Standing at the roof's edge, darkly outlined against the city's splendid brilliance, was Cannell, and down upon him from the upper air was dropping—what? A changing, inchoate shape of gray, at the center of which burned a little triangle of three radiant circles of purple light, one above the other two. In the moment that the thing swept down on Cannell, the roaring winds hushed for an instant, and we saw a writhing, shapeless arm reach out from the central mass, grip Cannell and draw him in. The gray mass hung for a moment, then the purple lights flashed into green, and at the same time the thing had changed into a swirling cloud of dense gray vapor, the three green orbs at its center, and the roaring winds shouting again with renewed power. The thing rose swiftly above the roof, holding Cannell, hung for a moment above us, a tornado of whistling winds, then vanished like a clicked-off cinema scene.

But as it disappeared before our eyes, as its raging, piercing winds died away to a mere whisper, out from the empty air where it had been rang an eery, fading cry, Cannell's voice, coming faintly down through time.

"Lantin! Follow—follow—"

Then the last word, coming dimly to us like a ghostly echo out of space and time, but with a world of fear and horror in it:

"The Raider!"

CHAPTER 4

INTO TIME

"And you really mean to try it?" I asked incredulously.

"I do," Lantin quietly replied. "I am going to find that secret of time-traveling and go after Cannell."

I stared at him doubtfully. A day had passed since we had seen Cannell seized by the misty shape of horror he called the Raider, and now, in the same room in Lantin's apartment, we were discussing what we had seen. After the first hours of dazed terror following the seizure of Cannell, I had fallen to sleep on a couch in that room, and when I woke in late afternoon, the whole thing seemed only a tortured nightmare.

"It seems impossible," I told Lantin. "We saw Cannell taken, yes, and we saw—the 

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