new to the staff and unfortunately I was delayed in Washington."

He said; "Tut-tut, forgive me. Step this way, Mr. ... Mr. Ahh—"

So I stepped his way and we went weaving through the clock-works to a desk at one side of the room. There were half a dozen chairs behind it and he seated me alongside himself. The flat top of the desk was banked with small tabs and push buttons so that it looked like a stenotype. He pressed one stud and the room darkened. He pressed another and the bam-bam quickened until it was a steady hum. The octahedron crystal whirled so quickly that it became a shadowy mist of light under the projectors.

"I suppose you know," the old coot said in rather self-conscious tones, "that this is the first time we've been able to push our definitive analysis to the ultimate future. We'd never have done it if Wiggons hadn't developed his self-checking data system."

I said: "Good for Wiggons," and I was more confused than ever. I tell you, boys, it felt like waking up from a dream you couldn't quite remember. You know that peculiar sensation of having everything at the edge of your mind so to speak and not being able to get hold of it—I had a thousand clues and inferences jangling around in my head and none of them would interlock. But I knew this was big stuff.

Shadows began to play across the crystal. Off-focus images and flashes of color. The little old guy murmured to himself and his fingers plucked at the keyboard in a quick fugue of motion. Finally he said: "Ah!" and sat back to watch the crystal. So did I.

I was looking through a window in space, and beyond that window I saw a single bright star in the blackness. It was sharp and cold and so brilliant it hurt your eyes. Just beyond the window, in the foreground, I saw a spaceship. No, none of your cigar things or ovate spheroids or any of that. It was a spaceship that seemed to have been built mostly in after-thoughts. A great rambling affair with added wings and towers and helter-skelter ports. It looked like it'd been built just to hang there in one place.

The old coot said: "Watch close now, Mr. Muggins, things happen rather quickly at this tempo."

Quickly? They practically sprinted. There was a spurt of activity around the spaceship. Towers went up and came down; the buglike figures of people in space armor bustled about; a little cruiser, shaped like a fat needle, sped up to it, hung around a while and 

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