Flight From Tomorrow

there was a loud _bang_ inside the mechanism, and a flash ofblue-white light which turned to pinkish flame with a nasty crackling.Curls of smoke began to rise from the square black box that housed the"time-shift" mechanism, and from behind the instrument-board. In amoment, everything was glowing-hot: driblets of aluminum and silver wererunning down from the instruments. Then the whole interior of the"time-machine" was afire; there was barely time for Hradzka to leapthrough the open door.

  The brush outside impeded him, and he used his blaster to clear a pathfor himself away from the big sphere, which was now glowing faintly onthe outside. The heat grew in intensity, and the brush outside wastaking fire. It was not until he had gotten two hundred yards from themachine that he stopped, realizing what had happened.

  The machine, of course, had been sabotaged. That would have been youngZoldy, whom he had killed, or that old billy-goat, Kradzy Zago; thelatter, most likely. He cursed both of them for having marooned him inthis savage age, at the very beginning of atomic civilization, with allhis printed and recorded knowledge destroyed. Oh, he could still gainmastery over these barbarians; he knew enough to fashion a crudeblaster, or a heat-beam gun, or an atomic-electric conversion unit. Butwithout 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 ofdisplacement within the space-time continuum, and those who constructedit knew that it could not be used with the sort of accuracy that thedials indicated. Hradzka had ordered his scientists to produce a "TimeMachine", and they had combined the possible--displacement within thespace-time continuum--with the sort of fiction the dictator demanded,for their own well-being. Even had there been no sabotage, his return tohis own "time" was nearly of zero probability.

  The fire, spreading from the "time-machine", was blowing toward him; heobserved the wind-direction and hurried around out of the path of theflames. The light enabled him to pick his way through the brush, and,after crossing a small stream, he found a rutted road and followed it upthe mountainside until he came to a place where he could rest concealeduntil morning.