My double and I shuddered when we heard this awful tragedy. Helen shuddered, too, and stared at me severely.
"Let that be a lesson to you, Jim Blakeson! Never run up bills like that again!"
"It is a lesson," I promised her. "I swear I will never pay any tradesman every cent I owe him so long as I live!"
And then, finally, the last stud had been pressed, the last instruction given and taken. And for the final time our two ships were hovering in the gray mists which are above Time's passageways, and our two pilots were preparing for the move which they seemed to believe would solve our difficulty. And Hank Number 2 said, "You've got it straight, now, Hank! You sit perfectly still. I'll guide my machine into yours, an' at the moment of impact, you and I will both press our temporal landin' studs—right?"
"Right!" said our Hank. "I guess it's the oney way to do it, huh?"
"Oney way I c'n see. We got to make a merger—"
"A what?" I yelled, sitting bolt upright.
Hank said, "Now, ca'm down, Jim. Me'n me figgered this all out, an' it's the oney way we can get back to normal. You see, we an' ourselves in the other ship is almost identical. Within five minutes or so of each other we got the same brains, mem'ries an' bodies.
"It's absolutely impossible for us here in this car to ever get back to exactly the sitchyation we left. Because under them circumstances, the ship wasn't never completed.