was tampered with. I wouldn't be surprised if there were
incendiaries placed at strategic spots. Nothing else could have made a
mess like this."

He finally glanced down at his hand and saw it was scorched. He hissed
with the realization of pain, blew on the burn, shook it in the air to
cool it, and pulled a handkerchief out of his back pocket by reaching
all the way around the rear for it with his left hand.

Lou looked helplessly at the heap of cooling slag. "Can you make any
sense of it, Prof?" he asked.

"Can you?" Aaronson retorted. "Melt down a microtome or any other
piece of machinery you're unfamiliar with, and see if you can identify
it when it looks like this."

He went out, wrapping his hand in the handkerchief.

Lou kicked glumly at a piece of twisted tubing. "Aaronson is a top
physicist, Mark. I was hoping he'd make enough out of the machine
to--ah, hell, I wanted to believe you! I couldn't. I still can't. Now
we'll have to dig through the house to find her body."

"You won't find it or the secret of the machine," I answered
miserably. "I told you they said the secret would be lost. This is
how. Now I'll never be able to visit the future again. I'll never see
them or May Roberts. They'll straighten her out, get rid of her hate
and vindictiveness, and it won't do me a damned bit of good because
the machine is gone and she's generations ahead of me."

He turned to me puzzledly. "You're not afraid to have us dig for her
body, Mark?"

"Tear the place apart if you want."

"We'll have to," he said. "I'm calling Homicide."

"Call in the Marines. Call in anybody you like."

"You'll have to stay in my custody until we're through."

I shrugged. "As long as you leave me alone while you're doing your
digging, I don't give a hang if I'm under arrest for suspicion of
murder. I've got to do some straightening out. I wish the people in
the future could take on the job--they could do it faster and better
than I can--but some nice, peaceful quiet would help."

* * * * *

He didn't touch me or say a word to me as we waited for the squad to
arrive. I sat in the chair and shut out first him and then the men
with their sounding hammers and crowbars and all the rest.

She'd been ruthless and callous, and she'd murdered old people with no
more pity than a wolf among a herd of helpless sheep.

But Blundell and Carr had told me that she was as much a victim as the
oldsters who'd di