Now the Master's fear changed to fury. As the visiscreen came on again, he shouted, "Intelligence Department, at once! Zadol, how did that storm get past our guard screens? Broke them with electric overload? Who calculated the safety factor? Have them executed at once! One of them a woman?—no matter. Put the execution on visiscreen where I can enjoy it. Ho, you Heidkamp, stand by and see the mildest penalty you technicians can expect when you fail me."
On the visiscreen appeared the figures of the shrinking victims, instantly electrocuted by the Master's new device, which galvanized every separate cell of the human body into a tiny inferno. As the despot's petulant order was executed, he smiled, while the Guards stood impassive and the murmur of the drenched city drifted thru the broken sound screens.
"Now, Technician Heidkamp, opener of windows and resurrector of the shattered and the dead, it is your task to prove to me that I saw the real past, not clever trickery. Burdened with the cares of the world, I have forgotten your theories. Explain."
"With pleasure, your Excellency. Upon graduation from Midland Technical, I was assigned to vibro-chemical work with the London Archaeological Expedition. In block 44 south, Section 33, we excavated a partially demolished laboratory and library, in which we found records of extensive calculations and experiments by which one Dr. Louis Foster had demonstrated that time is spiral in nature, and that the loops of present and past are pressed so closely together that vision and travel from one to the other are theoretically possible. Foster published his findings in 1941, by which time his country was so deep in the agony of the War of the Wings that it was interested in nothing except military science. Dr. Foster had hoped to make a time travelling device to escape the rising tide of slaughter, but before he completed it, cellulate bombs put an end to him and his work."
"Your Excellency generously condescended to supply me with facilities to investigate these theories. After finding Foster's mechanism to be ineffectual I experimented with Ronferth rays, until I found that the A and F output, interlaced at dissonant frequencies and reflected from thionite crystals in Madderhern tubes, would actually pierce the veil between us and the past. The case upon your desk throws a hollow beam of these dissonances, which it absorbs from the cabinet relays, and within this beam, light rays from the adjacent part of the next loop of the time spiral penetrate to the visor, subject to the same laws of optics that hold in our present time. The core of the visor is an ordinary electrically magnifying binocular, with stabilizers. The period of the time coil is sixty-six years, one hundred five days, and nine hours. Therefore, your Excellency, some minutes ago you were seeing the world as it was at seven o'clock, May 18th, 1940. For proof that this is indeed so, and not a deception, I can but trust to your Excellency's own acumen."
"You speak only of the past, Heidkamp. Can you not show me the loop beyond—the future?"
"The future is not visible, your Excellency, and I do not believe it yet exists. Through eternity time stretches backward, and as our instruments grow stronger, it shall yield its secrets. But you are the point at which the spiral builds, and the future waits for your shaping."
"It is well." Responding to Heidkamp's subtle flattery, the Master's thin lips curled with pleasure as he thought of a future shaped to his will. His hands twisted and twitched as he contemplated his own endless power. "Heidkamp, it is well. The Guards will accompany you to the reception chamber. You may go."
As the elevator silently started downward, the Master returned to the visor, impatiently turning the controls until he again found the white house with the gravel path, in the long-forgotten village of Nyack. Long he waited until he could see again the girl to whom he felt so strangely drawn. Darkness fell, and the city became a glory of colored lights around him, but he did not heed, as he steadily watched a path that lay sleeping in the afternoon of a beautiful spring day.
At last his vigilance was rewarded. A shining four-wheeled roadster stopped before the gravel path, and from it alighted the girl and a man, a man who was as tall and blonde and sleepy as the Master was small and dark and intense, a man with whom she laughed and talked as they went up the path and into the house. This time she did not look toward the Master at all.