half over a long period of
time would prove fatal, I knew, and I simply neglected to so inform
Ganeth-Klae.

"But his ultimate death was a boomerang. With Klae gone, I could find no
trace of his half of the formula. I was almost beside myself for a time.
Then I thought of something. Klae had once said that the secret of his
half of the formula lay in himself. A vague statement, to say the least.
But I took the words at their face value and gambled that he meant them
literally; that is, that his body itself contained the formula.

"I tried everything: X-ray, chemical analysis of the skin. I even
removed the cranial cap and examined the brain microscopically. All
without result. Meanwhile the police were beginning to direct their
suspicions toward me in the matter of Klae's disappearance.

"You know the rest. It was necessary that I leave Earth at once and go
beyond our system, beyond the jurisdiction of the planetary police. So I
arranged this voyage with a sufficient complement of passengers to
lessen the danger and hardship of a new life on a new world. I was still
positive, however, that Klae's secret lay in his dead body. I took that
body along, encased in the Martian preservative, solidifex.

"It was my idea that I could continue my examination once we were safe
on a strange planet But I had reckoned without Ganeth-Klae."

"What do you mean?" I said slowly.

"I said Klae was no fool. But I didn't know that with Martian stoicism
he suspected the worst and took his own ironic means of combating it. He
used the last lot of _Indurate_ to make that booster, a device which he
said would increase our take-off speed. He mounted it on the _Marie
Galante_.

"Mason, that device was no booster. It was a time machine, so devised as
to catapult the ship not into outer space, but into the space-time
continuum. It was a mechanism designed to throw the _Marie Galante_
forward into the future."

A cloud of fear began to well over me. "What do you mean?" I said again.

Navigator Norris paced around his desk. "_I mean that the_ Marie Galante
_has not once left Earth, has not in fact left the spot of its moorings
but has merely gone forward in time. I mean that the nine 'landings' we
made were not stops on some other planets but halting stages of a
journey into the future._"

Had a bombshell burst over my head the effect could have been no
greater. Cold perspiration began to ooze out on my forehead. In a flash
I saw the sign