on. 'Direct hits on the entire area. What would you do?'

"'I'd get out,' I said.

"'That's what I thought,' he said. 'But that kind of warfare carries a long way. A long way. And I'm a man who loves his comforts, reasonably. I don't intend to set up housekeeping in equatorial Africa or the forests of Brazil.'

"'What did you see thirty years from now, Mr. Vanderkamp?' I asked him.

"'Everything blown to hell,' he answered. 'Not a building in all Manhattan.' He leered and added, 'And everybody who'll be living here at that time will be scattered into the atmosphere in fragments no bigger than an amoeba.'

"'You fill me with anticipation,' I said.

"So I went back to my desk and wrote the story. You could guess what kind it had to be. 'Time Travel Is Possible, Says Amateur Scientist!'—that kind of thing. You can see it every week, in large doses, in the feature sections of some of the biggest chain papers. It went over like an average feature about life on the moon or prehistoric animals surviving in remote mountain valleys, or what have you. Just what Vanderkamp went back to after I left, I don't know, but I have an idea that he gave his sister a devil of a time."

Vanderkamp stalked into the house and confronted his sister.

"You see, Julie—a reporter. Can't you learn to hold your tongue?"

She threw him a scornful glance. "What difference does it make?" she cried. "You're gone all the time."

"Maybe I'll take you along sometime. Just wait."

"Wait, wait! That's all I've been doing. Since I was ten years old I've been waiting on you!"

"Oh, the hell with it!" He turned on his heel and left the house.

She followed him to the door and shouted after him, "Where are you going now?"

"To New Amsterdam for a little peace and quiet," he said testily.

He threw open the thick-walled door of his time-machine and pulled it shut behind him. He sat down before the controls and began to chart his course for 1650. If his calculations were correct, he would 

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