C. L. Moore

I can transport you into the past, and you can create events there which never took place in the past we know—but the events are not new. They were ordained from the beginning, if you took that particular path. You are simply embarking upon a different path into a different future, a fixed and preordained future, yet one which will be strange to you because it lies outside your own layer of experience. So you have infinite freedom in all your actions, yet everything you can possibly do is already fixed in time.

“Great Snell!” he gasped. “So that was it! I ran into a temporal snag!”

He was, Vanning reflected, an odd duck. Galloway was essentially amoral, thoroughly out of place in this too-complicated world. He seemed to watch, with a certain wry amusement, from a vantage point of his own, rather disinterested for the most part. And he made things—

Neither Paradine nor Jane guessed how much of an effect the contents of the time machine were having on the kids.

Now, shielding the bills with his body, he took them out for a closer examination. They looked all right. They weren’t counterfeit; the serial numbers were O.K.; and they had the same odd musty smell Holt had noticed before.

“You must have been hoarding these,” he hazarded.

Smith said absently, “They’ve been on exhibit for sixty years—” He caught himself and drank rye.

On the wall before him, in the dimness of the room, a great circular screen looked out opaquely, waiting his touch. A doorway into time and space. A doorway to beauty and deadly peril and everything that made livable for him a life which had perhaps gone on too long already.

By turning a calibrated dial, I check the possible futures

Looking backward later, Oliver thought that in that moment, for the first time clearly, he began to suspect the truth. But he had no time to ponder it, for after the brief instant of enmity the three people from—elsewhere—began to speak all at once, as if in a belated attempt to cover something they did not want noticed.

It was sensitive enough to pick up the “fingerprints” of light and sound waves imprinted on matter, descramble and screen them, and reproduce the image of what had happened.

Kerry: Then it is from another world?

Coach Trout: No, from our world, centuries in the future.

What have you got in there? Some sort of machine? Crystal ball? . . . You can see ahead, can’t you? You can look into the future.

They’ve been sending other Mimzies to the past to look for it, but none of them have come back.