s born. Given Time travel, it should have been possible. So we went
back--myself, John Morrel, Ann Strang, and you."

Roger shook his head, a horrible thought forming in his mind. "You
were trying to kill David--my son--" he stopped short. "David
_couldn't_ have been my son!" He whirled on Martin Drengo. "_Who was
that boy?_"

Martin looked away then, his face white. "The boy was your father," he
said.

* * * * *

The drone of the jet bombers came again, whining into the still room.
Roger Strang stood very still, staring at the gaunt man. Slowly the
puzzle was beginning to fit together, and horror filtered into his
mind. "My father--" he said. "Only twelve years old, but he was to be
my father." He stared helplessly at the group in the room. "You were
trying--to kill him!"

Martin Drengo stood up, his lean face grave. "We were faced with a
terrific problem. Once we returned to a time-area, we had no way of
knowing to what extent we could effect people and events that had
already happened. We had to go back, to fit in, somehow, in an area
where we never had been, to _make_ things happen that had never
happened before. We knew that if there was any way of doing it, we had
to destroy Farrel Strang. But the patterns of history which had
allowed him to rise had to be altered, too; destroying the man would
not have been enough. So we tried to destroy him in the time-area
where the leading time-patterns of _our_ time had been formed. We had
to kill his grandfather."

Roger shivered. "But if you had killed David--what would have happened
_to me_?"

"Presumably the same thing that would have happened to the Dictator.
In theory, _if we had succeeded_ in killing your father, David, both
you and the Dictator would have ceased to exist." Drengo took a deep
breath. "The idea was yours, Roger. You knew the terrible damage your
son was doing as Dictator. It was a last resort, and Ann and John and
I pleaded with you to reconsider. But it was the obvious step."

Ann walked over to Roger, her face pale. "You insisted, Roger. So we
did what we could to make it easy. We used the Dictator's favorite
trick--a psycho-purge--to clear your mind of all conscious and
subconscious memory of your true origin and environment, replacing it
with a history and memory of the past-time area where we were going.
We chose the contact-time carefully, so that we appeared in New York
in the confusion of the bombing of