"Which books," commented Lancelot Biggs wryly, "will do Tomkins a lot of good—I don't think! They won't arrive with him, you know—because in his time they weren't even written! I hope both those fellows will return to their original places on Earth. Rather amazing, wouldn't it be," he chuckled, "if something went wrong with the machine and Hallowell appeared suddenly on the campus of Midland University with some gadget from the future—his future—which fell into his pocket in his transit through space and time!"
"Campus?" exclaimed H. Logan MacDowell. "Don't tell me that time-travel thing of yours will actually set us down again in our own time!"
"If it doesn't," grinned Lancelot Biggs, "a lot of faces are going to be very red indeed."
He motioned to the second mate, Lt. Dick Todd. Todd set himself at the controls. Then he nodded to the detective.
With unseemly haste the gumshoe scrambled into the time machine.
"Contact!" Biggs ordered.
The second mate pressed the button that sent the snooper back to Midland campus. That lug! I don't think he ever did figure out what it was all about! In fact a week later, when I met him skulking along a corridor, I asked him how he liked his round trip through space.
"I'm trying not to think about it," he groaned. "Confidentially, in another ten days I'll be able to believe it never happened a-tall, no sir!"
"Brother," I said to myself, "if imagination was a baby chick, you couldn't scratch yourself out of an egg-shell."
But I'm getting ahead of the story. After we got rid of the gumshoe, there was Prexy H. Logan MacDowell to be considered.