r! Baseball!" Anthony exclaimed. "There is no baseball,
now. The Guide will not allow competitive sports; he says that they
foster the spirit of violence...."

The cadaverous man in the blue jacket turned to the man in the black
garment of similar cut.

"You probably know more history than any of us," he said, getting a
cigar out of his pocket and lighting it. He lighted it by rubbing the
end on the sole of his shoe. "Suppose you tell him what the score is."
He turned to Benson. "You can rely on his dates and happenings; his
interpretation's strictly capitalist, of course," he said.

Black-jacket shook his head. "You first, Gregory," he said. "Tell him
how he got here, and then I'll tell him why."

"I believe," Gregory began, "that in your period, fiction writers made
some use of the subject of time-travel. It was not, however, given
serious consideration, largely because of certain alleged paradoxes
involved, and because of an elementalistic and objectifying attitude
toward the whole subject of time. I won't go into the mathematics and
symbolic logic involved, but we have disposed of the objections; more,
we have succeeded in constructing a time-machine, if you want to call it
that. We prefer to call it a temporal-spatial displacement field
generator."

"It's really very simple," the woman called Paula interrupted. "If the
universe is expanding, time is a widening spiral; if contracting, a
diminishing spiral; if static, a uniform spiral. The possibility of
pulsation was our only worry...."

"That's no worry," Gregory reproved her. "I showed you that the rate was
too slow to have an effect on...."

"Oh, nonsense; you can measure something which exists within a
microsecond, but where is the instrument to measure a temporal pulsation
that may require years...? You haven't come to that yet."

"Be quiet, both of you!" the man with the black coat and the white bands
commanded. "While you argue about vanities, thousands are being
converted to the godlessness of The Guide, and other thousands of his
dupes are dying, unprepared to face their Maker!"

"All right, you invented a time-machine," Benson said. "In civvies, I
was only a high school chemistry teacher. I can tell a class of juniors
the difference between H_{2}O and H_{2}SO_{4}, but the theory of
time-travel is wasted on me.... Suppose you just let me ask the
questions; then I'll be sure of finding out what I don't know. For
instance, who won the war I was fig