of that book--and offer to swap them books and information about modern times for what they could tell and give him! He'll swear he jammed books through--mostly history-books in modern Greek and French--and they shoved things back. His frost-bitten hands are the evidence for that! When something comes out of that film or goes into it, it gets cold! The 'frigid Beyond'! He'll tell us that the ghost of the gadget began to get smaller as he swapped--the coating or whatever produced the effect would wear terrifically with use!--and he got frantic to learn all he could, and then your policemen came in and grabbed him, and then he went more frantic because he partly believed and partly didn't and couldn't make them understand. Then the doctor came and everything's messed up!"

"You believe that?" demanded Mannard.

"I know damned well," raged Coghlan, "he wouldn't have asked them what they did to the mirror to make it work! And the usable surface is getting smaller every minute, and I can't slip a written note through telling them to run-down the process because Duval's the only one here who could ask a simple question for the crazy answer they'd give!"

He almost wrung his hands. Laurie picked up the huge, five-inch-thick book that had startled him before. Mannard stood four-square, doggedly unbelieving. Ghalil looked at nothing, with bright eyes, as if savoring a thought which explained much that had puzzled him.

"I'll never believe it," said Mannard doggedly. "Never in a million years! Even if it could happen, why should it here and now? What's the purpose--the real purpose in the nature of things? To keep me from getting killed? That's all it's done! I'm not that important, for natural laws to be suspended and the one thing that could never happen again to happen just to keep Appolonius from murdering me!"

Then Ghalil nodded his head. He looked approvingly at Mannard.

"An honest man!" he said. "I can answer it, Mr. Mannard. Duval had his history-books here. Some were modern Greek and some were French. And if the preposterous is true, and Mr. Coghlan has described the fact, then the man who made this--this 'gadget' back in the thirteenth century was an alchemist and a scholar who believed implicitly in magic. When Duval offered to trade books, would he not agree without question because of his belief in magic? He would have no doubts! What Duval sent him would seem to him magic. It would seem prophecy,--in flimsy magic form, less durable than sheepskin--but magic nonetheless. 

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