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“What,” demanded Howell, “what in hell are you talking about?”

Lecky checked himself. He smiled abashedly:

“I think,” he said humbly, “that I speak of the high destiny of mankind. But the part that applies at the moment is that Sergeant Bellews must not be interfered with.”

He turned and ardently assisted Sergeant Bellews in making room for the just-brought devices. Sergeant Bellews led flexible cables from them to Betsy. He inserted their leads in her training-terminals. He made adjustments within.

It became notable that Betsy’s standby light took up new tempos in its wavering. There were elaborate interweavings of rate and degree of brightening among the lights of all three instruments. There was no possible way to explain the fact, but a feeling of pleasure, of zestful stirring, was somehow expressed by the three machines which had been linked together into a cooperating group.

Sergeant Bellews eased himself into a chair.

“Now everything’s set,” he observed contentedly. “Remember, I ain’t seen any of these broadcasts unscrambled. I don’t know what it’s all about. But we got three Mahon machines set up now to work on the next crazy broadcast that comes in. There’s Betsy and these two others. And all machines work accordin’ to the Golden Rule, but Mahon machines–they are honey-babes! They’ll bust themselves tryin’ to do what you ask ’em. And I asked these babies for plenty–only not enough to hurt ’em. Let’s see what they turn out.”

He pulled a pipe and tobacco from his pocket. He filled the pipe. He squeezed the side of the bowl and puffed as the tobacco glowed. He relaxed, underneath the wall-sign which sternly forbade smoking by all military personnel within these premises.

It was nearly three hours–but it could have been hundreds–before Betsy’s screen lighted abruptly.

* * * * *

The broadcast came in; a new transmission. The picture-pattern on Betsy’s screen was obviously not the same as other broadcasts from nowhere. The chirps and peepings and the rumbling deep sounds were not repetitions of earlier noise-sequences. It should have taken many days of finicky work by technicians at the Pentagon before the originally broadcast picture could be seen and the sound interpreted. But a play-back recorder named Al, and a picture-unscrambler named Gus were in closed-circuit relationship with Betsy. She received the broadcast and they unscrambled the sound and vision parts of it immediately.

The translated broadcast, as Gus and Al presented it, was calculated to put the high brass of the defense forces into a frenzied tizzy. The anguished consternation of previous occasions would seem like very calm contemplation by comparison. The high brass of the armed forces should grow dizzy. Top-echelon civilian officials should tend to talk incoherently to themselves, and scientific consultants–biologists in particular–ought to feel their heads spinning like tops.

The point was that the broadcast had to be taken seriously because it came from nowhere. There was no faintest indication of any signal outside of Betsy’s sedately gray-painted case. But Betsy was not making it up. She couldn’t. There was a technology involved which required the most earnest consideration of the message carried by it.

And this broadcast explained the danger from which the alleged future wished to rescue its alleged past. A brisk, completely deracialized broadcaster appeared on Gus’s screen.

In clipped, oddly stressed, but completely intelligible phrases, he explained that he recognized the paradox his communication represented. Even before 1972, he observed, there had been argument about what would happen if a man could travel in time and happened to go back to an earlier age and kill his grandfather. This communication was an inversion of that paradox. The world of 2180 wished to communicate back in time and save the lives of its great-great-great-grandparents so that it–the world of 2180–would be born.

Without this warning and the information to be given, at least half the human race of 1972 was doomed.