"But I didn't. I—I...."
"Don't lie to me," he said and gripped her shoulders. "You'd made your dicker with Tri-World. Trev was in your way. He knew too much about you. He might even have got wind of what you were up to. So you went to Cabot and told him about Trev being a dealer in scientific secrets. You knew Cabot would kill him, thinking the Martian had sold out to X."
The girl flinched. "I'm not asking you to shield me, Gavin. Turn me loose. Just let me have a fighting chance to escape. Give me a chance, Gavin."
"And Cabot," Gavin continued inexorably, his pale blue eyes stony. "You delivered Cabot and the Nova over to Tri-World."
He turned her loose.
"Give you a chance," he repeated and gave a short bitter laugh. "A chance to do what? Double-cross me like you have everyone else?"
Nadia shrank away. "The dream!" she said in a frightened voice. "It's just as it was in the dream. You laughed!"
Villanowski interrupted sadly. "You weren't dreaming during the little death. We're only equipped with three dimensional sense organs. We're blind to everything but the immediate instant. But time's a dimension. It's co-existent. When the Nova was projected across time, your entire life was spread out around you. What you actually did was experience a segment of your life. It happened to be a segment in the future."
Nadia's lips were bloodless. "You guessed when I told you about the dream?"
"I didn't guess," replied Villanowski. "I knew! Miss Petrovna, if you saw the Nova captured by the Interplanetary Patrol through efforts of Murdock who was a T.I.S. agent, then it was inevitable that it would take place exactly as you had seen it. There was nothing any of us could do about it!"