eved I was crazy when I first found
this alone, but not now!"

Maybe we were both crazy. Maybe he was wrong. But then and there I
believed him, and I knew that somehow, in some wild, impossible fashion,
that belfry on Stoddard's asinine house had become a door leading
through space and time, back five years into Germany, into the same room
where Adolf Hitler and Hermann Goering planned the conquest of Austria!

Stoddard was taking something out of his pocket.

"Now that you're here I can try it," he said. "I didn't dare do so
before, since I felt I couldn't trust my own mind alone in the thing."

I looked at what he held in his hands. A stone, tied to a long piece of
string.

"What's that for?" I demanded.

"I want to see if that veil, that gray fog door, can be penetrated," he
hissed.

* * * * *

Stoddard was swinging the stone on a string in a sharp arc now. And
suddenly he released it, sending it sailing through the grayish aperture
in the ceiling, straight into the belfry, or rather, the big room.

I saw and heard the stone on the string hit the marble floor of that
room. Then, just as sharply, Stoddard jerked it back, yanking it into
the attic again.

The result in the room beyond the fog sheet was instantaneous. Goering
wheeled from the map on the wall, glaring wildly around the room. A
pistol was in his hand.

Hitler had half risen behind that ornate desk, and was searching the
vast, otherwise unoccupied room wildly with his eyes.

Of course neither saw anything. Stoddard, breathing excitedly at my
side, had pulled the stone back into our section of time and space. But
his eyes were gleaming.

"It can be done," he whispered fiercely. "It can be crossed!"

"But what on--" I started. He cut me off with a wave of his hand,
pointing back to the gray screen covering the hole in the ceiling.

Goering had put the pistol back in the holster at his side, and was
grinning sheepishly at der Fuehrer, who was resuming his seat behind the
desk in confused and angry embarrassment.

The voices picked up again.

"They're saying how silly, to be startled by a sound," Stoddard hissed
in my ear.

Then he grabbed my arm. "But come, we can't wait any longer. Something
has to be done immediately."

He was pulling me away from the rent in the ceiling, away from the door
that had joined our time and space to the time and space of a world and
scene five years ago.

As we emerged fr