The pilot shook his head. Dave snapped the arm sharply and the pilot screamed. He screamed a name.

"There's no way back?"

"No," groaned the pilot.

Dave let him go. "No way of communicating with the real world from here?"

"No."

"Do you know where we are?"

"Interstitial time."

"What?" roared Dave angrily.

The pilot winced. "I'm told," he gasped, "that time moves in quanta, like energy. We're—between two quanta of time."

Dave frowned thoughtfully. The expression, "out of phase" came to mind, and he decided that the half-world was displaced, out of phase in time, moving behind one peak of the "real world" and before the next. He remembered seeing a series of synchronizing pulses depicted on an oscilloscope; a series of rectangular waves, square-sided and flat-topped, rising from the baseline sharply. Like the cross-section of a row of piano keys, the separation between pulses very narrow compared to the width of the flat top. This half-world, he supposed, moved along in the separation.

"Where is Claverly—and Phelps?"

"I don't know. Another crew captured them and took them back."

"I think that's about enough," said Dave. "I think we can take it from here."

"And what are you going to do with me?"

Dave grinned, "We'll make a sporting proposition out of this, superman. You'll be the bait for a trap. If the trap springs on me, you'll win. If the trap springs on you, well, that's just too damned bad!"

"You can't trap us!"

"No? You told me I couldn't get anything out of you, either. So just watch!"

Dave lifted the 'copter once more and drove, at headlong pace, back to Merion. He hovered thirty feet above the pseudo-ground, less than half a mile from the main building, and then cut the engine and let the helicopter drop. For good measure, he tilted 

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