"But," I said, "if you send that little cube back into Time, it will no longer exist at all. It will be in the past--non-existent now. Or suppose you send it into the future? It _will exist_ sometime--but now, it will be non-existent." "Ah, that's where you're wrong," Brett exclaimed. "Don't you realize that you're making Time absolute? You're taking yourself and this present instant as fixed points of Space and Time--the standards beyond which nothing else can exist. That's fatuous. Frank, look here, it's simple enough once you grasp it. Time and Space are quite similar, except that you have never moved about in Time but you have in Space. Suppose you had not. Suppose--with your present power of thought--you were this house. You had always been here--always would be here. Suppose, too, that the world--the land and water--moved slowly past you, at an unalterable rate. That's what Time does to us. Then suppose I were to say to you--you as the house--'Let us go now to Great-London.' That would puzzle you. You would say, 'Great-London was here a year ago. But now it is gone--non-existent. It did exist--but now it doesn't.' Or you would say, 'The shore of the Great-Pacific Ocean will be here next year.' If I said, 'I'm going there now,' you would reply, 'But you'll be in the future. You'll be non-existent!' Making yourself the standard of everything. Don't you see how fatuous that is?" I did not answer. It was so strange a mode of thought; it made me feel so insignificant, so enslaved by the fetters of my human senses. And these fetters Brett was very soon to cast off. II Martt said, "Can't we make the tests, Father? There is a frightful lot to do and it's nearly mid-morning already." From the table Dr. Gryce took a small rod of the milk-white metal--a rod half a meter long and the diameter of my smallest finger. He knelt on the floor beside the taboret, peering into the tiny doorway of the mechanism he was about to send winging into the distant ages of our Past. Again we were breathless. "More light, Frannie," he said. "I can not see inside here." Frannie illumined the tubes along the ceiling; the room was flooded with their soft, blue-white light. "That's better." Rod in hand he turned momentarily to me. "I'm going to throw the Time-switch by pressing it with this rod," he explained. "Within the vehicle--the confined space there--the current is equally felt." He smiled gravely. "Without the rod I should lose a finger to the Past----"