Henry Kuttner

“Yes, my boy. I understand your aversion to making any more trips into the historical Past. You have been a—um—lodestone for violent trouble . . .”

“Something always happens to me!” exclaimed Pete. “What if I she’d get bumped off in the Past? Nix. No more o’ that stuff for me.”

“Quite right, my son. And yet—” Mayhem’s benign tone and dreamy stare at the ceiling were pure ham. “I would never have invited you here again, Pete, knowing it to be a place of strange memories, except that occasionally in our lives there arise demands that transcend all selfish personal considerations. Do you follow me?”

“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.

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.

So, even now I do not know all that lay behind the terror in that Peruvian valley. This much I learned: the Other, like Lhar and her robot, had been cast adrift by a time-slip, and thus marooned here. There was no way for it to return to its normal Time-sector. It had created the fog-wall to protect itself from the direct rays of the sun, which threatened its existence.

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.