if he does, he will be left
stranded ten thousand years ago, when he can do us no harm.

"Actually, it did not operate as he imagined and there is an infinitely
small chance that he could have returned to our 'time', in any event.
But I wanted to insure against even so small a chance."

"We can't be sure of that," Zarvas Pol objected. "He may know more about
the machine than you think; enough more to build another like it. So you
must build me a machine and I'll take back a party of volunteers and
hunt him down."

"That would not be necessary, and you would only share his fate." Then,
apparently changing the subject, Kradzy Zago asked: "Tell me, Zarvas
Pol; have you never heard the legends of the Deadly Radiations?"

General Zarvas smiled. "Who has not? Every cadet at the Officers'
College dreams of re-discovering them, to use as a weapon, but nobody
ever has. We hear these tales of how, in the early days, atomic engines
and piles and fission-bombs emitted particles which were utterly deadly,
which would make anything with which they came in contact deadly, which
would bring a horrible death to any human being. But these are only
myths. All the ancient experiments have been duplicated time and again,
and the deadly radiation effect has never been observed. Some say that
it is a mere old-wives' terror tale; some say that the deaths were
caused by fear of atomic energy, when it was still unfamiliar; others
contend that the fundamental nature of atomic energy has altered by the
degeneration of the fissionable matter. For my own part, I'm not enough
of a scientist to have an opinion."

* * * * *

The old one smiled wanly. "None of these theories are correct. In the
beginning of the Atomic Era, the Deadly Radiations existed. They still
exist, but they are no longer deadly, because all life on this planet
has adapted itself to such radiations, and all living things are now
immune to them."

"And Hradzka has returned to a time when such immunity did not exist?
But would that not be to his advantage?"

"Remember, General, that man has been using atomic energy for ten
thousand years. Our whole world has become drenched with radioactivity.
The planet, the seas, the atmosphere, and every living thing, are all
radioactive, now. Radioactivity is as natural to us as the air we
breathe. Now, you remember hearing of the great wars of the first
centuries of the Atomic Era, in which whole nations w