"I mean, Brown pays me, and I stay here, like the first technician." He took his hand out of his pocket with the two empty cartridge cases in it and rolled them gently back and forth in his open palm.
Moirta stared at them fascinated. "Oh," she said faintly, "I didn't know. I thought ... I didn't know...."
"Well, you know now," he said. "And your job is to keep me cheered up and plugging away at the job until payday comes. Right?"
"No," she said. "Oh, no. Please, George. They wouldn't do that ... that is, I don't think ... it's so unnecessary."
"Unnecessary?"
"Yes. You see—I shouldn't tell you this, but I can't have you thinking ... you see, after we are gone, you will forget all this. Why should they kill you when there's no reason?"
She did not seem very strongly convinced herself, Dolan thought.
"How do you mean, I'll forget it? You mean they'll hypnotize me, something like that?"
She shook her head. "No, they won't have to do anything. It's the displacement effect. You see, we are not really here, in a way, it is a sort of illusion, but more real for us than for you. When we return to our own time, we will remember all that happened, but you will remember nothing, since the translator does not really exist in your time. You will just forget, it will be as if none of this had ever happened, as if you had never met me, never heard of a 'time-translator'."
It sounded plausible, in a way, but there was a flaw in the logic.