self into a chair.

"Now everything's set," he observed contentedly. "Remember, I ain't seen
any of these broadcasts unscrambled. I don't know what it's all about.
But we got three Mahon machines set up now to work on the next crazy
broadcast that comes in. There's Betsy and these two others. And all
machines work accordin' to the Golden Rule, but Mahon machines--they are
honey-babes! They'll bust themselves tryin' to do what you ask 'em. And
I asked these babies for plenty--only not enough to hurt 'em. Let's see
what they turn out."

He pulled a pipe and tobacco from his pocket. He filled the pipe. He
squeezed the side of the bowl and puffed as the tobacco glowed. He
relaxed, underneath the wall-sign which sternly forbade smoking by all
military personnel within these premises.

It was nearly three hours--but it could have been hundreds--before
Betsy's screen lighted abruptly.

* * * * *

The broadcast came in; a new transmission. The picture-pattern on
Betsy's screen was obviously not the same as other broadcasts from
nowhere. The chirps and peepings and the rumbling deep sounds were not
repetitions of earlier noise-sequences. It should have taken many days
of finicky work by technicians at the Pentagon before the originally
broadcast picture could be seen and the sound interpreted. But a
play-back recorder named Al, and a picture-unscrambler named Gus were in
closed-circuit relationship with Betsy. She received the broadcast and
they unscrambled the sound and vision parts of it immediately.

The translated broadcast, as Gus and Al presented it, was calculated to
put the high brass of the defense forces into a frenzied tizzy. The
anguished consternation of previous occasions would seem like very calm
contemplation by comparison. The high brass of the armed forces should
grow dizzy. Top-echelon civilian officials should tend to talk
incoherently to themselves, and scientific consultants--biologists in
particular--ought to feel their heads spinning like tops.

The point was that the broadcast had to be taken seriously because it
came from nowhere. There was no faintest indication of any signal
outside of Betsy's sedately gray-painted case. But Betsy was not making
it up. She couldn't. There was a technology involved which required the
most earnest consideration of the message carried by it.

And this broadcast explained the danger from which the alleged future
wished to rescue its