The Indian Prince ran forward and kneeled before Henry, wringing his hands in supplication. In his fat, brown face and his wide, brown eyes was registered an expression of terror and desperation.
"Henry!" he exclaimed. "Only you can give me the answer—it is all so mixed up that I cannot understand. Only you can tell me if it's true!"
"If what is true?" asked Kimnar.
"Shut up, Mohammed!" yelled Weston. "Edwards knows what he's doing! Tell them, Edwards!—before you plug 'em!"
Since Edwards held the gun, he took time to explain. In his eyes was a wild sort of triumph.
"I don't know where you three have been," he said, "but in your absence a great deal has happened. Since young Henry, here, has always exhibited his great intelligence so willingly, perhaps he would corroborate my own deductions—by doing some fast extrapolating!" He said this last word through his teeth. There was a smile on his lips, but not in his dark and wearied eyes.
As he went on rapidly with his story, his three listeners were scanning his mind for the rest of it, putting the whole picture together even before he had finished.
When Weston killed Mlargn, he managed to manipulate controls that finally released all the others from their mental paralysis. He made Lady Dewitt and the Texans show him the location of the Chronotron, and under directions from the various scientists at his command a series of experiments was conducted. Various power settings were utilized, and test groups volunteered or were assigned to be sent back through time. Some, they knew, might arrive in a place where conditions would not be suitable for life. Others might perish in a world populated by carnivorous monsters, or they might freeze, or drown in shoreless oceans. But most of them seemed willing to risk it.
It was Uncle Andy's group that produced the alternate time that the three had witnessed from the citadel. This group had consisted of Andy, Dr. Bauml, Dr. Singer, Valerie Roagland, Peggy Hollenbeck, and several other men and women. Pee Bee, it developed, had been in the first "group," which had consisted only of himself—as he had apparently been in a suicidal mood and was desirous of giving the dice a roll for double or nothing.