ying in a
closet thick with cobwebs and the tapping of a blind man's cane on a
deserted street at midnight.

_Tap, tap, tap_--nearer and nearer through the darkness. How soon would
the rats be swarming out, blood-fanged and wholly vicious? How soon
would the cane strike?

He looked up quickly, his eyes searching the shadows. For almost a month
now the gleaming intricacies of the machine had given him a complete
sense of security. As a scholar traveling in Time he had been accepted
by his fellow travelers as a man of great courage and firm
determination.

For twenty-seven days a smooth surface of shining metal had walled him
in, enabling him to grapple with reality on a completely adult level.
For twenty-seven days he had gone pridefully back through Time, taking
creative delight in watching the heritage of the human race unroll
before him like a cineramoscope under glass.

Watching a green land in the dying golden sunlight of an age lost to
human memory could restore a man's strength of purpose by its serenity
alone. But even an age of war and pestilence could be observed without
torment from behind the protective shields of the Time Machine. Danger,
accidents, catastrophe could not touch him personally.

To watch death and destruction as a spectator in a traveling Time
Observatory was like watching a cobra poised to strike from behind a
pane of crystal-bright glass in a zoological garden.

You got a tremendous thrill in just thinking: How dreadful if the glass
should not be there! How lucky I am to be alive, with a thing so deadly
and monstrous within striking distance of me!

For twenty-seven days now he had traveled without fear. Sometimes the
Time Observatory would pinpoint an age and hover over it while his
companions took painstaking historical notes. Sometimes it would retrace
its course and circle back. A new age would come under scrutiny and more
notes would be taken.

But a horrible thing that had happened to him, had awakened in him a
lonely nightmare of restlessness. Childhood fears he had thought buried
forever had returned to plague him and he had developed a sudden,
terrible dread of the fogginess outside the moving viewpane, the way the
machine itself wheeled and dipped when an ancient ruin came sweeping
toward him. He had developed a fear of Time.

There was no escape from that Time Fear. The instant it came upon him he
lost all interest in historical research. 1069, 732, 2407, 1928--every
d