The time-raider
flame. A day had passed since we had seen Cannell seized, from this same window. Just twenty-four hours!

I must have spoken my thought aloud, for Lantin, who had come up and was standing beside me, repeated it. "Just twenty-four hours—to us, Wheeler. But how long to Cannell, I wonder? Where is he tonight, do you think; what thousands, what tens of thousands of years ahead? And wondering if we will come after him, if we will save him—"

He stopped, but the thought persisted. Where was Cannell, now? Caught in some web of utter evil, far in the future, some unholy lair of that hellish thing, the Raider? I remembered the fear on Cannell's face, the fear in my own heart when the Raider had flashed down on us. Could I venture against such a creature, even though we found the way to cross time? Would I dare to pit myself against a being like that?

There at the window I battled my own fear, and when I finally turned, it was to extend my hand to Lantin.

"I'm with you," I told him shortly; "if we can discover the secret of the Raider's power, we'll follow Cannell—into time!"

CHAPTER 5

THE BUILDING OF THE TIME-CAR

It is not my intention to relate here the details of the work that occupied our attention in the following weeks. It has been dealt with at length in two technical treatises by Lantin and myself. The theoretical side of our work has been very fully discussed in those two books, but the concrete details are purposely slurred over. The most valuable part of our achievement, the time-wave itself, is hardly mentioned in them.

There is a reason for this, and that reason is the firm intention of Dr. Lantin and myself not to impart any information that would enable anyone to duplicate our own experiment. Thus it is of necessity that parts of this present record are vague and indefinite.

I may say, though, unquestionably, that without the notes that were left us by Cannell, we could never have achieved the success we did achieve. Those notes, brief and unsatisfactory as they were, were yet enough to set our feet on the right path, in our quest of the time-traveling secret. To us, then, the problem was one of accelerating electronic activity, and all our experiments were directed toward that goal.

Fortunately, Lantin had virtually a free hand at the Foundation, and we were able to use 
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