y direction. The
audience room was filled to overflowing with officials, and over the
whole planet people had paused in their work to watch him and listen to
his words.

"We, of Aleme," he was saying. "Dared not openly defy Hute Hitle. He was
too strongly entrenched. Unless we obeyed his orders to the letter we
were executed; and a dead man cannot serve the interests of all Amba. My
researches gave me the plan I had been looking for.

"As you all know, time travel was discovered many centuries ago. It
amounted to nothing more than perfect stasis. A person could travel
forward in time to any period, but not backward. The time machine in
marching forward existed at every instant, and was therefore always
present to the view of outsiders.

"My researches made possible sideways travel in time. By means of a
device that used fabulous amounts of power, I was able to gather matter
from two other universes existing in the same space as our own, but with
different time co-ordinates. I proved to Hitle that in one of these
other universes he could escape the destruction he planned, and then
return to a torn world and fulfill his destiny as ruler of the planet.

"I told him nothing but the truth. Because of that he believed me. If I
had told him one lie he would have seen through the whole thing.

"In order for you to understand just what happened, and why Amba was not
destroyed when he pressed the buttons that started the atom bombs on
their journeys of destruction, I must tell you a little of the basic
nature of reality. Our universe is at all times and in every respect a
root of a cubic equation. It has long been known that space is curved.
Being curved, it is not the expression of linear equations, but of
equations of some higher order. It had never been determined if that
order was quadratic, cubic or higher. I determined that it was cubic.

"To tell you how I solved the constants of the equation would be to go
into material too complicated for any but the expert, so I'll skip that.
When I solved that, though, I was able to calculate the field necessary
to create a bridge from this root of the equation to the other two,
gather substances from those two, blend the substances, and create a
natural bridge. I did that. BUT instead of blending substance from our
own universe with the other two, I kept the field going. The field acted
as a bridge, and when the disconnects were broken that bridge vanished,
leaving only a bridge