rise from the square black box that housed the
"time-shift" mechanism, and from behind the instrument-board. In a
moment, everything was glowing-hot: driblets of aluminum and silver were
running down from the instruments. Then the whole interior of the
"time-machine" was afire; there was barely time for Hradzka to leap
through the open door.

The brush outside impeded him, and he used his blaster to clear a path
for himself away from the big sphere, which was now glowing faintly on
the outside. The heat grew in intensity, and the brush outside was
taking fire. It was not until he had gotten two hundred yards from the
machine that he stopped, realizing what had happened.

The machine, of course, had been sabotaged. That would have been young
Zoldy, whom he had killed, or that old billy-goat, Kradzy Zago; the
latter, most likely. He cursed both of them for having marooned him in
this savage age, at the very beginning of atomic civilization, with all
his printed and recorded knowledge destroyed. Oh, he could still gain
mastery over these barbarians; he knew enough to fashion a crude
blaster, or a heat-beam gun, or an atomic-electric conversion unit. But
without his books and records, he could never build an antigrav unit,
and the secret of the "temporal shift" was lost.

For "Time" is not an object, or a medium which can be travelled along.
The "Time-Machine" was not a vehicle; it was a mechanical process of
displacement within the space-time continuum, and those who constructed
it knew that it could not be used with the sort of accuracy that the
dials indicated. Hradzka had ordered his scientists to produce a "Time
Machine", and they had combined the possible--displacement within the
space-time continuum--with the sort of fiction the dictator demanded,
for their own well-being. Even had there been no sabotage, his return to
his own "time" was nearly of zero probability.

The fire, spreading from the "time-machine", was blowing toward him; he
observed the wind-direction and hurried around out of the path of the
flames. The light enabled him to pick his way through the brush, and,
after crossing a small stream, he found a rutted road and followed it up
the mountainside until he came to a place where he could rest concealed
until morning.

2

It was broad daylight when he woke, and there was a strange throbbing
sound; Hradzka lay motionless under the brush where he had slept, his
blaster ready. In a few minute