nstantly as he did so.

But I was in better trim than Harbauer. I have never seen a laboratory
man who could stand the strain of prolonged physical exertion. Bending
over test-tubes and meters is no life for a man. At grips with him, I
was in my own element, and he was out of his. I let him wear himself
out, exerting myself as little as possible, confining my efforts to
keeping his weapon where he could not use it.

I felt him weakening at last. His breath was coming in great sobs, and
his long eyes started from their sockets with the strained effort he
was putting forth. And then, with a single mighty effort, I knocked
the pistol from his hand, so that it slid across the floor and brought
up with a crash against a wall of the room.

"Now!" I said, and turned on him.

* * * * *

He knew, at that moment when I put forth my strength, that I had been
playing with him. I read the shock of sudden fear in his eyes. My
right arm went about him in a deadly hold; I had him in a grip that
paralyzed him. Grimly, I jerked him to his feet, and he stood there
trembling with weakness, his shoulders heaving as his breath came and
went between his teeth.

"You realize, of course, that you're not going back?" I said quietly.

"Back?" Half dazed, he stared at me through the quivering lids of his
peculiar eyes. "What do you mean?"

"I mean that you're not going back to your own era. You have come to
us, uninvited, and--you're going to stay here."

"No!" he shouted, and struggled so desperately to free himself that I
was hard put to it to hold him, without tightening my grip
sufficiently to dislocate his shoulders. "You wouldn't do that! I must
return; I must prove to them--"

"That's exactly what must not happen, and what shall not happen," I
interrupted. "And what will not happen. You are in a strange
predicament, Harbauer; it is already written that you do not return.
Can't you see that, man? If it were to be that you left this age and
returned to your own, you would make known your discovery. History
would record it. And history does not record it. You are struggling,
not against me, but against--against a fate that has been sealed all
these centuries."

* * * * *

When I had finished, he stared at me as though hypnotized, motionless
and limp in my grasp. Then, suddenly, he began to shake and I saw such
depths of terror and horror in his eyes as I hope never to