aware of the trap?

He turned the television set on and watched a news announcer during several following cycles. Before long, he was convinced that he was the only one who was aware of the repeated time interval. The news announcer represented everyone in the world, and if he were conscious of the fact that he'd read the same news more than a dozen times, there would have been some change in his expression!

He recalled how the Martian had moved his fingers over the globe and how he'd felt a burning sensation inside his skull. The device had evidently been adjusted to his neural pattern so that only he was conscious of the trap. Or else only someone within a certain effective radius—fifty feet, for instance—was conscious of the repeated time intervals.

Although he'd always believed the stories about the time machines and he now had proof of their existence, he still found it difficult to comprehend their operation. He had heard that such a machine concentrated on only a few atoms of a radioactive substance. By drawing energy from the space-time continuum itself, the machine succeeded in thrusting those atoms backward or forward in time, and since that affected the entire probability stream, all physical matter was forced to follow them through the time stream.

He couldn't totally comprehend the concept, but he realized he had to do something nevertheless, and during following cycles that totaled hours, he tried to decide on a course of action. He recalled the Martian legend about how a particularly vicious criminal had been punished with a similar machine. The unfortunate had been tossed into a pit filled with lionlike animals and then, by repeating the time interval, he had been made to suffer the same death a thousand times. In his own case, he was in no physical danger, but he knew that an enemy was creeping toward him ... an enemy that could kill him as surely as any lion ... boredom.

If he submitted to boredom and just sat through the endless time cycles, it would be the same as sitting in a room for weeks, months, or years. That would be the same as solitary confinement and would eventually drive him insane.

So, there were two possibilities: he could attempt to wreck the machine or wait for it to wear itself out and fight boredom while waiting.

It didn't take him long to decide that he should wait for the machine to run down. If the alien devices really drew energy from the space-time continuum, it would be dangerous 

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