cylinder of livid light, for a period of perhaps two
seconds. Then Harbauer pulled all the switches, and pointed
triumphantly to the disc. It was empty.

We looked around the room for the dog, but he was not
visible anywhere.

"I have sent him nearly a century into the future," said
Harbauer. "We will let him stay there a moment, and then
bring him back."

"You mean to say," we asked, "that the pup is now roaming
around somewhere in the Twenty-second Century?" Harbauer
said he meant just that, and added that he would now bring
the dog back to the present time. The switches were closed
again, but this time it was the metal plate that seemed
incandescent, and the grid above that shot out the streaks
of thin blue flame. As he closed the last switch, the
cylinder of light appeared again, and when the switches were
opened, there was the dog in the center of the disc, howling
and struggling against his bonds.

"Look!" cried Harbauer. "He's been attacked by another dog,
or some other animal, while in the future. See the blood on
his shoulders?"

We ventured the humble opinion that the dog had scratched or
bit himself in struggling to free himself from the cords
with which Harbauer had bound him, and the inventor flew
into a terrible rage, cursing and waving his arms as though
demented. Feeling that discretion was the better part of
valor, we beat a hasty retreat, pausing at the barbed-wire
gate only long enough to ask Mr. Harbauer if he would be
good enough, sometime when he had a few minutes of leisure,
to dash into next week and bring back some stock market
reports to aid us in our investment efforts.

Under the circumstances, we did not wait for a response, but
we presume we are persona non grata at the Harbauer
establishment from this time on.

All in all, we are not sorry.

I folded the paper and passed it back to him; some of the allusions I
did not understand, but the general tone of the article was very clear
indeed.

* * * * *

"You see?" said Harbauer, his voice grating with anger. "I tried to be
courteous to that man; to give him a simple, convincing demonstration
of the greatest scientific achievement in centuries. And the fool
returned to write _this_: to hold me up to ridicule, to paint me as a
crack