Up and down, Layeville went on his journey to nowhere, in his prison, a strange smile etched on his lips. In a week or more, he knew, he would be the only man alive on earth. Elation flamed within him. This was _his_ victory! Where the other men had planned the pendulum as a prison it had been an asylum against annihilation now! Day after day the robots still came, worked, unabated by the visitation of the black horde. They came every week, brot food, tinkered, checked, oiled, cleaned. Up and down, back and forth--THE PENDULUM! ... a thousand years must have passed before the sky again showed life over the dead Earth. A silvery bullet of space dropped from the clouds, steaming, and hovered over the dead city where now only a few solitary robots performed their tasks. In the gathering dusk the lites of the metropolis glimmered on. Other automatons appeared on the rampways like spiders on twisting webs, scurrying about, checking, oiling, working in their crisp mechanical manner. And the creatures in the alien projectile found the time mechanism, the pendulum swinging up and down, back and forth, up and down. The robots still cared for it, oiled it, tinkering. A thousand years this pendulum had swung. Made of glass the round disk at the bottom was, but now when food was lowered by the robots through the tube it lay untouched. Later, when the vacuum tube came down and cleaned out the cell it took that very food with it. Back and forth--up and down. The visitors saw something inside the pendulum. Pressed closely to the glass side of the cell was the face of a whitened skull--a skeleton visage that stared out over the city with empty sockets and an enigmatical smile wreathing its lipless teeth. Back and forth--up and down. The strangers from the void stopped the pendulum in its course, ceased its swinging and cracked open the glass cell, exposing the skeleton to view. And in the gleaming light of the stars the skull face continued its weird grinning as if it knew that it had conquered something. Had conquered time. The Prisoner Of Time, Layeville, had indeed travelled along the centuries. And the journey was at an end. IS IT TRUE WHAT THEY SAY ABOUT KUTTNER? OR the man with the Weird Tale by GUY AMORY [Illustration] The extremely interesting specimen to your right is not a head from a formaldehyde jar, though at times we have seen it, or him, pickled. It is I, Henry Kuttner, the laziest man who ever punched a typewriter and got paid for it. Like several other L.A. natives he is too busy living to do much worrying--and besides--what does it get him? (a check from Weird Tales) Henry has just sold them a 20,000 word yarn about Elak of Atlantis. At present he has finished a story headed for STARTLING, fifty thousand words or more, and been working with C. L. Moore on a new chiller.