"Now do you see what I'm getting at?" Golfin said. "The mechanism must be the same in both instances. An underlying mechanism. In amnesia a person may suffer a brain injury, or a person may be under a terrific compulsion to escape the present. In either case the person jumps over a period of days or years in, seemingly, an instant—and refuses to return. In prophetic dreams the person jumps into the future to an instant when something crucial is taking place, and returns to the present with memory of it."
I looked at my own watch and said, "Any other time I would like to listen, but what are you driving at?"
He frowned and glanced at his watch. "Forty-one minutes," he said. "This is what I'm driving at. If I could discover the mechanism by which the mind leaps into the future, and returns, I would have a means of doing that myself. I could, possibly, go to tomorrow and buy a newspaper and see what it says, and return to today with that knowledge."
"I see now!" Sarah Fish said, quivering with excitement. "That's how you learned that Mr. Smith is to be murdered!"
"So you did discover a way?" I said.
"I did. That's why I'm here. For some time now I have been going into the future at will, and also into the past. I've learned how to control it, the length of time I stay there, and just how far into the future or the past I go."
"It sounds good," I admitted. "How could you change things?"
He glanced at his watch worriedly. "We haven't much time," he said. "A little over half an hour. What I want to do is this. I have the instruments with me to send you into the future to the moment you are dying. I want you to go there and see if you don't know then who killed you, and how. You will return to the present moment with that knowledge, and be able to avoid death. At least—" He smiled encouragingly. "At least I hope you will."
"And if I don't?"