first, Gregory," he said. "Tell him how he got here, and then I'll tell him why."

"I believe," Gregory began, "that in your period, fiction writers made some use of the subject of time-travel. It was not, however, given serious consideration, largely because of certain alleged paradoxes involved, and because of an elementalistic and objectifying attitude toward the whole subject of time. I won't go into the mathematics and symbolic logic involved, but we have disposed of the objections; more, we have succeeded in constructing a time-machine, if you want to call it that. We prefer to call it a temporal-spatial displacement field generator."

"It's really very simple," the woman called Paula interrupted. "If the universe is expanding, time is a widening spiral; if contracting, a diminishing spiral; if static, a uniform spiral. The possibility of pulsation was our only worry...."

"That's no worry," Gregory reproved her. "I showed you that the rate was too slow to have an effect on...."

"Oh, nonsense; you can measure something which exists within a microsecond, but where is the instrument to measure a temporal pulsation that may require years...? You haven't come to that yet."

"Be quiet, both of you!" the man with the black coat and the white bands commanded. "While you argue about vanities, thousands are being converted to the godlessness of The Guide, and other thousands of his dupes are dying, unprepared to face their Maker!"

"All right, you invented a time-machine," Benson said. "In civvies, I was only a high school chemistry teacher. I can tell a class of juniors the difference between H2O and H2SO4, but the theory of time-travel is wasted on me.... Suppose you just let me ask the questions; then I'll be sure of finding out what I don't know. For instance, who won the war I was fighting in, before you grabbed me and brought me here? The Commies?"

"No, the United Nations," Anthony told him. "At least, they were the least exhausted when both sides decided to quit."

"Then what's this dictatorship.... The Guide? Extreme Rightist?"

"Walter, you'd better tell him," Gregory said.

"We damn near lost the war," the man in the black jacket and striped trousers said, "but for once, we won the peace. The Soviet Bloc was broken up—India, China, Indonesia, Mongolia, Russia, the Ukraine, all the Satellite States. Most of them turned into 

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