top of my voice. "Did you say Schweil?"

	"Yes!" answered the senior, looking very startled. "When he turned up claiming he had come originally from about your time, he was laughed at, and was—"

	"Tell me," I interrupted, "from what year did he claim to come?"

	"Let me see." He studied the ground and thought for an exasperatingly long time. "It was nineteen hundred and forty-four, I think."

	"That's it!" I howled, literally shaking with excitement. "That's it!" Surrounding people stared at me as if they thought I was mad. I was making an exhibition of myself and didn't care.

	"Did you know him?" asked the senior, a soothing note in his voice.

	"No. He died a few years before I was born. Or he was believed to have died. He set out in his private airplane with the avowed intention of attending a scientific congress in New York. He vanished. The wreckage of his plane reached the shores of Nova Scotia a month later. He was rather eccentric, not very popular, and some people suggested that it was a plain case of suicide. His theories, and those of his successor, were used by me. What happened to him? Where is he? Please tell me about him—everything you know."

	The senior looked overwhelmed, took a deep breath and said, "In 312 N.R., four hundred and sixty years ago, this man Schweil appeared on the outskirts of Metro, our great city on the Thames, and claimed that he had traveled through time from the past. His machine took the form of a dull metal sphere about three meters in diameter. Despite his atavistic characteristics, he was not believed. His machine was examined and pronounced a hoax.

	"He was in the unfortunate position of not being able to prove his assertations, except by giving a practical demonstration and thus removing himself from the very people who were to be convinced, for he told us that though one could travel into the future there could be no motion into the past."

	"Quite correct," I said, hanging on every word.

	"He was very bitter. According to him ours was the eighth era he had visited and in not a single one of them had he been believed. In the end, he emigrated to Venus, taking his metal sphere with him. He lived there for nearly a year, then managed to convince us that his claims were justified. He did it by stepping into his sphere and vanishing before the eyes of a thousand colonists. He has not returned. We have seen nothing of him since."

	"He has traveled forward," I said, jumping about like a cat on hot bricks. "He has traveled forward. Oh, if only I could meet him! A man from my own time, a fit companion for my travels! I must meet him! I must find him somehow! He awaits me somewhere in the to-morrow. I must seek him! My travel room must be transported to Venus at once!" So saying, in my crazy excitement I jumped on to the faster center track and rushed along it, my mind filled with only one thought: to get to the Science Museum as soon as possible and arrange for the transport of the room.

	The exertion of running must have calmed my mind. Half a mile along the road I transferred myself to the pavement and waited for the others to catch up with me. They came stringing along breathlessly, first Henshaw, then Melsona, the senior a bad last and finding the going hard.

	Together we entered the Museum, where Melsona inquired where my room had been placed. Following his lead, we reached it on the top floor. By this time I had cooled enough to remember that my companions wanted to examine it. I opened the door and proceeded to explain to them how the ray apparatus worked and the theories it made use of.

	The room seemed to have suffered slight damage. The outside corners were badly scratched and dented; one of the windows was cracked. I pulled out the valves and ray tube, held them up to the light and examined them, replacing them when I found them still in excellent condition.

	I went over the whole apparatus, adjusting a cable here and tightening a terminal there. For several minutes I pottered about like a mother attending to her babe. I was in the act of bending down to examine a McAndrew vibrator contact when a nausea overcame me and the contact blurred before my gaze.

-

XII.

	I straightened, saw the windows framing a semitransparency in which a vague shadow danced, flickered, then disappeared like the flame of a snuffed candle. Panic overcame me, as a familiar mist obscured my sight. I realized what had happened. By some means the projector had come into operation.

	Frantically, I searched the enveloping haze for the switch. The rapidly alternating impressions of smoothness and fibrousness fuddled my mind. I searched like a drunken man looking for he knew not what. Everything my hand touched I pulled. I tugged at unseen objects that refused to move. I heaved upon things that came out and sprang back again.

	For how long I acted thus I do not know. I grew frantic at the knowledge that my last sweet world was receding rapidly into the irreclaimable past. I commenced to kick wildly in every direction. A crash of glass, followed by a sensation of strain, rewarded my efforts. The mist cleared, leaving me gazing at a broken valve. The time-travel room had come to rest.

	A heavy vapor coated the inside surfaces of the windows. My attention was attracted by a loud, hissing sound. I was astounded to discover air rushing outward through the gap in the partly open door. I closed the door tightly, turned the pet cock of the spare oxygen bottle, rubbed moisture from the windowpanes and looked out.

	The scene before my eyes was most depressing: a smooth, even expanse of dirt and dust extended to the horizon without break. The sky to one side was sparkled with white light, to the other it loomed a dark, ominous purple. One glance told me that the world of this day was airless, deserted, dead. Horror took command of me with the knowledge that my hours were numbered. Death awaited me without—and within!

	Hours later, with the precious oxygen still dribbling away, I stared gloomily through the windows of my room, noting that the sky had not changed in the slightest degree and that apparently I was stationed in a zone of perpetual twilight. Even as I watched, some instinct drew my attention to the far horizon. There, in a majestic curve, swooped a colossal space ship, its sleek body glistening, its tail plumed with fire. My heart leaped as I followed its line of flight until it dipped to an invisible landing place just over the edge of the Earth.

	It did not occur to me to wonder why a space ship should fly over an airless world. The idea that I might be the victim of my own delusion never entered my head. I folded a handkerchief to form A pad, secured it over the end of the nearly empty oxygen bottle and opened the door. Ramming the pad against my nostrils, I ran toward the horizon—

	For endless miles I seemed to run with heaving chest, thudding heart and whirling brain. My tongue swelled in my mouth my eyes protruded painfully; I ceased to see. Whether I was moving in a straight line or in circles, I did not know or care. The main thing was to keep moving. Delirium became my master; I moved, moved, moved like an automaton.

	I must have dropped the oxygen bottle; I must have fallen and died. But I have no recollection of it. My last memory of Earth is that of fleeing on leaden feet like one chased by phantoms in a nightmare. You know the rest of my story. I came to my senses lying in the resuscitation room at Kar Institute, my body racked with pain, my pulses throbbing in sympathy with the beating of a mechanical heart suspended over my chest.

-

	What next? You are entitled to know. It is my intention to spend a little while touring your beautiful world. I wish to see the sights, to Study your customs. With much interest I have learned that the immense amount of work resulting from the Great Migration has caused many radical changes from the world I visited last. I want to read about the Great Migration, to learn all there is to learn about this remarkable epic in human history, to know the nature of the changes it has brought about such as, for instance, your return to a monetary system.

	Then I shall set to work and build myself another time-travel room. I shall do this because I am going to find my age-compatriot Schweil. We need each other. Would you like to know how I expect to accomplish this? Let me tell you.

	I shall make a series of very short jumps into the future and from them I shall derive the data necessary for certain calculations which, when completed, will enable me to set out for a predetermined date. If Schweil has not turned up by then, I shall leave a message for him, making an appointment far in the future, and will then depart for that date. When Schweil arrives, and gets my message, he will travel to the same date. Thus we shall meet at a rendezvous in futurity.

	I have no doubt that the scheme will work, if only Schweil is given my message. You will have to look for him. I am sure that already he has returned a dozen times since last he was heard of. Because of his previous receptions, knowing his character as I do, I can tell you he is likely to return secretly, without publicity.

	You can assist me! All I ask of you is that you keep my story and my message ever fresh!

-

	The stereo announcer padded softly in the direction of the transmission screen. The auditorium was a mass of eyes fixed intently on one central figure. With an abrupt movement, Glyn Weston, the "Seeker of To-morrow," left the stage.

The End