me day and see what
happened, but he'd been too busy courting Rosie to get at it.

* * * * *

Now he did get started. His own voice on the telephone had told him to.
It had warned him that one thing he had intended wouldn't work and
something else would. But it was essentially simple, after all. He
finished it and cut off his line from Central and hooked this gadget in.
He rang. Half a minute later, somebody rang back.

"Hello!" said Sam, quivering. He'd broken the line to Central, remember.
In theory, he shouldn't have gotten anybody anywhere. But a very
familiar voice said "Hello" back at him, and Sam swallowed and said,
"Hello, Sam. This is you in the second of July."

The voice at the other end said cordially that Sam had done pretty well
and now the two of them--Sam in the here and now and Sam in the middle
of the week after next--would proceed to get rich together. But the
voice from July twelfth sounded less absorbed in the conversation than
Sam thought quite right. It seemed even abstracted. And Sam was at once
sweating from the pure unreasonableness of the situation and conscious
that he rated congratulation for the highly technical device he had
built. After all, not everybody could build a time-talker!

He said with some irony, "If you're too busy to talk--"

"I'll tell you," replied the voice from the twelfth of July, gratified.
"I am kind of busy right now. You'll understand when you get to where I
am. Don't get mad, Sam. Tell you what--you go see Rosie and tell her
about this and have a nice evening. Ha-ha!"

"Now what," asked Sam cagily, "do you mean by that 'ha-ha'?"

"You'll find out," said the voice. "Knowin' what I know, I'll even
double it. Ha-ha, ha-ha!"

There was a click. Sam rang back, but got no answer. He may have been
the first man in history to take an objective and completely justified
dislike to himself.

But presently he grumbled, "Smart, huh? Two can play at that! I'm the
one that's got to do things if we are both goin' to get rich."

He put his gadget carefully away and combed his hair and ate some cold
food around the house and drove over to see Rosie. It was a night and an
errand which ordinarily would have seemed purely romantic. There were
fireflies floating about, and the Moon shone down splendidly, and a
perfumed breeze carried mosquitoes from one place to another. It was the
sort of night on which, ordinarily, Sam would have thought only