orking on a temporal--" the army secretary cut
in.

"He was working on a time machine," roared the general. "I don't
know about this 'temporal' business. Just plain 'time machine' is
good enough for me."

"Let's calm down, General," said the JCS chairman, "After all,
there's no need to shout."

The general nodded. "I'm sorry, sir. I get all worked up about
this. I've spent the last ten years with it. As you say, I'm
trying to make up for what I failed to do ten years ago. I should
have talked to Hudson. I was busy, sure, but not that busy. It's
an official state of mind that we're too busy to see anyone and I
plead guilty on that score. And now that you're talking about
closing the project--"

"It's costing us money," said the army secretary.

"And we have no direct evidence," pointed out the JCS chairman.

"I don't know what you want," snapped the general. "If there was
any man alive who could crack time, that man was Wesley Adams. We
found where he worked. We found the workshop and we talked to
neighbors who said there was something funny going on and--"

"But ten years, General!" the army secretary protested.

"Hudson came here, bringing us the greatest discovery in all
history, and we kicked him out. After that, do you expect them to
come crawling back to us?"

"You think they went to someone else?"

"They wouldn't do that. They know what the thing they have found
would mean. They wouldn't sell us out."

"Hudson came with a preposterous proposition," said the man from
the state department.

"They had to protect themselves!" yelled the general. "If you had
discovered a virgin planet with its natural resources intact, what
would you do about it? Come trotting down here and hand it over to
a government that's too 'busy' to recognize--"

"General!"

"Yes, sir," apologized the general tiredly. "I wish you gentlemen
could see my view of it, how it all fits together. First there
were the films and we have the word of a dozen competent
paleontologists that it's impossible to fake anything as perfect
as those films. But even granting that they could be, there are
certain differences that no one would ever think of faking,
because no one ever knew. Who, as an example, would put lynx
tassels on the ears of a saber-tooth? Who would know that young
mastodon were black?

"And the location. I wonder if you've forgotten that we tracked
down the location of Adams' workshop from those films alone. They
gave us