om the attic and started blinkingly down the steps,
Stoddard almost ran ahead of me.

"We must hurry," he said again and again.

"To where?" I demanded bewilderedly. "Hadn't we better do something
about th--"

"Exactly," Stoddard panted. "We're really going to do something about
that phenomenon in the belfry. We're going to the first place in two
where we can buy two rifles, quick!"

"Rifles?" I gasped, still not getting it.

"For that little moustached swine up there," Stoddard said, pointing
toward the attic. "If a stone can cross that gray barrier, so can
bullets. We are both going to draw bead on Adolf Hitler in the year of
1938, and thus avert this hell he's spread since then. With two of us
firing, we can't miss."

And then, of course, I got it. It was incredible, impossible. But that
gray screen covering the rent in the attic ceiling upstairs wasn't
impossible. I'd seen it. Neither was the room behind it, the room where
the belfry was supposed to be, but where Adolf Hitler's inner sanctum
was instead. I'd seen that, too. So was it impossible that we'd be able
to eliminate the chief cause of the world's trouble by shooting
accurately back across time and space?

At that moment I didn't think so!

Our mad clattering dash down the attic steps, and then down to the first
floor brought Mrs. Stoddard up from the basement. She looked
frightenedly from her husband to me, then back to him again.

"What's wrong?" she quavered.

"Nothing," Stoddard said, pushing her gently but quickly aside as we
dashed for the door.

"But, George!" Mrs. Stoddard shrilled behind us. We heard her footsteps
hurrying toward the door, even as we were out of it.

"My car," I yelled. "It's right in front. I know the closest place where
we can get the guns!"

* * * * *

Stoddard and I piled into the car like a pair of high school kids when
the last bell rings. Then I was gunning the motor, while out of the
corner of my eye I could see Stoddard's wife running down the front
steps shouting shrilly after us.

We jumped from the curb like a plane from a catapult, doing fifty by my
quick shift to second gear. Then we were tearing the quiet streets of
Mayfair's second subdivision apart with the noise of a blasting horn and
a snarling motor.

It was ten minutes later when I screeched to a stop in front of the
sports and gun store I'd remembered existed in Mayfair's first
subdivision. The clerk was amaz