ey'll
learn from it, about the people in it. I think everybody'd be quite
willing to forego all possible benefits from their coming, if only
something would happen to them."

"But they can't pry into secrets!" protested Gail. "You know they can't
read minds! They can't!"

"But they have the reputation and have to suffer for it," said Soames.

They were then very close to the pseudo general store. Gail put her hand
lightly on Soames' arm. "Brad, please be careful."

* * * * *

He went into the store. He went through to the stock-room behind,
pressed a button, and an elevator door opened in a rather surprising
manner. He stepped inside and the elevator lowered him three hundred
feet into the earth.

On the way out from the East he'd sunk into gloomy meditation about the
situation of the children and for that matter of the world, since their
arrival. Fran had an urgent mission he felt he must perform at any risk.
He couldn't do it on the missile base.

Fran felt the hatred surrounding all of them from the conclusion of the
broadcast. He knew that nobody, anywhere, would help him do something he
had to do. So he fled in order to try somehow to send the signal Soames
had prevented from beside the wrecked spaceship.

But why must Fran send it? Why hadn't an automatic device been used?
Something which could be so ruggedly built that it could not possibly
smash....

And suddenly there was an explanation.

Up to this moment Soames had doggedly accepted the idea that the
children came out of a past so remote that numbers of years simply had
no meaning. The evidence was overwhelming even though the law of the
conservation of mass and energy denied the possibility of time-travel.
Now, abruptly, Soames saw the infinitely simple answer. Time-travel was
possible, provided certain conditions were met. Those conditions would
at first instance inevitably produce a monstrous burst of static and an
implosion to cause an earth-shock and a concussion wave audible at
eighty miles distance. Once communication between time-frames had been
established, however ...

The flight of Fran instantly became something so much more alarming than
mere danger to Fran, that there was only one thing Soames could possibly
do. He'd said he was not Fran's enemy. But he must do anything to keep
Fran from carrying out the mission he'd been sent to accomplish.

So when Soames got out of the elevator from the village st