Dugan peered cautiously through a shattered door-panel. "There hasn't been any fire," he said almost without wonder. "The trees are green."

Manning bent tensely over the table. "Four years backward," he nodded. "Now, if I can just find out how much power that took...."

Half an hour later for them, it was 1935, an evening with the first chill of fall in the air.

"Too bad we lost the invisibility units," grieved Manning. "There's nothing now to prove we ever travelled in time—except the traveler itself, and we can hardly carry that with us to America.... And Kahl and Wolfgang make another paradox we didn't think of. They died in a time that never will be."

"Hell, what's another paradox," said Dugan. "We've got our work cut out for us without worrying about them."

Regretfully they smashed the time traveler's mechanism—lest it fall into still other hands anxious to remodel history—and set out on foot with a good chance of making the Swiss border by dawn.

 Prev. P 47/47