igence department dug up the fact
that somewhere in the forces surrounding Nu-Yok, I had left behind me
Wilma, my bride of less than a year. In some manner, I will never tell
how, they discovered some likeness of her, and faked an electronoscopic
picture of her in the hands of torturers in Nu-Yok, in which she was
shown holding out her arms piteously toward me, as though begging me to
save her by surrender.

Surrender of what? Strangely enough, they never indicated that to me
directly, and to this day I do not know precisely what they expected or
hoped to get out of me. I surmise that it was information regarding the
American sciences.

There was, however, something about the picture of Wilma in the hands of
the torturers that did not seem real to me, and my mind still resisted.
I remember gazing with staring eyes at that picture, the sweat pouring
down my face, searching eagerly for some visible evidence of fraud and
being unable to find it. It was the identical likeness of Wilma. Perhaps
had my love for her been less great, I would have succumbed. But all the
while I knew subconsciously that this was not Wilma. Product of the
utmost of nobility in this modern virile, rugged American race, she
would have died under even worse torture than these vicious Han
scientists knew how to inflict, before she would have pleaded with me
this way to betray my race and her honor.

But these were things that not even the most skilled of the Han
hypnotists and psychoanalysts could drag from me. Their intelligence
division also failed to pick up the fact that I was myself the product
of the Twentieth Century and not the Twenty-fifth. Had they done so, it
might have made a difference. I have no doubt that some of their most
subtle mental assaults missed fire because of my own Twentieth Century
"denseness." Their hypnotists inflicted many horrifying nightmares on
me, and made me do and say many things that I would not have done in my
right senses. But even in the Twentieth Century we had learned that
hypnotism cannot make a person violate his fundamental concepts of
morality against his will, and steadfastly I steeled my will against
them.

* * * * *

I have since thought that I was greatly aided by my newness to this age.
I have never, as a matter of fact, become entirely attuned to it. And
even today I confess to a longing wish that man might travel backward as
well as forward in time. Now that my W