tossing the sheet in the flame.

A smile curved his lips. He held it over the basket. By releasing it, it would drop down and burn. Then whatever event he was holding up would happen.

His fingers relaxed. The paper slipped a fraction of an inch. Suddenly he clutched it tightly and drew it to safety. His forehead prickled. Beads of perspiration dampened it. This puzzled him. It was almost as though somewhere in his mind was terrible anxiety. But he was quite calm.

He stared at the torn sheet of paper again, the smile playing about his lips. Slowly and deliberately he folded it and, taking out his billfold, stored it safely away.

He took a last look at the silent robot, the clicking typewriter, then crossed the tablerock to the stairs and went down them to the path.

Again he saw no sign of movement except for the occasional bit of floating charred paper that came from above. He recrossed the stream at the footbridge. He went slower then, looking for the mark he had made in the hard packed path with the edge of his shoe.

He nearly missed it, seeing it only as he stepped over it. Stopping, he turned and looked back the way he had come. Ahead were the broad leaved trees that looked so much like Maples, the path over which he had come.

He started to turn—and the world turned topsy turvy around him. There was the white face of the girl through the windshield of a car, dropping away suddenly and rotating in a mad gyration until the face was upside down, and then was gone past him.

A dull booming sound exploded on his bewildered mind. Wild forces were tossing him about inside the car so rapidly that there was no way to tell which was up and which was down.

As abruptly as it began, it ended. In the dead silence he heard the screech of brakes. He wondered if it was the girl stopping her car to come back, but he didn't turn his head to look.

He was trying to reconcile the sequence of events brought by his senses. It was impossible. He had spent at least two hours walking up that path, watching the robot statue, and walking back down again to where he had first appeared.

Yet, if it had happened at all, it had happened in less than a split second, for events in the collision had taken up at the exact point where they had left off.

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