While a bewildered but grateful man named Kennedy and a wide-eyed Indian Prince followed Kimnar, Henry and Martia into a scintillating civilization in far off space and time, a secret rocket experiment was being concluded in French Morocco. In the nose of the rocket was a D-C bomb, which was to be detonated on the surface of the moon.
No one who had entered the Chronotron, at Weston's insistence, had succeeded in reaching the twentieth century and altering the future by a hair. But Pee Bee had shot far behind the line, landing somewhere in the 8th century B.C. No change in original Cause can ever fail to precipitate an equal degree of change in final Effect. Yet the world that existed between the 8th century B.C. and the twentieth century A.D. was not greatly shaken by having a few lines of print changed here and there in various histories, reference books and encyclopedias. It seemed that there never had been such a word as billiards. There was an ancient game known as pool (Egypt.—puul), the origin of which was not England, but in the glorious imperial days of Ethiopia, when Egypt was one of its provinces and a famous emperor referred to later by Roman historians as Pibeus, invented it to amuse his harem of two hundred wives....