It was not until he had gotten two hundred yards from the
machine that he stopped, realizing what had happened.
The machine, of course, had been sabotaged. That would have been young
Zoldy, whom he had killed, or that old billy-goat, Kradzy Zago; the
latter, most likely. He cursed both of them for having marooned him in
this savage age, at the very beginning of atomic civilization, with all
his printed and recorded knowledge destroyed. Oh, he could still gain
mastery over these barbarians; he knew enough to fashion a crude
blaster, or a heat-beam gun, or an atomic-electric conversion unit. But
without his books and records, he could never build an antigrav unit,
and the secret of the "temporal shift" was lost.
For "Time" is not an object, or a medium which can be travelled along.
The "Time-Machine" was not a vehicle; it was a mechanical process of
displacement within the space-time continuum, and those who constructed
it knew that it could not be used with the sort of accuracy that the
dials indicated. Hradzka had ordered his scientists to produce a "Time
Machine", and they had combined the possible--displacement within the
space-time continuum--with the sort of fiction the dictator demanded,
for their own well-being.
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