d I know damned good
and well they didn't have them a hundred thousand years ago!"

Was Michaelson wrong? Was he talking through his hat when he said the
Idaho had been precipitated through a time fault into the remote past?
He had said they might be a hundred thousand years in the past, or a
million years--he didn't know which. The appearance of the lizard-birds,
the great winged dragons of mythology, had seemed to prove that the
scientist was correct.

Did these two mysterious planes, of strange shape and design and with
the ability to fly at such blinding speed, prove that he was wrong?

Was it possible--the thought stunned Craig--that they had been
precipitated into the future?

The winged dragons belonged to the past. The planes, theoretically at
least, belonged to the future.

"Something is crazy!" Captain Higgins said. "Go get that scientist," he
spoke to one of his aides. "I want to talk to him."

* * * * *

Michaelson came to the bridge and listened quietly to what Higgins had
to say. His grave face registered no emotion but his eyes were grim.

"I can definitely tell you _two_ things," he said at last. "One of them
is that we are not in what could be called the future."

"But those two planes were better than anything we have invented!"
Captain Higgins insisted. "The airplane was not invented until 1907.
This _has_ to be the future."

"_Men_ invented airplanes in 1907," Michaelson said. Ever so slightly he
emphasized the word "_men_."

Higgins stared at him. Slowly, as he realized the implication of what
the scientist had said, his face began to change. "What are you driving
at?" he said, his voice a whisper.

Michaelson spread his hands in a helpless gesture. "The Wright brothers
invented the lighter-than-air ship early in the twentieth century," he
said. "They were the first men to fly a plane, the first men of our
race. But how do we know what happened on earth a million years ago, and
I can definitely tell you that we are at least a million years in the
past? The history that we know fairly well does not cover a span of more
than five thousand years. How can we be certain what happened or did not
happen on earth millions of years ago?"

The scientist spoke quietly, his voice almost a whisper. "We are before
the time of the airplane. Yet we find airplanes? What do you think that
might mean?"

"I--" Higgins faltered, his mind flinching away from facing the unkn