Hank said, "Jim--Helen--whut I got to say ain't nice. From the minute we started this trip, I been worryin' about one thing. The other 'me' which we met back there in the room realized it, too, an' he was also worried. You see, like Jim oughta realize atter he couldn't grab aholt o' that likker bottle--we can't eat or drink while we're travelin' in this crate!" "We can't--!" I realized, suddenly and completely, that he was right. That was one of the things he had tried to make clear. We had no real existence to these other worlds, nor they to us. I'm afraid I went into a sort of panic, then. I said, "Then we've got to get back to our own time, Hank, or we'll starve to death!" Hank said miserably, "But that's jest it, Jim--how are we gonna git back to our own Time? We don't know where it is. Like I awready said, we seem to be travelin' sideways across a billion possible Times. An' since I didn't get the temporal grapple installed, like I planned to before Helen--" He stopped. But Helen had caught the implication of his words. She cried suddenly, "It's all my fault! Because I thought I knew it all, Hank, I've let us in for this. Oh, I wish I'd never tried to be so smart--" "That's a woman for you!" I grunted disconsolately. "Better late than clever! Hell, Hank--you mean we're doomed to sit here in nothing, looking at worlds of food and liquid, until we check out from malnutrition?" Hank said staunchly, "We ain't gonna give up that easy, Jim. We're gonna keep on tryin'. Mebbe by plain dumb luck I can work us back to our own proper place in Time." And thus we started anew our time-hopping. Hank's fingers went to work on the cryptic studs and keys. Again we became the wraithlike visitants of fourscore and umpteen odd, incredible worlds. We saw one in which great bearded Norsemen ruled America ... another in which the Union Jack flapped above the docks of a great sea-port ... dozens upon dozens of Americas we saw, and each of them was, by some guess, quite plausible and logical. Had Leif the Lucky's colony not been wiped out by the pox ... had the Sons of Liberty not roused the colonists to rebellion against George III ... had Aaron Burr not duelled and killed Hamilton ... had Columbus not believed himself headed toward the Indies.... Hank's brow was as smooth as a corrugated washboard by now, and there was nervous haste to even his customarily placid fingers as he continued to press our shimmering buggy forward along the transverse lines of maybe. "It ain't logical!" he moaned once, softly. "Even if they _is_ diff'rent circumstances, they oughta spring from each other outa certain points. Like the pictures you see of fam'ly trees, or genee-ologies. But we ain't getting nowhere an' we ain't gettin' there fast!" * * * * *