"No. We've been using that machine to pick up men from battlefields all over the world and all over history," Gregory said. "Until now, none of them could adjust.... Uggh!" He shuddered, looking even sicker than when the film was being shown. "He's thinking," Walter said, "about a French officer from Waterloo who blew out his brains with a pocket-pistol on that table, and an English archer from Agincourt who ran amok with a dagger in here, and a trooper of the Seventh Cavalry from the Custer Massacre." Gregory managed to overcome his revulsion. "You see, we were forced to take our subjects largely at random with regard to individual characteristics, mental attitudes, adaptability, et cetera." As long as he stuck to high order abstractions, he could control himself. "Aside from their professional lack of repugnance for violence, we took soldiers from battlefields because we could select men facing immediate death, whose removal from the past would not have any effect upon the casual chain of events affecting the present." A warning buzzer rasped in Benson's brain. He nodded, poker-faced. "I can see that," he agreed. "You wouldn't dare do anything to change the past. That was always one of the favorite paradoxes in time-travel fiction.... Well, I think I have the general picture. You have a dictator who is tyrannizing you; you want to get rid of him; you can't kill him yourselves. I'm opposed to dictators, myself; that--and the Selective Service law, of course--was why I was a soldier. I have no moral or psychological taboos against killing dictators, or anybody else. Suppose I cooperate with you; what's in it for me?" There was a long silence. Walter and Carl looked at one another inquiringly; the others dithered helplessly. It was Carl who answered. "Your return to your own time and place." "And if I don't cooperate with you?" "Guess when and where else we could send you," Walter said. Benson dropped his cigarette and tramped it. "Exactly the same time and place?" he asked. "Well, the structure of space-time demands...." Paula began. "The spatio-temporal displacement field is capable of identifying that spot--" Gregory pointed to a ten-foot circle in front of a bank of sleek-cabineted, dial-studded machines "--with any set of space-time coordinates in the universe. However, to avoid disruption of the structure of space-time, we must return you to approximately the same point in space-time." Benson nodded again, this time at the confirmation of his earlier suspicion. Well, while he was alive, he still had a chance. "All right; tell me exactly what you want me to do." * * * * * A third outbreak of bedlam, this time of relief and frantic explanation.