naked branches; then, in an instant, blurred and flickering forms
of leaves. Sometimes there were brief periods when the gray scene was
influenced by winter snows; other times it was tinged by the green of
the summers.

"750, Migul.... Hah! You know what to do if Harl dares to follow and
stop simultaneously?"

"Yes, Master."

"It will be pleasant to have him dead, eh, Migul?"

"Master, very pleasant."

"And Tina, too, and that young man marooned in 1777!" Tugh laughed.
This meant little to Mary and me; we could not suspect that Larry was
the man.

"Migul, this is 761."

The Robot was at the door. I murmured to Mary to brace herself for the
stopping. I saw the dark naked trees and the white of a snow in the
winter of 761; the coming spring of 762. And then the alternate
flashes of day and night.

The now familiar sensations of stopping rushed over us. There was a
night seconds long. Then daylight.

We stopped in the light of an April day of 762 A. D. There had been a
forest fire: so brief a thing we had not noticed it is we passed. The
trees were denuded over a widespread area; the naked blackened trunks
stood stripped of smaller branches and foliage. I think that the fire
had occurred the previous autumn; in the silt of ashes and charred
branches with which the ground was strewn, already a new pale-green
vegetation was springing up.

Our cage was set now in what had been a woodland glade, an irregularly
circular space of six or eight hundred feet, with the wreckage of the
burned forest around it. We were on a slight rise of ground. Through
the denuded trees the undulating landscape was visible over a
considerable area. It was high noon, and the sun hung in a pale blue
sky dotted with pure white clouds.

Ahead of us, fringed with green where the fire had not reached, lay a
blue river, sparkling in the sunlight. The Hudson! But it was not
named yet; nearly eight hundred and fifty years were to pass before
Hendrick Hudson came sailing up this river, adventuring, hoping that
here was the way to China.

We were near the easterly side of the glade; to the west there was
more than five hundred feet of vacant space. It was there the other
cage would appear, if it stopped.

* * * * *

As Mary and I stood by the window at the end of the chain-lengths
which held us, Tugh and Migul made hurried preparations.

"Go quickly, near the spot where he will arrive. When he sees you, run