gliders have a battery-powered auxiliary motor, don't they? If we land near the machine, we can get it going again and return to our own time, or a few years earlier."

"I don't blame you for wanting to, but—"

"It's not just that." Manning's eyes met Kane's and held them with odd intensity. He asked slowly: "Wouldn't it have been better, Kane, if the last hundred years of history had never happened?"

Kane stared at him, first blankly and then with dawning understanding. "But—that's impossible," he stammered. "A paradox."

"Paradoxes are an occupational disease of time travel, I guess.... I don't know just what we can do, if we do get back. We'd have to be careful or we might end up in a padded cell. We couldn't hope to prevent the development of atomic energy—that seems inevitable, with progress—but we might warn America in time to assure our beating the Germans to the punch."

Kane said quietly, "It's true that our world has taken a wrong turning. What you suggest, Manning, is quite unimaginable—but it's possible, all the same—an experimental destiny, perhaps. Anyway, I'll help you get the glider ready."

"Would you like to come with us?"

Kane shook his head. "Whether this world is real or not, I belong to it. And you'll be bucking enough paradoxes as it is."

The glider dropped at first like a stone from the great height; then its wings began to find support and it descended in vast looping turns that in the troposphere became at last a tightly circling glide over the Schwarzwald. The air over Germany was empty; now, short hours before the coming of the dust, everyone who could command aerial transportation had escaped from the country. But the roads, from the great Autobahnen to the narrowest country lanes, were crawling with traffic, snarled and choked by the fear that drove it.

Manning strained his eyes for landmarks as they lost altitude; he wanted to spare the batteries in the glider.

"Say," remarked Dugan worriedly, "if we find the thing, how far do you figure on going back?"

"Mmm—say 1935. We'll need a few years to work if we're going to change history."

"We might meet ourselves!" Dugan voiced his fears.

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